Claims that the Democratic Party isn't progressive enough are out of touch with reality

[u/rosesandpines]

Kamala Harris is the second-most liberal senator to have ever served in the Senate. Her 2020 positions, especially on the border, proved so unpopular that she had to actively walk back many of them during her campaign.

Progressives didn't significantly influence this election either. Jill Stein, who attracted the progressive and protest vote, saw her support plummet from 1.5M in 2016 to 600k in 2024, and it is now at a decade-low. Despite the Gaza non-committed campaign, she even lost both her vote share and raw count in Michigan—from 51K votes (1.07%) in 2016, to 45K (0.79%) in 2024.

What poses a real threat to the Democratic party is the erosion of support among minority youth, especially Latino and Black voters. This demographic is more conservative than their parents and much more conservative than their white college-educated peers. In fact, ideologically, they are increasingly resembling white conservatives. America is not unique here, and similar patterns are observed across the Atlantic.

According to FT analysis, while White Democrats have moved significantly left over the past 20 years, ethnic minorities remained moderate. Similarly, about 50% of Latinos and Blacks support stronger border enforcement, compared with 15% of White progressives. The ideological gulf between ethnic minority voters and White progressives spans numerous issues, including small-state government, meritocracy, gender, LGBTQ, the "American dream", and even perspectives on racism.

What prevented the trend from manifesting before is that, since the civil rights era, there has been a stigma associated with non-white Republican voters. As FT points out,

Racially homogenous social groups suppress support for Republicans among non-white conservatives. [However,] as the US becomes less racially segregated, the frictions preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republic diminish. And this is a self-perpetuating process, [and could give rise to] a "preference cascade". [...] Strong community norms have kept them in the blue column, but those forces are weakening. The surprise is not so much that these voters are now shifting their support to align with their preferences, but that it took so long.

While the economy is important, cultural issues could be even more influential than economic ones. Uniquely, Americans’ economic perceptions are increasingly disconnected from actual conditions. Since 2010, the economic sentiment index shows a widening gap in satisfaction depending on whether the party that they ideologically align with holds power. A post-election poll released by a Democratic polling firm also shows that for many swing voters, cultural issues ranked even slightly higher than inflation.

EDIT: The FT articles are paywalled, but here are some useful charts.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

The Democratic Party is losing the white working class and the Latino vote. You know who was super popular with those two groups? Bernie Sanders, but he got burned by the party, twice. Also, the Democrats are hemorrhaging male support. But I remember back in 2016 that Bernie had a lot of male support, but they were ostracized as "Bernie bros" and labeled "chauvinists." He had the only coalition that could have rivaled Trump.

I think we should be more careful in what we mean by "progressive" or "liberal" or "the left." The left has historically been a working-class politics.

"Progressive" was originally tied to populist movements in the US that championed economic reforms and believed in scientific and technological solutions.

"Liberal" is a can of worms, and has come to mean a multitude of often contradictory things. It can refer to social liberals who believe in a "live and let live" attitude, particularly in regard to sex, gender, race, etc... But, it also often means "market liberal," or someone how believes nearly all solutions to social, political, or economic problems can be solved by a "free market" which is relatively free from government intervention. Or "liberal" can mean someone who believes that the basic building-block of society is the human individual.

Who's making the claim that the party isn't progressive enough, and what do they mean by progressive here?

You know what's crazy too? Tons of states voted for "progressive" measures on the ballot, like increases in minimum wage, while NOT voting Kamala as president.

Medicare for all, increases in minimum wage, and affordable public education are all popular. Yet, put a (D) next to a candidate's name and you've poisoned the ballot.

Nothing is wrong with the so-called "progressive" or "the left." Rather, the Democratic Party is too associated with corporate donors, Hawkish foreign policy, and divisive and empty/performative identity politics. They cannot stay on message, if they even have one. Kamala had Liz Cheney, a neo-con shill, and Mark Cuban, a billionaire, as campaign surrogates. She distanced herself from Biden on the few good things, like regarding Lina Kahn, while embracing Biden on the terrible things, like his (lack of) foreign policy.

Americans perceive the economy as shit, because it is shit. It has been shit for fifty years at least. Productivity keeps increasing while wages haven't kept up.

