Progressives: Great Marketing Name. The Complete Story of The Socialists
The Progressive Movement's century-long march toward socialism has pulled the Democratic Party to the left, and it's a one-way ticket.
Ask a self-described progressive to define the word, and most will tell you it means they believe in progress, in moving society forward. It is a difficult label to argue against. Nobody campaigns on going backward. The name was chosen with care, and it has done its job well for more than a century, functioning as a respectable wrapper around a set of ideas that, stated plainly, most Americans would recognize as socialism.
That is not a charge. It is a description, one that the movement’s most prominent leaders now largely embrace themselves. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist openly, repeatedly, and without apology.¹ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez carries the same label. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told the Wall Street Journal that Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign gave him “the language to even describe my own politics as being a Democratic socialist.”² So why does much of the political media continue to call these figures progressives, as though the word were politically neutral? The answer is that the name was never neutral. It was strategic from the start.
Where the Name Came From
In the spring of 1912, a worker standing inside a Chicago meatpacking plant had no minimum wage, no protection against a 14-hour shift, and no recourse if the machines hurt him. His employer answered to no regulatory body. His alderman was on the payroll of the same corporation that ran the plant.³ When reformers looked at that America, they concluded the system was broken. They called themselves progressives. The word described a moment and a mission: moving an industrialized nation beyond the Gilded Age’s lawless extremes.
The movement drew its intellectual energy from a generation of American academics who had studied at German universities, where they absorbed ideas about active state management, centralized administration, and a theory of government that differed fundamentally from the limited-government philosophy the American Founders had built.⁴ Those ideas were not inherently socialist. But they were the intellectual ancestors of socialism’s American cousin: the belief that expert-run government, not private markets and individual liberty, should determine the shape of society.
Theodore Roosevelt gave this thinking its first dramatic national voice. His Square Deal framed government as an active referee between capital and labor, not a passive bystander.⁵ His 1912 Bull Moose campaign pushed further, calling for social insurance, labor standards, and a more direct style of democratic governance.⁶ Roosevelt was not a socialist. But he established a template that later generations would push further: that the federal government’s job was not to protect individual liberty within a constitutional framework, but to produce the outcomes that experts and reformers considered fair.
Wilson and the Philosophical Break
Woodrow Wilson went further than Roosevelt, not just in policy, but in philosophy. Wilson openly admired Bismarck’s Germany, describing its system of relatively unchecked state power as “nearly perfected” and acknowledging it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle.”⁷ What Wilson was describing was not an update to the American founding. It was a replacement for it.
The Declaration of Independence holds that rights are God-given and pre-political, meaning government cannot grant them and cannot legitimately take them away. Wilson reversed that premise entirely, arguing that liberty is “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs,” not a natural condition but something the state manages and distributes.⁷ From that philosophical shift flowed everything: the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the income tax, and the idea that expert administrators, insulated from democratic accountability, should run the mechanisms of modern society.⁸ This was the birth of what scholars call the administrative state, the permanent, largely unelected bureaucracy that governs vast swaths of American life today.
Wilson’s legacy carried another dimension that honest history cannot ignore. He re-segregated the federal workforce, rolling back Black advancement in civil service employment.⁹ The progressive movement he led also intersected with the eugenics movement, which produced the Supreme Court’s 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell, upholding compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit.¹⁰ The movement that called itself the voice of the people simultaneously held much of the population in profound contempt.
From New Deal to Great Society: Socialism by Degrees
Wilson’s philosophy did not die when he left office. It went underground into universities, think tanks, and the Democratic Party’s policy infrastructure, waiting for the next crisis that would make the case for activist government self-evident. The Great Depression provided it.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did not invent a new ideology. It applied the Wilsonian blueprint at a scale Wilson had only theorized.¹¹ The alphabet agencies, including the SEC, the NLRB, and the Social Security Administration, institutionalized the idea that expert bureaucrats managing complex economic systems was not just acceptable but necessary. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s layered Medicare, Medicaid, federal education programs, and sweeping anti-poverty initiatives on top of that foundation.¹²
These programs produced real benefits for millions of Americans, and supporters of progressive governance rightly point to that record. But they also produced something else: a federal government that had fundamentally redefined its role from the one the Constitution described. The question of whether that redefinition was a reform or a revolution is the argument American politics has been having ever since.
