I think you are too optimistic, because your five points seem to assume "the tradition of all the dead generations [that] weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." (KM, The 18th brumaire...). You seem to tacitly assume that institutional history of the country can be set aside virtually overnight and a new bright future built virtually from the scratch by the committed cadres. Many if not most on left still believe this.
These are nothing but vain hopes of the Enlightenment intellectuals. The history weighs like a nightmare and will not let your brave new plans veer too far from its path. If we were to learn only one thing from the Soviet communist experience, this would be it. There were hopes and blueprints for the new vision of the modern future, and there was a path set by the feudal peasant past. The feudal peasant past won over the new vision, albeit it was a Pyrrhic victory. Soviet "communism was mainly peasant "mir" and its collectivistic and paternalistic ethos embedded in the institutional structures of the state that eventually collapsed under its own weight.
A similar process is going on in the US, except that instead of the peasant "mir" and its collectivistic and paternalistic ethos, the US "nightmare" that weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the livi8ng" is the small-town, petit bourgeois philistinism embedded in the i8nstitutional structures of the state. There is a reason why the labor movement in this country did not mature into institutional structures as it did in Europe - and the petit bourgeois mentality brainwashed with a mixture of individualism, self-righteousness and evangelical religiosity was a big part of it.
The absence of that institutional structures that evolved from the labor movement and progressive urban intellectualism is the main cause of the structural weakness of anything left of the center in this country - and this weakness will not be compensated be mere dedication of the left cadres - even in the more opportune moments, let alone the current rather bleak situation.
Stated differently - the US does not have the key structural elements that made the European left strong - the predominantly urban and urbane society, with strong political institutions and political parties that evolved from labor movement. This is why your item #5 - "we are about a million miles apart from anyplace we want to be politically" is not only fundamentally true right now, but a likely forecast for the foreseeable future. The stars are simply not aligned to help the US left or rather what is left of it.
Elsewhere, it is a different story. This is why the best the US left can hope for is the relative decline of the Evil Empire which will likely leave more breathing space for the left forces to spring elsewhere in the world. But it simply will not happen here - at least not in our life time. If there was any chance of it happening here, it would have happened long time ago, when the labor was at the peak of its power.
Wojtek