It is not so good for workers when labor cost is due to high taxes.

Southwest corners:  Southern California, the French Riviera, Perth.

You pretend you care about liberal principles, but always end with "we must be practical and take what we can get." You're such a phony and a troll, it isn't even worth responding to you. But it's too easy to expose your b.s. for what it is.

Seems to me that when that is your position, you're on defense all the time against those whose much-different beliefs are not deterred so easily.

And I have to say that this constant refrain from you, that since it wasn't ever going to happen, there's no blame for those who had the ability to at least try, is just you protecting Obama from the criticism he absolutely deserves.  

There is a difference between believing in a principle and believing that you can get that principle enacted

When you're not willing to hold fast then it's not a principle.  It's just a theory. Or a concept.  Same as any other theory or concept.  It allows you to give up without even trying and then causes not a single pang of the conscience.  

I swear, sometimes I picture you with a powdered wig*, taking a pinch of snuff and tsking about how it's a shame people are suffering but, you know...

Most democrats believe that we should not fight to the death.  They believe that we should compromise.

So, there's been one poll, and now, it's settled: democrats believe we should compromise.  Period.

I do not believe that, when an issue that matters to someone is put on the table for compromise, most democrats, much less people in general, want those who represent them to compromise.  Put someone's Social Security on the table.  Put Medicare there.  Put privacy rights there.  Reproductive rights.  Pick a policy that matters to someone, and ask them how far they are willing to compromise.  Ask them if they have any fear that, once compromised, the door is open to more changes that will weaken that policy past the point where they're comfortable.  And then see if they still feel the same way about compromise.

I can't speak for most Democrats, or most liberals - I can only speak for me - but I can tell you that yes, I do want the Democrats who represent me to fight, and to lead on the issues; I don't want them to have the attitude that fighting is a waste of time.

That view is not one which can be squared with liberalism according to this forum and you end up in a situation where people here are arguing, in essence, that most democrats are not liberals.

I think it is entirely safe to say that most democrats are not liberals, not anymore, if even they ever were.  I think there has been a real shift to the right within the Democratic party, and I think that's in large part due to the push to elect anyone with a (D) after his or her name, especially in red states, even when those candidates, if they were to run in a solid blue state, would be instantly recognizable as conservatives, if not flat-out Republicans.  What kinds of voters are attracted to conservative candidates with Republican-like positions?  The kind that share that world view.  It grows the party, but not the liberal base.

I think that structure destroys much of what it means to call yourself a democrat or a liberal. That's why I am constantly pushing for a distinction between believing in a principle and believing in a course of action in the real world.

So, you're really just a pragmatist, who's more concerned with process than substance; for some of us, the substance matters, and the action should be in service to that substance.  Is it always successful?  Of course not.  But it puts ideas out there, it brings them into the conversation, it evokes possibilities, it encourages small-scale experimentation.  Movements aren't just born out of thin air, they are grown.  You keep saying that you believe in a single-payer health system, but you were okay with Obama taking if off the table.  The man who wanted to hear all the good ideas didn't want to have that one out being discussed and you were okay with that because...it was never going to happen anyway.

Imagine if that's what people thought about women's suffrage, civil rights, slavery, equal opportunity, gay rights; do you think we would have made as much progress on any of these things if people had shrugged it off as impossible to attain?

Where does that start?  With someone else, someday, when the time is right?  No, it starts in the moment, with people who care about the issues and want to work to make progress on them.  If it's going to be incremental and take years to achieve, why would we want to waste time waiting?

As to your question of how big the tent should be, it really comes down to a slightly different question I think:
How many viable parties do you have in a system.  In a bi-party system, you want the tent to be as big as possible, particularly if the other party has a monolithic set of ideals and can unify easily.

A bunch of people in a big tent turns into a three-ring circus without leadership.

In other words, liberals of all types have no choice in the US system but to gather in the big democratic tent. To do otherwise would kill any chance of making ideals a reality.

Of course we have a choice, ABG.  We can vote for select candidates within the Democratic party, we can vote third party, we can withhold our vote if there is no one worthy of it.

As for killing chances of making ideals a reality, after you've weeded out anything that might be too hard to achieve, what's left?

It is ironic that those who claim that the ideals are important are advocating an approach that will make their implementation less likely in many cases.