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Explain each political ideology mentioned in the text.

"Regressive, Regressivism. Broadly, any political movement which idealises and romanticises the past, typically prior to some negative event such as a war, and seeks to return matters as much as possible to their state before that event. The term is believed to have been coined in France by René, Comte de Champagne, in an 1817 letter addressed to his nephew Philippe (and heir, as both the Comte’s sons had died in the Jacobin Wars and his brother, Philippe’s father, had been executed by phlogistication in the early days of the Revolution). René commented that the young Philippe, born in 1802, could not truly appreciate ‘la douceur de vivre’ (“the sweetness of living”) of those who remembered the time before the Revolution. He then went on to say ‘O, if only there were some marvellous conveyance, perhaps of the steam devices of which the Jacobins and their stooges [referring to Bonaparte’s Parti Modéré] are so enamoured, that might regress us to that glorious age: a regressive engine, if you will’. The French phrase he coined, machine regressife is remarkable for inspiring not only a political movement but also a genre of scientific romance, the so-called “Chrono-Voyage” in which such devices are used to allow protagonists to travel backwards—and, eventually, forwards—in time. While the Comte was a member of the doradic Parti Royaliste, which we would now call a regressive party, it was in Britain during the Marleburgensian Period that the term became popularised. While William Wyndham was not the first there to use the term, he made it his own. Wyndham’s anti-Churchill faction was originally known as the Old Contrarians and later as the New Tories, but after the Inglorious Revolution formed the core of the new Regressive Party that would be a major force in British politics for the rest of the century. The use of the term there popularised it across the world. SEE ALSO: Progressivism, Retrogradualism.

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Progressive, Progressivism. Any political movement that seeks reform and to further existing trends of reform (the precise nature of such reforms are not specified, but are often Mentian in nature). It usually also carries connotations of an embrace of the future and a disregard for the past and tradition. Scattered uses of the term are found before it becoming a major accepted form towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was popularised by its use in opposition to the term Regressivism (q.v.). SEE ALSO: Mentianism.

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Doradism. SEE: Metallic Spectrum.

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Reactivism: A political ideology created in Britain by John Greville, a political thinker originally a junior minister of the Phoenix Party government who renounced his allegiance shortly after the death of Churchill the elder and therefore was allowed to remain in exile, although he never returned to government. Greville, a conservative and doradist, viewed the Inglorious Revolution as a catastrophe but acknowledged that it had been precipitated by authoritarian misrule under the Phoenix Party (and its precursor the Rebirth Coalition). In the aftermath of the Popular Wars, drawing upon examples from the earlier Jacobin Revolution in France, contemporary events and much older history, Greville argued that progressive or cobrist ideas (which he viewed as negative) generally had little reception among an apathetic public unless oppression from above led the public to reflexively side with anyone speaking out against the ruling regime.

Greville’s On Revolution is considered even by his detractors to be one of the finest treatises on the subject of armed revolt to governance: his A Reactive Solution produced more mixed reactions to put it mildly. Greville’s original Reactivist treatise states that a government that wishes to enforce conservative and anti-Mentian ideals should use as light a hand as possible (which ties in with doradist economic thinking) and should tolerate protests and assembly. Greville argued that such events are like safety valves letting off steam from an engine and stopping them up will simply cause it to eventually explode. For this reason he is sometimes compared to the French medical pioneer Claude Toussaint, his contemporary, whose core tenet was that simply treating the symptoms of a disease might not solve the underlying problem and might even worsen it, particularly in reference to fever. Greville’s Reactivism is so called because it advocates using such protests to gauge public support for what he terms ‘a small Radical minority that even the most perfect earthly state can never hope to totally eradicate’. When public support is strong, the state should react—give in and enact some reforms to placate the public—until that public support falls away and the ‘Radical minority’ is left a lone voice crying in the wilderness wants more. Greville claimed that such an approach would ‘preserve the maximum of the desired practices possible, let us say eighty percent over a period of a century’, whereas ‘cracking down with violence and paranoia at the slightest hint of protest’ would have a ‘fifty-fifty chance of eventually triggering a revolution that would sweep away one hundred percent of the ruling regime’s practices’.

