Progressive Realism - emerging D concept?

[Beastly Boy]

5. My immediate association was with Socialist Realism of Stalin's Soviet Union, and that is a bad thing.

The clue is in the phrase "keep doing what we’ve been doing, but to start calling it progressive realism". What is being proposed here is to replace the name but nothing else. This underscores the superficiality of the proposal rather than an "offer of a better plan". Why change the branding when it doesn't come with a change of direction?

More ominously, the proposal implies making a distinction between "progressive realism" and all other types of realism. This, as history shows us, is a well known technique that had been used by populist regimes and movements to separate "desirable" realism from the "undesirable" (and, therefore, punishable) version of it.

If the idea was to emphasize pragmatism based on existing realities, "Realistic Progressivism", although awkward, would be a far better choice.