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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

That was my first thought when I read this comment. Progressives tend to believe that the government knows best (e.g. please tell me what size soda I should be allowed to buy), while conservatives tend to believe that the free market will naturally regulate itself (e.g. amusement parks will voluntarily keep their rides safe, because people won’t buy tickets otherwise). There are pros and cons to both sides. But it is simply inaccurate to say that progressives “despise” regulation - they love regulation and would do far more of it if left to their own devices.

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Progressives don't love regulation, but they also don't have a superstitious dread of it. Progressives want to use the right tool for the job. In some cases, that is regulation. In particular, when the consequences of a decision cannot be internalized, so the pursuit of self-interest is not sufficient to produce societally optimal solutions, regulation can correct this market failure.

I always understood it as a progressive wants to change things and a conservative wants things to stay the same.

Kind of, but it's more nuanced than that. A traditionally conservative ideology isn't opposed to change, but rather states that revolutionary changes are extremely likely to have unintended and unpredictable concequences, and so we should be extremely sparing with that. If change is necessary, it's better to to let it arise organically through societal pressures or the invisible hand of the free market, which can happen in a slower way with more controlled self-corrective measures.

Both "conservative" and "progressive" ideologies generally allow for change, but in different ways.

I don't subscribe to conservative ideology myself, but traditional conservatism is an understandable outlook.

I think in practice it has differed a lot between different groups that call themselves "conservative" in different time periods and locations. I suppose winding back recent changes (back to the "good old days") is also an aspect of conservatism.

It's also a far too simplistic way of looking at politics: usually groups will be in favour of same changes and opposed to others, regardless of what they call themselves.

There are also issues where it's not even clear what a "conservative" approach would be. Should action be taken against global warming, to prevent potentially undesirable climate change, or resist taking action, to prevent changes to the economic status quo? For some reason, modern conservatives generally seem to prefer the latter.

Those would be the literal meanings of the words, yes.

In practice, the fundamental difference is probably more about a person's radius of empathy (progressives tend to apply their empathy to a larger group of people), and then lots of vaguely related things flow from that, e.g. different outlooks on power (conservatives prefer a strong man - obviously only assuming he's from their own "tribe" - and therefore strongly tend towards authoritarianism) and economics (empathy with more people tends to make one prefer more equal distributions of wealth and income).

The terms progressive and conservative simply arose at a time when the world was largely shaped the way conservatives like. Since then, the world has changed more towards the progressive vision, so today conservatives do want to change creating things.

Progressives love regulation mainly because that's the only way for outsiders to get a voice in capitalist institutions which are run by a small minority that can cause extreme externalities on the surrounding community and their employees for their own benefit. One alternative solution to regulation is to let the employees and surrounding communities participate in the management of the business. This would lead to fewer externalities and hence, in some cases, less regulation.

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