I initially read this as a pretty benign comment but I’ve sat on it overnight and the more I think about it the more it makes me angry. Sorry satanmat.

which direction forward?

I don’t think this is true. There are huge swathes of progressivism which most if not all progressives agree upon. The problem is that the right has a deadlock. They can make incremental “improvements” to their goals because they’ve already “won” more or less. We’re at the “end of history” and picking up the pieces as losers, and a fractured movement. This necessarily means more work to bridge that gap, but this doesn’t mean no one agrees on the outcomes.

Workers get upset that we’re providing for immigrants

The right has effectively used globalisation + racism to kneecap unions. The “left” really has no answer. There are global unions but inequality is at such a scale that you couldn’t get some sort of global agreement to labor, or labor rights which operate across nations (this also goes back to the previous point: For the left to fix one problem, it needs to fix a lot of problems at the same time).

Couple that with broadly progressive people having conservative ideas, and we can see that it’s conservative thinking (racism, sexism, etc) limits how we can co-operate. All of us are free or none of us are free.

Israel should have the right to defend itself. BUT Palestinians should too.

I’m just going to link the Shaun video here. It’s not Israel vs Palestine, it’s (right wing, in some ways fascist) Zionism vs not. This is an issue of Media which largely frames the debate in terms the right prefers, thinking of it as a wedge issue.

The left tries but we’re by nature self destructive

As I hope I’ve made clear, the right has a lot of connective tissue, mostly because they have most of the bargaining power, and the left have been slowly losing ground over centuries. It’s not destructive, it just has a much harder job.