There’s a lot to unpack on this but you’ve got gist.

At the root? America is just a very conservative country, and it has backwards laws on the books that only accelerates our downward spiral. It’s made more conservative because the wealth gap has widened so much and billionaires and psychopathic corporations blindly pursuing profit only care about enriching themselves – and they can now freely buy media megaphones and dupe the masses while simultaneously eroding education and making the electorate more short-sighted, easier to dupe. (Hence why Trump said, “I love the poorly educated” and “Smart people don’t like me.”

So the Overton Window drifts right; sensible policies that would be center-left by European or Canadian standards get painted as radical communism, etc.

Democrats as I noted in another comment below are timid because they’re up against a more powerful force and partly corrupted from within themselves. The corrupt (and naive) have sold the party on the notion that, “Hey, we can never persuade the electorate. We can never compete with the megaphones of the right, so best we can do is be Republican-Lite, lest we’re perceived as commies by the poorly educated electorate.”

So Overton Window keeps being defined by the Right, so goes the country…

That is… Unless gas prices go up lol.

Edit: I should say there are things to be hopeful for. Talarico has a damn near AOC platform and just won Texas. A Sanders-backed progressive just beat Collins in Maine finally. A Medicare For All and Muslim just won the battleground state of Michigan. So the bullshit that progressivism doesn’t sell and we have to cater to the blind has been largely debunked.