Are Republican Party policies the root cause of nearly all of our problems?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The way the OP uses the word 'progress' reminds me a little of the movie Braveheart with its completely unelaborated concept of 'freedom'. As Beet said, the only way presenting 'progress' itself as inherently good and 'social conservatism' itself as inherently evil makes any sense at all is if one is both a believer of some stripe in the concept of permanent revolution and basically amoral about what the exact content of the revolution should be. This is why I haven't described my own political views as 'progressive' in years.

If you want to get at big banks, the best approach is not regulation, which the banks welcome because they can navigate it with their armies of lawyers and win special favors and carve outs. Instead, what you need is a smarter effective approach to regulation that discourages monopolies and also the risky behaviors, whilst incentivizing the competition and maintaining the necessary competativeness that will prevent things like the crash.

I can't really parse the second sentence of this paragraph. The following paragraph helps somewhat, but only somewhat. Would you mind expanding on it a little bit?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In reality only the reorganization of American society around a meritocratic elite, a civil-military education system and the training of successive cohorts of American men and women to regard advancement in service of the state and that the nation would have their back, would solve our problems. This would be a society where whole generations of young men and young women would learn from grade-school age to work together and to value being part of a society of friends and countrymen where they learn apart from traditional education, military, technical and emergency survival and civil defense skills. Only when the populace has embraced the virtues of being part of an "organic national community" would we be able to fix our country's problems with astonishing swiftness.

This is literally Simfan-ism. Literally. So I think this is a good idea.

It's either non-euphemistic Simfan-ism or euphemistic fascism. I don't think that's a gamble you want to make.