If you ask most anyone on the political left why everything seems to be going to shit right now — from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to restrictions on voting access to the banning of curricula in dozens of states — the answers you’ll get are relatively predictable.

First and foremost among them: the political system in America is structured in such a way as to favor conservative states, localities, and individuals.

This is true, of course. From the Electoral College to the structure of the Senate, there are systemic advantages that favor smaller, less populated states, which tend to be rural and more conservative than states with larger and more cosmopolitan populations.

Obviously, when a state like Wyoming can have the same influence over judicial appointments and other important Senate business as a state like California, with more than 60 times its population, there’s an imbalance.

And it favors the small, conservative, and rural over the country’s larger, more metropolitan areas.

But with that said, we on the left are often unwilling to acknowledge one of the other big problems facing progressivism: namely, that conservatives are better at politics than we are.

So yes, there’s the Electoral College, the Senate structure, and partisan gerrymandering for House seats. And yes, those give disproportionate power to small states and, in the case of gerrymandering, allow right-wing legislatures to pack the House of Representatives, all out of proportion to the actual political balance of residents in their states.

But this begs the question: Why is all that such a problem?

Because many of those so-called red states were not red 20 to 30 years ago.

Even though structural advantages for the right have always existed, they’ve become more of a hindrance to progressivism in recent years than ever before.

I was born and have lived most of my life in Tennessee. For most of that time, state politics were overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats: the state legislature, both U.S. Senators, most Governors, and all but one or two congressional representatives.

But now? We have a GOP supermajority, in which the State Senate has only 5 Democrats out of 33 seats.

And soon, given the legislature’s ridiculous gerrymandering of Nashville’s congressional district, we will only have one Democratic Congressperson left representing the Memphis area.

Granted, back when the Dems had the majority here, they weren’t that progressive or “left,” but that’s not the point. What matters is that many of the states that are deep red now were deep blue not long ago.

Even if they went for Reagan or Bush in presidential elections, at the state level, Democrats not only competed but won, and our House and Senate delegations were overwhelmingly Democratic, which mattered to all kinds of votes in Washington.

So what happened?

Democrats didn’t all move away, and Republicans didn’t flood the state. But the GOP decided to focus on state and local politics, having realized that even with twelve years of Reagan/Bush, they hadn’t accomplished vast portions of their agenda — especially culture war priorities they had been nurturing for a generation or more.

Meanwhile, Democrats largely eschewed state and local politics. The party establishment and the more progressive activist wing did this.

For the party, there was such a desire to push back on Reaganism that resources and attention were overwhelmingly put in the bucket of national politics. Simply put, party leaders desperately wanted the White House back and to consolidate or hold power in Congress.

For progressive activists, often unenthused about the national party, it was something else, but with the same result. I know this first-hand because I was one of these people.

I was the head of College Democrats at Tulane University. And, like many others, I was so focused on moving the national party left on big issues (because that stuff is often more exciting than local politics) that I did nearly nothing regarding state politics. And I was not alone in this. It was a common tendency at the time.

We were busy complaining about how not progressive Dukakis was, how the Senate had too many people like Sam Nunn or John Breaux, and how we needed to replace them with progressives who would slash defense spending, scale back the American empire, and guarantee national health care.

Of course, we didn’t have a strategy for any of that. But we knew that the answer was at the D.C. level, but only if real progressives could replace all the awful moderates and center-right Democrats, who were “no different than the Republicans,” or so we insisted.

So we didn’t pay much attention to state House races, council races, or school board elections.

After all, those people didn’t read The Nation or have deep thoughts about contra aid in Nicaragua, Salvadoran death squads, or the nuclear arms race.

Too often, we viewed local politicians as representatives of a party machine that we detested because both parties were “corporate entities” backed by “big money.” So they were, in our rendering, all corrupt, and equally so.

So we took a dive on all that, functioning more as a progressive network looking to take over the Democratic Party than as people intent on building the party’s infrastructure and getting Democrats elected.

And this was not an anomaly, by the way. I knew plenty of College Democrats across the country with similar tendencies.

But while we focused on national issues and demanded purity from candidates (or else we wouldn’t vote for them), the right developed a strong state and local focus.

While we abandoned state and local politics, the right dove into them head first.

And then, in national elections, they would vote for anyone who promised to deliver on two things: guns and abortion, by at least promising to appoint the right judges.

So, in short order, the state Houses started to flip because the GOP ran culture war campaigns against Democrats who abandoned the field.

This allowed those state Houses to viciously gerrymander Congressional seats. Then the House and Senate began to trend Republican because of those structural advantages, which wouldn’t have mattered as much if Democrats and progressives were better at politics.

But because we focus on so many issues — and actually care about whether politicians deliver on them — we have lots of people who won’t vote in certain races if the candidate has a shitty record on something they care deeply about, even if they’re good on other things and far better than the other side.

I remember arguing with several friends on the left who refused to vote against David Duke in the 1990 U.S. Senate race because the incumbent Democrat was a “shill of the oil companies.”

Seriously? Nazi vs. centrist Democrat? Not the same, comrade dumbass.

And this puritanism has only gotten worse.

Yes, the right has a version of it, but they have been willing to vote for any candidate so long as they hold the proper views on guns and abortion. The left has no such issue(s) over which we have managed to coalesce, putting other matters to the side, so long as officials deliver on those one or two things.

Because we aren’t driven by some religiously-inspired imperative (like the right is on abortion) or existential fear of “bad guys” and perceived threats to our cultural identity (like the right is on guns), we tend to have a less focused approach to politics.

So, we end up with people finding fault with candidates and not voting for them because they disappoint us on x, y, or z issues. And since we care about delivering the goods to people on everything from health care to education to jobs to criminal justice reform to the environment to progressive taxation, when Democrats fall short on those things, we punish them with electoral abstention.

Meanwhile, the right-wing views politics as a symbolic clash of values, and rewards that symbolism, regardless of what their chosen candidates can deliver.

It’s tribalism for them, while for us, it’s about making a difference in people’s lives. And while the latter is a more virtuous purpose for politics, it also puts Democrats, especially progressive ones, at a disadvantage.

Because it’s easier to deliver symbols than tangible and significant changes to the national social structure. The former takes a handful of well-placed campaign commercials. The latter takes quite a bit more.

And so we have ended up here.

It’s not that the Democrats went too far left or that they went too far to the center. It’s not really about ideology at all. It’s that the Republicans understood how power works.

And they were patient.

They started planning this shit after they had their asses handed to them in the 1964 Presidential election.

Democrats and those on the left are not good at being patient because we want to stop injustice, suffering, pain, and ecological collapse now, understandably. But our system is crazy slow. It was set up that way. And you have to think long-term.

The right knows that. We didn’t.

We got outmaneuvered. It wasn’t just “corporate money” and right-wing media and getting outspent by “big pharma,” or big whatever.

We got outplayed. By fascists. Enough of that. It’s time to play the game differently.

Local politics matter.

Elections are, whether we like it or not, more about symbolism — what you stand for and why — than what you can deliver to improve people’s lives.

Purity tests are bullshit.

The lesser of two evils is still, wait for it…

Less evil.

And less evil hurts fewer people.

And until and unless we come to understand that, the greater evil will keep hurting more of them.