Was the 9/11-Era GOP So Different From Today’s? Not Different Enough.

We have trained ourselves to think of Donald Trump as sui generis, an outlier in the history of the American political experience. And of course, in so many ghastly ways, he is. But he arose from somewhere; the instant and fervent attachment of millions of conservatives to his brand of search-and-destroy politics, his disregard for the truth, did not emerge from whole cloth in 2015. It had antecedents. Some thing or things inculcated in the conservative mind a fealty to that brand of relentless political warfare.

And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the “fact” that we were a country united then, and look how far we’ve fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth.

The nation was united in shock and grief, that much is true. A different presidential administration might have approached that reality with a certain humility; an acknowledgment—especially given the dubious terms under which it took power (the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president, not the voters, who preferred Al Gore)—that its job was to give oxygen to that shock and grief in a sincere and nonideological way. To guide a tremulous nation through a gut-churning moment without hitching the trauma to a preconceived political agenda.

Bush did just enough of that to appear to your average person to be sincere about it. He visited a mosque in Washington just six days after the attacks and said, “Islam is peace.” That, to be sure, was laudable. Could you picture Trump doing that?

But behind the scenes, other, darker wheels were spinning, almost from the moment of the attack. Donald Rumsfeld was Bush’s secretary of defense. The very afternoon of the attack, he told an aide, according to declassified, handwritten notes: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only U.B.L,” referring to the man then known in intelligence circles as “Usama” bin Laden and widely and correctly assumed to have orchestrated the attacks. And: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” And not?

Hussein, at the time, was the leader of Iraq—and of what was without question a fascist, evil regime. American neoconservatives, a cohort that included Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many others in the administration—had trained their bellicose eyes on Hussein since 1991, when the first President Bush repelled his invasion of Kuwait but spurned the neocons’ importunings to press on into Baghdad and depose Saddam. An organization, the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, was conjured into existence during the Clinton presidency for the express purpose of keeping the pressure on U.S. administrations to wage war on Iraq. Cheney was a key figure in PNAC, a founding member in fact. He had been Bush Sr.’s defense secretary and had scorned his boss’s decision not to march on to Baghdad.

In other words: The great, unifying national tragedy was—within hours—converted into an excuse to wage a highly divisive and very ideological war, which was commenced in due course 18 months later. Those 18 months were defined by a campaign of lies about Saddam being six months away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States and having links to the 9/11 attackers. You see, Cheney, as Pentagon chief under Bush I, had developed with aides, including Wolfowitz, a plan—massively controversial at the time, when The New York Times revealed its existence in 1992—for U.S. global hegemony. At the heart of the plan was invading Iraq and turning it into a democracy.

So, to sum up: Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. had wanted to invade Iraq since 1991. The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse because they put the public in a jittery, revenge-seeking frame of mind. But public opinion was still skeptical, so from there, they started lying.

It worked, and they got their war. That it proved to be a disaster was no surprise. That’s what generally happens with wars when the people who start them think they’ll be cakewalks, over in weeks. I trust that sounds familiar.

On the domestic front, the uses to which the Bush team put 9/11 were possibly even worse. The surveillance powers of the federal government were expanded vastly and immediately. Those who raised questions about all this were attacked and maligned—not just for disagreeing with Bush, but for being enemies of America (“Why do you hate freedom?” became what we now call a meme in those pre-Twitter days).

Bush said in a speech a week or so after the attack that the terrorists came after us because they “hate our freedoms.” It was irresponsible nonsense. Al Qaeda did not attack the United States because we have a Bill of Rights. It attacked the United States because of our military adventurism in the Middle East. I wish to be clear that I do not think it is remotely justified that 3,000 innocent civilians died because of that, but that was the justification, which bin Laden stated many times, not “our freedoms.”

But once Bush said that—once he stripped the attacks of their specific motivation and assigned to them a fuzzier one that would hit average Americans in their emotional kishkes—he blurred the line of what did and did not constitute legitimate criticism of his government. Now it was about “freedom.” And now, anyone who questioned any action of the administration could easily be branded an enemy of freedom.

