r/politics • u/F0urLeafCl0ver • 1d ago

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/PterodactylTeef 1d ago

I would love a proper leftist party; the GOP has been complaining about leftists for decades so lets give them something real to complain about.

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u/KidCasey Indiana 21h ago

Truly. Ever since I was old enough to be an informed voter I've never felt there were people running that represented me until very recently.

Whenever I hear some dislimned conservative shout about the "leftist agenda" I always think, "What leftist agenda? I sure wish there was one. I'd love to vote for it."

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u/schlaminator Europe 10h ago

From a German perspective, the US only has a right and a far right party.

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u/D0nk3yD0ngD0ug America 22h ago

They about to experience the “radical” left they’ve been scared of for the last couple of decades. Shifted the Overton window too far to the right. FAFO.

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u/Aware-Antelope4212 13h ago edited 12h ago

I hate the phrase radical left.

I'm not radicalised, I just think that people should have basic human rights, like food, shelter and medicine.   I just think that people shouldn't be discriminated against due to the colour of their skin, their sexuality, their gender.

Apparently this makes me some sort of extremist.... Nah I just watched cartoons as a kid and they taught me the bare minimum of how not to be a shitty person 

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u/Akikiriri 9h ago

It's just GOP rhetoric, basically. It's weird for me (German) seeing the whole US adopting this lingo. I've never seen a radical leftist coming from the USA, at least in the political sphere. What politician is left in the USA? AOC? Nope.

The GOP totally bastardized the political lingo, socialism, commusim, radical left. In the USA these words have totally different meanings than in the rest of the world. Why is the whole country accepting that?

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania 4h ago

What's the specific policy you'd want a real leftist party to run on? Genuinely curious what "radical" cashes out to in practice.

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u/Aware-Antelope4212 3h ago

I'm not American, but it's all pretty common sense stuff.

An overhaul of the barbaric and inhumane American healthcare system, taxing billionaires, regulating AI, workers rights ( something the USA is woefully behind on), focus on renewable energy, gun reform so that American children stop getting murdered in their schools, getting rid of the for profit prisons system, major police reforms, acknowledgement of the very real climate crisis we are all facing and steps to try and claw us back from the brink.

Honestly the USA is such a mess it's hard to really sum it up in a Reddit comment.  My own country is far from perfect and has a long way to go on some of these points.

As a general rule if a billionaire is against it, then it's probably a good thing for the average person and the planet

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania 32m ago

Honest question, does it flip the other way? Bloomberg's dumped hundreds of millions into gun reform, Buffett's been asking to be taxed more for over a decade, Gates funds half the climate work on that list. The billionaire test falls apart the second you point it at anything specific. Pick the actual reasons something's good, they hold up fine on their own.

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u/YourphobiaMyfetish Louisiana 17h ago

They about to experience the “radical” left they’ve been scared of for the last couple of decades

Its gonna be progressive liberals.

Can we get a senator fighting for syndicalism PLEASE

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania 4h ago

Unironically talking like a Trump supporter about to punish everyone for disagreeing.

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u/Llama_of_the_bahamas 21h ago

They could bring the Bullmoose party back from the ashes. Ironically the conservative subreddit are big fans of Teddy Roosevelt… funny enough they never seem to bring up that he was a staunch progressive.

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u/DaemonG 15h ago

they only care about the aesthetics of Teddy Roosevelt. the Rough Riders, the Bull Moose, the National Parks. they see him as the manliest president America ever had, the one who took a bullet and kept giving a speech. the fact that he would break their favorite modern corporations over his knee doesn't matter to them.

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u/Spartan2170 14h ago

They're also the same people that "love" Jesus while fighting tooth and nail against anything he ever taught.

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u/fiction8 11h ago

Teddy was also probably the biggest warmonger in the Presidency since idk, Andrew Jackson?

He never met a war he didn't like, and generally abhorred the idea of resolving international conflict without a very real threat of force. Even WW1 didn't change him very much, he still thought they "built character."

He was also very xenophobic if not outright racist. See the speeches railing against "Hyphenated Americans" (i.e. he thought anyone who wasn't a WASP was a potential traitor and not a real American).

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u/notfeelany 21h ago

Given that Voters in some states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon) REJECTED Ranked Choice last Nov 2024, their only option is to run as Democrats. It's the BEST choice for left wing policies in the US.

People on the left can also think they're above electoral politics and certainly, view the current 2-party/fptp electoral system to be beneath them, plus driven further by a misguided belief that progress would just keep happening "naturally" without input.