Greville’s theory was hotly debated in his lifetime but mostly not implemented until after his death by doradist parties in various countries—while born of doradism, it is worth pointing out that Reactivist practices have also been used by authoritarian cobrist governments as well to suppress counter-revolutions. Today Reactivism consists of two warring strands, the legacy of a high-profile split in the late 19th century. The split was over how to deal with Greville’s permanent ‘small Radical minority’. Fabian Reactivism is named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, whose tactics against the invading Carthaginians focused on retreating and making hit-and-run raids against the enemy rather than facing them head-on—by doing so he was able to defeat a tactically superior opponent by means of gradual attrition. Similarly Fabian Reactivism argues that the best approach to reducing activity from the ‘Radical minority’ is for a government to drag its feet as much as possible, forcing progressives to fight for every step of the way for a reform, to try and instil a negative impression and discourage them from trying it too often: perhaps reducing the progressive fight for just their most cherished reforms and thus sweeping the others aside as ‘unrealistic to try for at this time’.

In opposition, Continuity Reactivism argues that such an approach misses the whole point of Greville’s thesis and is only more likely to irritate the public and drive more of them into the arms of the ‘Radical minority’. ‘Continuers’, as adherents of the ideology are generally known, instead state that the best way to cement doradist ideals is to give ground willingly to the ‘Radical minority’ when they have public backing, but when the public are contented and disinclined to cleave to the ‘Radical minority’, to then pursue regressive policies aimed at undoing those reforms. Continuers are often ridiculed thanks to some early high-profile cases of adherent governments undoing the reforms in a manner that made it obvious what they were doing and upsetting a much larger portion of the public (those with a political memory longer than months, that is) than they had intended. However the modern Continuer realises that it is perfectly possible to pursue counter-reforms in a manner that makes it appear to build upon the existing reform rather than reversing it as is the intention. The conflict between Fabians and Continuers persists to this day and shows no sign of going away: indeed, like many blood feuds inside a political ideology, it is often felt more bitterly than any conflict between Reactivists and progressives. There are cases of coalition governments falling apart due to two parties each cleaving to a different strand of Reactivist thought refusing to cooperate.

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Mentianism: A full description of this cobrist ideology is beyond the scope of this book, but broadly speaking Mentianism is the modern English name for the philosophy whose adherents were originally known as “Neo-Levellers” and were an important faction behind the Inglorious Revolution. Originating in what was then Austrian Bohemia and spreading across the mining and industrial areas of Europe (and eventually beyond), Mentianism started out as a struggle for workers’ rights by the formation of cooperatives and ‘popular guilds’ (as opposed to the old medieval guilds which were usually controlled by the rich). Later on, sympathetic political philosophers such as August Hartmann and Gerard Deligne helped organise Neo-Leveller goals into formalised treatises. Mentianism is so called after an English corruption of the German word mensch, meaning ‘man’ or more properly ‘human’ as unlike the English term it unabiguously refers to both genders. There have been some attempts to retitle it ‘Humanism’ for an English-speaking audience, but these have generally failed both due to the potential for confusion with the literary term and also because ‘Mentianism’ has carried through the connotation in German for mensch to refer not simply to a human but to one possessing positive qualities and also emphasising those unique qualities that all humans have, distinguishing them from animals. Mentianism draws attention to the fact that all humans have potential to do great things, citing examples of those who have risen up from low origins to do so, and arguing against the then-popular view that such examples did not signify isolated happenstance lower-class individuals who happened to be able to intellectually compete with the upper classes.

