edit: also, while we're talking of glasses, that whole conservative-progressive axis is through the looking glass now. A lot of what looks "progressive" now is simply restorative to common sense.

Voters on each side are extremely diverse to the point there’s little universal on either side. As should be obvious from the two party system.

Historically heroine was legal and women couldn’t vote. That’s not part of what people mean by conservatives, it’s a modern political ideology.

Similarly, Democrats stances on tariffs etc have changed through the years. They aren’t particularly tied to 100+ year old ideas either.

The family values crap is just bread and circus for the religious zealots.

Sure they get into public debates and throw political mud at each other, but at the end of the day they agree on direction and end up only debating details.

For example, both parties want to shut down the southern border and only debate how to do it. Both parties want larger government with more regulations, they just occasionally debate which regulations to add. Both want to spend like there's no tomorrow, debating only who to give the newly printed money/debt to. They both agree that banks and many large corps are too big to fail. They both continue to pull more power to the federal level, only pulling state-level stunts when its a political show. They both lean heavily on executive power when in charge, wielding more and more power from the Oval Office and circumventing congress.

The list goes on, but from where I sit we aren't offered the choice between a more liberal or conservative party, we're offered to pick one of two sides in a fight that is largely chummed with political hot topics that keep us all arguing with each other while the politicians largely do whatever they want.

Kindly don’t put words in my mouth.

I should have clarified though, and wasn't even meaning it as a comment directly or argumentatively at you so much as a comment on our current political system.

Federal monitoring of voting rights wasn’t just for red states like Mississippi. Places like NYC required the same scrutiny.

Sure, homosexuals have been around forever, but societal acceptance of homosexual relationships is relatively new. Conservatives (in the US) want to turn the clock back on that, and make those relationships socially unacceptable or even illegal.

Of course, conservatives have certain ideas of when exactly the "good old days" were. Homosexuality was very accepted (even encouraged) in ancient Greece, for example, but Christian US conservatives obviously don't want to go back to those days.

> Homosexuality was very accepted (even encouraged) in ancient Greece, for example

"Homosexuality" in ancient Greece was different in so many ways from the modern concept, one has to question whether it is appropriate to apply that modern label to it. Doing so tends to promote misunderstanding, by erasing rather than highlighting how very different ancient Greek attitudes were from all contemporary Western ones, whether progressive or conservative.

(1) was it homosexuality or bisexuality? It is questionable whether the distinction between the two even makes sense in an ancient Greek context

(2) it was socially acceptable for a grown man to have relations with a teenage boy, but a grown man having such a relationship with his social equal (another free adult male) was (generally speaking) viewed much more negatively; by contrast, in the contemporary West, the former is increasingly viewed as taboo, the latter as increasingly acceptable, which is moving in the complete opposite direction to the ancient Greek attitude

(3) the term "homosexuality" encompasses both male-male and female-female relationships, but ancient Greeks didn't treat them as equivalent: in many city-states, the former was much more socially acceptable than the latter (Sparta was a noticeable exception, possibly due to its more egalitarian gender relations). Many cite Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium as one of the few ancient forerunners of the modern homosexual-vs-heterosexual distinction, yet it treats female-female and male-male relations as two separate categories, rather than merging them into a single category of "homosexual"

(4) contemporary Western ideas tend to emphasise heterosexual and homosexual relations as interchangeable and equivalent; ancient Greek views did not. Many ancient Greek men had both a wife and an adolescent male lover, but we have no evidence any of them ever thought of marrying the latter. They wouldn't view the two as coequal members of a common category, as much contemporary Western thought does

(5) the idea of sexual orientations ("homosexual", "heterosexual", etc) as categories of persons was largely unknown in the pre-modern world. As I mentioned, Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium is sometimes viewed as a precursor of that modern idea, but (a) the Symposium is arguably not representative of the mainstream of ancient Greek thought on this topic, (b) given it is a speech by a comedian in a text rich with irony, it is unclear how seriously Plato actually wanted us to take it (c) in the details it doesn't agree with modern concepts either (missing any concept of bisexuality, and treating male-male and female-female relations as two separate categories on the same level as male-female ones)

> or why you're putting scare-quotes around it

To emphasise its status as a word (and the specific concept/cultural construct that word represents), which emerged in the context of a particular culture and historical period, and hence whose applicability to very different cultures in very different historical periods is open to question

> Anything involving sexual relations between men is anathema to Christian conservatives.

I don't see how the views of contemporary Christian conservatives has any inherent relevance to the question of how applicable the word "homosexuality" is to ancient Greece

Modern high culture is what, 2 centuries old? Maybe 3 in Paris and parts of Italy? And modern embraceness of homosexuality barely 50 years old?

Whereas Greeks had at least 5 centuries of high culture to perfect their "craft".

If you are defending the "modern homosexuality" specifically that stops looking like Human Rights and starts looking like a fad.

What is conservative, in the sense of wanting things not change, is a constant moving bar and requires more context. Conservative, in the sense of going back to something in the past, requires context of how far you want to go back.