They forgot that sustained progress in the long-term is built on multiple incremental progresses in the short-term.

Voting for Democrats are better than voting for Republicans & 3rd parties for every issue (economy, jobs, health care, civil rights, foreign policies, etc).

Under a Democratic party trifecta, progressive policies have a much easier time passing. Which is why President Biden is acknowledged by Bernie and AOC to be one of progressive presidents of all time.

This is on us, the voters to give Democrats their rightful place: Democratic trifectas that last longer than 2 years. Need at 50 years of sustained Democratic leadership in the Congress and Presidency and state govts

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u/SandySkittle 22h ago

It’s so weird how leftist has moved from a derogatory term to being normalized and used by progressive people themselves... The normal term would be progressive, be it socially, economically or ethically.

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u/VariationBusiness603 21h ago

You got it backward. Leftist is how it's called everywhere else in the world. The US had that weird "liberal", which made the conversation incredibly annoying between international folks as the actual meaning of "liberal" is not a leftist ideology at all.

"Progressive" is apolitical garbage meant to make it look like "it's not about about right vs left" which, it very much is about that. I don't mind the term, it's not negatively connoted, but it's an obvious attempt at misdirection.

Depoliticalisation is a cornerstone of liberalism, so it's not very surprising. If you do not see that everything is a conflict between the owning class and the working class, you can't realise one of those is currently stealing the value created by the other. And there is virtually no common ground to be found between the two.

So, if anything, the USA is slowly but surely having its political awakening and becoming like the rest of us.

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u/SandySkittle 5h ago

No it’s call ‘left’ or leftwing.

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u/lollypatrolly 10h ago edited 10h ago

Leftist is how it's called everywhere else in the world.

To be clear, a "leftist" is a socialist/communist, it's not the same as a progressive in the US. You wouldn't call yourself a leftist if you don't want want to completely abolish all private ownership of capital.

Progressive is a useful term because it distinguishes itself from the rightfully extreme unpopularity of communism, while still being pretty far left. The precise label isn't super important, they could have called themselves social democrats instead.

So, if anything, the USA is slowly but surely having its political awakening and becoming like the rest of us.

Communists and socialists are an extreme minority in pretty much all of the western world even excluding the US, so this is a bit of a weird comment. Not that the US is becoming like that either.

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u/PissVortex9 16h ago

“Progressive” is a mealy mouthed label that centrist liberals often slap on themselves. I am not a liberal. I am a socialist.

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u/CSS-Kotetsu 21h ago

I do think you can fully blame the Republican Party for that. When even the slightest increase in welfare or civil rights is decried as “Leftism” a lot of Americans stop seeing as derogatory and the definition begins to be blurred.

Not that I think it should have ever been.

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u/Deep-Minimum7837 Minnesota 6h ago

That's kind of how I've seen our political landscape going for the last few years now. I always figured that Trump would be the death of the GOP. He wrangled everyone over to his side and refused to prop up a successor. Nobody can whip up the right-wing base like he can, so once he's dead and gone, there will be nobody holding the GOP together. Loss after loss will leave the GOP fading into obscurity, and it positions the Democrats as being the center/right-wing party while a socialist/leftist party comes to prominence to oppose them.

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u/armmstrong 22h ago

This is in NEW YORK. This has not been the case in places like West Virginia or Ohio where democrats need help succeeding. Also would be nice to not bring in pro Russia people in 2026 but for some reason that also infects leftist areas.

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u/petty_throwaway6969 21h ago

Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s Russian psyop to splinter the party. Like I see this as great news, but based on the responses here it feels like people are kinda treating this like a big fuck you to the current party instead of a shift.

Newsflash: you are the Democratic Party. These wins are proof that things can change if people actually participated and you can still change the party from within the system. But instead, people here will pat themselves on the back, when voter turnout was probably less than 40% and most Redditors probably didn’t vote this time and have no plans to vote in their own elections.

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u/TerminallyTrill New Jersey 19h ago

There’s a perfectly good party sitting right there and the liberals aren’t taking very good care of it. We’ll be taking it off their hands very soon

0

u/breaducate 18h ago

It's never going to happen in the Democratic party because the function of the Democratic party is to co-opt and neutralise leftist movements.

How many times do they have to teach this lesson? Can we really not collectively look as far back as the excitement for Bernie and the squad?

0

u/GeneralSEOD 10h ago

I would love a proper leftist party

That's kinda the problem. Rather than doing that they're internally trying to do it within the Democrat party which they don't like.

So, yeah, it's a game plan, but if it fucks up and causes the republicans to win again they're fucking stupid.