MadIce writes:
I agree with your "True progress, in my opinion, is a melding of ethics and a realistic understanding of human nature." But isn't that a liberal point of view? It would allow you to make a progressive decision.

Not necessarily. Each side's ideologues believe they have a lock on both.

Communism failed because it didn't take into account human nature (which led to cascading inefficiency that ultimately spelled its ruin -- people generally want to succeed for themselves and their families, not for the state). Fascism failed because it had no ethics (which led to everyone focusing on its destruction in a violent way). American conservatism and liberalism falls far in between those two extremes.

I do not believe that the government rules us. I see the government leading us but we control the government. It's a service provider that we set up. It exists at our convenience.  In other words, the government exists to serve us. But liberals tend to see the government as the solution to many of life's problems. And to do that, they see the need to invest more and more power into the government. A binding power that, given time, turns what we consider basic rights into privileges.  Conservatives tend to see government as a necessary evil. An instrument to implement things that we cannot, as individuals, take care of that must be taken care of (roads, defense being the main two things).

Conservatives tend to see the government as merely this thing we set up to take care of a few things. So when people start suggesting that it should have power over us (such as telling us what we can and can't own in our homes) conservatives have a problem. Note that I use the term conservatives and not Republicans. Republicans are not purely conservative anymore than Democrats are purely liberal.

Americans, particularly conservatives, tend to feel that we are allowed to do anything we want unless expressly forbidden by a law. And even then, we can change those laws. Increasingly, liberals tend to take the opposite track, that the government should decide what behaviors, attitudes, even thoughts are allowed.  To any Europeans reading this, this must seem absurd, backwards. That's because it is. Somewhere down the line, things got switched around. In the United States, it's increasingly liberals looking to take away things from Americans and conservatives wanting to provide more freedoms (or arguably restore more freedoms hence "conservatives").

Moreover, Conservatives want to see the laws made and enforced as locally as possible. Liberals prefer to see laws made and enforced on a national level. I see nothing progressive in that. In fact, I don't really see anything "progressive" about American liberalism. In some ways, such as political correctness laws and policies (seen particularly on campuses), American liberalism is regressive.

So what is progressive really depends on your point of view. My own point of view is that philosophies that promote greater freedom for individuals, as a whole, are progressive.  And I find, overall, that conservative values are more along those lines.