That adage, however, cuts both ways: for progressives to make the most of their current spring — to make it last — they have to deliver on their core commitments: aggressively addressing the affordability crisis, ending the Iran war, and advancing a just, moral, and prudent foreign policy more broadly. And they have to eschew the boutique cultural causes and hectoring tone that turned voters against them the last time around. Otherwise, spring will turn to another winter before too long.

The midterms were a victory for the Democratic Party, of course. But more consequentially, the election was a triumph for the party’s Left flank. The biggest win on the ledger was that of Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, a standard-bearer of what Matthew Yglesias has called the “clean-living Muslim wing” of the Left. El-Sayed won despite the GOP’s relentless efforts to tar him as an Islamic extremist and the pro-Israel lobby’s expenditure of tens of millions of dollars on behalf of his opponents in both the Democratic primary and the general election. Perhaps more remarkably, even in a red state like Florida, Angie Nixon — a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — came within three percentage points of winning, despite receiving little support from the national Democratic Party.  

The Left clearly has a winning message: a dogged focus on affordability, and a strong stand against American complicity with Israel’s destructive wars. The atrocities in Gaza on their own might not have been enough to sway voters. But the Israeli government’s role in pushing for a US military intervention against Iran further soured on Americans, who (correctly) tied the war’s inflationary effects to their own struggles to make ends meet. 

Vice President JD Vance, in a blistering postmortem, cited the war and his own administration’s close relationship to Israel as two of four key reasons a significant share of Trump-Vance voters shifted their support to Democrats. On Election Day, Trump himself seemed to acknowledge this when he said of US aid to Israel, “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when [the Israelis] don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point.” 

There is little downside, then, to Democrats criticizing Israel. Some centrist critics of El-Sayed worried that his focus on Israel’s misdeeds — they would call it something worse, an obsession — would ultimately hurt him. It didn’t. A majority of Michigan Jews voted for El-Sayed.

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Religion can save democracy

By Shadi Hamid

This isn’t to say that every progressive should make criticism of Israel a focal point of their politics. But they can and should at least make clear where they stand. While the Rev. Adam Hamilton of Kansas didn’t talk much about Gaza, his basic orientation in defense of Palestinians — in line with his neighbor-love vision of Christianity — was not in dispute. As early as Oct. 13, 2023, a week after the Oct. 7 terror attack on southern Israel, Hamilton issued a statement that: “I also stand with Palestinians who, for a variety of reasons, live as second-class citizens in the land where they have lived for hundreds of years.” Such statements didn’t stop Hamilton from turning Kansas — yes, deep-red Kansas — blue.

But being on what progressives call “the right side of history” is no substitute for governing well and wisely, something that Zohran Mamdani intuited from the start of his tenure as New York City mayor. You have to get things done and deliver tangible results for the citizens you serve. 

Luckily, there is the “sewer-socialist” tradition — recalling unabashedly Leftist mayors in the previous century who won renown (and re-election) by focusing relentlessly on basic good government and the delivery of services to the working majority. That tradition, which Mamdani has sought to revive, teaches that ideological purity can only take you so far, which is to say, not very far. 

It is here that the past must not be a prologue. Beginning in the mid-2010s through the early 2020s, progressivism came to be defined by “wokeness” — a puritanical approach to politics that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor according to racial and gender identity. In addition to grating on voters with its hectoring tone, woke politics undermined class-based solidarity — once the linchpin of Left and labor politics — by dividing populations along identitarian lines.

It’s telling, then, that in 2026 “wokeness” was no longer the animating issue it had been in previous elections. Here, the Republican Party became a victim of its own success. After Trump’s 2024 victory, wokeness receded in many progressive institutions, which made it harder for conservatives to evoke its specter to motivate voters.

A broad “vibe shift” was the result, with even the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wondering out loud whether the whole enterprise had gone too far. The obsession with race and gender identity didn’t actually work: it alienated large swaths of the American public and led, at least in part, to Joe Biden’s catastrophic decision to elevate Kamala Harris as vice president.

Going forward, the Left must resist the temptation to re-entertain racial and gender-based identity politics. The danger is that, as enjoyable as power and success may be, they breed overconfidence as well as overreach. Whatever the midterm elections were, they were not a mandate for divisive cultural politics. The good news — for Democrats, at least — is that wokeness has been replaced by Israel-Palestine as the primary progressive litmus test. And unlike many woke causes, this one brings Democrats in line with the median voter. More Americans today sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel, a dramatic reversal from just a few years ago. Fact is, Israel-skepticism is now the majority, mainstream position in American political life — including among Republicans under age 50.

Some on the pro-Israel Right will no doubt counter that the criticism of Israel amounts to the latest iteration of wokeness. But that isn’t quite so. For one thing, this is an issue that implicates world-historic events, such as the Iran war and the stability of the Middle East, unlike pronoun preferences and so-called “microaggressions” at the workplace. 

For the most part, Palestine’s advocates speak not the language of special pleading — “as a member of oppressed class X” — but that of universal rights. At stake aren’t the cultural preferences of the urban precariat, but the principle that Washington can’t underwrite and diplomatically back a permanent military occupation of a people who aspire to self-determination. That sort of Enlightenment-based moral universalism is a much more comfortable place to be for the Left, historically speaking. It also has the benefit of being intellectually coherent.

What the decline of wokeness means, in practice, is that progressives don’t have to be particularly “progressive” on hot-button issues like trans athletes participating in women’s sports, as long as they’re progressive on Palestine. The reason a relative moderate like Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff is largely accepted by the Left is that he’s sufficiently critical of Israel. So he gets a pass. (Ossoff is also Jewish, and the fact that Democrats may very well nominate him for president belies the accusations that the party is in the grip of an anti-Semitic fever.)

But it’s not just a matter of resisting the siren call of woke. It is important for the Democrats to continue moderating on cultural issues in order to solidify their majorities and build as big a tent as possible in the years to come. Culture matters. People don’t vote solely on their material interests. With young men falling behind on a wide array of social and educational metrics, and amid a loneliness epidemic and a birth-rate crisis, Democrats need to be able to speak to America’s broader social malaise.

Fortunately, the midterms were a great day not only for democracy and Democrats — but for religion, too. In the post-Obama years, the Democratic Party became the secular party, with little space for outward expressions of faith. But that appears to be changing. Democrats are finally “getting” religion. Three of the most prominent Democratic candidates — El-Sayed, James Talarico, and Hamilton — were openly and unapologetically religious. They made their faith a central part of their pitch to voters. And they won, including (again) in red states.

Talarico and Hamilton are now standard-bearers of a new and emboldened Christian Left. It was less clear exactly how El-Sayed’s faith informed his specific policy positions, although he did occasionally sound more “conservative” notes on cultural issues like gambling and porn addiction. While critics tried to smear him with the Islamist label, if anything — as Yglesias amusingly noted — it might have helped him to be “a bit more ‘Islamist,’” in the sense of being broadly traditionalist on cultural values, which would have appealed to moderate voters.

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Get ready for Left populism

By Ryan Zickgraf

But religion isn’t just, or even primarily, about being socially conservative. As the evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk and I argue in our new book Can Religion Save Democracy? (excerpted here in UnHerd), both the Christian and Islamic traditions lend themselves to pluralism, intellectual humility, and learning to live with deep difference. Final, definitive judgments about our fellow citizens are God’s alone. If God is the All-Knowing, then not knowing is part of what makes us human. This opens up space for a more generous and forgiving approach to politics.

This generosity has more direct political implications for Democrats. Another temptation — and this one will probably be harder to resist — is to interpret their electoral mandate as a license to punish Republicans, hearkening back to the endless Russiagate investigations and impeachment proceedings of the first Trump term. Retribution might feel good, but it will only narrow the tent and alienate independents and disaffected Trump voters. 

Talarico’s and Hamilton’s “neighbor-love” Christianity offers a much more inclusive and affirmative vision, in stark contrast to the Christian Right’s apocalyptic preoccupation with vengeance and casting progressives as enemies of both God and the state. If vengeance is God’s alone, then we can be confident that God will sort it out, not necessarily now but in the next life. Adopting a posture of what Kaemingk and I call “delayed justice” can help relieve tension and minimize the existential tenor of our politics. Knowing that Trump will have to give account to a higher power — amusingly, Trump himself seems aware of this possibility — relieves the demand to punish him in the here and now.

The Left has always been animated by a utopian impulse. One might even call it a “religious” impulse in that it speaks to a yearning for transcendence as well as deliverance. To be a progressive, after all, is to believe in progress, that the arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice” — a phrase not coincidentally coined by a theologian. This faith in politics and in human nature has often served the Left well, spawning the great moral crusades of American history, including the abolitionist and civil-rights movements. But it must be tempered by a recognition of its limits. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but it is long and uneven. Politics can help us, but it won’t — and probably shouldn’t — save us. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans’ political winter should be a lesson for Democrats: all it takes to lose a broad coalition is betraying a core pledge and becoming distant from voters’ real concerns. The roadmap for the Left, then, is clear enough: focus relentlessly on affordability, demonstrate competence at every level of government, and stay principled on Palestinian rights while reimagining the American relationship with Israel. Lastly, resist the twin temptations of cultural overreach and political retribution. Easier said than done, of course, but saying it would be a good start.

El-Sayed, speaking to Goldberg, pitched his insurgent campaign as a test of an “alternative hypothesis.” Voters hated the establishment so vehemently that they were willing to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump twice; they might do something stranger if offered a real alternative — like a Bernie Bro Muslim who antagonized the Democratic establishment nearly as often as he did the GOP.

On Tuesday night, El-Sayed looked like Nostradamus. He predicted he would beat Mike Rogers by seven points, and he won by nearly six in a state Trump carried two years ago. He did it as a Muslim candidate with a Muslim name, whom Trump and other Republicans repeatedly accused of being a jihadist. Haley Stevens’s entire case in the primary was that El-Sayed could not win. Her final act, pulling her endorsement and backing Rogers, was an attempt to make that true.

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Hell is other Leftists

By Ryan Zickgraf

Elsewhere, the populist Left won in places it had no business winning. Bernie Sanders spent the fall crisscrossing districts Trump carried, and his and AOC’s endorsees have turned up on the winning side of the map: Troy Jackson, a former logger and labor leader, unseated Susan Collins in Maine. Sam Forstag, a smokejumper and union leader, claimed victory in Montana. Randy Villegas, a professor and auto-shop owner, won in California’s Central Valley. DSA member Melat Kiros knocked off 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Denver and became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. And in the Senate, a party that spent years being told to run to the center flipped seats in Texas, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa by talking like the populist Left on prices, health care, and contempt for the wealthy and powerful.

In doing so, the Left might have finally killed the old “Third Way” theory of the Democratic Party, much like MAGA and Trump’s victory in 2016 upended the old corporations-first, free-trading, globalization-friendly GOP of the Paul Ryan era. 

The Third Way, for readers who missed the 1990s, was the project of making Democrats electable by making them more like Republicans. Born in the Democratic Leadership Council and perfected by Bill Clinton, the theory held that the party had lost the country in the Reagan-Bush era by looking like a union hall with a welfare office attached. The cure was to triangulate: embrace free trade, balance budgets, be tough-on-crime, cozy up to Wall Street, and promise that markets would deliver what government used to. A think tank, also called Third Way, still carries the banner in Washington. 

This strategy was perfected by Rahm Emanuel, who, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, took credit for the blue wave of 2006 during the tail end of the George W. Bush administration. Rahm-ism was about trying to please Lindsey Graham and Barney Frank alike with a mix of fiscal conservatism and cultural liberalism led by milquetoast technocrats, which would attract independent voters on the notion that independents demanded a mythical midpoint between the two parties’ agendas.

The logic of the Third Way continued into 2026, as Stevens and other moderate Democrats insisted that the Left had the enthusiasm, but ultimately could not win big elections in November. But on Tuesday, independent voters — and just about everyone else — swung hard to the Left. The blue wave was especially prominent among Latinos, Catholic voters, and voters younger than 30, with one poll suggesting that Gen-Z voters shifted 46 points since 2024. A NBC national exit poll also found that 17% of midterm voters call themselves democratic socialists, and 97% of those voted Democratic. Among voters 18 to 29, a full third say they are democratic socialists, while only 10% say they are MAGA. 

Ted Cruz may accidentally turn out to be the best political analyst of the 2026 cycle. Stumping for Mike Rogers in Michigan last week, the Texas senator made a prediction he clearly intended as a threat: if Abdul El-Sayed wins, he said, the Democratic nominee for president in 2028 will be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tuesday’s results could prove him right.

Now for the reality check: All of this doesn’t mean, as some archly suggested on social media on Tuesday, that “woke is back” and that Democrats are going to start putting their pronouns back in their email signatures, or wheeling out guillotines to use on Elon Musk — let’s hope not. Despite what Trump and the GOP have warned, there is no communist revolution around the corner. Maybe not even a New Deal-lite. “Democratic socialist” in an exit poll covers, in practice, everyone from the person who has a copy of Capital in their tote bag to the person who would like insulin to cost less. Ask many of these self-proclaimed socialists what they want, and the answer tends to be: lower prices, universal health care, and some relief from an economy suddenly being rewired by AI and an expensive war in the Middle East. 

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It’s the war, stupid

By Sohrab Ahmari

To give credit to the Left, it has promised to deliver affordability and economic benefits and it has toned down calls to end white privilege, abolish the police, and get you fired for your problematic Halloween costume. The Left has begun following the example of Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City on a sunny campaign to freeze rent and make buses free, and proved you can mute the worst of Woke 1.0, keep the substance, and talk like someone who wants to win. You can see the shift in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, too, whose turn toward a more welcoming, kitchen-table progressivism got the full Times profile treatment, in which she claimed to want a progressive movement “that is not rooted in judgment, castigation or being closed off.” 

Yet the Democratic Party — as a brand and institution — is still weak and unpopular, with a platform that fits on a bumper sticker: Stop Trump. Voters, ultimately, may have hired the Democrats the way you hire a bouncer, for whom or what they will keep out. Plus, midterms historically punish the president’s party; the second-term version is especially brutal, and this president arrived at the polls with historically bad approval numbers and a catastrophic Iran war. Voters were in a Vote Blue No Matter Who mood, a doctrine that turned out to be very flexible about who.

Ultimately, everything about this moment feels contingent. What happened Tuesday was a blue tsunami, to be sure, but it also looks less like a realignment than like another turn in a long dealignment, in which the electorate keeps hiring and firing whoever promises relief, because no one can stop creeping American decline. El-Sayed and the rest of the new Left have just been handed that job, and nobody, including them, is sure how to do it.

It’s the summer of 2026. Most of Murphy’s fellow Democrats have long given up on the sort of national soul-searching that followed President Trump’s first election in 2016. You remember: that brief window in which Left-of-center pundits and electeds crisscrossed the de-industrialized heartland for clues to why they had lost their working-class base. Soon, though, soul-searching gave way to lawfare aimed at reversing the election’s outcome: Russiagate, the Ukraine phone call, this, that — all futile.

Not Murphy. For several years, the senator has been on something like a spiritual quest: not to find God or himself, but what ails America at a much deeper level than most of the center Left has either allowed or even bothered with. Murphy’s new book, titled Crisis of the Common Good, is the thoughtful, surprisingly well-written, densely researched product of that quest. This, even as Murphy carries a separate persona as a fierce #Resistance liberal on social media and the network formerly called MSNBC. 

Whether these two dimensions can work together, and perhaps elevate him to higher office, is the central question of his career.

Crisis of the Common Good is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, its pages and notes section are littered with positive references to conservative intellectuals, mostly from the post-liberal-ish corner of the Right. These include the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the American Affairs editor and re-industrialization advocate Julius Krein, the political economist Oren Cass, and, ahem, yours truly.

“I’ve certainly been enamored of the intellectual Right,” he tells me, “and I think there’s a lot of overlap.” In a way, that understates things. Murphy’s deepest project involves translating to American terms and conditions the political tradition known as blue Labour in Britain and Left conservatism in continental Europe. 

Proponents accept the necessity and blessings of market activity. But they’re also acutely aware of the dangers posed by unrestrained capitalism to family, religion, belonging, and community — the goods historically cherished by conservatism. 

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The triumph of Lindsey Graham

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To mitigate the dangers, they turn to social-democratic means, or what Murphy in his book describes as the “social-contract” model of American political economy: business regulation, labor unions, wage floors, industrial policy, jealous guardianship of public goods that private actors can’t preserve even if they want to. The “conservative” or “blue” half of the equation identifies what must be preserved; the “Labour” or “Left” half sets out the means. 

Or as FDR, quoting Macaulay in a 1936 speech, put it, “Reform, if you would preserve,” adding in his own words: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” Reform the market if you care to protect society.

The words and speaker are significant. America came closest to adopting a blue-Labour or Left-conservative politics during the New Deal order, roughly from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. To cite one example: the New Dealers’ massive rural-development programs — emergency farm credits, foreclosure moratoria, rural electrification — kept hundreds of thousands of landowning families on farms they would otherwise have lost.

Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republican Party upheld these reforms in many areas, and even expanded their logic in others. Then came the neoliberal counterpunch under Reagan and the Bushes. Yet as Murphy is the first to admit in his book, neoliberal Democrats also did their part in tearing down the socially managed capitalism of the midcentury. 

The senator devotes the bulk of his book to chronicling the consequences with anecdotes and data. He organizes his chapters under several “cults” that enthrall Americans: the cults of profit, “everywhere,” technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption. (The religious undertone here isn’t accidental; surprising for a progressive, Murphy seems to premise his thinking on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally religious animals; all culture is cultus, and some cult or other always commands our obeisance.)

He opens the chapter on the profit cult, for example, by noting how he and his fellow parents are barred from filming their own kids playing hockey by the for-profit entities that now control much of youth sports. Why? Because the firms insist you pay a monthly fee to access footage from their proprietary cameras. 

The example is well-chosen. The small businesses and wealthy donors who once underwrote youth sports in his part of Connecticut did so not expecting to turn a profit, as Murphy notes. They did it because they valued the camaraderie and public-spiritedness cultivated — cultus again — by youth sports. But now, profit-maximizing enterprises have invaded this corner of American life; the days aren’t far when you can place Polymarket bets on high-school sports.

The examples pile up grimly: a lonely teenager who killed himself after an AI chatbot convinced him that he could join her in the afterlife; the class-based stratification of literally every corner of public life ($20 gets you someone who will stand in line for you at a congressional hearing; $100 a night gets you special amenities in the California prison system); the obscene commodification of higher education; and much else of the kind.

In the book — if not always in his cable-news commentary — Murphy frames Donald Trump not as the cause of these transformations and the social alienation to which they’ve given rise. Rather, Murphy treats Trump as a symptom. “Literally the first time I mention his name in the book,” the senator tells me, “it’s in the context of drawing him as a symptom, not the cause, of our spiritual rot.”

The distinction matters, because many conventional Democrats would prefer to frame Trump as a demonic aberration — the easier to avoid the systemic rot the 45th and 47th president has revealed. Says Murphy: “It’s so easy to blame all of our problems on him. He is the main character, and he is, perhaps, an existential threat to democracy, so he’s an important character, and he can’t be avoided. But I just worry that it’s not enough to beat him in an election.” The underlying political, economic, and cultural crises would still churn beneath the surface.

More than that, Murphy is surprisingly willing to acknowledge Trump’s preternatural ability to register and address America’s subterranean ailments, even as the senator vehemently disagrees with Trumpian solutions (such as they are). And while the post-liberal intellectuals of the American Right, he believes, offered useful diagnoses and prescriptions, “my impression is that Donald Trump has effectively obliterated that small but previously growing movement within the party” that sought to re-orient the Right toward worker power and social solidarity. I think that’s overstated but, alas, directionally correct.

So does the Left have anyone who comes close to Trump’s capacity to “get” American discontent? And wouldn’t Democrats have to change course on immigration, especially, if they want to get within striking distance?

In his book, Murphy identifies a sense of place and belonging as one of the goods ravaged by corporate-led globalization and neoliberal capitalism. He rails against the commercial ideology of “everywhere” that runs roughshod over local community — “a belief that efficiency and scale should trump rootedness and place, that it really doesn’t matter where you live so long as you can order the same products, watch the same streaming shows, and follow the same influencers online,” as he writes. 

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But isn’t American discomfiture with mass, low-wage migration — a defining cause for the Trump campaign in 2024 — part of the same rejection of the cult of “everywhere”? 

Murphy seems to bristle a bit at this question. “I hope I’ve put my actions where my mouth is. I spent five months in a locked basement room trying to drag my party to the center on immigration.” He was a major proponent of a bill that would’ve given the president the authority to close the border if average daily crossings crossed 5,000 in a given week. Restrictionists objected — rightly, I believe — that the president already has the statutory authority to shutter the border, while the bill championed by Murphy would have legitimized a huge number of illegal crossings annually as long as figures stayed south of the threshold.

He goes on: “I think you have to have an answer to the existing, often unrestrained migration patterns this country has dealt with over the last decade. It is hard to live in a country where people are different from each other, in which there are so many new entrants. And one of the ways you keep a multicultural, multilinguistic country together is to have clear rules about who can enter — how you become a member of our club, how you become a citizen, how you become a worker. The Democratic Party has been far too casual about answering that question. And I do believe there’s a way for the Democratic Party to be stronger on the question of border security, stronger on the question of a true immigration rule of law.”

Fair enough, but doesn’t the right to call somewhere home also entail the expectation of some stability in who else gets to live there? More to the point, the #Resistance Murphy has joined many further to his Left in calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What gives?