And so we arrive at September 26, 2001, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, responding to a late-night joke by Bill Maher, much more conventionally liberal then, said that Americans in this new era “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” This suggests an atmosphere of Gestapo-like censorship, but in fact none such was even needed. The world—the media, the late-night shows, the Democrats—largely censored itself.

Ah, the Democrats. A moment of national unity was appropriate. Except, ask yourself this: If these attacks had happened under President Gore, do you think Rush Limbaugh would have pled for national unity? Of course not. But still—a moment was appropriate. But only a moment. Once the neocons on the Bush team started exploiting 9/11 for a war that they had wanted to wage since 1991 and that most Democrats opposed, the Democrats should have become a genuine opposition. They failed to do that. They were cowed. They went along.

The hangover from that sad episode extends into our time. Can one draw a line, for example, from the 2002–03 Democrats’ capitulation on Bush’s war to the Democrats’ general confusion last year? I think one can. It’s a different party, with younger people who are less afraid, and who know that their base wants a more pugilistic stance. But some of the leaders are the same people. And even for those in the current leadership who weren’t there in 2001, they seem too often to have inherited the backpedaling caution that characterized the 9/11-era Democrats’ response to Bush’s aggressive posture.

So that’s what happened after 9/11. The Republican Party hijacked this national, indeed international, tragedy to start a war that was a practical and moral calamity (and I can’t write this without at least mentioning the sanctioning by the United States of America of torture and special prisons and CIA “black sites” and more) and to commence a crackdown at home that unleashed deeply reactionary forces. Those forces grew and metastasized as the nation elected its first Black president, and they became bolder and more public with the arrival of a demagogue who stripped the sentiment of its more polished veneer and got matters down to the rough surface. 

I do think there’s a difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I believe that Bush, on a personal level, is a decent man, while Trump is not. But personal decency is not what matters most in a leader. What matters in a leader is what he will and will not do in his public capacity for the sake of political advantage; what moral lines he draws. And Bush, after 9/11, drew a couple good lines, but he drew too many lines that pointed his party in the direction of Trump. On this anniversary, we should not forget this, or absolve him and the people who enabled him.

On this cusp of Labor Day, when election campaigns kick into fourth gear, I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have to say it: The voters are going to barber-strap Donald Trump in the November midterms.

I’ve been wrong before, of course. On the other hand, I’ve also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody—I mean everybody—was saying that Bill Clinton’s Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year’s midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police—Gingrich’s mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican—than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely.

The first is people like you and me—the people who have always thought he was a fascist goon and an imbecile, and who would go out to cast a vote against him and his minions even if it meant voting for Homer Simpson. We are turbocharged to get to the polls, and there are millions of us.

The second is the swing voters who were, to be frank—oh, OK, let’s put it slightly more politely—naïve enough to believe that Trump could lower prices and fix the economy. They know now that Trump cannot do that; he possesses no such magic wand. Would that they had known in November 2024. But they know now, and those who bother to vote will vote 80, 90 percent against Trump and his party.

Third is the BMPs: the Betrayed MAGA Pigeons. They’re not the same as swing voters. Unlike swing voters, they were never going to think for five minutes about voting for a Black woman in 2024. But to feel OK about themselves, they had to build a case for Trump in their brains that justified their Trump vote, even made it a righteous protest against the status quo. Core to the BMP justification were a few central ideas: that Trump would improve the economy; that he was right on immigration and heads needed to be cracked; that Kamala Harris was the real warmonger, and Trump would calmly keep the peace.

Well, that defense against reality has been crushed like a grape under a tire. Trump has failed on the economy. He’s gone way too far for these people on immigration (Joe Rogan this year compared ICE to the Gestapo). And finally, the Iran war destroyed it. Trump and the Republicans are losing the “manosphere,” a process Sidney Blumenthal described with coruscating precision on this site a couple weeks ago. But they’re losing many other segments of MAGA-land as well that simply can’t believe he started a war; let alone an obviously stupid war that we’re losing; let alone at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, as the Israeli prime minister just bragged on Israeli TV.

