first of all, i would say that the idea that time is progressive traces to a millenial, christian tradition. you see it going mad in the nineteenth century: everyone anticipating one or another version of the ecstasy at the end of history, and there is a transition from pietism to the perfectionism of the shakers, for example, to a hegel/marx conception of the end of history. you get a milder but just as definite conception in pragmatist meliorism, which prescribes eternal progress wih no end-state. let's just say there are other ways of conceiving time: cyclically, for example, or as one damn thing after another (which is my astonishing account).

to give a progressive account of history, and then to be a "progressive," is to identify your own position with the unfolding of time, an idea which, if nothing else, is magnificently or satanically arrogant, and would of course make all resistance useless. then you get the political spectrum (as divided by progressives) taxonomized into progressives and reactionaries: people pushing forward and those pushing against the unfolding of history. the first thing i want to point out is that this structure of thought is optional: it's not the only idea about history. which is good, because it's also silly. really it's as though the ticking of clocks should slow when a republican gets elected, or as though time curves around glenn beck as around a black hole.

here is one massive paradox: time has a certain directionality, but we are called upon to make this actual: we are the agents of time: time (god) requires our assistance in its inevitable progressive unfolding. this is the craziness at the heart of marx: the proletarian revolution and subsequent millennial communism is strictly speaking inevitable. but we must hasten the day. what this means in practice is that the people who are holding up time - the bachmans throwing their bodies in front of time's bulldozer - must be liquidated. and the ignorant must be constrained to actually enter time.

in other words, with one sentence we identify ourselves with history. with the next we are deploying totalitarian power to make time actual. the first, we might say, is the rhetorical flourish and the egomania. the latter is the only actual agent of time as conceived progressively. time can only be pushed forward by coercion or if necessary genocide etc. meanwhile, the time of this world - as opposed to the time of progressive fantasy - just tick tick ticks at the same rate wherever it is found. right now it's 7:34 est at michelle bachman's place too. you can't slow it down, and you can't speed it up. you can't be an agent of the future or an agent of the past: all you're doing you're doing now.