The Reagan Correction and What It Did Not Fix
The 1970s exposed the limits of the progressive model. Inflation, crime, urban decline, and a general collapse of public confidence in institutions produced the Reagan era, a sustained cultural and political backlash against the idea that government expertise could solve every social problem.¹³ Reagan won by speaking directly to Americans who felt that progressive governance had become condescending, fiscally reckless, and inattentive to the disorder that ordinary people actually experienced in their daily lives.
The backlash stalled the progressive advance but did not reverse it. The New Deal and Great Society infrastructure remained largely intact. Progressive ideas retreated into universities, activist networks, and the Democratic Party’s policy offices, where a new generation was being shaped by thinkers who believed Reagan had interrupted something essential and necessary.¹⁴ What came back in the 2000s and 2010s was not the moderate progressivism of Franklin Roosevelt. It was something more explicitly ideological, more culturally assertive, and far less interested in the broad coalition politics that had made mid-twentieth century liberalism work.
Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani: Progressives Who Call Themselves Socialists
A decade after his first bid for the White House ended in failure, Bernie Sanders is still trying to take over the Democratic Party. At 84, he has done more to reshape it than any other figure of the past decade, and he is not finished.¹⁵ He speaks at least once a week with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who shocked the political establishment in 2025 by defeating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. He swore Mamdani in as mayor in January.
Sanders has assembled an email list with more than five million contacts. More than 8,500 people have expressed interest in running for office through his organization, far surpassing anything the national Democratic Party has built. During a recent nationwide rally tour, Sanders drew the biggest crowds of his career.¹⁵ His litmus test for endorsements is revealing. He asks candidates whether they will “stand up to the oligarchs,” demand that “the wealthy start paying their fair share,” and whether they believe in “healthcare as a human right and Medicare for All.”¹⁵ That is not progressive. That is socialist.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez carries the same label and is now considering either a run for the White House or a primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2028.¹⁵ Sanders said of the prospect: “I’m a big fan of Alexandria’s.” In Denver, a 28-year-old Democratic socialist named Melat Kiros is mounting a surprisingly competitive challenge against a veteran 30-year congressman by running on Medicare for All and free child care.¹⁵
Mamdani told the Journal he has always seen Sanders as a political North Star, and that Sanders’s 2016 campaign gave him the language to call himself a democratic socialist.² In New York City, a population of 8.5 million people is now the test case for what that language means when it meets a $5.4 billion budget deficit.¹⁶ Wall Street has taken notice. Former Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop has stepped forward to organize business opposition to Mamdani’s proposed tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.¹⁶
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the formal legislative arm of this movement, includes nearly 100 members in the House and Senate. Its 2024 policy agenda called for Medicare for All, a federal minimum wage of $25 per hour, a Green New Deal framework, and sweeping expansions of housing and childcare programs.¹⁷ These are not fringe positions within the Democratic caucus. They are its stated platform.
Why Mainstream Democrats Are Running Scared
The Democratic establishment knows exactly what is happening. It is simply too afraid of its own activist base to say it plainly.
