on politics: What Is the Left?
Primaries, Outrage, and the Crisis of an Idea-less Left
In the wake of the recent NYC primaries, the usual media hysteria is drowning out a deeper reality: we’ve forgotten what primaries actually are. They’re not public elections in the true sense — they’re party business. A primary is just a private club deciding who gets to wear its logo in November.
Low turnout? Maybe that means fewer people care about the club. Maybe voters have realized the brand doesn’t matter much anymore. If they already know who they’ll back in November — be it Eric Adams running independently or even Cuomo resurfacing — why bother with an internal party ritual that doesn’t bind anyone’s hands? In NYC, the real fight happens in November, when Republicans, independents, and disillusioned Democrats all weigh in.
It’s the same big pattern everywhere: the base that once gave the Democratic Party its muscle is fractured into three pieces — old-line establishment insiders, the activist left pushing ever more extreme cultural and economic ideas, and an exhausted moderate middle that no longer feels at home.
And that last group — the moderates — are the swing voters who decide if a figure like Mamdani survives or gets crushed by a wave of support for any more familiar, less radical name. Many people in New York will back whoever they know won’t deliver a “communist socialist New York City.” If the GOP candidate is weak, those votes won’t vanish — they’ll drift to the moderate or independent who feels safer.
The Manufactured Hysteria Trap
None of this would matter if the Left had good ideas. But the modern American Left doesn’t run on clear, practical ideas — it runs on outrage. The progressive machine thrives on crisis: the world will end if you don’t vote for us. Trump, racism, fascism, climate collapse — pick your alarm. The media feeds the outrage cycle daily, because moral panic sells clicks and votes.
For decades, this emotional fuel worked. But people get tired. They learn. After being told for years that democracy will vanish tomorrow if you don’t retweet today, voters become numb. When Trump won again in 2024, the meltdown was predictable — but the shock factor was gone. People saw the same shrieking headlines they saw in 2016. The sky never fell then. They doubt it will now.
Meanwhile, the Right doesn’t need a daily freak-out to keep its base alive. The Right has durable narratives that appeal to normal people: freedom, parental rights, secure borders, a strong nation. Yes, the Right uses emotion too — but its core appeal is idea-driven. Trump’s entire brand is “America First,” not just “hate the other side.” Voters can feel it in their wallets, their neighborhoods, their schools.
What Happens When Outrage Runs Dry?
This is the existential threat to the Left. If you strip away the moral panic and force it to run on ideas alone — what’s left? The best ideas today are mostly in the Center or the Right: sane industrial policy, smart deregulation, local control, free expression, common-sense border security, a focus on families and working people.
Progressives claim moral high ground but often push slogans, not blueprints. Defund the police was a protest chant, not a plan. Climate policy is mostly delivered by markets, tech, and centrist regulation — not radical left manifestos. “Equity” is a posture, not a program.
When the outrage fizzles, so does the glue that holds the so-called Left together. That’s why we see absurd contradictions: “Gays for Islam” alliances that collapse on contact with reality, or the trans rights push colliding with feminist sex-based protections. These camps aren’t aligned by any unifying philosophy — they’re stapled together by shared anger at the status quo.
The Big Lesson: Reality Doesn’t Care
Voters are noticing. If you treat people like emotion-driven pawns long enough, they wise up. They want practical answers, not hashtags and hashtags of outrage.
So, the Left faces a brutal choice:
Pivot to being idea-driven — which exposes that there isn’t much there there.
Or double down on manufactured hysteria — which is losing its effect on a population that’s simply exhausted by the noise.
The endgame is obvious. If forced to compete honestly on ideas, the modern Left, as we know it, dissolves into special interests that drift Center or Right. And that, ironically, may be the healthiest thing that could happen for politics — an environment where parties win because they offer something real instead of just screaming that the other side is the end of the world.
Because at the end of the day, people can only be lied to for so long before they learn — and reality, unlike hashtags, always wins.
“...and people say AI is biased towards the ”left” LOL.””
