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No, it's because I'm seeing it from a consequentialist standpoint that I see the notion of one's sociopolitical movement as having been failed instead of being a failure as wrong and, to be honest, rather absurd. To wit:
Whether or not the accusation is of sabotage or resistance from the enemy, it doesn't change the fact that the colonel's soldiers are now dead, and the hill hasn't been taken. The colonel's job, in this metaphor, is do what it takes to take that hill, taking into account any obstacle that gets in the way, whether that be enemy combatants or sabotaging fellow colonels or incompetent underlings or anything else. If a colonel sends his men to rush a hill only to get shot in the back by people he assumed was friendly, then clearly that colonel failed due to believing that those people were friendly and wouldn't shoot his men in the back.
And in the realm of sexual sociopolitics, I'm rather skeptical that the progressives considered the conservatives to be people mostly on the same page and with similar ideas about what "victory" looked like, just with different ways to get there. From my experience as a progressive living around progressives, we tended to see conservatives, both in sexual matters and in others, to be closer to enemy combatants with very different - almost incomprehensible in its absurdity - ideas of what a good world looked like, than fellow-travelers who would sabotage us for just having some disagreements about the details. And, again, either way, if we only get 90% of the way there instead of 100% because of enemy combatants or sabotage that my movement didn't properly take into account and work around or defeat, and as a result we end up with a situation that's significantly worse than 100% (whether it's worse than 0% is another matter; it's certainly possible, and it's certainly true for some subsets of the population), then that's clearly the responsibility of my movement for failing to properly account for our adversaries, whether they're enemy combatants or sabotage.
If you zoom out far enough, sons and daughters living happy fulfilling lives is what everyone is after. At least, for people who invest themselves into social policy making with impacts on that kind of timescale. There isn't really any personal gain to be made, the people who pushed the changes that led to the current environment are by now too old to personally benefit from it.
My point is not that the colonel who cannot ever manage to implement his strategy is worthy, but that it's a fair complaint if another person ostensibly working for the same objective is actively making things worse for no other reason than to not see him succeed. If the other colonel really was shooting his country's troops in the back, pointing it out to the brass is not pitiful whining, it should be investigated and that colonel arrested and tried for treason. If, in progressives' mind, conservatives are making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives, they should make that case to the population as best they can so that the population rightly shuns conservatism. It's not argument I can see them making convincingly, but they absolutely should try it if they truly believe that conservatives are that nasty and petty.
Yes, they (we) should make that case as best as they can, and if and when that case fails to convince people to shun conservatism to the extent required to actually defeat conservatism, then that is a failure on their (our) part. And indeed, as best as I can tell, we have tried this method for decades at this point and have largely failed to convince people; we do convince individuals and groups here and there, but we also lose people due to the same methods, and for what we're discussing, we need massive net wins, not wins and losses mostly offsetting each other or even just a slightly higher win-rate than loss-rate. We weren't failed by a populace that didn't rightly listen to us in shunning conservatism, we failed the populace by not giving them the arguments that convince them of the truth of conservatives making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives.
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