It was a good time to be a Millennial girlboss in 2018. #MeToo was tearing through institutions and canceling pervs. Beyoncé became Coachella’s first black female headliner, a phenomenon known as “Beychella” (bonus points for the cringe portmanteau). Blogs such as Jezebel, Man Repeller and Refinery29 were still setting the agenda, before their bathetic banishment into internet irrelevance. In Washington, too, girlbosses were making their mark. A record-breaking 102 women entered Congress that year, with four newly minted representatives kickin’ butt under the nickname “The Squad”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most famous and divisive of the lot, told an interviewer that she and her squadmates — Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — in fact preferred to call themselves the Spice Girls. As she explained: “We’re sisters, not clones.”

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When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t or wouldn’t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.

So it was infuriating to hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to laugh off — giggle off, really — what she now calls the “Woke One” era and pretend it was all a Covid fever dream.

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC about Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America activist running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” and that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.” Hong has also called for canceling Thanksgiving: “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.” AOC chuckled in response and reached for a line she’d picked up from a New York City councilman: “Woke One was crazy.”

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn’t always this way. 

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For a decade, a highly online horde of academics, journalists, techies, and activists operated like America’s unelected HR regime — a petty administrative state with a mob of reactive nerds attached. They were authoritarian, coercive, and sustained by the threat that anyone who failed to master an ever-expanding vocabulary could be publicly humiliated, professionally ruined, or expelled from polite society. Latinx one year, Latine the next: choose the wrong suffix, and HR might open a case file.

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You’re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you’re not putting your pronouns in your email bio — what kind of an asshole are you? 

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred. 

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics. 

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for “a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.”

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it’s only because the movement’s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year’s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago. 

Facing such scrutiny, Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.” Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief herself.

At the height of the madness, Cea Weaver, who today serves as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rental-housing czar, posted that “private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.” Doorstepped earlier this year by the New York Post about her mother’s $1.4 million mansion in Nashville, Weaver burst into tears. She has since said that she regrets “some” of it. 

Somewhere in there is a lesson about what it feels like to become a stranger’s content, one the movement she helped build could once have explained to her at length, and for free. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who knocked off five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat with Mamdani’s backing, had a whole deleted account’s worth: abolish the police, prisons and borders, and seize the landlords. Mamdani said he hadn’t seen the posts before endorsing her, and that her views had evolved.

He’d know. In June 2020, he tweeted that the NYPD is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety”; that November, two days after winning his Assembly seat, he posted: “Queer liberation means defund the police.” Then he ran for mayor on rent and buses and childcare, apologized for the language, and called himself “a candidate who is not fixed in time.” To quote Kamala Harris, who stumbled on her own woke-era statements: You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

AOC is now trying to explain the woke era away as a symptom of something like Covid cabin fever. You see, lockdown opened the Overton window, in AOC’s telling, and suddenly the Left entertained “any and every policy” that might improve society. Those debates were “quite fruitful,” she said, but candidates would not use the same rhetoric now. Voters should judge Hong by what she says today: she will not abolish the police; what was once “aspirational” is no longer primary — Thanksgiving is actually Hong’s favorite holiday!

Call it the Lockdown Alibi, and expect a great deal more of it between now and November. We were all a bit odd during Covid. I made sourdough bread; other people wanted to abolish the carceral state — different strokes, right? 

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But forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt. What the new DSA-adjacent generation of Democrats wants instead is amnesty without a full accounting for wokeness, its irrationalities and its cruelties. It isn’t clear what “Woke One” includes, which ideas have been abandoned, or why. Is it police and prison abolition? Abolishing borders? The claim that homeownership is white supremacy? Can you at least admit that land acknowledgments make you sound ridiculous? Or that Ibram X. Kendi is Miss Rachel for people with humanities degrees?

This, of course, doesn’t mean every cause associated with Woke One was wrong, or that its critics have been vindicated in everything. The anti-woke Right has produced its own identitarian grotesqueries, and its answer to racial essentialism was apparently to dust off the calipers from the 19th century.

But admission of some guilt on the Left would be nice. Instead, we have gone, in six years, from woke doesn’t exist — it’s just basic decency to: of course it existed, and it was crazy, and also it was 2020, and also can we talk about your high grocery bill? We went straight from denial to nostalgia, skipping the bit where anyone apologizes. 

