You Are Not the Label They Gave You
What We Should Conserve. What We Must Progress. And Why Both Words Were Stolen From Us.
Somewhere along the way, two of the most important words in our civic vocabulary were hijacked.
Conservative. Progressive. They were reduced to team jerseys and weapons of division, words that tell you which side someone is on before they have said a single thing about what they actually believe. Say you are conservative and half the room assumes you hate the poor. Say you are progressive and the other half assumes you hate tradition. Neither assumption is fair, neither is true, and both serve the people who profit from keeping us separated from one another.
I want those words back. I want to use them the way they were meant to be used, stripped of the political machinery that has been running them through a distortion filter for decades. When you ask what those words actually mean at their root, something remarkable happens. Most people find themselves on both sides. Most people want to conserve some things and progress others. Most people, when the jerseys come off, discover they want the same things. Let me tell you what I mean.
To conserve something is to recognize its value and protect it from being lost. It is an act of love for what has been built, what has been inherited, and what sustains us. There are things in this world that deserve to be conserved not because they are perfect, but because they are foundational, and removing them carelessly would cost us more than we could recover.
Family, in all its forms, is worth conserving. Family is the unit of people who show up for one another, who transmit values and stories and ways of being in the world from one generation to the next. It is the first government any of us ever know and the first place we learn what love, accountability, and sacrifice look like in practice. Whatever form it takes, the family is the original community, and a society that weakens the bonds between people close to one another weakens everything downstream.
Healthy tradition is worth conserving. Not tradition for its own sake, and not the preservation of injustice under the cover of custom, but the rituals and practices and ways of gathering that connect us to something larger than the moment we are living in. The holiday meal, the community celebration, the stories told by elders to children, the songs that carry a people’s history in their melody — these are the connective tissue of a culture, and when they fray, something essential goes with them.
Nature, land, and the environment are worth conserving. This may be the most urgent conservation argument of our time, and it is also the most ancient. Every indigenous tradition on earth understood that the land does not belong to the people — the people belong to the land. We are not the owners of this planet. We are its stewards, and what we do to it, we do to every generation that follows us. Clean air and clean water are not political positions. They are the preconditions for human life, and a conservatism that does not conserve the natural world has lost the thread of its own meaning.
The liberties enshrined in our Constitution are worth conserving with everything we have. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the right to due process, and the protection against unlawful search and seizure were not written to protect the powerful. The powerful have always been able to protect themselves. These rights were written to protect the rest of us from the powerful, and every generation has to actively choose to defend them because they do not defend themselves. The moment we treat them as negotiable, we begin losing them.
The pursuit of happiness — what the founders meant by that phrase and what it still means at its best — is worth conserving. It is the belief that a person can work hard, live with integrity, and build a life of dignity and meaning regardless of where they started. Affordability is part of that promise. A balanced capitalism that rewards effort without crushing the people who fuel the economy is part of that promise. A free press that tells the truth is part of it. Law and order that protects everyone equally, not selectively, is part of it. Art and music and culture that remind us what it feels like to be fully alive are part of it. The pursuit of happiness is not a luxury. It is the founding promise, and it is worth defending with the same seriousness we bring to everything else.
These are conservative values in the truest sense of the word, and they are also values that the majority of Americans across party lines hold in common. They were never owned by any single party and were never meant to be.
Progress is an equally serious word, and it has been equally abused.
To progress is to move forward, to recognize that where we are is not where we have to stay, and that the wisdom of the past is a foundation to build on rather than a ceiling to live under. Every expansion of the American promise has required people willing to say that what we have is not enough, that we can do better and we must do better. That is not radicalism. That is the work of every generation that has ever made this country more just than it was before.
Human rights and justice are areas where we must continue to progress. The belief that every person, regardless of race, gender, background, or circumstance, deserves to be treated with dignity and to have access to the full protections of the law is not a partisan idea. It is the logical completion of the founding promise. We have made enormous progress from abolition to suffrage to civil rights, and every step was met with resistance from people who called it radical. Looking back, we call it overdue. Future generations will say the same about the progress we are making now and have yet to make.
Social safety nets that lift and empower people represent progress that is not charity but investment. A child who grows up in poverty without access to healthcare, nutrition, and education does not fail because of personal weakness. That child fails because the floor was not there. A safety net is not a hammock. It is the foundation that allows people to stand up after they fall, to try again, to contribute to their communities rather than be lost to despair. Every dollar invested in early intervention, mental health care, nutrition, and education returns multiples in reduced emergency costs, increased productivity, and stronger communities. That is not ideology. That is arithmetic.
Advancement in medicine and technology that serves humanity is progress worth pursuing with real urgency. The capacity to heal disease, to extend healthy life, and to understand the human mind and body in ways our grandparents could not have imagined represents one of the greatest gifts of the modern era. The essential condition is in those three words — that serves humanity. Technology deployed to concentrate power, to surveil and manipulate, or to replace human connection without offering anything meaningful in return is not progress. It is a new form of the oldest problem we have faced. The question we must always ask is not whether we can do something, but who it serves and who it harms.
Education is where conservation and progress meet most powerfully. We must conserve the belief that every child deserves access to knowledge, mentorship, and the tools of critical thinking. We must simultaneously progress in how we deliver that education, because the world those children are entering looks nothing like the world the current system was built for. Teaching a child to memorize facts in an age of artificial intelligence is not preparation for life. Teaching a child to think, to question, to connect ideas, to lead with empathy and reason — that is preparation. Conservation of the purpose, with progress in the method.
Culture, music, and art are where both impulses live together most naturally. We conserve the traditions, the songs, and the stories that tell us who we are and where we came from. We progress by creating new ones, by expanding the circle of whose stories get told, and by allowing the culture to breathe, grow, and reflect the full complexity of who we are becoming together. The greatest artistic traditions in human history have always been both rooted and alive at the same time.
I want you to read back through everything I have described — the things worth conserving and the things worth progressing — and ask yourself honestly whether you disagree with most of it. Ask whether the people you know, regardless of how they vote, disagree with most of it. The family, the land, the freedom, the dignity, the safety net, the truth, the art, the healing. Most people do not disagree. Most people, when they are not being told who their enemy is, want all of these things. They want to protect what is sacred and build what is missing. They want a country that honors its past and is honest about where it still needs to go.
At their core, most Americans are both conservative and progressive, because those words properly understood are not opposites. They are partners. One holds the foundation while the other builds the next floor. The division we live inside is not organic to who we are. It was constructed deliberately by people and institutions that benefit from our inability to find common ground. As long as we are fighting each other over the words, we are not asking who took the meaning out of them. As long as we are sorted into teams, we do not notice that both teams are being played.
I ran as an Independent because I refused to choose between conserving what matters and progressing toward what is possible. I do not believe those are two different visions. I believe they are one vision, held by the majority of this country, waiting for the language and the leadership to bring it into focus.
That work is not finished. It has only just begun.
With belief in what we share and what we can build together --
Nina Linh
True North | WonderSeed Foundation | A New Way Forward