America Moved Right. What Should the Left Do?

Art by Leo Hendrixx

On the heels of Donald Trump winning the 2024 Election, I made a video sharing my thoughts, many of which made many different kinds of people angry. But one particular thought I shared really struck a nerve with some people on my side of the isle, and that was my assertion that the results of the election are proof that the country has moved further right. I asserted that republicans winning all across the country—the presidential election, the house, the senate, as well as defeating progressive legislation on the ballots all across the nation, and the many many polls throughout the election season, as well as the final exit polls that stated clearly that Americans feel that the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris alike are too liberal (which much to my chagrin, is far from the truth)—but that it all stands as proof that the country moved further right, explicitly rejected the left, and that Kamala Harris would not have won running on the leftist platform many of us would’ve liked her to.

And I haven’t changed my position. But I want to expand on it because I realize that many people seem to have misconstrued my point, misunderstood the point, or willfully misinterpreted it in bad faith to push their own fruitless agenda that I’m anti-left or blaming the left. So, allow me to both reiterate and expound on my position for those who care. In my election day video, I said it’s obvious that America has moved further right and would not have voted for a truly leftist candidate or platform, and some have taken that to mean that I’m happy with that, that I want that to be the case, or that I’m in some way arguing we should move further right or abandon leftist beliefs or something. None of that is the case, I am simply identifying the sad situation we have found ourselves in. I am attempting to identify the problem we are facing so that hopefully we can address it because we cannot fix a problem we won’t acknowledge exists.

I have always recognized that our views, our progressive values, are in the minority—we are challenging the status quo. So, we have always been fighting an uphill battle and that will continue to be the truth, although that hill will be much steeper going forward. Nevertheless, we’ve always been swimming against the current trying to get the majority—who have been indoctrinated to hate “other,” to see helping one another as the true enemy—we’ve always been fighting an uphill battle trying to persuade them over to our side by trying to challenge, debunk and dismantle their entrenched foundational beliefs—so I’m not sure why anyone would misinterpret me pointing out that we are currently losing that battle by a lot more points than I would like, to mean I think we should give up or join the majority.

What I’m saying is, we need to stop deluding ourselves to believing a nation full of people who are so prejudice they can be easily convinced to support a raging bigot explicitly planning to destroy all of their lives because they’re just happy to have their neighbors lives destroyed, are really on our side, that a couple of quick fixes and messaging changes in 3 months of a campaign would’ve done the trick.

No, we’re in much worse shape than that. We obviously have a lot to do to move America to our side.

Something I hear a lot is that Americans support progressive legislation when they don’t know it’s progressive legislation. And when this is said, it’s usually said by someone trying to advance the point that Americans are really more progressive than we’re giving them credit for but I’m here to tell you that tricking a bigot doesn’t make them a progressive.

It you have to trick someone into supporting progressive legislation that would benefit them because if you told them the truth outright they’d oppose it because they prefer to align themselves with politics, politicians and ideologies that won’t necessarily benefit them but explicitly harm others, the fact that you were able to trick them doesn’t make them a progressive, it’s not proof that “America supports progressive legislation,” it’s proof that they are both a bigot and an idiot, which is a lethal combination.

The fact that Americans oppose Obamacare but support the Affordable Care Act is not proof that they’re secretly progressive, it’s proof that they’re racist and dumb. The fact that Americans hated Michelle Obama’s healthy food agenda when the Obamas were in office but can easily accept RFK Jr.’s bootleg knockoff of it, “Make America Healthy Again” is again, proof that these people are racist and dumb.

In fact, it’s proof that they’re so racist and stupid, they won’t even support legislation that would benefit them.

A nation that must be tricked into helping others, but flocks to a candidate and party campaigning on the promise of destroying the lives of millions of people is not one that’ll be so quickly won over by the tweaks and messages I’ve heard so many people throw out. And I’m not saying that because I think the democrats did nothing wrong, I’m saying that because I want people like me who are in the business of trying to bring people over to our side of thinking to go back to the fucking drawing board and figure out how we start walking some of these people over to our side and to stop embracing these silly ass notions that our beliefs are secretly popular and Americans can be easily swayed overnight if we did XYZ. I don’t want us to abandon trans people, Black people, immigrants, Asians, Latinos, or anyone else. I want us to sit down and assess how our biases were played on, how right-wing media and right-wing politicians alike have been so successful at playing on people’s prejudices, fears, rugged individualism, selfishness, and downright stupidity, and I want us to figure out how we undo it.

I’m not saying I don’t think we would’ve won on a leftist platform because I’m happy or even ok with that fact. I say that with great pain as someone explicitly building a leftist platform—whether you believe I’m left enough for you or not. I simply want us to tackle the issue, which is:

We are losing on messaging, we are being out propagandized, and we are persona non grata in the court of public opinion. And the reason for that is that Americans consume year-round rightwing propaganda in the form of most of their media, mainstream, independent and social. Most of the political content people are consuming is not the news or content that explicitly labels itself as political content: they’re getting it from content that packages itself as entertainment while only peddling antiquated views meant to make people look down on and exclude women, minorities and the LGBT community. It’s in the manosphere content, the tradwife content, the gossip blogs and platforms like The Shaderoom, Akademiks, NoJumper, and all the other wildly popular plagues on the mind that Americans keep embracing.