In 2016, the writer Lauren Duca published a viral Teen Vogue essay arguing that Donald Trump was gaslighting America — training us to distrust our own memory of what he’d said the week before. By that logic, large swaths of the Left have also been gaslighting America for years. It’s now time to say the obvious thing: there was a woke movement, it had a program, they were in it, and it lost. Take it slowly if you need to. 

I know how hard some words are to get out.

El-Sayed, a former public-health official, managed it, clinching (as of this writing) 48.5% of ballots, against 47.5% for his centrist opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. The narrow margin might prompt Democratic-establishment crowing about El-Sayed’s chances in the general. But consider that AIPAC and other outside groups poured some $60 million into Stevens’s campaign, with more than half of that amount coming from the political action committee of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby — making this the most expensive Democratic primary ever. Outside groups backing El-Sayed, by contrast, only managed fewer than $5 million. 

Sixty million bucks couldn’t buy a Democratic primary. We have, in every sense, entered a new era.

Stevens was the sort of candidate who, not long ago, breezed to the nomination in a statewide contest. When Mallory McMorrow, the third Democrat in the running, dropped out, it was assumed Stevens could consolidate the anti-El-Sayed vote. This was how centrists almost always beat the Left, after all. In 2020, Bernie Sanders was doomed when Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the primary, endorsing Joe Biden. Even when Leftists were strong, they were factional candidates, doomed to electoral ceilings. Sanders couldn’t get more votes than Biden or Hillary Clinton. The Left had to content itself with small-scale victories, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocking off Joe Crowley in a single New York House district.

But now we have a Left surge of a kind not seen since the late 1960s and early ’70s. Back then, Left-leaning Democrats won primaries on the strength of their full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War. Just so, today it’s Israel-critical Democrats who are being rewarded for aligning the party with popular sentiment. And popular sentiment is clear: the Jewish state is now viewed unfavorably by nearly all major demographic groups (save for Republicans over age 50).

El-Sayed, like Mamdani, is a fierce critic of Israel. Both shattered taboos around what could be said about the Jewish state. AIPAC knew what was at stake, hence its unprecedented spending. The state’s Democratic establishment, led by outgoing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, likewise lent its backing to Stevens. Before the mid-2020s, that sort of endorsement power alone would have just about ended any statewide primary.

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Progressives, of course, can’t claim total victory. The margin was uncomfortably tight, and El-Sayed must survive the general election come November. But here, too, the deck is stacked. Moderates get to lose elections all the time, but if the Left blows a race to a Republican, the alarm bells are heard ringing all across the country. It’s the same way with governance: a centrist like Eric Adams, the former Gotham mayor, can depart City Hall in utter disgrace. But Mamdani, the democratic socialist, must run the city without a whiff of scandal; the slightest failure on his part (supposedly) indicts the entire American Left. 

What makes El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens most intriguing, though, is that progressives will finally be able to test a thesis they’ve long entertained: namely, that their brand of politics — populist on economics but still socially liberal — can win in a battleground state. Progressives, typically, haven’t won primaries where a strong Republican is waiting in the wings. If El-Sayed can win Michigan, one of the most pivotal states in the country, he will be a true national star.

For now, at least, the progressive Left has been able to leave its cultural baggage behind. El-Sayed can’t be credibly called anti-woke, but he might be, like Mamdani, post-woke. Mamdani abandoned his earlier calls to defund the police. He does not, like the Democratic Socialists of America and 2010s progressives, support an open border. 

El-Sayed has trod a similar path. With his bulging muscles and willingness to mix it up on the podcast circuit and alternative online channels, he codes as the sort of pol who might be able to solve the Democrats’ problem with woke-weary young men. He possesses a certain machismo that, for Leftists, is a more recent phenomenon. And he speaks forthrightly to the cultural crises of young men, telling UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari that Leftists should address the structural causes behind male malaise — issues like online gambling and porn addiction — rather than write off men as “toxic.” Whether this is enough to convince young men to vote Democratic again nationally remains to be seen.

The bigger story, though, is the pro-Palestine current running through the party, and the generational shift well under way that will eventually tug top Democrats away from Israel. Like all small-d democratic groups, they eventually respond to their voters, and this is clearly what their voters want. Social media were rife with videos mocking Stevens for her over-the-top devotion to the Jewish state — “Israel comes to me in my dreams” — and the AIPAC largesse floating her campaign. 

There was her voice, too, almost a peculiar parody of the Michigander accent — I’ve spent a great amount of time in the state and never heard anyone speak that way — that had many online critics pulling up old clips of Chris Farley. Were these attacks sexist? Maybe. But they came from as many young women as young men. Swaggering El-Sayed was the one they wanted.

