Likely relevant: Raising the Sanity Waterline.

I tend to think of much of this as coming down to coalitions. Different coalitions have different norms/beliefs/etc., and what you want to do is to make more people be in coalitions that support enlightenment norms and ideas.

There seem to be three main ways that this can be achieved:

1. Create an enlightenment-based coalition that is so attractive that people will naturally tend to want to join it and adopt its norms.
2. Enter into existing coalitions and gain power in them, and then use that power to shift them towards more enlightenment norms and beliefs.
3. Use force to destroy the alternative non-enlightenment coalitions, thereby making people need to adopt enlightened norms and beliefs.

Option 3 seems kind of contrary to the enlightenment ideals, e.g. one option for "force" could be censoring them, but censorship violates the enlightenment norm of freedom of speech.

The other two options are basically reliant on impressing the people within the coalitions that currently disagree with enlightenment norms. But there's a reason people follow those coalitions rather than the more pro-enlightenment ones, because they are not sufficiently impressed by the achievements and goals of enlightenment-aligned people compared to what their own coalitions have to offer. So the things that recruited people to the enlightenment-aligned groups are unlikely to work on the people in these competing groups.

I would support EA spending a chunk of its resources strategizing on whether and how to participate in politics, do activism, or lobby politicians. If we understood how to involve ourselves in politics in a way that didn’t pose a serious risk of destroying or corrupting EA, we might be able to find some important, tractable, and neglected levers to pull in at least some of these areas. We also need to figure out a way to think about these more sociological and qualitative issues; it’s not EA’s strong suit.

I’m very glad EA has tried to stay largely clear of politics so far, and our track record in our few attempts thus far is not encouraging. By contrast, EA seems to have a good thing going using its present strategy, and I don’t see an obvious slowdown looming for the movement.

On the flip side, learning how to be effective in politics might be crucial for pressing standard EA goals like AGI and biorisk. SBF already spent a pile of cash on a fruitless and possibly misguided attempt to gain political clout for his causes by getting an EA elected to congress. If money’s already being spent and EA’s reputation is already at risk from high-profile misguided political activity, maybe that’s a sign we ought to focus on learning how to do it well.

I should point out that the logic of the degrowth movement follows from a relatively straightforward analysis of available resources vs. first world consumption levels.  Our world can only sustain 7 billion human beings because the vast majority of them live not at first world levels of consumption, but third world levels, which many would argue to be unfair and an unsustainable pyramid scheme.  If you work out the numbers, if everyone had the quality of life of a typical American citizen, taking into account things like meat consumption to arable land, energy usage, etc., then the Earth would be able to sustain only about 1-3 billion such people.  Degrowth thus follows logically if you believe that all the people around the world should eventually be able to live comfortable, first world lives.

I'll also point out that socialism is, like liberalism, a child of the Enlightenment and general beliefs that reason and science could be used to solve political and economic problems.  Say what you will about the failed socialist experiments of the 20th century, but the idea that government should be able to engineer society to function better than the ad-hoc arrangement that is capitalism, is very much an Enlightenment rationalist, materialist, and positivist position that can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Fourier, and other philosophes before Karl Marx came along and made it particularly popular.  Marxism in particular, at least claims to be "scientific socialism", and historically emphasized reason and science, to the extent that most Marxist states were officially atheist (something you might like given your concerns about religions).

In practice, many modern social policies, such as the welfare state, Medicare, public pensions, etc., are heavily influenced by socialist thinking and put in place in part as a response by liberal democracies to the threat of the state socialist model during the Cold War.  No country in the world runs on laissez-faire capitalism, we all utilize mixed market economies with varying degrees of public and private ownership.  The U.S. still has a substantial public sector, just as China, an ostensibly Marxist Leninist society in theory, has a substantial private sector (albeit with public ownership of the "commanding heights" of the economy).  It seems that all societies in the world eventually compromised in similar ways to achieve reasonably functional economies balanced with the need to avoid potential class conflict.  This convergence is probably not accidental.

If you're truly more concerned with truth seeking than tribal affiliations, you should be aware of your own tribe, which as far as I can tell, is western, liberal, and democratic.  Even if you honestly believe in the moral truth of the western liberal democratic intellectual tradition, you should still be aware that it is, in some sense, a tribe.  A very powerful one that is arguably predominant in the world right now, but a tribe nonetheless, with its inherent biases (or priors at least) and propaganda.

Just some thoughts.

I don’t think we have time before AGI comes to deeply change global culture.

But I never hear EA folks talk about these kinds of issues, and these ideas don’t seem to resonate with the community when I bring them up. I’m still left wondering, what is the disconnect here?

I've noticed that LW is generally more cynical about civilization (probably inspired by EY) compared to EA. You can see it in the framings. The "reducing existential risk" framing focuses on risks, not on making something happen that gives us more control than we currently have. The implicit theme is that “humans will be in control by default.” Whereas the way EY frames things, it's more like "there's a big challenge coming up but civilization isn't reacting properly; we have a lot of work to do forming pockets of sanity and saving everyone with the help of magic-like technology which we're forced to develop and master fast enough (because others are going to fuck it up by default)." 

"Moral progress" is first and foremost what it takes for people to get along.  An ongoing process at the individual and group levels.

"a lot of problems rarely discussed among EAs."

While I'm floored by the civil, intelligent and sincere discussion I've recently found here at LW , the rootier problem to what is discussed often is, IMO, that no person seems immune to the avoidance of self-regulation. The imperative to do so noted in B. Russell's Nobel Prize acceptance speech "The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior"(1950) in which he describes universal human desires that are insatiable.

Communities of those striving to self-regulate know they must be mindful of the constant maintenance required to balance individual and societal needs as well as wants.

cite: From Walden, 1854: "Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails."  Also, Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean.