I had no strong exposure to politics in my early youth aside from the occasional newspaper and radical grade-school peers with which most of us are equipped. It was my tenth-grade year that saw me join with my high-school speech and debate club, where I participated in public forum debate and first learned to discuss an issue from one’s opponent’s perspective. In ‘PFD’, credible sources were more than just points for the marking-sheet—they were what stood between you and general believability. This was the birth of the ‘thoughtful’ element of ‘thoughtful progressivism’. To hazard ideas wantonly, directly from the gut, became an embarrassment. One needed to arrange oneself, arming oneself with the full weight of history and policy.

I regret that I did not subsequently seek out a collegiate debate society, but I nonetheless received my second awakening to politics in my university’s history program. Centuries of wars, social movements, political developments, and popular sentiments cultimated in what I immediately interpreted as powerful lessons for the conduction of today’s world. It was in this—historical study—that my own political and social alignments began to emerge. Further, increasing familiarity with the academic system during these years afforded me no doubt as to the power of a truly credible citation, and soon enough grew the ‘progressivism’. I had long heard from my hometown’s ‘traditionalists’—unhelpfully called ‘conservatives’, a term now arguably too loaded with connotations to be convincingly used in any American political discourse—and now truly immersed myself in the arguments of their opposites.

The immediate issue which pushed me in this direction was the lack of traditionalist ‘heroes’ in the history-books. When we turn our heads to the past and list off the forefathers of which we are proudest—perhaps, in the United States, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.—they were invariably in the progressive wing of their day. We call them ‘ahead of their time’. (Their lauded decisions were, at least; Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery, for example, was complex and featured strategic motivations, but it was an act supported ethically by progressives and in line with the progressives of his time.) Indeed, traditionalists of Lincoln’s time supported slavery or some compromise in which it would survive; when the prolific progressive Roosevelt was made to heed traditionalist Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and slash New Deal spending, the economy entered a recession; and Martin Luther King’s traditionalist opponents were invariably supporters of segregation. O traditionalism, where art thy heroes?

What of other examples? George Washington and his fellow Founding Fathers staged a violent revolution to upend the traditional system of governance; traditionalists of their time were loyal to the British crown. The traditionalists of the suffragettes’ day were against women’s enfranchisement. Medieval traditionalists drowned women as witches. One crowning example may be the trial of Jesus Christ by the religious traditionalists of the Sanhedrin. This is not to say that traditionalists cannot be upstanding or warm-hearted, but when given the reins on social and political issues, traditionalistic factions seem to do more harm than good.

All of this certainly leaves the modern thinker to wonder at the benefits of being a traditionalist, if they are so scorned by history. One can imagine it is merely fleeting comfort. It must be terribly cozy to sit unchangingly in one place, unwilling or unable to move, insisting that the decade in which one was born constituted the ‘good old days’ and refusing to accept new ideas. Yet, under the unblinking stare of history’s all-seeing eye, it seems unwise to imitate the crucifiers, witch-hunters, Loyalists, slavers, penny-pinchers and segregationists. (That is not to say that one should charge recklessly forward, or that all that is new is good. Unchecked progressivism can have faults—one might look to the implosion of Revolutionary France as an example. Change is best when slow, measured, and reasonable. However, there would seem to be little appeal in declaring oneself resistant to change altogether.) One becomes, in short, heir to an unsavory legacy.

Fine, then. It is established that progressives appear to generally be on the right side of history. To what end was all that earlier talk about ‘evidence’ and ‘sources’?

In a great many of the issues I studied, scientific evidence guided the way of the progressives in their time, and even a cursory view of history evidences that progressivism and scientific study have been closely allied. Progressives have long touted the dangers of man-made climate change—an issue on which they are increasingly thought correct. Scientific calculations and evidence have pointed in the direction of climate change conclusions since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, rarely are strong bodies of research disproven. Evolution, a heliocentric solar system and Mendelian genetics are all ideas which received general progressive and scientific support against traditionalist drawback and which now prevail. Indeed, all new ideas must be put up against all of our scientific knowledge to be tested for their verity—but to follow new ideas illuminated by the light of science would seem a truly progressive ideal. The eye of history scorns the unscientific. Thus intertwines the value of evidence with the acceptance of new ideas. Whithersoever the evidence points, the progressive must venture. (This is not to say, though, that all progressives have always striven after science. It is merely a tenet of the thoughtful progressivism endorsed by the Cognizant Society.)

Each time an issue arises, one must thus do the progressive thing and seek out the scientific and historical evidence. A scientific example: the steam of a nuclear power plant is several times cheaper than that of fossil-fuel steam and additionally subtracts the issue of non-renewable energy consumption. Critics will point to nuclear waste as a drawback—scientific analysis, however, evidences that ‘nuclear waste’ is a scarier phrase than reality, and that the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste poses no issue. Thus, a thoughtful progressive will support nuclear power and, presumably, this will be vindicated with time. What of history? A mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans has been suggested—ethics aside, what became of it the last time it was tried? It did nothing to improve the economic standing of remaining Americans, likely actually worsening it. (Ethics would compel one against the issue in the first place; forcible movement of anyone ought to be strongly justified.)

The framework which ought to be used in analysis of social and political issues is thus laid out in the shadow of history’s eye. It begins with a binary—one of change against resistance to change—and from it draws a starting point, thoughtful progressivism, from which to branch out and dynamically engage with history and society. Use it to be ‘ahead of your time’, I say. Be cognizant—look to science and history, those tools which have afforded progressives their historical victories. Be, in other words, on the right side of history.