The progressive left claims Republicans invented a frightening caricature of Democrats. The party’s own platform suggests otherwise.
Murry Evans recently accused Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Republicans generally of manufacturing a grotesque imaginary version of the Democratic Party. According to Evans, conservatives locate some obscure radical, pretend that person represents millions of ordinary Democrats and then defeat the straw man they created.
That criticism deserves a fair test.
So let us dispense with viral videos, anonymous social-media lunatics and carefully selected outliers. Let us instead examine what Democratic organizations and democratic socialists say about themselves.
The Democratic Party of Oregon’s official 2025 platform calls for “eliminating wealth inequality” through progressive taxation, publicly funded childcare, free education through college, elimination of existing student debt, comprehensive single-payer healthcare, reparations and government recognition of housing, food, healthcare and even “sufficient recreation and rest” as basic rights. It further declares bodily autonomy “absolute,” including abortion and gender-related medical treatment without permission from parents, courts, partners or politicians.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America is not hiding in a basement mimeographing manifestos. Its own publications acknowledge that advancing socialist politics requires using the Democratic ballot line. Its newly released program calls for a classless society, a new constitution, public ownership of major corporations, abolition of the Senate, an executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress, universal rent control, publicly owned housing, aggressive wealth taxes and the eventual creation of a “democratic socialist republic.”
That does not prove that every Democrat is a Marxist. Most are not. It does prove that the socialist movement operating within Democratic electoral politics is neither imaginary nor merely a Republican invention.
The Old Democratic Party—the party of John F. Kennedy, working-class families, organized labor, civil liberties and a government expected to live within some recognizable limits—is being displaced by a New Democratic Party increasingly influenced by the Socialist Democratic Party.
The change is not merely economic. It is moral.
The new progressive belief system increasingly takes human weaknesses that Christianity has historically warned against and repackages them as rights, identities, grievances or public obligations. Viewed through that lens, the transformation bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the seven deadly sins.
Pride: The Sovereign Self
Pride is not the same as dignity, confidence or refusing to be ashamed of one’s humanity. Every person possesses inherent worth and should be treated with decency.
The deadly sin of pride is something different: the elevation of the individual self above truth, nature, tradition, family and God.
Modern progressivism increasingly teaches that the individual defines his own reality and that society must affirm it. Personal identity becomes sovereign. Desire becomes self-authenticating. Disagreement becomes oppression.
The Oregon Democratic platform illustrates this absolutism when it declares that bodily autonomy is nonnegotiable and that no person requires permission from parents, courts, partners or politicians when making decisions involving abortion or gender-related treatment.
The political slogan is “live your truth.” The Christian warning is that truth does not belong to us. We belong to it.
A society may protect adults from mistreatment without declaring every subjective identity immune from question. It may extend compassion without requiring compelled affirmation. It may recognize human dignity without placing the sovereign self upon the throne formerly occupied by God.
That is the dividing line between liberty and pride. Liberty permits a person to make choices. Pride demands that everyone else celebrate them.
Greed: Entitlement Disguised as Compassion
Progressives usually assign greed exclusively to corporations, landlords and billionaires. Certainly, wealthy people can be greedy. So can governments, institutions and ordinary voters.
Greed is not limited to hoarding what one has earned. It can also be the desire to obtain what belongs to someone else without assuming the cost, labor or responsibility required to produce it.
Healthcare, housing, education, food and childcare do not materialize because politicians declare them rights. Every one of those things requires land, materials, energy, skill, labor and investment. Declaring them “free” does not eliminate their cost. It merely conceals who is compelled to pay it.
The question is not whether society should help the poor, sick, elderly or disabled. A decent society should. The question is whether compassion remains a moral duty performed by families, churches, communities and carefully limited public institutions—or becomes an unlimited legal claim upon the earnings and property of others.
The DPO platform promises lifelong economic security through a strong safety net and seeks to eliminate wealth inequality through taxation. The DSA goes considerably further, calling for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.
