progressives
Article
progressives is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 20, 2023 and August 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals”; “it was the Progressives that kicked off associational, communitarian ideals”. It most often appears alongside India, OpenAI, 2020 election.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 20, 2023
- Last seen: August 12, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
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- 2020 election (1 shared issues)
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- 2020 primary (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- ACTION TRANSFORMERS (1 shared issues)
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- Age of Miracles and Wonders (1 shared issues)
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External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
It will become more and more apparent that there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals. How exactly they sort themselves into two parties is going to be interesting. The easiest continuation-of-current-trends option is neoliberals+progressives vs. conservatives, with neoliberals+progressives winning easily. But progressives are starting to wonder if neoliberals’ support is worth the watering-down of their program, and neoliberals are starting to wonder if progressives’ support is worth constantly feeding more power to people they increasingly consider crazy. The Republicans used some weird demonic magic to hold together conservatives and neoliberals for a long time; I suspect the Democrats will be less good at this. A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations. For like ten years. Until there are enough minorities that the Democrats are just overwhelmingly powerful (no, minorities are not going to start identifying as white and voting Republican en masse). I have no idea what will happen then. Maybe the Democrats will go extra socialist, the neoliberals and market minorities will switch back to the Republicans, and we can finally have normal reasonable class warfare again instead of whatever weird ethno-cultural thing is happening now?
We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today. But because we have been so focused on the last 60-odd years of data, we have missed the incredibly important context of the (titular) upswing that occurred in the first half of the 20th century in America and didn't require populism (in fact, the Populist movement in America was strongest right BEFORE the upswing began, ~1870-1900), and it was the Progressives that kicked off associational, communitarian ideals. This increase in community and togetherness was a strong trend through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Postwar years. It wasn't costless! There were reasons people rebelled against the reigning order in the 1960s and 1970s. But every solution creates its own problems, and I think making this about Modernity and not about the last 65 years of culture obscures the contours of the issue.