Progressive: “A person advocating or implementing liberal social reforms to destroy traditional societal values in stages, proceeding step by step.”

Progressive Cancer: “A disease that attacks the body by using abnormal cancerous cells to kill normal cells while incrementally spreading in stages through nearby tissues and then throughout the body through a process called metastases.”

Notice the two definitions are very similar.  One is a physical disease that incrementally destroys the body by killing good cells with bad ones, and the other is a social disease that destroys society by killing good values with bad ones.  That’s why when someone snobbishly professes they are a Progressive, my response is of course you are Progressive, like a cancer.

The challenge is that Liberals understand that their ideas can spread like a disease if they can only inject them into the governmental machinery.    A great example of one of the deceptions that the Progressives use to incrementally spread their disease is their constant claims for the need to compromise.  First they stake out an outrageous goal, like nationalizing all health care into a single payer program.   They initially stake out a goal they really want but at the same time they don’t realistically expect to achieve it all at once. When the public rejects the Left’s extremist idea, the Progressives fall back to a more incremental approach. Their approach is to convert  their end state goal into a few enabling components and implement those components one at a time.   So instead of overtly stating they want to nationalize healthcare, they will state that they are only attempting to implement health care exchanges.  Using this stealth strategy,  Progressives drive to implement each of their enabling concepts into the government bureaucracy because the bureaucracy serves as the carrier to spread their disease.   At the same time, the Left then labels anyone who won’t compromise as irrational and unreasonable. (and no one wants to be seen as unreasonable, right? )  By shaming politicians into compromising on a seemingly innocuous mild expansion of government control, the Progressives effectively inject their disease into the very system that will serve to spread it through the government bureaucracy while having it expanded and grown outside of the watchful eye of the public through administrative orders and departmental policies.   Each step of the expansion involves increasing the degree of governmental control and creating more people who are dependent on the government for handouts.

Once one understands that progressive liberal thought is a form of cancer, you better understand how to fight it.   Understanding that Progressives will first push for their end state goal and then fall back to a position of implementing their plan a piece at a time puts you on the alert that political compromise is the same as political failure.  You don’t compromise with cancer.  You don’t say, I’ll let cancer have my left lung but I won’t let it have my right one.  You know that cancer’s only interest is creating more abnormal cancer cells, not making sure that your body is healthy nor even being concerned whether you even survive.   The way to fight a Progressive idea, like a cancer, is to destroy it completely, not compromise with it. First, identify all of the enabling components of their plan that they are trying to implement or possibly have already implemented.    Then one at a time, cut out each enabling concept that has been implemented into the government bureaucracy and crush each enabling concept that is currently being proposed.   Go on the offensive while understanding that destroying a Progressive program is also a multi-step process.   Cancer can’t survive without a blood supply, and a Progressive program can’t survive without a money supply.   So a good first step in removing a Progressive program imbedded in the government bureaucracy is to shut off the funding.   However shrinking and removing the Progressive program is not sufficient.  You must aggressively introduce initiatives into society that address the root of the issue that the Left is attempting to exploit.    Think of our approaches here as repeatedly hammering the Progressives enabling components with chemotherapy and radiation until there are no traces of the disease anywhere.  Our versions of chemotherapy and radiation are implementing free market solutions and enforcing the constitutional limits on governmental authority by repealing or defeating expansionist legislation.   But remember, destroying a Progressive concept infiltrating the government bureaucracy is a war, not a debate club.

When Progressives want to shift more power to bureaucrats to redistribute wealth or limit your rights, you must fight to win.   Fighting to win isn’t compromising and letting them take only some of your money or a few of your rights.  We attack the bad idea by informing the public of their real end state goal and their real agenda.   Expose how the Left is using deceptive tactics, like Obamacare, to incrementally implement government programs while using administrative orders and departmental rules to take away even more individual rights and further expand government power.   Then we must counter with solutions that use both free market and constitutional principles. For instance the Left is targeting providing more handouts to the unemployed, counter with decreasing government regulations and reducing marginal tax rates so businesses can grow and add more jobs.   Then further expand the free market approach by cutting the government regulations that interfere with the private agencies and churches that can raise funds voluntarily to assist those in society that can use additional assistance to get back on their feet.   Offer a multi-point, comprehensive solution such that the Left is forced to fight against multiple free market concepts in which the public already believes.

Don’t fall for the Left’s final trick – the “compromise” to implement both their big government ideas and the free market ideas. Crush their goal of growing the control and scope of government with the public’s overwhelming belief that the free market works and the Great Society programs have failed to decrease the poverty rate in spite of the billions of dollars redistributed from the working class to the non-working class.  And don’t worry about being popular.  The cancer cells don’t respond well to chemotherapy and radiation.  That’s why it works.  The Progressives won’t react well to your rejection of their goal to compromise and your adherence principles of the free market and limited government. They will belittle you, slander you, threaten you and protest you.  And they will rally the “takers” from society to join them in their outrage.

However we know that since the Progressives are robbing Peter to pay Paul, they can count on the support of Paul.   Well, we can depend upon the support of Peter!  In addition by appealing to the traditional values of the majority of the public, we gain even more support because most individuals realize that it is only a matter of time before they are on the Progressive’s chopping block.  In  the Progressives world,  eventually only the ruling class  represents Paul, and the rest of us are Peter.

Like all cancers, the Progressives use a strategy of divide and conquer.  They just use hate and envy to trigger class, race, age and sex divisions in society.  The Left uses those divisions to create a crisis and an excuse for their programs to expand governmental control.  However we can crush their divisive disease by pulling the American society together.  Although we are a cultural melting pot, American society still has a core set of traditional values that we learned when we were young: Faith in God, Compassion for our Fellow Man, Reliance on Constitutionally Limited Government and Dependence on Free Market Capitalism.   Each time we effectively tie our solutions to these principles that the majority of the public already believes in, we win.  So the next time someone introduces themselves as a Progressive you can say, “You are a disease, and I’m the cure.”