It’s Not Radical—It’s Just What’s Right

The left doesn’t need another retreat. It doesn’t need a gentle recalibration. We need a return to our roots: the needs of working people, a common sense approach, and a platform that is unapologetically grounded in justice, care, and the reality that too many of us work day in and day out and still can’t afford the basics.

For too many decades we have capitulated to moderate talking points, allowing centrist views to become more and more right-wing over time. The center has become unrecognizable, and the left has altogether lost its compass.

Once the party of the working class, the Dems are little better, in many cases, than the Repubs: both parties answer—quite unabashedly—to the oligarchs, who have finally taken their masks off and stand front and center at every inauguration, regardless of who’s been elected. The ultra-rich and mega corps openly fund both parties, encouraging both sides to fight for favor in a race to the “middle"—which drifts farther and farther to the right.

The U.S. was founded on genocide and built on the backs of enslaved people. These abject horrors are an incontrovertible part of our national and cultural legacy. Reparations are long-coming, while those wronged are still waiting for even the basest of acknowledgements.

There’s no “normal” to go back to that will get us anywhere good. A major flaw in the rhetoric of the left is investment in a myth of some past equality that has never yet been achieved.

However, I believe that this democracy is not a fully failed experiment. I believe that in the ideal of liberty and justice for all, there is some possibility of dreaming and working toward our collective liberation. I believe that, just maybe, there’s something in our founding documents that’s worth saving.

I’m an anarchist, but I’m not a purist. I believe in using every tool at our disposal in the effort to create cultural change. I’m an abolitionist, but I am not blind to the need for reform in the interim. I believe in a future where well-resourced communities are the first response to preventing harm—not police and prisons. Where bodily autonomy for all is known to be a central element of the liberty we so glibly give lip service to, while pregnant people bleed out in the hospital due to inhuman anti abortion laws, and trans people die waiting for gender-affirming interventions that have been impeded by unjust legislation.

I also believe that if there is a country that may have a seed of potential for this dream, perhaps this is one of them.

We don’t have to believe electoral politics will save us, because they surely will not. We just have to understand this: those who run for office shape what’s possible in the field of public discourse. If the left wants to shift the window of political discussion—if we want to have a cultural conversation that posits housing as a human right, bodily autonomy as non-negotiable, and puts care over cops and people over profits—we need every organizer, every activist, every street medic and harm reductionist and union steward to seriously consider running for something in the next three years.

We don’t have to think we’ll win. We just have to have something worth saying out loud, in public. The will to push. The desire to reframe. The willingness to say out loud what no one else is saying from the debate stage.

If we don’t run, we leave the conversation to those who are invested in the status quo.

That investment is killing us.

So yes; run for office—or don’t. But even if you aren’t going to, go ahead and build a platform. And then campaign for change. Challenge the current “norms,” which are anything but normal. (Dehumanization is not a norm I want to cosign.)

Put your name on the ballot. Move the needle. Bring your people with you. And when you do, run on an idea that actually reflects the world we’re trying to build.

I’m a queer, working-class Californian. Like one in four Americans, I live with chronic disabilities. I grew up poor, experiencing deep poverty. I survived on food stamps and soup kitchens, I experienced housing insecurity, I got by on grey- and black-market work.

That history shaped me. It also shaped this platform.

Here’s what I’ve come to know: if we want to win—not just in elections, but in building a livable future—the left needs to stop leading with frameworks that only speak to the cultural elite. We need to stop marginalizing those who do not have the privilege—or the desire—to seek higher education. We need to include the needs and values of those who started working while in high school—and never had the luxury to divert their energy to attend college. Those who go to trade schools, and struggle to make ends meet because of the cultural and economic enshrinement of a graduate degree. Those whose lives precluded finishing high school.

We need to recognize the needs of those who are unable to work due to disability or illness, and those who are forced to survive in the grey- and black-markets of the US.

We need to speak to truck drivers and trans kids. To factory workers and disability activists. To disabled veterans and single moms and cannabis growers and survivors and shift workers and sex workers and everyone who’s ever felt the system was rigged—because it is. We need to start there.

That’s where the platform I’m proposing comes in. It’s accessible, it’s grounded, and it’s built on common ground, common-sense solutions to the problems we all face.

Here are the three columns I propose:

Common Sense Economics. Universal Healthcare. Your Body—Your Business.

Common Sense Economics

• Tax the ultra-rich. Close the loopholes. End corporate giveaways.

• Invest in housing, transit, food access, and public schools.

• Let communities decide how money gets spent.

• Decriminalize survival — no one should be locked up for being poor.

Universal Healthcare

• Free, full-spectrum care for all — medical, mental, dental, and reproductive.

• Mobile and community-based care, especially for inner-city, rural and underserved areas.

• Dignified elder care and disability justice.

• No more GoFundMes to stay alive.

Your Body—Your Business

• Full reproductive freedom — abortion, contraception, family planning.

• Gender-affirming care at every age.

• End criminalization of sex work, drug use, and abortion.

• Protect the right to live — and to die — with dignity.

It’s not radical. It’s just what’s right.

This platform does three things most progressive platforms fail to do:

1. It centers class without erasing race, gender, or disability.

It speaks to survival in all its forms. The vast majority of us are one paycheck away from being unhoused, one accident or diagnosis away from bankruptcy via medical debt. This platform recognizes that we’re all in this struggle together.

2. It’s not afraid to say what’s broken.

We name the enemy: billionaires, corporate monopolies, carceral punishment, and profit-driven healthcare.

3. It’s winnable—and it’s worth fighting for.

According to the informal testing I’ve done so far, the messaging lands. Not just with progressives, but with working people across the political spectrum who’ve been gaslit into thinking their pain is their fault.

This isn’t a moderate pivot. It’s not a watered-down compromise. It’s a hard reset — from the ground up.

The left can’t afford to run platforms that only speak to people who’ve read theory. We need to speak to the person stocking shelves on the night shift who just got their insulin cut off. To the grandparent raising grandkids in a house with no AC. To the queer kid figuring out how to get HRT without getting fired. To the vet with PTSD who’s still fighting for basic support.

We need to be willing to tell the truth in public if we want to shift discourse. We need to be able to articulate what we think, and why. We need to be able to envision how we can get from here, to there—the dream of a tomorrow rooted in liberty, and justice. And we need to demand that this vision be seen, heard, and recognized.

Let’s speak the truth. Let’s run on real solutions. Let’s organize around ideas that create the world we want to live in. Let’s build the future on our visions of collective liberation; not the fantasy of assimilation.

This is the platform I propose. What’s yours?