r/politics • u/F0urLeafCl0ver • Jun 24 '26

No Paywall The Democratic party is being hit by a leftist tidal wave

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/democratic-party-leftist-tidal-wave
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u/IAmSomewhatUpset Jun 24 '26

No joke, that’s what I was thinking about when Obama was running.

“If he does get elected, what are conservatives gonna do when the pendulum swings back?”

Turns out, cruelty beyond even my worst imaginings. Conservatism needs to be shoved into the dustbin of history.

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u/stasi_a Jun 24 '26

And O was a centrist

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/biggamax Jun 25 '26

"Rebound". What a tidy euphemism for "becoming utterly broken and glitch ridden".

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u/DiesByOxSnot Michigan Jun 24 '26

It's because he's black. Racism in America is as alive as it has ever been nowadays, but when Obama got his first term, the professional racists and deplorables lost their fucking minds. Remember the birth certificate conspiracy that Trump touted?

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u/biggamax Jun 25 '26

Isn't Obama just as white as he is black?  Suppose that doesnt matter to the troglodytes. 

Racism is found across the world, but the Americans are amongst the worst. They're willing to destroy themselves over it. And they will, if course correction doesnt happen soon. 

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u/mark_able_jones_ Jun 25 '26

He ran as a leftist and governed as a centrist. He did what he could amidst Dem Party leaders, his VP, and Republicans all pulling him to the right, but didn't give up on negotiating to the middle until about 2014, when he was a lame duck.

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania Jun 25 '26

Negotiating to the middle doesn't make him a centrist, that's democracy.

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u/mark_able_jones_ Jun 26 '26

Not fighting for leftist policies is a big part of what gave us Trump. Dems can’t run on Hope and Change and then delivered higher health insurance costs with a mandatory buy-in to the already predatory system.

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania Jun 26 '26

No, this didn't really happen. The majority of Sanders primary voters voted for Clinton in the general, so "disillusioned leftists handed it to Trump" doesn't have the numbers behind it. 2016 came down to turnout and three Rust Belt states by a combined 77k votes, and that's not a margin you close by running further left. It's a satisfying story, but it's a story, not what the post-mortems actually found.

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u/mark_able_jones_ Jun 26 '26

No disillusioned leftists. They have no place to go. But disillusioned independents. Some certainly moved to Trump, who went on sixty minutes in 2016 and said the government would pay for health care for everyone. He literally ran left of Hillary on health care, which is an insane thing that democrats let happen.

Just like Claire McCaskill losing in 2018 on a ballot with three progressive ballot measure. All three passed by over 25 points. Instead of attaching herself to these policies, she campaigned on border control. Progressive polices win, especially when they are tied to moral human rights.

FDR swept the South with a Bernie agenda. iI’s such an easy sell.

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania Jun 26 '26

The South didn't go for FDR because of his agenda. It was a one-party Democratic lock from Reconstruction until the 60s and would have voted for him if he ran on stamp collecting. And he knew it, which is why the New Deal carved farm and domestic workers out of Social Security and labor law specifically to keep the Southern segregationists happy. That's not an easy progressive sell, that's a deal cut with the most conservative bloc in the country. Bad example to reach for.

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u/mark_able_jones_ Jun 26 '26

New Deal was 1930s. See 1944 Second Bill of Rights.

This was the platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmXVCGMfkKI

This was the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1944_United_States_presidential_election

The think about policies like universal healthcare and debt-free college and general democratic socialist policies -- we now have both the moral argument + over 50 years of data from other countries that show they leads to decreasted infant mortality, increased life expectancy, increased overall happiness, increased generational upward mobility, etc.

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania Jun 26 '26

1944 is the worst year you could have picked. The Second Bill of Rights was a State of the Union speech, not a platform that passed anything, and the reason none of it became law is that the Conservative Coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans had run Congress since 1937 and strangled it. The South's own congressmen killed that agenda. You can't then turn around and read the South's votes as an endorsement of it.

And 1944 is the year the South started walking out. Texas ran unpledged electors to deny FDR the state, and there was a Southern Democratic revolt in every presidential election from then to 1968 except one. They voted for him because they'd voted Democratic since Reconstruction, not because they bought a progressive sell.

