There Are No Leftists in America
Leftists went into hiding forty years ago when Reagan was elected
We are officially at the point where the United States is a far-right nation. The left has been annihilated.
When I tell folks that I’m left of Bernie and AOC, they audibly gasp, even if it’s in a chat. I can almost hear them roar, “You’re a communist?”
No. I’m more of a 1970s moderate Republican.
You’ve probably read this next paragraph before. It’s not a new idea.
Donald Trump is the symptom, not the disease, of what ails us. He is what happens when a nation becomes apathetic to the steady claw of an insatiable right-wing party that is never satisfied with its latest cruelties. The more the right-wing takes, the more they want, and as its propaganda network grows, the more to the right the country lurches.
What began, for example, as the stripping of abortion rights has morphed into a 24/7 assault on contraceptives and women’s bodily autonomy. The Equal Rights Amendment has reversed into something not far removed from the Salem witch hunts, except that now women are hunted down for the “improper” disposal of their miscarriages instead of their praise for all things fae.
What began as a demand for lower tax rates became a call to end government as we know it.
What began as a raised fist against what some call excessive immigration (there really is no such thing1) has become a war against anyone with skin darker than a Pantone antique white.
Worse, the majority of Americans approve of the Trump regime’s efforts to stifle immigration, according to recent polls like this one from Semafor:2
I’ll add the obvious disclaimer that polls taken by CNBC are most likely not the best gauge of current attitudes, but it’s only been the regime’s vicious approach toward immigrants that has begun to finally eat into consistent polling that has consistently shown that most Americans favor deportations.
As a result:
There is no such thing as a left wing in America. There are leftists, for sure (see Sky, Blue if you wish to seek a few out), but there has been no significant leftist movement in the United States for several decades. The rare true lefty is considered a gadfly. A curiosity.
Gaza protesters don’t count as left-wingers. Prior to entering this era of far-right politics, protesting genocide had never been considered the exclusive domain of the left wing. The nation of Israel was conceived as a worldwide bipartisan reaction against genocide. Everyone in the world agreed that the brutality of killing six million Jewish people required an extraordinary solution. History shows that the solution was flawed and driven by colonialism, but that fact doesn’t erase the awful truth behind the motivations.
Today’s United States consists of two conservative parties. One of them warmly embraces the corporate elite but adds a few weak guardrails, and the other is trying, and largely succeeding, to impose fascism.
The likes of AOC, Bernie, etc., exist just barely to the left of what was once the political center in the 1970s. The mainstream media’s coverage of New York City’s Democratic candidate for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a reflection of the fear that we might return to the 1970s, not that the nation is imperiled by his so-called socialism, which is not a thing in America any more than communism is.
Let’s unpack what I mean by looking at the policy proposals of those who are now considered to be leftists in the United States.
Education
So-called leftists have long pushed for a variety of publicly funded educational programs.3
But there’s nothing new here. Inexpensive and accessible higher education was a matter of accepted public policy in the 1960s and into the 70s.
Keep in mind before you read any further that the steady dismantling of our educational system led us directly to Trump. There’s a big difference between poorly educated people and stupid people. The number of stupid people isn’t high enough to result in a Trump.
Most people, in general, aren’t stupid.
So let’s just stop calling Trump voters stupid. The ability to reason within the framework of historical context is developed through education. It’s not a brain thing.
Poorly funded public K-12 schools have been a bipartisan problem for a long time, but they’re getting even worse. Democrats have largely been silent on this, despite outcries from some of their allies in the education field.
The result is that most jurisdictions rely on things like property taxes to fund schools. And who likes those?
So, naturally, K-12 funding is hard to come by.
As Democrats remain silent, many rural counties, because bake sales only bring in so much cash, are moving to four-day school weeks.
When it comes to K-12, this is nothing new.4 Getting the American public to swallow the expense of public education is too challenging for most politicians to even consider.
The proposals in Joe Biden’s social spending bill would have released funds for enhanced preschool and free child care options, but West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin killed it.
Democrats being Democrats, the bill died as quickly as so-called centrists began to stress over supposed high costs. Manchin’s rural constituents, drunk on Trump juice, will pay the biggest price.
The passage of such a bill shouldn't have mattered to red states, because they would have been able to opt out if they didn’t like the bill, but they fought it anyway, because that’s what they do.
If the bill had passed, the balkanization of the United States into have vs have-nots states would have continued, since you can be sure that Republican states would not have opted in, for the most part, because most modern-day Republicans are more like miniature death stars than real people.
Many public universities were once free or nearly free.
Public universities were often free or close to it during the 1960s.
I paid just a little more than $300 per semester at the state university I attended in Illinois in 1976. I was able to pay for college by working at the local supermarket.
Today’s kids have to mortgage their futures with impossible-to-pay student loans so that they can graduate into the world of Amazon warehouse work.
The University of California was free to Californians until 19755 because the state of California funded 32 percent of the University of California’s budget.
Then, under Ronald Reagan (who else?), in-state tuition fees beginning at $630 were imposed in 1975.
