We are losing the battle for humanity to the Alt Reich, and I believe it’s time to be honest about our own failings so that we can get better. Nobody is perfect, and certainly politics is a messy thing, but unless we face these weaknesses, we will keep giving ground.
1. Protecting life and the dignity of life through truth and clarity
Progressivism at its best is about defending and expanding human dignity and capacity. Yet the left frequently relies on appealing to power-brokers (politicians, courts, CEOs) instead of building durable community power within its own base.
At the same time, shock tactics and hostile rhetoric alienate potential allies. Being unignorable doesn’t have to mean being grotesque. It can mean being lucid, persistent, and absolutely clear about harms and solutions.
The challenge is reclaiming moral clarity without diluting radical honesty. And not letting the brand of progressivism be hijacked by the loudest most extreme fringe voices.
2. Failure to build resilient independent infrastructure
The left often relies on tools owned by corporations or governments hostile to their aims (e.g. activism organized on Twitter/X or Facebook, fundraising via PayPal/GoFundMe, discourse filtered through corporate news media).
When these platforms change policies, censor content, or deplatform people, movements get kneecapped. The right, by contrast, has spent decades quietly building parallel institutions (e.g. Fox News, conservative think tanks, church networks, dating apps!).
Without independent infrastructure whether digital, financial, or cultural progressive movements remain fragile, reactive, and at the mercy of elites they ostensibly oppose.
3. Lack of practical, staged implementation
Progressives often fall into “ideal-model” traps, trapped in endless debate about coming up with the perfect system, while never building a roadmap to get there.
History shows staged, iterative change is the only sustainable way to transform society. The right understands this and they’ve been winning ground through incremental rollouts of policy for decades (e.g. voter suppression, deregulation). The left could learn from this strategic patience.
The cost of refusing pragmatism is paralysis. Movements splinter over details, initiatives stall out, and opportunities vanish while progressives argue about perfection.
What we need is to adopt strategic patience by rolling out reforms in stages, studying results, refining, and pressing forward. No massive change in history has happened cleanly or all at once. Progress isn’t built on purity or perfection. It’s built on persistence.
4. Purity politics is not real progress
The arts and academia should be spaces of radical critique, but often they collapse into purity contests. Policing language and intent can end up fracturing movements instead of strengthening them.
Meanwhile, genuinely harmful behaviour such as bullying, harassment and exploitation are excused or ignored. Especially if the perpetrators know the right buzzwords and hold social power over others, i.e. the treatment of Pro Palestine protestors around the US in recent times. So “political correctness” becomes surface-level performance instead of deeper accountability. It makes progressives self police themselves from being effective and invites conservatives to exploit that limitation.
What we need is a spirit of free inquiry and courage: a willingness to produce and share art that confronts the darker sides of the human condition e.g. exploitation, sex and violence. Sanitising culture doesn’t make those demons disappear; it just ensures they erupt in uglier forms in the real world.
5. Whitewashing elites through philanthropy
Philanthropy often serves as reputation laundering. By treating billionaires as saviours for giving away crumbs, the left sometimes indirectly props up the very system that entrenches inequality. If wealth was taxed properly in the first place, we would have more funding for these causes and their charity wouldn’t be needed.
The problem runs deeper than donations. The left accepts prestige through awards and titles bestowed by wealthy institutions. It looks like a harmless tradition, but it creates an alternate reality where elites define their own goalposts and manufacture their own heroes.
The most dangerous effect comes when governments and industries consult these charities as if they were genuine representatives of the community. What they really represent is the interests of the wealthy.
Progressives haven’t been losing the fight because our ideas are wrong. We have lost battles because we sabotage ourselves: by outsourcing our movements to elites, by fighting each other over purity, by refusing to plan change in stages, by depending on hostile infrastructure, and by mistaking performance for progress.
The Alt Reich understands patience, discipline, and the power of narrative. They are playing a long game while we are tripping over our own feet.
If we want to win the battle for humanity, we need to stop flattering billionaires, stop mistaking censorship for accountability, stop chasing perfect models, and start doing the slow, unglamorous work of building durable community power.
The left has always been strongest when it was clearest about its purpose: protecting life and dignity, confronting ugly truths, and refusing to bow to elites. If we can reclaim that clarity and pair it with strategy then progress is still possible. But if we can’t, then history will continue to be written by those who were ruthless enough to seize it while we argued.