Start with the first trend. Democratic politicians have come to understand that the base of the party is deserting the Jewish state. The atrocities in Gaza during the war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks resulted in a civilian death toll that has been too much to stomach for anyone on the Left — and for an many on the Right, as well, not least Tucker Carlson. 

Now the Israel consensus in the United States, once unified across the two major political parties, has been shattered by Trump’s war in Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly promoted war; Trump was all too happy to oblige; and as a result, America is mired in a global catastrophe that has been, at least in part, Israel’s making. The poll numbers are disastrous: almost 60% of Democrats and half of independents view Israel negatively, according to an NBC News poll released last week. This is a sharp increase from a few years ago, and it’s highly unlikely that the Jewish state will win back many of these voters, since the young hate the Zionist mission with the greatest intensity. This under-40 cohort will age and carry its views with it, while the more sympathetic middle-aged and elderly will die off. 

For many decades, criticism of Israel was the third rail in American politics, but leading Democrats are now unafraid to break with precedent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Israel an “apartheid” state. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, has sworn off donations from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby, as has Ro Khanna, a progressive lawmaker from California. Last year, JB Pritzker, the billionaire Illinois governor who once sat on the AIPAC board, voiced support for a Senate resolution that would have blocked American arms sales to Israel. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish and may end up the most prominent hawk of the 2028 race, has been sharply critical of Netanyahu.

The second Leftward surging through the Democratic Party, popular opposition to the Iran war, presents the party with a clear opening: Trump ran on opposition to Mideast regime-change wars, but he has now launched a large operation that may soon entail the deployment of ground troops — of which only 7% of voters approve, according to a Reuters poll last week. But it is yet to be determined if the Democrats will capitalize on this opportunity. Opposition to the war has been clear enough, but certain Democrats, especially the older legislative leaders like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, run the risk of merely stating their opposition on procedural grounds.

When Trump launched the bombing campaign in Iran, Democrats in Congress fumed that they weren’t consulted first. Israel hawks like Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, weren’t necessarily upset that a war with Iran was happening — it was more that it wasn’t sanctioned, that Congress didn’t get its say, as it did when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. These leaders suggested that if Congress could have signed off on the bombings, perhaps the chaos would have been more palatable.

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For Democrats to find a way forward, the party will have to be unequivocally antiwar, in the same way it is moving toward the position, soon to be entirely mainstream, that conditions must be placed on military aid to Israel, if it is to receive any aid at all. The Left will have to move on from lamenting the lack of congressional hearings to a clear and forceful denunciation of the war. Yes, accountability to Congress matters. But as Trump, like the two Republican presidents before him, immolates the Middle East, it’s hardly the main point.

Most crucially, Democrats will have to be the party that is, without question, against all war. MAGA must not outflank the Left on the isolationist front again. The always dubious proposition of a Republican “peace” president has lost credibility, and Democrats must take advantage of it.

The war in Iran is a reminder of just how badly Democrats, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in particular, failed in 2024. Biden, of course, was senile, and never should have run again; Harris was put in the unenviable position of replacing him without having competed for a single primary vote. But then Harris ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory, ducking the media and struggling to articulate any serious domestic policy vision.

When it came to foreign affairs, however, she equivocated less — and the hawkish posture she landed on gave Trump the opening he needed to best her in every swing state. “Make no mistake, as president, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend American forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists, and I will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Harris said in October 2024, in a call with Jewish voters. “Diplomacy is my preferred path to that end, but all options are on the table.”

All options are on the table sounds an awful lot like what’s happening now. Granted, Harris is not unstable like Trump, and the odds are far lower that as president, she would have launched such a controversial military operation. Yet it was rhetoric like this that allowed Trump and his followers to hustle to Harris’s Left and promise voters that MAGA, with its vow to put America first and end foreign entanglements, would be the less risky option. When Stephen Miller, in November 2024, posted that “Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” and that “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” plenty of Americans believed him. It was a lie, but one the Democrats allowed to pass unchallenged, especially as Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, an unreconstructed neoconservative who celebrated her father’s legacy.

The new generation of Democratic politicians is wiser than Harris. Despite an onslaught of scandal related to an alleged Nazi tattoo (since removed), Graham Platner, a proudly Left-wing oyster farmer, has been a fundraising juggernaut who could very well knock out Schumer’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, in a primary race for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Maine seat. Platner is an Iraq War veteran who is unapologetically against the war in Iran. He has a fierce, compelling antiwar message that may well launch him to victory. Speaking with a CNN reporter recently, Platner likened Trump’s Iran bombing and troop deployments to Iraq. “We find ourselves here with another war that should not be happening, that is resulting in destruction and horror — all frankly on the taxpayers’ dime,” he said. “That is money that should be spent here in the United States on schools, on hospitals, on infrastructure.”

