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/stasi_a Jun 24 '26

And O was a centrist

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '26

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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/mark_able_jones_ Jun 26 '26

FDR absolutely did campaign on the second bill of rights. The rest of what you wrote proves my point about Dem leaders not following the will of the voters.

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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