> That isn't the English subjunctive.

No, it is not a proper English subjunctive (a correct example would have been «as if they were» – past subjunctive) or «[we suggested] that they go».

I deliberately lumped subjunctive, conjunctive, and conditional together for brevity. Part of the problem is that many English speakers do not differentiate between subjunctive and conjunctive (conditional) and incorrectly label the latter as subjunctive, but that happens because English does not have a conjunctive (conditional) mood.

English subjunctive is translated into other Indo-European languages either as the conjunctive or indicative mood, as there is no 1:1 mapping in existence.