Which side in American politics is “correct” is not as simple as it sounds. What does correctness mean here. Moral truth. Outcomes. Who puts people over power. American politics is not a clean parable of left and right. It is a history of contradiction, ambition, harm, and survival. If we measure correctness by who reduces harm, uplifts the vulnerable, and honors reality, a moral compass starts to take shape.
We are told a story about liberty and equality. We live with a different inheritance. The United States was also built on genocide and slavery, not as footnotes but as the scaffolding that made the nation possible. Entire Indigenous nations were dispossessed or destroyed. The wealth of the early republic grew from stolen labor, and its aftershocks still appear in maps of who owns land, who builds wealth, who is stopped by police, and who dies younger than they should. Some insist this is ancient history. It is not. When leaders deny or downplay these foundations, when textbooks are stripped of the brutality of colonization or the centrality of slavery, they shift the moral baseline. A politics that cannot tell the truth about its past cannot be trusted to guide a just future.
Conservatives often cast themselves as guardians of tradition and moral truth. The question is tradition for whom, and whose truth. Many of the traditions held up as bedrock have historically excluded women, queer and trans people, people of color, and disabled people. Appeals to God, scripture, and family values are common, but the family imagined is usually heterosexual, patriarchal, Christian, and often white. The queer teen sleeping on a friend’s couch, the single mother working two jobs, the disabled veteran facing a maze of denials do not fit this picture. Tradition then becomes a tool for gatekeeping. Rights become negotiable. Lives become abstract.
Freedom is invoked often, yet the freedoms prioritized are selective. Freedom to carry weapons in public, but not freedom to access affordable healthcare. Freedom to refuse vaccines, but not freedom to marry or receive gender-affirming care without interference. Under the banner of religious liberty, several states have passed laws that limit LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive autonomy. One group’s theology becomes another person’s loss of freedom. Liberty narrows to those already dominant.
There is also a growing detachment from fact within parts of the conservative movement. Democracies need some shared commitment to truth. Instead, falsehoods are deployed as strategy. Climate change denial, conspiracies about vaccines, and unfounded claims about stolen elections circulate widely. Years after the 2020 election, most Republican voters still told pollsters the election was illegitimate, despite the lack of evidence and the failure of dozens of court challenges. Major outlets and personalities fueled these narratives. A high-profile defamation case ended in a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar settlement after bogus claims about voting machines were broadcast. When power depends on misinformation, moral legitimacy erodes. Rhetoric about truth cannot override the practice of spreading lies.
Religion adds another layer. Nearly all Republican members of Congress identify as Christian, far more than Democrats. Faith can inspire justice, and it often has. But when officials write laws based on sectarian doctrine, government slides toward theocracy dressed up as patriotism. Freedom of religion includes freedom from having someone else’s religion enforced by the state. Policies that privilege Christian nationalism weaken the secular framework that protects everyone’s beliefs.
The right claims to defend timeless truths and freedom. Too often its policies express fear of change, not faith in inclusion. Protecting traditions that exclude and elevating ideology over evidence points backward to a narrower, more unequal past. A politics devoted to maintaining power for a select group, and sustained by demonstrable falsehoods, cannot plausibly be called morally correct in a nation that promises liberty and justice for all.
The left presents a different story. Democrats and progressives describe themselves as champions of compassion, progress, and equity. At their best they try to widen the circle of who belongs in “we the people.” They tend to accept scientific consensus on climate and public health. They acknowledge systemic injustices and advocate for universal healthcare, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, immigrant protections, and robust social services. The moral grounding is inclusion and care. Government protects the vulnerable and ensures a fair chance for those pushed to the margins.
This ethos has produced real policy: civil rights protections, Medicare and Medicaid, landmark environmental laws, and recent expansions of health coverage and targeted relief. In this vision, housing, healthcare, education, and clean air are rights, not privileges. A safety net is not charity. It is solidarity.
