Some people interpreted the fact that Donald Trump had met with Gore, the former Democratic Vice-President and veteran climate-change campaigner, as a sign that he might be rethinking the retrogressive views about environmental policy he expressed during the campaign.
"He was rather retrogressive in thought, wasn't he?" Sassoon said.
While much of the industrialised world is embracing biomass energy as a pillar of low-carbon growth, a review of national energy policies in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that biomass is widely viewed as a retrogressive source of energy that degrades the environment and engenders poverty.
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist revered by American conservatives, argued that democratic socialism threatened a form of brutal tyranny that all supporters of a free society would view as primitive and unenlightened — retrogressive, as it were.
More hazardous, from the perspective of circulation, is the invasion of retrogressive architecture into the city fabric.
But retrogressive it is not.
Eastern observers considered this retrogressive.
It seemed corny and retrogressive then.
Yet they do not appear retrogressive.
The Taliban, for all their retrogressive conservatism, are pragmatic Afghans.
