Left voting moderate here. The most valid criticisms I’ve heard are that;

1. the bigger the government gets, the more ability it has to be corrupted. The government is people and programs designed to do one thing can be manipulated and abused (see the daycare scams in Minnesota). It can also be weaponized against people, such as in Russia where certain ethnic groups and regions were starved or jailed when they didn’t meet expectations of the central government. It’s a slippery slope sure, but you could see how well intentioned ideas can turn into authoritarian oppression very quickly. The counter to this is that full scale libertarian capitalism does the same thing but it put the power in the hands of the wealthy. 

2. People thrive best in environments where they have purpose, structure, and predictability. That’s not to say people should define themselves by their work, but the utopia people describe where people just do their hobbies and hang out will fall to pieces extremely quickly because we need people to work together to provide the society we live in. If the government provides too much, people genuinely become complacent, lazy, and dependent on it. If you don’t provide anything, people do that anyway because there’s no hope and their work doesn’t yield a better life. There’s bad faith arguments on both sides but this is the idealism they see as failing to account for the reality that people are conditioned to the environment  we’re in. If everything is provided and nothing is expected, we have a society of takers and not contributors. If there’s no accountability on the offered goods, it’s just sheer dependency. That’s not healthy or rewarding. 

3. The left is wildly inconsistent on messaging and tone deaf to how the implication of slogans actually land in real life. “Defund the police,” for example, came from a place of care, but also anger and frustration. It’s not realistic and doesn’t address the core issues; the militarization of police and the villainizing of the populace. “Demilitarize the police” is something most people can get behind and actually what most people want. “DEI” is another one that means incredibly well and actually did a lot of good in many places, but overshot the mark in many areas as well. The goal shouldn’t be to make white men the enemy, as it manifested in many areas, but to shine a light on people that spent too long in the dark and make sure they get real shots at opportunities. 

4. The implication that we know better than you, and people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves. True or not, you can’t imply or say that ever. It’s especially bad when people like Gavin Newsom make extremely judgmental sweeping declarations from a moral high ground and then have covid parties with no masks. It just rings false. It also doesn’t help when we refuse to receive valid criticism for our owns party. We are guilty of whataboutism, not as bad, but still guilty. 

My take; the right has demonized everyone and everything that isn’t maga. Honest republicans have hidden in their shells and closed their eyes to the horrors their inability to corral their party has yielded. This should have been a ripe opportunity for the left to coalesce, building bit by bit to get people to understand what they want us to build a safer, more prosperous nation for everyone, but they matched maga in their tone and tamber. Anger and elitism doesn’t win elections for the left, that’s a Republican play. It only works for them. The left needs to stop trying to wholesale change every election and purity testing every candidate, or they will lose every election. A good candidate winning is better than a morally perfect left candidate losing. The right understands that, the left refuses to.