What I would love to see right now is a strong positive argument for why mail delivery is a service that should be provided by the government, by public employees. Then we could ask, what other activities, on the same principles, also ought to be performed by the public sector.
Obviously I support a public post office! (Well, obvious to people who know me.) My concern is that progressives today seem much better at defending the public institutions that happen to exist than at articulating general principles by which those institutions ought to exist.
I've been thinking about this since working on the campaign against Social Security privatization when I was working for the Working Families Party back in the 00s. We did a great job mobilizing people in support of this particulr program. But...
... no one was able to articulate any broader principle that explained why old age and disability pensions were a thing that the federal government ought to provide. So the campaign didn't lay the groundwork for anything else. As soon as Bush dropped privatization, it evaporated.
We do have language for goods that the government should ensure that everyone receives one way or another. We can talk about public goods, human rights, etc. What we lack is language for why some things should be done by the public sector specifically.
Or again, the teachers' strikes of a few years ago, one of the most inspiring labor upsurges of recent years. We know how to make the case for these particular people getting better pay etc., we kow w want better schools, we know we're against charters and privatization.
What we don't have is language for why government should directly operate schools, rather than just ensuring that people have access to them, or for why strong job protections and a public service culture are specifically appropriate for education.