But the left does not always live up to its story. The gap between rhetoric and reality is real. Several Democrat-led cities and states, despite progressive branding, enforce ordinances that effectively criminalize homelessness while failing to provide enough housing or mental health care. Homelessness has reached record levels nationwide. The number of people without housing on a given night recently climbed past 650,000, the highest since the federal government began tracking it in a consistent way. Many of the worst crises unfold in deep-blue jurisdictions. The encampments and the suffering reflect policy failures and decades of underinvestment.
Racial disparities persist in blue places as well as red. Wealth, education, and incarceration gaps remain stark. The median white household holds many times the wealth of the median Black household. That gulf reflects centuries of policy decisions, and bold remedies have been rare. Democrats talk more openly about systemic racism than Republicans, but their leadership ranks remain disproportionately white, male, and affluent. Are marginalized communities being invited to lead, or simply spoken for by elites who retain control. Until power itself is shared, inclusion will sound aspirational.
Consistency is another test. It is right to condemn family separations at the border, anti-trans laws, and environmental rollbacks under Republican administrations. It is also necessary to speak with equal clarity when harms occur under Democrats. Deportations and detention surged in prior Democratic years, yet criticism from party leaders was often muted. Moral clarity should not depend on which party holds office. Selective outrage weakens trust.
Even with these contradictions, the left’s program aligns more closely with a moral arc that reduces harm and expands rights. Other wealthy democracies long ago created universal healthcare and generous family leave. They have lower maternal mortality, longer life expectancy, and better health outcomes. The United States stands out for the wrong reasons. American mothers die at rates far higher than their peers in comparable countries. That is not an abstract statistic, it is a policy choice, and it is deadly. Efforts to expand coverage and invest in caregiving aim to meet a baseline of decency that other nations consider normal.
Outcomes matter. Across many measures of social health, places that embrace progressive policies tend to deliver better lives than those governed by rigid free-market and socially conservative rules. The United States has fallen behind on basic quality-of-life metrics while adhering to decades of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and a thin social safety net. Life expectancy in the U.S. lags behind peer nations and the gap widened after 2010, even as other countries kept improving. Child care and higher education are financially crushing for many families. In contrast, the moral case for public investment in health, education, and care is not abstract. It is evidence-based. It prevents avoidable deaths, reduces suffering, and expands human potential.
Gun violence exposes the divide in stark terms. No other high-income country endures mass shootings at the scale we do. By mid-2024 there had already been more than four hundred mass shootings that year, following a near-record the year before. Over one hundred twenty Americans die by a gun every day. Our firearm homicide rate dwarfs that of our peers. This is not fate. It is the result of policy. The right resists even modest gun safety laws, holding to a maximalist reading of the Second Amendment. The left, in line with most democracies, supports universal background checks, safe storage rules, and limits on weapons designed for war. One side defends widespread access to guns regardless of the human cost. The other side prioritizes the right to live free from daily gun terror. That is a moral difference, not just a policy disagreement.
Mass incarceration tells a similar story. Over the last half-century, the United States built the largest prison system on Earth. Every state imprisons people at rates that would shock most of the world. Nearly two million people are behind bars, and Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white Americans. These numbers reflect unequal policing, sentencing disparities, and the long shadow of discrimination. Reformers call for ending cash bail, reducing mandatory minimums, and investing in treatment and opportunity instead of cages. Research shows extremely high incarceration does not meaningfully reduce violence and can deepen cycles of poverty and harm. A politics that is morally serious will unwind this machinery of punishment. Today that push comes more often from the left than the right, which too frequently argues for harsher penalties and a return to failed drug war tactics.
It also matters that one side treats climate change as an urgent reality while the other side often denies it or dismisses it as a hoax. Large majorities of Democrats see climate change as a major threat. Only a small minority of Republicans say the same. The stakes are not theoretical. Heat, fire, flood, and forced migration are here. History will not score parties by slogans, but by who acted to prevent catastrophe and who stood in the way.