The pundit class contends that El-Sayed is a terrible bet in the general election against the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. Whether they have a point or not, we will find out soon enough. What the Michigan primary proved was that Democratic voters are no longer compelled by that pitch. They once were; the entire premise of Biden’s 2020 campaign was his contention that only he could defeat Trump. Now the electorate is restless. They saw the Democratic failures of 2016 and 2024. They are weary and angry about living, again, under the yoke of Trump. When a Democratic politician or star operative lectures them about electability, they tune out. Wasn’t the failed reality-TV star supposed to be unelectable? Then he won — and won again. Stevens could talk all day and night about how she flipped a Republican seat. Very few people cared.

The harsh reality for the Democratic establishment is that they have, like Republicans in 2016, lost their grip on the party. They have no one but themselves to blame. In 2024, Michigan was the home of the Uncommitted movement: progressives who refused to fall behind Biden and Kamala Harris over the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Why would Stevens, AIPAC’s foot soldier, be the right candidate for 2026 in Michigan of all places, with its sizable Arab and Muslim population? 

Now that it has been proved that AIPAC cannot buy a Democratic primary, the group’s influence on Democratic politics, already waning, will collapse sharply. Even if El-Sayed loses in November, there won’t be a lane for Israel hawks in future Democratic primaries, and they will migrate fully to the GOP (where, it must be noted, a warm embrace isn’t certain to greet them). 

Organic support for Israel is vanishing, and the vast reserves of cash can’t bring it back. Stevens herself once won a House primary bludgeoning a progressive Jewish Democrat, Andy Levin, whom Israel hawks believed was insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. Now she is finished. At best, she will be a footnote: one of the very last pure AIPAC Democrats. Like the Rockefeller Republicans of old, she and her cause will fade into history.

Yet the woman who introduced modern democratic socialism to America, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, may find this outcome more discomfiting than thrilling — at first blush, at least. Though AOC entered Congress as a disruptor railing against the party’s leadership, she has become, quietly, far more accommodating in Washington. Will the incoming socialists follow the same pattern — or adopt a more radical line, forcing her to choose between fidelity to the Left and her mainstream aspirations?

AOC is friendly with top Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who might well end up the next House speaker. She has climbed the ranks of key committees. She has been, when needed, a good soldier. In 2024, at the Democratic National Convention, she delivered a forceful speech in favor of Kamala Harris, hailing the then-vice president for working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Uncommitted National Movement — progressives who refused to commit to the Harris-Walz ticket over Palestine — were all but barred from the convention. This irked Leftists to no end, leading them to question AOC’s progressive credentials and to wonder out loud whether she was a sell-out.

Yet beyond the hard-Left rank-and-file, AOC is unlikely to face an immediate battle with the new socialist electeds. She didn’t endorse all the primary challengers who won — in deference to her House colleagues, she stayed away from those challenging incumbents or the preferred candidates of incumbents. Even so, she has made overtures to the victors, praising Valdez and Avila Chevalier in New York. The winners all express a fondness for her — publicly, at least. In short, comity will likely reign within The Squad.

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There’s a larger question, though, over how these relationships might fare if some of the new Leftists decide to behave in a more confrontational manner. Ocasio-Cortez may run for president and wants to make a bid for a broader national audience. A lawmaker like Avila Chevalier won’t have the same incentives. Within the DSA itself, there are also going to be fresh tensions. It isn’t hard to find online gripes from Leftists wondering if AOC is too soft on Israel, too willing to accept the Democratic status quo.

How things change.

It was in 2018 when AOC won her shock primary over Joe Crowley, the boss of the Queens Democratic Party, seen as a potential successor to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The organization that supported her, the DSA, was mostly a fringe curiosity, a legacy project of the famed political theorist and activist Michael Harrington, who died in 1989. As recently as a decade ago, the DSA boasted only a few thousand members nationally and had little impact on conventional electoral politics. When AOC won, she benefited from the first DSA boom, which followed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s unsuccessful but surprisingly robust battle against Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Fast forward to today, and there are around 120,000 DSA members across the country, per the organization’s own tally. 

At first, it looked like AOC would fulfill the expectations of her greatest fans and detractors alike. Before she was even sworn in, she stormed Pelosi’s office with 200 youth activists to demand Congress do more to combat climate change. Her nascent Squad seemed poised to disrupt the Democratic majority, with AOC leading the way. 

