Political Memes

Almost all of your examples are exactly what they mentioned

Obamacare - shitty mild reform forced after literal decades of working class begging for drastic reform. The essential “meat” of it in terms of progress was ending the ability of insurers to deny for pre-existing conditions. The cost of this was the individual mandate, forcing everyone to buy (still privatized and ridiculously expensive) insurance, which was ultimately a huge win for insurers. They sold a significantly higher amount of shit coverage high deductible plans, especially to young people, who generally never meet the deductible. So now they had the monthly premiums for those people while essentially paying $0 in coverage. In turn many of those people became extremely resentful and saw the gop as saviors when they eventually removed the individual mandate to pander to them. Romneycare, the original bill, did nothing to address the huge administrative overheads that plague our system (5-10x the rate of other countries), no regulatory controls for price gouging, etc because it was designed to look like something was being done while ultimately serving the corporate monopolies involved in health insurance, which the democrats were happy to adopt because they are corporatist in nature

Green energy investments were paltry and pathetically low considering the scale of the issue. Americas grid is not even 25% green energy. Meanwhile China has 3x the capacity of Americas entire grid in green energy alone

When has significant antitrust action occurred? Honestly? The last real movement was breaking up the telecoms in the late 80s/early 90s. Even that was pointless as the telecoms eventually re-convened through mergers and acquisitions over the next 10-15yrs and have reemerged as Internet monopolies with price fixing and everything. Monopolies exist everywhere in the USA - obviously in tech to an almost unprecedented level, health insurance through companies like Aetna and Cigna, mass media is overwhelmingly owned by 6 indicates/companies, even shit like the major music record labels have dwindled from like 14 to like 4 from 2000-now because no controversial merger is ever blocked. Even fucking grocery chains and food brands that have been demonstrably shown to price fix are either given a slap on the wrist fine or nothing at all

Gay marriage was not codified in a way that prevents repeal at any point, similar to abortion rights. As a result it is in a precarious situation where the republican evangelicals are actively funding court battles to challenge it

Aid abroad was to generate “soft power”, eg “I did you a favor so you now owe me the world”. While aid is good it was extremely often exploited for imperialist motives like perpetuating the military industrial complex

Every single one of these is an example where the democrats presented idealized progressivism, watered it down to something tolerable for the donor class (and sometimes even beneficial), and still went into it kicking and screaming (the complaints people have about fetterman, that they had about manchin and sinema, were about Lieberman in the ACA days). Neoliberals eat it up because it feels like progress with marketing and the democrats then leave the issue behind forever as “solved”, eg “we did the absolute bare minimum to appease enough of the masses to continue to secure power”

As an outsider, I feel like while democrats have done many things that you might be vocal about, the biggest factor of deteriorating quality of life wasn't sufficiently addressed.