Well, I’ve not heard it nearly as much since the 1993 federal election, when the Progressive Conservative worked themselves into electoral oblivion.
Oxymoron in the sense that those two words usually have opposite meanings, but everything’s political these days.
It’s not even an oxymoron in the literal sense. Jtur88 and Left Hand of Dorkness are claiming that progressive is synonymous with liberal but that’s not correct. That’s just one of progressives’s meanings. Its primary meaning is “happening or developing gradually or in stages; proceeding step by step.”
If I was trying to restore the political system that existed fifty years ago and was doing so by a series of gradual steps, I would be a progressive conservative.
Progressive Regressive would be oxymoronic. So might Liberal Conservative or Monarchist Anarchist. Progressive Conservative isn’t, really.
First, that’s not what I’m claiming; look at the definitions I quoted above. Second, when you’re finding opposites, you can look at single definitions. Third, for a silly little thread game, I’d think that a super-strict definition of oxymoron might not be the standard to reach for.
Liberal-Conservative was the moniker for the first MacDonald government after Confederation. It was because in the flexible party structure after Confederation, the government had some Conservatives and some Liberals, united in support of Confederation and opposed by anti-Confederates, Rouges and some others Conservatives and Grits opposed to Confederation. It wasn’t an oxymoron, but an accurate description of the make-up of the party.