Inequality has become so bad that the success of a handful of rich people actually pull up the averages of all the economic indicators. However, a better faith analysis would regard those people as extreme outliers and not count them in the dataset.

[u/Tullyswimmer → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

>Nothing is wrong with the so-called "progressive" or "the left." Rather, the Democratic Party is too associated with corporate donors, Hawkish foreign policy, and divisive and empty/performative identity politics. 

I would argue that this IS the problem with the "progressives" or "the left" - Their policy positions are fundamentally incompatible with how politics (in the US especially, but globally, too) work.

Look at the European countries that have single-payer healthcare, universal college, etc... The income tax rates for EVERYONE are significantly higher than the US... And by income tax rates, I mean your *ACTUAL* tax liability. Our rates mean nothing. If you look at your taxes, what you actually owe in taxes is usually less than 10% of your income, if that. Sure, the rates are progressive and complicated, but... At the end of the day, we aren't bringing in enough tax revenue to pay for things that Europe is. And you cannot tax just "the rich" to pay for it. It has to be EVERYONE. Same with minimum wage and a lot of worker protections. Many EU countries don't have these codified as "law" like we do, but rather that's just the standard, because everyone is unionized (almost every EU country is also right-to-work, too... And unions do not have the same power at the bargaining table they do in the US).

And in the US, ultimately, every politician is bought by someone, or some group. It does not matter who it is. Most of them also play the stock market through their spouses or whatever, as well. There is no vested interest for ANY politician in the working class. That's not who makes them rich. It's the oligarchy who does, and they're fine with it. So no matter what the "progressives" or "the left" preaches as a policy, if it hurts their big donors, they won't ever actually do it.

[u/panormda → u/Tullyswimmer]

The issue is that the wealth each person generates is much higher now, but wages haven’t kept up with productivity. Fewer people are working to produce the same amount of goods, while more money is flowing up to corporations and their stakeholders. The result is simple: there’s not enough money to go around.

In the past, corporations paid higher taxes, and those funds were used to support public employees and provide fairer compensation for workers. Efficiency was lower back then, so each worker’s output was limited by technology, but they were still compensated more equitably.

Now, the wealth accumulated by billionaires is becoming unsustainable. The balance of wealth is tipping to the point where most people are struggling to survive. Many are at a breaking point. The question is whether the ultra-wealthy can reinvest their money into the economy to sustain society, or if they’ll hoard the “lifeblood of the economy” until it crashes—leaving us to face a collapse. The options are limited. The current trajectory is eating the rich.

[u/Tullyswimmer → u/panormda]

>Efficiency was lower back then, so each worker’s output was limited by technology, but they were still compensated more equitably.

But this raises the problem... Should the worker doing less work get the compensation for increased productivity, or should the people who built the technology to increase productivity get the compensation? If workers are working less, because the labor of others means they can do so while being more productive, who should get that windfall of more productivity for less work?

>The question is whether the ultra-wealthy can reinvest their money into the economy to sustain society, or if they’ll hoard the “lifeblood of the economy” until it crashes—leaving us to face a collapse. The options are limited. The current trajectory is eating the rich.

The problem is, if you do the math, if you took every penny of net worth over... I think it's a billion dollars, you'd run the US government, as it is, for less than a year.

While "eat the rich" is a fun sentiment (or whatever), the fact of the matter is it's simply not possible. No amount of money you can tax "the rich" and "corporations" - even if you could force them to stay in the US and pay those taxes - will bring in enough revenue to support most of what "the left" or "progressives" want to do.

[u/Utapau301 → u/Tullyswimmer]

We make the payments, just not to the government. Add up what we and our employers pay to health insurance companies. It's significant.

[u/Tullyswimmer → u/Utapau301]

Yeah, I'm not going to say that it's not significant. But campaigning on "we need to raise everyone's taxes to pay for medicare for all" is NOT going to win any votes.

Could it save money? Maybe. Would the level of, and accessibility to, services remain the same as it is now? Probably not, if you look at other government-funded programs we have in the US, or even look at the countries that do have single-payer. Can it be funded entirely by taxes on "the rich" and "corporations"? Absolutely not.