Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.

Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.

I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much.

Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.

Obama wasn't necessarily anti-gay marriage, but like most liberals at the time (and like liberals for most issues), was sitting somewhere in the middle. He was in support of civil unions which would grant legal rights to gay partnerships but would leave the labeling of it as a marriage up to the states. A sort of "separate but equal" application to marriages. Did he actually believe this in his heart? Who knows, but that's what he said and did as a politician. It almost doesn't even matter what candidates say, they are looking to sway voters and donors, not actually make policies. You really just have to wait until a president's second term for progress to happen.

The slow march of progress has to navigate what is politically acceptable for most people of the time these changes take place in. Obama put in two of the justices that granted gay marriage rights during his first term.

You're doing a thing here where you're equating "Democrat" with "liberal". That's less true than people think today, but it wasn't even a little bit true in Vonnegut's heyday. It isn't perfectly accurate to say we had four political parties in the 1960s (liberal and conservative Democrats, liberal and conservative Republicans) but it's not far off. The ideological sort picked up in earnest in the mid 1970s, and wasn't a dominant force in politics until the election of Reagan. Prior to Reagan, the Republican party platform was open to abortion!

Chicago under Daley (and long before) was deeply segregated (it still is). But Daley's was a conservative government.