Once government declares that every need creates an entitlement, there is no logical stopping point. Politicians gain the power to distribute benefits, activists gain permanent grievances and taxpayers become little more than involuntary donors.
Greed does not become virtue merely because government performs the collection.
Lust: Appetite Without Covenant
Lust is more than sexual desire. It is appetite separated from love, commitment, restraint, consequence and responsibility.
The sexual revolution promised liberation from old-fashioned moral judgment. What it often delivered was a culture saturated with pornography, commodified bodies, broken relationships and the idea that any boundary imposed upon sexual appetite must be oppressive.
Progressive politics increasingly treats sexual expression as central to personal identity while describing traditional moral standards as inherently hateful. Schools, corporations and government agencies are expected not merely to tolerate private conduct but to affirm increasingly contested ideas about sex and gender.
There is an important difference between protecting adults from violence or employment discrimination and requiring every institution to participate in an ideological view of human sexuality.
Christian liberty does not mean that government should spy through bedroom windows. Neither does liberty require parents to surrender their authority, churches to abandon their doctrine or citizens to deny biological reality.
Real freedom includes the freedom to exercise restraint. It recognizes that not everything desired is beneficial, not everything consensual is wise and not everything legally permissible should be celebrated.
A culture that cannot say “no” to appetite will eventually become ruled by it.
Envy: Resentment Made into Public Policy
Envy does not merely observe inequality. It resents another person’s success, possessions, influence or happiness.
Marxist politics depends upon dividing society into antagonistic classes: oppressor and oppressed, capitalist and worker, exploiter and exploited. Once that framework is accepted, individual circumstances matter less than group identity. Wealth becomes presumptive evidence of wrongdoing, and unequal outcomes become proof that the system is unjust.
The Oregon Democratic platform states that the wealthy and powerful have “rigged the system” and expressly commits the party to eliminating wealth inequality. The DSA describes the entire global system of capital as an enemy and calls for aggressive wealth taxes and public ownership of major businesses.
Not every wealthy person earned honestly. Crony capitalism exists. Monopolies should not purchase government favors. Fraud and exploitation should be punished.
But justice requires equal treatment under law, not equal bank balances.
There is a profound difference between opening opportunities for the poor and teaching people to hate those who have more. One encourages achievement. The other converts resentment into political power.
“Eat the rich” is not an economic program. It is envy with a bumper sticker.
Gluttony: Consumption Without Gratitude
Gluttony may be the least partisan of the seven sins. America’s culture of excess infects Republicans, Democrats and people who have never voted.
We live in an age of endless delivery apps, disposable products, daily luxury beverages, influencer-driven consumption and instant gratification. We condemn corporations while ordering from them three times before dinner. We rage against capitalism using smartphones, streaming services and social platforms made possible by private capital.
The progressive contradiction is especially striking. The same culture that denounces consumer capitalism frequently demands that government subsidize the consequences of unrestricted consumption while imposing the cost upon someone else.
Every inconvenience becomes a crisis. Every desire becomes a need. Every need becomes a right. Every right requires a program. Every program requires an agency, and every agency eventually discovers that it needs a larger budget.
Gluttony is not simply consuming too much food. It is the inability to recognize the word enough.
A free society requires citizens capable of governing their own appetites. When self-government fails, political government expands to manage the wreckage.
Wrath: Rage as Political Identity
Wrath is anger that has escaped reason and become hatred, vengeance or a desire to destroy.
Progressive activism increasingly operates through permanent outrage. Every election is an existential emergency. Every disagreement is violence. Every opponent is a fascist, racist, Nazi, bigot, traitor or threat to civilization.
I have witnessed this anger personally. At a “No Kings” demonstration, I was threatened with violence. I did not experience a theoretical policy disagreement. I experienced political wrath face-to-face.
Evans’s own essay demonstrates the contradiction. He condemns Republicans for dehumanizing opponents while describing Stephen Miller as poisonous, ugly, cold-blooded and morally bankrupt. Trump’s supporters are portrayed as frightened, angry, gullible and willing to mistake ugliness for strength.