“Won’t that leave troops in harm’s way, if you vote to defund this operation?” the reporter asked. “No,” Platner said, “because the troops should just not be in harm’s way. End the war. Bring people home. Stop bombing. We can end it.” 

That’s all that needs to be said. Stop bombing, bring home the troops. If Democrats can distill this message plainly — if the party can equivocate less, and avoid the traps Harris laid for it in 2024 — it can quickly outflank a GOP defined by Donald Trump. Few wars in modern American history have been more unpopular at the outset than the bombing of Iran, and voters will only sour further on the conflict as energy prices remain high and the economy stagnates. Unlike in the aughts, today Democrats will take little political risk in being antiwar. During the Iraq War, politicians had to contend with the long shadow of 9/11. They had to beat back accusations of hating America or not sufficiently supporting the troops. They had to, like past generations of liberals, worry about red-baiting, and fend off implications that a belief in civil liberties or pacifism meant they wanted to comfort the enemy within.

Now all they have to do is speak like Platner. Stop killing — and stop wasting money. If Democrats truly want to be the party of peace, their future is plenty bright. 

The episode instantly became a shorthand for his governing philosophy, one he repeats often and with pride: get shit done. It’s that reputation, along with his electoral record in the swingiest of swing states, that landed him on Kamala Harris’s short list of veep candidates in 2024. It’s also why he’s in the mix as a plausible presidential nominee in 2028. But if you want to see the limits of Shapiro-ism, visit the seat of his power — Harrisburg, Pa.

The Keystone State’s small capital city, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, is trapped in a post-pandemic doom loop, a place many Pennsylvanians avoid because of high crime, boarded-up storefronts, and chronic homelessness that range just beyond the glittering green-domed capitol building. Local politics are shackled by a corrupt mayor and a dysfunctional city council. The economy, once anchored by state workers who have remained stubbornly remote, keeps sinking. “Ghost city” is an often-encountered label for Harrisburg.

In 2023, the same year Shapiro rode to the rescue of I-95, an electrical fire consumed the Broad Street Market, the oldest continuously operating stone market house in the country, which first opened during the Civil War. A day later, Shapiro stood amid the charred remains and again promised lightning-strike efficiency. “You’re going to see government at all levels now work together,” he pledged. “We are all now going to come together and do what’s necessary.”

That didn’t happen. Nearly three years later, Broad Street Market is in worse shape than ever before. This winter, one of the market’s historic exterior walls, weakened by two years of exposure and the sheer weight of local ineptitude, crumbled to the ground. The collapse is forcing new delays and reopening questions that stretch into the indefinite future.

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The same day the Market wall tumbled to the ground, Dec. 15, Shapiro was busy schmoozing in Midtown Manhattan. There, the governor attended a ritzy $1,000-per-plate Pennsylvania Society dinner with the state’s political elite, bragging about how good a job he was doing as the state’s chief executive. When a reporter asked Shapiro about the state of the Broad Street Market, he blamed Harrisburg leaders and said they need to “get their act together.” Meanwhile, the market’s site sits fenced off and inert, a civic wound slowly scabbing over, yet to heal.

To be fair, many of Harrisburg’s problems are indeed out of his jurisdiction, are self-inflicted, or predate his reign by decades. In the aughts, former Mayor Steve Reed went on a wild and reckless spending and debt spree that ended with the city seeking bankruptcy protection to manage its $315 million debt, and the state appointed a receiver. Yet it quietly crawled out of that hole, and by the 2010s, central Harrisburg enjoyed a mini-Renaissance, with a series of restaurant and bar openings that solidified into a Restaurant Row on 2nd Street.

Not anymore. Since the pandemic, Harrisburg’s downtown core has hollowed out, and the now-vacant storefronts of Restaurant Row make the city look like a set for a low-budget zombie movie. Why? For one, the state of Pennsylvania, the city’s biggest employer by far, doesn’t pay property taxes. Second, state workers, the lifeblood of Harrisburg’s core, aren’t fully back in the office, and they may never be.

Shapiro’s press team boasted to UnHerd of a 56% increase in state workers returning to the office last year. But walk down State Street at noon on a Monday, and you’ll see the reality: on a typical weekday, homeless people staggering about on the sidewalks outnumber state workers and tourists. To make matters worse, the Shapiro administration is in the process of severely shrinking the state’s office-space footprint, which hits Harrisburg the hardest. As part of his Space Optimization and Utilization project, the state didn’t renew a lease at a 22-story downtown building that had housed state offices for more than two decades.

The decay from disinvestment is visceral. Every week, it seems, a different local business fails, and there are few takers on vacant properties. In December, Zeroday Brewing Co. — whose taproom, a block away from the state capitol building, once buzzed with legislators and state workers (and where I once worked) — announced it was shuttering. The owners cited a workforce that never returned and an environment that has become hostile to small businesses. On Wednesday, a beloved Mexican restaurant, El Sol, announced it was also closing its doors a stone’s throw away from the state capitol. This, even as El Sol is keeping open its suburban branches.

