Word of the day: meliorism
Meliorism is the doctrine that the world tends to become better or may be made better by human effort. It comes from the Latin word melior which means better.
I first came across the term meliorism today when reading a new book: a biography of the new US president Joe Biden by Evan Osnos.
Osnos uses the word in the sentence: “The tensions afflicting the Democratic Party reflected a clash between liberal meliorism – the ‘long view’ politics of [Barack] Obama and [Joe] Biden – and the urgent movement that [Bernie] Sanders called a ‘revolution’ .”