Some of their number, such as Omar and Michigan’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib, would prove to be lightning rods. Yet as the years wore on, Ocasio-Cortez gradually evolved into an institutionalist, a proud progressive who would nevertheless partner with Pelosi and try to climb the ranks of the body. She is one of the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and while she still supports policies like the Green New Deal — a massive stimulus program to fight climate change while putting millions to work on the scale of the original New Deal — she rarely talks about it anymore. In light of her rising stature in the Democratic caucus and her alliance with Jeffries, AOC didn’t endorse Avila Chevalier or Valdez in their primaries, though both are fellow Latina DSA members from New York City. 

Among a faction of the left, AOC skepticism persists. Bhaskar Sunkara, the Jacobin founder (and a contributor to these pages), recently declared that Ocasio-Cortez is “more progressive than socialist.” Some in the DSA have grumbled that by upholding corporate-friendly Democrats like Jeffries, AOC has undercut her own seriousness about rebuilding the welfare state and union power. There’s a schism, too, between how New York City socialists view Ocasio-Cortez — they adore her — and a smaller slice of the national leadership that has always seen her as too moderate: AOC never forced a vote on Medicare for All, voted to support Iron Dome funding for the Jewish state, and seemed, at times, more concerned with placating colleagues in seniority than catering to the base. 

How will these factional tensions contour her future and that of the wider DSA-aligned Left in Congress?

Power, generally, tends to change those who obtain it. For the next wave of DSA members entering the House, the question is whether they’ll follow the current AOC example — or venture down a more radical path. The latter, given Ocasio-Cortez’s own entanglements with the Left, may be more likely. Neither Avila Chevalier nor Valdez have said they would support Jeffries for speaker. Kiros and Rabb haven’t committed, either. (Brad Lander, who is not a DSA member but would be one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress next year, has said he will back Jeffries.) 

This doesn’t mean, ultimately, that Jeffries won’t have the votes to win the speaker’s gavel. Nor does it imply that all of these DSAers won’t fall in line with the mainstream of the party. But it does offer a preview of what’s to come. 

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What was true was that Ocasio-Cortez never employed the tactics of hard-Right Republicans in Congress, many of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, who were able to take down one speaker (Kevin McCarthy) and hold another hostage (Mike Johnson). If these conservatives took relatively little interest in governing — the nihilist anti-spending approach dated back to the Tea Party years — it was inarguable this faction could, at times, impose its will on the rest of the Republican Party.

The hard Left has never been able to do the same to the Democrats, whose party leadership disciplined members far more effectively and could, more often than not, tamp down insurgencies. Donald Trump thrice clinched the GOP nomination, while Sanders couldn’t do it even once. In 2026, though, the Democrats are running out of cards to play. A democratic socialist governs New York City, and Leftists are running roughshod over establishment Democrats in congressional primaries. Jeffries, for all his skill, lacks Pelosi’s stature and naked political talent. AOC and her allies couldn’t defenestrate Pelosi because she was, unlike McCarthy, one of the great backroom tacticians of the modern era, a legislative leader with few peers anywhere. And she was a historical figure, too, the first and so far only female speaker of the House. By the time AOC entered Congress, Pelosi had already completed a four-year stretch as speaker and spent many decades in politics; she was the preeminent power in San Francisco and Washington, DC.

What is Jeffries compared to that? Suddenly, the radicalism that the new DSA members might pursue almost reads like realpolitik. Why should Valdez or Avila Chevalier or Rabb fear Jeffries? What can he really do to them? Why not try to replicate the House Freedom Caucus model on the Democratic side? Jeffries’s staunch support for Israel is outmoded, and even ordinary Democratic voters alienated from the DSA don’t have an especially high opinion of him. They’re tired of their leaders and don’t feel they’re fighting Trump hard enough. 

This is where the DSA Leftists can appeal, to some degree, to the “normie” Democratic voter — both despise Trump and want to engage in political combat at his level. AOC, ultimately, will have to shift with them — she’ll need to be more pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, and more willing to spar with Jeffries. For her, this all might be liberating, anyway. The AOC of 2018 would probably be protesting the AOC of 2026. If she really wants to run for president, she’ll need every last activist in her corner. That primary will be a real war.

