First off, thanks for the response.
I should have been more clear with this terminology I think, but it’s a reference back to concepts laid out in the prior article:
Liberal/Conservative and Republican/Democrat are both pretty muddy terms, but Traditional-Progressive is a clearer continuum. Traditionalists favor societal organization structures that are tested, because they know the old ones work and they fear that new ones won’t. Progressives favor societal organization structures that are new, because they don’t fear the new ones won’t work, and they identify problems with the old ones they want to fix. Liberal / Conservative maps generally into this landscape, but not exactly, on an issue by issue basis, and I’m not sure what the terms Liberal / Conservative even mean in this modern post-Trump landscape. Everything has boiled down into two teams trolling each other, without clear ideology on either side.
The other article makes this much clearer, and I originally included much more of the same argumentation in the current one, but had to trim it for space. Head over there and give it a read, and see if it’s more clear.
In fact, progressivism does not really seem germaine to some of these issues, liking parenting. I don’t know if I could differentiate progressive parenting from non-progressive parenting.
So.. ..two things about that. One, parenting by nature leans traditional because parents are inclined to teach their children the things that they were taught, somewhere between ten and thirty years ago. This happens on two levels. At the conscious level, you’re simply conveying the concepts you were conveyed when you were a kid. This happens everywhere, and isn’t particularly special. The only time this indoctrination scheme evolves is when the parent has been indoctrinated with subsequent paradigms since childhood, as in the case of college or military service, and quite often the individual seeks out indoctrination paths that are similar to their early life indoctrination on purpose, so they aren’t likely to vary much.
But there’s a subconscious level to it as well. They used to call this “taping” in developmental psychology, but I’m not sure the term is still popular. Basically, you are going to internalize the behaviors of your father from when you were a child, and revert to those when you become a father, entirely subconsciously, even if those behaviors in retrospect weren’t positive behaviors. You’ve probably noticed this in some of the social dynamics between your adult peers and their children.
So the natural inclination, both at the surface level and the subconscious level, is to convey indoctrinations that are approximately as old as you are. This is what I meant by a “lag” in the article.
That’s not to say that progressivism doesn’t leak into the parenting indoctrination path. One thing that’s being hotly argued about right now, in this space, is the idea of transgender kids.
Blue media piece:
Red media piece:
So setting the entire argument aside, because that’s not what this article was intended to do, let’s take a meta-look at the argument itself using the article’s analysis framework.
The very idea that kids can be transgender wasn’t on the map at all for centuries at least, because of the traditionalist lag in the parenting indoctrination path. It has only become a thing now, because parents in 2018 were subjected to alternate indoctrination paths since the concepts were laid out in the 1970s — those being largely the media and feminist higher ed — and those indoctrinations supplanted the traditionalist ones for some parents.
In fifty years, the idea that children can be transgender may be so firmly indoctrinated that it becomes part of the tradition. This is the running media narrative on both the Red and the Blue — The Red says it must be fought against, the Blue says it must be enshrined. But it’s quite possible in my mind that the whole thing falls flat in the next decade as the progressives overplay their cards, and their indoctrination paths also become eroded.