“Well, you have to have an internal immigration enforcement mechanism,” Murphy says. “You have to have a means to control the border. But he has literally built a personal political police force. There’s no way to just make a few personnel changes and have an actual internal immigration enforcement office that is obeying the law. So, yeah — I’m someone who believes we have to have a way to enforce our immigration laws internally. But I also believe we’re going to have to rebuild it in a different way when he’s gone.”

Perhaps this line — yes to what ICE does, no to ICE itself — is just enough to position Murphy in the sweet spot between a national electorate and where the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing is taking it. Speaking of which, is Murphy planning a presidential run in 2028?

“I mean, I don’t know,” he replies, sounding earnest. “I really don’t. A reporter said to me earlier today, this would not be the book you’d write if you were running for president — because it’s not a book about me. It’s a book about a deeper set of questions about the country. And I’ve had a couple of my friends — who I absolutely know are running for president in 2028 — text me and say, ‘Hey, listen, I think you’ve found a way to frame some things that people have been having trouble talking about, this spiritual rot in the country.’ And, you know, hopefully, if this gives a vocabulary to people to use in 2028.”

The evidence is becoming difficult to ignore. Last week, two Democratic Socialist of America members achieved electoral successes that underscore the movement’s growing ability to outcompete the party mainstream. In Maine, Graham Platner, who has described himself as a DSA member in online forums, clinched the nomination for the US Senate, besting the party’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills. On the other coast, Nithya Raman, the first DSA member elected to the Los Angeles City Council, advanced to a mayoral runoff against the establishment-backed incumbent, Karen Bass. 

Meanwhile, in New York City, fewer than five months after becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani is using his newfound political capital not to unify the Democratic Party, but to build a New York-based socialist faction in Congress. In a surprising escalation, he has endorsed the DSA-backed firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier in her bid to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and the progressive Brad Lander in his challenge to Rep. Dan Goldman. The Democratic establishment will now be compelled to spend millions to fend off these DSA primary challengers, no small feat for a party that needs significant funding to compete in the battleground races it must win to retake Congress.

The national Democratic leadership seems unwilling to publicly acknowledge the scale of the challenge emerging from the DSA and broader Left-wing movement. 

Unlike previous iterations of the American hard Left, today’s movement has learned to build a durable political infrastructure capable of producing candidates, mobilizing volunteers, and influencing Democratic politics. For more than a decade, this movement has quietly built a political ecosystem that operates independently from the traditional party. Organizations such as the DSA, Justice Democrats, and the older Working Families Party have spent years recruiting candidates, training activists, building donor networks, and developing local power. 

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Dems are losing a winnable election

By Alicia Nieves

The movement’s success isn’t measured only in the number of candidates it elects. It is also reflected in a growing capacity to shape Democratic politics. Across many cities, self-described progressives and DSA-endorsed candidates have assembled voting blocs on city councils and  successfully pressured moderate Democratic elected officials to slash police funding, ban ICE from city jurisdictions, and expand state and city funding for various social-welfare programs.

No organization has been more central to this effort than the Democratic Socialist of America. With more than 200 chapters nationwide, 100,000 members, thousands of highly motivated volunteers, and a growing roster of elected officials, the DSA has become the backbone of the modern socialist movement. Its greatest strength is the organization’s willingness to adapt its tactics to local conditions, now touting its presence, now deliberately obscuring its involvement when doing so is more electorally advantageous.

The rise of Graham Platner illustrates this point. It is now being revealed that his candidacy was largely manufactured by a handful of DSA members from the same networks that powered Mamdani’s election. Socialist operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan found Platner through a DSA-affiliated local activist group, but that affiliation never became part of his public profile. Instead, the duo built a carefully curated image of him as a humble veteran and oysterman. 

The operatives also managed to keep several major liabilities from coming to light before the primary, including his Nazi tattoo, allegations of manhandling his ex-girlfriends, and extramarital sexting. Now that Platner is the nominee, these DSA operatives have effectively saddled the Democratic Party with a nominee offering a socialist platform and enough personal baggage to sink its chances in Maine and damage the party’s broader brand heading into November.

If Platner’s campaign showcased the growing sophistication in defeating the party’s preferred picks in a primary, Raman’s challenge to Karen Bass reveals something more fundamental: the radical Left-wing movement will turn on Democratic incumbents — regardless of how much those incumbents have conceded to it. 

Bass wasn’t a moderate figure who resisted progressive demands from city lawmakers or the grassroots. She and Raman had worked closely together on their biggest shared priorities, including the city’s massive homelessness crisis. Bass also had the support of many of her progressive colleagues on the council, who chose to endorse her over Raman. But none of that mattered. The moment Bass became politically vulnerable, as she did after her mishandling of the Palisades wildfires, Raman filed to run against her. This is not a movement that can be appeased into loyalty, it is an insatiable insurgency that views propagating its own power as equally important, if not more so, than securing policy victories. 

Leading into the midterms, the Democratic Party faces the seemingly impossible task of forging a united campaign capable of winning enough moderate votes to flip at least one chamber of Congress, while simultaneously resisting a hostile takeover by a radical movement. Nowhere is the cost of that takeover more visible for Democrats than in Maine. DSA operatives built Platner from scratch and hid his liabilities long enough to push Janet Mills out of the race. Now that Platner is in the hands of the Democratic Party as its official Senate nominee, party officials have no choice but to defend him. Senate Democratic leaders have been forced to publicly rationalize his fitness to the moderate voters they can’t afford to lose. 

And it was the decision by the broader progressive ecosystem to challenge Karen Bass through Raman that helped transform what might otherwise have been a routine municipal election into a national headache for Democrats. It’s true that the DSA has thus far formally withheld its endorsement from Raman, in part over her tepid statements in support of Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Still, there’s hardly any doubt that she can be expected to push city politics closer to the group’s position.

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By michael tracey

The entry of television personality Spencer Pratt further amplified scrutiny of blue governance in the city and state, drawing national attention to the party’s failure to deal with homelessness and public safety. Perhaps unexpectedly, the race has also brought attention to California’s unusually slow vote-counting process and permissive election rules, both of which have long raised Republican ire. In that respect, the Los Angeles race has provided Republicans with a highly visible example to cite as they continue pushing the SAVE Act and its proof-of-citizenship voter requirements.

As usual, Democratic leaders have opted for damage control rather than direct confrontation in response to each of these power grabs. This posture of strategic ambiguity reflects a naive confidence that maintaining a peaceful coalition will eventually absorb DSA and progressive officials into the party apparatus and keep them under establishment authority. But that logic is flawed. It doesn’t account for the strength this movement has built at the local level, or its willingness to use local political power to resist submission to national leadership.

The tipping point may already be here. If Mamdani succeeds in helping even one DSA challenger unseat a sitting member of Congress, or if the candidate cultivated by DSA operatives captures the Maine Senate seat, it will demonstrate that the Democratic establishment can no longer protect its own incumbents. Once that assumption disappears, every safe Democratic seat becomes a potential target. Members of Congress will live in fear of the DSA or other Leftist organizations launching  primary challenges against them. The threat itself would become the most powerful leverage the movement has to push the national party to the hard Left. The party’s performance in the midterms, as well as its viability in the 2028 presidential election, will depend upon whether it can confront this threat. 

Be honest: you can’t tell. Hunter, the former-addict son of Sleepy Joe Biden, is Succession’s failson made flesh. In the HBO series, Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) is another damaged and furious second son, a meme-literate ex-crackhead who specializes in spectacular curtain-pulls, exposing the soiled halls of power to the hate-watching public. Biden, who resurfaced on X last week to celebrate seven years of sobriety before embarking on a trolly tirade against the Trump administration, is experiencing his KRoy rebellion moment: after holding a patricidal press conference calling his father Logan Roy a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar”, Kendall sets about plotting a sick social-media persona for the PR battle to come. His vision: “Good tweet, bad tweet, cool tweet, get-on-the-right-side-of-history tweet.” 

The purpose of Kendall’s too-online self-image is to broadcast edgelordy, trauma-inflected truth, dine out on family mythology and turn acrimony into audience capture. This, too, is the instinct of Biden: he too has no independent role, no electoral mandate and no coherent program, only his identity as the weirdly magnetic fallen son. His natural medium is not the Burisma boardroom (the Ukrainian natural-gas company to which Biden was accused of selling access to his father in exchange for an executive role) or the courtroom (he graduated from Yale Law and worked for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner before an extensive lobbying and business career). It’s the internet, that great hospice for aggrieved nepo babies with axes to grind. X rewards crashouts — posters by turns pathetic and lucid. Hunter, like Kendall, is confessional, vindictive and showmanlike, looking to expose the corruption of his father’s Washington world while benefiting from it. 

Hunter’s apparently spontaneous return to social media coincided with the release of his stepmother’s much-criticized memoir View from the East Wing, in which Jill details the fraught final stretch of Joe’s cursed presidential campaign, his prostate cancer diagnosis and ailing cognitive condition. In the memoir, Hunter’s role is as an exposed nerve for parents under pressure; his addiction and legal troubles are subsumed in the earnest Biden tableau, part of a family’s struggle. The X Hunter comes from a less stage-managed and more chaotic place — perhaps in huffy response to the media clucking around Jill’s book. It began with a mic-tap on 19 May: “I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me.” Get in, losers: next stop Truth Town. Then came the aforementioned tweet on 1 Jun celebrating his sobriety, to which one Xeeter responded with the infamous conspiracy theory that Hunter left a bag of coke in the West Wing in 2023 during his father’s presidency (a Secret Service investigation never found its owner). “It most definitely was not [mine]. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” was his banger reply; it has 246,000 likes and counting, making a bigger splash than any official or dignified confession — such as his 2021 addiction memoir Beautiful Things — ever could. Several Hunter Home Truths followed, with a focus on the Trumps. On 5 June, he posted: “[Jeffrey] Epstein didn’t hang himself. The Trumps and Epstein were best friends for decades.” Ventriloquizing Kendall, he explained his MO: “Be yourself. Radical honesty. No fucks given, no fucks taken. Everything else is just noise.” Realtalk straight from Little Guy Lane. 

Along the way he cuts through with serious Recovery Realness: “I smoked crack. I would never have wasted cocaine by putting it up my nose.” When a user reassuringly called “Least Retarded Liberal” accuses him of being “part of the Epstein class”, he pleads to the “exact opposite” with a Bukowski-worthy grope for anti-glamor: “I wasn’t on a private island smoking crack. I was at the Super 8 off I95 in West Haven. Very different class of people, and with more integrity than any of those people.” Like any white-bread Yalie ironically slumming it with the povvos at Popeyes, Hunter thinks he’s communing with the Real America; he doesn’t get that with the click of his fingers he could have switched the strip lighting of a budget motel for the tinkling pianos of a Georgetown steakhouse. Searching for crack rocks on the soiled floors of Super 8s isn’t the flex you think it is when the deep-pile carpets of DC were a phone call away. But the often-insufferable language of recovery provides all the Real Boy cover he needs: like his HBO hologram Kendall Roy, Hunter tells himself he’s more authentic than his privileged peers because he’s been a junkie.

And just like Roy, Hunter sees the revelation of the “real him” as an important moment for a waiting America. In a tweet from Sunday — one of many, by the way — he addresses his “haters”, promising “total transparency. Finally on my terms. Not yours.” Yet Biden is one of the most tragically overexposed figures of the 21st century — compromising material allegedly from his laptop was leaked to Maga figures and the New York Post in 2020, and chaotic images of drug use, sex and other humiliating acts have circulated ever since (the scandal has a strange afterlife as a feature on gay X, where posters thirst over his nudes). All this lends him a strange nihilistic freedom: the worst is surely already out there — and besides, he was pardoned on gun and tax cases by his father shortly before he left office, meaning he is immune from related federal charges between 2014 and 2024. Go nuts!

Hunter’s sense of injury has long family roots; his personal struggles lie along a continuum of clan tragedy. Joe Biden’s political story began with catastrophe: in December 1972, just weeks after being elected to the Senate at 29, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. His sons Beau and Hunter survived but were badly injured; Biden was sworn into the Senate from Beau’s hospital bedside. The widowed young father commuting home from Washington to Delaware every night became the picture of resilience, of moral authority. Then, in 2015, Beau died of brain cancer at 46. He was the golden son: attorney-general of Delaware, Iraq vet, the natural political heir. Hunter was the surviving son under impossible pressure; he was the anti-Beau: a damaged addict, a liability. Since then, like the Roy boy, he has veered between rebelling against the family empire and identifying as its chief victim. 

All this pulls focus from the bone-dry Democrats because unlike them, Hunter isn’t bloodlessly boring: his persona is not focus-grouped but fuming. This enfant terrible aside, Maga has mainly had a monopoly on wildcards: its streamers, memers and reply guys have always snubbed the institutional sobriety of professional Dems. Hunter provides the chaotic charisma otherwise seen as copyrighted by loose-cannon Trump kids, or Hillbilly Vance, or the million digital demagogues who n-word their way into the social-media rage cycle every day. Hunter is a drop of deranged water in the desert, precisely because his tirades reek of 2am. 

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For Hunterheads, who appear to skew young, Dem and male, Biden isn’t a political force as much as a fandom object — endlessly quotable and beyond embarrassment. These guys don’t love Hunter as straightforwardly as Maga fans love Trump; “loving” Hunter isn’t about endorsing or agreeing with him, just thinking he’s hilarious. Hunter’s fanbase fetishizes his damage and laps up his anti-pious spirit. But this distance poses a new danger: detachment and the wafting away of accountability. “Did Hunter cash in from his father’s power” is not being asked; “did you see his last tweet” is.

Meanwhile, Hunter’s return to social media has perturbed Republicans, who have come to see him as a malign symbol of Democrat decadence and corruption. But in terms of real political influence, they surely have nothing to fear from this slightly mad scion spitting facts to the lounge lizards of X. As a Washington dynasty, the Bidens are donezo; Hunter may be gunning for the Trumps on the Epstein scandal but as an effective court jester he is unlikely to shift the dial in the midterms. 

If Hunter Biden is Kendall Roy, what does that make us? Well, spectators. Fans. “He got me feeling like Lana Del Rey,” said one. This is not the mentality of a voter. Voters expect outcomes from Washington — lower taxes, abortion rights, border control, healthcare etc. Fans, however, demand only drama: continued installments, villainous turns, betrayals, quips, catchphrases. We want our politicians to resemble HBO prestige-television characters. We enjoy the parasocial sense that we know Hunter Biden intimately, we like following his self-flagellation and watching him pants his enemies. Politics is slow, procedural and boring; becoming fans prods us awake with plot twists. The reason the public keeps up with Hunter’s mental X timeline is that these days nowhere does the drama of wounded heirs, ailing patriarchs, revenge, secrets and humiliation play out better than in real-life politics. Well, not unless Succession gets another season. 

And what of it? Well, in time we might watch the Democrats reorganize themselves around the sordid appeal of figures like Hunter, lauding charisma, humiliation and narrative propulsion above expertise and competence. This has already happened within Maga. The Biden boy, like second-term Trump, is enacting a revenge fantasy; both, to the watching “fans”, are not ridiculous but iconic. This should worry us. My advice to Hunter: remember how Kendall Roy gets on. It’s not pretty. 

Regardless of their chosen parties and aesthetic differences, all three figures are vintage throwbacks from a dying era of US politics: the urban machine boss.

For all the recent talk of Trump as a Bonapartist or an “American Caesar”, he’s more like a supersized version of William “Boss” Tweed, the Democratic honcho who dominated New York politics via an elaborate system of patronage centered around Manhattan’s Tammany Hall. Tweed was only the most notorious example of a bigger phenomenon.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, “bossism” reigned in metropolises like New York and Chicago, cities where social and economic policy was made through political horse-trading and personal networks rife with varying levels of corruption. These networks were led by strong mayors and executives, the the Buck-Stops-Here types once wryly depicted in old newspaper editorial cartoons as tough-talking, cigar-chomping kingpins.

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One boss that Trump has sometimes looked to with a sense of nostalgia is Meade Esposito, the swaggering king of the Brooklyn Democratic Party from 1969 to 1984. Esposito was described by one one historian as “an ‘old school’ king-maker: a political fixer whose machine was fueled by loyalty, patronage, and a quid-pro-quo system that resulted in a bevy of municipal corruption scandals and inquiries”. To Trump, though, Esposito was a hero, whom the 45th and 47th president has praised for ruling “with an iron fist”. As Trump told The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, “I figured that the Mitch McConnells would be like him in terms of strength.”

The boss’s admiration for bossism has now yielded a pardon for Rod Blagojevich. Lord knows that Blagojevich tried to govern like a boss. The problem was that the former Illinois chief executive made the mistake of doing so while Chicago’s machine was being scrapped for parts. The old brand of politics was supplanted by the new Democratic Party as embodied by Clintonite disciples Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama — both Chicagoans who harnessed mass media, celebrity, NGOs, and fundraising prowess, replacing the backscratching loyalists of old with bloodless progressive technocrats.

It has now been 16 years since Blagojevich was impeached and ousted as governor, one of a long line of Illinois politicians imprisoned for political corruption. Among his crimes: lying to federal agents and holding up money to a children’s hospital in exchange for campaign contributions. Most notably, Blagojevich tried to sell access to Obama’s Senate seat in 2008 after Obama left to run for president (the FBI secretly wiretapped Blagojevich saying of Obama’s vacated job: “I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.”)

It was a shockingly blatant and clumsy example of quid pro quo, but it may have been seen as business as usual in a different era of Illinois politics. Consider the example of Jacob Arvey, a Chicago Democratic boss of the Forties infamous for providing virtually anything for residents of his ward, including legal counsel, apartments, and even wooden legs and glass eyes in exchange for votes. His advice in politics was purely transactional: “It’s very simple. Put people under obligation to you.”

But when the well-coiffed Blagojevich tried to put people under obligation in the aughts, he was convicted of a host of corruption-related crimes. In 2010, he appeared on four episodes of Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice, during his national innocence tour before heading to prison to serve 14 years; he only served eight years behind bars before Trump commuted the sentence in 2020 (ending Blagojevich’s prison stint without formally clearing his name or wiping his record).

At the time, Trump made it clear that he saw parallels between Blagojevich’s case and the FBI’s inquiry into his own alleged — and later disproved — “collusion” with Russia. It was notable that Robert Mueller served as FBI director when the bureau investigated Blagojevich and later led the special-counsel probe that would clear Trump of collusion.

Blago has kept a low profile since his exodus from jail. He has been recording Cameo videos and occasionally performing ironic covers of Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock at Chicago street festivals. There was little reason now to pardon Blagojevich, as he has no political favors to return — unless, that is, it’s Trump magnanimously “recognizing game”.

Then there is the Eric Adams case. Unlike Blago’s run-ins with the law, his case is more recent, and a lot more complicated to navigate. Adams, a Democrat, was considered an outsider in New York’s 2021 mayor’s race. The former NYPD captain was the polar opposite of Michael Bloomberg’s elite technocrat. He was an aspiring Machine Man, the kind of dealmaking Gotham politician who helped Trump land millions in tax abatements for his properties in the wake of the Big Apple’s fiscal crisis in the Seventies.

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But like Blago, Adams got caught playing bad machine politics. In September, he was hit with a five-count federal indictment for bribery, fraud, and campaign-finance violations. Prosecutors alleged that the mayor quietly received more than $100,000 worth of illegal campaign contributions, plus free luxury travel, in exchange for doing favors for the Turkish government. Adams pleaded not guilty, suggesting that he was being targeted with lawfare by the Biden administration because he criticized the Democrats’ loose immigration policy. (In reality, Adams was all for welcoming tens of thousands of newcomers from points south before he turned against it.)

As with Blagojevich, Trump publicly sided with Adams this week, expressing sympathy for his claim that he was unfairly targeted for political reasons. “We need great Judges and Politicians to help fix New York and to stop the kind of Lawfare that was launched against me”, he posted on Truth Social.

In response, Trump’s Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against the mayor. Remarkably, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove wrote that the decision wasn’t about the merits of the case. Instead, Bove claimed that the case was interfering with Adams’s ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration”. There’s a not-so-small catch. The DOJ left open the possibility that charges could be refiled on Adams following a review.

Perhaps, then, Trump is treating the Gotham’s mayor like an old-fashioned machine boss who is gaming the system for an underling while expecting something in return. Meade Esposito and Boss Tweed would be proud. Game recognizes game, indeed.

Now the race for the next leader of the Democratic National Committee, to be elected on 1 February, is an opportunity to confront the party’s utter collapse in Middle America and chart a new course. Whether the Democrats will seize the chance turns on the resolve of the winner to buck the party’s subservience to donors and allocate resources to fresh candidates in former swing states.

The two most prominent contenders — Wisconsin party chairman Ben Wikler and Minnesota chairman Ken Martin — are workhorses adept at the art of coalition management. As Midwestern white guys, Martin and Wikler could help the party stanch the hemorrhage of Democratic support among their own demographic. But while they have sounded populist notes, their appetite for a shake-up has yet to be tested.

The backdrop is bleak. Progressives are demoralized over The Squad’s diminished size. Red-state Democrats are reeling from the loss of Sens. Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, and Bob Casey. And establishment liberals such as Chuck Schumer have rationalized defeat by explaining that workers “didn’t realize” how much Democrats “care for them”. Party activists can’t spot any would-be saviors in the distant horizon.

