As far as I can tell, progressives are the things that go bump in the night. They live under ever wingnut’s bed, hide in every dark alley, watching, waiting to leap out and destroy America! Any policy attributed to a *spit* progressive is (in their simple minds) automatically and irreversibly discredited. Who’s a progressive? Anyone and everyone who has ever dared to disagree with them. And at the same time no one. The faceless evil, the “them”, the “other”. They’re the modern Emmanuel Goldstein, giving the wingnut a target for its two minutes of hate. The refuge of a simple mind in a complex world.