The long and bumpy journey there began one hot summer night in 1992, in the same city that gave us Mamdani. Then, Bill Clinton stood before a packed Madison Square Garden to accept the Democratic nomination for president. “The Cold War is over,” he said. “Soviet communism has collapsed and our values — freedom, democracy, individual rights, free enterprise — they have triumphed all around the world.” Having declared the death of socialism, he then outlined a program to pivot the Democrats towards a new ideology that would “end welfare as we know it” and create a “government that is leaner… that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy… that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise”.

The previous Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had begun experimenting with neoliberal policies in the late Seventies — trying deregulation and the use of tight monetary policy to fight inflation — but Clinton went full-hog and made small government the new creed. Its basic premise, that social progress resulted from individuals pursuing their self-interest in an enlightened manner, essentially took Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments and gave it a liberal sheen. Most significantly, by burying the Keynesian consensus that had dominated the Party since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clinton joined the Democrats to the Republicans in a new neoliberal consensus. This doctrine, which would dominate American policy-making for the next three decades, would prioritize free trade and globalization, deregulation, a leaner state with less generous welfare, low taxes, balanced budgets, and an independent central bank that used monetary policy as the final arbiter of the government’s fiscal rectitude.

Ever since, it’s been an article of orthodoxy among Democrats that no party which welcomed socialists could ever stand a chance outside of America’s liberal heartlands. Candidates could talk a good line on change, as Barack Obama did in his 2008 election campaign, but once in office quickly reasserted the hold of the neoliberal wing on economic policy. Obama did just that when he handed his economic policy-making over to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

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Various theories have been put forth to explain the seemingly visceral antipathy Americans have long had to socialism. The frontier thesis posited that European settlement of the West created a culture of rugged individualism; the fragment thesis suggested socialism came to America via German rather than British immigrants, and so was Marxist and counter-cultural rather than Fabian and non-revolutionary. Marxist historian Mike Davis held that organized labour chose not to form a party, as happened in Europe; instead, they hoped to play one party off against the other to secure maximal benefits. Sociologist Barrington Moore believed the outlet of Western settlement acted as a pressure-release valve of urban working classes in 19th-century America’s industrial seaboard. But to this day, polls consistently show that most Americans dislike anything that smacks of communism. Mamdani, for example, polls better in the Big Apple than in the wider country.

That doesn’t mean Americans haven’t been building an appetite for significant change. Over the course of the Obama presidency, the public began turning against the neoliberal consensus, spawning the Occupy movement on the Left and the Tea Party revolt on the Right. But when the 2016 presidential primaries saw insurgent candidates openly challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy, the Republicans succumbed to the anti-free-trade populism of Donald Trump while the Democrats stood firm, delivering the nomination to the uber-establishment Hillary Clinton rather than the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders.

In hindsight, though, that was the beginning of the end for the Democratic neoliberals. Clinton’s subsequent humiliating defeat at the hands of Trump rankled with the Democratic Left, which pointed to polls that said a hypothetical Sanders-Trump contest would have been won by the Brooklyn-born firebrand (though hypotheticals rarely tell us much). Since then, Left-wing populists have repeatedly surfaced, and the establishment has kept beating them back. Most recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was working as a bartender in the Bronx when she won a shock victory in the 2018 House of Representatives election, found her wings clipped last year when she tried to win the top Democratic position on a powerful House committee, only to be beaten by a septuagenarian. AOC, as she is popularly known, then set off on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with her mentor Sanders, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds in unlikely places such as Oklahoma, Utah and Montana. The tour culminated in September in her native New York City, where the star attraction was none other than Mamdani.

On Tuesday night, more than 30 years after Clinton pronounced socialism dead, the self-declared socialist Zohran Mamdani stood before a raucous crowd as proof that it had risen once more. Like AOC, Mamdani came out of nowhere to rocket to victory. Like AOC, he is a charismatic and articulate master of new media. Like AOC, he deeply unsettles the Party establishment — the Clintons refused to back him, as did Senate leader Chuck Schumer.

But by defeating the establishment and its deep-pocketed backers in a hugely lopsided contest, Mamdani may have given the Left both inspiration and a significant base from which to launch a run for the 2028 presidential election, with AOC frequently topping lists of the papabile. While that possibility still seems a long shot, she and Sanders may well emerge as kingmakers in the Democratic primaries, one way or the other.