The job of the next DNC chairperson won’t be easy or glamorous. He or she will face the daunting task of rebuilding the Democratic coalition in nearly every part of America. Not only are Democrats on a backfoot in the Rust Belt and former Sun Belt strongholds like Florida, they must reckon with Trump’s surprising inroads among working-class voters and people of color in deep-blue areas.

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To be effective, the DNC leader will have to intervene forcefully in big debates over ideology and strategy. Grassroots activists, Left-wing intellectuals, and labor leaders such as Shawn Fain of the United Autoworkers are urging a showdown with the donor class and corporate power to compete with Trump’s GOP. Others who are close to the party elite are proposing a “common-sense” approach to economics, which some suspect is code for a Wall Street-friendly tack.

As the DNC’s 448 members gear up to vote, it’s far from certain that the victor will have a mandate to court the working-class voters who have defected to Trump since 2016. Still, there are hopes for serious change following the hapless tenure of Jaime Harrison, a friend of elite lobbyists who staunchly defended the party’s embrace of identity politics after critics blamed it for November’s humbling results.

At first glance, Martin and Wikler, the two frontrunners, seem well-positioned to oversee a “reset”. Each boasts of having overhauled his respective state party. Each enjoys the backing of labor unions, grassroots organizations, and reform-minded establishment figures. And both have bluntly stated that the party lost the working class this past election.

The basic assumption is that either of these two middle-aged white men from the Upper Midwest is suited to reconnecting the party with Gen-X and Millennial men without a college education — a demographic group that extended its shift to the right in November. A victory by either Martin or Wikler, the thinking goes, would install a competent leader bent on revamping the party’s message and cultivating down-ballot insurgents in states that have swung to the GOP since the Obama era.

Yet there are reasons to doubt the Democrats will be so easily led out of their morass. Most centrally, there is no obvious basis for a truce between the party’s Left flank and its more centrist members. Many progressives are unwilling or afraid to discipline “the Groups” — the professional advocacy organizations that are widely seen as responsible for the party’s unpopular and outré positions on race, immigration, gender, sexuality, drugs, and criminal justice. This reputation has overshadowed progressives’ support for a strong welfare state, consumer protection, and workers’ rights, limiting their appeal among workers who lean Right or simply hold mainstream views on cultural questions.

The “moderates”, meanwhile, comprise two factions that generally disagree on economic priorities: Rust Belt populists who shrink from the excesses of the “woke” Left, and neoliberals who once exploited identity politics but are now willing to muzzle “the Groups” if that means regaining control of the party.

Although both moderate factions have recently stressed the importance of tackling high prices, they are divided on tariffs, corporate oversight, and the need for long-term re-industrialization. Team Biden’s gamble on industrial policy failed to stir the electorate, leaving populists who supported such efforts without a clear framework to move forward. And they diverge from progressives on key questions such as border security, the pace of the green transition, and the economic threat posed by China. This impasse has emboldened neoliberals backed by major donors to discourage a push toward populist economics.

Bridging these divides while preventing a return to neoliberal orthodoxy will require clearheaded leadership. An effective DNC leader must bend progressives and neoliberals on the issues where they are most vulnerable. Given Martin’s and Wikler’s Midwestern backgrounds, it is reasonable to wager that both would favor the pragmatic populists. Neither contender, however, seems terribly inclined to force hard choices on the party’s dominant factions.

Take Wikler, whom pundits have depicted as more likely to excite the progressive base and who just garnered the endorsements of seven Democratic governors. While some high-profile commentators see him as bolder than Martin, he has embraced the same naked appeals to identity politics that have backed his party into a corner. Wikler has also been credited with “nationalizing” elections in Wisconsin to make them more competitive for Democrats. This involves attracting major media to lesser-known contests and mobilizing party activists behind local candidates whose election could have a decisive impact on Democratic priorities.

In the right context, this strategy can generate momentum and pool resources for progressive challengers to Republican incumbents. But as disastrous races elsewhere have demonstrated, it can also exacerbate perceptions in places typically ignored by Democrats that the party elite is only interested in flashy contests that fill up campaign war chests.

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Martin, meanwhile, may be too mild-mannered to forge meaningful compromises. A leader possessing sangfroid still must be able to throw a punch, particularly in the age of Trump. Avoiding gaffes that reinforce perceptions that Democrats are as much in the pocket of Wall Street as the GOP is also crucial. In a recent candidate forum, Martin appeared to astound himself when he blurted that Democrats will take money from “good billionaires … who share our values,” but not from “those bad billionaires”. Oops.

Still, there is some evidence he has more of an independent streak than Wikler. Martin has focused on strengthening the autonomy of local party branches and irritated the elite by establishing a group of state leaders that is separate from the DNC. For the sake of rebuilding local trust, such a strategy might be worth the price of angering consultants and grandees from the Northeast and California. Democrats are in desperate need of someone willing to clean house and keep the liberal establishment at arm’s length.

Whoever prevails, however, must do more than hone a new image. For Democrats to have any hope of winning back the working class, they need to recall the policies but also the party vision that gave succor to struggling Americans from their party’s founding in the Jacksonian era to the New Deal and the Great Society.

Egalitarianism, the vitality of a free society, and a belief that active government could spur national progress: these were the ideas that the Democratic giants of the past masterfully combined in their appeals to ordinary people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman could denounce injustice in plain language while arousing the spirit of optimism once considered inherent to the American experience.

In more practical terms, that meant adapting the original progressive tradition of the Midwest, predicated on reining in monopolies and forging alliances between workers, small businesses, and farmers. For decades, this approach to coalition-building was embraced by Left-leaning Democrats, from populists like Oklahoma’s Fred Harris to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It flourished until the end of last century, when Bill Clinton’s commitment to globalization sundered his party’s ties with small towns and fading industrial regions.

Biden, to his credit, did draw on this older progressive tradition through his administration’s antitrust policies. Despite stark obstacles in the heartland, rallying the party once more to the anti-monopoly banner is probably the best way to revive its fortunes. The alternative is to court America’s wealthy suburbs — an approach that would close the door on New Deal liberalism for good and that may not even be worth the candle, judging by Harris’s campaign.

Yet with the exception of Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate who pursued a 50-state strategy in the mid-aughts, all of the party’s recent leaders have been careerists beholden to the donor class. This has deepened the sense among disenchanted activists that the obstacles to major reform also run through the DNC. To rebuild the Democratic coalition, the DNC will have do more than serve as the gatekeeper of critical campaign funds.

The overarching task of the next four to eight years, then, is to build the bridge to a new era that Biden himself couldn’t deliver. That demands identifying future leaders who speak to the common interests of American workers, while encouraging stances that serve America’s long-term security.

It also means resisting pressure to cede control of the party’s direction to powerful presidential aspirants. The 2028 field is already anticipated to feature ultra-wealthy players such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and celebrity tycoons like Mark Cuban. A party leader intent on protecting democracy from oligarchy would do well to act as Martin has and defy efforts to centralize power in patronage networks that resemble Trump’s.

No matter how ambitious the next DNC leader turns out to be, stoking an anti-donor insurgency won’t come naturally. Democrats in the Trump era have become the party of institutions — so much so that they can’t see the powerful interests that have suffocated reform in the cradle. But if the party has a soul, its salvation begins with a revolution against its own monopolists. A venerable tradition calls out to those willing to take up the gauntlet.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

Today, these words ring just as true in late neoliberal America. And it is the Democrats, formerly the party of the people, who occupy the place of the “Tory establishment”, with all the same lordly arrogance but with none of the Old World aristocratic charm.

The Democrats could learn from this comparison as they attempt to rebuild. For just as Disraeli concluded that the Tories should seek to harmonise class differences rather than flattening them, so too can Democratic elites serve ordinary citizens while acknowledging the chasms that exist between them.

But who can possibly assume the part of an American Disraeli? (Certainly not a revived candidate Kamala Harris!) Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, may have been lucky to be passed over as Harris’s vice-presidential pick, for he is now set to be a leading presidential candidate in 2028. With his tailored, tie-less suits, and his too rehearsed “White Obama” speaking style, he represents almost perfectly just the kind of professional managerial elite that has come to dominate the Democratic camp. Yet he has earned the confidence of moderate and working-class voters, precisely the demographics which sank Harris. In 2024, Shapiro increased his national recognition without necessarily being tarred by the Harris campaign’s disastrous performance.

Unlike the flamboyantly folksy Tim Walz, with his camo gear and football coach anecdotes, or Shapiro’s intraparty rival John Fetterman, with his hoodie and shorts, the governor has come far with voters without affecting the aesthetics of a working-class person. Instead, he has attempted to reach the working class through clever policy innovation, notably, his trailblazing first executive order which removed college requirements for 65,000 public service jobs. His fierce mutual antipathy with the pro-Palestine Left, as a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, has also served to establish distance between himself and his party’s noisy activist class; the repair of a collapsed bridge in record time (weeks rather than months) demonstrated a basic competence rarely seen in elected officials.

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MAGA must be reborn

By Michael Cuenco

This approach of lifting up workers without trying too hard to appear to be like them is a promising avenue. Delivering tangible results while rejecting the tiresome diversions of progressive pet causes could regain the trust of voters. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the patronising and moralising mentality of the Democratic political class, which either looks to make everyone else like them, through the aggressive propagation of the “correct” social values, or else attempts to turn them into another captured client group, to be pandered to with shallow symbolic gestures. Once more, the contrast must be drawn with Walz, whom Darel E. Paul has described as “a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man”.

The Democratic Party’s unfolding identity crisis, a kind of “social class dysphoria” to use a metaphor that would make sense to its gender activists, arises out of the contradiction between its historical — but now grossly outdated — self-conception as the New Deal-era party of the underdogs, and its actual condition as the natural home for college-educated elites. Now, of course, a college diploma by no means guarantees economic success — there are “poorly educated” millionaires in America as well as minimum-wage baristas with PhDs — but, on average, four-year college educations are still a reliable indicator of social mobility, economic advancement, and most of all, cultural prestige.

To resolve this tension, Democrats raised in the meritocratic pieties of the Clinton-Obama era will have to confront a difficult truth. The future of politics will not rest on realising a rational unity between enlightened liberals and working people (“why do they vote against their interests?”), but on acknowledging that there are natural and likely irreconcilable cultural differences between the two classes, which can neither be erased by the “march of progress” nor elided by Obamaesque appeals to a post-partisan America.

Yet again, Disraeli put it best: elites, whether in industrial England or post-industrial America, must embrace the existence of distinct “classes of the realm… equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give strength and variety to our national life”. Thus if, as Adlai Stevenson (who was himself a Disraelian figure) said, the Democrats should be the “party of everyone” — not “everyone” crudely understood as an undifferentiated mass, but as an organic community of variegated and interdependent estates.

Holding society together, in spite of its entrenched moral asymmetries, calls for a settlement of some kind: not a mass conversion of the proles to the “National Church” of the patricians, but rather a social compact in which the latter must serve the former out of duty or noblesse oblige.

Such an effort would amount to an American application of the Disraelian ideal of “Tory Democracy” or “one-nation conservatism”, in which class differences are affirmed but also harnessed and synthesised in the service of national unity, industrial progress, and social order. An analogous “one-nation liberalism” may not strike a chord in a culturally egalitarian and “middle-class” republic like the United States, but it is at least premised on a more realistic account of the starkly bifurcated society America has become. And if the Democrats are indeed the “conservative” faction in this society, Disraeli’s politics of pragmatic inter-class harmony may be a better standard for the party than either the pseudo-revolutionary radicalism of the campus Left or the genteel progressive puritanism of the liberal establishment (which puts one in mind of Disraeli’s rival Gladstone).

In practice, it would call on professional elites to follow the lead of Shapiro’s governorship in finding pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, instead of pursuing grand projects of moral homogenisation. It would seek to help the working class materially — through higher wages, child tax credits, and accessible vocational education — while giving them a greater stake in their government (as both Shapiro and Disraeli did). Yet it would do all this without expecting to initiate them into the same ideological milieu that progressives inhabit, by elevating more non-college-educated Americans to positions of public authority and cultural visibility. A more broadly representative Democratic Party along these lines would have paid more heed to concerns around inflation and immigration than did the Biden-Harris administration.

And just as this settlement would allow working-class citizens “to be themselves”, so to speak, it would also let the members of the professional managerial “estate” inhabit their own rarified niches and lifestyles as private and non-generalisable subcultures. If, as Pennsylvania state senator Jordan A. Harris said, the current Democratic Party is “too much Starbucks and not enough Dunkin’ Donuts”, then a better balance has to be struck. Yet it will nonetheless have to be one which retains and accommodates the sensibilities of both the macchiato-drinker and the Munchkin-eater.

Under such a dispensation, no longer will progressives have to keep searching in vain for “our own Joe Rogan” or “working-class whisperer”. They can instead emulate America’s greatest aristocrat and its greatest democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speaking freely in the tone and tenor of a patrician elite — but from a place of genuine respect and decency for all fellow citizens, whatever their station. Whether Shapiro, or any Democrat, can embody such an archetype remains to be seen. But, relegated to four long years of opposition, the party should assess the reasons for its repudiation while considering the line uttered by Disraeli’s heroine Sybil: “Power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the people.”

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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Taylor Swift, America's national hero

By David Samuels

As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

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By David Samuels

In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

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It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.

The progressive Mission District in San Francisco has become ground zero for a form of Lefty nativism that scorns newcomers and most forms of economic growth. In a city renowned for its inclusive diversity and technological innovation, it is here that a bitter racialised activism has taken root.

Roberto Hernandez, self-styled “mayor of the Mission” and candidate on the ballot in local elections this year, is one of those activists. He has been waging a decade-long war to keep the neighbourhood, in his words, “a Latino barrio”. He has campaigned furiously against shuttles for tech workers, new restaurants and bars, and even a low-cost bike-sharing programme — all in the name of battling gentrification and those developments that might alter the demographics of the predominantly Latino area.

Plans for hundreds of new housing units at vacant lots or blighted areas were defeated by a Hernandez-led coalition. Developers pitched nearly 400 below-market rate homes as part of their proposals, but Hernandez has said that he opposes anything that is not built at “100% affordable” rates. He demands vouchers for any black or Latino resident priced out of the city to first return before new residents are allowed to arrive.

“Delay, delay, delay,” said Hernandez of his strategy for stopping a proposed mixed housing development on South Van Ness Avenue by 26th Street. “Until we kill it,” another activist added.

In a barn-burning speech in 2015, Hernandez decried the influx of thousands of privileged “white techies” who he said gallivant around Dolores Park with the audacity to openly drink wine and smoke marijuana in full view of cops.

The hostility towards those perceived as racial outsiders is palpable. Several non-Latino small business owners, have cited ethnic intimidation from neighbourhood groups in the Mission. In one instance, an organisation tied to Hernandez helped block a Russian immigrant-owned bakery from leasing a vacant storefront previously occupied by a Mexican panaderia over the baker’s lack of Latino heritage. The pressure worked — over the last four years, the location has remained boarded up and bereft of any tenants.

Meanwhile, the Hernandez faction has placed onerous restrictions on various forms of policing and ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into failed homeless assistance programmes — the results of which are now world famous, as images of the city’s urban decay and untreated addiction-mental health crisis routinely go viral.

The Mission is now hardly gentrified. Rather than a hotbed of investment, 56 storefronts are empty and lots once viewed as prime real estate sit abandoned, accumulating trash and graffiti. Car break-ins and burglaries abound and drive-by shootings by gang members, once a relic of the distant past, have returned over the past year. The mass transit BART station is now a daily market for stolen goods, with young men hawking electronics and shampoo bottles still featuring their tags from the Best Buy and Walgreens stores.

New elections, then, represent an opportunity to shift this status quo. With the mayor’s office and several pivotal supervisor seats up for grabs, Hernandez and other far-Left candidates are vying to represent the Mission. Jackie Fielder, who has called to defund the police and restrict building projects, similarly never skips an opportunity to tout her candidacy on identitarian grounds as “a queer, Indigenous-Latina”. Fielder or Hernandez are favoured to win, but unlike previous years, these types of candidates might not be a shoo-in.

Because for the first time in recent memory, moderate liberals seeking pro-growth policies, less bureaucratic obstacles, and commonsense policing have organised and are pushing back. They have been on the march over the past two years, winning elections to remove the city’s anti-law enforcement District Attorney and several education commissioners who prioritised renaming schools over the basics of teaching children. Despite the doom loop narrative, change may be on the horizon.

The far-Left campaigns, however, offer the tempting allure of scapegoat politics. They blame nebulous landlords and tech workers and “gentrifiers” for every affliction facing the city, claiming that only they alone can finally prioritise the Mission’s true “natives”, as Hernandez has argued.

Such storylines not only sidestep scrutiny of the failed policies of the past decade, but obscure a more vibrant history than these one-dimensional identity politics might suggest. The Mission’s past is rich with cycles of migration and economic growth.

Once home to indigenous communities, the land next saw the arrival of Spanish missionary explorers who gave the neighbourhood its name with the first Catholic church. The gold rush brought waves of Scottish, German, Italian, English and Scandinavian arrivals, migrants who built the ornately decorated Victorians that line the main boulevards. Successful merchants and traders constructed stately homes, while the business corridors of Mission were self-sufficient centres of commerce. Following the 1906 fire, the neighbourhood swelled with those displaced by the disaster.

The Irish arrived in large numbers by the turn of the century, filling its eastern factories and warehouses with working-class labour. St. Peter’s Church in the Mission — now one of the largest Spanish-speaking congregations in the Bay Area — was once a bastion of the strong Irish majority.

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It was not until after the Second World War that many residents of European descent began moving out to be replaced by immigrants from Latin American countries. The Latino migration has its own storied and fascinating history, one that is vital to the Mission’s identity. It is a community that has welcomed asylum seekers and those displaced by foreign conflict, and produced wonderful Mission-centric food and music inspired by far-flung cultures. The Chipotle burrito is said to have been inspired by local taquerias.

Hernandez, to his credit, has helped organise the widely attended Carnival, a daylong parade displaying the many cultures that make up Latin America, an event that has become a signature festival of the community. And he has pushed for vital job training and arts programmes for Mission youth, efforts that should be applauded. Yet he myopically views the neighbourhood as a territory claimed by one racial group, to the exclusion of all else. The post-dot-com arrival of Asian and young entrepreneurs as well as artists of every ethnic background should be welcomed equally. The stubborn rejection of new housing and business is a race to the bottom, ignoring credible economic research which shows that depressing the housing supply actually raises housing costs.

Many fear that any new influx of residents might threaten the neighbourhood’s character. But such anxiety is fuelled by the same concerns over any ethnic change. For an ultra-progressive sector of San Francisco, the mindset is downright reactionary.

The mix and blend of cultures and backgrounds is what makes the neighbourhood unique. The grand Lutheran church on 22nd Street and the breweries on Potrero Hill were built by 19th-century German immigrants. Now, the church is a Buddhist temple and nunnery, and the largest local brewery was recently purchased by a yoghurt billionaire of Kurdish ancestry. The most popular Mission burritos now include a Filipino fusion variety. Among the most generous donors to philanthropy in the neighbourhood are software developers born to Taiwanese and Indian immigrants, as well as white Americans born in New Jersey and Illinois who now call San Francisco home.

The anger at the arrival of white neighbours is misplaced. Decades ago, the inverse arguments were made to denounce “white flight”. Such double-standards only serve to create a nasty racial barrier, where superficial differences take precedence over behaviour.

At a forum earlier this month, taking place at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, the progressive candidates jostled for racial authenticity points, repeatedly reminding the audience of their Latino heritage and competing to fight the influence of outsiders, especially housing speculators and landlords. Hernandez opened his remarks with a nod to the venue, noting that he helped open this institution, a testament to his ethnic appeal.

Left unmentioned, though, were the venue’s humble roots. A century ago, it was Shaff’s Furniture Company, a small business run by German-Jewish immigrants who were known in the community for their relief efforts directed towards refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. And here is the irony at the heart of the Mission’s politics. For a community so transfixed on identity, its representatives fail to appreciate the actual history and diversity of the neighbourhood. Focusing on ethnic scapegoats and powered by racial chauvinism, it is fiddling while the Mission burns.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.

But Ty Pinkins, a slim and energetic African-American lawyer, decided to challenge the GOP incumbent for a US Senate seat anyway. As the 50-year-old told me of his decision to take on Roger Wicker, “Don’t be afraid to walk in the tall grass. That’s how I started.”

Born to an unwed 15-year-old mother, Pinkins chopped cotton as a boy to help feed his family, a fate David Rushing, chair of the Sunflower County Democratic Party, says is typical of poor boys from the Mississippi Delta. “We don’t have many gutters in Mississippi,” explains Rushing, “but we have a lot of ditches.” For Pinkins, then, the tall grass was the only route out of that Delta ditch.

The first in his family to graduate high school, he struggled to pay for college. So, Pinkins left Mississippi for the tall grass of the US Army.

A 21-year military career gave him a passport full of stamps, three combat tours, a Bronze Star, and a job in the White House. After retirement, Pinkins earned not one but two law degrees from Georgetown University. He turned down the big money of a Washington law firm for the Delta. 

Back in his hometown, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Pinkins published a memoir, 23 Miles and Running, and litigated hundreds of civil cases for the underprivileged. In 2021, he made national news by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of fired black farm labourers, who had been replaced by white South Africans. Filing suit and testifying before Congress on the issue, he forced a settlement. 

Taking note was Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman, Bennie Thompson. The chair of the January 6 Select Committee tapped Pinkins to run for the local school board. By the time Pinkins learned of Thompson’s desire, he had already publicly declared his candidacy for the senate seat. “The biggest problems are federal issues,” he tells me. “That’s what I’m interested in. Our state is last in everything that is good and first in everything that is bad.”

