This is why conservativism is just not compatible with democracy.
You can’t have a society that adapts to a changing world and growing understanding of reality if people’s political ideology boils down to “We need to ignore new information and instead keep trying the failed ideas of the past.”
These two statements do not logically follow each other. There’s nothing inherent to democracy that makes Progressivism necessary
Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There’s no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it’s a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they’re not. They’re either able to admit when something doesn’t work or they’re not.
Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they’ll work. It’s an ideology that’s constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would’ve never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking “We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing.”
Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it’s not a counter balance.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same.
Literally untrue. You seem to have a very idealistic definition of what a democracy is. Democracies can follow any policies they want, as long as they’re based on the popular vote of the people.
Inherent to democracy, no. Inherent to a well-functioning society in a world where changing circumstances are inevitable, yes.