Technically, this was a Board of Regents decision, so we can’t pin this directly on Reagan, but it is noteworthy that the next biggest hikes came under Republican George Deukmejian (1983–19916) when the fees jumped first to $1,296 in 1985, then to $4,354 under Republican Governor Pete Wilson.
Not to be outdone, in 2004, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lined up a deal with UC administrators to drop public funding to 16 percent.7
In-state tuition under Schwarzenegger ultimately shot up to $14,460. For something called “public” universities.
The trend caught on with the rest of the country in no time because Reagan convinced the entire nation that government spending is bad for you.
The tuition at the school I attended is now $16,000 per semester. I can’t think of any supermarkets that pay that kind of money for a summer job.
The decimation of publicly funded higher education is illustrative of the collapse of the left.
Climate Change
The Environmental Protection Agency was started by Richard Nixon.8
Everyone was on board with climate change back then, although it was mostly called pollution. Same thing, different name.
Now that the country is on fire every summer (see your news feed for today’s latest fires in the L.A. area) and high-intensity December tornadoes are wrecking lives in libertarian Kentucky, somehow climate change is suddenly a question?
That’s almost too weird for words.
The point is, climate change is not a new thing. Everyone pretty much conceded that pollution was a problem at one time. Remember acid rain? If you don’t, it’s because a bipartisan effort ended it.
But Democrats have allowed Republicans to change the messaging. Now, instead of freaking out about Greenland’s melting ice cap, everyone is talking about how we can mine its rare earths while an insane American president babbles about taking it over.
The Antarctic glaciers are disappearing so quickly that some scientists fret that catastrophic flooding could begin hammering world coastlines within a few years.9 But most Americans mostly care more about how tariffs will affect their Temu orders.
Vaccinations
Every Republican in the United States is vaccinated against smallpox, rubella, polio, and others because every Republican in the U.S. was at one time in favor of mandated school vaccination mandates.
It’s not leftist or socialist to be in support of vaccinations or even mandates.
Full stop. Case closed.
Democrats have allowed Republicans to control the messaging on this, too. Science is ignored or cursed, replaced by YouTube videos created by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Civil Rights
Remember bipartisan votes? No. Of course you don’t.
But it happened during the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.10
Senate Democrats split their vote 46 (69%) for and 21 (31%) against the Civil Rights Act. Republicans split their vote 27 for (82%) and 6 against (18%).
Believe it or not, the “no” vote consisted of 78% Democrats.
You think Joe Manchin was bad? Well, he was. But…
…Southern Democrats in 1964 led a 74-day filibuster against the civil rights bill, then overwhelmingly voted against it, while moderate Republicans like Everett Dirksen were stalwarts in the fight to get the iconic bill passed.
Similarly, the House of Representatives voted 290 to 130 in favor. Democrats split their vote 152 (61%) to 96 (39%) while Republicans split theirs 138 (80%) to 34 (20%). The no vote consisted of 74% Democrats. I’ll let you guess which region of the country they represented.11
There was a time when a clear majority of American politicians agreed that the oppression of Black people was a really bad thing.
Now, you’re a socialist if you think that.
Again, Democrats have allowed Republicans to control the messaging.
Taxes
Hey, not even an old frustrated “lefty” like me wants a 70% tax rate on high incomes. But although there were loopholes and other processes for wealthy folks to avoid taxes, the highest marginal rates were once much higher than today.
One look at the chart below shows the difference and the precipitous drop since the 1980s.
Wow, look at 1945. No wonder Ike warned us about the military-industrial complex.12 An awful lot of that money went to the military.
Today, we are at 37% for single-filers making above $647,850. It’s very difficult to push that up even a couple of percentage points in today’s political climate.
Needless to say, no Democrats are suggesting we push the top marginal rates up more than a percentage point or two.
Elizabeth Warren and a few others are seeking a wealth tax. That’s not radical stuff, especially compared to the tax tables of the 1950s, which were considered by some to be part of America’s most prosperous era (it was for some people, but not minorities).
You’d think everyone would be on board with it, but the truth is, if you are in support of a wealth tax, you’re labeled a socialist. But you’re not even a 1970s moderate Republican if you support a wealth tax.
The pendulum has swung so far to the right on every political topic that you’re a socialist if you want to pay for things like we did in the 1950s and 1960s.
And God help you if you protest a war or forget (or refuse) to take your hat off during the national anthem at a baseball game. If you’re a professional football player taking a knee, kiss your career goodbye.
There are no leftist policies in play right now
None of the policies “leftists” have proposed are any more extreme than what moderate Republicans in the 1970s either supported or proposed.
Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed a nationalized European-style healthcare system.
Republicans across the board supported, albeit sometimes reluctantly, tax tables that could never get passed today. At a minimum, they knew you had to pay for stuff. Republicans in those days would never have signed off on a budget bill passed by this latest session of Congress that increases the deficit to almost incoherent numbers.13
Republicans were even, during the Civil War days, back before the script flipped, the main supporters of civil rights. As recently as 1964, they were still on the civil rights train, as proven in their votes at the time.