But none of that means that we abandon our causes, our communities, or the most marginalized among us. It means we have to figure out how we tap into the majority’s base instincts to bring them to our side, how we take what we know about people and use it to our advantage—and we can’t do any of that if we are hellbent on lying about what the majority’s base instincts are, if we keep refusing to believe what they’ve told us about them, what history and our lived experiences confirm.

What we have to do is educate people about these issues all year around, and not only do we have to constantly fight, debunk and respond to misinformation steeped in bigotry, we have to lead the charge to educate the masses unprompted, we have to choose to not just be advocates for ourself and others, we have to invite the people who are other, who are most vulnerable, to tell their own stories, to humanize their own stories, to dispel the caricatures of them that bigots present to the society—and none of that happens if we’re constantly downplaying the impact and threat of these kinds of content and the ideologies that they espouse—especially when it’s all significantly more popular than any explicitly leftist political content—none of that happens if we refuse to see how our pop culture and social discussions are truly political in nature and affect how people see the world around them, and thus what kind of politicians and legislations they will support.

We also cannot do this following the white leftist model of trying to strip race and gender from every analysis. Bigotry and hate is not as nuanced as we insist on pretending it is. It’s not economic anxiety or any other term people have grabbed onto to explain why everyone, but Black people voted for a white supremacist.

It’s more than class. Anybody peddling this idea that the “working class was abandoned” to explain why white people voted for a white racist like they always do when the Black working class all chose not to vote for a white supremacist, and Biden’s administration has allowed for some of the biggest union wins we’ve seen in a while, is wrong. And I mean that even if Bernie Sanders is the one saying it.

So many people want to divorce race and gender from the analysis of Kamala Harris’s loss even though it’s inextricable from any meaningful analysis of how a white supremacist who was impeached twice and incited an insurrection beat a far more qualified Black woman who’s served in every branch of government. The mere facts that Kamala Harris is viewed by many of the left as a moderate, or maybe even a right-leaning one to some, and she never once ran on or even mentioned identity politics, trans issues, being “woke” or anything else that the right was able to convince the majority she represented, and even many of the white liberals and democrats echoed these outright fallacious assumptions, is proof of the fact that she wasn’t listened to, who she actually presented herself and her beliefs to be were either ignored, discounted, unheard, or disbelieved; is itself proof of how misogynoir and white supremacy functions. This effort by white people on both sides of the isle, to render race, gender, and the intersection of both, irrelevant to Kamala Harris’s loss reductive, lazy and useless.

And I want to emphasize not just race and gender, but the intersection of both because people think Kamala Harris’s identity is as simple as being Black or a woman. They dismiss the prejudice she faced and the unique perception and obstacles she was up against as a Black woman, by comparing her to Barack Obama, a Black man, or Hillary Clinton, a white woman, as though these experiences, identities, or plights are the same—they are not. Black woman are not either Black or woman, we are both and that brings about its own specific obstacles.

The function of white supremacy is to create conditions where white people are presented as having done exceptionally well or having been exceptionally great to explain why a mediocre white people benefited from a system meant to benefit them. And that’s what this post-election whitewashing is. It’s meant to paint Donald Trump as an exceptionally great candidate who ran an exceptionally great campaign, while doing everything imaginable to paint Kamala Harris as a bad candidate and responsible for not coming out on top in a system designed for her to fail. Where somehow the only truth can be that she just wasn’t good enough, that she just didn’t do good enough. I hate the white leftist tradition of trying to present as progressive and woke by acknowledging racism and misogyny in the abstract, but always dismissing it in application, fighting hard to have class reductionist arguments for why everything happens, and to dismiss race and intersection.

White people and the world around them, have an instinctual vested interest in always coming up with a non-bigoted explanation for why white people support bigotry, and we’re all forced to live in their delusion, but I refuse.

We don’t have to overcomplicate this.

What’s the reason Trump’s most successful commercials attacking Kamala Harris were the ones painting her as an ally of the trans community? Because America hates trans people. Not because trans people have done anything to them, not because the trans community is even big enough for most of these people voting against them to encounter a trans person, but simply because it’s that easy to turn Americans, the majority, against anyone they deem “other”

We can keep going down this list. Here’s another one.

What’s the reason Trump can promise to not just mass deport undocumented immigrants, but to reverse the naturalization, literally strip citizenship from people who are already citizens “who did it the right way,”? Why can he promise to end birthright citizenship and Americans cheer for him?

Because they hate immigrants. A fact they scream from the rooftop every second of every single day.

I am exhausted of people trying to pretend this nation and it’s inhabitants are something it’s not because again, we cannot fix problems if we don’t acknowledge they exist.

We cannot sit by and watch right wing propaganda become more and more popular without being checked for years on end and then convince ourselves democrats could’ve overcome deeply engrained right wing sentiments in 3 months had they simply spoken to left wing belief systems.