Between 2020 and 2024, the Democratic Party lost ground in voter registration in all 30 states that track partisan affiliation, a net swing of 4.5 million voters toward Republicans.¹⁸ Among men under 45, the share registering as Democrats fell from roughly two-thirds of new registrants in 2018 to less than half by 2024. In Pennsylvania alone, nearly twice as many registered Democrats switched to Republican between 2020 and 2025 as went the other way.¹⁸ In Miami-Dade County, once a Democratic stronghold by 200,000 voters, Republicans now hold the registration advantage.¹⁸
DNC Chairman Ken Martin reversed course in late 2025 on his pledge to publicly release a detailed review of the party’s 2024 election failures, calling the findings “a distraction” ahead of the midterms.¹⁹ His own party’s internal review reportedly found that presidential campaign messaging was “not credible for many voters,” that outreach began too late, and that Democrats had taken younger voters for granted. These are polite ways of saying the party’s left-wing brand cost it the election.
Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist group Third Way, put it directly: the voters who decide elections “don’t want an upheaval of the economy as progressives have proposed.”¹⁵ Nathan Brand, a senior adviser to the Senate Republican campaign committee, is equally direct about the electoral calculation: “Republicans would always rather run against a Bernie-backed candidate than a traditional candidate.”¹⁵ Even as these warnings pile up, the progressive machine keeps winning primaries, keeps pushing the party’s platform further left, and keeps insisting the problem is that Democrats have not gone far enough.
Schumer and Sanders “disagree on almost everything,” in Sanders’s own words.¹⁵ That is an accurate description of the state of the Democratic Party in April 2026. One side is trying to win elections in Pennsylvania and Arizona. The other is trying to build a socialist movement. Both call themselves Democrats. They are not.
The Constitutional Problem Nobody Is Talking About
The dispute between progressive governance and the American constitutional system is not just a policy argument. It is a structural conflict that the courts are now actively adjudicating. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo overturned Chevron deference, the decades-old doctrine that had given federal agencies broad latitude to interpret their own statutory authority.²⁰ That decision marked a direct judicial challenge to the administrative state’s foundational premise: that unelected experts should be trusted to expand government power beyond what Congress has explicitly authorized.
As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a speech at the University of Texas in April 2026, the progressive project from Wilson forward has represented a sustained challenge to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, specifically, the idea that rights are pre-political and that government’s role is to protect them, not to define and distribute them.⁷ That critique is not an abstraction. It describes a real and ongoing tension between what the progressive movement is trying to build and the constitutional framework within which American government is supposed to operate.
Where This Is Going, and Why 45 Percent of America Should Be Deeply Concerned
The most important political fact in the country right now is not what progressives or Republicans are doing. It is what the rest of America is doing, which is leaving.
Gallup reported in January 2026 that 45 percent of American adults now identify as political independents, an all-time high, surpassing the previous record of 43 percent set in 2014 and 2023.²¹ Republicans and Democrats each stand at just 27 percent. Among Gen Z adults, 56 percent call themselves independents. Among millennials, the figure is 54 percent.²¹
These are not disengaged voters. They are not people who have tuned out. They are people who have made a deliberate decision that neither of the two parties that currently dominate American political life represents their interests, their values, or their understanding of how a functioning government should behave. They watched the Democratic Party spend a decade lurching left toward an agenda it now struggles to distinguish from democratic socialism. They watched the Republican Party abandon principled conservatism for something else entirely. And 45 percent of them decided they were done with both.
The Democratic Party’s Gallup favorability rating stands at 34 percent, the worst the organization has recorded in the modern era.²² The voters who left the party between 2020 and 2024 did not relocate to the progressive wing. They relocated to political independence, and the polling offers no evidence they intend to return. Political analyst Lee Drutman has projected that even if Democrats win the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028, structural forces including the 2030 Census and population shifts toward red states could produce a Republican wave by 2030 and 2031 more durable than anything the party has faced in decades.²²
The 45 percent of Americans who have walked away from both parties are not waiting for a more progressive Democratic Party. They are not looking for a more energized socialist movement. They are looking for something the current system is structurally incapable of providing: a governing organization that treats them as capable adults, builds policy on facts rather than ideology, and is accountable to voters rather than to donors and activist bases.
