How about this: In principle I am quite sympathetic with the goals of the left but do not consider myself part of it. My preference ranking puts sustainability

How about this: In principle I am quite sympathetic with the goals of the left but do not consider myself part of it. My preference ranking puts sustainability higher than equality of opportunity and far higher than equality of outcome. My observation is that society in practice does not value equality that much anyway see capitalism and IQ. Trying to force the issue might be a misallocation of resources. Plus as a white male living on mostly white neighborhoods struggles with inequality seem distant and abstract to me, far outside my monkeysphere. Other policy issues will have an easier time appealing to me directly. And that brings us to the "expense of other things". Open discourse, rationalism, free speech are also part of humanism, not just treating people as individuals. If "deplatforming", online lynch mobs and other authoritarian instruments become part of the left's arsenal then my sympathy for the left shrinks and my tolerance of the right grows simply on balance. If some well-organized nazi came around and offered me a party program with infrastructure projects that aim for sustainability as long as I turn a blind eye to some stricter immigration policy or undoing protections for certain classes which are a minority of the population anyway then on balance I might be a little more tempted to vote for them than before. Or maybe just not vote against them. Because on balance the left is just declared it is willing to suppress people on the other end of the overton window. So why not? This is not likely to happen in the US anyway, so take it more more of a thought experiment to illustrate my point, but I am trying to show that not everyone has the same value-system. Whenever I vote I have to choose between a set of value-systems where none of them are perfectly aligned with my own. So if progressives make a "small sacrifice" in values to promote a greater goal for themselves then this may have a radically different effect on their position in the energy-potential landscape as computed from my perspective. What to them might be an insignificant alteration to a very steep slope can be a significant flattening of the landscape which makes it a lot easier to just roll rightwards. Or just not roll to the left.