And I strongly agree with your assessment, dearest sister in Christ!
Yet your post set me off onto so many different areas of investigation, which entailed finding answers to such questions as: What is a "Liberal"?; What is a "Democrat?"; and finally, what is a "Progressive?"
Here are the best definitions that I can come up with, respecting these three terms:
(1) "Liberal" refers to a great political tradition spawned by the experience of British citizens asserting their "sovereign natural rights" against the powers of an unaccountable (to them) Monarchy. The great political philosopher John Locke proclaimed that State power concentrated in a single quasi-divine figure whose mandate derived from the ancient theory of the "divine right of kings" was an illegitimate power — because it did not recognize the fundamental, natural rights possessed by natural human beings — the divinely-endowed natural powers of life, liberty, and the acquisition/conservation of personal property against any encroachment/usurpation by the State. Liberalism makes the people the sovereign of the State. The main value protected under the Liberal understanding is the protection and preservation of the natural, "God-given" powers of the human person against abuses arising from the actions of an abstract State that sees itself as unaccountable to these self-same people — the We the People who chartered the entire American Experiment, as primordially expressed in the U.S. Constitution — in contrast to the usurper's better idea, which conduces to some kind of human utopia to be "certainly" instantiated at some future, yet uncertain, date.Boiling it all down, what Hegel did was to destroy the relevance of any former idea of the "ground of being" of human existence — the key concept of both classical and Christian philosophy/theology — exterior to, but required for, intelligent human understanding and control of truthful human action.
(2) Democracy, on the other hand, when you boil it all down, is nothing more than a system describing how the electoral franchise is to be executed. It is all about "equal voting." The Dems are really, really keen on that, nowadays.
(3) Progressivism is a German import into American culture. It comes down to us, in contemporary times, from the German Transcendental Idealist School philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (See his Phänomenologie des Geistes [1807] for relevant details.)
Of all people, Hegel was a master student of Classical and pre-Socratic philosophy, not to mention of the specifically Christian development therefrom. I gather he may have self-identified as a Lutheran at a some point in his career.
But what he actually accomplished, by the communications of his writings, was to assert that the idea of God is not at the root of all material and immaterial things. Rather only unaided human reason and will can govern human thinking, and thus define and account for what happens NEXT in space and time — to human beings and to the natural environment of which humans are both parts and participants.
In short, God is not only unnecessary, but is positively a stumbling block to men who want to be "as Gods" themselves. Thus, the Lord can be dispensed with, in favor of human "expertise." That was the major lesson that Hegel wanted to teach, if only because he presented himself as the New Candidate for the eternal Godhead....
Anyhoot, the Progressives have a very ambitious schedule to implement. "Ambitious," because it flies in the face of actual, cumulative historical human experience in so very many ways.
It should come as no surprise that the Democrat Party would be the party especially vulnerable to "progressive" ideas. What is surprising to me somehow, is that the Democrat Party is the first VICTIM of Progressive ideology. And they probably can't even figure out how that even happened in the fisrt place. So go figure.
Just look at the history of the Democrat Party: After the Civil War, they resisted tooth and nail any constitutional amendment that would recognize the basic humanity, sovereignty, and free status of persons formerly held in a condition of slavery, of bondage. I am here speaking of the Amendments 13 through 15.
Amendment 13 freed the slaves. Amendment 14 secured their civil rights as Americans equal under the laws of the United States of America (and penalizing, in its following Sections 2–4, any attempt by local jurisdictions to get around the full implication of Section 1). Amendment 15 guaranteed their right to vote.
As mentioned already, the Democrat party resisted such innovations tooth-and-nail. But when they were duly ratified by the People of the Several States, thus to became constitutional law, the Democrat Party continued to resist, adopting such postures/strategies as Jim Crow, "separate but equal" jurisprudence, and even the mobilization of the Ku Klux Klan in order to try to maintain unjust domination over an already thoroughly lost cause.
One hundred years after the ratification of these overwhelmingly Republican-championed amendments, the state of (so-called) African Americans had improved enormously. Notwithstanding the "separate but equal," Jim Crow legal ambiance that obtained during these years, the strengths of Black Americans came straight out of the achievements of the corresponding strengths of their own natural community, which placed the premium on such things as: Strong family formation; strong ties to their spiritual moorings, that is, to the Black Church (the foundation of so very much good in American society, from the basics of social order to the beauties of modern American music).
Given such foundations — freedom and the Holy Bible (which was their main instrument of education/acculturation at a time when Blacks were forbidden all means of formal education, under criminal penalty) — they were bound to prosper, even if they were not getting any "help" from the larger secular "society."
To wrap up this point, there is no historical evidence whatsover of sympathy for the "problems" of Black Americans emanating from the Democrat Party until LJB came along. And he was a political cynic, were you to ask me.
LBJ evidently had no love of Blacks, and was not inclined to extend much sympathy to them in their struggle to fully assimilate into American society. It was only when he recognized that they were actually bona-fide VOTERS — meaning to a political cynic like himself that they could be "bought" — that he started paying attention to their "concerns."
Trillions of misspent tax-payer dollars later, not much social progress has been made. Nor can progress be made, if the sitting president of the United States finds his best recourse is to be in the business of dividing the races....
To me, we Americans are One People, irrespective of the race we were born into.
Will leave it there for now.
Certainly, dearest sister in Christ, "in all things may God's will be done."
Maranatha, Jesus!!!
Anyhoot, the Progressives have a very ambitious schedule to implement. "Ambitious," because it flies in the face of actual, cumulative historical human experience in so very many ways.