I agree 100%

I think a lot of the words we're given as labels for political views are misnomers meant to make it impossible to talk about things using them. "Progressive" started being used more frequently in the 1990s because GHW Bush made the label "liberal" sound pathetic. Funny thing is the Bush's are pretty much classical liberals from the original meaning of the word. Progressive refers to the Progressive Era, when big institutions and monopolies where basically in feeding frenzies and messing up the economy and markets. "Progressives" decided they needed to regulate these institutions to protect them from themselves. It had nothing to do with protecting people or communities (Progressive populism and populism tried to look at things from a human perspective). So when Obama said he was a progressive, he wasn't lying. And what ever was left of the labor-left was pissed at him.

The "Left" as a political thing only makes sense when capitalism and industrialization had people, children before long, working themselves to death for nothing. They were pushed to that over a long series of events where people were no longer able to provide for themselves. In any event, the idea of a left in politics was always about economic issues. You could not be a ceo or a banker or live off your investments and call your self "left".

Social issues were never left. They were classically "liberal" which was the political ideology that developed along side capitalism. Liberalism presents itself as freedom and the right to do as you choose, but prior to industrialization most people grew their own food and freedom was about as broad as your feet could take you. Liberalism was about the freedom do what you want with the money you had. If you had a lot of money, you should be able to do what ever you wanted with it. Critiques of this way of thinking came from basically every side. In Spain traditionalists and Catholics fought violently against liberalism. Labor groups organized not against liberalism but against unfair working conditions. The relationship between classes began to be studied in detail. For me, the best and clearest discussion of these can be found in the writings of Bakunin, and they are conveniently found at Audible Anarchist on youtube (as is Rudolph Rocker, another great resource, and Kropotkin). These people are as far left as possible, and they have nothing to do with Biden or AOC or Bill Gates or Soros or any of them. (notice I make no mention of Trotsky or Marx, because the ones I mention are much better)

If you look at MLK or Malcolm X or Fred Hampton (especially Hampton) they ended up seeing things through class, not just race. That is not to say that they did not see racism and race as the major thing in their lives and in their communities, but they also saw the same dynamic at work in all working class communities and they were killed because they made the connection.

Their class consciousness has been replaced by identity politiics. Even the idea of being working class is treated as an "identity" when it is not. Class is about a relationship, as it was going all the way back to the Luddites or the German Peasant's uprising. By making it about identities, it gives those a top the system, those who moved their factories to China, those who don't blink an eye at sending their kids to $20,000 a year grammar schools, a pass while they destroy the schools we have to send kids to. When we ask about fixing the schools, they look at the schools across racial lines, not class. They say "the black schools do worse" and rather than see the continuum from poor schools to rich schools, they divide us by color.

Many of the people here (me included) are here because they see the word "woman" as biological reality, not an identity one can "identify as". The idea that women get the short of the stick in society make sense, they didn't even have property rights until recently. And looking at material reality tells us why: they make the babies, or the next generation of the labor pool. This is not an identity then, it is just reality. Making woman an "identity" is not anything that comes from any real "left" point of view because the left starts from a materialistic analysis of the world.

There is a lot of talk about depopulation on the right. What better way to make it impossible to stop if you can't even say what a woman is in reality and turn it into something you can just identify as? Left and right have been stripped of their meaning. It was originally working class vs idle leisure class that doesn't actually do any work. What I would call the Actual-Left and what others call the "alt-right" should agree on far more than they disagree on, that's what I think anyway.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm really fed up with things, and our "sides" need to start looking at things together. We were divided by those who profit from us being divided. We need to drop our BS and reunite in what ever ways we can. It won't be everything, but I do think the more real-world-based it is, the more it is about things we have direct knowledge of and not things that we only hear about from media people (I have no fucking idea what's going on in Seattle or NYC or anywhere like that, let alone what ever country they want to invade next), the more likely we will find agreement and solve problems. Honestly, when was the last time any actual problem was solved by anyone in power. Their power comes from the problems, not the solutions.