In theory, Thompson and state Democratic chair Cheikh Taylor promised Pinkins, the only Democrat to announce for the race, their party’s full support. But though he knew the contest would be an uphill struggle, Pinkins never expected a major hurdle would be Bennie Thompson — his own Congressman and the very politician to first have noticed his talents.

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At first, his phone calls asking for endorsements went unanswered. Then, when his phone did ring, respondents attacked, apparently upset that Pinkins’ hadn’t followed Thompson’s advice and run for his local school board. As Will Colom, a prominent black Mississippi attorney and party donor allegedly told him: “You will lose. You are a loser. And you will always be a loser.” A young Mississippi state representative also phoned. “Who the hell do you think you are, getting your name on the ballot?” they yelled. “You need to go through us gatekeepers.”

Gatekeeper. The term shocked Pinkins. Party insiders refused to support him simply because, as he tells me, “I didn’t ask anyone, ‘can I please run?’” The candidate’s astonishment went beyond personal ambition. With its pungent whiff of machine politics, what Pinkins calls Mississippi’s “Gatekeeper Syndrome” is the very problem “preventing our democracy at the state level from blossoming.”  

Not that everyone is surprised. When I asked Ralph Eubanks about gatekeeping he laughed. As the academic and writer puts it: “Welcome to poor ole beat down Mississippi.” To Eubanks, Gatekeeper Syndrome reflects the “way the Democrats think about their own state. It is learned helplessness. There are so many things that are broken that can’t be fixed that many just give up.” 

“Giving up” would oblige Democratic elites to abandon their prerogatives in favour of building a competitive party. So to safeguard their position, Bennie Thompson and his colleagues have adapted the strategy of that classic wheeler-dealer: Richard Daley. Just like Chicago, Eubanks tells me, Mississippi is a place where you “have to work your way up through the system or you are jumping the line.” He adds: “It’s not healthy at all because it stops someone who has talent and drive with an inspiring backstory. You’d think ‘let’s get behind the brother and help him out’ but that’s not happening.”  

From the outside, Mississippi is ruby red. Outsiders assume that Democrats like Pinkins have zero chance. But with an African-American population of 40%, it’s the blackest state in the union. A reliable Democratic bloc, the African-American vote means Democrats can win with high black turnout and a quarter of white ballots. In 2023, Brandon Presley used that formula to come within 26,619 votes of the governor’s mansion.  

White and black Mississippi Democrats can, and have, run competitive statewide races. But the problem isn’t at the top of the ballot. The issue, as Pinkins and others point out, are those gatekeepers, those machine politicians who think Mississippi’s Democratic Party belongs to them and them alone. No less important, gatekeeping means the bottom of the ballot stays empty. 

In the same cycle as Presley’s 2023 near-miss, there were contests for all 122 of Mississippi’s statehouse seats. Yet in nearly half of contests, Democrats failed to field a candidate, a phenomenon that affects up-ticket races too. As Michele Hornish, the executive director of the Every State Blue campaign group explains, simply fielding a state representative candidate gives the top of the ticket a 1.5% vote boost. Running candidates across the ballot is also a barometer of a party’s grassroots health. As Scott Kleeb, a lead organiser with Rural Americans for Harris-Walz, admits: “For the last several decades Democrats have not been building at the local, county, and state level,” especially in rural states like Mississippi. Of the nation’s 3,143 counties, Kleeb says that Democrats have a chair in just 300. 

To be fair, an increasing number of Democrats are prodding the system to change.

One example is Rickey Cole, a two-time Mississippi Democratic state chair and Pinkins’ campaign manager. Cole always intended to run a senate race while also re-building the state party’s grassroots. 

Cole’s strategy was to organise Mississippi’s 82 counties and appoint a campaign leader in all 1,762 precincts. From there, Cole says, it’s “just math.” In 2020, after all, some 400,000 registered Mississippi Democrats failed to vote. This year, Cole needs to mobilise around 178,000. Once the party got organised, the path to higher Democratic turnout was easy. “In rural Mississippi,” Cole explains, “if you provide the matriarch of the family a list of folks who are sporadic voters, they can get to them.” 

As Kleeb warns, moreover, this comprehensive approach is the only viable path to a Democratic revival in conservative redoubts like Mississippi. “Institutions matter,” he says. “We can’t go from candidate to candidate. Every campaign can’t build an airplane from scratch every four years.” 

But instead of endorsements and campaign cash, all Pinkins got was a cold shoulder. Mississippi’s African-American leaders — notably Mike Espy — refused even to meet, much less endorse. Appeals to the Congressional Black Caucus, Black Economic Alliance, BlackPAC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Dirt Road Democrats all went unanswered too. 

Behind it all was Pinkins’ former admirer: Bennie Thompson. 

Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman is the political kingpin of the Delta, and the state’s black political establishment. Thompson earned national attention as chair of the January 6 Select Committee, but at home he squelches democracy as Mississippi’s lead gatekeeper. Pinkins tells me that “fear of Bennie Thompson” has resulted in only three of Mississippi’s African-American state senators and representatives endorsing him. Others supposedly tell him: “I can’t host a fundraiser for you because of Bennie Thompson.” 

All the same, Pinkins persevered, and nearly two years on from his initial snub finally bagged a meeting with Thompson in May 2024. Much like their earlier interaction, Thompson was kind, heaping praise on Pinkins and promising his full support. “I commit to you,” he apparently said. “I will make a sizeable contribution to your campaign.” 

Yet once again, Pinkins would soon find this apparent warmth vanish, like dew in the Delta sun.  

Just days after their apparent reconciliation, the duo attended the Democratic State Convention. In an auditorium full of the state’s leading liberals, Pinkins awaited his promised endorsement. Instead, Thompson praised the white Brandon Presley as his “brother” and then promptly sat down. Audience members turned to Pinkins in astonishment. In July this year, at another Democratic gala, Thompson pulled the same stunt. Pinkins understood “that my own Congressman was clearly refusing to publicly support my candidacy.” 

And in late August, at the Democratic National Convention, Bennie Thompson took his gatekeeping public. At a Mississippi state delegation breakfast, Thompson supposedly told 100-or-so party leaders that “we need to support our candidates but some of them need to earn it. He needs to work for the support. He doesn’t get to walk up to the head of the table and think he’s going to get our support.” The Congressman never mentioned Pinkins by name — but then again he didn’t need to.

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Pinkins, for his part, has endured Thompson’s slights with grace, describing them as “the Congressman’s prerogative.”  Not that he’s sat on his hands either, instead throwing himself into grassroots campaigning. Gradually, perhaps, Mississippians have understood he’s a different sort of candidate from the gatekeeper stereotype, not least in terms of race. 

In the Deep South, most African-Americans run in majority-minority districts, developing little experience wooing white voters. Pinkins, by contrast, had spent two decades in the military, meeting civilians and leading soldiers from every walk of life. And like Georgia or North Carolina, Mississippi’s demography is changing. Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s scandal-plagued GOP nominee for governor, won his race for lieutenant governor on the backs of white votes. He may bring pizza to a porn shop, but he also reveals that white voters in 2024 are not what they were in 1965. He also shows that Southern whites are more open to voting for black candidates. For their part, Cole and Pinkins have eyed white Yankee transplants to Mississippi’s Memphis suburbs, as well as snowbirds, soldiers, and shipbuilders in towns like Pascagoula. In soliciting white votes, alongside the African-American base, Pinkins says he’s learnt that most voters crave the same thing. “They want someone they can trust,” he says. “They are so tired of politicians doing the same old things. We end that by meeting voters face-to-face.” Pinkins adds that Mississippians of all races are interested in a Delta boy like him “doing something unorthodox.”

More than that, meanwhile, Pinkins feels a moral obligation to take on people like Bennie Thompson. “Walking in the tall grass,” he says, “is doing what the average Mississippian can’t afford to do,People want politicians to have moral courage. They wonder: ‘Do you have the courage to the hard right or the easy wrong?’” 

By going public about Thompson’s behaviour, Pinkins believes he is doing that hard right. Perhaps. But there’s still a way to go until the gatekeepers are vanquished. As Pinkins explains, one issue are those black Mississippian Democrats still unwilling to cause civil rights legend John Lewis called “good trouble”.

“There are a select few black men who, because of Gatekeeper Syndrome, are stopping progress in Mississippi at the federal and state level,” he says, after a heavy sigh. “Their reluctance to go against Bennie Thompson is holding back black Mississippians. We have a lot of officeholders who prioritise their personal power over the people’s interest.

At this point, Pinkins stops and exhales, before starting again. “We need to have the conversation. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” 

All the while, Cole and Pinkins believe their efforts will boost Democratic changes in a 2026 senate race against a weak GOP incumbent. They’re also looking ahead to Brandon Presley’s widely anticipated 2027 race for governor. But those efforts will be undone if Mississippi’s gatekeepers shoo talented candidates like Ty Pinkins from the ballot.

As for the former cotton chopper, David Rushing is clear. “He has my unequivocal support. He’s the real deal. He is not blowing smoke. I just admire him. He’s a bright star, and the future of the party if he doesn’t get frustrated by all this mess.”

But the tall grass is where Pinkins feels most comfortable. Like his own life, he sees it as the only way for Mississippi to move forward.

But what, one might ask, about Harris the Progressive? For months, the American Right has gleefully painted the Democrat as a “woke” warrioress, a liberal campaigner who cares more about “kindness” than keeping America safe. Yet the truth couldn’t be more different. In fact, on the global stage, Harris’s progressive pedigree is precisely what makes her so dangerous.

One of the ways the US has traditionally justified its foreign interventions, especially after the Cold War, is through appeals to humanitarianism and morality. This represents in many respects the ideological foundation of liberal interventionism, which advocates for the use of military force, regime change or economic-diplomatic pressure to secure the “rules-based international order”. In reality, these lofty ideals have often served as the pretext for the advancement of US economic and geopolitical interests.

In 2022, the international relations scholar Christopher Mott coined the term “woke imperium” to describe the most recent iteration of this mode of government, which doesn’t just seek to overthrow foreign rivals, “but [to] engineer their very cultures according to the Western progressive model”. Its real aim, he explained, is to “advance the foreign policy objectives of the liberal Atlanticist Blob”.

Harris’s advocacy for progressive issues — from climate change to democratic governance in developing countries — perfectly fits this pattern. Like Biden, she has often framed the tensions resulting from the emerging multipolar order as a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and championed human rights as a cornerstone of US foreign policy. As America’s first female president, and a multiracial one at that, she would be uniquely qualified to double down on this agenda.

To understand what this might entail, we need only look back at the past four years. From its role in provoking and escalating the war in Ukraine to its near-unconditional support for Israel and aggressive approach to China, it is no exaggeration to say that Biden’s Democratic Party has become the official heir to the neocon agenda. Read again the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992, which asserted that “America’s political and military mission in the post-Cold War era would be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia, or the territory of the former Soviet Union”. The only difference now is that the US is no longer fighting to prevent the emergence of systemic challengers to its hegemony but, much more perilously, to contain and suppress new powers that have already emerged, first and foremost China and Russia. This was perhaps best captured by a classified report approved in March by the Biden Administration, and recently disclosed by The New York Times, advocating that the US must prepare for a simultaneous nuclear war against China, Russia and North Korea.

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Harris played an important role in cementing this posture. In her speeches as Vice President, she repeatedly underscored the importance of maintaining American military superiority and reaffirming the US’s central role in Nato and other military alliances. She dealt extensively with Ukraine, for example, meeting Volodymyr Zelensky six times since the beginning of Russia’s invasion. On several occasions, she reiterated America’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine. Harris also made numerous trips to Asia, meeting with US allies in the region to bolster Washington’s various anti-China military-security alliances, as well as pushing important legislation targeting China for human rights violations.

Since assuming the role of Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has made it amply clear that her approach to foreign policy will remain rooted in Wolfowitzian principles. At the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”. She also vowed to “never waver in defence of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs”. This might sound relatively benign, but it betrays a deeply Manichean worldview — one which openly rejects the idea of civilisational distinctiveness as the foundation of an international order based on sovereign equality between nations, but rather divides the world in legitimate (“good”) and illegitimate (“evil”) states.

Harris also made it clear that she would maintain the status quo on Ukraine: continuing — and possibly escalating — Washington’s proxy war against Russia. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Harris hasn’t been involved in the White House’s recent discussions about allowing Kyiv to use American and British-made long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory, even as far as Moscow itself — something that Putin has warned would draw Nato into a direct conflict with Russia.

We can expect Harris to pursue a similar line of continuity over China and the Middle East. Her manifesto, for example, claims that “she will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats” — whereby “threats” should be understood as America’s declining hegemonic status resulting from China’s rise, not as a direct military or security threat to the US. Meanwhile, as far as Israel is concerned, despite Harris placing more emphasis on the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, she has done little to actually rein in Israel — nor has she provided any intention of doing so in the future. Indeed, in her campaign manifesto, she vows that she will “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself”.

This follows reports from Harris’s current and former staff members that she will not only reject any cuts or conditions on military aid to Israel, but will also refuse to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as a means of reducing tensions in the region. According to The Times of Israel, congressman Brad Schneider stated that Harris’s Jewish outreach liaison informed him that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee would oppose re-entering the nuclear agreement — even though the unravelling of the deal allowed Iran to massively advance its nuclear programme, while incentivising it to strengthen its ties to its proxies in the region, including Russia.

On all major foreign policy issues, then, we can expect Harris to toe the Democratic Party’s imperial line. Especially when considering that her national security advisor, Philip Gordon, is a “dyed-in-the-wool transatlanticist” who played a key role in devising Obama’s disastrous attempt at toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

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Nor is it surprising that, despite her progressive credentials, Harris has been collecting heavyweight endorsements from hardcore neocons and Republican foreign policy hawks. Indeed, none other than Dick Cheney — lifelong Republican über-hawk, mastermind of the post-9/11 “forever wars”, and notorious advocate of torture — recently announced that he will be voting for Harris, who said she was “honoured” to have Cheney’s endorsement. Cheney’s daughter, Liz, a former Republican congresswoman, has also given her backing to Harris. Referring to Harris’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, she said: “It is a speech Ronald Reagan could have given. It is a speech George Bush could have given. It’s very much an embrace and an understanding of the exceptional nature of this great nation… [If you care] about America’s leadership role in the world, a vote for Vice President Harris is the right vote to make this time around.”

As an intervention, it was as revealing as it was remarkable. The fact that ultra-conservatives are now endorsing Harris is reminder that the “culture wars” are, ultimately, little more than a sideshow: when it comes to the issues that truly matter — first and foremost foreign policy — elites will happily join forces with peers who share opposing views on “cultural” issues. Indeed, the Cheneys are merely part of a growing list of Republicans who have come out to endorse Harris, including Roberto Gonzales, attorney general in the Bush Jr Administration, where he was an architect of some of the early War on Terror’s worst legal offences; Larry R. Ellis, a retired general who also served under George W. Bush; and more than 200 former Republican staffers. The establishment media has been fawning over Harris for very much the same reason. Jennifer Rubin recently wrote a glowing analysis of Harris’s foreign policy in The Washington Post, approvingly describing it as “Reaganesque”.

Meanwhile, as the US establishment lines up to celebrate the prospect of a Harris presidency, the rest of the world could be forgiven for being more wary. After all, for the billions of people around the world who are deeply concerned about the prospect of global war, this kind of zero-sum Cold War mentality only spells bad news. Under Harris, the “woke imperium” will have found its emperor. And with a smile, she will deliver more of the same: intervention in the name of democracy, and war in the name of peace.

There has been a lot of talk about imminent civil war in America, and the internet sizzles with violent discord. It’s true that whichever side wins, the other side will feel either cheated or bereft, and feelings will run high. But neither candidate stands for anything ideologically galvanising. Kamala Harris tries to be nice. Donald Trump strives for an intimidating autocratic effect, but he lacks a cohesive vision, of the sort you might find in Mein Kampf or in Mussolini’s fiery speeches, a vision that would impel millions towards self-immolation for the sake of an idea. His formerly sharp demagogic instincts running on empty, Trump seemed at least to grasp the need to fill an urgent ideological need as he desperately sought last night to get the country worked up over what he claimed was undocumented immigrants eating the pets of American citizens in Springfield, Ohio. But immigrants feasting on cats and dogs would be a poor centrepiece of, say, imperialism or antisemitism; it does not an origin of totalitarianism make. Instead, the unhinged quality of Trump’s groundless claim might well have lost him the election.

Gravely serious matters were at stake at the debate: abortion, immigration, the rule of law. But America has adapted and will adapt to permutations in policy for the first two, and the country is too stable for Trump’s most virulent autocratic fantasies to become reality. No one as obsessed with the bottom financial line as Trump is would ever risk creating anything more than rhetorical chaos. Business people hate real chaos. And unlike the Chicken Littles of the liberal media, they know fantastical bluster when they see it.

Still, after the uncertain first few minutes of the debate, the mysterious air of profound consequentiality intensified. The expectation, of course, was that a live debate without an audience, with the microphone of whoever was not speaking turned off, would be some sort of freakish Zoom meeting to end all Zoom meetings. From pandemic isolation to general post-pandemic anomie, all organised under the strict control of the debate’s moderators. The first televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy had also taken place without an audience, but that was just at the dawn of television, and the faces on the screen had not yet detached themselves from actual social interactions. (The handsome Kennedy won the TV debate, they say, while Nixon prevailed among those who listened to it on the radio.) As Harris and Trump walked onto the stage, Harris striding forward to shake Trump’s hand, you settled in for just another pleasurable diversion, compliments of the ubiquitous and omnipotent Screen.

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I was once at a party in Manhattan that began as a disjointed assemblage of people and then suddenly became a living organism. “Now it’s a party,” someone said to me. At the instant that Harris grasped Trump’s hand, the disconnected event started to become a debate. The note of “once upon a time” was struck. By asserting herself with a surprised Trump, who clearly had not wanted to shake her hand but had no choice but to do so once she extended it, Harris established control over her adversary. It was a fateful bookend to that fateful moment in the 2016 debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, when Trump circled around Clinton, finally standing behind her and towering over her in order to establish his own authority and control.

The optics were remarkable. Americans don’t like short presidents; the country hasn’t had a short president in modern times. And here was Harris, short by, as it were, any measure, even with heels, deliberately making a physical contrast between herself and the much taller Trump. And, lo and behold, the bigness of offering her hand had the effect, in one stroke, of making Trump look small.

You realised then that what was at stake was not social, economic or foreign policy, not the fate of culture or the future of industrial relations. Never mind the question of whether America retains its preeminent power in the world. What was at stake last night was the question of whether the American personality still has power in its own land. Amid all the screens, and chips, and algorithms and AI, amid all the opioids and the psychiatric drugs, can the sheer force of being a particular person carry the day? And what sort of person, what type of personality, will it be?

Psychiatrists speak of narcissists who have their personal myth of greatness challenged by exploding into a rage response, and this is precisely what Harris achieved when she referred to the small size of Trump’s rallies, belittling him by talking about all the people who leave them early out of “boredom and exhaustion”. Trump combusted. From then on, he sputtered and raged and danced with his demons. He circled back to the menace of illegal immigration again and again, no matter what the subject was, despite the fact that Harris had observed, at the beginning of the debate, that he would return to immigration again and again in just that way. By the time Trump warned Americans about the wholly fictional “transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison” — why that would bother him remained a mystery — it became clear that he will never inhabit the White House again.

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Harris, however, brought to the event a softly riveting novelty that served the purpose of replacing the bonkers, electrifying novelty of Trump in 2016. She began as a cipher, nervously clearing her throat, her voice trembling at moments, and ended as figure of character and principle. The pundits had all complained, as if to tutor her, that the country needed to know her. Well, by the time of the debate, she was still blank and unknown. She was still someone who seemed to want to be president only to be president, as if she had nothing better to do. But then something happened.

As Trump blustered and came apart, Harris’s mediocrity fell away. As he wrecked himself on the rocks of his obsessions, her shallows became depths. She stopped clearing her throat, her trembling voice grew strong, expressions of patient affliction, alternating with a certain narrow-eyed, seething incredulity, began to flow naturally across her face. Lacking originality and charm, she drew vitality from Trump’s bile and rage. In 2016, enough Americans were mesmerised by the utter newness of Trump’s brazen iconoclasm and insults to make him president. In 2024, after a pandemic, racial convulsions, revolutions in patterns of work and in mores, Americans watched rapt last night as perhaps the most ordinary human to ever run for president responded to lies, and menace, and insults by pulling herself together into a recognisable personality. People didn’t need to know who Harris was. They watched as she became Kamala Harris.

Politics, said Lenin, is Kto-Kvo, “Who-Whom”. Last night, Americans who were pummelled by radical change over the last eight years watched a fellow “Whom” replace the dominant “Who”. Nothing is so consequential, and so riveting, in American politics, not war or peace or taxes, as the drama of becoming a person. Harris won the debate hands down. She will win the White House, too.

But appearances can be misleading. Yes, there is something called the Democratic Party and something called the Republican Party. But these entities bear little resemblance to the grassroots, mass-membership party federations that existed half a century ago. Rather, today’s organisations are made up of various groups as different from each other as from those across the aisle.

In the early decades of the American Republic, political parties were widely viewed as corrupt factions incompatible with the public interest. Yet because the US inherited the first-past-the-post-electoral system from Britain, the number of major parties had been whittled down to just two by the time of the Civil War: the Republican anti-slavery party, and the slave-holding Democrats in the Southern states.

