This is a loaded question.
When you are able to prevent harm, without causing more harm in the process, you should make the attempt to prevent the harm.
However, it is important to understand that human minds are not endlessly plastic, and individual people's minds are not able to adapt efficiently as they age. Lamentably, this means older people are less tolerant of new social mores.
Accepting that this is the case, and enacting social reforms at a pace that enables these people to naturally be removed from political concern through natural age and death, while still reaching for the progressive goal, handily removes the danger of radicalization (Dead people cant blow up buildings, or spread rhetoric that is inflammatory) at the consequence of getting to the finish line later.
I suppose a reasonable analogy might be a cancer patient. They have inoperable tumors, that are life threatening, and are quite painful to them.
We have 3 course of action that we could take--
1) We could attempt to cut out the tumors right away anyway, and damn the consequences. At least the tumors are gone.
2) We can use slow chemo therapy to slowly kill the tumors, and have a better overall prognosis for the patient.
3) We can just ignore the cancer patient totally. In fact, we will just deny them any kind of treatment at all.
The typical progressive tends to favor action 1, since they view any length of time in which the patient suffers from the tumors as unimaginably horrible, even if doing so is very bad for the patient in the long run. I favor option 2, which takes longer, and forces the patient to endure having the painful tumors for a time. The recalcitrant biggot favors option 3.
Choosing option 2 does not mean that you are trying to appease supporters of option 3.