"Progressive" only really became a thing during the Late Clinton / Early Bush Era, when talk radio heads were trying to turn "liberal" into a slur. Which, in hindsight, very funny. The folks that adhere to the word tend to be ones who grew up in that time period and were hunting for leadership that was farther to the left than Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

As they pivoted, lots of conservative media shifted in turn. And so you got a bunch of talking heads tying "progressive" back to the eugenics movements of the early 20th century and the Girl Boss Capitalism of the 1980s. So the term soured among younger millennials and zoomers, while the post-Soviet world denuded terms like Socialism and Communism of their nationalist energy.

In another ten or twenty years? Idk. Alphas will all call themselves something new, maybe? Or maybe we'll all go back to calling one another Radical Centrists while winking and nudging? Who can say. But its all just verbage, one way or another. What's really the difference between a Liz Warren Liberal, a Bernie Sanders DemSucc, and an Infrared Patriotic Communist, anyway?

I didn't mean that literally