Despite some questionable uses of that word, I have to admit that it's a useful classifier for what has essentially become a consolidated political movement.

Everyone seems to know the ideology it's describing when they hear it, and I don't know of another term that does that.

On another tangent: "SJW" was originally coined by social justice warriors as a way to describe themselves. It only became an offensive word once people started lampooning it, but it's still a fair term to use given its history and original intent.

> It only became an offensive word once people started lampooning it

Yes, words only become slurs by being used as slurs, and many words that have become slurs were earlier terms preferred or accepted by the people it is now used as a source against.

The problem I have with it is it appears to be generally used to describe a wide group of people that don't really exist, at least not in the numbers that "SJW-haters" claim they do.

Rarely do I see people sincerely espousing what self proclaimed anti-SJWs claim they are. Rarer so do I see it in droves, as a generally promoted claim versus one person or a small group of people.

Preferred by whom?

Let's be real, it's a more descriptive term. Plus it isn't slang like SJW (and in many circles a slur). So yeah it's a better term when discussing these things.

Calling them "regressive" seems to be intended as an insult to me.

Regression is a very well-defined concept. What would be a non-insulting way to refer to someone who advocates regression?

I don't think any SJW would characterize their position is the dictionary definition of regression, and nor would I (despite not characterizing myself as one). Do people you consider SJW really say "life was better before?", I instead hear "life was bad before and is better now but hasn't gone nearly far enough: the trajectory of political correctness and minority rights needs to progress drastically further forward on that same line drawn from 1950 to 2018". It seems very difficult to attribute that sentence to the textbook definition of "regressive".

If a political position was literally "let's go back to how things were" then it would be fair to call that regressive. The closest thing I can think of is MAGA though, and for most other cases the goal of calling something regressive seems to clearly be "your politics will make things worse" not "your politics will return things to a previous state".

Whether you agree or disagree, I believe that the people who consider some SJWs to be “regressive” is that the system used to be that social conservatives used to tell people what to think, we had a period of open-minded exploration, and now SJWs are advocating moving back towards a system that people are told what to think, except it’s social liberals who are doing the telling. In the sense of someone telling people what to think versus a embracing a wide range of different views, it could reasonably called regressive — perhaps up one level of abstraction if you want to get technical.

Note that I am not supporting one view or another, rather I am just explaining how the term can be used to reflect one’s perspective accurately.