Americans Aren't Right-Wing—They're Just Jaded and Hopeless

People are voting for Trump not because of his policies or his criminality, but in spite of those things. They're desperately searching for someone powerful enough to turn over the apple cart.

TL;DR: Democrats keep pretending Trump voters are moving right when the truth is much simpler: people are voting for whoever promises to blow up a rigged system. Same reason they voted Obama in '08, Bernie in '16, and Trump—twice now. It's not about specific policies. It's about wanting someone, anyone, to break through and deliver transformation. Democrats either can't see this or won't admit it because their entire mission is maintaining the status quo for the donors and consultants who run the party. They'd rather manage decline than acknowledge that voters want revolutionary change—because admitting that would mean admitting they're not the leaders for the job.

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The immigration polling data making the rounds tells a fascinating story, but not the one Matt Yglesias thinks it does. Yeah, support for reducing immigration hit its highest point since 2001. But buried in those same polls? 79% of Americans think immigration is good for the country—a record high. Path to citizenship beats mass deportation 78% to 38%.

This isn't contradiction. It's the political psychology of a people who want sensible policies but have lost faith that anyone can deliver them.

Yglesias and the rest of the pundit class can't wrap their heads around this: Black and brown people voting for Trump aren't suddenly becoming conservatives. They're not attracted to his policies. They're looking for systemic and radical changes, and Trump at least promises to shake things up.

I've been looking at where Americans actually fall on economic issues, immigration, corporate power, and the data proves it. People aren't jaded and hopeless because they're right-wing. They're voting right-wing because they're jaded and hopeless. And when the only person promising radical change is a convicted felon, well, that tells you everything about how badly Democrats have failed.

Take taxes. Navigator Research found 79% of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy, including 63% of Republicans. Pew Research confirmed it at 58% overall. YouGov found 57% backing a billionaire minimum tax. When Gallup asks if corporations pay their fair share, 70% say no. These aren't fringe progressive positions—they're mainstream American opinion.

The minimum wage tells the same story. Pew found 62% support for $15 an hour, Data for Progress found 66%. Even among Republicans, there's 75%+ support for raises to $9–12 per hour.

Labor unions, supposedly this great dividing line in American politics, enjoy 70% approval according to Gallup—near 60-year highs. Even 47% of Republicans approve.

Healthcare? Gallup and Pew both find around 62–65% saying it's the federal government's responsibility to ensure everyone has coverage. The public option polls at 68% in multiple surveys. Medicare and Social Security cuts face 79% opposition across party lines. Infrastructure spending consistently hits 68–87% support.

On corporate power, Americans show remarkable unity. Morning Consult found 61% saying tech companies have too much influence. Multiple polls show majorities want stronger antitrust enforcement. Private prisons, corporate monopolies, the concentration of wealth—Americans consistently want government to act.

The pattern's unmistakable, but so is the disconnect. Only 22% of Americans trust the federal government to do what's right most of the time. Satisfaction with democracy sits at 34%—up from a record low of 28%, but still dismal.

Here's the reality nobody wants to admit: The Democratic Party is already to the right of the majority of the country economically. They're to the right on healthcare. They're to the right on taxing corporations and the wealthy. They're to the right on infrastructure investment. And they're to the right when it comes to using government as a force for good instead of some convoluted, tax-deductible, 39-forms-to-fill-out bullshit.

But don't expect this to change. The Democratic Party's leadership, like so many other entities in our society and government, is captured. They're captured by ideology—specifically, the neoliberal orthodoxy that says markets know best and government should just get out of the way. They're captured by special interests—healthcare, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, defense contractors—and by a donor class that benefits from the status quo. They're captured by a consultant ecosystem that profits from managing decline rather than building power.

This capture prevents them from being anything different than what they are. They can't imagine a different world because their paychecks depend on not imagining it. They've internalized the limits imposed by their donors so completely that they genuinely believe incrementalism is the only path forward.

The fact is that Congress and most of our political parties are more aligned with the ideologies of the business elite, the ruling elite, the billionaires, and other people with whom they have the most interactions. That's who they've become convinced the American people are, and then they tell anecdotes or look at polling that cherry-picks their desires.

Into this vacuum steps the MAGA movement with a simple message: the system is rigged, burn it down, and we'll rebuild it for you. Democrats respond with: the system is basically fine, we just need to defend institutions and make incremental improvements.

