Thing is, the only people I've known who are promising progressivism with balls call themselves socialists. Most of the people opposed to that label have little to offer IMO, and focus excessively on norms and civillity. Biden, for instance, reassured donors that nothing would fundamentally change, which makes sense for a campaign that focused on norms and civility. My issue with norms and civility is that this is insufficient to stabilize anything; the proof in that we had 8 years of that before and we got Trump. I was willing to accept "norms and civility" politics (if not love it) for quite a while, on the basis that it was necessary to keep far-right extremisms at bay. Now that it's been demonstrated that it is incapable of doing that, I have no further use for it. In cother words, if the "social stability" sought by centrists like Obama means that people like Trump can get elected, it's not something of any value to me. I truly believe that if Obama had taken more radical steps (for instance, not enabling Wall Street to continue to act recklessly, and bailing out homeowners as opposed to just the people who caused the crash in the first place), we would not have had a Trump presidency.
The dynamic in this country is also such that any attempt to reform capitalism gets labeled as socialism regardless, and that tends to stick. Given that, it makes a certain amount of sense to redefine what that means so that the label becomes ineffectual. At this point, I also don't see much about our institutions that is worth preserving, given how much they have failed us on every level.