To make sense of U.S. politics, we have to be clear about terms that are often deliberately blurred. When we say "left" and "right," we are not talking about cultural identities or party branding. We are talking about power. Historically and structurally, the left has represented movements to expand democracy in both economic and political spheres of life. The right represents the defense of existing hierarchies and concentrated power.
Seen through that lens, corporate Democrats in the US are functionally right-wing on the issues that matter most. On economic policy and militarism, they reliably defend concentrated wealth, corporate dominance, and U.S. empire, even while using progressive language on social issues. That is why so many policies that enjoy broad public support—from universal healthcare to serious limits on corporate power and war-making—are perpetually stalled regardless of which party holds office.
From this vantage point, conservatives are "on the right" only to the extent that they defend those same power structures. The moment conservative voters challenge corporate capture, endless war, and oligarchic control, they are no longer acting as defenders of the right in any meaningful sense. They are contesting it.
So yes, the central political struggle today is still left versus right. It is democracy versus concentrated power. But the path forward is not a tribal victory of one cultural faction over another. It is the bottom, across political differences, refusing to be divided and rising against the top.
For decades, both major parties have been dominated by empire, Reagan/Thatcher-era neoliberalism, and corporate rule, while ordinary people are pushed into endless culture-war conflicts that change nothing materially. That division is not a mistake. It is how power protects itself.
What We Believe Is Necessary
To challenge this system, we believe a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party is necessary. The party still claims to hold progressive values, even as it remains largely captured by corporate interests. The Republican Party, meanwhile, is fully captured—and openly hostile to those values.
Both parties need a populist movement from below.
The difficulty in achieving this is asymmetrical. Many Democratic voters recognize their party's failures and justify their support as a lesser-evil calculation. Many Republicans, however, have been convinced their party is a moral force for good, while criticism is often deflected by claims that Democrats have committed similar crimes. This cultivated instinct to defend one party's war crimes rather than oppose the war crimes of both parties—which both loyal Democrats and loyal Republicans do—is how both right-wing parties manufacture consent. The goal should be for everyone to call out the war crimes of both parties and hold both to account, regardless of who it offends.
Cracks in the Foundation
But something is shifting. We are already seeing fissures in the conservative base—principled opposition emerging where party loyalty once seemed absolute. The clearest example is U.S. support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. Conservative voters who value human life, constitutional limits on executive power, and fiscal responsibility are increasingly unwilling to defend blank-check military aid for actions that violate international law and Christian ethical teaching. This is not a left-wing talking point. It is conservatives applying their own stated principles and finding their party leadership in violation.
These cracks matter. They reveal that loyalty to party is not inevitable, and that when confronted with undeniable moral failures, people can and do break ranks.
What Conservative Opposition Could Look Like
Ideally, we'd see both parties renewed—progressives taking over the Democratic Party, and conservatives taking over the Republican Party. Both factions need to kick out the corporate grifters in their own ranks. That requires conservatives to challenge their party from within using their own stated values: opposition to concentrated power, skepticism of endless war, respect for constitutional limits, and commitment to local communities over global corporate interests.
What would that actually look like?
It would mean:
- Challenging the military-industrial complex by demanding Congressional authorization for military action, opposing blank-check foreign aid, and insisting on transparency about where defense spending actually goes. Every dollar spent on endless wars is a dollar not spent on infrastructure, schools, or communities at home. “America First” should be more than a slogan.
- Breaking up corporate monopolies that crush small businesses and family farms—enforcing antitrust law isn't socialism, it's defending free enterprise from oligarchy. When a handful of corporations control entire industries, that's not a free market. It's feudalism with better PR.
- Ending corporate welfare while protecting Social Security and Medicare, which people paid into and depend on. We're told there's no money for retirement security while corporations rake in record profits and pay nothing in taxes. Meanwhile, the same politicians who vote for trillion-dollar tax cuts for the wealthy call your earned benefits "entitlements" and insist we can't afford them.
- Protecting workers and families from a globalized economy that enriches executives while devastating manufacturing towns. Trade policy should serve American workers, not multinational shareholders. A genuinely pro-family agenda would prioritize strong unions that give workers bargaining power, minimum wages that rise with productivity (which they did until the 1970s, when wages flatlined while productivity soared), and the restoration of policies that actually made America's middle class strong: high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, robust labor protections, and benefits that allowed single-income families to thrive. The economic golden age conservatives claim to want to return to was built on these policies—then dismantled by the very corporate interests now funding both parties.
- Guaranteeing everyone who wants to work a decent-paying job—and if the private sector can't or won't provide it, the government should. This isn't radical. It's how we built the interstate highway system, rural electrification, and the infrastructure that made American prosperity possible. When private companies won't invest in communities, public investment creates both jobs and the foundations for future growth.
- Stopping pharmaceutical price-gouging and putting price controls on food cartels. When insulin costs ten times more in the U.S. than in Canada, that's not the free market—it's monopoly extraction. When four companies control 85% of beef processing and prices spike while ranchers go bankrupt, that's a rigged system. Conservatives once understood that cartels destroy markets and price-fixing harms families. It's time to remember that.
- Defending local governance against both federal overreach and corporate consolidation that strips communities of self-determination. When Walmart destroys Main Street or a private equity firm buys up local hospitals and newspapers, that's an attack on community sovereignty just as much as any federal mandate.
- Reclaiming fiscal responsibility by cutting bloated defense contracts and ending subsidies for wildly profitable corporations, not by gutting programs ordinary people rely on. Real fiscal conservatism means asking why ExxonMobil gets tax breaks while teachers buy their own classroom supplies.
These positions don't require abandoning conservative principles. They require applying them consistently—including when it means opposing your own party's leadership.
The Shared Fight
A populist movement from below is needed in both parties. Not to erase ideological differences, but to break the shared allegiance to a political and economic system that no longer serves the public.
We know what we're asking isn't easy. We get plenty of pushback from liberals who say we're too harsh on Democrats, that we should focus our fire exclusively on Republicans, that criticism of "our side" only helps the other team. We understand that instinct—it comes from the same place of party loyalty we're asking you to question. But we've chosen to hold our own party accountable anyway, even when it costs us allies, even when it's uncomfortable, because we believe democracy requires it.
That's what we're asking of you: the same courage to defy party loyalty when principles demand it.
We will continue to disagree on many things. That's democracy. But if we cannot agree that endless war, oligarchic control, and corporate capture are problems worth fighting together, then we have already lost to the only faction that benefits from our division: the powerful few at the top.
The question is not whether you agree with us on everything. The question is whether you are willing to hold your own party accountable to the principles it claims to represent. Because until we all do that—on both sides—nothing fundamental will change.
If you've made it to the end of this letter, thank you for reading. I hope you'll join us.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people and movements creating a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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