Left: "there's an inequality of ability due to economic conditions, and the solution is redistribution"
e.g. affirmative action to push women/minorities/etc. into the workplace, taxes on the wealthy to finance programs for the poor, social housing quotas in every new development...
"Right" (usually more libertarian than where the GOP stands these days): "there's an inequality of opportunities due to regulations, and the solution is removing regulations"
e.g. Milton Friedman observing that the minimum wage increased black teenage unemployment and pushed many low-skilled black teenagers permanently out of the workforce as they were unable to get that first step on the job ladder; or Uber as a second, ad-hoc source of income for low earners being regulated out as an option as any Uber driver becomes an "employee"; or most extreme, that public schools are always a bad thing because the government monopoly on education means no effective oversight or pressure for teachers to perform.
The latter group's views I disagree with, but I can't find much common ground with which to argue from. They don't think it's a problem and they don't want to do anything about it.
Among the former (people who would self-identify as progressives), I often find people fixated on certain pet issues relating to legacy social programs (you mentioned a few of them), rather than the broader picture of how a whole swath of the population is falling behind regardless of their colour or gender. These are the progressives who are caught up in, say, pushing for more generous public-sector pay, as if that helps the guy with no high school diploma. Or in fighting housing development on the grounds that it pushes out the poor, without asking why the poor can only afford to live in shitty neighbourhoods to begin with. I feel like many progressives are invested in fighting the symptoms of inequality rather than the causes.
I think that if we started by backtracking on a lot of IP based protections, and changed the tax structure so that B2B transactions are taxed, actual investment over gambling could be a lot better. That's just me. We, as a nation and our government no longer legislate to ensure proper competition is allowed to happen and subsidize too much, and too often.
Poverty isn't a problem we can spend/indebt our way out of, we can only reduce some of the ways that the income gap has expanded out of control... Raising taxes isn't the solution, reducing loopholes, subsidies and deductions is. As would be making capital gains taxes line up closer to income taxes, with exemptions for directly inherited physical assets.
But, that's just my take on it... instead of spend at the bottom, cut from the top.
This is because the strength of a political faction (or its united subset) grows with the square of its size, and because the winning strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma is tit-for-tat.
The former reason stabilises the system towards two roughly equal sized parties fighting for power and slowly iterating towards where the people are standing politically (compare the respective positions of Johnson and Goldwater in 1964, or around FDR's new Bill of Rights, to today's discourse) and moves away from discussing ideas and towards the behaviour of sports teams in a high stakes championship.
The latter reason means that if one side lowers itself to base populism, the other has to follow or lose the race. This cheapens the discourse and encourages simplification and the discussion of trivial matters (such as ideas no longer relevant, or high visibility but low impact "Cecil the Lion"s), whilst the civil service quietly takes care of the business of government. Panem et circenses.
Thus, people choose a camp, and rationalise their views accordingly so that they align with whatever the party is selling at the moment. This is, game theoretically, the most efficient use of their person for the cause since if they do not tit-for-tat, the other side will be stronger and win the argument.
It does not even make sense for the average person to think too hard about issues since they have such low visibility of them. How can someone who has never left the USA and whose town consists of 7th generation Swedish immigrants understand immigration and global competitiveness in a world where billions, equivalent to the entire US population several times over, are entering the middle class? How can one have a sound opinion about the Ukraine or Israelo-Palestinian conflict when both sides' intelligence agencies are doing their best to intoxicate public opinion? Whilst the NSA is now famous, how many of the general public know about the NRO, or have any idea how the roots laid by Soviet Active Measures distorted yesterday's zeitgeist and influenced today's? This is a subject Kissinger talks about many times in his works: that he had "no idea" and as he gained higher and higher clearance, his views changed.
But the senior party members do have access to the information (or as good as the alphabet soups can provide, anyway) and are supposedly meritocratically selected for their shrewdness, so what they decide is probably the best for the party. What is the fastest way to get the electorate to follow you? Shape the discourse with simplifications, red herrings, wild goose chases and The Donald's hairpiece. Let Fox News lead the GOP lot, let CNN lead the Democrats (or however you want to split your groups). This way, you manoeuvre House of Cards style into a position that optimizes your own, whilst not giving away too much of the country's future.
Personally, I think it is that last bit that the current generation of Washington residents is getting very wrong, because they do not see the bigger trends or think they'll be long gone, or the changes too gradual to be noticed and result in unpleasant circumstances for them. Like the Brits and the French they might find themselves swimming naked as the tide goes out... I could write for hours about it, but that would be off topic. Just thought I'd throw this in.
Nevertheless, I was recently told by a progressive regarding a tech conference that I was too privileged to offer a diverse perspective ('cause I'm a white guy, you see).
From the article:
"Sean Reardon of Stanford University has calculated that the race gap in student test scores has diminished, but that the class gap has widened. A half-century ago, the black-white test score gap was 50 percent greater than the gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent. Now it is the other way around, with the class gap almost twice that of the race gap."
But for whatever reason progressives (broad term I know) seem to be happy to talk about anything except class and income equality.
It's of course very slippery to try to attach labels to any informal political groups, and probably better to discuss ideas, not people's labels.
In my experience, progressives are the ones who are pushing the class issue.