Over the last three decades, the American political climate has been engulfed by the shadow of Ronald Reagan, as the nation’s political decisions and mindset have taken place squarely in the camp of the right.

Instead of arguing whether neoliberal economic policies and an erosion of governmental capabilities should be the law of the land, political debate has centered upon the extent to which they should shape legislation and action.

This pattern has held steady even under Democratic executives. President Bill Clinton’s signature policy initiative, welfare reform, framed governmental assistance as a privilege, not a right, creating work requirements that placed the economic benefits of cheap labor over the survival of America’s neediest citizens. President Barack Obama, who in 2008 was heralded as the harbinger of a new liberal age, has not been the transformative force his campaign promised he’d be, instead continuing to operate within the conservative parameters of his predecessors. To give just one example, the Affordable Care Act, his greatest legislative achievement, placed even more power in the hands of the insurance companies that are the most responsible for the country’s pitiful care-to-cost ratio.

I have neither the know-how nor the column inches to pinpoint the exact reasons that the American government has moved rightward since the late 1970s. Factors include the cultural, the demographic, the economic, the personal, the political and the psychological, and I am not foolish enough to think that I’d be able to synthesize them all into a grand unifying theory about the country as a whole.

I am foolish enough, however, to think I can identify the main reason why we are still living in the Reagan Era: because the Democratic Party remains content to do so. The organization that is, for all intents and purposes, America’s only left-leaning party has failed to push a policy agenda that gives this designation any sort of meaning, allowing the right to shape the government in its image. Instead of pulling back against the rightward movement of the Republican Party, the Democrats have been dragged along with it.

The current Democratic Party says the only alternative to using soldiers to assert American hegemony is using drones. The current Democratic Party says the only alternative to a massive wall at the border is a deportation program that merely pays lip service to amnesty. The current Democratic Party says the only alternative to decreased deregulation of Wall Street is an increase in easily evadable red tape.

This does not have to be the case.

Admittedly, the party has little reason to shake up the status quo, given the GOP’s off-putting rightward tilt, the Democrats’ upcoming demographic advantages and the likelihood of a Democrat winning the presidency in 2016. But despite the chiding of insiders, who treat familiarity with “the way things work” as an appropriate substitute for substantive understanding, it isn’t naive to expect more from the Democrats. For one, we shouldn’t have to treat the 2013 miniscule hike of the top marginal income tax rate — from 35 percent to just under 40 percent on taxable income over $400,000, applicable to only the very wealthiest — as a game changer when such a rate was over 70 percent in the prosperous ’60s. Seeing these victories as consequential instead of pyrrhic only maintains a system of Republican dominance.

A leftward shift in Democratic values is the only way for the America promised by the party — one that succeeds “when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules” — to exist. In an America where the benefits of economic prosperity are given nearly entirely to the rich, where the average white American has around six times the wealth of the average black American, Democrats have offered insufficient resistance to these trends, and a continuation of current policies, more focused on looking good than doing good, will do nothing to right them.

An examination of specific issues where the Democratic Party has failed to stand up for justice, dignity and respect is in order, as is an exploration of ways the party can address these failures in order to become the party the left wishes it could be.

Democratic electoral victories mean little when Washington is still playing by the rules of the right — a transformation in attitudes and ideas is the only thing that will bring America out of the darkness.

Hunter Main is a senior in the College. Left Behind appears every other Tuesday.