Indeed. There is another option between "Everything is already great and people just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and "Criticise all the things that exist."

You know what I'm going to say that option is, don't you?
It's liberalism, isn't it? https://twitter.com/MattPolProf/status/1285587681238560770

Liberalism is the approach that is inherently progressive because it is inherently reformist. It spurns reactionary impulses to halt progress or go backwards & revolutionary impulses to burn everything down & hope that utopia will somehow arise from the rubble.

Liberalism is the belief that we already have much of what we need to run a free society in which everybody has equal access to everything & systems exist to support those who cannot support themselves but this doesn't mean it's already working perfectly & achieving that.

So, revolutionaries who say liberalism supports the status quo because we don't want to overturn it completely are not entirely wrong but nearly.If liberals believed the status quo was already perfect, we'd be conservatives trying to conserve it, not liberals trying to improve it

And reactionaries who say liberalism's constant pursuit of progress is a selfish individualism that fails to respect vital traditions & institutions that protect cultural integrity, decency & order are not entirely wrong either but again, nearly.

Because we do indeed fail to respect many traditions & institutions because we don't think they make culture particularly decent or orderly. We do respect others though - secularism, liberalism and democracy, for example, which reactionaries often do not.

Because of this place in which liberals fall - between the revolutionaries and reactionaries - we are prone to being called 'centrists' often accusingly. The accusation is that we're wishy-washy fence-sitters. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Many of the aims of liberalism are quite radical. There's the freedom of belief & speech thing, for example, which seems to be highly counterintuitive to humans if we look at history & countries which don't at least claim to be liberal.

So are the individualism, universalism & pluralism. We're tribal & territorial animals. The idea that we should regard each other as individuals with shared humanity & co-exist peaceably as groups with different beliefs & customs who are all allowed to live by them is WEIRD.

Of course, the Critical Social Justice people would say that liberals don't actually want groups to peaceably exist but that we want all groups to assimilate to ideas that are white, western, male, capitalist, heterocentist & ciscentrist & this is oppressive.

However, this thinking tends towards essentialism & standpoint epistemology. That is, the claim that certain ideas belong to certain demographic groups & then assigning science, reason & liberalism to straight, white cisgendered, heterosexual men is quite racist/sexist etc.

Liberal societies do tend to think that science, reason & liberalism are the best systems for attaining knowledge & maximising human rights & freedoms, but it allows for people not to think this, say they don't think this & try to persuade the majority to see things their way.

Meanwhile, the reactionaries often say that liberal aims for different groups to live peaceably together will actually spell the end of 'Western Civilisation" because it allows for people to be anti-western & anti-traditional gender roles without which the west will fall.

Thus, they don't to be that keen on science, reason & liberalism either. This is, as with the CSJ people, because none of these comport with their idealism about how human beings should work & relate to each other. Instead it discovers how they actually do & then allows that.

Now everybody will tell me I am painting a romantic & rosy picture of liberalism, but I recognise its limitations. It works comparatively slowly to improve things, it allows for mistakes with severe consequences & it can tolerate the intolerant.

However, it improves society more reliably than drives to either freeze or revolutionise it, it is self-correcting & it tolerates intolerance far less than either revolutionary or reactionary aims which are, after all, fairly intolerant.

And now my time on Twitter is up for the day so I shall cease pontificating and begin working.