Is a Left-Wing Populist the Current Answer?

I voted “America First” because I thought we were finally going to put this place first — wages, housing, supply chains, families. But watching this administration, it feels like we’re still stuck in the same loop: culture-war noise up front, and big-ticket priorities happening quietly in the background. Foreign aid packages move with record speed - domestic cost-of-living fixes, less so.

That contrast tells you more than any speech ever could.

You can’t tell people the economy’s “strong” while the average renter is priced out of their own city. You can’t celebrate job numbers without acknowledging that many of those jobs are still being built overseas or offered as contract work without stability. You can’t pitch 50-year mortgages as “opportunity,” or treat one-time rebates like structural relief. It all feels disconnected from how people actually live.

And populism — the version that was supposed to disrupt this dynamic — didn’t really build the basics. Some folks felt heard, sure. But factories didn’t return at scale, the cost of living didn’t ease, and the same donor class still shapes the menu. The tone shifted but the outcomes did not.

One side optimizes the language. The other optimizes the outrage. Neither is explaining how you’re supposed to make rent.

The modern left has its flaws — jargon, bureaucracy, and a tendency to legislate in paragraphs instead of plain English. But in 2025, the clearest voices talking directly about the cost of being alive — rent, groceries, transit, healthcare — are coming from the populist left.

Take Zohran Mamdani. Whatever you think of him, when he was asked which foreign country he’d visit first as mayor, he said he’d stay focused on New York. In a moment when symbolism gets more airtime than policy, that answer actually meant something. His platform is built on affordability — rent freezes, fare-free buses, universal childcare. Concrete policies tied to real pressures people feel every day.

You see a similar thing in Graham Platner — not a media project, not a think-tank creation. A veteran and oyster farmer from Maine talking plainly about corporate capture and what it’s like to live in a state that’s been economically sidelined for years. You don’t have to agree with every detail to understand the stakes he’s describing.

Both of them point toward the same uncomfortable truth: the U.S. spends tens of billions a year on foreign assistance — about $70 billion in 2023 — while basics at home, like childcare, affordable transit, and regional infrastructure, remain underfunded or inconsistently supported. I want spending cut across the board; that part hasn’t changed. But when we can move quickly to fund versions of these same supports overseas and then tell our own communities they’re “too expensive” or “not feasible,” the priorities start to look a little backwards.

And people feel that imbalance because the bigger picture isn’t subtle anymore. Wealth keeps drifting upward — the richest 10% now hold more than two-thirds of total U.S. household wealth — while wages for most workers have barely moved in decades. The bottom half of the country holds about 2–3% of the wealth, and upward mobility has been sliding for years. The old promise was simple: work hard, save money, move up. Now it feels more like work hard, keep up, try not to slip.

There’s nothing wrong with capitalism. But we’ve been living in a corporatist atmosphere for a long time — an economy where the cost of everything climbs faster than the paycheck that’s supposed to cover it, and where the institutions claiming to fight for “the people” often answer to donors, shareholders, or whoever’s buying the next ad slot. Pretending this isn’t happening means ignoring what most families see every single day: rent jumping, groceries climbing, healthcare laughing in your face, and fewer real paths to stability.

That’s why these candidates are gaining traction. Like them or not, they’re naming what both parties tiptoe around — that our freedom increasingly comes with an asterisk. Not servitude in the old sense, but a modern version: you’re legally free, sure, but economically pinned. Free to move, but weighed down so heavily by the cost of living that moving becomes a theory. Free on paper, constrained everywhere else.

And that tension — the widening gap between what life was supposed to cost and what it actually does — is why people are looking elsewhere. They’re not chasing ideology. They’re chasing relief.

I don’t line up perfectly with either of them. I still believe in local control, small enterprise, and keeping bureaucrats out of people’s homes. But they’re naming the core crisis honestly: it’s hard to live in this country right now. Policy should make life easier, not harder.

To be fair, there are people in government pushing for transparency and restraint — like Thomas Massie, who actually reads the bills and asks uncomfortable questions about spending. But the fact that those questions are treated as a problem tells you plenty about who’s steering the ship.

And historically, this isn’t new. The New Deal gave people a lifeline, then ballooned into a bureaucracy that sometimes forgot who it served. Trickle-down sounded nice in the ’80s, but in 2025 it mostly trickles crumbs while housing and healthcare outpace wages. Every fix becomes a flaw when no one adjusts the plan.

So is a left-wing populist the answer? I don’t know. But right now, they’re the only ones consistently starting with the basics — the cost of being alive, the ability to stay rooted in your own community, the simple idea that work should still lead to stability.

If “America First” means anything in 2025, it should start with the people who actually live here — not whatever headline polls the best.

Because the idea that the old promises still hold — work hard, save, buy a home, raise a family — while we’re being offered half-century mortgages and rebate coupons for an economy nobody asked for? Come on. It’s absurd. And everyone knows it.