"Progressive" ranks in my mind right up there with "Hope" and "Change" as words that mislead uninformed voters.
They are easy to say and fall softly on the ear.     But they have multiple definitions in the modern lexicon.

Not too long ago I heard a suggestion that we need to also educate voters as to the positive meaning of the word "Republican".    It seems that immigrants do not always understand how a "Republic" is a superior protector of individual rights to a "Democracy", which political imagery they equate to the Democratic party.    Since then I have observed that a majority of young people born in the USA suffer from the same lack of understanding.

Remember the failed Soviet Union?    Its official title was "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".    Like many of the fascist-communist national structures worldwide, in which the working man is treated as a serf to the statists, it includes the misused word "Republic", and oppressed peoples have come to the USA to escape that, in favor of a "Democracy" which they perceive in its ideal to be a bastion of personal liberty and opportunity.

The reality in the US, however, is that "Republicans"-- understanding the true spirit of the governmental Republic, as envisioned by the Founders who wrote our Constitution-- are the party that wished to protect minority rights from majority despotism, wished to put the rule of laws superior to the personality cult of career politicians, wished to insure that economic opportunity for all would not be sapped by the voting of largesse from the public purse.

In short, we are "Republican" because we wish to constrain government from progressively expanding its impact on our work effort  and life choices.     "Progressives" by contrast have voted themselves the "majority" thought in the Democratic party, and their vision of  "democracy" is approaching the economist's definition of "fascism"-- the very economic oppression generations of immigrants risked life and property to escape  

The "Republican" party likewise is the original source of the courage to challenge the social injustices of slavery in the southern plantation states-- an insidious holdover from the European feudal property structures of centuries prior to the war in which American colonies fought for independence from autocratic rule of "Royal" families.   The Progressive tendency to make certain American families into quasi-royal political dynasties is a throwback to the anti-Republican culture of the pre-Civil War plantation societies, and depends upon the "democratic" tendency to vote for incumbents-- familiar names-- instead of for the clarity of vision required to sustain limited government.
 
In the history of the world, the first true republics were Israel, Greece and Rome.    All rose to greatness from their founding as republics-- all in the complacent comfort of their economic success made a conversion to democracy, after which at the first sign of trouble, the more timid majority voted in kings, emperors, and dictators, after which they declined economically and spiritually and eventually fell to barbaric foreign aggression.

We are now in a period where decades of touchy-feely Progressive thinking have weakened us economically, spiritually, and in our understanding of history, which then tends to repeat itself.     We keep hearing how the present conditions parallel the Great Depression, but we lack the history to understand how Progressives both got us into that mess and then prolonged its agony (in part by copying the socialist experiments in the USSR!).       

A little history lesson is needed, and it currently falls to Republicans to do the teaching.     With the help of both the hard working law abiding immigrant, and those of us who descend from long ago generations of immigrants that understood the ideals of liberty and opportunity embodied in the young American Republic, the lesson can also be put back into practice, and the spirit and productivity of the USA restored. 

Only a "Progressive" is inclined to turn "Conservative" into a dirty word.    The question voters have to ask is-- who is more likely to preserve "Hope" in the economy for everyone, not just those who fit certain criteria and adhere to one world view?    Who is more likely to bring "Change" to over-burdened systems that prefer multigenerational poverty locked into entitlements over offering motivations to escape into a more prosperous self-determination?     Who is more focused on offering "Progress" that is defined by individual liberty and a moral consciousness rather than a collectivist socialization of society?

Compared to the original forms of government-- collective property under a tribal chief,  feudalism under inherited royalty, or the empires imposed under military rulers-- "democracy" is certainly an improvement; but for a society to benefit from and preserve its liberty of thought, action and rights of property, the "Republican" ideal of a limited government subject to the constraints of its people is what we need today.     To slide into a Progressive democracy as we have done and are doing, is to allow hard-won liberties to slip away, one at a time, and if we study our world history, economic opportunity and personal liberty go hand in hand.   