Fair enough. I find myself agreeing with a lot of people who call themselves neoliberal, but I guess it seems like a different brand than the neoliberalism that juice and the jacobin side of the left derides. I for one, wholly reject "things were fine before let's get back to normal" politics (though I don't think the status quo was particularly technocratic either). And I see your interpretation of the pramatism over populism line, I knew when I posted it that was the one most likely to get push back. But I look at it a little differently.
Put aside for a second how unlikely it is that the democrats will have a majority, let alone a super-majority in the Senate. Even with the dream result in 2020, there is still only so much legislative space to go around. I imagine even the Bernie or bust folks would concede you can't do the full 80 trillion dollar makeover overnight. So it becomes a question of legislative priorities. And for me, where the pragmatism comes in, is what should those priorities be? For me, it makes sense that it should be an effort to balance policies that do the very most good for people (the most important thing) and are the most popular/well supported by the public (also important!).
I haven't sit down to give it a whole lot of thought, but for me, I think I'd want to focus on a few things first.
1. Fix democracy. I don't a single particular policy to point to here, but we need to protect our elections and make it super easy to register and vote. Automatic registration should be the norm. Expand early voting, more voting locations, especially in low SES areas. I'd support voting national holiday (even compulsory voting, though I'm not sure of the politics of that). Fix gerrymandering. Some kind of anti corruptions package to help with the lobbying/money in politics problem. I think this has the benefit of correcting some pretty awful injustices that are happening today and strengthening the coalition to help a more progressive agenda going forward.
2. Give poor people more money, especially poor kids. Michael Bennet has gotten some shit on here as a neoliberal shill, but the American Family Act with Sherrod Brown is awesome. $300 per month for every kid up to age 6, $250 a month for kids over 6, with no phase in. This would reduce the number of children in poverty by ~40%. That's about 4.5 MILLION children no longer in poverty. It would also reduce the number of adults in poverty by 10%, (~3.2 million adults). It would cut deep poverty, kids living on 50% or less of the poverty line, by 50%. That's 1.8 million children who were living on less than $12,000 per year for a family of 3. Could this be improved on, probably. I'd like it to be a bit more generous. But I'd argue this bill would do more as much for well being of poor people in American as any single policy from the left this cycle, and we could fully fund it by repealing just a fraction of the TCJA.
To be continued...
