19 Sep 100 Reasons to be a Progressive Conservative: #1-3

Liberals keep losing the biggest, most crucial battles of our times. (footnote: Marriage Equality a rare exception, more on that later).

Is it because conservative arguments tend to reduce more efficiently to sound-bites? Do conservative arguments tend to seem more like common sense? Is there some underlying reason for this if it is so?

We are currently experiencing a great debacle, perhaps our last as a Democracy, resulting from yet another epic loss by Liberalism, this time the 2024 election.

I’m tired of the constant losing, the difficulty of making Liberal arguments to anyone who does not already believe. I have decided to wave goodbye to the workhorse ideology of Liberalism and hope others might join me in hitching up a new steed: Progressive Conservatism.

100 reasons to be a Progressive Conservative Reason #1-3:

posted September 19 , 2025 from Seattle, WA

Reason #1: Progressive Conservatism believes in nonviolence and makes no exceptions and makes this a foundational principle (the right to self-defense is separate and not affected)

NONVIOLENCE IS ITS MOST IMPORTANT PRINCIPLE, AND IT’S NON-NEGOTIABLE.

What’s the advantage? Progressive Conservatism is a new doctrine with a book (this book) and therefore can rank principles by importance and call them prerequisites for inclusion. Liberalism is beyond anyone’s control, a catchall category whose Venn Diagram absolutely includes people who don’t reject or who are not particularly rigorous in rejecting violence or who don’t see nonviolence as a foundational principle. (People’s right to self-defense is separate and not affected)

The Theory: How is this Conservative?

Pundits like to quote Clausewitz, the Prussian General, in saying “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” That’s fine, that’s the view of a person who had been ensconced in the public sector for the entirety of his (very successful) life.

But while War may indeed be seen as a continuation of politics, which is located primarily in the public sector, it can be seen as murderous assault on the private sector of the victim country. There is no continuation, war can and does put an end to market transactions that would otherwise have happened and replace them with external transactions (to the market) which unlike market transactions differ in being nonconsensual (such as being killed).

Conservatism of the strain I embrace is always suspicious of government, always looking for ways government is overreaching, always skeptical of grandiose new government projects requiring massive budgets and seeking control over people. Deciding to oppose an unforced war is as easy as falling off a log for a real conservative.

And of course, many many conservatives have opposed violence, among them the person sometimes called the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, who spent much of his career opposing the English military opposition to the American Revolutionary War.

War generally is in the province of the public sector. War and policing are arguably the original reason-for-being of the public sector, the first, most urgent and perhaps still the most impacting reason for creating a government with its taxing power and coercive structures. Anyone who has ever read any histories of the middle ages is familiar with the meme: The King develops an imperative to wage a military campaign, Richard II of England, for instance, wants to go on the second Crusade, and of course needs to impose a new draconian tax on everyone to raise money in order to do so.

How Procon would lead to a better world

Nonviolence is a key bedrock foundational belief of PRO CON.  Consider the PRO CON take on the last batch of Democratic candidates who took on Trump. Two of the three Democratic candidates had cast a key vote to greenlight an unprovoked military attack on Iraq. Leading up to the vote Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, one of the least left-leaning Democrats in the Senate at the time, had waged an all-out Hail Mary campaign to keep us out of Iraq.

Proponents had claimed Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”  That this turned out to have been a lie was no surprise to many of us at the time but few in the media and few politicians other than Byrd pointed out the much bigger flaw in the rationale for going to war: Who were we, as the Nation that had the most weapons of mass destruction of any country, to say that some other country had no right to have any?

A moral problem there, and for PRO CON, morality should always guide our Nation’s actions even more than what pundits like to call “our national interests.”

Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both voted for this unforced error, an unprovoked military attack on another nation.  I was furious at them.  The Democratic base should have been also. However, the base, composed of many Liberals, went back to work as though nothing had happened. There was never a reckoning inside the Democratic Party over this support of an egregious unforced error.

The PRO CON position is that both Biden and Clinton and all the Democratic Senators who voted for first-strike war should have been primaried or at least B-listed so they would never again be national leaders–after all, they had failed a simple test. They had voted to add more war to the world, with all the human and material costs that entailed. B-listing or voting them out would have allowed some new candidates to rise through the ranks and represent the left half of America in their various states.

Caption: (Photos Above: Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia; Joe Biden in 2015 and Hillary Clinton in 1997. All photos courtesy of Wiki-Commons)

Had we not run either of those candidates there is a possibility, albeit only a possibility, that we never would have had to suffer under Trump.

Another part of the “no exceptions” should involve a rejection of our cultural embrace of violence. Movies today feature the good guy killing the bad guys. If only life were that simple. Video Games today put every kid, plus millions of adults into a mental space where the only way they can succeed is to constantly kill people. No wonder killing is being seen as just another tool to use to get whatever you want.

Caption: (The above photo of Martin Luther King was taken in 1963 and credited to NARA, and courtesy of Wiki-commons. King’s greatness is understated and I get the feeling some people think his holiday is to give Black People a holiday. Martin Luther King gave all the oppressed groups throughout the world a blueprint to use to achieve their freedom He never wavered and he never let up from stating, with immense eloquence, his commitment to nonviolence.)

Caption: (World War One marked a great turning point in US history, ending whatever reluctance and facility our country had had regarding “going overseas in search of monsters to destroy” (the words of James Madison). Then-President Woodrow Wilson threw 20,000 Americans in prison for simply voicing opposition to going to war. The propaganda for militarism had not by then yet succeeded in imbuing pacifism with the stigma of masculine-weakness that it has now. The opponents to entering the war included perhaps equal parts “left” and “right”, and included many ordinary folks. Opponents tended to be from what we now think of as “red states.” Senator Robert Vardaman of Mississippi was a notorious supporter of white-supremacy and Jim Crow, but was against the War. He called it a “rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” Vardaman was one of only 6 Senators (including “Fighting Bob” La Follette) to oppose it. Henry Ford was a virulent racist and generally a right-winger, but was initially at least strongly opposed as a pacifist (far left). Jane Addams, who created Chicago’s Hull House and turned up on every list of supporters for all progressive causes of that time, was a staunch opponent (2nd from left) as was Eugene Debs, who had been the Socialist Party candidate for President (second from right.) Debs was jailed by Wilson and later released by Cal Coolidge, who had dinner with him and said he quite enjoyed it. On the right is Crystal Eastman, among the most tireless activists of all in the cause of keeping us out of the war.) Emma Goldman and Jeanette Rankin are two great anti-war heroes not shown.

Assassinations and Political violence

I’ve been concentrating on War but the question of lone or small group-actor assassinations and political violence is sadly everpresent. A person doesn’t need a lot of political doctrine: the Golden Rule will answer this and we don’t need to elaborate on it theoretically, it’s perfect as is. Lately the US has been engaging in a type of violence that’s in the gray area between War and rogue violence, such as the Drone killing of so-called terrorists (but not under the jurisdiction of the United States and not afforded due process) around the World outside of US jurisdiction and most recently of individuals on Boats in International Waters or the Waters belonging to other countries about whom nothing is known. All this extra-judicial violence should be called what it is: murder. It should be resolutely opposed.

Reason #2 PROCON, doesn’t take a different position than many Liberals. While there may be no air between a PROCON position and the position of many Liberals, there is a possibility that PROCON arguments could play better with death penalty proponents.