 Not quite a synonym of what a progressive is, but the Venn diagram overlaps pretty well. The people who want to see the world better, who think that the project of government is, in fact, to make it a more perfect union, that what we do together is, in fact, try to get us stronger together than we are apart, to make a country that's at least a little bit better rather than a lot worse. That project trains our brain to think about what could, in fact, be made more perfect.