The first two groups will turn out in droves against Republican candidates. The third group won’t do that. But it, dispirited and confused, simply won’t turn out. And its absence, I think, is what will be decisive. There will be no defense against the onslaught.

Well, you say. That may all be true. But a clever politician can reframe things. We’re on the cusp of Labor Day—the traditional start of general election campaigns in the regular-people-start-to-pay-attention sense. On the assumption that most people haven’t been paying attention so far, doesn’t Trump have time to redirect the narrative?

The answer is that he does, maybe, have the time. He certainly has the money, though he may be hoarding it for his own selfish purposes well beyond this year. But he doesn’t have the brains. And he doesn’t have the brains because his brain marinates in a fantasy world in which Trump can do no wrong. His reality-denying cocoon has sometimes been beneficial to him. Last year, for example, when he was riding (comparatively) high, when law firms and elite universities quaked before him, he was able to create a willed reality. But today?

The cultural power that he possessed in the spring and summer of 2025 has completely vaporized. He sits up there and says we’ve won the war, we control the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation’s no big deal. Affordability isn’t a thing. Data centers are great, and if you’re against them, you want to stay “backwards and poor.” The United States is the “hottest” country on earth. As the American people cry out for help, he’s obsessed with building monuments to himself.

With the multibillion-dollar propaganda machine he’s got behind him, there are, of course, still millions of Americans who believe him. But to return to my three groups: The first group of course doesn’t believe a word, the median representative of the second group has lost all faith in him, and the BMPs have turned on him.

And ask yourself: What’s going to get better in this country between now and Election Day? Answer: Not much that I can see. We got a good jobs report this morning, but the bond market is still jittery and central banks are contemplating rate hikes. On Iran, he may cut a deal, but it will be a bad, desperate deal, and most people will recognize it as such. He’d better pray that a new ICE shooting controversy doesn’t explode in October. Am I missing anything? Ah, yes. Water-body renaming. He may score a couple more key wins there.

So: By November 3, there’s every chance that Trump will be more unpopular than he is today. His mental deterioration in just these last few weeks is noticeable, and in two more months, he may literally be drooling. Even dear old Rasmussen may have him down in the 30s by then.

The result? Again—I don’t want to jinx anything. I’ll just say it like this: I heard someone the other day on TV say that we may need to start paying more attention to Senate races in states like Kansas, where Democratic preacher Adam Hamilton is in a near dead heat with GOP incumbent Roger Marshall. In Nebraska, a recent poll has independent Dan Osborn running even with GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts. One recent Arkansas poll was close. In Florida, everybody laughs off the democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination. But she pulled off a stunning upset in the Democratic primary, and she did it without running a single television ad. And the appointed Republican incumbent is knee-deep in that Medicaid scandal involving the governor’s wife.

I’m not predicting Democratic wins in the last two states. I am saying that a wave is building. And the man toward whom the wave is heading looks out on the ocean and sees calm, pacific seas. He’s delusional, spent, incapable of responding to reality. In the next two months, all that is only going to get worse—and more apparent to the American people.

Today is the six-month anniversary of President Trump’s war in Iran, which as any non-brainwashed human can see has been a failure in every sense. Meanwhile, with diplomacy stalled, Russian insiders tell Bloomberg News that Vladimir Putin is frustrated (poor thing!) and is weighing an escalation in Ukraine that could ultimately include the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

These next few months will be extremely dangerous ones for the world. We have two old men whose purchase on reality is slipping by the week—that’s obviously true in Trump’s case, and it sure seems to be accurate with respect to Putin too. But they have something else in common that’s much more ominous: Both will do anything to maintain their corrupt hold on power, which makes both nations a threat to global peace. Sadder still: I never thought I’d see the day when we’d be saying that the United States and Russia were more or less equally malevolent forces in the world.

Here in the U.S., Trump retreats more and more into a fantasyland of denial. He posts a grotesque, tacky, fascistic, AI-generated poster of himself proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” trying to compare his Iran misadventure favorably to George W. Bush’s own misadventure in Iraq. He insists the Iranian regime is weakened. He brags about controlling the Strait of Hormuz.

