I don’t think many people really care about living up to the letter of their movement’s name. If you ask conservatives why they don’t want to conserve nature, or pro-lifers why they favor the death penalty, it’s not going to force them to do a deep rethink of their value system. So I don’t expect progressives to lose sleep if I tell them that some of their cherished beliefs and policy approaches stand in the way of “progress”; they’ll just assume I’m using a different definition.

But the problems are deeper than semantics. Many current progressive approaches are detrimental to progress not as others would define it, but as many progressives themselves would. Whether it’s a social safety net, green energy, or affordable housing, progressives are often committed to a set of procedures and methods that end up being detrimental to their goals. And yet these procedures and methods are rarely questioned, because they weren’t planned but accumulated over time — sometimes in response to pressures from specific interest groups, sometimes as compromises with the political constraints of the past, sometimes for reasons unknown. But whatever the reason, it’s increasingly clear that many progressive approaches will simply not “get ‘er done”. And this puts the entire modern progressive project in danger of frustration and failure.