“And Then Nothing Happened": Former Democrats On How Inaction Pushed Them Left
From Obama to Bernie to Biden, the ups and downs of electoral politics and how they shaped the way progressives see the world
After just about every election, news media focuses on right-wing voters.
By always reporting on this perceived rightward tilt of the country, mainstream sources perpetuate the perception of a version of the US that’s out of touch with reality. Politicians on the right and the left see their own constituents the same way—a 2013 paper on the topic from the University of California Berkeley explained the disconnect.
“Nearly half of sitting conservative officeholders appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than the most conservative legislative district in the entire country,” the paper’s authors wrote.
If voters are more left-leaning than we’ve been led to believe, why isn’t that story being told? I decided to take on that challenge.
Late last month, I put out a call for people to tell me how they went left over the last decade or so.
The response was overwhelming. This one is about the Democrats.
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“I grew out of Obama”
In 2008 a generation of first-time voters and other progressives, mostly millennials, saw their pick for president reach the White House. President Barack Obama rode a wave of youthful enthusiasm and promises of progressive change to victory—but once he was in office, his actual governing ideas proved different.
“I did that whole register people, drive them to the polls, have an election party with $5 champagne for Obama's first election,” Megan, a 36-year-old from Oklahoma, told me. “Because change and all that. And then nothing happened.”
The Obama years proved radicalizing for a number of people I talked to. Daniel Daughhetee, 38, from Birmingham, Alabama, said that the way the Democrats worked to stop their own agenda was clarifying.
“The party was actually hostile to the transformative promises of the 2008 campaign,” Daughhetee told me.
Democrats seemed incapable of, or uninterested in, passing health-care reform outside of the right-wing framework, a problem that was compounded by how compromise with the GOP seemed more important to the ruling party than governing. Ben Fowler, a 36-year-old in northern Virginia who identifies as a socialist, told me that the Affordable Care Act negotiations were a pivotal moment in his political development.
“It seemed we scratched and scrabbled and shot ourselves multiple times in the foot to compromise with a party who thought Obama was less than human,” Fowler said. “We got it passed and we're still dealing with the same issues it was supposed to solve while Democrats all gave themselves a collective pat on the back.”
“Utterly galling”
After coming on the scene presenting himself as an anti-war candidate, Obama showed a proclivity for bombing people indiscriminately once he was in power.
“I grew out of Obama during his second term,” said Kevin, a 28-year-old in Chicago. “I voted for him in 2012, but his hawkishness turned me off, as I was always anti war.”
It wasn’t just younger people. Jim Sells, a 53-year-old from Chattanooga, Tennessee, said he’s gone from New Deal Democrat in 2010 to “full-blown socialist” today. That’s in large part because of “Obama's utter failure to deliver on all the campaign rhetoric combined with his complete swing into centrism that accomplished nothing.”
“He was just an '80s centrist Republican,” Sells added. “It was utterly galling.”
Socialism was the only way
That disappointment found a champion in 2016: Bernie Sanders. The Sanders presidential campaign’s surprise success against Hillary Clinton, however fleeting, gave lefty Democrats and other progressives the sense that they could get a do-over on the prior eight years.
To Mark Miranda, a 40-year-old Teamster truck driver in Philadelphia who grew up in a conservative household, Sanders represented a real hope for the future in 2016.
“Bernie is the first politician I personally relate to and find to be a genuine person,” Miranda said.
Sanders showed him that the left wasn’t dangerous, Miranda told me.
“Bernie definitely was my first experience of a left even existing as viable versus what I was shown my entire life through cold war and generic red baiting by politicians and media,” he said.
The primary and general elections in 2016 were politically decisive for Noel, a 28-year-old in New York whose father had worked in proximity to Donald Trump for years and had always hated the oafish businessman. Watching such a personally despised figure win the presidency then act in exactly the ways they feared he would made the contradictions hard to ignore. But Noel was already tilting further to the left, he said.
“Bernie brought me over, in a lot of ways, starting a few years before the primaries when I started to follow him and realized there was somebody advocating for ideas that I thought would be good for society,” Noel told me. “And 2016 fully broke it open for me, and I pretty well realized that only socialism of some stripe was the only way.”
California-based Mitchell, 29, had a similar experience. He’s become a socialist due in no small part to the influence of the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 and how the candidate was treated by his fellow Democrats.
“The change into socialism was a result of Bernie's campaign lifting a lot of other left voices into more prominence,” Mitchell said, adding, “the defining moment in terms of separation of the party was the culmination of the previous five years from Bernie's second loss.”
“If I had to pinpoint it,” Mitchell said, “the media response after he won Nevada and then the subsequent events in South Carolina and grouping around Biden sealed the deal” for leaving the Democrats.
“I see futility in electoral politics”
Today, the people I talked to are looking at different avenues for change. It’s a move away from seeing political parties as the solution. Megan told me that Biden’s broken promises and the ineffectiveness of the Democrats has her reconsidering where to put her energy.
“Now I almost feel like giving up on electoral politics altogether,” Megan said.
To Shayna Raichilson-Zadok, a married 42-year-old mother of two in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, the two-party system represents everything that’s wrong with the country’s politics. Raichilson-Zadok, who said she used to be a liberal but now identifies as “somewhere hovering around anarcho-communist,” told me that she sees radical democratic change as the only way forward for electoralism.
“I see futility in electoral politics as long as the duopoly reigns,” Raichilson-Zadok said. “The only way forward is people-powered movements and possibly open primaries or ranked choice voting.”
Former Democrats and Democrat-supporting progressives are increasingly looking to more grassroots avenues for change and turning their back on federal elections. Kevin, whose anti-war politics turned him off of Obama nine years ago, told me that he sees working together for the benefit of one another as the only real way forward. Waiting for politicians to make change is a loser’s game.
“The only thing that could truly change things would be a movement built on solidarity, from the ground up. Nobody left behind. Help when the government doesn't. Fight when it isn't popular,” Kevin said. “And the Democrats will never do that.”
I’ve opened up comments on this post for everyone, not just paid subscribers.
Please share your story about how Democrats and electoral politics have pushed you left—and let me know if you’d be interested in joining a live podcast about it on Callin.
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I'm another person who was deeply jaded after the Obama years. I guess I ate up the messaging and thought things might be a little different, but those 8 years were just a parade of disappointments.
As time went on I became more angry at myself for being such an easy mark. I don't know how I feel about electoralism generally, but the intense drive to not get scammed again is pretty strong. As much as I hate everything that is happening now with Biden's do-nothing admin, knowing that I didn't get invested in his campaign at all has really been a comfort. I'd rather piss away my vote for the Greens than give my votes to these ghouls who have nothing but contempt for me.
For me there’s a bunch of reasons why I no longer wish to consider myself a member of the Democratic Party, but two big ones stand out:
1) after the embarrassment of 2016, the same failing party leaders remained in charge. A historically bad election result and we don’t get some fresh blood? Show me another business, group, or team that doesn’t change directions and bring on new leaders after they hit rock bottom.
2) the utter contempt that the Democratic Party has for the folks that don’t rally behind their candidates simply because they are an ever-so-small improvement over their Republican counterparts. I haven’t been happy with the candidates and I’m told “well you need to vote for them because if not you’re helping the other side”. So I do. And what I get is a mix of losing campaigns, winning campaigns with unfulfilled promises, and more uninspiring candidates.