Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
Source: https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
People think that's crazy talk, even though it's happening right in front of their faces since Obama, we're cooked.
I think part of the problem is capitalism itself. Most US companies are run like tiny little fascist dictatorships, which is a great training ground for the real thing. It doesn't socialize people to cooperate. Contrast eg Norway, where businesses operate inside a formal 3-way agreement (Trepartssamarbeidet) between the government, employers associations, and trade unions.
Think about it: A bernie Sanders type candidate not taking corporate PAC money is currently in the running for the White House! We saw with Mamdani they will throw everything at her. Will she falter? Hope not but feeling better than I have felt in a while.
You can do a lot when you have a mandate and you are determined to get things done. How to determine if a candidate is like this? After many cycles of election in my experience there is only one reliable barometer. The only determining factor seems to be money in politics. If your candidate has corporate contributions, you can pretty much guarantee that nothing is going to get done. On the other side, we've seen non‑corporate‑backed candidates actually try, at the very least.
Now, talking about the actual specifics of how you get past a gridlocked Congress and a hostile Supreme Court: with the advantage of being at the top of the party, you have the ability to whip your party into falling in line. We saw this with FDR. He wasn't pulling any punches. If someone got in his way, including the Supreme Court, he made their lives miserable. One of the reasons bernie people feel fond of him.
A lot of these politicians are only there for the corporate donations and in hopes of a job afterwards. So a very low‑hanging fruit is to go after the corporations that are donating to the politician who is holding things up. Make the public aware that this SOB is the one holding up plans that are very popular. Do what Trump did: go into that person's district and get his voters to realize that this is the person that's holding everything up.
For example, paid family‑leave polls show ~71% overall support, including Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. Yet when Biden campaigned on it and then immediately dropped it at the first sign, it showed that he didn't even try.
A lot can be done if the candidate actually tries.
In contrast the right does whatever Trump says, no matter how many kids he rapes. They have an idea where the country should be in 50 years, whatever the cost. I haven't seen that level of discipline from the left. I hope it's there now post-Trump, but it certainly wasn't there during the Obama midterms.
Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
"A broad middle class can act as a counterweight against oligarchy." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class
The US right wing doesn't do "middle class". It does tax cuts for the rich and hunger games for the rest. If you pander to them, things will just get worse and the far right will surge even more ... which is probably what they want.