By the original philosophical definition, I'd probably qualify, though my affinity for the ideas is marginal. I'm not really convinced that our "advances" have improved the human condition. A few have, many others have not, and on the whole I think our species is in worse shape than it was 300 years ago. I'd like to think that an increase in our empirical knowledge would lead to an improved human condition, but empirically that doesn't seem to be happening. It might end up being one of those theories that lends itself to proof by elegance, but when tested just plain doesn't hold up. The string theory of its day, perhaps.

Unfortunately, Progressivism in 21st-century America bears little resemblance to Enlightenment thinking. It is a toxic brew of extremely hardcore Communism (Marx would have been appalled), beyond-stifling political correctness, defeatism, and a vicious temporal smugness that glorifies both ignorance and denigration of anything at all involving the past. Because of course we're so much better than they were. Not just more knowledgeable about the Universe, not just given the benefit of more experience, but better. Anyone who says otherwise is "speaking from privilege" and must be ignored, shouted down, or ideally punished or removed entirely from society (so that it can make more progress, naturally). Better men than I have commented on the astonishing narrowness of the range of ideas and narratives acceptable to these ideologues who demand inclusiveness. This philosophy wouldn't even be worthy of comment were it not occupying the entirety of the Overton Window.

To bring this to bear on the topic at hand, since Progressivists hold that everything that exists today is superior to whatever version of it existed in the past, it must be true that our gigantic bureaucratic regulatory regime is in every way superior to what it replaced (small government, laissez-faire market capitalism, individualism, etc.), we can make further progress by doing more of that. Since our system of laws has become so large and unwieldy that it's essentially impossible to comply with it, we may well make further progress by simply penalizing anything that smacks of success (undeserved, of course). Since our taxes are so much higher than in the past, we can naturally improve our lot in life by raising them further. Since we're better people than previous generations, we know better than they did and may safely ignore the lessons they learned in these matters (the Soviet Union, the 1950s-1970s tax regime, etc). When it comes to government, more is better, always and without exception. Anyone who has money, regardless of how obtained, is to be punished -- not for stealing it, but simply for having it. It's much easier than punishing crime, after all, and since people with money had a lot of power in the past, the future will be better if they have less. Ideally, less than none. Instead of punishing individual behavior, it's easier to just punish people who seem similar to people who were successful in the past (the decadent, evil, exploitative past again). It saves the trouble of finding evidence of wrongdoing, and after all, everything balances out in the end, right?

So we don't need to bother with the rule of law or written contracts; whichever party, historically speaking, was in a position of lesser advantage must prevail in any dispute. Anyone who's less than hopelessly impoverished and disenfranchised must have achieved that exalted position through fraud, theft, or murder; how else could one prosper in that past? And surely anyone who is poor today owes it not to any defect in himself but to the inescapable injustices of that past. Else what progress do we find in the march of history?

So if you're a banker, it doesn't really matter whether you've followed the law. It doesn't matter if you've disclosed your policies properly and timely. It doesn't really matter because you're a banker and the other guy isn't. You're wrong, and you'll always be wrong, and you'll keep being wrong no matter what you do until you give up and die.

Progressivism, in a nutshell, seeks to replace rule by law with rule by victimhood, just as the original version sought to replace rule by sword with rule by law.

Afraid I'm just not having any. But HN sure is.