This is the same strategy Hillary Clinton supporters tried to use too. The author is right, it's just a framing technique. We can choose the future we want.

John Gray the philosopher expands on this by saying that Progress as a whole is thought of as inevitable. The last couple of years I think have shown the cracks in this thinking. Western notions of progress, the liberal movement to increase and improve humanity is actually something to be activiely fought for, it's not something that will organically happen. It's not a human right. But that's what we are told: "the right side of history" is the framing.

People today think progress is a natural thing. That it's inevitable that human rights increase, the individual liberty increases, that my self expression becomes more secure with time, naturally. We still see this inevitablism in culture and politics.

That the political inevitablists don't see the history and origins of progress and liberalism (e.g. partly Christianity) is part of the diagnosis.

We might see parallels with AI. We might see anti-AI stances equated to those who want to take away personal autonomy (e.g. "to claim I cannot have an AI boyfriend means you are advocating for violence against me").

One has to actively defend and campaign for these things and not fall into a sense of it's all natural and inevitable.

Inevitability is a kind of psychological blindness. It's to be encouraged in some as it does actually work but it can give some pain when sight is restored.