The events of the last six weeks have been a whirlwind, with the might of the Trump administration bearing down on any government department, remotely resembling progressive.
While the thinking for those who elected the 47th President was that undeserving Blacks would be at the receiving end of the changes, white women have borne the brunt of the end of DEI, across board.
But here’s the thing: with the grand exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and Lyndon Baines Johnson, to a lesser degree in 1965, no Democrat candidate or President has demonstrated the boldness and decisiveness that Trump has shown (His clarity leaves much to be desired).
John Kennedy dragged his feet on civil rights, while getting through the leading women of his time and pursuing a pointless and ruinous war in Vietnam.
Adlai Stevenson and George McGovern were easily brushed aside by Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Milhouse Nixon, respectively, in the 50s and 70s.
The recently departed James Earl Carter III never wielded the Big Stick or Bully Pulpit when it mattered most and Ronald Reagan swatted him in the most one-sided election in recent history.
Walter Mondale was innefective and shouldn’t have bothered running at all, in 1984.
Michael Dukakis should have stayed in the Governor’s mansion in Massachusetts as he was exposed by George Bush Sr. in 1988, when Lee Atwater deployed Willie Horton to scare the life out of white Americans.
William Jefferson Clinton was extraordinarily pusillanimous in enacting progressive legislation and paradoxically tigerish when it came to gutting the welfare checks of the poorest Americans.
And when he was caught pants down with Monica Lewinsky, our man didn’t hesitate to bomb the living daylights out of Somalia and Sudan.
Barack Hussein Obama was handed the opportunity of a lifetime in breaking the backs of the investment banks which destroyed the lives of millions of people across the world and chose to give the monsters of wall street a lifeline with no terms and conditions attached.
For all of Joseph Robinette Biden’s proclamation of being a union man, he accomplished very little during his time in charge of his nation’s affairs.
And this is precisely why we must ask if the left is capable of producing its version of Trump?
The business of capturing power is an ugly undertaking. It entails building a coalition and dominating the narrative at all costs.
Republicans were able to attract genocidal Zionists, white Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists, involuntary celibates, rabid Islamophobes, hip-hop legends, traditional wives, and foreign Nazis cyber warriors to win resoundingly at the polls, sweeping both houses of Congress and the popular vote.
The left, on the other hand, has always had to rely on general discontent and moral superiority to win elections.
The biggest lesson of the Trump years is that decency is a thoroughly overrated quality in a President; ruthlessness, on the other hand trumps — pardon my pun — everything.
The only times that Democrats have been especially ruthless, have been to their own.
This writer hopes that the next generation of Democrats will learn the harsh lessons of the 2024 defeat and become adept at using left wing conspiracies to beguile millions and win elections.
Left wing populism must become a thing: a phenomenon which embraces feminists, the LGBTQIA community, trade unions, environmentalists, Black folks and the white working class, without placing any of the groups above the other.
We need leaders whose vision and oratory matches the extremity of the times, while offering clear solutions to the ever widening chasm between the haves and have nots.
Failure to do this will mean that we will have to make do with the Republicans for the foreseeable future.
Foreign Exchange are op-eds from writers who do not live in the U.S. They have thoughts but don't have a dog in the race.