Why Progressives are Losing the Battle… Everywhere.

What the Left Can Learn from Conservatives Around the World.

Ideas once considered fringe are now winning elections. From Donald Trump in the U.S. to the surging AfD in Germany, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Poland’s newly elected populist Karol Nawrocki, the Right is ascendant. Meanwhile, progressives are losing ground, clinging to narrow victories or shifting toward the center in hopes of appearing more electable. But it’s painfully apparent, something isn't working. What’s driving this backlash, and can it be reversed?

The Disconnect

Across Western democracies, working-class voters increasingly view progressive politics as detached from their material concerns. Rising costs of living, job insecurity, housing shortages, and declining public services dominate their lives, not abstract discourse about representation or climate goals filled with sacrifice.

The demoralization has only been exacerbated by the economic trend of having items once considered luxury become more accessible than objective necessities such as housing. The heightened visibility of the wealth gap, made ubiquitous by social media, has resulted in a social malaise. People in Canada and the United States spend an average of over 6 hours online daily, where they're constantly exposed to curated lifestyles. This phenomenon fuels resentment and reinforces the feelings of restlessness.

Today, left-leaning spaces are often perceived as culturally rigid. An inflexible tone on speech and behavior, especially online creating a fear of saying the "wrong thing”, and experiencing the punitive wrath of spectators. For many already under financial stress, this purity culture feels more like exclusionary than inclusive.

In Canada, during 2025, women voted for Carney more than Poillevre by at least 5% in every age group. Many working-class men, in particular, feel economically left behind, and then are told they must "acknowledge their advantages," despite not feeling advantaged at all.

Worse still, many working-class people feel talked down to by progressives. The tone can feel moralizing, even paternalistic. When politics becomes a language game dominated by university-educated elites, it breeds resentment. It doesn’t matter how noble your cause is if no one feels seen by it.

The Emotional Advantage

The Right has stepped into the emotional void. Their message is simple: "They forgot about you. They made things more expensive and allowed in dangerous migrants who take what is rightfully yours. We didn’t." It may be cynical, and it may lack real policy depth, but it resonates. Cultural signaling- flags, family, freedom all become a proxy for economic stability and self-respect.

Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre, Giorgia Meloni, they all channel outrage and offer someone to blame. They tap into something primal: the need for control, belonging, and dignity.

Meanwhile, the Left often responds with data, not emotion. But numbers don’t motivate people, stories do. There are some approaches that progressives can begin to employ to re-engage disillusioned voters.

1. Lead with Economic Security

In nearly every major city across the Western world, housing has become unaffordable, a fundamental failure that strikes at one of the most basic human needs. The Left must return to first principles: jobs, housing, healthcare, and education. When people are worried about covering rent, talk of a 2050 climate target rings hollow— unless it comes with a good union job this week, not a pink slip today. Every policy must translate into visible, immediate improvements in daily life.

While macroeconomic indicators may show growth, the public feels something very different. It doesn’t matter that job numbers are up if people still can’t afford to live without roommates or are choosing between groceries and electricity. The data may say one thing but lived experience says another.

2. Know Your Audience

Progressive discourse too often collapses into policy jargon and academic abstraction. But clarity is not the enemy of intelligence. If a policy can’t be explained around a kitchen table, it won’t resonate in a union hall.

Prime Minister Trudeau’s pandemic-era immigration reforms had substance and foresight to address severe employment shortages in specific sectors, but their impact was muted by a failure to communicate their purpose clearly. This failure in marketing was co-opted by the opposition party which then capitalized this opportunity to create a highly effective narrative that worked in their favour. Donald Trump, for all his distortions, mastered the art of simplicity and communication to his base. People may not trust his facts, but they understand his message.

A concise promise such as “your eggs will cost less”, lands far more effectively than a treatise on inflation metrics.

3. Respect People’s Lives, Not Just Their Votes

Too often, progressive spaces adopt a tone of condescension toward the very communities they hope to represent. There's a dangerous assumption that working-class voters are either misinformed or morally undeveloped. That posture is not just counterproductive, it’s alienating.

People are exasperated by sanctimonious lectures, they instead want to be heard. The constant policing of discourse, purity tests, and public shaming doesn’t advance the cause; it delays it.

4. Drop the Script

Over-rehearsed messaging doesn’t inspire confidence, it raises suspicion. Figures like Trump, Bernie Sanders, and even Silvio Berlusconi built their followings not through polish, but through presence. Their off-the-cuff speaking style, while flawed, reads as authentic and familiar.

Highly credentialed leaders who speak in carefully curated soundbites often come across as insincere, even if their policies are sound. People want to know what you actually believe, not what you’ve been trained to say. Authenticity can’t be outsourced to a communications team.

5. Reconnect Offline

Digital ads and clever slogans can’t replace real relationships. Loyalty isn’t built with just an online presence, it’s earned by knocking on doors, attending local meetings, and showing up again and again.

The Right understands this. That’s why they’re building tight, emotional coalitions on the ground, while too many on the Left are arguing in comment sections. Politics, at its core, is retail.

A Needed Change

Rebuilding the bond with the working class won’t happen overnight. It requires humility, consistency, and a genuine shift in how progressives understand power. The goal is not just to win elections, it’s to build a movement that earns loyalty because it shows up and delivers. The posturing over pedantic details of appropriate progressive language is proving to be a hindrance and wasteful distraction of the true progress that people are demanding from their politicians.

The strength of the Right is that they create emotional coalitions and consolidate power, while the Left polices semantics, alienates potential allies, and is bordering on punitive towards anything that isn’t considered ideological purity. If there isn’t a shift in course, liberals won’t just lose elections, they’ll lose the ability to shape the future at all.