And I think it is tremendously disingenuous to claim the opposite. The very same attacks on the "excesses" of progressivism, and "if only you'd focus on this instead of that you wouldn't antagonize people" were beat-up clichés at the time of the women's suffrage movement if not abolition. In fact, calling the claim that there is some widespread suppression of speech and reduction in freedom at a time when clearly more people can say more things to wider audiences than ever before, and with the least interference from anyone, mere "disingenuous" is an understatement. It is hysterically delusional.
Whenever you criticize "progressive excess," some progressive says "well you would have said the same thing about slavery/women's sufferage/integration/etc".
This highlights the disagreement perfectly. Progressives view history as "the long march of progress". To progressives, ceasing to publish certain Dr. Seuss books, saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Chistmas," using terms like "latinx" and "BIPOC," announcing your pronouns, denouncing "whiteness," etc are part of the same historical process that ended slavery and passed the Civil Rights Act.
I just don't view history that way. I view historical causation and direction as fundamentally mysterious. There are a very large number of plausible interpretations of history and they all seem pretty convincing while being completely contradictory. We should argue over these interpretations, because some of them are better than others, but we shouldn't take any of them as gospel.
I think you accurately describe the misconception many progressives labor under. In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things. White abolitionists were evangelical Christians. The confederates attacked them as religious zealots, clinging to morality that was at odds with the emerging "science" regarding the races: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... Woman's suffrage was also a highly religious movement.
There's also lots of progressive ideas that turn out to be ideological dead ends. Prohibition was heavily supported by women's suffragists, and was seen as a progressive social reform. Building highways through the middle of cities was seen as a progressive and futuristic approach. Eugenics was, of course, the nadir in terms of progressive ideological dead ends in the 20th century.
Take the example of same-sex marriage. Academics like Judith Butler have consistently opposed same-sex marriage because they believe it does not go far enough to dismantle, and indeed entrenches, what they see as a repressive, patriarchal institution: https://theconversation.com/why-same-sex-marriage-is-not-the... ("But there is actually a large amount of anti-homophobic academic and everyday writing from thinkers and activists that probes the numerous problems associated with same-sex marriage."). Andrew Sullivan recognized this back in 1989, arguing that same-sex marriage was the conservative option to accommodating gays and lesbians, compared to the radical dismantling of traditional norms that people like Judith Butler espoused: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-vot....
That same Judith Butler is a leading academic in the field where "whiteness" is used as a pejorative and "objectivity" is attacked as "white culture." Maybe that, too, is an intellectual dead end, not real progress?
> In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things.
I don't claim there was a single ideology underpinning the reasons for the calls for social change. I'm saying that there are usually people (radicals, progressives) calling for social change, and others (conservatives) warning against it, and the rhetoric employed is similar throughout history (e.g. "if you only asked for a little less", or "the previous demands were reasonable, but the new ones are excessive"). That's understandable, as conservatives throughout history sometimes don't like to appear -- possibly even to themselves -- as the enemies of progress so they claim to be in favour of "reasonable progress," but whatever it is that the progressives currently call for is unreasonable; of course, a generation later, the story repeats. Ideas like women's suffrage were deemed outright preposterous, risible, and too silly to seriously consider; in fact, it took actual acts of terror by feminist activists and a world war to get them the vote.
So if you want to compare current demands to previous ones in order to explain the reaction to them, I'm saying that you should also compare current reactions to previous ones. "Previous demands were reasonable, but now they've really crossed a line," has been pretty much the conservative refrain going back millenia to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome. All of this is why I reject talk of "excess." It's just how conservatives speak of social change for millenia. You can say that you agree or disagree with some policy, but the "this is too much" line is just a cliché.
At any given instant in time, progressives and radicals are calling for lots of different things. Some of those are good ideas, and some of those are bad ideas. It's the job of conservatives to filter out those bad ideas. The fact that they oppose the good ideas too doesn't mean they're wrong when they push back on the bad ones. It's like the old trope: they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein.
Criticizing "defund the police" (as in, actually defunding the police) or normalizing the use of "whiteness" as a pejorative is not a bad thing just because conservatives do it. In fact, conservatives are doing society a valuable service by pushing back on those things. I'm quite sure in the retrospect of history, those will be proven to be "bad ideas progressives tried at one point" rather than examples of real advancement.
I'm not saying that everything conservatives say is wrong nor that everything progressives want is a good idea, just that speaking of "excesses" does not actually make them so, because that's how conservatives have always talked about demands for change.
Having said that, I'm fairly certain that in the retrospect of history, conservative pushback on the change in our understanding of race would look like another incarnation of white supremacy, and would appear as horrendously wrong to the people in the future as segregation appears to us to day, so much so that the conservatives of the future will use them as an example of something that is obviously right, unlike whatever social change people call for then.
Perhaps the difference is that I spent a few years studying history in grad school... I'm not saying that "latinx" is analogous to abolition, but that during abolition there were also behaviours analogous to "latinx" that conservatives used to ridicule abolitionists with.
This cartoon, ridiculed abolitionists as espousing all sorts of radical ideas that just sow discord (you can search for more ridicule the men in the picture were subjected to): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661525/
