Indeed. And there's nobody so conservative that he can't admit there's good change, nor anyone so progressive that he can't admit there's bad change. What distinguishes the two, though, is how likely they are to see a change as promising or scary. A very progressive person will assume non-reactionary changes are likely to be good unless there's clear evidence to the contrary, while a very conservative person will assume they're likely to be bad unless there's clear evidence to the contrary. The progressive perspective is more consistent with history, where change has been a constant and the general trend has been towards improvement. At least since the end of the Black Death, you can look at practically any period in history and compare it to 50 years earlier and you'll find that the large majority of people are a lot better off.
Take life expectancy as a proxy for well-being. In the 50 years from 1969 to 2019, the average person came to live almost 16 years longer! That doesn't mean every change was for the better in that time. But the frequency and magnitude of the changes that were improvements vastly outweighed those that made things worse, for the large majority of people. So, far more often than not, the progressive outlook was correct, and the conservative one was wrong.
