We just fucking cannibalize each other fucking ourselves over and over.

[meadowlander]

119. Right, except I was alive through all of those election cycles

and the overwhelming message that progressives were given when they proposed universal health care in 2007 was that they were naive and unrealistic, that they wanted ponies and rainbow-farting unicorns and they didn't have serious policies that could win elections. Will someone think of all the insurance industry employees!

We were told the $15 minimum wage was a pipe dream that would tank the economy and hurt small businesses.

We were told the Green New Deal was a communist fairy tale, dangerous to any sober minded person, until Joe Biden wanted to run on rebuilding the rust belt with renewable technology when it became, of course, the position that the mainstream Democratic party had held all this time.

Student loan forgiveness was a poison pill - a handout, a dangerous precedent, elitist, etc until Joe Biden needed a few more young people to vote for him.

We were told sit down at the back of the bus because we had an election to win against an existential threat (George W Bush) and middle America just wasn't ready for marriage equality for gay people and maybe never would be.

Can you cherry pick examples of individual mainstream Dems that also held those positions? Sure. But you're never going to convince people who actually lived through those debates that those ideas have always been planks adopted by centrist Democrats regardless of the influence of progressives.