There are only two things that really progress (and they aren't "progressives")

The always readable and ever thoughtful Anthony Esolen ponders:

But this brings me again to the term "progressive." What does it mean?

If I call myself a liberal, I claim to uphold the principle of individual liberty. It may well be that liberal policies actually destroy liberty, but that is a problem with the use of the term "liberal," and not with the nature of the term itself. If I call myself a conservative, I claim to uphold the principle that tradition is a source of wisdom from which we dare to swerve only with great reluctance. It may well be that policies called conservative actually destroy tradition, but again, the problem lies with usage, and not with the nature of the term. I am a localist, because I believe that local government and local groups should do most of the practical governing in our lives—the educating of children, for instance, keeping the peace, and celebrating feasts. I am a distributist, because I advocate a wide distribution of personal property. Some people are monarchists, some people are republicans, some people are even anarchists. But what is a progressive?

The term does not actually denominate anything. It is the obverse of reactionary, which is itself merely a term of abuse. That is, the reactionary reacts irrationally against something new and wonderful, and the progressive is the upholder of that novelty. About where we are going, nothing is said; the term is empty. Hitler thought he was progressive. Stalin thought he was progressive. And by their own lights, they were right about that; they were energetically progressing somewhere, "into the future," as another empty platitude has it. Now I do not mean to say that contemporary self-styled progressives are like Hitler (whom the erstwhile progressive Margaret Sanger admired) or Stalin (whom Western progressives lionized for twenty years). All I mean to say is that the term's purpose is self-approbation. Perhaps nowadays it is equivalent, practically, to "sexual libertarian with a statist vision of political life," but in itself, the term implies no such thing. It implies only that the user thinks well of himself and not so well of other people, particularly his own forebears, whom he by definition wishes to leave behind.

The progressive, as it seems to me, is therefore always in a position of impiety.

Read the entire post, "Progressive Impiety", on The Public Discourse. G. K. Chesterton, who grew up and lived in the so-called "Progressive Era" (c. 1890s-1920s), made a number of fine observations about the amorphous, vague, and malleable word, "progress". "If we are bound to improve," he slyly noted in Orthodoxy, "we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being progressive." And in his novel, The Ball and the Cross (1909), a character states:

No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church."

On the more overtly negative side, Chesterton observed, progress quite often means oppression, especially of real humanity and the ordinary man. See if this passage from The Common Man (a collection first published in 1950) seems applicable today:

The enlightened and emancipated age especially encouraged those who chucked away other people's fortunes instead of their own. But anyhow, the comparison remains continuous and clear. Progress, in the sense of the progress that has progressed since the sixteenth century, has upon every matter persecuted the Common Man; punished the gambling he enjoys and permitted the gambling he cannot follow; restrained the obscenity that might amuse him and applauded the obscenity that would certainly bore him; silenced the political quarrels that can be conducted among men and applauded the political stunts and syndicates that can only be conducted by millionaires; encouraged anybody who had anything to say against God, if it was said with a priggish and supercilious accent; but discouraged anybody who had anything to say in favour of Man, in his common relations to manhood and motherhood and the normal appetites of nature.  Progress has been merely the persecution of the Common Man.

But on a more philosophical and positive note, true progress requires knowing what man is and Who he is meant for in The End:

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. ... All this fallacy of false progress tends to obscure the old common sense of all mankind, which is still the common sense of every man in his own daily dealings: that everything has its place and proportion and proper use  and that it is rational to trust its use and distrust its abuse. Progress, in the good sense, does not consist in looking for a direction in which one can go on indefinitely.  For there is no such direction, unless it be in quite transcendental things, like the love of God. It would be far truer to say that true progress consists in looking for the place where we can stop. (Fancies Versus Fads, 1923).

One of the more maddening (but consistent) qualities of progressives is their blithe insistence that history is on their side, to the point that they will misread and/or misrepresent progressive errors of the past and use them as evidence for a pressing need for more progressive measures today. For example, a New York Times columnist recently took up the historical hammer of the Prohibition as a weapon against the (supposedly) puritanical, right-wing, tax-hating, government-destroying conversatives of 2011:

The battering ram of the prohibitionists was the Anti-Saloon League, which Okrent calls "the mightiest pressure group in the nation's history." (A public editor might note that Okrent overuses the word "mighty," a minor complaint.)

The coalition against drink was hardly a majority. The Anti-Saloon League played an outsized role at the margins, killing off moderates at the primary level, or in legislative deals, and forcing politicians to pledge to their cause.

Sound familiar? Today, virtually every Republican in national office, and a majority of those seeking the presidency, has taken a pledge to an unelected, single-issue advocate named Grover Norquist. His goal is to never allow a net tax increase — under any circumstances — and in the process reduce government to a size where he can "drown it in the bathtub," in his well-known statement of mortal intentions.

Oddly enough, the author had noted earlier that the Prohibition was driven by progressive groups and "progressive" thinking. But, miraculously, he turns the wine of the Prohibition into a water of government-shrinking zealots who are also narrow-minded moralists intent on demonizing homosexuality and abortion:

The other parallel from the dry years concerns personal liberties. With the 18th Amendment, the prohibitionists took away the right to make a basic choice. Gov. Rick Perry, now leading the Republican polls for president, has vowed to do the same, promising to amend the Constitution in several ways to take away freedoms. One would prevent gays from ever getting married. Another would outlaw a woman's right to decide when to end a pregnancy. A third would repeal the 17th Amendment, which gives citizens the right to directly elect their senators.

It would be as if, say, numerous historians stated repeatedly that the Crusades were driven by a Papal and Romanist lust for expansion and bloodshed against the peaceful, flower-carrying Muslims during the medieval era. (What? Some historians have done that? Wow, go figure.) The fact is, the Prohibition was primarily a left-wing, progressive movement that was as much of the Progressive Era mentality as was eugenics and other forms of state-controlled social engineering:

As so often happens in the United States, leaders of this social movement tried to justify their views with scientific evidence. Temperance advocates, for example, founded the Scientific Temperance Journal after the Civil War. Schoolchildren's textbooks depicted human organs degenerating from an overabundance of drink. In the 1870s, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) promoted the use of public education for the cause of temperance. They succeeded in getting their propaganda in textbooks and, by 1902, every state and territory except Arizona had a law requiring temperance instruction in the schools. The prohibitionists also used eugenics--the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding--to bolster their cause. They argued that immigrants were inferior due to the fact that their children had been drinking since a young age. ("The Politics of Prohibition: The 1920s")

Yes, many Christians were involved in the Prohibition movement—and they were mostly liberal, white Protestants who had drunk deeply from the waters of the "Social Gospel" movement (aided, it must be said, by more than a little racisim and dislike for Irish Catholic immigrants). And what power did the progressives lean on and use in order to bring about the Prohibition? That of the federal government, of course, which was itself increasingly enamored with the idea that a centralized state could efficiently and morally control and guide its citizens in matters big, small, and everything betwixt. All of which to say that the Prohibition was mostly the work of middle-class, white Protestants who subscribed to liberal theologies, believed that eugenics and social engineering were both necessary and good, and happily worked to have the federal government take over a significant part of the social, cultural, and economic life of the country.

And that is parallel to the current-day conservatives who wish to limit government growth, expand individual liberties, and lessen the grip of the welfare state—how? Right (I mean, "Left"). No need to ask; just accept that "progress" is good and that "progressives" can only do good, for when progressives do bad in the past, they only failed (in retrospect) because they were somehow or another acting like conservatives.