Eliezer Ben Avraham: "...why on earth did we let these leftists call themselves progressive?..."
The label progressive was borrowed from actual USSR Communist Party propaganda.
There is almost no Communist Party or Communist Party "front-group" literature which is absent the "code words" used to mask and distort the true intentions of Communist revolutionaries.
The coded catch-words most often are "...join together with all democratic and progessive forces throughout the world...", "...working peoples united for progess...", etc...
Only quite recently did Democrat Party loyalists and others from the "left-of-center" begin openly using this Communist code terminology in all of their literature and all of their speeches.
As a matter of fact, the term political correctness is another catch-phrase code which was invented by the East Germany Communist Party.
"Politically Correct" means "following the official Communist Party line of "group-think" propaganda.
Those behind the Iron Curtain displaying any type of "politically incorrect" behavior; be it written word, or even thoughts whispered among intimate friends, were subject to every possible form of political prosecution and punishment.
The United States of America is just a hair's breadth away from enacting Communist "thought crime" legislation which is a keystone of the present Democrat platform.
The already enacted "hate crime" legislation is the beginning of the slippery slope down which Americans are soon to find themselves enslaved.