“Progressive” has become a label. People who identify with an underdog claim that title, people who care and work for a fairer world. That would be me.

Progressive people are derided by conservative people by the term, Woke. That would be me. The term Woke is meant to hurt and it hurts me.

Back in the times before it became a label, I used to be progressive. Of course the word progressive is an adjective, like big, or old or green. In the past I wouldn’t have called myself a Progressive, any more than I’d have called myself a Big (which I am not), or an Old (which I am), or a Green. Very many people identify as Greens. I’m green: I’m concerned for the environment and live accordingly. However in Australia, the Greens as a political party are an organised mass movement hostile to Jewish people. (The Greens will deny, hand on heart that they are anti-semitic. But I am a Jew who judges them by the harm they do, not by their ever-so-pure, who-me? intent.)

We Jews hear a Greens voice that allows our people no homeland. The Greens voice that Australians hear is not heard on Hamas terror. It’s a voice that cannot pronounce the word rape when committed by Hamas.

The Greens of course, would claim to be progressive.

So I’m not a Progressive, that proper noun that’s a self-label. In the days when I knew myself as progressive, rape was rape, and rape was always hideous, always condemned, always wrong. In the days when I was progressive, we who embraced the underdog were capable of civil agreement to disagree. In those times those who embraced Palestinian people as underdogs did not vilify those who supported Israel. They did not deny our humanity. That inhuman individual would be me, Zionist, former progressive. 

Progressive people knew once the dignity of difference. We might be Zionist or non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, and we could hear each other. We could see the human face of one with whom we disagreed. 

We had not learned to cancel.

Progressives have made progress. They’ve progressed to shouting where previously they’d debate; to shaming where they’d show respect; to cancelling and to doxing. Once upon a time Progressives used to be democrats. The Progressives have progressed far out of sight, so far they cannot be recognised. They have followed the logic of their self-contradiction to their present morass of moral confusion. Many Progressives – in my speculation most of them – mean well. Many are young and are uninformed and susceptible. Some become useful idiots manipulated by older persons, agitators for one cause or another or every cause de jour.

So I am one whose constituency has moved on. I am one left behind, marooned in a once-was world, a world of outmoded values like decency, like openness to the other, like mutual respect. I am stuck in a past where we could agree to disagree.

I guess I have to accept I am not progressive. I need a new noun. Call me a Retrogressive.