These issues are not cable news talking points. They are the texture of daily life. As a disabled, autistic, trans woman, I do not encounter politics as a debate stage. I encounter it in clinics that misread my body, in forms that erase my identity, in streets where my safety is conditional. When people argue about which side is correct, I listen for a simpler truth. Which side will help me stay alive, free, and well. In this moment, with statehouses targeting gender-affirming care and public life for trans people, the difference is not subtle. One side votes to criminalize doctors and erase our care. The other, imperfectly, votes to protect it. The moral stakes are human and immediate.
None of this excuses bipartisan failures. Wall Street funds both parties. Neither has fundamentally challenged an economic order that treats people as expendable. The surveillance state grew with bipartisan support. The post-9/11 wars and the legal architecture that followed were bipartisan too, and we still live with the consequences. A just politics would question endless war and mass surveillance, yet hawks on both sides keep those engines running.
Militarism is a glaring example. The United States maintains a vast network of overseas bases and keeps large numbers of troops abroad. Both parties have sustained this footprint. We claim to export democracy, yet we arm and endorse autocrats when it suits national interests. We lament human rights abuses while allowing them in our own detention centers. This is moral dissonance that neither party has fully confronted. Indigenous sovereignty is another area of shared neglect. Land acknowledgments have become fashionable, but treaties remain unhonored and crises like missing and murdered Indigenous women receive a fraction of the attention they deserve.
If the measure is who fully honors the dignity of every person, no party passes. Too often our politics chooses corporate donations over community needs, punishment over care, and force over diplomacy. Many activists argue that the real divide is not left versus right, but the people versus the powerful. From that vantage point, the most correct stance lives in movements that push both parties from the outside: labor rights, climate justice, Black liberation, disability justice, peace, and the work of building alternate systems rooted in care.
Faith still matters in this landscape. It has fueled liberation struggles across generations. It has also been used to restrict the freedoms of others. A moral politics in a plural nation protects both the right to believe and the right not to. It draws laws from shared ethics, not sectarian doctrine. Progressives generally support this principle of secular government, though they sometimes tiptoe around it. The commitment should be clear. Your freedom to worship is safe. Your religion cannot be used to cut down my rights. The First Amendment protects both sides of that promise.
So which side is correct. The better question is which direction moves us toward justice, dignity, and truth. Politics is a rope pulled in opposite directions. On one end is a vision that is multiethnic, compassionate, and forward looking. On the other is a vision that is exclusionary, nostalgic for an imagined past, and often in denial. In 2025, the left’s imperfect steps toward equity point to a more hopeful path than the right’s retreat into fear and falsehood. Health care, climate, civil rights, public safety, and basic measures of well-being all point the same way.
This is not a cheer for the Democratic Party. It is a call to demand more. If one side is at least facing the right way, push it to move faster and go farther. Organize. Vote. Protest. Create. Build systems of care outside the ones we were handed. Moral correctness in politics is not a static label. It is a practice of listening to those most impacted, adjusting when you are wrong, and choosing justice over comfort.
In practice, that means standing with trans kids when states try to legislate them out of public life. Naming anti-Blackness wherever it operates, including in liberal institutions. Centering Indigenous sovereignty with action, not ceremony. Funding care, not cages. Holding our own allies accountable and insisting that people matter more than donors.
This work is slow and humbling. It does not fit into a soundbite. It asks us to trade certainty for honesty. But it is the only work that leads anywhere worth going. The correct side in politics is not a jersey. It is a set of commitments. Show up when it matters. Tell the truth when it hurts. Share power. Lift the most impacted from symbols to leaders. Look through that lens and the picture sharpens. One side is trying, however unevenly, to widen the circle of “we.” The other is drawing it tighter. One side admits the nation’s flaws and works to repair them. The other often denies the flaws and doubles down.
The future we need will not be delivered by a single election or a party savior. It will be built by communities that refuse to accept cruelty as normal. It will be carried by people who know that care is not weakness, that facts are not optional, and that dignity is not negotiable. If correctness means standing with those values and making them real in policy and practice, then that is the direction we have to move together. And if that is what it means to be correct, count me in.
Gemma Ortwerth 
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