Apparently, dehumanizing language becomes acceptable when directed at the people one has designated as dehumanizers.
That is how wrath works. It always discovers a moral justification for itself.
The proper response is not to pretend the political right is innocent. Conservatives are capable of rage, cruelty, dishonesty and idolatry as well. No party has cornered the market on human depravity.
But the modern progressive movement has industrialized outrage. It uses anger for recruitment, fundraising, social pressure and political discipline. It does not merely oppose adversaries. It declares them illegitimate.
A movement cannot spend every day calling half the country evil and then act astonished when national unity disappears.
Sloth: Rights Without Duties
Sloth is often misunderstood as simple physical laziness. Traditionally, it also meant spiritual and moral negligence—the refusal to perform the duties one owes to God, family, neighbor and community.
It would be dishonest to label everyone “not in the labor force” as lazy. The federal classification includes retirees, students, caregivers, people with disabilities and others who have legitimate reasons for not seeking employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics specifically lists schooling, family responsibilities, illness, disability and childcare problems among the reasons people may be outside the labor force.
The more defensible criticism is directed at an ideology that discusses rights endlessly while treating duties as suspicious.
Citizens are told they possess rights to income, housing, healthcare, education, food, recreation and rest—but rarely that able-bodied adults have corresponding obligations to work, support their children, obey the law, maintain their communities and contribute before demanding more from their neighbors.
A safety net should catch people when they fall. It should not become a hammock in which government encourages them to remain.
When public policy removes every consequence from destructive choices, it does not create compassion. It creates dependency. And dependency gives the political class something more valuable than gratitude: control.
The state becomes provider, parent, employer, insurer, landlord, doctor, counselor and moral authority. Citizens gradually become clients.
That is not liberation. It is comfortable servitude.
Ordered Liberty or Government-Managed Appetite
The seven deadly sins are not unique to Democrats. Republicans display pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth too. Donald Trump is not anyone’s model of humility, and Christians damage their credibility when they excuse conduct from political allies that they would condemn in their enemies.
But that does not answer the policy question.
The issue is whether a political movement restrains human appetites or builds institutions around satisfying them. Does it recognize moral limits, personal responsibility and rights grounded in something higher than government? Or does it transform every appetite into an identity, every desire into a right and every grievance into a claim against another citizen?
Older Democrats could disagree sharply with Republicans while still believing in work, family, faith, ordered liberty and constitutional limits. Many Democrats still believe those things today. They should look carefully at what is happening inside their party.
The socialist movement is not hiding its ambitions. It is writing programs, recruiting candidates, contesting Democratic primaries and using the Democratic ballot line to advance openly socialist objectives. The official Oregon Democratic platform increasingly echoes that movement’s vocabulary of economic equality, government-guaranteed necessities, absolute autonomy and expansive public control.
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller did not write those documents. Republicans did not invent them.
The wolves have announced what they intend to eat. The lambs simply object to being told what is on the menu.
America’s founders understood liberty as freedom exercised within moral boundaries. Rights came from the Creator, not the legislature. Because government did not grant those rights, government could not legitimately revoke them.
Progressivism reverses that relationship. When government becomes the source of rights, it also becomes the final authority over their meaning, distribution and enforcement.
That is why liberty without God eventually becomes license, and license eventually demands more government to contain the consequences.
Government cannot save the human soul. Whenever it tries, it usually sends the taxpayer the bill—and fines or confines the dissenter for refusing to applaud.
That’s my viewpoint, now I challenge you to share yours with someone who typically disagrees with you. Find some common ground, and influence our future.
Sources:
Murry Evans is Retired university & seminary leader. Writer, traveler, and observer of faith, culture, and politics. I found his writing shared by a friend on my social feed.
Why to love the list, The 7 Deadly Sins. “The list of seven deadly sins is a tool that Christians have been using for well over a thousand years with its origin going all the way back into the fourth century.”
Oregon Democratic Party Platform & Policy
Oregon Republican Party Platform
Democratic Socialists of America
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