In reality, Iran has almost total control of the strait. Right now, says Reuters, 10 or 15 ships are getting through the strait every day. That’s down from 100 or more. As I write these words Friday morning, the Strait of Hormuz traffic tracker has three ships transiting and 319 vessels waiting.

Trump’s latest policy solution, to the extent that he has any, involves the “D-Day sanctions” announced earlier this week by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent said his department was going to isolate business done with Iran in five economic sectors and sanction 60 businesses, individuals, and vessels. But he didn’t say which countries that do business with Iran would be targeted (that is—China, most notably). He said Trump would be calling world leaders “with specific requests to cease their interactions with the regime.”

Mr. Art of the Deal at work again. Donald Trump is the last person in the world who still believes that Donald Trump has any leverage whatsoever over Xi Jinping and can cajole him into doing what Trump wants him to do. To everyone else (well, not everyone—Bessent, Natalie Harp, and so on), the idea is ludicrous.

And a lot of experts think that these sanctions, as announced anyway, won’t bring Iran to its knees. The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett quoted one sanctions expert as saying: “Unless they sanction a Chinese bank everyone has heard of, this will fall flat.”

Trump lives in this cocoon where he thinks he can bend people to his will because he’s Trump. Facts about leverage and how the world actually works—he just ignores them. And the fact is that China has all kinds of leverage. Most conspicuously, it could decide to stop exporting rare earth minerals. It already did so in 2025 in response to Trump’s tariffs. Then, write two experts, “a wave of turbulent Chinese export restrictions on rare earth elements and magnets—triggered by the Trump administration’s tariffs and semiconductor controls—laid bare a critical choke point across defense, semiconductor, and automotive supply chains.” Worse could happen if that’s what China wants.

It’s a disaster, entirely of Trump’s making. The Washington Post reports today that six months into the Iran war, while Americans aren’t dying in large numbers, this is still a conflict with no plausible end in sight. Trump has boxed himself in: “His fierce aversion to becoming a twenty-first-century Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Great Depression, limits the economic moves available to him. His decision, at least so far, to hold back from the riskiest and most extreme military moves against Iran similarly limits his war options.”

“At least so far.” That’s the scary part. What happens six months from now, if Trump hasn’t managed to sue for peace, i.e., capitulate, and hand over hundred of billions of dollars to Iran? This war will never become “Trump’s Ukraine,” in the sense of the massive number of casualties—in the half a million range—Putin has racked up in his war. There is no check whatever on Putin in Russia, whereas the U.S. is at least enough of a democracy that Trump has to pay some attention to public opinion, which obviously would not tolerate such losses.

Still … Putin is, in a sense, Trump’s unfiltered id. Imagine no Constitution, no First Amendment, no vast network of civil society–oriented nonprofits, no 250-year history of democratic habit; without those guardrails, Trump would be Putin. So what Putin does, arguably, is what Trump might do if he feels desperate or reckless enough.

So Putin is contemplating a tactical nuke. It would be a fraction of the size of the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in kiloton terms. It wouldn’t wipe out Kyiv; just a neighborhood or two. And it might just get Trump thinking. We are living in a new age of nuclear proliferation, which is to say that our longtime consensus around extreme nuclear caution has been waning. And also bear in mind: The U.S. stockpile of conventional weapons is depleting to the point that the Council on Foreign Relations calls it a “munitions crisis.”

It probably won’t come to that. But even if it doesn’t, we’re left with the fact that we have two wars that are inflicting upon the world and its people a tremendous amount of pain, both started by delusional men who live in bubbles where everyone told them victory would be easy, a matter of days.

We’re accustomed to things working that way in an autocratic state like Russia. In the United States, they’re supposed to happen differently. But the United States is no longer so different from those places.

The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class.

There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.

Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.

These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.

Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.

Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.

The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in a Substack post in early July.

But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.

Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.

It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.

So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.

In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.

