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Left Populism is the way forward. There is no other choice.

(this will be messy and incoherent, apologies now)

In the year 1994, we elected the Southern conservative Democrat Bill Clinton. He is remembered for being the first Democrat that we had in decades, and is seen as an icon in liberal circles.

Look at this graph:

We see that mass incarceration started under the conservatives, but it then continued up until now to skyrocket to unprecedented numbers. This is because Democrats in 1994 decided to win by conceding, compromising.

Compromise, the word that liberals love to use, is used to appeal to academic, elitist establishment Democrats who only see winning or losing— with no care for the results of their actions to get there.

Compromise gets us where we are right now. We are supposed to be the party of the working class, yet we are appealing to rich whites more than ever before: abandoning the plight of immigrants in this country, becoming tough on crime, essentially giving up on basic labor laws such as a $15 dollar minimum wage, and much more.

In the past 20 years, the Democrats and Republicans alike have both gone further to the right, making lukewarm leftists like AOC (who I support, of course) be seen as comparable to the soviet opposition of the past in the eyes of the public.

As this continues, the lukewarm left that we have in this country will be radicalized by the public further, such as how a Democrat of the early 2000s is unrecognizable to a 2024 one.

The establishment will continue to deny rights to certain groups until only the dominating class is left. That applies to Republicans as well as Democrats— we are seeing it happen now. We abandoned soft border policy in favor of what the Republicans pre-Trump thought was best policy: deportation and exclusion, but not en mass. Further, a move right from the Dems means a move farther right for the Republican party. Mass deportation is a fascist policy, yet it will be normalized if we continue to move right.

The most frustrating thing I have seen in the aftermath of the loss by Kamala Harris is the blame game is the exact same as 2016. “Hillary was a woman, Hillary ran a great campaign, men are just evil and sexist and don’t want her as President. Black people didn’t show up enough for Hillary, the Appalachians showed up for Trump so it must be their fault, we must hold the Black population responsible.”

To say these aren’t the reasons for a loss in an election is not to deny the existence of racism and misogyny , it is to recognize which party uses it to their advantage. Very few sects of the Democratic party believe that a black woman can’t be President, and it definitely isn’t 10 million of them.

It’s also ignoring the two elephants in the room: her takes on Gaza, and her right-wing capitulation on immigration.

We keep seeing in the news that “a bigger percentage of Latinos voted for Trump than ever before”. That is propaganda that will be used to harm Latinos further, except this time by establishment Democrats. Democrats will use this as an excuse to continue their harsh behavior towards immigration, and establishment Democrat Latinos will see it as a cultural failure, similar to how Black people are towards their non-voting sects.

The issue is this: more Latinos didn’t vote for Trump, just less voted for Harris. Same thing goes for Gen-Z voters, a lot didn’t go out so it seems as if his lead grew. This is false, he had less voters overall than in 2020, it’s just that Kamala had 10-15 million less and he had 3 million less. People didn’t want to vote for Kamala, and she didn’t give them a reason to. Constantly campaigning with Liz Cheney and other Republicans is a losing strategy, and loss for Democrats leads to further compromise to the right (as we saw during the 80s and 90s with Clinton).

Further, this comes from the expectation that minorities will vote for Democrats by default. This, in itself, is a racist ideal that believes that people of a race are a monolith who all have the same ideas of how a system should function. Not to say the Republicans support minority rights— they definitely don’t, but they are more likely to be abstinent from elections if the Democratic Party doesn’t give them a good reason to show out. These minorities groups are not dogs to be trained, they are people to be earned.

Democrats must escape this cycle, they have to encourage left populism— and appeal to the working class once again. They can no longer rely on massive corporate interests, and must fight for the majority of the country if they expect to win them.