> Of course, conservatives have certain ideas of when exactly the "good old days" were. Homosexuality was very accepted (even encouraged) in ancient Greece, for example, but Christian US conservatives obviously don't want to go back to those days.

This is a perfect example of the latter. Anyone in the US that considers removing protections for sexual identity must first pick a time in the past where the laws and norms fit their preferences. That can be called conservative, but is it really?

For the former, my generation's big push was to finally make gay marriage legal. It was progressive for sure, and classically liberal in the sense that we were trying to further protect individual rights and freedom to choose. Once it passed, though, does it become conservative? Personally I prefer the definition of conservative that is more present focused, preferring to leave things as they are today unless we have a very good reason to change it. In that sense, protecting gay marriage and similar protections on the books today would be very conservative and trying to remove them would fall into some other bucket that likely doesn't have a name (reductivist? destructionist?).

Radical gay liberationists argued (and still argue) that same-sex marriage was always conservative rather than truly progressive, since it is trying to co-opt and tame gay radicalism into sustaining traditional social institutions such as marriage, rather than what they argue would be the truly progressive approach, which would be to dismantle those institutions entirely.

Words like "conservative" and "progressive" have no inherent meaning, absent a background political ideology to read them against. Once you pick your political ideology, that ideology then gives those words meaning for you – but to someone else, who has chosen a different ideology, they can have radically different meanings. If we can't agree on what is the objectively correct ideology, then there we won't be able to agree on any meaning of those terms as objectively correct.

And I would argue that is an unnecessarily extreme stance. The concept of marriage can't be dismantled, at best we could remove any state concept of it and get rid of any legal protections, tax benefits, etc. I don't personally see the value in that over making sure everyone has access regardless of who they wish to marry, though regardless marriage as a concept would never be abolished as it exists both in state and religious contexts.

> Words like "conservative" and "progressive" have no inherent meaning, absent a background political ideology to read them against. Once you pick your political ideology, that ideology then gives those words meaning for you – but to someone else, who has chosen a different ideology, they can have radically different meanings. If we can't agree on what is the objectively correct ideology, then there we won't be able to agree on any meaning of those terms as objectively correct.

This is a really strange view on language in my opinion. We absolutely could define what the terms conservative and progressive mean, and the definitions could be absolute rather than relative. In my experience people do seem to have different understandings of the terms today, but that can easily be a failure to agree of definitions rather than a given side effect of the terms themselves being relative to one's starting point.

In Australia, unmarried couples (what we call de facto relationships) have essentially the same legal rights and benefits as legally married couples. In fact, Australia extended de facto status to same-sex couples before it legalised same-sex marriage, rendering the latter move an essentially symbolic measure, at least as far as Australian domestic law goes. There's no reason why other countries (including the US) couldn't do the same thing, except maybe "conservatism"?

And once unmarried relationships are made legally equivalent to married ones, you don't need to retain government recognition of marriage. One could just repeal marriage laws, and abolish marriage as a secular legal concept. If individuals want to get married as a cultural or religious tradition, that's a private matter in which the government doesn't need to get involved. If a couple are separating and can't agree on issues such as property and children, and hence need the courts to decide those issues, the courts don't need to know or care whether the couple are "married" or not.

I think most gay liberationists would be happy with an outcome in which marriage disappears from the law, and starts to fade from mainstream culture. Yes, there will probably always be minorities of religious conservatives/etc who retain it, but there's a saying "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"

> This is a really strange view on language in my opinion. We absolutely could define what the terms conservative and progressive mean, and the definitions could be absolute rather than relative

You can define words to mean whatever you want. The problem is, different people define words differently, and if definitions disagree, what makes one person's definitions objectively superior to another's?

No doubt one can come up with completely unreasonable definitions – if someone was to define either "conservative" or "progressive" as "the belief that the moon is made of green cheese", that's obviously not a definition worthy of anyone's time. But, if radical progressives start arguing "'mainstream' progressivism is really conservatism", that doesn't seem to me to be an inherently unreasonable position, in the way that the 'green cheese' definition is. It is a reasonable definition if their views are right; and its value if their views are wrong may depend on how exactly one thinks their views are wrong.

> You can define words to mean whatever you want. The problem is, different people define words differently, and if definitions disagree, what makes one person's definitions objectively superior to another's?

As far as I see it words are entirely arbitrary, there is no objectively superior definition. The only important factor is that definitions are shared. If everyone makes up their own definitions for a shared set of words we'll never understand each other.

I think we get into problems when people begin refining terms like "progressive" or "conservative" when people start adjusting their understanding to allow themselves to fit into one bucket or the other. I.e. people don't learn the shared definition of each term and decide if they fit into either bucket, the find themselves wanting to fit into one bucket or the other and redefine terms to reshape their reality. Tribalism at its finest, basically. The idea of not fitting into either category is a bit scary or stress-inducing, people want to fit in and it is easier to change definitions rather than to change their opinions or beliefs.