The reaction so far among establishment Democrats to Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary has been surprisingly encouraging. Almost instantly after the race was called Wednesday morning, Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed El-Sayed, saying in a video, “Congratulations to [gubernatorial nominee] Jocelyn Benson, Abdul El-Sayed, and every Democrat who won up and down the ballot. They’ve got my support as we fight like hell together to win in November.” Centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin wrote a Facebook post expressing unequivocal support. Primary foe Haley Stevens backed El-Sayed instantly, and he spoke graciously of her at his first post-win speech, calling her a “friend.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had supported Stevens, praised El-Sayed’s “very, very strong campaign” and said, “I’m not looking back, I’m looking forward.”

This is good. It also may end up posing a challenge to El-Sayed over the course of this election, as he walks the tightrope between a progressive base that brought him to this point and the establishment that he’ll need to make peace with to win in November. But right now, we need to speed through some recent history and examine the conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party that, if unchecked, may be a bigger problem for El-Sayed than anything Republican Mike Rogers throws at him.

That conventional wisdom, for about 40 years, ever since the Reagan realignment that left liberalism discredited in the eyes of many Americans, has been simply that only centrist candidates can win general elections in swing states. Has it been right? Mostly, yes. It’s hard to think of many proud progressives who’ve won Senate seats in swing states in recent history. Paul Wellstone pops to mind. He was elected narrowly in 1990, when Minnesota was much swingier than it is now.

Interestingly, Schumer himself sort of qualifies in this category. He first won his New York Senate seat in 1998, in a race I covered closely. There were three candidates in that Democratic primary fighting for the right to challenge incumbent Al D’Amato. Mark Green was definitely the most liberal. But Geraldine Ferraro was without question the moderate candidate. Schumer was in-between, but, as a Jewish Brooklyn congressman whose big issue at the time was gun violence, he coded more liberal than not. I remember people laughing at me when I told them that summer that I thought Schumer would win the primary and could beat D’Amato. A gun-confiscating Brooklyn Jew, winning votes in Rochester and Schenectady? You’re nuts.

But it happened. Things change.

Things have been changing in the Democratic Party since, really, the wake of the 2008-09 Great Meltdown. First up was Occupy Wall Street. Then the Fight for 15. Then Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president in 2016, and his groundswell of ferocious support that surprised a lot of people, me very much included. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House win in 2018, along with a few others. Then Sanders’s second run. Then Joe Biden’s 2020 pivot to the left on economics, when he started speaking of the need for a new New Deal. And most of all, of course, the election, twice—the second time narrowly but unequivocally—of Donald Trump, which is about as much evidence of a furious electorate as one could ask for.

So the Democratic Party has been moving “to the left.” But it isn’t doing so because people are enraged about the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s because average, hardworking people are furious at a system that isn’t doing enough to keep them from falling behind. I could insert here a raft of statistics about wage stagnation, the explosion in economic inequality, and so on. Moderates and progressives argue about all that too, but what cannot be denied is what poll after poll after poll, and interview after interview after interview, tell us about what working people themselves feel. They feel screwed, and they feel no one is listening.

And today, this election cycle, rank-and-file Democrats are veritably crying out: We want you to do something about these billionaires getting obscenely richer and amassing all this power. We want reinvestment in us. We’re sick of getting nickel-and-dimed by corporations with all their hidden fees and price-gouging. We’re kind of freaked out that AI is going to further destroy our lives and towns. We hate these data centers the size of the Pentagon. We want people, goddammit, who’ll fight for us.

That’s why El-Sayed won Tuesday’s primary. Yes, Israel was a factor. El-Sayed spoke, again, graciously on Wednesday morning about fighting antisemitism arm in arm with his Jewish “sisters and brothers.” But he’s made other statements over the course of the campaign that have worried some Jews, even some whose politics are close to his, like his statement after a thwarted terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue in March. El-Sayed noted that the assailant’s niece and nephew had died recently in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, adding, “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” El-Sayed had to know at the time that some would interpret this contextualization as an attempt to justify the assailant’s motivations. But when people—your would-be constituents, no less—almost get mass-murdered, just express sympathy.