The democrats and our failure was not failing to stand up for these communities during Kamala Harris’s 3 month campaign, it’s the failure to do it for YEARS while republicans passed more anti-trans legislation than ever before in US history and mainstream media leaned completely into republicans hate campaigns on trans people and independent media, like TYT—home of the progressive left and largest independent leftist media—actively insisted that the left should completely ignore trans issues because the party doesn’t support it, and even eventually leaned fully into anti-trans arguments and talking points. And that’s truly not a dig at TYT or “blaming the left” it’s just illustrative of the problem we have on our side of the isle and I’m focused on what we can do better on our side of the isle.

We can’t simply ignore right-wing hate and it’s also woefully insufficient for us to simply respond to it after allowing them to construct these harmful and ignorant narratives, to lead the conversations. We must understand that people do not just embrace left wing ideologies in a vacuum because they’re better for everyone or more intelligent—which they are. Getting people to embrace left wing and progressive beliefs and agendas requires us to first help them unlearn their right-wing belief systems before we can even begin educating them about left wing ones. It’s a process, and it’s a process because we quite literally live in countries that systemically and institutionally indoctrinate us to believe in gender roles, in the patriarchy, in sexism, in racism, in xenophobia. That’s why it’s so easy to get people on board with platforms built entirely on hating trans people, hating Black people, hating women, hating immigrants, and keeping us all out of the rooms they don’t want us in.

That does not mean that we should move right, it doesn’t mean either us or democrats should abandon our messages or each other, it means we have to contend with reality, and stop buying into the idea that there’s a quick fix.

Which is why it’s not enough to respond to the horrible things republicans want to do to trans people or immigrants or women or people in the criminal system by telling them it’s horrible. They don’t care, because they think it’s the way it should be, that it’s the natural order of things, that it’s what’s right.

We can’t ignore, downplay, or dismiss the onslaught of attacks on the trans community for at least the last 4 years and then expect people to give a fuck that Republican bigot Nancy Mace working overtime to ban trans employees in the federal government from using the bathroom because they’ve been consuming propaganda for years that have told them that trans people are a threat to them and their safety. We can’t just respond to attacks on the trans community, we have to actively advocate for them first, we have to educate people about gender, about gender roles, about binaries, patriarchy, the murders and violence trans people experience at higher rates than any of us, and everything in between.

And we can’t educate anyone about the humanity of trans people, we have to show them and that requires us to give trans people seats at our table not just to advocate for themselves, but to be seen.

It’s so easy to “other” people you never truly see or hear from, it’s very easy to convince people to believe lies about people if they never get to hear those people’s truths.

The same is true for immigrants, homeless people, people within the criminal system, the list goes on.

We have to educate each other; we have to craft our messages to quietly address people’s preconceived biases and misconceptions out the gate—not because I agree with or think those preconceived biases and misconceptions are justified—but because they’re there and I have to first tackle them to get people to hear my point. This is something I consciously think about whenever I think about how I’m going to approach advocating any issue to the public.

Take for example, Rikers, or even abolition.

I can want people to oppose Rikers and the criminal system as a whole all I want, and I can think the reasons they should are all that’s just or logical, but I have to recognize that the majority of people are not inclined to agree with me because everything they’ve been taught to believe about police, prisons, jails, and the people who find themselves trapped within the criminal system tells them that police are the good guys, prisons and courts are justice, and anyone who finds themselves on the bad side of the criminal system are the bad guys deserving of what they get. So, I have to work from there, whether I want to or not.

I know that when people think about Rikers, its infamy precedes it, and they believe that it’s an exceptionally horrible place for exceptionally horrible people who’ve been convicted for exceptionally horrible things, so whenever I talk about Rikers, the first thing I mention is that it’s actually a pre-trial detention center and the people held there have not been convicted of a crime, they just don’t have the money for bail.

I don’t say that because I believe we should only have compassion for people who haven’t been convicted, or people who may be innocent, I say it because I know it dispels their preconceived misconceptions and biases.

Similarly, whenever I discuss abolition in depth, I go out of my way to explain that when I first heard about abolition it sounded crazy to me too, and that even as a person who knew prisons, police, and the courts were unjust, it was still hard for me to conceive of a world without them and that I didn’t suddenly become an abolitionist overnight after reading Are Prisons Obsolete, because it’s impossible to simply abandon the entire foundation for your beliefs the first time it’s challenged.

I go out of my way to say that because it’s necessary to make people feel like it’s safe for them to keep learning more, asking questions, exploring issues and coming to conclusions overtime, that I’m not indicting or hating them for not switching over to my side immediately—even if that’s what I would like to happen.

Meeting people where they’re at doesn’t mean allowing them to stay there, it means building your arguments from there, choosing messages that will resonate—but never abandoning the cause and the communities.

None of what I’m saying means that I believe I, or any other leftist, or the left as a whole, is responsible for the position we find ourselves in. I’m simply diagnosing where we’re at and trying to figure out how we can better bring folks over to our side, as someone who has managed to persuaded tens of thousands of people to be receptive to my arguments.