Most modern Republican politicians love to claim their lineage to Abraham Lincoln when it suits them, even though most of them have nothing but disdain for people of color unless those people of color actively toe the line. But that wasn’t always the case.
This means that in their hearts, many of them know civil rights matter, maybe even Black Lives Matter, even though they can’t come out and say it because of the barbaric cult that Donald Trump has spawned.
But here’s the thing.
It didn’t all start with Trump.
Trump was the slimy climax of ideas pushed by extremists like Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schlafly that have gradually taken hold of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.
In conclusion…
As the midterms approach, you’ll hear a lot about how the “left” is going to ruin the midterms for Democrats.
If the midterms are disastrous for Democrats, it will be because they parrot the policy points coming from what used to be called moderate Republicans and are always on the defensive when it comes to what used to be accepted policy.
It will be because Democrats continue to hew to the needs of corporate America instead of the person in the street trying to make ends meet, including small business owners who should also be able to rely on Democrats for solutions that worked once and can work again through simple adjustments to the tax tables.
As the November election showed us, the Democratic Party is in a self-sustaining stranglehold of ineptness and mediocrity driven by the desire to cling to a center that no longer exists.
That center got blown away during the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
It looks like it is never coming back, as we all stand on the back of our heels and wonder why we are living under a right-wing autocracy led by a madman whose best friend was Jeffrey Epstein.
Notes
This article was inspired by an article written by
:
The excellent editor of Politically Speaking on the Medium platform, Scott Tarlo, once asked me: “Could the definition of leftism be changed as it relates to how it historically was? Just like the Republicans changed over time from the 60s, could what it means to be on the left just mean something…different?”
My answer was that I didn’t even know how to define leftism these days. Back in the 1970s, it meant true socialism — the workers owning the means of production, or, at a minimum, the state controlling many of the levers of industry.
Today? I think it just means anybody who isn’t happy with the status quo. But I honestly don’t have a good answer for that. Maybe you good folks do. I’d be interested in your reaction in the comments.
Footnotes
Excessive immigration is a concept invented by the right. The reality is that the United States needs more immigrants and their inexpensive labor than Mexico and other countries south of the border can provide. Your expensive rental is expensive because there aren’t enough dudes in red hats around willing to do the hard work in summer heat to build more housing for you.
Furthermore, immigration is rescuing many small towns from oblivion. Immigrants bring their entrepreneurial hunger and intense work ethic with them. They change these towns for the better. They turn pockmarked roads that crisscross shuttered downtowns into busy avenues of new, renovated districts full of small restaurants, stores, and cultural centers.
Weigel, David. 2025. “🟡 Semafor Americana: Cities in Dust | Semafor.” Semafor.com. August 8, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/08/08/2025/semafor-americana
“Affordable Higher Education for All | Elizabeth Warren.” 2019. Elizabethwarren.com. 2019. https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/affordable-higher-education.
“US Government Education Spending History with Charts - a Www.usgovernmentspending.com Briefing.” 2025. Usgovernmentspending.com. 2025. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending.
Vega, Lilia. 2014. “The History of UC Tuition since 1868.” Www.dailycal.org. December 22, 2014. https://www.dailycal.org/archives/the-history-of-uc-tuition-since-1868/article_12b00b4e-5074-5830-8d89-99fd3bbc148c.html.
“Governors of California - George Deukmejian.” 2019. Ca.gov. 2019. https://governors.library.ca.gov/35-deukmejian.html.
“The Origins of EPA | US EPA.” 2013. US EPA. January 29, 2013. https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa.
You can play around with scenarios here. The base levels are the most optimistic scnarios:
https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/6/121.4348/35.3024/?theme=sea_level_rise&map_type=ice_sheet&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&ice_loss_level=1.0&ice_sheet=antarctic&water_unit=m
U.S. Department of Labor. 2024. “Legal Highlight: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 .” Dol.gov. U.S. Department of Labor. 2024. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/civil-rights-center/statutes/civil-rights-act-of-1964.
“HR. 7152. PASSAGE. — Senate Vote #409 — Jun 19, 1964.” 2014. GovTrack.us. 2014. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/s409.
Contributors. 2011. “Final Presidential Address of Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. January 18, 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower%27s_farewell_address.
“What Does the One Big Beautiful Bill Cost? | Bipartisan Policy Center.” 2025. Bipartisanpolicy.org. 2025. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/what-does-the-one-big-beautiful-bill-cost/.
I want clean air, water, food and housing for everyone, even if you’re an idiot. Last I heard, that makes me a commie.
I am an old free love hippie.
I read, or try to read, people who represent as leftist Democrats. Think of the Substacks with huge numbers of subscribers. Those are the kind of voices getting attention.
I find them and their followers to be like my Republican parents in the 50s. They may care more about others than my (quietly) racist parents, but otherwise indistinguishable.
I call myself a Democratic Socialist for the purpose of identification.
I don't see Democrats saving us from much of the damage being done.