And while the Party leadership still invokes the need to cleave to the center, the Left-wing Democrats seem to have two things going in their favor. First, sentiment is shifting. Ever since the bank bailouts that followed the 2008 crash, Americans have grown less enthusiastic about capitalism, with Democratic voters now expressing strong and growing support for socialism. Most notably young voters, who broke strongly for Trump last year, have soured quickly, apparently disappointed that his anti-establishment rhetoric gave way to a warm embrace of tech oligarchs. Meanwhile, Sanders remains one of the most popular politicians in America and even AOC, who is more divisive, enjoys substantially better approval ratings than Trump.

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The second thing going for the radicals is that Americans don’t always do what they say they’ll do. The received wisdom in 2016 was that Clinton was a shoo-in because Americans would not vote for a candidate as far outside the mainstream as Trump. But they did, twice. The secret to Trump’s success seems to be that even though he seldom enjoys majority approval, his supporters are so devoted to him that the Party has opened an enthusiasm gap with the Democrats. It may be that the secret to Democratic success lies in a similar strategy: don’t worry if a majority don’t like your candidate, provided a highly-motivated plurality turns out on election day. Mamdani may show how to do it.

While a socialist is still unlikely to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2028, the resurgence of radical populism within the party makes it probable that the next candidate will have to repudiate neoliberalism. In other words, the odds have improved that the 2028 election will pit a MAGA Republican against a Left-wing Democrat. The resulting pyrotechnics might obscure the true significance of that development: a definitive end to the neoliberal era.

A new consensus might not immediately emerge to replace the fallen neoliberal one, given that both parties are engaged in internecine warfare between rival wings. Among the Democrats, the establishment won’t give way without a fight, and they can point to the fact that centrist Democrats did well in other elections on Tuesday night. Among the Republicans, while loyalty to Trump binds the Party together, splits are emerging between different factions as the fight for the 2028 nomination heats up. Policy volatility could result, as one administration after another repeatedly undoes its predecessor’s work, as Trump has done with the Biden administration’s.

Nevertheless, on several points, MAGA Republicans and the Democratic Left seem to be converging — not least because some of Trump’s neoliberal reversions, such as tax cuts, deregulation and a rollback of public health care, have landed uneasily with many of his supporters (witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent meltdowns). But the deeper trends seem increasingly clear. Globalization will likely diminish as trade deals and immigration policy pay more attention to worker rights and supply-chain resilience. Central bank independence may no longer be sacrosanct, and the Federal Reserve may be expected to underwrite looser government spending. Inflation may consequently settle at the higher level it’s at now. There is likely to be some restoration of regulation, and the tech oligarchs especially may come back into the crosshairs of populists on both sides of the political aisle. Tax policy may be revised to be less favorable to the rich, and more to the middle class. A cross-party consensus on health care reform may yet emerge. In other words, American capitalism may be entering a new and uncertain age. The future could look quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

“I got a good friend where our entire relationship has been comprised of talking about athletes of the past,” El-Sayed tells me in a wide-ranging phone interview. “You just spitball: name an athlete from the past and their best moment, or whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the GOAT” (greatest of all time). He adds parenthetically: “It’s Jordan, by the way.”

ESPN used to be at the center of the friendship. But more recently, El-Sayed and his buddy can’t watch it, because the network “has become one gigantic billboard for sports betting, and he has problematic gambling. It’s was such an important of his identity, and it’s gone from him. We don’t talk about that.”

The $100 billion sports-betting “industry” raises bankruptcy rates by a third within four years of a state legalizing the practice, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. That’s about 30,000 additional bankruptcies per year nationally. Yet for El-Sayed, the deeper crisis is how gambling firms, and other corporate peddlers of vice, “monetize men’s dopamine circuits.”

A gym rat and former star athlete, El-Sayed says he doesn’t know “any young man between the ages of 14 and 40 who doesn’t have some kind of problematic relationship with one of the following: sports betting, gaming, porn, cannabis.” Each “leaves people feeling small and kind of broken.” Meanwhile, elite discourse blames men “for this sort of ‘toxic masculinity,’ ” while the likes of Andrew Tate promote a misogynistic caricature of what it means to be a man. “All of these working together have led to this massive MAGA-pilling of young men.”

In response, El-Sayed thinks, Democrats should return to what their party was founded to do: empowering ordinary people relative to the market forces profiting off their misery. In this case, El-Sayed argues, that means regulating vice advertising that attempts to ensnare Americans at ever younger ages. His own daughter Emmalee (age 7), he says, has started to notice a marijuana dispensary called Cookies on the way to hockey practice in Ann Arbor, where the El-Sayeds live.

