Democratic socialism *is* the centrist position

Time to scream at the media, just for a moment.

Because I simply do not understand how few people understand that the media’s handling of the left–right political divide has utterly sabotaged the American political process.

When they ask questions like “can progressives actually win in swing states?!” and openly wonder if candidates like Mamdani, El-Sayed, or Francesca Hong are “too far left” for working class Midwest voters, they are proving they’ve spent so much time buried in their own headlines that they have totally lost sight of what regular people actually care about.

Just look at the economic message that helped Trump get back into office.

He hammered the Biden administration on the cost of living and gas prices. He even learned the word “groceries” just to appeal to working-class voters. He brought a union boss to the main stage of the RNC. He picked a Rust Belt bumpkin—who once hated him—as his running mate. He ran as both the anti-war candidate and the working class change candidate.

And as a result, he won all of the swing states Biden won just four years prior … with the exact same economic message.

The same states Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won using that same message.

The same goddamn message that FDR and JFK and Lyndon Johnson used when they won in massive landslides, and the same message Democrats in Congress used when they held the House and the Senate for virtually the entire era of the American economy that Trump considers the golden years.

What I’m trying to say here is these “far left” candidates are neither far nor left, and democratic socialism is nothing close to a fringe movement.

Democratic socialism defined the 20th Century, and in the process, delivered so much prosperity to so many regular people that they finally started to unclutch their pearls and develop some economic empathy for each other.

This then made room for civil rights movements, which then infuriated evangelical zealots, who then took over the Republican Party because they realized prosperity for everyone meant fewer people were turning to their tyrannical system of control for comfort and guidance.

Democratic socialism isn’t booming across the country because of a fundamental shift in American priorities. Quite the opposite.

It’s booming because, despite the political smear campaigns, when people hear that these candidates really just care about core domestic issues like the cost of living, protecting the environment, and taking care of families, they’re forced to ask one inevitable question:

how does this compare to Republican priorities of hiding the Epstein files, forever war in Iran, and billionaires forcing data centers down our throats?

And the verdict becomes plain.

What people actually want is not someone the media tells them is a “moderate,” but someone who fights unapologetically for regular people.

People who, incidentally, have been at the core of the progressive movement for nearly a century.