The progressive movement is real. Its grievances about inequality and corporate power are legitimate, and its policy ambitions connect with genuine suffering in the American economy. But calling it progressive does not make it so. What it is, is a well-organized, well-funded, electorally ambitious movement that believes the American government should look substantially more like the European social democracies its founders admired a century ago. American voters, at least the 45 percent who are watching from outside both parties, deserve to have that stated plainly, so they can make an informed decision about what kind of country they want to live in.
Endnotes
1. Bernie Sanders, interview with the Wall Street Journal, as quoted in Eliza Collins, “Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2026. Sanders has self-identified as a democratic socialist throughout his career and reiterated the label in this interview.
2. Zohran Mamdani, quoted in Eliza Collins, “Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2026.
3. Centercratic Party / CenterVoter.com, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026, centercratic.party. Opening scene of Chicago meatpacking conditions drawn from this document, which in turn draws on Library of Congress primary source materials for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
4. Daniel J. Mahoney, “The Progressive Origins of the Administrative State,” Social Philosophy and Policy, Cambridge University Press, January 8, 2007; American Mind, “The German Stamp on Wilson’s Administrative Progressivism,” November 2, 2020, americanmind.org.
5. Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, “What Was the Square Deal?”, trlibrary.com; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Theodore Roosevelt: The Square Deal,” April 15, 2026.
6. Miller Center, University of Virginia, “Transforming American Democracy: TR and the Bull Moose Campaign of 1912,” February 12, 2017, millercenter.org; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Bull Moose Party,” March 18, 2026.
7. Justice Clarence Thomas, remarks at the University of Texas, Austin, April 15, 2026, published as “Justice Thomas: Progressives vs. the Declaration,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2026. Wilson quotations are drawn directly from Thomas’s speech and the primary sources he cites therein.
8. Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026, centercratic.party; Heritage Foundation, “The Birth of the Administrative State,” November 19, 2007, heritage.org.
9. Berkeley Haas News, “How Woodrow Wilson’s Racist Policies Eroded the Black Civil Service,” July 24, 2024, newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu; Equal Justice Initiative, “President Wilson Authorizes Segregation Within Federal Government,” calendar.eji.org.
10. Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026 (citing Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 1927); historical scholarship on forced sterilization in twentieth-century America.
11. Roosevelt House, Hunter College, “From FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society,” roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu; Time, “The New Deal and the Great Society: How They Were Different,” April 4, 2016.
12. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Great Society,” March 8, 2026, britannica.com.
13. Ruy Teixeira, “How Progressives Blew It,” The Free Press, October 27, 2024, thefp.com; general historical scholarship on the Reagan era and the conservative resurgence of the 1970s–1980s.
14. Hoover Institution, “Obama and the State of Progressivism, 2011,” November 30, 2010, hoover.org; Center for American Progress, “Social Movements and Progressivism,” April 13, 2010.
15. Eliza Collins, “Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2026.
16. Wall Street Journal, “Wall Street Enlists Marine Veteran Steve Fulop Against Zohran Mamdani’s Push to Raise Taxes,” 2026.
17. Congressional Progressive Caucus, “Congressional Progressive Caucus Unveils New Legislative Agenda to Deliver Equality, Justice, and Economic Security,” April 17, 2024; Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026.
18. Shane Goldmacher and Jonah Smith, “The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis,” New York Times, August 20, 2025; Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026 (citing L2 voter registration data).
19. John McCormick, “Democratic Party Flip-Flops on Releasing Review of 2024 Election Failures,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2025.
20. DLA Piper, “Chevron Overruled: In Loper Bright v. Raimondo,” June 2024, dlapiper.com; K&L Gates, “The End of Chevron Deference,” June 27, 2024, klgates.com.
21. Gallup, “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents,” January 12, 2026.
22. Lee Drutman, “The Democratic Party Is About to Make the Most Predictable Mistake in American Politics,” Undercurrent Events, March 23, 2026; Gallup, January 2026 report (cited in Drutman).