Note a key thing: in none of these stories does the opposing always-winning team matter at all except as a dramatic device, as inevitable antagonists.

But (to adopt your metaphor and oversimplify a bit) we all only play for one team, and that team is naturally the focus of our concerns and efforts. The idea that liberals have inevitable antagonists simply reflects reality.

Too much sound and fury about how we have to do this or that or seize this moment or get rid of our ideological splitters, etc., presumes that a progressive answer is always available to us, and that a losing season is always our fault.

A lot of apologetics for, say, Obama involve some notion of inevitability. Given the political realities, we are told, Obama approximates the best of all possible presidents. This convenient story will necessarily carry some credibility, given our imperfect knowledge and the genuine possibility that good solutions aren’t available.

But the other thing about winners is that when the stars line up and the opportunity arises, they are ready to seize that opportunity. Obama himself did this in a remarkable way. It’s a shame he mostly plays for the other team.

Issue-driven politics operates at a fairly steady pace: people who working to preserve reproductive rights, insure net neutrality, improve police-community relations, ensure quality public education, and so on need to keep at it as best they can all the time, with as much support as they can mobilize.

But the big canvas of national and global politics rests on far more subtle kinds of alignments and accidents, and arises out of the messy substance of lived experience and conjunctures of events in ways that are not tractable to the kind of rule-based, structurally-derived, theoretical constructions of political action, change over time and the human subject that both liberals and leftists tend to serve up in their own preferred forms. If you want to know what people and their institutions are going to do next, I think you’d be better off reading novels or watching movies than consulting formal political theory or Beltway prognostications. Theorists and wonks alike might notionally leave some space for contingency in their thinking but not too many seem to take the concept terribly seriously in the way they make demands and complaints to one another.

Tell me if I’m right: you’re basically of a mind that yes, my point was a correct one, and you’ve no quarrel with the Foxes/Farrells/leftists/anti-neoliberals of the world trying to make (and fighting about) our plans…but we really ought to realize that “when a team that often loses suddenly manages to put together a championship season, it’s often because of the unpredictable alignment of a lot of events and initiatives”, and so shouldn’t get too panicked about how all our diverse strategies for turning the left into both ideological and electoral winners are likely to fail. We had our “unpredictable alignment”: it was 2008, it was Obama, it was the Affordable Care Act, which with all their limitations and failures really were a pretty big win for equality. And now, well, we’re back to losing and that’s the way it’s just going to be–that’s what “the season ahead looks like”–until things get unpredictable again. Am I reading you right, or reading too much into it?