Which message do you think resonates with people who already believe the system doesn't work?

The immigration data captures this perfectly. Americans think immigration benefits the country and support pathways to citizenship. But they also see chaos at the border and conclude that government can't manage basic functions. So they tell pollsters they want immigration reduced—not because they're anti-immigrant, but because they don't trust anyone to handle it competently.

Americans aren't looking for some mythical middle ground. They don't sit around thinking about where the Overton window lands on this or that issue. They want results. They've been told for decades that it's the fighting between Democrats and Republicans that prevents progress, so compromise sounds like the solution. Meeting in the "middle" gets sold as the path forward. But they don't actually want that—the polling makes it clear. They want a functional government that delivers what they need. When 79% support higher taxes on the wealthy and 68% want a public healthcare option, that's not a cry for moderation. That's a demand for action.

Dean Phillips–style incrementalism completely misses this. When you tell people who've lost faith in institutions that the answer is better messaging and more competitive primaries, you're missing the whole point—they want transformation, not tweaks.

The problem is that as this conversation happens at a national level through media and other avenues, it's going to trickle down in the way people see their vote counting because they're terrified, rightfully so, of electing more MAGA people. The Democratic establishment knows this and counts on it—using fear of Republicans to maintain their grip on power while offering nothing but more of the same. A situation, by the way, that led us to this point.

They're going to keep saying we need to move to the right. They call it the center, but what they mean is to the right. And they'll keep losing, because they've already moved. They've already shifted.

They've shifted so far that their brand really resembles very, very little other than these fringe ideas like transgender people playing in sports, especially women in women's sports. And that becomes what their brand's identified with, that or pedophilia conspiracy theories or some shit. But the reason for that, by and large, is that their brand and their identity as a party and their results as a party are so bad that that's where they end up being associated with.

What we need is a party of producers, a party of doers and builders, a party of fighters, a party that helps to cleanse itself. We need to start cleansing out the centrists and the right wing in the same way that the party cleansed out the communists in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Just like we don't have a tent big enough to have people in there that might want to support slavery, we ought not have folks supporting Israeli genocide or status quo insurance and health care, or leaving our Supreme Court as is in its dysfunctional form.

We need a party that believes in building power generation, rail, transmission, new industries, rebuilding and renewing aging industries and infrastructure, and reclaiming public healthcare. That's what a party of producers and builders looks like.

We don't need polished resumes and donor-approved slogans—we need people who can take action, deliver, and fight for the public good.

Zohran Mamdani won New York City's Democratic primary because he offered exactly this kind of transformation. Public grocery stores, $30 minimum wage, massive public housing funded by wealth taxes—policies that sound impossible until you realize most Americans already support their core elements. The corporate donors who mobilized hundreds of millions against him understood what many Democrats don't: people are hungry for big changes, not small fixes.

The data shows Americans aren't divided on economics—they're divided on whether economic change is possible. Seventy-nine percent want higher taxes on the wealthy, but only 22% trust government to implement fair tax policy. Sixty-eight percent want a public healthcare option, but most assume it'll never happen. Seventy percent approve of unions but figure corporate power is too entrenched to challenge.

MAGA succeeds because it promises to blow up a system people already think is broken. Democrats fail because they promise to fix a system people want replaced. The choice isn't between left and right—it's between transformation and incrementalism, between hope through change and resignation to the status quo.

The polling shows Americans want progressive policies. They just don't believe the Democratic Party can deliver them. And why would they? The party has spent decades convincing itself that the American people are whoever writes the biggest checks. The party's leadership is so thoroughly captured by corporate interests and neoliberal ideology that they can't even see the cage they're in.

This pervasive mentality that a vote for Trump represents a vote for right-wing ideology or specific policies misses the point entirely. It represents a rejection of the status quo. It represents a desire to see things improve. When you're watching your community crumble, you don't care about the ideology of the person promising change. You just want someone—anyone—willing to deliver it.

We need to primary the lot of them. Not because we expect the current leadership to change—they won't. They can't. They're too captured, too invested, too dependent on the very system that's failing the rest of us.

The Democratic Party is our best bet to changing this nation short of a third party, but only if we transform it from the ground up. The only chance it has at doing that is by being transformed. We need people who think differently in the party. The status quo is dead. That is what we must move away from.

We need to understand that radical change isn't that radical when you're in the shape we are in.