El-Sayed recalls, “I had to explain to her that they don’t sell cookies. How do I explain to [her] that they’re trying to market a product that isn’t meant for children, but [is] explicitly marketed to children?”

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Post-puberty young men are even worse off, in thrall to those who would addict them (Pornhub), and to those who farm online engagement by shifting the blame (Tate). As El-Sayed puts it, “When you’ve been sapped of all your energy because you’ve just looked at porn for the third time today, because it’s literally everywhere, and then somebody comes and tells you that ‘the reason you feel so bad is because of women,’ you’re talking about people in a very vulnerable place.”

The progressive alternative, El-Sayed contends, should be a combination of self-help and collective action: “You can tell young men, ‘OK, put on your pants, go to class, show up better in your life, hit the gym, all of it.’ But also: ‘Let’s talk about why you feel this way. It’s not about the women in your life. It’s about these huge corporations that have tried to separate you from your dollar in ways that make you feel bad.’ ”

It’s this relentless economic populism — combined with a blunt, here-I-am rhetorical style, especially on Gaza — that has made El-Sayed one of the most talked-about candidates amid the progressive ferment roiling the Democratic Party. Indeed, he comes closest to being the true heir to the aging Bernie Sanders progressives have spent years looking for.

The only question is whether El-Sayed is more like the 2016 Sanders (a heterodox rebel) or the 2020 Sanders (more conventional, more willing to play ball with the party mainstream). The shorter answer is: El-Sayed has elements of both. But on the whole, he’s more Bernie 2016 than Bernie 2020.

Abdul El-Sayed was born in 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich., to Egyptian parents who’d moved to the area so his father could study engineering at Wayne State University. His parents later separated, and he grew up, as he told a radio interviewer in 2021, with a “Daughter of the American Revolution” stepmother and his immigrant father — the kind of only-in-America blended family that belies fantasies of racial purification animating the online Right.

He finished his undergraduate degree and the first two years of medical school at the University of Michigan before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a public-health doctorate. Back Stateside, he completed his medical degree at Columbia but skipped residency to pursue a career in public-health research. In 2015, at age 30, he returned to Detroit to serve as the city’s health director before running for governor three years later.

His gubernatorial bid failed, but along the way, he garnered endorsements from the likes of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Meanwhile, he co-authored a book making the case for Medicare for All that doubled as a decent history of American health care and insurance.

Then came 2024. Michigan proved to be an especially challenging battleground for Democrats — in ways that touched on El-Sayed’s biography. Not only did the Biden-Harris campaign fail to motivate the state’s Muslim-American community, the country’s largest, but Donald Trump even won major endorsements from a number of imams and mayors. When the dust settled, Trump had clinched a majority of ballots in Dearborn, Mich., the country’s most heavily Muslim city.

How does El-Sayed explain the loss? In a word, Gaza. “Unfortunately,” he tells me, “President Biden was on the wrong side of that. His ‘hug-Bibi’ strategy put us in a situation where our values and our aims were not consistently applied as Democrats. . . . Folks got sick and tired of their tax dollars being spent to watch children being murdered who looked like their own children.”

While noting that he endorsed Kamala Harris, El-Sayed isn’t shy about where he thinks principle and politics should lead Democrats when it comes to the Middle East. For starters, he wants more Dems to get comfortable with the G-word: “I call this a ‘genocide’ in large part because that’s a technical term for a horror that’s being inflicted on people. I don’t know another word for killing 60,000-plus people, at least 18,500 of them children. Rendering their homes unlivable. Trying to push them into other countries because they happen to speak the same language.”

El-Sayed’s immediate solution to the Gaza crisis is to cut off all funding to the Israeli military (and, he quickly adds, to all foreign militaries): “I think we would do well to spend our money here to feed our children who are going without food, to build our kids’ schools, to empower our people to have health care, to build our infrastructure, rather than decimating and devastating people abroad.”

Unfavorable views of Israel are now overwhelming among Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a growing share of younger Republicans (though, as a whole, the GOP remains stalwartly pro-Israel). Yet the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party isn’t ready to follow its base, notwithstanding a recent vote in the Senate that saw an astonishing half of the Democratic caucus call for withholding offensive weapons from the Jewish state.

Case in point: Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary and a likely 2028 presidential aspirant, faced broad ridicule for a podcast appearance in which he pontificated at length on Gaza without taking any clear stances. (When I ask El-Sayed to comment on this —Buttigieg is from neighboring Indiana, after all — he demurs: “I’m not a pundit.”)

