Liberal or progressive?

[Recursion]

33. Both are nebulous terms with historical baggage, as is "left"

"Progressive" comes from late 19th century bourgeois Republican reformers whose legacy ranges from the awesome (labor laws) to the awful (eugenics -- the KKK in the 1920s was a "progressive" organization), and to me and a lot of people the term does have some baggage of creeping puritanism.

"Liberal" is a much older term and basically doesn't mean anything anymore; a century ago it described what we might call today libertarianism, but also had more of a social than political meaning.

"Left" comes from which side of Louis XVI's court different factions sat on, and is probably the only term that can be pretty reliably defined; I think Noah Millman said it best that leftism sides with society's losers and rightism sides with society's winners.

Oddly enough, none of those ideas are particularly contradictory of "conservatism" in the broadest sense (that of preferring to adapt existing institutions over creating new ones).