That the American left has fled from its liberal responsibilities is an inarguable fact. Like many Americans, I rushed to the polls (twice) to elect and re-elect President Barack Obama. Obama represented a change in this country that many liberals thought was long overdue — a man who stood for the working class, aspired to make healthcare available to all, took Wall Street and big business to task and supported a whole host of other leftist agenda items.

But today, that man is only a husk of the man I went to the polls for — his most recent failures being his support for the Patriot Act and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) — and I can’t fathom where this departure began. To be sure, Obama is a far cry better than anything the right has brought to the national scene in many years — Mitt Romney was an elitist fool, George W. Bush was inept and the current presidential hopefuls are slovenly business leaders, badly diluted fascists and religious extremists of the worst sort.

But no matter how bad the American right has become, it does not excuse the left from ignoring the plight of working men and women; it does not excuse them from cozying up to the same business dictators that they’ve claimed to stand against; it does not excuse them from taking part in the same idiosyncratic political business practices that their adversaries on the right have perfected over all these years. Thankfully, there is a class of true liberals coming up through the Washington ranks right now — specifically Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.