Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
The conventional wisdom amongst American historians, politicians, pundits and citizens is that the United States took a sharp turn toward the left during the Progressive, New Deal and Great Society eras. This perspective, however, is only instructive when you look at our political and economic history from the standpoint of American history. From the standpoint of world history, the United States took a sharp turn toward the center during these three historic time periods.
The explanation for this fundamental difference is plain. In the United States, we have existed within the confines of what the late Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz called "the liberal tradition.” Unlike the United Kingdom and the countries on the European continent, the United States had neither a feudal past and a long heritage of monarchs nor a socialist tradition.
Our political tradition, Hartz argued in 1955, revolved around individual rights based on the political philosophy of John Locke, whose views we would today call libertarian. Rights theory in the 20th century also included the "liberal" mixed economy or "liberal" welfare state. In any case, Hartz argued that we never developed a serious socialist tradition because we had no tradition of centrally controlled government associated with right-wing monarchies.
Therefore, by the early 20th century the liberal capitalist order did, from our perspective, take a sharp turn to the left when two Republicans – President Theodore Roosevelt and Wisconsin Gov./Sen. Robert LaFollette – and Democratic President Woodrow Wilson led efforts to rein in big business.
They busted up Standard Oil and the trusts in general and created federal agencies to regulate the flow of money (Federal Reserve Board), the production and distribution of food (Food and Drug Administration), and the transportation of commerce across state lines (Federal Trade Commission). They created a federal income tax and gave women the right to vote.
The New Deal and the Great Society kept traveling left, with the National Labor Relations Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security Administration, the National Industrialization Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare, Medicaid and affirmative action.
From the standpoint of world history, however, the United States since the early 1900s has been moving toward the center, because socialism became the rival force to capitalism from the mid-19th century through the work of writers in France, the U.K. and especially Germany, namely Karl Marx. By 1917 the Russian Revolution brought forth the first major socialist, indeed communist, totalitarian state.
Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, even Barack Obama and Joe Biden are regarded as socialists by huge numbers of Republican voters and many Republican politicians. From the perspective of world history, none of these democratic leaders comes close to being a socialist leader. The social democracies of the Nordic countries today, and indeed the socialist-led coalitions on and off in Germany, France and the United Kingdom since World War II, represent the real leftist challenge to the advanced industrial age, the information age and capitalism.
The truth is, the United States and the Western democracies, which are all multiparty parliamentary democracies with a strong socialist presence, have been striving since the 1930s to find the center between laissez-faire capitalism and democratic socialism. It is true that Germany and Italy during World War II became fascist regimes, but those are exceptions.
In the U.S. and the U.K. many Clinton Democrats and members of the Tony Blair Labor Party have been seeking to find the "Third Way," which is really the "New Center," since the 1990s. Our left-right spectrum, which has never had a strong socialist presence (though Sen. Bernie Sanders has given socialism a real boost) occupies the middle of the ideological spectrum – we're in between the two 40-yard lines on a U.S. football field.
If we are to maintain our democracy, in the next 10 years we must find ways to educate ourselves about the reality of our quest for the next stage of the center – on the left side of the center or the right side of the center – whether through nonprofit organizations, political leaders, schools or some combination. Otherwise, we will continue to talk past each other, misidentify each other, and confuse each other in our very narrow perspective on ourselves and the rest of the world.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.