It’s also a little demagogic to say things like, “Rather than sending your money somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids, we can keep that money here at home.” Historically, that’s how right-wing nativists talk. He needs to do better. Everyone expects him to criticize AIPAC and the Israeli government. He should just do so on the basis of the things they say and do. Lord knows there’s plenty to criticize, and I’d imagine most Michigan Democrats and independents would agree with him most of the time.

But Israel isn’t why he’s the Democratic nominee. He’s the Democratic nominee because he compellingly speaks the language of economic populism (why he, and all these lefties, don’t get more working-class votes is a question to which I have an answer, but that’s for a future column). And I cannot understand why anyone who calls themselves a Democrat or a liberal would oppose this.

We’ve sat here for decades watching the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent mushroom from 22 percent in 1990 to 32 percent now. We’ve seen CEO pay over roughly the same time go from 50 times the salary of the average worker to 300; we’ve seen employers try to (mostly successfully) get away with calling people “contractors” who are obviously employees; we’ve sat here powerless as free trade deals and mega-mergers have destroyed jobs, killed communities, and concentrated economic and political power to levels way beyond the Gilded Age.

If you’re a Democrat or a liberal (or a leftist), you’re against those things. So why would you be against a candidate who is himself against those things?

In any case, opposing all this at this point in history is like opposing the tides. Even if you sincerely and devoutly believe that this is a bad direction for the Democratic Party, it’s very hard to deny that this is happening. After a very long and dormant period, the left in the United States is awake again—as it was for most of the twentieth century. FDR and LBJ had to consider the leverage of the left. Roosevelt brought a number of socialists into his administration, and Johnson put the socialist Mike Harrington on his War on Poverty task force. It’s a pretty normal thing in American history, actually.

I have my own reservations about aspects of the left’s renaissance. “Defund the police” and “eliminate the border”—and sure, throw in “cancel Thanksgiving”—are disastrous stands for anyone seeking office to take. Big-D Democrats shouldn’t come within a mile of some of those national DSA platform positions.

But overall? Far and away the most important thing politicians can do in this country over the next 10 or 20 years is reverse the concentration of wealth and political power that has characterized this polity’s last four decades and make working people’s lives better and more hopeful. Any ally in that fight, however they want to fight it (within obvious lawful and constitutional limits) and under whatever label, should be welcomed.

So it’s dismaying, to put it mildly, to see Third Way announce in the wake of El-Sayed’s victory that they’re going to spend $15 million over the next two years to wage a “war” on democratic socialism. Guys: You are not going to win this war. Each coming decade will bring more and more young people into the electorate, and each of these cohorts will be more and more supportive of socialism, until such theoretical time as the socialists have had their chance to govern and have screwed things up on their own. But that’s a good ways away.

In the meantime, with respect to any Democrats or liberals who are against El-Sayed: Is securing the general-election defeat of El-Sayed—who, by the way, isn’t even a socialist and has been, in fact, extremely thoughtful and well-spoken about why he is a capitalist and what’s wrong with American capitalism today—a “win”? Really? Electing yet another Republican election denier to the Senate is victory? This I do not get. People can fight for a vision of the party they believe in without aiding and abetting the party of fascism. And I can imagine the righteous howls if the left submarined a moderate candidate in such a fashion.

Maybe you sincerely believe El-Sayed can’t win. I think that’s wrong. I think that if he’s skillful enough, he can keep the base energized, spend loads of time at Black churches, and maintain a cordial-enough relationship with the party establishment that he can win. He couldn’t have six or eight years ago. But as I saw as a young(er) reporter in New York in 1998, there comes a moment when things change.

But even if you’re a Democrat who doesn’t think El-Sayed can win—well, it’s one thing to express your honest opinion, but it’s quite another to say provocative things that help will his defeat into being. Schumer, Whitmer, and Stevens get the stakes. Their response to El-Sayed’s win was mature and big-picture. I wish Beltway moderates would just follow their cue.