Crime is a massive problem. While violent crime declined around the country in 2024, Harrisburg had 23 homicides, its most in nearly 40 years and the highest among central Pennsylvania’s largest cities. I live in Midtown, half a dozen blocks from where the governor sleeps. In one week in the summer of 2025, my e-bike and my car were stolen in two separate incidents. When I called the police about the bike — having actually located a stash of stolen goods where mine was likely sitting — they wouldn’t even take the call.

A few months later, a woman who talks to herself stole my cat. I had to beg a police officer to accompany me to her apartment just to get my pet back. This is the daily reality in Shapiro’s backyard, a place where package theft is so rampant that my neighbors have resorted to a sort of biochemical warfare, placing dog poop inside fake Amazon boxes to spite the porch pirates.

The elephant in the room — the one Shapiro refuses to truly tackle — is Harrisburg Mayor Wanda Williams, who was just sworn in to her second term. Williams is Harrisburg’s tiny version of Donald Trump: pugnacious, defensive, corrupt, and perpetually embroiled in a civil war with her own city council. Her tenure has been a masterclass in petty dysfunction. Williams reportedly placed as many as five relatives on the city payroll in full-time positions. A federal lawsuit filed by former Public Works Director Nathaniel Spriggs alleges that Williams pressured him to alter job descriptions so her relatives could be hired or promoted. The city is now spending taxpayer dollars on legal fees to defend those actions in court, while the mayor is busy trying to raise her own salary by 20%.

The Broad Street Market rebuild has been the city’s biggest fiasco. The market’s manager was convicted of stealing money to fund his doggie-spa habit and then tried raising vendors’ rents by 25%. In 2024, the city council voted against approving a construction contractor due to insufficient DEI promotion. A ramshackle tent structure meant to serve as a temporary holding space for the market’s vendors got the embarrassing moniker Tenty McTentface.

But if there’s one moment that defines Harrisburg in the mid-2020s, it’s July 4, 2024. That’s when the annual fireworks show on City Island was disrupted by an armed teenager fleeing police. The 18-year-old threw his pistol into the Susquehanna River and bumped into Williams during his escape from the cops, injuring her leg in a fall. Instead of boosting police presence or cracking down on crime, however, Williams simply canceled all future city-run fireworks on Independence Day. The best solution, she figured, was to tuck and run.

Shapiro’s response has been muted. His spokesperson didn’t respond to my query about the governor’s relationship to the mayor, which her press office characterized as “positive.” The spokesperson cited $850,000 in additional state funding to support the Broad Street Market’s $20-million-plus rebuild and said Shapiro is “working closely with the City of Harrisburg, the Harrisburg delegation, and other local leaders to help Harrisburg reach its full potential.”

The governor’s press team also noted a recent $15,000 grant to a group of local leaders trying to revitalize downtown. But that’s peanuts compared to the comprehensive revitalization plan Gov. Kathy Hochul is pursuing for Albany, New York’s also-struggling capital city. In mid-2025, she announced that the Empire State would be funneling $400 million of investments into revitalizing Albany’s downtown core.

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There are plenty of other examples of blue-state governors boosting their capital cities. In the aughts, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick launched a 10-year, $1 billion program that helped establish Boston as a national magnet for the life-sciences industry. St. Paul, Minn., was one of the biggest beneficiaries of Mark Dayton’s two terms as the state’s governor, with a $100 million capitol renovation, part of nearly $1 billion in investments made in 2014.

I’d be surprised if Shapiro suddenly steps in to save Harrisburg in 2026. He’s gearing up for a national book tour to promote Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service, the kind of softly lit, hagiographic autobiography that usually indicates a warm-up to a White House bid. As 2028 whispers grow into a roar, the Shapiro narrative will be polished to a mirror shine. You will hear about the bridge constructions and the get-shit-done attitude.

Shapiro may indeed be getting shit done in Pennsylvania, but there’s little evidence of it in the city where he works and lives part-time. In Harrisburg, the only thing that seems to be getting shit done is gravity. Just ask the Broad Street Market.

There is, however, one construction project in Harrisburg that appears to be moving along with I-95 speed: The Wall. Last April, a troubled Harrisburg man named Cody Balmer, invoking the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, broke into the governor’s mansion and threw Molotov cocktails in a frightening assassination attempt. The state immediately went into action and spent $32 million to rebuild the governor’s fire-damaged dining room and erect a new permanent security wall. Plus, a controversial $1 million was spent on Shapiro’s private home in the Philadelphia suburbs, including $311,000 for a new security system and $290,000 for landscaping and groundskeeping. Shapiro’s office has argued that the security upgrades were recommended by law enforcement for the governor’s personal safety, but the optics are terrible. Shapiro is literally walling himself off from the city decaying around him.

What does that imply about his readiness to lead in a national environment also defined by slow, grinding institutional failure? We may find out in the next two years.

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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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.”