Instead Mentianism advocated the idea that those individuals happened to be the only ones who through particular determination or just good fortune happened to have the opportunity to draw themselves out of their low station. In fact everyone had the potential towards greatness. Pointing out the great achievements in literature, science, architecture and so forth of those few examples, Hartmann in his famous pamphlet Gemeinsinn (“Common Sense”) suggested his readers imagine just how much richer, more wondrous, and happier a place the world would be if every single human being had the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Deligne on the other hand concentrated on the idea that every human had the potential to excel in a particular field, and being stuck in a peasant lifestyle meant that uncounted millions had unknowingly lived the tragic life of never having the opportunity to pursue their own field of genius, be it in art or engineering or warfare. Deligne went on to state that even the upper classes could achieve more than they currently did under Mentian principles, pointing out that upper-class children were just as automatically trapped in an occupation as their peasant subjects: “The heir to the local baron has the potential locked inside him to invent new methods of farming that could feed all the starving children of the nearby city, or perhaps to devise wondrous new steam devices to triple and quadruple our industrial production once again, or even for a field that he himself will invent. But he will never do any of those things because all he is allowed to do is rule—and even if he has the free time to pursue a hobby, many of those things are frowned upon as ‘ungentlemanly’.”

Although Mentianism was theoretically gender neutral from the start, much internal conflict in the often fractious movement has been over whether women should break from traditional roles, whether they should follow a husband as he pursues his own potential, whether they should have the right to pursue their own potential in a field in their own right, and so on. Nowadays Cythereanism is most commonly associated with Mentianism but that was not always the case, and in the late nineteenth century it was common for Cythereans to publicly clash with Mentian groups who tended to be dominated by local industrial workers with traditional attitudes towards women.

Mentianism has been viewed as a significant threat by doradist political forces and even some cobrists who believe that the Mentians go too far and endanger more moderate doradist principles. It is common for doradists and others to accuse Mentians of being closet Societists (SEE ALSO: Societism) due to the transnational nature of the early history of the movement and some of its factions being anti-racialist. Naturally Mentians tend to hit back at such accusations, calling them absurd considering the Societist enshrinement of the same class hierarchy that the Mentians view as the ‘yoke holding back the human race from enlightenment’. And indeed Mentians often tend to produce some of the most fiercely anti-Societist governments.

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Metallic Spectrum. From Spanish Espectro Metálicos, a term coined by the New Granadine writer Rodrigo Campos in his 1839 work Política (simply ‘Politics’). Campos however merely recognised and recorded the pre-existing use of terms in Meridian politics, which by this point were spreading into the Empire of New Spain, Old Brazil and elsewhere, and organised them in a format with definitions. The three main terms in English are Doradism, Argentism and Cobrism, derived from the Spanish words for gold, silver and copper. Together they describe points on a ‘spectrum’ of political thought, so called because the terms were originally colours. The terms are derived from Meridian politics in the Watchful Peace and Popular Wars period. The UPSA had two main political parties, the conservative Amarillo (Yellow) Party and the radical Colorado (Red) Party. The Colorados had originally taken their colour from that of the precursor Solidarity Party, which had in turn been inspired by the Jacobin regime in France and its Bloody Flag. The Amarillos embraced yellow as their colour as it was the major colour of the Meridian flag and therefore emphasised the fact that they were a home-grown movement in contrast to the foreign-inspired Solidarity Party. The Colorados therefore changed the symbolism of their own colour, pointing out that the Meridian flag also used red as one of its colours. Unaligned deputies in the Cortes Nacionales, who sometimes acted as a single voting bloc, were unofficially known as the ‘Blanco (White) Party’ as white was the third colour of the Meridian flag.

The Metallic Spectrum originates from political discourse during the presidency-general of Roberto Mateovarón, when deputies sometimes crossed party lines over particular political issues. With the old enmities fading after the retirement of Ayala from frontline politics in 1813 and the more moderate Portillo rising to lead the country as the Colorados’ first president-general, party lines became less tribal and more issue-based. For that reason political commentators needed terms to describe ideals and ideology independent of party identity. It is uncertain just who had the idea to convert the colours of the flag to analogous metals, but that was the terminology that caught on. Yellow became gold, white became silver and red became copper; this also had the bonus of carrying the connotation of ‘common copper’ versus ‘high-class gold’ for the egalitarian Colorados and elitist Amarillos. Argentism is sometimes confused with Adamantianism (q.v.) but Argentism properly describes moderate ideals held for their own sake, whereas Adamantianism emphasises moderation as a pragmatic approach to stabilise a nation while working towards more cobrist ideals."