Since then, the names of both organisations have remained the same. But until the late 20th century, they described loose, often incoherent alliances of regional power blocs. For much of the last century for instance, the Democrats were a ramshackle coalition of anti-labour Southern segregationists, northern labour union members, rural populists, and metropolitan, professional-class reformers. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was made up of liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller and conservatives such as Barry Goldwater.

Until the Seventies, conventions continued to play a central role in bringing party groups together. Delegates were considered ambassadors from around the country, representing both local political machines and rural courthouse gangs. To secure the nomination, the winning candidate had to make concessions to these various party factions, even if it meant choosing a running mate from a different wing of the party.

All of this, however, is now ancient history, in no small part thanks to two structural changes: the rise of party primaries and the deregulation of campaign finance.

In the decades since the Seventies, reformers in both parties introduced the primary process in the hope of democratising an antiquated system in which cigar-chomping state and local bosses picked candidates in smoke-filled rooms between ballots at party conventions. But the replacement didn’t work out that way. Instead, candidates are now picked in primaries, and a few caucuses, in which only small, unrepresentative shares of the eligible electorate bother to vote. In 2016 and 2020, 15% of eligible voters participated in the party primaries that selected the presidential candidates. This year, roughly 10% of eligible selected Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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What’s more, in both parties, each small group of selectors was neither representative of their own party’s voters nor the American population as a whole. Both Democratic and Republican primary voters are more likely than voters in general to have college degrees and to have completed postgraduate study; they also have considerably higher household incomes.

As a result, there has been a shift in power from state and local party bosses, who were at least somewhat accountable to local working-class voters, to upper-middle class and rich primary voters, who vote on the basis of their values and material interests. Relatively cushioned from monthly struggles to pay the bills, these voters tend to be motivated more by culture-war issues than the rest of the electorate. For instance, while abortion dominated the Democratic primary, only one in eight voters considers it their most important issue, with most Democrats naming health care costs, the economy, and education as a priority.

Meanwhile, as the adoption of the primary system reduced the pool of voters selecting candidates, the deregulation of campaign finance all but severed the link between local communities and the politicians who purport to represent them. This crystallised in 2010, when the Supreme Court’s effective deregulation of campaign finances allowed so-called “dark money” groups to spend unlimited amounts from undisclosed donors on behalf of parties and candidates, as long as they pretended not to be affiliated with them. These donors didn’t hang around. Between 2012 and 2022, the amount spent by these groups rose from $50 million to $653 million.

Money, of course, has always been necessary for parties and individual candidates wishing to plant their platforms before the public. Decades ago, it was common practice for Democratic politicians in Texas to seek the support of the oil and gas industry and the rich families and businesses in their cities or counties. Yet now, a handful of Democratic and Republican megadonors who live in a few cities, along with corporate and non-profit lobbies, can pressure candidates even in state and local races to promote their agendas — to the extent that America’s parties are little more than fronts.

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And this partly explains why American politics is more polarised than ever. Unlike the pragmatic party bosses of the past, primary voters tend to be purists who view compromise as betrayal and would rather lose elections than surrender their principles. For their part, the megadonors who flood both parties with money are less interested in political victory than in imposing their personal views — on climate change and gender ideology if they are progressives, or on tax cuts and Social Security cuts if, like most Republican donors, they are libertarians.

The result is perhaps unsurprising, with an increasing number of American voters left without a political home. Last year, 43% described themselves as independents — a group nearly twice as large as self-described Republicans and Democrats. These independents do not share common values or views. They include libertarians who combine free-market economics with support for drug legalisation and populists who are Left-wing on economic policy but conservative on social issues.

What they have in common, however, is the sense that they’ve been betrayed by the American political system — a system that hides the reality of oligarchic domination behind the façade of old-fashioned representative democracy. When Trump and Harris take to the debate stage, their suspicions will only be confirmed.

Taken together, several commentators believe these trends mark the end of neoliberal governance and the beginning of a different consensus in Washington — and in a narrow sense they are right. Biden’s policies do harken back to aspects of the New Deal and Cold War liberalism, while the populist Right have promoted their own vision of economic reform. But, for reasons intrinsic to America’s party system, neoliberalism’s final chapter has yet to be written.

There are real obstacles to consolidating a new consensus — and they go beyond the obvious influence of each party’s most prominent donors or the rulings of conservative justices. The current geographic division of political power in the United States between conservative red regions and progressive blue ones reinforces a status quo which greatly privileges economic elites in both party coalitions and curtails the possibility of faster action on urgent issues.

Compared with the latter half of the 20th century, when Democrats and Republicans contested a broad range of states and a handful of landslide elections took place, the strategies animating today’s party coalitions are primarily defensive. Bold incursions by either party into the other’s strongholds are now uncommon. And the Democrats’ big-tent posture under Kamala Harris is unlikely to disturb this balance of power.

The regional pattern of party dominance is reflected in the small set of swing states that have determined presidential elections since the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. But it is illustrated just as much, if not more so, by the rise of one-party control in a majority of US states. Democrats currently hold “trifectas” (the governorship plus a majority in a state’s upper and lower chambers) in 17 states, while Republicans have a veritable lock on 23. In an echo of past “sectional” distributions of party control, geography would appear to denote ideology in the first decades of 21st-century America.

And this regional dynamic seems to go hand in hand with an accelerating political realignment or class “dealignment”. This phenomenon, wherein since the late Nineties the GOP has attracted far more working-class voters than it used to while the Left has won the vote of more and more upscale voters, appears to wary progressives and eager “New Right” thinkers alike as a harbinger of a generation-defining political realignment. But, while that is partly true, what is more salient is that the parties now coalesce support on the basis of identity-driven loyalties and deeply felt negative partisanship, and are then able to limit their economic promises, hewing instead to vague rhetoric about growth and opportunity. Campaign strategists continue to prioritise mobilising core supporters, rather than courting workers who are wavering in their partisan affiliation or engaging the country’s estimated 80 million disaffected nonvoters.

Consequently, the respective opposition party in key regions has become feeble to the point of being virtually nonexistent. Modern Democrats have been routed in several Rust Belt and Southern districts where New Deal liberals once swept the polls, while Republicanism, once a vehicle for Reaganite yuppies and wealthy suburbanites, has been reduced in the citadels of high finance and the multicultural elite to an ornery badge of non-conformity. In both cases, wage-earners who want a bigger share of the economic pie and more accountable politicians must contend with de facto one-party rule in much of the country. This is a situation that has rarely favoured more egalitarian outcomes.

The past 30 years might have altered the composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions, but it has also calcified the power of regional and national elites. The political realignment has failed to catalyse any fundamental change of priorities in Republican strongholds. With few exceptions, Republicans, in spite of Trump’s 2016 foray into economic populism, remain beholden to big players in older extractive industries and a host of middle-men magnates. The combined lobbying efforts of these interests prevent local- and state-level Republican officials from reorienting their party branches to populist ideas. The GOP response to teachers’ strikes and unionisation drives at auto plants and Amazon distribution centres has predictably ranged from indifferent to hostile.

Conservative thinkers advocating substantive overtures to labour still have high hopes for Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, and a few other “anti-globalist” Republicans in the Senate. But remove the ever-churlish Trump from the equation and the GOP all but loses its insurgent garb. Belying Trump’s fading anti-establishment message, rising GOP leaders such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp have staked their reputation on attracting high-profile business investment and pet development projects. Ribbon-cuttings, not a showdown with American oligarchs, are what motivates them. Vintage Trumpian populism shows no sign of supplanting the traditional business conservatism that still guides local GOP elites.

By contrast, the Democratic Party certainly appears more attentive to the needs and hardships of its own lower-income base. Indeed, the party’s self-image as the vehicle of social uplift has endured despite attracting a growing share of wealthy and college-educated voters in  recent election cycles. Even though Democrats have haemorrhaged support from working-class whites, they continue to heavily draw black and other minority wage-earners as well as white progressives who want a stronger welfare state. On the basis of this alliance, it is hoped by the party’s reformers that if Harris wins the presidency she will continue to legislate in Biden’s “post-neoliberal” vein.

This optimism derives in part from stalwart Democrats’ rose-tinted view of the records of blue cities and states. As housing costs began to soar last decade, a handful of Democratic governors and mayors billed themselves as reformers ready to take on powerful real estate interests and build more affordable housing. They likewise tried to aid their working-class constituents through minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave, experiments in fare-free public transit, and efforts to raise enrolment in health insurance subsidised by the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s key social programme.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and one finds little has been done in major US cities to alleviate economic insecurity. Whether due to permitting obstacles or vested interests, the housing shortage is now a full-blown crisis. And the problem is only bound to get worse. Nationwide, a record-breaking twelve million renters now spend half their income on housing while nearly seven million units need to be built for heavily rent-burdened low-income people. This shortfall stands in contrast to Harris’s plan to build just three million homes.

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Previous efforts to ensure wages kept up with living costs have likewise proved insufficient. App-driven gig work has become ubiquitous in large metro areas, testing Democrats’ commitment to full employment and pro-worker principles. From California to Massachusetts, Big Tech has successfully fought legislation that would classify gig workers as employees and have tried to resist industry-specific minimum wage bills. Despite the Biden administration’s investments in infrastructure and clean energy, urban economies continue to reflect neoliberalism on steroids: the pace of gentrification, pushing poorer residents to outer neighbourhoods, has put them at a further disadvantage when it comes to finding decent work.

These trends have heightened the perception that Democrats cater to affluent professionals while offering, at most, minor relief to the wage-earners who provide their margin of victory in major elections. That is bad enough for a party once considered to be the tribune of workers. Rather absurdly, however, the Democratic Party’s deference to tech, real estate, and finance has been accompanied by ham-fisted choices which have exacerbated quality-of-life problems for many working families. These range from radical misjudgements influenced by social justice paradigms to less obvious but still pernicious forms of incompetence.

Most notoriously, recent ill-conceived experiments in drug decriminalisation under the framework of “harm reduction” in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon eroded public safety enough to dampen economic activity in core neighbourhoods. Those case studies have since become a source of ridicule and embarrassment for Democrats trying to thread the needle between maintaining vibrant commercial centres and reforming the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, other trends only underscore the ways in which blue-city governance has become strangely inept. Since the pandemic, truancy rates and learning loss in public schools have exploded — an outcome that more and more analysts attribute to extended remote-learning protocols in Democratic districts. Those decisions had a disproportionate effect on lower-income and nonwhite students whose family breadwinners were nurses, truck drivers and warehouse packers who by definition could not work from home.

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Urban Democrats’ handling of immigration politics has also compounded tensions in their coalition. During Trump’s term, it was a point of pride among progressives to live in a sanctuary city that shielded undocumented immigrants from detention and deportation raids. The surge in migrants since 2021, however, has strained municipal resources and working-class neighbourhoods due to the pressure put on scarce housing and already-overcrowded schools.

Some on the Left insist concerns about these burdens are inherently reactionary. But for others it is a matter of public trust and effective administration. In key cities, congested streets teem with overworked “deliveristas” yoked to those very gig platforms which fail to provide a living wage; migrant mothers and children hawk snacks and cheap toys throughout parks and subways; while municipal agencies turn a blind eye to the proliferation of illegal and unsafe flats. All this has snuck up on hopeless local politicians at the same time that homelessness and evictions have spiked.

Conservatives, of course, are more than happy to pin these various challenges on misguided progressives. Yet, far from being too ambitious, Democrats’ urban governance instead reflects the extent of “policy capture” in their party. Absent a GOP fit to govern large cities, many of today’s business titans have turned to an all-too pliant Democratic Party eager to build its donor network. That relationship is unlikely to fray anytime soon, whatever one makes of the party’s episodic populism under Biden.

The truth is that if Democrats had devoted less energy to cosying up to elites and committed themselves to grand public projects and social investments in the spirit of the New Deal, fewer of their loyal supporters would be contending with extraordinary rents, mediocre jobs, underfunded transit, and underperforming schools. And a genuine record of governing “for the people” would be resonating in places which have long slipped from the party’s grasp.

One might think, therefore, that the unity displayed at the Democratic Convention is shallow and that Harris is helming a coalition susceptible to fracture. But the current state of the GOP campaign suggests Trump is no longer poised to exploit discontent in the Democratic base over their party’s contradictions and shortcomings. Nor are Republicans making the barest effort to offer a positive alternative. On the contrary, it is the Democrats who remain at once the party of government and the agents of, well, limited yet “hopeful” change.

This returns us to the regional divide which constrains the advance of a post-neoliberal order. Even if Harris wins and sticks with Biden’s flagship policies, her mandate — and thus her obligation to deliver reform — will be determined by the scale of her victory. It is certain the result will relieve elites in both parties. In fact, trench warfare between Democrats and Republicans may well revert to battles over culture, identity, and values, muffling vital issues of economic power and life chances. Until one party wages an insurgency that rallies struggling Americans of all stripes, transformational change will remain out of reach.

Urban senses that Pennsylvania, the nation’s key tipping point state, is slipping away. He fumed to me: “Trump had the big positions, the vibes, and the themes. But with Harris there are no themes except: we are not Trump and abortion.”

Flipping the script, it is Harris who now leads Trump in Pennsylvania and a series of key battleground states. But some knew this before they saw the polls. Sam Talarico, chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party has the pulse of the swing county of the nation’s swingiest state. With Biden as the nominee, Talarico witnessed a trickle of volunteers. Once Harris topped the ticket, a flood commenced. Talarico told me: “People are calling and asking, ‘what can I do?’ Canvassing and phone banking are way up. And interest is way up. There was a lot of energy that was just released once the change [Biden to Harris] was made. It is exponentially different.” And as Erie goes, so goes Pennsylvania — and with it the White House.

With money and energy, Talarico now has eight full-time staffers and dozens of volunteers. And Erie is merely a microcosm of the fundamental vibe shift in American politics. I spoke with Joe Morris, an Erie-based political science professor, who sees in the polling what Talarico senses on the ground. He told me: “Harris has completely changed the dynamics of the race. At this time, the Trump campaign is at a loss for how to manage this.” Even more ominous for the Republican is Morris’s interpretation of the political mood: “To beat a movement, you need a movement. Harris is on the threshold of being a leader of a movement, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016.”

Urban’s political Spidey senses are tingling. A Harris movement, like Obama in 2008, would mean her candidacy has come to represent “change” to voters in what is most certainly a “change” election. Harris would then float above the political flotsam. This would spell political doom for Trump whose only chance at victory is an ugly slugfest in the mire. The race is still winnable for Trump. But the Harris vibe, immense crowds, record fundraising, and grassroots energy, has distracted the boss. And a distracted, sullen Trump is his own worst enemy. Urban griped: “Trump is one of the most gifted politicians, but he is also one of the most flawed. He is incredible at connecting with crowds, but he is also incredibly ill-disciplined.”

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In the weeks since Biden left the race, Trump’s utter lack of self-restraint has been on full display. His rants about the Vice President’s racial identity and vulgar social media posts have merely fuelled the Harris momentum — and vibe shift. For Urban, Trump’s self-immolation is especially galling. He knows that Harris’s liberal record makes her politically vulnerable with Erie County and Western Pennsylvania’s normie voters. He advised, “All the Trump campaign has to do is focus on the issue. If we make this about the issues, Republicans win.”

Urban is surely onto something. In Harris’s truncated 2020 presidential campaign, she delighted the progressive fringe with gun buy-backs, fracking bans, and the Green New Deal. These positions, to Urban, loom as Harris’s political Kryptonite in Western Pennsylvania. A smart pol, the Vice President has pivoted to the centre. Urban said of this: “Those are some mental gymnastics that Olga Korbut would be proud of.” But he knows that Harris’s liberal centrism is good politics. That’s why he growled: “If we listen to her [now], she sounds like a fuckin’ Republican.”

And that’s important — because while policy obviously matters, “vibes” reign supreme. Years ago, Peter Hart, the veritable Yoda of Democratic pollsters, explained why George W. Bush defeated Democrats whom voters deemed more intelligent and knowledgeable: “voters value ‘I Like’ over IQ”. If vibes didn’t precede ideology, Hillary Clinton would be finishing her second term.

It is losing campaigns and candidates who cry “stick to the issues”. Winning presidential campaigns capture the vibe by the political alchemy of personality, first, and policy, later. Like a first date, a voter must get “the feels” before they entertain the wonk of inflation reduction or stories about your awkward brother.

Urban’s “stick to the issues” steals a page from a long cast of liberal losers. In the Fifties, liberals noodled over the riddle of sustaining party loyalty in an era where old fidelities had faded. Southerners were no longer automatically voting Democrat. Northern white ethnics increasingly ignored political bosses. The liberal egghead answer was “programmatic liberalism”. In this equation, voters would decipher the meaning of issues to their own lives and vote accordingly. For the Democrats, voters were like Star Trek’s Spock or AI.

Since the Sixties, a bevy of well-intentioned liberals placed policy at the forefront of their campaigns. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump were the result. Liberals lose because they underestimate humanity’s frailties and foibles. Conservatives win because they don’t.

The latest political science affirms this reality. Voter behaviour is dictated by emotions just as much as rational choice. Even those of us with fancy degrees are influenced by “vibe” and “tribe” more than we admit. Obama’s healthcare-for-all and Iraq War posture mattered. But he, more than Sarah Palin or Chris Dodd, dressed, talked, and lived like your coolest professor from graduate school. Plus, Obama signalled a definitive vibe turn from the Clinton-Bush era. For upwardly mobile professionals, voting Obama was tribe and vibe first, policy came second.

That’s why David Urban is partly right but mostly wrong. Kamala Harris’s 2019 policy positions should cause West Pennsylvania normies to wince. This is why Urban is begging Trump to frame the race as a choice between policy visions. But he admitted to me: “[Trump] is terrible at talking about his policy accomplishments. When he is off-prompter he is much more fired-up about the hand-to-hand political combat.”

Trump wants the political combat because he knows, more than anyone, that vibes are key. In 2016, he tapped into the nation’s sour mood and launched a movement. He, like Professor Morris, sees a nascent counter movement on the Left. Trump understands what Urban knows is true but hopes is not. The vibe, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, always “abides”.

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But to boost the political feels you need campaign nuts and bolts. In 2016, the Clinton campaign ignored Erie County and Western Pennsylvania, while, in 2020, Covid prevented much face-to-face canvassing. So, for 2024, Talarico is touting a “coordinated campaign” that combines his staff with a recently opened Harris office, one of 14 across Pennsylvania. Terron Sims, who helps lead the Democratic National Committee’s vote mobilisation efforts, boasted to me: “When it comes to grassroots get-out-the-vote campaigns, no one beats the Democrats. We have professionals and super volunteers who have been doing this for decades.”

And the issue for Trump is, while he understands the value of vibes, he doesn’t see that they mean less without political organisation. A local Democratic strategist admitted that the GOP’s local dysfunction fuelled Biden’s 2020 win in Erie County. Four years later, the Erie County Republicans might have new leadership, but sources report “major beef” between Trump forces and area Republicans. Local Republicans pay rent to the Trump campaign for a bit of space at the local headquarters, an arrangement that a Democratic official described as “odd”. The Harris campaign, who have the opposite agreement with local Democrats, seem to have it the right way round.

Conflict is to Trump what the sun is to organic life. But as in 2020, dysfunction could prove decisive in a close race. Urban pointed to Trump’s disregard for mail-in early voting as greatly hurting the Republicans. In the 2022 US Senate race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrats banked 1.5 million early votes. The Democrats had won before election day. Urban, obviously frustrated with how “Trump derides early voting”, advised that “Republicans need to play by the rules in the commonwealth. We need to ensure that the voters of colour who are for us are registered.”

By mid-October, millions of Pennsylvanians will have cast their ballots. Trump has weeks to stunt the Harris vibe. In Erie and Pennsylvania, it is vibe and organisation, not the issues, that will decide this race. For now, both decisively point to Harris.

“Mr Biden’s here,” his friends yell across the room when Herman walks in. He’s the only self-proclaimed Democrat who’s a regular at the western Pennsylvania club, and they make sure everyone knows it. Luckily, Herman is about the most likeable person you could ever meet, and he’s more than capable of holding his own, including by giving his friends their own set of nicknames.

In industrial or ex-industrial towns and their surrounds in the Midwest, union retirees such as Herman are more likely today to vote Democrat than their younger, working counterparts. And even though they don’t stand to gain much any longer, they’re still likely to believe that unions are important for society. Despite long-standing endorsements of Democrats by union executives in Washington, D.C., today’s rank-and-file members aren’t convinced. Many view the Democratic Party as out of step with their way of life and reflective only of the urban, coastal elite.

But how did unions cultivate such loyalty among members, and what can Democrats learn from it? The answer, I suspect, lies in understanding that how we vote is based on a lot more than a candidate’s stance on a particular issue. More often than not, the powerful nature of community attachments comes into play.

Perhaps predictably, then, the presidential tickets are fighting desperately to court the votes of union families in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But while union presidents were primetime speakers at both conventions, the parties’ strategies have differed markedly. On one side, the Harris-Walz ticket is playing up its commitment to unions and the right to organise, distributing “Union Yes!” signs to audience members at the Democratic National Convention. The Trump-Vance ticket, in contrast, is stressing the failed free-trade policies of previous administrations and proposing protectionist policies toward domestic industry, such as a 60% tariff on goods imported from China.

