It has to do with Chronos’ comment in post #15, which does not have anything to do with “progressive” as a label but does have to do with something closely related, the validity of the concept of political “progress.”
You don’t know thing one about anarchism do you?
Then you’ve chosen a bad example. Lenin understood that real progress takes time and effort just as well as any other progressive or radical. While some changes (like the overthrow of bourgeois society) had to be done quickly, he most assuredly did not assume that the Bolsheviks knew how to build a communist society all at once, top to bottom; in fact he never even said it was the job of the Bolsheviks alone to do it. At the end of his pamphlet State and Revolution, written before the October Revolution, he said that the real flowering of communist society would only come about:
Belief that this could happen in a very short span of time is naïve and nowhere did Lenin express that belief.
I do, I have at least three issues of Anarchy Comics! 
And don’t get me started on Commies from Mars . . .
Most perhaps, but what about Individual Health Savings Accounts? Privatized Social Security? Sure, we can demonstrate logically that these wouldn’t work that well, but they appeal to the Rand-addled American mind.
As do ideas like a color-blind society with no legal remedy to enforce its lack of discrimination, or banning abortion without actually imposing criminal penalties on anyone. Woo-hoo.
What is “RW”? [[insert generic rant about not defining abbreviations]]
I think that political discourse should not bother with overarching labels. It causes arguments about definitions, often of No True Scotsman variety. It tries to shoehorn “correct” answers to multiple policy questions that don’t necessarily have any connection. (Policies stances on nuclear power and abortion, for example.) Its broad brush alienates people who feel they don’t completely fit in. It feeds the soundbite culture and the us-vs-them mentality.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’m tired trying to figure out what political labels mean. Statements like “I am a ” are simply ignored by me.
Right-wing.
Nevertheless, it is not the case that we are simply a society of 300 million individuals each with his/her own particular, unique concatenation of political views. That is true, but it is also true that broad political traditions and tendencies and schools of thought are very real, and there are many of them, and people form political alliances and movements based on them even when the members of a given movement do not necessarily agree about every little thing.
But, to follow on what Pleonast said, doesn’t it make more sense to have movements of opinion about a given issue, rather than overarching categories?
I’m a moderate on gun control, an authoritarian conservationist on natural resource policy, largely indifferent to sex-related “social issues,” highly redistributionist on tax policy, kind of libertarian on military policy, not so libertarian on corporate policy, & favor single-payer health care for efficiency reasons. Some of these stances are rooted in primary values, some are more pragmatic.
But some people will decide they’re “conservatives” & look to a “conservative” leader to tell them the “conservative” stance on every blessed thing. Isn’t that problematic?
There are such things as “single issue” movements. The point is, political ideologies, traditions and movements are, like religions, organisms with a life of their own, greater than the sum of their followers as you are greater than the sum of your cells. And we do need names for them.
OK, I’m willing to use the term “progressive,” but still, it bugs me. I don’t believe in progress for its own sake. It matters what we’re progressing toward.
I prefer the term “Progressive” because the right wing has succeeded in demonizing “Liberal.”
Liberal = Left = Socialism = Communism = Bad = Satan’s Spawn
When I was a young & stupid Reaganite, I believed this very thing. (Well, briefly.)
“Progressive” seems to me even more the opposite of “conservative,” & its use, in my mind, marks one as further to the left than the standard “liberal Democrat.”
Lately, I just say I’m a socialist. But I’m pretty much the figure of a wild-eyed Trotsyite compared to the tax protesters & social conservatives in my hometown. ymmv.
Welcome to the dark side. We’ll spot you a ‘k’. 
aargh. Of course, now I’m trying to figure out what a “Trotsyite” would be.
It would be a dude who, after all these years, still can’t let go of the memory of ol’ “Trotsy” Pizzarelli. Man, that chick was hot to . . . I’ll be in my bunk. Permanent Revolution!
Well, that’s one of Lind’s points. You can’t get away from demonization by rebranding.
So it does. But progressivism, at least as I defined and defended it in the OP, does have a definite content.
From “The American Paradox,” by Ted Halstead, published in The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2003:
Each approach to the social contract has its pluses and minuses, of course, but on balance America has made a very bad bargain for itself and should learn from the examples of others.
Progressives – only progressives – can make that happen
Not really convinced that we can, entirely convinced that we must as least try.
What’s so inferior about America, that we can’t do what the Euros have done?
I’m not convinced this is a good thing, for the reasons I stated earlier.
While it’s possible to use broad labels to describe large groups, I think doing so is too homogenizing. Look at the political types that the Pew Research Center has identified and try to come up with larger groups that have reasonable utility. Even these groups are broad–I certainly don’t fit well in any of them.
Maybe political labels are a necessary part of mobilizing political forces, but it seems to me that the labels (liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat) have become more important than issues. I get a sense of the group browbeating individuals into particular stances on issues because its the “label” thing to do rather than supporting them on their own merits.
To bring this back on topic: I would prefer all broad political labels be discarded.