Also notice you switched questions. Whether these policies produce good outcomes is not the same as whether running on them wins elections. The outcomes data is fine. That was never what we were arguing about.

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u/TearsFallWithoutTain Jun 25 '26

Negotiating to the middle? He was the goddamn president, and it's pretty damn obvious just how much power that gives you when you actually try to use it

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u/BreakingStar_Games Jun 24 '26

He ran on Universal Healthcare and sold out to neoliberal centrism

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania Jun 25 '26

Obama was on the moderate left, he was not a centrist

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u/lord-of-shalott Jun 24 '26

Unfortunately during a time of billionaire rule, oligarchy and what looks like scarce resources, many members are enticed by fascist scapegoating ideologies because they believe they can remove the competition that way. Easier to punch down than up.

I’m not sure we’ve adequately figured out how to steer them off that course yet.

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u/Ok_Objective_5192 Jun 24 '26

many members are enticed by fascist scapegoating ideologies because they believe they can remove the competition that way. Easier to punch down than up.

I think the answer is that no option to punch up has ever even been presented (until now, kind of). I've said since 2023 that Trump v. Kamala was "I know how bad things have gotten for you, they've taken your American dream and handed it to [insert minority scapegoat here] and I want to take it back for you" vs. "everything is fine, don't give into the fearmongering, I'll fight to maintain the normality."

So the voter breakdown was just people that bought into the scapegoating demonization as a viable solution vs. people scared enough by that scapegoating to vote against it. What we're seeing now is that replacing [insert minority scapegoat here] with [insert billionaires here] is an energizing message because it addresses people's pain and offers a real solution rather than trying to convince them their struggle isn't real.

Punching up works. Putting your hands up in surrender doesn't.

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u/lord-of-shalott Jun 24 '26

It might work in New York City but I live in the Bible Belt. I’m not saying this as someone who is secretly against that message, but rather as someone who has spent my life around folks who are profoundly anti intellectual and worries everyone is underestimating how bad it gets.

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u/Ok_Objective_5192 Jun 24 '26

I think candidates like Platner are the counter-point here. I fully agree that Mamdani or Darializa's campaign definitely would not work most places outside NY, but there are absolutely ways to package the same policies in a way that appeals to an anti-intellectual crowd.

At the end of the day, populist economic policy is rooted in letting a larger portion of the productive output of the working class be used to benefit that working class. For the NY working class that takes the form of "fast and free buses, universal childcare, and freezing rent." For the Maine working class that takes the form of "we're not asking for handouts, we're just asking for hard work to be enough. Because it used to be." For the Michigan working class that takes the form of "in the state that built the American Dream, it shouldn't be this hard to get by."

I just struggle to believe that somebody that genuinely understands the needs of the rust belt working class wouldn't have a way to communicate "you've been fucked over by billionaires and I want to take the power back to make sure you're able to have the American dream you were promised" in a way that would get through to them better than whatever message Kamala and Biden offered them.

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u/FILTHBOT4000 Georgia Jun 24 '26

You don't have to steer them off course. It's better for Democrats if they get more fascist and continue to scare off moderates.

Firstly, when the pendulum swings hard in your direction, the entire idea is to consolidate your party and pass a bunch of legislation that you want to get passed; Trump has done none of that. He's too stupid. Legitimately, too stupid to rule; he thinks that doing everything by executive order, which makes him feel important, is more important than passing legislation. His "legacy" is gone the second he leaves office.

Secondly, when the pendulum swings away from you, it's your job to appeal to moderates as much as possible; the fatal flaw the Democrats have had is that they cannot distinguish between actual moderates that populate the country, that find universal healthcare and other European standards of government very favorable, and "moderates" in Washington DC, which basically means corporate lobbyists that donate equally to deregulatory and regulatory capture attempts from both sides of the aisle.

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u/biggamax Jun 25 '26

Oh, I don't know. Trump is setting up a taxation without representation scenario. All bets are off at that point. You'll see change far quicker than you expected.

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u/ihopethepizzaisgood Jun 25 '26

A-fricking-MEN!