Who will prove the more convincing? Union voters have a high likelihood of showing up to the polls, but it’s unclear who they’ll favour and by how much. Aggregate exit polling data shows that Joe Biden ran away with the union vote in 2020, with 56% to Donald Trump’s 40%. But aggregate exit polling data is misleading. Most union members today live in solidly Democratic states. Those are not the union voters who could decide the 2024 presidential election. Rather, the union population being sought by Harris and Trump are workers, retirees, and families in industrial or building trade unions in those key Rust Belt states.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a departure from mid-20th-century union loyalty it is that Trump has a very good chance of winning the vote among these union members. Although it may seem unimaginable today, these voters — prototypically white men without college degrees who worked in the trades or heavy industry in the Midwest — used to be a reliably Democratic constituency. As one union retiree told me, most blue-collar workers in the mid-20th century “figured there wasn’t a Republican in the world who took care of the working guy”.

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But things have changed. In the employee parking lots of unionised western Pennsylvania steel mills, the most frequent type of bumper sticker relates to guns. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump stickers abound as well. The licence plates of the cars in the employee parking lots are not only from Pennsylvania but also from West Virginia and Ohio. In contrast to the mid-20th century, when workers lived around the mill in the same several communities, these workers came from all over the region.

At the executive level, union loyalty to the Democratic Party is largely intact, despite leadership being aware of the chasm between them and the workers. At election season, union leadership sends members pamphlets and candidate information, and many unions make endorsements. But union members have never liked being told by the leadership how to vote. Polling data from 1955 show that, even back then, the majority of United Steelworkers (USW) members didn’t think their union should even be making endorsements. And yet the vast majority of those members voted in line with the union’s endorsements for Democrats.

In the days of the solidly blue union vote, workers viewed being a member as a core piece of their identity. Just as people display allegiances to sports teams by wearing jerseys and caps, they often had rings or pins. One retiree I spoke with, for example, proudly wears a ring with the engraving “USW Retiree” and the union’s logo. And if you go digging through the bins of small metal items at antique stores in the Rust Belt, you’re likely to find some United Mineworker rings or United Autoworker pins.

Unions in the mid-20th century were deeply embedded into family and community life. Brick-and-mortar union halls were used for more than just union meetings: they hosted banquets and dances, Christmas parties and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Beyond the physical halls, local unions hosted sports leagues for members, provided community services, and circulated information via newsletters to members and their families about local and national happenings. Unions were woven into the community fabric and being a “union family” had a great deal of personal importance.

Back then, local unions were much more than collective bargaining units or political action groups, and that’s why they had so much power. We don’t vote based on purely economic metrics or a dispassionate calculus of policy pros and cons. If that were the case, most college-educated people would be irrational actors — they’re less likely to use government-provided social services and more likely to pay higher tax rates. We vote based on who we are. Being a union man or union family — or even living in a union town — meant being part of a shared identity, and that shared identity was inextricably connected to voting Democrat.

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When people receive political cues, we make both conscious and subconscious decisions about what to filter out and what to hold onto. Our subconscious decisions about what to hold onto are informed, in part, by our social identities. For example, a union steelworker voting for Trump may cite the fact that Trump signed an executive order to protect the domestic steel industry by putting tariffs on steel imports. It is simultaneously true, however, that as president, Trump made it easier to fire striking workers and harder to organise. What made that worker overlook the anti-union actions that Trump took as president? Perhaps because that worker does not have a strong stake in his union. I would venture to guess that if that worker’s friends were all fellow union members, and if they had a union hall that they frequented every so often for parties and gatherings, and the union sponsored his son’s Little League team, the answer might be different.

Because multiple messages can be true, it’s a matter of which messages are being listened to. What we spend our time on, the places we spend our time in, and the people we spend time with are how we subconsciously prioritise information we receive. Unions used to be, and to a lesser degree still are, central places where people would get messages from trusted sources — not necessarily from union executives in Washington, D.C., but from fellow workers and their families. The bumper stickers in the union parking lots indicate that, today, this process of prioritisation no longer favours unions.

Gun clubs, like the one that Herman frequents, aren’t new in western Pennsylvania. But their function as community gathering spaces has increased in importance as other institutional spaces have shrivelled. Just as union halls used to be built in part to be social spaces, so too are gun clubs. Today, they are some of the most vibrant civic associations in smaller towns and cities in western Pennsylvania and other electorally important regions of the Midwest.

Consolidated churches and megachurches are other civic associations that are thriving in these areas. One union retiree told me that her grandson is deeply involved in his megachurch. “It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure,” she said. “They have groups for everything. You like rock music? There’s a group for that. Punk music? A group for that.” The backdrop of this community atmosphere, she said, is an intense form of traditionalism and conservatism — “anti-abortion and stuff like that, for sure”.

Unions used to balance out some of the conservative forces at play in predominantly white, Christian regions of the industrial Midwest. A former mine inspector even told me a story about how a United Mineworker (UMWA) member joked to him that he didn’t join the Ku Klux Klan because he was a UMWA member — “and we believe in equality and all that”, he had said. Now, the union counterweight in many of these communities is largely gone.

But while union halls may no longer exist in all of these places, people are still getting together somewhere. And the Democrats, if they’re smart, should try to locate those places. Every community is different. Maybe it’s a café or a bookstore that hosts workshops and events. Maybe it’s a Boys and Girls Club or a Lions Club. It might be a knitting club. Once those places are identified, a smart Democrat strategist could scope out friendly players. Someone in a leadership position at the Boys and Girls Club, for instance, may be open to the Democrats using the space to coordinate door-knocking events. The knitting club might in fact be an excuse for women who were part of the anti-Trump “Resistance” movement in 2016 to get together to chat about local happenings and politics. Using the existing, informal community infrastructure can help get more people involved. And it’s more likely to be effective for people who wouldn’t otherwise get involved but will, because their friends are. That’s how mobilisation often happens — through friends.

When it is not election time, the model of the Democratic Party on the state and county level should be long-term investment in building community in towns and localities. Having brick-and-mortar locations, hosting events, organising community service initiatives or block parties, and having volunteers show up at every local parade, fair, or festival (and, at least in western Pennsylvania, there’s a lot). This is a long term project. Its goal would not be to politicise everything. Indeed, similar to union community life, organising efforts would not have to always put the Democratic Party in the foreground. When a union hall hosted rare-coin trading events, for example, it didn’t have people going around the room telling attendees about the benefits of joining a union. It was enough that the event was there, in that space, to convey that the union was present and committed to the community. Building a hub for community information and happenings would begin to build two-way relationships between community members and the Democrats. On Election Day, there will be a huge effort to drive community members to the polls. Maybe, year-round, the county Democratic Party could coordinate a volunteer system to deliver food to elderly community members.

There’s been a lot of talk about civic decline and the loneliness epidemic in America. In the industrial Midwest, there is no speedy remedy for the sense of loss that many people have experienced as a result of regional economic decline and the toll that addiction has had on many communities. But it starts somewhere. Unions didn’t have banquet halls for collective bargaining purposes, and, likewise, gun clubs don’t have clubhouses so members can become better shooters. To rebuild support — and for the more important goal of creating stronger communities — the Democratic Party should take note.

The Democrats know what a powerful issue this is, driving turnout and bringing in donations. “When abortion is on the ballot, we win,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the pro-choice organisation NARAL. And yet, Harris has yet to put forth an actionable plan to restore access to abortion across the United States. Her raft of vague promises to do something for women are familiar for Democratic voters — each of their party’s nominees, from Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, has promised to protect reproductive rights. The question remains: does the Harris administration have any intention of following through on her pledge to secure those rights?

The appeal of the issue hasn’t escaped Donald Trump, who, has made several contradictory statements about his plan for reproductive rights. Just this week he voiced support for the expansion of access to abortion in his home state of Florida — a statement his campaign was swift to retract and deny. He also said he planned to require insurance companies to cover fertility treatments like IVF in full.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s intention to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision was leaked in 2022, the issue has powerfully motivated voters, even in strongly Republican areas. In Montana, for example, abortion is legal until the 24th week of pregnancy, but the Republican governor and legislature have repeatedly tried and failed to pass laws to ban terminations. In response, a recent push to ensure that abortion rights were safeguarded from such interference was so popular that the petition to get the issue on to November’s ballot received more than twice the number of signatures necessary.

And Montana is only one of nine states currently organising constitutional amendments and initiatives for the autumn election. Kansas — also traditionally Republican — has already passed similar protections, and also did so with surprisingly large margins. It’s not clear if these attempts are enough to drive typically Republican voters to support a Democratic presidential candidate, but the state-level ballot initiatives have caused higher than usual voter turnout. And as polls are spelling out, Democrats, women and younger voters are particularly likely to see abortion as a motivating factor in their vote.

With this in mind, Trump’s sudden change of tune does prompt one question: could these pro-choice voters be a more important voting bloc for him than those on the religious Right who were instrumental in electing him in 2016? Certainly, the reproductive rights platform does seem to be shifting things this election cycle. In Texas, for example, Greg Abbott has seen his disapproval ratings rise since passing restrictions on abortion, and conversely, Marilyn Lands, who campaigned on a strongly pro-choice platform in conservative Alabama, has made headway by running on a strongly pro-choice message.

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Why is this? One explanation is that while elements of the Right have successfully campaigned on the more edgy “family values” matters, against things such as transgender healthcare for children and the teaching of critical race theory in schools, when it addressed more popular issues, such as the availability of IVF and gay marriage, it’s possible they started alarming some of the more moderate voters in their midst. There hasn’t been a major election since the Alabama Supreme Court made its controversial ruling about IVF treatments, so how big an effect this will have on voter turnout and support for political parties is so far speculative.

But equally, if the Democrats were to pick up centrists and undecideds by promising to reverse the damage done to reproductive rights, can they actually be trusted to deliver on their promises, given their past record? The general understanding of American political parties is that the Democrats are good for reproductive freedoms and the Republicans want to bring about some sort of Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. However, if we look past the language politicians use when they’re trying to get elected, and instead at what happens once they achieve office and have the power to pass legislation, we see a slightly different divide.

Since the Eighties, the Christian Right’s stance has evolved from being mostly apolitical to pushing rigid positions on the subject, leaving it hard for a pro-choice Republican politician to now gain any real support in the party. Susan Cullman has spoken recently about how marginalised someone who supports abortion rights can be in the party. More recently, only a handful of Republican governors promised to preserve abortion rights in their states — Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire — and all of them were or are leading states that tend to vote Democrat in Presidential elections. If Trump’s Republicans are looking to bring a more moderate position to women’s rights issues, there is a lot of ground yet to cover.

At the same time, however, there is precious little evidence to support the idea that Democrats are devoted to protecting reproductive rights, beyond appointing pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court. Not only have Democratic presidents failed since the Seventies to reinforce abortion rights — they have also failed to push back on legislation that has shut clinics down, dragged their feet in approving the drug regimen once known as RU-486 for administering abortions, and they have not pursued changing the law that forbids federal funds — such as Medicaid coverage — from paying for abortion services.

Over the years, such moves have restricted access to reproductive rights, making them available only to those who can afford them. The party thus seems to be cynically paying lip-service to those women who are voting for them. After the Dobbs decision in 2023, Joe Biden tweeted that “it’s time to restore Roe v. Wade once and for all”. It’s now a year and a half later, and there was no follow-up as to what that might mean, how Democrats might go about it, and of course no actual restoration.

It’s also important to remember that reproductive rights extend to more than simply access to abortion. And nor have these wider issues been addressed by the Democrats. These are things such as the maternal mortality rate — which is rising at an alarming speed and disproportionately affecting black and poor — and the difficulty rural communities face in accessing prenatal health care services. These are all issues that affect the working class, the vulnerable and the marginalised — the Democrats’ former constituency. Yet no one in the party seems interested in discussing them, let alone other hot-button issues such as surrogacy or subsidised childcare.

Instead, on both sides of the political aisle, all the focus is on abortion — but only in rhetoric and not in specific policy. It’s all very well for a presidential candidate to come up with a jaunty slogan like Harris’s “We are not going back”, but the time for pretty speeches and fiery rhetoric is over. What women need is a plan.

Over the past 10 months, however, there has been a notable exception to this rule: at anti-Israel protests, where masks are still not just the norm but often mandatory. Sometimes, a keffiyeh will be fashioned into a balaclava; more often, a surgical mask or N95 respirator will be worn. All three were on show outside of last week’s Democratic Convention.

Yet it was more than 1,000km away, in a populous suburban region adjacent to New York City, that the latest battle in America’s mask wars was unfolding. Earlier this month, legislators in New York’s Nassau County signed the country’s first mask ban into law, a strange inversion of the mandates that prevailed state-wide between 2020 and 2022. Although exceptions for health and religious grounds may make the law unenforceable in practice, it threatens recalcitrant public maskers with a stiff fine of $1,000 and up to a year in prison.

The legislation was introduced by local lawmaker Mazi Pilip, a former IDF paratrooper who gained a national profile when she ran unsuccessfully for the congressional seat vacated by the disgraced George Santos, and signed into law by county executive Bruce Blakeman. To justify the new law, Pilip raised the alarm about Gaza protesters “hiding behind the mask and terrorising the Jewish community”, while Blakeman argued that the anti-mask bill “protects the public”. Like the mandates it inverts, then, the ban has been presented as a means of keeping the citizenry safe from a real and immediate danger.

Pilip and Blakeman are Republicans, so to a certain extent the ban reinforces the Covid-era partisan split over masking. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Indeed, the first high-profile New York politician to endorse such a measure was Democratic governor Kathy Hochul. In June, after a viral video seemed to show pro-Palestinian demonstrators harassing Jewish passengers in a subway car, Hochul was reported to be considering a ban on face coverings on public transit, and several Democratic state legislators drafted a bill doing just that.

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Versions of the same idea had also been floated on both the Left and the Right in response to an upsurge in shoplifting and other crime in the wake of the pandemic. Widespread masking clearly played some role here by enabling thieves to conceal their identities from employees and surveillance cameras. Though he stopped short of calling for a citywide ban, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, suggested to small business owners last year they should ban customers who refused to uncover their faces.

A paradoxical secondary effect of the draconian rules imposed during the pandemic was to create conditions for a severe collapse of public order in urban areas. For one thing, the collective retreat of much of the population from public spaces in effect abandoned large areas of cities to homelessness and delinquency. Meanwhile, universal masking norms — combined with cutbacks in policing —helped create conditions for impunity for petty crime.

But there are deeper roots, too. The Left-wing embrace of masking on public health grounds also coincided with the prominent role of antifa during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, another source of major public disturbances that year. “Black-bloc” masking, long practised by antifa militants, gained greater respectability as face-covering became nearly universal in pandemic-era Left-wing protest.

By the time of the October 7 attacks, the continued progressive attachment to Covid precautions and the greater acceptance of black-bloc-style tactics ensured that anti-Israel protests were heavily masked affairs from the outset. The concentration of protest on elite college campuses evidently strengthened protesters’ resolve to conceal their identities, given most were students worried that the public exposure of their activism might derail their promising careers.

The Nassau law, then, is a response to several highly contingent developments of the past few years. But even so, the bans themselves and the issues they raise aren’t new in American or New York politics. Indeed, prior to 2020, a mask ban had been on the state books since 1845. Back then, a law was passed to squelch the “anti-renter” movement of tenant farmers who had revolted violently against the harsh terms dictated by their landlords, donning elaborate Indian costumes when attacking their nemeses. The landlord-allied state government responded by making it illegal for three or more people congregating in public to mask, with an exception made for “masquerade parties”.

Nor did the ban fade entirely into obscurity along with the anti-renter movement. Over the recent decades, New York police used the 1845 law to arrest anti-globalisation protesters, Occupy Wall Street militants, and Pussy Riot supporters, as well as to constrain the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, extensive litigation followed a 1999 Manhattan rally by the latter group, in which city officials prohibited them from covering their faces. Anti-masking laws in several other US states were devised specifically to rein in the Klan — a precedent sometimes cited by lawmakers advocating crackdowns on masked Gaza protesters, whom they claim are engaged in a campaign of racist intimidation.

These older mask ordinances have faced legal challenges, as the Nassau law likely will. So far, American jurisprudence has remained divided on their constitutionality, with some courts finding that masking is not a form of expression and thus enjoys no first-amendment protection, and others determining that the anonymisation enabled by face coverings offers a means of protecting the expression of unpopular views. Those arguing against the right of Klan members to mask have made a case critics of Gaza protests have repeated recently: that masks are a tool of intimidation. “[A] faceless figure strikes terror in the human heart,” as a 1990 Georgia Supreme Court decision put it.

Yet we are, of course, living in very different times. And what sets apart the new round of controversy isn’t just the conversion of the mask into a symbol of politicised public health, but the contradictory effects of the new electronic media landscape on how we conceive of our public identities. Perhaps most obviously, online existence has made younger generations of protesters take the constant availability of anonymous or pseudonymous modes of expression for granted. Today, every one of us, when we communicate by way of a digital profile, is at least partly “masked,” which makes our publicly exposed faces feel all the more naked. This is all the more true as facial-recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous and accurate.

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Thus a paradox emerges: at the same time as they furnish new means of anonymisation, digital technologies also elevate the risk of exposure. Political protesters in the late 20th century were unlikely to have their participation made public unless a news camera happened to capture them. Conversely, in today’s crowdsourced panopticon, any public activity is a viral video waiting to happen, which might well upend the life of anyone unlucky enough to become the main character of the day. Our technologies incite us to make our views public on a scale rarely possible for prior generations, and at the same time threaten us with dire consequences if the expression of those views provokes a backlash.

As long as these conditions hold, several things will be true. The availability of anonymous means of expression online, as well as the premium accorded by the attention economy to the extreme, will ensure that controversial and often hateful views enjoy a visibility they wouldn’t have otherwise. This, as well as the general decline of public order exacerbated by the collective retreat into digital life, will continue to provoke a general sense of unease and vulnerability, creating constituencies for various sorts of “safetyist” appeals — such as laws targeting disinformation, hate speech or masked protest.

And in the meantime, the conflict over mask bans will remain legally and politically unresolved because it pits two goods against each other: on one hand, freedom from intimidation carried out under the cover of anonymity; on the other, the protection of unpopular views from retaliation. As long as it can be plausibly claimed that both of these values are severely compromised, an end to this decade’s mask wars is unlikely to arrive soon.

The challenge the Democrats face now is whether the public will ultimately be beguiled by their razzle-dazzle, or whether the effect of making so many audacious, hard-to-swallow moves in so short a period of time will be that none of them are ultimately believable. But that is a problem for another day. With Donald Trump looking like a bona fide hero, and their own candidate looking like a corpse, the Democrats had their backs up against the wall. They left Chicago with a spring in their step, their heads held high, and a new Queen.

Once the nets slung across the ceiling of the United Center were finally empty, after burying the likely next President of the United States, Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz, and their respective families beneath a giant pile of red, white and blue balloons, it was clear to everyone in the arena that they had witnessed political magic. It wasn’t Harris’s acceptance speech, which was a solid B or B+, with most of that grade being awarded for simply fulfilling its purpose. By not being an obvious failure, the speech plausibly established Harris as a fresh character who might, maybe, if everyone closes their eyes all together and wishes on a star, transcend the scorched-earth narratives spun by Joe Biden and Donald Trump — two ancient political dinosaurs who probably remember the birth of the sun.

The truth is that Harris was there, too — having in fact been serving as Biden’s Vice President for the past three and a half years. But no matter. No one really holds Harris responsible for anything, the Democrats are betting, in part because she left so little visible imprint on events. The fact that few Americans have any real idea of who Harris is means that she could plausibly be branded as whatever people say they want right now, while Donald Trump, an ex-President whose imprint on the public consciousness is indelible, could be framed as the man responsible for all the bitterness and bad feeling that the country hopes to transcend through the magic of — what is her name again? — Kamala Harris.

It was telling that on the last night of the convention, the script doctors were still writing bits in which small children taught the audience how to pronounce their candidate’s name: “Kah-Mah-Lah”. The absence of name recognition this late in the game is a problem, yes — but is one that can be solved with a big-enough media megaphone. Luckily for them, the Party owns one.

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The march of Kamala's brides

By David Samuels

So, who is Kamala Harris again? Looking at her face on the United Center Jumbotron, one of the first things one might reasonably notice is that, nearing 60, she is, objectively, a strikingly beautiful woman, in a profession in which neither men nor women are particularly known for their physical charms. Saying that someone in Washington is attractive is like saying someone in Hollywood is a deep thinker. A heavy discount is assumed. As the old chestnut goes: “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.”

The truly remarkable thing about Harris’s face, though, is how unfamiliar it remains to most Americans. The American political system is a machine for rocketing obscurities like Arkansas governor Bill Clinton or first-term US Senator Barack Obama or reality game show host Donald Trump to the heights of global power, but the reality of wall-to-wall media exposure means that each of these figures, or at least their brands, was a known quantity by the time they were nominated. For the better part of the past century, every major party candidate has slogged through the psychic and practical tests of two solid years of speeches and fundraising events with mega-rich donors and political bosses and ordinary union members, then winning a majority of delegates in hard-fought national primaries punctuated by three or five or seven lengthy debates with dwindling numbers of other candidates, before stepping out in the front of the general public as the Next New Thing.

Kamala Harris has done very little of that. Her abortive 2020 presidential campaign was a flop, and she dropped out of the race before a single vote was cast. Added to the ticket at the apparent behest of the Democratic Party’s eternal leader, Barack Obama — reportedly over the strong objections of Jill Biden — Harris had a single, forgettable vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence, which did neither one of them any favours. Thanks to Covid, the rest of the Biden-Harris campaign was nearly void of public appearances; upon taking office, Harris was probably the least-familiar vice president in modern American history.

