Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be future-oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions that contemporary solutions must be liberated from past answers but that the future will have as much regard for our present as we have for the past. The future is an unknown country, and those who live in a present arrayed in hostility to the past must acquire indifference toward, and a simple faith in, a better if unknowable future. Those whose view of time is guided by such
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