I'm a centrist. We tend to Tr'ed  a lot here:)

I was asked this question in another diary. Here's what I replied.

Progressivism has a long and honorable history in this country. In recent years, it has become a substitute for 'liberalism' since the conservative movement ran a campaign to turn 'liberal' into a dirty word. People took to calling themselves progressives to avoid the liberal tag. Unfortunately, a lot of those people didn't realize just how strong the progressive movement has been in this country. Progressivism and liberalism are not the same thing, although they do agree on many policy issues.

Progressives come in all shapes and colors. One of the greatest progressives was Teddy Roosevelt. Many of the policy proposals that Franklin Roosevelt put in place came from Teddy when he was in office.

Progressives are primarily for social justice, regulating business to control the ill effects of greed, direct democracy (which is incorporated in the name of this site), limited international intervention, and conservation (this could be a legacy of Teddy R's), and more efficient, trustworthy government.

Progressives believe that society can be made more even-handed. They also believe that the world can become a better place through gradual improvements. This is where they begin to diverge from conservatives who believe in the status quo. Some progressives also believe in the basic goodness of humans. This is not necessarily a belief shared by liberals or conservatives who, although they differ on how to deal with human nature, both assume humans need to be coerced.

That is a brief overview of what I consider the core beliefs of the progressive movement. You may or may not agree with some or none of them.

A progressive is a person with a socialist bent and has the guts to stand up for what he/she believes in and puts ideals ahead of power.

that doesn't sound as bad. We can thank Mike dukakis for that.

My honest opinion? It's a word people use because conservative culture warriors somehow managed to make "liberal" a swear word. Pure bait-and-switch.

I was asked by MPIRG to identify my ideological tendencies and I said "liberal".  The person running the survey informed me I only had 3 choices "conservative", "centrist" or "progressive".  I kept saying "liberal" and kept getting corrected for at least a minute. At that point any intellectual honest person would have shredded my in person survey because my next response wouldn't mean anything.  So as far as I'm concerned this is my single biggest linguistic pet peeve.

I think that if this is your platform you can call yourself some flavor of progressive:

You favor the silver standard.
You want to show the mighty big railroad interests who's boss.
You want to abolish child labor in the U.S.
You favor CREATING some sort of National Park System to preserve the vast amounts of open land.
You read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and you want to create an agency that actually monitors claughterhouses (OK this actually applies).
You favor temperance.
You favor extending the franchise to women.
You favor direct election of Senators.
You think the most dangerous families in American Life are Morgan, Chase, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.
You are voting for Bob LaFollette in the next presidential cycle.

For me "progressive" has very specific historical connotations everyone else should just reclaim the word "liberal".  If not you are going to need a word after "progressive".

"Progressive" is the ability to write an entire diary and have 15 comments without ever mentioning that "progressivism" is politically unviable in the United States unless it embraces the political aspirations of people whose skin is not white.  

"Progressive" is supposing that it is possible in the United States to win elections without ever mentioning minorities and their political interests in your definition of "progressive."

A brief discussion about the meaning of progressivism, like the one in this diary, can only cover the surface of the issue. Progressives, like all other political labels, covers a broad swath of beliefs.

There are many different kinds of conservatives - neo-conservatives, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, etc... There are many kinds of progressives - liberal-progressives, centrist-progressives, and conservative-progressives. Each one leans towards one part of the political spectrum while still sharing some or many of the beliefs common to progressivism.

Some people might be for a more militaristic foreign policy, yet believe in govt regulation of business and favor a single-payer health plan. Others might be against all military intervention and yet favor school vouchers and privatization of certain aspects of govt. Trying to cram all progressives into one tiny box is as stupid as trying to paint all conservatives as homophobic.

In a country of 300,000,000 people, it is really dumb to use the few labels we have to define people. Those 300,000,000 people have 300,000,000 different opinions on the issues. It is nearly impossible to find 2 people that agree on every single issue. They might agree in principle, but disagree in how to handle the actual implementation.

Attempting to narrowly define a group is an old tactic. The idea is to group people under one definition and then find one part of that definition that you can ridicule. It also makes it a lot easier to push the 'with us or against us' meme.

As a simple example, many atheists are humanists. They actually share many of the same beliefs about helping other people that many Christians believe. Yet, atheists and Christians are thought to be totally at odds with each other. With us or against us. It's all rather silly, really.