The candidate’s past four years as Vice President have done little to make her more familiar to people living outside of Washington DC. A flurry of welcoming attention at the beginning of Biden’s Presidency was followed by a thankless appointment as the Administration’s “Border Tsar”. The disaster that followed was greeted with a series of negative profiles in reliably liberal outlets, which suggested that Harris was a capricious, unlikeable boss who had trouble retaining staff and was out of her depth in a policy role. Rumour also had it that she drank during the day. The Vice President was then shunted out of the spotlight — under the assumption that further large-scale public exposure was unlikely to do either her or Biden any favours.

That was true as recently as the end of June. When whispers about Biden’ cognitive decline became louder in the wake of his disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump, whispers about dumping Harris from the ticket, which had circulated earlier in Biden’s presidency, began to gain more momentum. Some party figures began talking about an open convention, at which a familiar, tested figure like Hillary Clinton might ignite the enthusiasm of the party faithful.

Instead, through a mysterious mechanism that can be found nowhere in the US Constitution or Democratic Party by-laws, it was Joe Biden, the sitting President of the United States, who was forced off the ticket in July, only a month before the convention, which just happened to be held in Barack Obama’s political hometown of Chicago. Having an open convention was judged to be undesirable, or impossible. Instead, Harris would be the Party’s nominee, and the convention delegates — whose choice of candidate ostensibly reflects the democratic will of the Party — would rubber-stamp her candidacy by Zoom, avoiding any possibility of messiness inside the convention hall in late August.

As far as marriages go, the match between Harris and the Democrats was more of the five-week shotgun wedding variety than a romance for the ages. And with the wedding coming up fast, the Party’s new bride needed a makeover. In the three weeks before the convention, Harris was duly transformed from a surly, almost forgotten loser in DC power games to a shining new star whose watchword was “joy”. But all of that was a prelude to the great unknown of Chicago. Would there be riots? Would Kamala laugh in a way that alarmed the nation? How to squeeze so many plot reversals into such a short period of time, without fracturing the space-time continuum?

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By David Samuels

As for the question of who Kamala Harris truly is, the answer was that even the overwhelming majority of her fervent supporters couldn’t care less. Before July, there were no fervent Kamala Harris supporters. In reality, Democrats aren’t voting for Harris, though they may learn to love her over time; they are voting for the Democrats, which is a powerful political vertical that can draw upon the best image-making talent in the country. The goal that the entire party could agree on was beating Donald Trump, which was the thing that Harris’s acceptance speech was engineered to achieve.

The first section of that speech was a masterpiece, which Harris inhabited perfectly. Written in a classic American voice, at once soaring and plainspoken, and inflected by newer immigrant stories, it told of Harris being raised along with her younger sister Maya in a working-class neighbourhood in gritty Oakland by their tough-minded doctor-mother who travelled all the way from India to America to cure cancer. There were touching memories of moving trucks, before the family found a home in a middle-class neighbourhood where a host of friendly neighbours stood ready to help out whenever Mom worked late.

No doubt the details of this story are all verifiable. But as an autobiographical narrative, they served to elide as much of Harris’s upbringing as they revealed — the early estrangement between her parents, culminating in a bitter divorce and custody battle, which was followed by her mother moving Harris and her sister from Oakland to, of all places, Montreal, where the official language is French. There was little mention of her African-American heritage, which the Party chose to emphasise through her sister Maya’s more performative blackness and hairstyle. What happened to her relationship with her father after she was a toddler? Are they at least on speaking turns? Didn’t her mother die of cancer, instead of curing it?

As prime-time soap opera, the Harris story still has some kinks to work out. From the cheap seats at the top of the arena, though, it was possible to imagine during the first quarter of the speech that one was watching history being made, like during Obama’s inaugural Convention speech in 2004, or his acceptance speech in 2008. We were watching something new, or at least the unveiling of a promising new product line, targeted particularly at the Party’s core demographic of single women, with growth potential among married women, too — Obama Lite.

Then it all came crashing down, thanks to whoever on the script-writing committee decided to abandon positivity and recycle old attack lines against Donald Trump, which is the type of work that is best left to surrogates at the wedding party. No one wants to hear the bride herself go negative. Harris’s manner audibly changed while delivering the attack lines, and her voice became unpleasantly insinuating and cynical. The writing itself was lazy, and made the candidate seem unpleasantly like a hack. The spell was broken.

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After Chicago, Kamala Harris is now exposed

By Edward Luttwak

After digging herself into a hole, Harris then managed to climb out, by passionately, and with real feeling, endorsing both Israel’s right to real security and unlimited American backing and armaments, and, at the very same time, the absolute right of Palestinians to freedom and self-determination, presumably in a free and independent Palestinian state. That both these miracles can be achieved at the same time, and in fact make each other possible, is one of the magic formulas of American Middle East diplomacy that have no apparent basis in reality. But for a moment, Harris made the pairing seem convincing. More importantly, in doing so, she conveyed strength, passion and toughness.

One takeaway for the Party’s script writers should be that Harris is at her best when conveying strength. She sounds like a warrior. That’s because she’s a prosecutor at heart rather than a social justice advocate or a deep thinker. Conversely, she sounds worst when she seems cynical about the law, which is a professional risk of being a prosecutor, or when she tries to explain geopolitics, or spout poetry. Leave that stuff to Obama, who held the crowd in the palm of his hand on Tuesday night by uttering bromides about ending political division that might have been recycled from decade-old National Public Radio shows. It worked, though, because Obama wields his stiletto in the dark, and his level of political skill and feel is off the charts.

All told, the Chicago Miracle, as it will doubtlessly be known, was a reality-fracturing magic act, akin to seeing your grandmother get up from the dinner table and flawlessly replicate Olga Korbut’s famous “Doom Loop” from the 1972 Olympics. Less than two months ago, the Democrats looked to be in bad shape — and that was before Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and responded by pumping his fist in the air and yelling “Fight!”. That was magic, too.

Now a greater magic act has happened: Joe Biden is gone, and the three and a half years of his failed Presidency are gone along with him. As speaker after speaker emphasised, Trump represents the past, while the Party represents the future. Trump represents himself, while the Party represents us. The rhetorical opposition is an effective one. Magically, the Democratic candidate plausibly represents change and the people fighting against power, when the Democrats themselves are in fact the party in power.

The crowd helped, too. The green-haired gender gremlins, antifa rioters masked in keffiyehs, and accusatory and divisive racial rhetoric — all of that was magically banished. It was as if someone somewhere had flipped a switch, or threatened to cut off the checks to the Party’s radical organiser class, and made the Democrats the party of normal Americans again. Everywhere you looked in the United Center on Thursday night, there were Americans of all races and creeds waving the American flag and breaking out into spontaneous chants of “USA! USA!”. Moreover, the chants seemed entirely sincere. Yes, the people in the hall would dutifully follow the party wherever it led, but it turns out that most of them are more comfortable expressing pride in their country and waving the flag than they are in calling for abolishing the police or demanding that public-school children use genderless bathrooms. Maybe all the weirdness and seeming insanity of the past eight years was just a bad dream, or the product of some kind of Right-wing AI deepfake manipulation.

Or maybe the Party image-makers, faced with the sudden disintegration of the agreed-upon pseudo-reality in which Joe Biden was running the country so successfully that he was on the verge of becoming the greatest American President since FDR, used the awesome machinery at their disposal to construct a new pseudo-reality in the space of five weeks, and then jammed it into everyone’s brains. Yes, we lied to you non-stop for the past three and half years about who was running the country, and what we were actually up to — but cross our hearts, we are now telling you the truth. Kamala Harris will make tough decisions about a more compassionate and inclusive merit-based American future of opportunity while defending freedom around the globe Also, she’s a beauty queen. Also, we love football.

Faced with such wonders, the brain can’t help but rebel against familiar sensory inputs. Did I just see that? Of course not. Except, it’s right there in front of me. Is the world that I can see, feel, and touch real? Or is it simply a guided projection, engineered by unseen and potentially malevolent forces. And if nothing is real, why not believe in what everyone else also wants to believe in. Perhaps the safest choice, under the circumstances, is to hover somewhere between belief and disbelief while hoping that the people in charge of the big show come up with an even newer, better script once Donald Trump is finally gone.

Even last night, in her acceptance speech, Harris chose not to play that card. Instead she accepted “on behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks”. She talked about her life story, dipping into personal anecdotes, building to a pointed but carefully vague overview of her policy plans. And she talked in muscular fashion about her record on crime and drug cartels and predators. In her own way, she tried to be soft but firm.

The starkest statement about Harris’s gender over the week was a wordless one, on Thursday, when female delegates wore white as a nod to the suffragette movement. Their outfits dotted the audience but their silence was deafening. Even the New York Times noticed the messaging gulf on Thursday, describing Clinton-style rhetoric about historic firsts as “somewhat dated”. Clinton made gender central to her campaign message. Harris let surrogates and supporters “point out the obvious”.

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By Emily Jashinsky

The Democrats seem to have absorbed a genuine lesson from Clinton’s loss, and it’s not that America is teeming with irredeemable misogynists. It’s just that perhaps voters don’t really care.

While a few other speakers over the week referred to Harris becoming the first female president, it was in the context of her becoming the first non-white female president — and mostly in passing. We heard personal stories about the Vice President as a loving step-mother and a wife, as a daughter and a sister. It’s not as though Harris’s womanhood is being ignored by the campaign; it’s that her womanhood is not being treated as an important pitch to voters. This is post-woke America. Pronouns don’t matter.

Polling tells an interesting story. As The Hill reported: “Since 2015, the number of Americans who say they are ready for a female president has dropped by nine points.” That same poll found only 30% of American voters say they aren’t “ready for a female president”. A clear majority, 54%, say they are.

What accounts for the shift? Since 2015, Americans supported Clinton in the popular vote and elected the first female vice president. They flocked to the Women’s March. Then came the heady days of cancel culture, and the MeToo movement ripped through the country like a tornado. But now, “majorities say that a woman president would be neither better nor worse or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter,” according to a Pew report last September.

In another survey, Pew found: “A majority of adults (64%) say that it’s not at all or not too important to them personally that the U.S. elects a woman president in their lifetime or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter.” Only 18% of people said it was extremely or very important to them that a woman is elected president in their lifetime. The country has moved on. It’s not about identity politics: they simply want to vote for good candidates.

Hillary Clinton lost for many reasons, and perhaps some small amount of sexism was enough to cost her the electoral college, but the data seems to suggest that meritocratic Americans were turned off by the suggestion Clinton’s sex should affect their vote. When the New York Times asked Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) about the tone shift, she explained: “There’s a ground that has been softened with lessons that we’ve learned from Hillary.” The Times added: “Female politicians have learned not to shy away from sharing aspects of their personal lives and struggles. Authenticity and vulnerability seem to be helping women in modern politics, not hurting them, [Pressley] said.”

Perhaps, though, authenticity and vulnerability were acceptable in 2016 as well. Perhaps Democrats spent nearly a decade in the wilderness as the culture edged closer and closer to a breaking point and learned a lesson about the American public. They want the best candidate to win, and intersectionality points don’t count.

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Will Kamala have the last laugh?

By Matt Feeney

There was a land acknowledgement and a “gender neutral” prayer room in the United Center. Harris’s step-daughter lauded her commitment to “social justice” from the stage. But the Kamala Harris of 2020 did not show up. Democrats talked about Harris taking on criminals, not fundraising to bail them out of jail. Harris echoed this toughness last night as she boomed and projected a hard-edged attitude to foreign policy. “I will not cozy up to dictators and tyrants like Kim Jong Un who are rooting for Trump,” she declared to a roaring crowd.

It was abundantly clear in Chicago that Democratic loyalists — the same people who just over a month ago openly feared for their ticket if Harris became the presumptive nominee — are now enthused about the Veep. Rather than proving Democrats are newly relatable and not at all the kinds of politicians who create “trans refuges” or put pronouns in their social media bios, this week’s DNC proves the party is desperate for a win — desperate enough to be clever.

Harris ended her speech last night with another mention of her late mom. “My mother had another lesson she used to teach,” said the VP. “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”

It’s working so far. When the balloons fell last night, with suffragette white blanketing the crowd and not a glass ceiling in sight, Harris had almost closed the approval gap that yawned so vastly scarcely a month ago.

Such a systematic avoidance of the press requires an explanation, and the most obvious is that she is afraid of having to answer all of the questions she has dodged by receiving the nomination without going through any primaries at all. Some of those questions would have addressed her moral character, including her affair with Willie Brown, the exceptionally powerful Mayor of San Francisco; others would have addressed her unremarkable performance as Biden’s Vice President and “Border Tsar”.

Yet much bigger unanswered questions are raised by the only policy proposals that Harris issued after Biden’s renunciation — just two of them, both deeply flawed. The first proposes government price controls on food sold by retailers of all kinds, but most often by local supermarkets, which Harris blamed for “price gouging”. That is truly strange: as a lawyer, Harris should know that such activity is already illegal during emergencies and very rarely enforced. And second, as an educated person, she must know that when governments spend much more than they collect in taxes, as the Biden Administration did on a huge scale, the dollar loses value and prices must rise. If price controls are nonetheless imposed on, say, carrots, their price will not go down, instead shopkeepers will just stop selling carrots. Nobody will work to lose money by selling carrots at a loss — and the same goes for everything else. 

The second Harris proposal also ignored economic realities: to help first-time home-buyers afflicted by high house prices, she proposed to give them money grants. Had she asked any economist, either Democrat or Republican, she would have learned that injecting government money into the housing market will not produce more houses but only higher house prices. Moreover, it’s striking that Harris did not propose the one thing that could reduce house prices: the abolition of the many regulations that impose high costs, including the especially costly new “green” regulations.

Crucially, these indefensible policy proposals are not just narrow measures, but rather expressions of something 10 times bigger: the application of Californian “Big Government” principles throughout the United States. Since 2017, more than a million Californians have left to emigrate elsewhere, from Montana to Texas, because of the extreme nature of the state’s new laws and taxes. Extreme environmental regulations, which increase housing costs and are driving people into homelessness, have been one result. A law that calls for slavery reparations, even though slavery was never allowed in California, is one more, while another, the new S-1955, prohibits school employees from telling parents that their child is wearing the clothes of the opposite sex — while protecting them from any punishment for “guiding” children in choosing their gender. (Elon Musk reacted to S-1955 by moving to Texas.)

That is the sort of California madness that Kamala Harris considers the new normal. And this is the sort of programme she is proposing. Over the next 73 days, non-Californians will have an opportunity to find out what Californian measures Harris intends to apply throughout the US, and then vote accordingly. If the vote were held today, immediately after her Chicago triumph, Harris would probably win. But with each passing day, as more people consider the few political ideas she is offering, victory becomes less likely.

Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.

In Garner’s case, those voters were the good ol’ boys of Texas and the South who might not otherwise vote for a New York patrician who was also a liberal. In Biden’s case, those voters were women: so much so that he felt it necessary to announce the sex of his vice president without first selecting a plausible candidate. Indeed, Senator Elizabeth Warren initially thought she had secured the position, but Biden’s most important backer during his painful primary season — after losing badly in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, America’s most senior black politician, Rep. James Clyburn, came to the rescue — demanded that the woman should be black. For Biden, Harris was the obvious choice because she was still new in the Senate and had little power of her own.

Having chosen Harris, he then proceeded to ignore her, just as each president before him had ignored his own vice president, so that it was only very recently that Harris was given a definite task: to stop the embarrassing and politically disastrous immigrant flood at the border with Mexico, which had started when Trump’s rather effective control measures were revoked during the very first days of the Biden Presidency.

What ensued was also embarrassing: having been appointed the “Border Tsar”, Harris did not stay in Washington to re-activate the controls that had worked so well under Trump, but instead travelled to Guatemala to earnestly tell would-be immigrants: “Do not come! Do not come!” Yet nothing changed at the border, which continued to be swamped — until Biden reactivated Trump’s measures as the election was approaching, when the numbers duly fell.

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This is why, only a short time ago, the very same outlets that are now filled with joyful enthusiasm for Harris featured the grave warnings of anxious Democratic gurus, whose editorials urged her swift replacement by Biden. Unsurprisingly, Biden ignored those suggestions. As his own physical strength waned, Harris gained a very important new role in the White House: the best possible reason to keep Biden in the White House.

What happened next could not possibly have occurred if there were not a single directing hand behind the scenes. Suddenly, the very same voices from Nancy Pelosi down, who had just told the American people that Biden was fit and ready to win in the upcoming elections and rule for four more years, said the very opposite: that Biden should immediately announce his withdrawal from the elections. Nor is it any mystery who pulled the switch: Barack Obama, the only American President of recent times who has continued to live in Washington DC after leaving the White House — and it is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.

With the Biden White House staffed by officials who had served Obama for eight years (Biden’s own followers from his decades in the Senate are all dead or retired), his former boss could control policy directly, as he certainly did via Robert Malley (now removed for a security violation), who enforced Obama’s injunction that the US should never strike back at Iran, not even if Iran attacked US troops in Iraq and Syria. But except for Iran, Obama was much more focused on politics than policy; and when he saw Biden faltering, and then outrightly falling in debating Trump, he started the process that would swiftly lead to Biden’s abandonment of his re-election campaign — even though he had no solution for the Kamala Harris problem.

Obama had definitely not wanted Harris in that position, fearing that she would come under attack for her San Francisco career launched by an older mayor who was also her romantic partner. After Biden had locked himself into his vice-presidential choice of a black woman, Obama proposed his former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. But even the faithful Biden could not accept that: in his own eight vice-presidential years, Biden often tried to influence foreign policy only to be overruled by Obama’s appointees, who knew very much less than he did after his decades of attentive service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And none was more arrogant with him than Rice. And so, even faithful Biden would not accept her, which meant that Obama could ensure Biden’s withdrawal, but not his replacement with his own candidate.

So, what is the party left with? Because Kamala Harris did not win even one primary, and her vice-presidential role was more unremarkable than most, it is possible, just possible, that this week’s gathering will not unfold as a Chinese Communist Party Congress, and one or more delegates will call for a choice. And because there are in fact candidates ready and waiting among the Democratic governors, eight of them women, an open convention need not devolve into chaos or coup — but rather into a democratic election.

Lost in the days of press attacks that followed was the fact that both Trump and his critics were stuck in an outdated American electoral calculus of identity politics grounded in race. In fact, the key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

Julia’s life was defined by her interactions with the state, with each step of her life tied to a particular government programme. She is able to pursue her chosen career as a web designer because, at age 27, “her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health”. At age 31, Julia changes her mind about birth control and “decides to have a child” — a decision that apparently involves no partner aside from the state. The resulting progeny, Zachary, attends a Race to the Top Federally-funded public school — which allows Julia to start her own business. At age 67, Julia retires with the financial support of Social Security and Medicare, and spends her partner-less golden years volunteering in a community garden.

While the Julia campaign was a subject of some mockery in 2012, the Obama campaign was in fact ahead of the curve. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he made the fictional “Linda” the avatar of his “Build Back Better” campaign. More blue-collar than Julia, in keeping with Biden’s lunch-pail Democrat persona, Linda earned $40,000 annually working at a manufacturing facility in Peoria, Illinois — an income that was a little more than $10,000 short of the city’s median salary. However, Linda had no need for a second income in her home, thanks to the government — which gave her $3,600 annually in the form of a Build Back Better tax credit. Her son, Leo, who like Zachary appears to have been fathered by an anonymous bureaucratic sperm donor, began universal pre-K by age three and enjoyed a free educational ride subsidised by the state — all of which enabled Linda to keep working and Zachary to obtain a “good-paying, union job as a wind turbine technician”. The saga wistfully concludes by describing how, later in life, Linda needs home and hearing care. But fortunately, help is at hand: “Thanks to President Biden’s plan,” it adds, “Linda can access affordable health care through Medicare, and Leo is able to afford at-home elder care for his mom.”

Kamala Harris can fairly be seen as the flesh-and-blood electoral successor to Julia and Linda. Childless, she remained unmarried throughout her professional career until a decade ago, when, aged 49, she tied the knot with a lawyer named Doug Emhoff while preparing her run for the US Senate.

Both Harris’s demographic profile and electoral appeal are, therefore, arguably quite different from the last woman that the Democratic Party nominated to take on Trump. For all those who derided Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage as a business deal, it was hard to question the reality that Hillary Clinton was a classic Seventies feminist who was entirely serious about the idea of having it all: she stayed married to her law-school sweetheart through very public ups and downs for nearly a half-century while raising a child and enjoying a notable public career. By contrast, Harris first attracted public notice as the mistress of flamboyant San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a married man more than twice her age who rewarded her with an expensive car and public office — a relationship which in turn became a stepping-stone to other public jobs. Julia and Linda, take note.

Harris’s life and career are, therefore, clearly representative of a demographic shift that is remaking the Democratic Party and American society as a whole. An astonishing 22% of women aged 40 or higher in America have never been married, which is the highest percentage since data was collected in 1900. The rise in these numbers is both recent and startling. Throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, the percentage of American women who remained unmarried by age 40, as Harris was, had remained constant at around 6%. The percentage of black women who have never married by 40 is markedly higher, hovering at 46%. The overwhelming majority of these women vote for Democrats.

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The ballot box is hardly the only place that this new demographic is making its unique preferences felt. BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars.

BOTS are also the primary beneficiaries of government affirmative action programmes in education and hiring. In fact, in the roughly 60 years since Civil Rights programmes to reduce racial and gender discrimination were introduced in higher education, women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees, while black and Latino students remain underrepresented.

