Conservatives are the group that traditionally oppose change, oppose new ideas..
Progressives have since humans existed made all the advances that changed societies for the better. They learnt to use fire, made tools, invented the wheel, planes, trains and automobiles and so on right up to the here and now.
Conservatives tend to stand in the way, resisting change. They stood in the way of health reforms such as discouraging smoking and now they don't want to believe our climate is detrimentally changing and want to stick to the old way of doing things by over using fossil fuels instead of transitioning to cleaner energy.
Were it not for the progressives we would likely still be cave dwellers and maybe even not have evolved from our forebears the apes.
