Just look at the name of each of the primary groups in the US:

- Progressives

- Moderates

- Conservatives

Progressives, by definition, want 'progress'. Conversely, Conservatives do NOT want progress; if anything, they want regression and thus their desire to roll everything back done in the name of Progress(ives).

Moderates just want to play both sides and find some sort of middle ground; something that doesn't really play well in the US in the current political climate.

This is not the right framing. The left vs right battle was invented so people wouldn't think about the up vs down battle. It's wealthy people vs everyone else but the wealthy people convinced everyone else that it's red vs blue.

Taking political labels at face value is stunningly naive. Parties' rhetoric is similarly untrustworthy to the point of irrelevance. In reality, major parties are just different combinations of graft, which for obvious reasons is not shared with the public. But even if that were not the fact, taking some label that arose a century ago (progressive) or four centuries (conservative, in England) -- under circumstances that are barely remembered and may have been mendacious even at the time -- and have changed continuously since -- is common enough, I guess, but sheer childishness.

> Progressives, by definition, want 'progress'. Conversely, Conservatives do NOT want progress; if anything, they want regression and thus their desire to roll everything back done in the name of Progress(ives).

I don't know what this logical fallacy is called, but it's a logical fallacy nonetheless.

I'm going to take you at face value, and assume you're talking about the idealized state and not the parties as they stand right now. (Because the Republicans are increasingly reactionary and not at all conservative in their governing.)

Saying that someone called conservative means that they, by definition, do not want progress is silly. First, it's better to say "change" than progress, because a lot of what has been put in place by the "progressive" party is not necessarily better and a direction forward. Second, you can want change in a conservative manner, and you can be of the belief that small changes are better for society than massive changes, Chesterton's Fence, all that.

This kind of thinking is something most people leave behind after freshman year in University.

Progress towards what? Conserving what exactly? What is moderation between the progress goal, and the conservation of the past?

so if a junior dev checks in 4k lines of crap code in the codebase, is that progress?

And what do you call the more senior engineer that advises we make changes carefully, and that there are subtle, important reasons why systems are working well today. Is that engineer a conservative?

The "we oughtta run society in a way that <bible mumbo jumbo>" stuff that "conservatives" spew is literally textbook "progressivism", just not in a direction that anyone who self identifies as a "progressive" wants.

The progressive movement is not representative of the whole Democratic Party (it’s widely liberals vs conservatives, not progressives)

Republicans also don’t simply roll everything back that democrats do, as you can see with tariffs

Moderates can be found to have ideas from more than simply two camps. In fact there are many different ideas and movements in the US (liberals, conservatives, progressives, libertarians, neolibs, neocons, social democrats, classical liberalism, …)