But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values and would seem to benefit most directly from bureaucratic intervention in their lives is also the most miserable group in America. A startling 56% of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition (the percentage for conservative women is 21%).

What is even more striking is that the enormous happiness gap between liberal BOTS and their conservative peers has only existed for the past decade or so. Analysing an NIH dataset of high school seniors, the researchers Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes found that, prior to 2012, when the Obama campaign rolled out Julia, there was no meaningful difference between male or female or liberal and conservative high-school students in internalising symptoms (depressive affect). “We hypothesise that increasing exposure to politicised events has contributed to these trends in adolescent internalising symptoms, and that effects may be differential by political beliefs and sociodemographic characteristics,” the researchers concluded. Noting that liberal female adolescents were by far the most depressed, they suggested that the new ideological lenses through which adolescents were viewing the political climate were affecting their mental well-being.

When the Gimbone study came out, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rejected that view. “Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights,” she wrote, concluding: “It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.” The real culprit, Goldberg suggested, was social media and iPhones. Yet she didn’t explain why social media would have such disparate effects on young women and young men, or why its effects would differ according to political viewpoints.

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By blaming technology, Goldberg was clearly avoiding the implication that the victory of liberal ideas itself was helping to make young women miserable — a point made by the feminist writer Jill Filipovic: “Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life… are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimisation, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.”

If Filipovic’s point is persuasive, the Democratic Party’s message for the past decade has been exactly the opposite. Instead of promoting the goal of mental health in young women, and using unbiased research to determine what in fact makes women happy, progressives have instead been bent on implementing a set of evermore-intrusive top-down social policies that substitute state intervention and protection for the fellowship of human partners of whatever gender.

From the Party’s point of view, at least, the unhappiness and depression of younger, never-married women, which produces outcomes like never getting married or having children, may be less of a bug than a feature: that BOTS are both unhappy and dependent is what makes them a uniquely valuable energy source for the party. Conversely, adopting policies and encouraging social attitudes and outlooks that make women happier and less depressed and anxious would in fact negate the Party’s most significant electoral advantage, and thereby undermine its power — depriving the Party of its most loyal voters and foot-soldiers.

Paradoxically, then, the Party’s interest is in telling young women that they are miserable and alone without providing solutions that promote personal happiness, and then transmuting the resultant depression and anxiety into anger, which it then utilises as political fuel for empathy-based social justice campaigns from Ferguson to Gaza. This strategy, whether cunning or simply ad hoc, hardly benefits women, though — either individually or as a class. Instead, it undermines their sense of personal agency, while denying them the tools that any human needs to make themselves happy. That humans find happiness and satisfaction in community is as true for women as it is for men, if not more so. Yet only 35% of American liberals report being a member of a church or place of worship, and 37% of American liberals are currently married — a social arrangement that has been shown to have broad benefits for the mental and physical health of both adults and children at all stages of life (56% of conservatives are married). The idea that the state can make up this apparent happiness gap with Build Back Better grants and assertions of false consciousness on the part of conservative women is a chimera.

These numbers are also likely to get worse. According to Gallup, nearly 40% of young liberal women now identify as LGBTQ — a startling rise in a demographic that was presumed to be relatively constant across most societies over time, regardless of what people told pollsters. Partly as a result, fertility rates in the US, which had long hovered around replacement level (2.1 lifetime births per woman), have plummeted since 2008, to a new European-style low of 1.61. However, this sudden demographic sea-change does not appear to be the result of Americans not wanting to have children. Last year, the share of Americans who said that having three or more kids is the ideal hit its highest point since 1971, at 45%. In the simplest sense, young American women want what their mothers had — but have no idea how to get it.

Why is that? While one might blame everything from the internet to plastics in the water to the exploitation of female misery by the Democratic Party (even if some real share of that misery is caused by anti-family conservative social policy), a more concrete answer may be the impact of not having fathers, particularly on young girls. Here, too, Kamala Harris’s biography — she was raised largely by her mother, who moved her to Montreal from California, where her father still bitterly complains about being separated from his daughters — maps directly onto the larger social turmoil.

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When Americans do have children, they now do so out of wedlock more often than ever before in American history, with 69% of black children being born outside of marriage, 52% of Hispanics (up from 34% in 1990), and 28% of whites (up from 15% in 1990). What this means in practice is that an increasingly large percentage of American children are now growing up without regular contact with their fathers — thanks in some large part to the persistence of the “tender years” doctrine that gives mothers custody of young children.

The numbers here, too, are startling. In 1960, 89% of minor children lived with their fathers. The number in today’s America is 73%, with nearly half of African American fathers — like Kamala’s father Donald Harris, an economics professor at Stanford — living apart from their children. There is a plethora of studies that show that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems, with boys more likely to become involved in crime and girls more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

One under-appreciated reason why increasing numbers of young American women are confused and miserable, and failing to make choices that promote happiness later in life, may therefore be that increasing numbers of American children grow up without regular contact with their fathers. And contrary to popular stereotypes, the effects of paternal absence, especially in early childhood, are particularly negative for young girls. “In both self-reported and parent-reported data, we found a three-way interaction of gender, age, and parental divorce, indicating that with increasing age, parental divorce became more strongly associated with depressive symptoms among girls, but not boys,” one Dutch study has found. “These results suggest that girls with divorced parents are at particularly high risk to develop depressive symptoms during adolescence.” Subsequent studies have further localised the negative effects on girls to paternal absence in early childhood.

If governments want to stem the tide of misery among young women, which is affecting everything from voting to birth rates, they may wish to do more to keep fathers around — both inside marriages and also in cases of divorce. On the other hand, the Democrats might not win as many elections.

I was recently invited to a presentation by IDF veterans wounded in Gaza after October 7. The organiser, a friend who taught at West Point, brought several of his cadets to hear the stories too grim to make the news, from the soldiers they might soon be fighting alongside. There were other guests; they were older Los Angeles Jews, like me.

When the floor was opened for questions, there was little more for the veterans to say; they fought to protect their country from savagery, and they were wounded. The questions, in any case, coming from Jews like myself, were predictably statements. They were expressions of outrage, followed by suggestions: the state of Israel must be helped by “Changing the Narrative”, which invariably meant “changing the minds of others”.

I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through 50 years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function — they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter one’s thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced antisemitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.

All the guests at the presentation were enraged at the eruption of American and international Jew hatred. The World Court, whatever that is, had indicted the Israeli Prime Minister as a war criminal; our President and Vice President pointedly insulted him on his visit to Congress; the administration withholds the release of arms voted by Congress for Israeli defence in contravention of the Constitution; and so on. The affronted Jews each proclaimed what he considered a solution, but which I understood as cries of anguish.

Islamists at home and abroad have been demonising the Jewish State since 1948: why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by “changing the narrative”? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated, they merely wanted peace, which, to their minds, might be achieved, rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding.

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The proximate solution to Jewish vulnerability — which I saw but did not say — was not in persuading others to think differently, but in so-persuading oneself. The problem that day was not to be found in “world opinion”, but in that room. We Jews, without a country for 2,000 years, have always been second-class citizens, where we were not “guests”, which is to say “visitors on suffrage”. The assimilated successful German Jews of the 19th century embraced reform de-accesionism (divestiture of language, observance, and tradition) and assimilation, which included an indictment of the other: their poor co-relgionaries in the East, whose arcane practices, they agreed, explained much of the hatred leaching over onto “Civilised Jews”. They offered their reasoned betrayal of their brothers as part of the initiation fee into the liberal world, a process we find repeated today. (See: Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Tom Friedman, Anthony Blinken.)

We American Jews, traditionally, vote for the Democrats, since we look around and see social ills — and believe it is the job of the government to eradicate them. But this concern with social justice is a warped understanding of the Biblical injunction to do justice. The Bible admonishes us not to respect the claims of the rich, nor of the poor, but to pursue justice. It can be pursued, we learn, only through application of previously determined rules: set by, for example, the Torah, the Talmud and the Constitution.

“Social Justice”, though, is the appeal to the sentient to assert that the rules are insufficient, and that “surely there must be a better way”. But there is not. A dedication to law, as untidy and indeed absurd as it may sometimes be, is the firewall between peace (even precarious peace) and anarchy.

“You cannot spill a drop of American Blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,” wrote Herman Melville in 1849. “Be he an Englishman, Frenchman, Dane or Scot… We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality — whose blood has been debased in an attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.”

Melville might have stuck to his whales, but he also trots out his antisemitism, turning his proclamation of an American Brotherhood into an oxymoron. Jews are despised for enforced separatism and for attempted assimilation; as we are loathed as a minority up until the moment when minority status is preferred but is denied us, and we concur that that’s fine, too. Our problem is not public opinion — but denial.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of antisemitism. Obama and Biden’s policies have given money and arms to Iran, and withheld congressionally mandated military aid to Israel — and yet Jews vote Democratic. Charles Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is a Jew, representing a significantly Jewish constituency. He pointedly insulted Prime Minister Netanyahu, on his visit to Congress, refusing to shake his hand. For whom was Schumer performing his discourtesy? Who does he think he is, and what does he think might defend him, and his constituents, should the Caliphate come knocking?

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Kamala Harris, as Vice President, is President of the US Senate. It was both her responsibility and her honour to preside over the Joint Session of Congress convened to hear Netanyahu. Instead, she chose to attend a reunion of her college sorority. Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.

I believe that a Jew who votes for the Democrats is a damned fool. I know that no one ever acts for any reason other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. What is the idea good enough to induce Jews to side with antisemites? It may be called liberalism, but it contains the unavowed fear of demonisation. The good news is that the Jew need not worry, as he has already been demonised.

As Rebecca West writes in her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “There are better things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their doers could have fought had they chosen.”

These days, people are much more alive to the possibility that conventional wisdom might not apply to highly unconventional cases. This is good because, in many respects, the 2024 cycle is far more unusual than 2016.

This was true even when the race was still Trump versus Biden. It had been over a century since a former president last squared off against a sitting president (in 1912), and nearly 70 years since the last time two presidential candidates had a rematch. Both Trump and Biden were unprecedentedly old for presidential contenders, and other candidates were deeply unpopular. Everything, it seemed, was to play for.

However, even with Biden out of the running, this is still an extraordinarily unusual contest. Most obviously, substituting one’s candidate — as the Democrats did last month — is largely unheard of in US presidential contests. Precedents from abroad suggest that, because this is a tactic usually deployed by parties heading for certain defeat, candidate substitution typically improves a party’s performance, but not enough to change the overall outcome of the race. But sometimes — as in the case of Jacinta Ardern replacing the previous Labor Party candidate in New Zealand — it does flip the election.

It’s also unclear how to think about incumbency in this cycle. As a result of various psychological tendencies, incumbents are often strongly advantaged in electoral contests. However, this benefit does not seem to transfer to vice presidents or other chosen successors. In this race, then, Kamala Harris is not an incumbent.

But might Trump be? It’s hard to know. In previous cases where former presidents (Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt) have run for re-election after a spell out of the White House, they were running against direct incumbents — currently sitting presidents — so the advantage of their presidential experience likely washed out. In this case, Trump is running against someone who has never served in this role. Hence, if there is an incumbency advantage this cycle, it likely favours him. But Trump was the direct incumbent in 2020, and he lost anyway (the only time since 1980 that the winning party failed to stay in power for at least eight years).

Moreover, beyond the idiosyncratic structural nature of the race, both Trump and Harris are highly unusual contenders. On the Republican side of the equation, the candidate is a twice-impeached former president who recently survived an assassination attempt. Since he was last on the ballot, Trump has also been convicted of multiple felonies with myriad other criminal and civil cases pending. The last time a major presidential candidate was in a remotely similar position of legal jeopardy was when socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for office from prison during the 1920 election.

With respect to the Democrats, Harris’s candidacy marks only the second time in US history that a woman or a non-white person was at the top of the ticket for one of the top two political parties. It also marks the first time in more than a half-century that a presidential candidate who was eligible to run for re-election decided not to stand.

For now, this seems to be paying off. And it’s now suddenly the case that Trump — who previously oriented his whole strategy around exacerbating voter concerns about age and fitness — is the oldest candidate to run for the presidency. His opponent is roughly two decades younger than him; his running mate is half his age. Voters are now deeply concerned about Trump’s age, health, mental acuity and viability in office — concerns that are especially salient because his VP choice is one of the least popular picks in modern history. No one wants J.D. Vance to be President. Even Trump isn’t prepared to say his running mate is well-suited for the job.

Moreover, Harris’s history as a prosecutor, which was a deep liability in the 2020 Democratic primaries, seems advantageous in the current cycle, in which the “Great Awokening” of Democratic voters has run its course, public concern about crime and safety is high, and her opponent has recently been convicted of multiple felonies. For better or worse, Kamala can lean into security or “law and order” frames with abandon. She’s already been piloting this with great success, declaring that she has dealt with “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain”. In that same speech, she continued: “Hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

However, despite Harris’s obvious virtues, her appointment also entails significant risks and liabilities. For one thing, much like Biden and Trump, her approval ratings and general favourability have been consistently underwater. And for another, few have forgotten her dismal performance in the 2020 primaries. And as well as being vulnerable to accusations of being extremely liberal (but also, insufficiently Left), her political instincts leave much to be desired. For instance, despite her tough prosecution of non-violent drug offenders, Harris has previously joked about her own history of pot use. In the process, she tied her consumption of illegal drugs to her Jamaican ethnic background, leading her own father to publicly condemn her for trafficking in stereotypes. She’s also famous for serving up incoherent word salads when speaking without a script.

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The biggest wildcard for Harris’s nascent campaign, though, is her leadership style. Over her time in California politics, Harris earned a reputation of being a cruel boss whose organisations operated in a dysfunctional way and with unusually high turnover. In one striking instance, she pushed an employee who resigned to sign an NDA agreement in order to receive a severance package, despite having been publicly opposed to this practice. Her tenure as vice president has also been marred by vicious struggles among her staff, alleged mistreatment of employees, and extraordinary levels of staff attrition — over the past four years, she’s had markedly higher levels of turnover than Trump did. The problems have been so persistent and severe that the White House has even been forced to publicly address them. Among beltway insiders, this chronic dysfunction has sown doubts about Kamala’s ability to successfully spearhead the Democrats’ 2024 presidential campaign, or to effectively govern should she win.

And yet, so far, Harris has benefitted from Trump’s lack of substantive knowledge about her background, positions and liabilities. Rather than focusing on any of the genuine weaknesses described above, he’s tried to portray Harris as unintelligent, weak, and not black enough. Other Republicans have called her a DEI hire; J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has previously referred to her as a “childless cat lady”.

But these kinds of attacks are unlikely to stick. In fact, they echo precisely the kind of thing that has been alienating prospective Democratic voters from their party over the past decade: a focus on niche identity and “very online” discourses over the bread-and-butter issues that voters actually care about. Incidentally, these lines of attack also exemplify what many have consistently found unpalatable about the Republican nominee: his pettiness, his lack of basic decency, his inability to conduct himself in a manner befitting his office. No one should underestimate Trump’s ability to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory.

It is also the case, though, that Harris probably won’t be able to rely on her opponents’ incompetence forever. It’s not enough for her to coast on the current positive shifts. If she wants to win, she needs to continue making gains.

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At present, prediction markets continue to project Trump as the likely winner in November. Nate Silver’s electoral forecasting model (which outperforms markets) paints the race as essentially a toss-up. One thing that’s critical to note about these probabilistic portraits is that, while they aren’t terrible for Harris, they aren’t spectacular either — and these may be her finest moments in the entire electoral cycle.

In the coming months, Republicans will likely sharpen their attacks and recalibrate their campaign around their new opponent. While she’ll probably receive a boost once she picks her running mate this week, the honeymoon phase of Harris’s candidacy will likely taper off among voters (and in polls) after the Democratic National Convention. Meanwhile, Harris’s organisational efficacy will be acutely tested as a likely brutal campaign wears on — even as challenging world events, like the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza, lead people to pay closer attention to her leadership style.

All of which is to say: no one should take the Democrats’ current gains in the polls as evidence that the election is in the bag. The presidential race will likely continue to be volatile all the way to the finish line. Indeed, if the aftermath of the 2020 election was any indication, there could be chaos all the way through Inauguration Day. We’re condemned to live in interesting times. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

An avuncular and sharp-witted persona, Walz ticks the right boxes when it comes to winning the Electoral College. He is a popular Democratic governor from the upper Midwest, a crucial battleground region, and has received ringing endorsements from the AFL-CIO, UAW and other trade union organisations. He is also a muscular surrogate who has already put Republicans on defence over J.D. Vance’s “weird” cultural views.

Perhaps most important, Walz is a white old-school liberal who speaks to the “kitchen table” concerns of working-class voters anxious over living costs and now the possibility of a recession. Though reliably progressive on issues such as abortion rights and LGBT equality, Walz seems to bask most in common-sense reforms like free school meals and paid family and medical leave that he and Minnesota’s Democratic state legislature passed into law. Well before he was a contender for the vice-presidential nomination, progressives of various stripes looked to him as an example of how Democrats should rebuild their brand outside the coasts

This record is an important asset for Harris. Throughout her term, she has struggled to lift public approval of the Biden administration’s economic agenda, reinforcing perceptions she is a lightweight on the administration’s signature industrial, trade and development policies. Many progressives, meanwhile, worry she is too enmeshed with the donor class and will wobble on Biden’s efforts to support organised labour and rein in monopolies. Walz’s presence at the very least assuages some of those concerns, even if vice presidents are hardly known for influencing an administration’s economic priorities.

At the same time, his elevation also provides some insight into how the campaign views the battleground states, particularly so-called Blue Wall states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and the Sun Belt. In 2020, Arizona and Georgia padded Biden’s final total in the Electoral College, but only by razor-thin margins in each case. Some progressive strategists nevertheless believed these victories were a sign of things to come, and that Democrats needed to expand their support in the diverse metro areas and affluent suburbs of the South and West to make up for expected shortfalls in an ageing Midwestern Rust Belt. But Biden’s standing in the Sun Belt, especially Nevada and North Carolina, took a beating from inflation. As Biden’s poll numbers lagged behind Trump this spring before his fateful debate performance, it became evident that some combination of Midwestern states and Pennsylvania offered the clearest, and perhaps only, pathway to victory. By early July, however, even those odds of reaching 270 Electoral College votes had dwindled.

Harris appears to be a determined realist on this front. By ultimately declining to pick Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, another top contender for the VP slot, she has signalled her campaign is laser-focused on the swing states most in reach. Despite the challenges she may face as a female and biracial candidate, she recognises that the industrial Midwest still exerts a powerful hold on the liberal-Left psyche. In addition to Walz, Harris is therefore still expected to be aided on the campaign trail by two of her other potential running mates: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who were feted by pragmatic progressives for repelling MAGA opponents in the 2022 midterms.

Of course, should Harris make up Biden’s lost ground in the region over the next couple of weeks, her fundraising will undoubtedly swell. That would allow her to divert some resources back to the Sun Belt and make a concerted effort to win Georgia, where Democrats still have the best chance of cobbling together an “anti-Trump” coalition in the South. That strategy, in turn, would likely bleed the Trump-Vance ticket of campaign cash in states that it still expects to win, while leaving Walz to venture deeper into Midwestern swing counties rich in working-class votes.

The selection of Walz is not foolproof, however. While he coasted to re-election in 2022 by a margin of almost 200,000 votes, his first term was rocked by the George Floyd protests, which led to extensive looting and property damage in Minneapolis. Conservatives are again claiming Walz did not deploy the Minnesota National Guard soon enough to contain the chaos, while some Left-wing activists remain angry over the limited policing reforms pursued by the state’s Democratic establishment. In an election that will be won on tight margins, Walz will have to quickly prove he can parry these sorts of attacks on the Right and the Left and keep the focus on Trump’s unfitness for office.

Another potential liability concerns the way blue cities and states handled the pandemic. Though many progressives adhered to stringent protocols, extended school closures and remote-learning policies in some cases put the Democrats’ traditional urban coalition of affluent professionals, black and Latino workers, and teachers’ unions under strain. In particular, wage-earning parents who could not work from home struggled to adapt to shifting policies, and research now shows that learning loss and absenteeism have been greater in those districts that did not resume in-school learning sooner. Although not an extreme outlier, Minnesota was also no exception to these challenges. Hence, as much as Walz was selected to bridge divides in the Democratic coalition and win over disaffected independents, the party which relies on robust turnout in all cities could suffer unexpected defections or poor mobilisation in key districts due to divergent experiences of the pandemic.

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To be sure, none of these vulnerabilities on their own are enough to drag down the Democratic ticket. Walz is the archetypal happy warrior of Midwestern liberalism, something the Democratic Party arguably needs more of. Still, it would be naive of progressives to discount the most obvious attack the GOP will deploy: that Harris is a “DEI” limousine liberal and Walz a feckless bleeding heart. Democrats are counting on Walz to deflect those volleys, but in the end the ticket will need more than Walz’s pugilistic talents to prevail in November.

In fact, Democrats should not overestimate the ways in which Walz “balances” the ticket. While Walz is expected to lend the campaign a much-needed everyman feel, the election will come down to the economic concerns that national Democrats have struggled to alleviate. Walz can help, but the top of the ticket needs to convey, with force, how it plans to tackle an across-the-board affordability crisis. As the party strives to unify a frayed coalition divided between pro-globalisation professionals, young identity-driven activists and progressive populists, it will take more than one man to show regular workers Harris has their interests at heart.