Eva Peron... ???

Why do you feel the left has become illegitimate and what do you mean by legitimate?

Basically Perón failed because his reforms were not radical enough. For example, although he raised rural wages and forced landlords to sell cheap to the AIPE, he refused to take the next step when they balked. He did not nationalize the land. Thus, the amount of land under cultivation dropped from nearly 22 million hectares in 1934-38 to just over 17 million in 1955. What you had was a producer's strike, not that much different from the kind Allende was confronted by.

...The one thing that they can do to keep imperialism at bay is impermissible: to arm the workers and expropriate the expropriators. Despite their inadequacies, the workers movement has an obligation to defend such governments under attack from imperialism....

The American Republic, as nations go, has led a safe and easy life, with no serious enemies to menace it, either within or without, and no grim struggle with want. Getting a living here has always been easier than anywhere else in Christendom; getting a secure foothold has been possible to whole classes of men who would have remained submerged in Europe....

"...She was making enough to afford to move into a better hotel although she still couldn't afford an apartment and she even considered having plastic surgery to enlarge her breasts (in crude Argentine macho talk a girl had to have melones and not limones if she wanted to keep a man). But when the day came for the operation, she failed to appear. She had apparently decided to leave nature alone, although the decision may well have been determined by an unexpected setback in her fortunes at about that time. Her brother Juan phoned her to say that he had been caught stealing money at the bank where he worked. It was not a large amount, but if he did not replace it immediately, he would go to jail. Eva did not hesitate for a moment. She appeared to have a genuine love for her big brother despite his playboy ways. She sold everything she had, gave him every peso she possessed, and moved back into a cheap boarding house, this time in Boca, the old Italian district down in the port where the buildings lean crazily over twisting narrow alleys leading down to the quayside.

Eva had the steel will of a survivor. Living in the Boca could not have been a pleasant experience for a single girl on her own. In those days in Argentina's big cities, an unchaperoned girl was considered fair game. On the narrow dockside streets, she had to contend with the chirripos, the neighborhood dandies in their tight black suits, gummed back hair, and highly polished shoes who lolled their days away in street corner bars, passing leering comments at any girl who passed by. But they quickly learned to respect the backlash of the peasant girl from Los Toldos. "She had a tongue to skin a donkey", one of them remembered admiringly years later....

I asked about the left and not about the Democratic party.