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Notes -
I mean, it's the classic Freddie DeBoer progressive name cycle, right? Progs come up with some name for themselves that's a shifting, colloquial term, it's then used as a pejorative by conservaboomers (making it kludgy and cringe pretty much out of the gate), then progs deny that there was ever a core meaning behind the term when they used it. See also "SJW".
I see your point that it already existed in progressive circles, but these terms only get pinned down and reified once the boomer-right gets to them. The kludginess is inherent because those types don't really understand the social and memetic characteristics of progs and of different prog types. Compare, for instance, "bugman", "cuckservative", "chapo", and other terms from the internet-native right. These don't have the kludginess and don't go through the same cycle, because they were created on the right and designed to cleave online social reality at particular joints.
Historically, a great deal of American politics has been fighting over labels. Once these labels make it into mass politics, they quickly get reified as simply meaning "good" and "bad", and the conflict shifts to who gets to own the Good Label and hit their enemies with the Bad Label. Occasionally you really see how empty these labels are - for instance, in the careers of both Roosevelts, with Teddy jumping dexterously between identifications as the Good Label of his time shifted, and FDR redefining "liberal" to claim the Good Label while inverting its meaning. I suspect that boomers and other institutionbrained people these days are particularly bad at navigating this dynamic (compared to people from the newspaper age or internet natives), not being able to tell the distinction between label and meaning. That's how you get these very shallow and unconvincing arguments that "Democrats are the real racists" or "the hard right are the real Woke", scrabbling together a bunch of similarities meaningful and superficial, real and imagined, because the people making them are mired in the ostensible content of a label without understanding the meta-level dynamics at play.
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