As eager pundits speculate over the 2028 presidential election with growing fervor, the clock has started ticking for Democrats to select their candidate. Democratic primaries will take place in early 2028 based on historical data, but party members presently stare down the barrel of an identity crisis.
American politics spent roughly 75 years in cruise control after World War II. However, the 2016 presidential election augured a change in national political sentiment. Pots left on the back burner by status quo politicians finally boiled over, and two candidates positioned themselves to fix it: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. There is no need to explain our timeline, but the snowball that Sanders started has been visibly growing in momentum; now it feels inevitable. It's time Democrats embrace the progressive movement.
From the 1870s to ’90s, rapid industrial growth characterized the Gilded Age, a time when a few wealthy elites stood on the shoulders of working people. A concise generalization of the Gilded Age is this: The rapid metastasization of corporations led to disparate income between the top 1% and bottom 99% as legislation struggled to keep up with the rapid changes. This generalization applies just as easily to the time after 1990, where rapid digitalization and mammoth tech growth has resulted in enormous disparities between the top 1% and bottom 99%.
The Gilded Age shuddered to a halt when Theodore Roosevelt became president. Roosevelt, who would pull the country into the progressive era with the vigor you would expect from the rough rider, enacted sweeping reform employing the full weight of the federal government. An ever-increasing number of voters see the present as a time to demand another progressive president — to combat what has been called a K-shaped economy, where high-income households thrive while low-income households struggle. Young people especially see the effect of a president like Roosevelt and believe that someone similar is the only solution to the issues facing the nation.
The adage that history doesn't repeat itself but rhymes is certainly true of American politics. In the days of the founders, the notion that women should hold the right to vote was not fiercely debated. In fact, it would take 140 years to ratify the 19th Amendment, nationally guaranteeing women’s suffrage. In the present day, women’s right to vote is taken for granted. This is all to say progressivism is always an inevitability in this country.
How will progressivism manifest in our future? By far, the most progressive age group is the youth — 75% of voters 18-29 in the NYC mayoral race cast their ballot for Mamdani, and College Democrat organizations have endorsed Platner and Talarico — whose politics will one day influence their kids, enshrining progressive politics as the future of the American left. To fight the turning tides of the political landscape is a losing battle, so we need to take the opportunity we have to charge headfirst into the future.
One of the biggest critiques of progressives in this country is that they are only popular with wealthy college-educated white voters, which led to the pejorative “Bernie Bro” being coined. Yet, this is clearly changing. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was able to increase his vote share in majority Black neighborhoods by upward of 30%. Popular progressives like Graham Platner of Maine and James Talarico of Texas are running for respective Senate seats where they serve much poorer areas compared to New York.
Having moved to Indiana from New York, I have seen what works and what doesn't. I can envision the areas a progressive could improve: providing minimum wage increases, ensuring sustainable farming practices and addressing the healthcare issues that leave 47% of Hoosiers without proper access to a physician would be fantastic places to start. Progressive Democrats are running to serve all Americans, not just the wealthy white college-educated class.
Progressive politics are a certainty of our future. Democrats must now embrace the rising progressive Democrats before the clock strikes midnight.
William Sudnik is a freshman from the New York area studying engineering at IU’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. Sudnik has prior experience working in municipal government in Westchester county.