But besides cutting off arms to the IDF, what’s his long-term plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Does he envision a two-state solution? “Every president before Donald Trump, since the founding of the State of Israel, has agreed that we want a two-state solution. That has been their stated aim. There is an Israel — there is not a Palestine. And yet our taxpayer dollars continue to be spent to aid, arm, and abet the very people who want to foreclose on the possibility of Palestine.”

Squint hard enough, and you might detect a grudging acknowledgment of official US policy there — two states for two peoples. Then again, El-Sayed’s cynicism is well-founded, in that leaders in Jerusalem increasingly reject Palestinian self-determination, most recently with an overwhelming vote in the Knesset in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Given the widening gap between Israel’s leaders and political culture, on one hand, and younger Americans of all political persuasions, on the other, even centrist Democrats are likely to shift in El-Sayed’s direction, even if not all the way. What makes him a potentially transformative leader for the party, however, isn’t his vociferousness on Israel per se, but his hospitals-here-not-bombs-there attitude. It echoes Sanders’s 2016 campaign — and could win back moderate or marginal GOP voters: not MAGA die-hards, but working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.

El-Sayed is open about trying to reach disaffected Trumpians. “The fundamental divide,” he says, “is between people who have felt locked out of our system for a very long time and people who’ve been trying to lock them out. I want to work for the people who’ve been locked out. . . . How they’ve voted in the past, where they stand on social issues — I’ve got my opinions about those things, but I think we’re better as a society when people who’ve been locked out get a fair shake.”

If El-Sayed is indeed the closest thing progressives have to Bernie 2.0, his success will turn on his ability to navigate the tension between class-based economic populism and the identity-and-grievance jockeying that has shaped the party since the mid-2010s.

In 2015-16, Sanders denounced “open borders” and ran an unabashedly class-first message. In response, the party’s neoliberal center derided his followers as “bros” and often accused them (preposterously) of racism and sexism. Hillary Clinton asked: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Four years later, amid “peak woke,” Sanders fell in line on immigration and lost his edge.

Where is El-Sayed on all this in 2025? At first, he bristles at the question and its left-right, class-versus-identity framing: “I’m a little bit too much of a scientist to take on premise a lot of the implied lenses that you’re using to make sense out of our political moment.” Yeah, OK. Obama, too, had wearied of red and blue, right and left by the time he gave his career-defining speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

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On immigration — an issue that massively contributed to Trump’s re-election last year, and which has dramatically altered politics across the developed world — El-Sayed sounds more conventionally progressive notes. While disavowing “open borders,” he mostly fumes against the cruelty of the newly supercharged Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Masked, anonymous ICE agents, he says, “are literally tearing mothers from babies and babies away from mothers. Tell me how this is something that benefits all of us. I just don’t see it, I’m sorry.”

Fair enough. But this doesn’t overcome the deeper economic argument against the free movement of labor: that it allows capital to engage in wage arbitrage, especially at the lower rungs of the labor market. It was just this that impelled the labor movement, and many trade-union and civil-rights icons, to back restrictionism until relatively recently. And it’s why the Bernie of old denounced porous national frontiers as a “Koch Brothers policy.”

El-Sayed disagrees: “The answer to going after the DoorDash economy, is to go after fucking DoorDash.” Meaning: pro-worker and pro-consumer legislation and regulation. So would that include national E-Verify, holding employers responsible for the immigration status of employees? Not quite. His bottom line is that border enforcement can’t and mustn’t be thought of as a means for boosting labor’s market power.

Immigration aside, El-Sayed’s vision resembles Bernie 2016 to a great extent. Class and economic power are at the heart of it: “I’m interested in trying to achieve an America where everyone has their best shot at a dignified life,” he says, “and I understand that the central challenge to doing that has been the power of extremely wealthy people to corrupt our politics, to shape an economy that funnels more and more money to the very top, against and despite everybody else who does all the work.”

He goes on to call for Medicare for All, higher union density in the private economy, robust antitrust enforcement, and the removal of corporate influence from politics. Add his communitarian concern about widespread male addiction and alienation, and his agenda could prove extremely popular in years to come. Doubly so if the Trumpians continue to deliver a George W. Bush program — Medicaid cuts, Mideast war — under the banner of America First.

This is the state of the Democrats in 2025. Bereft of ideas and riven by internal division, the party is no longer in control of itself. That has left it open to challenges from the ideological fringes, with a new wave of socialists and progressives emerging in America’s cities, from New York to Minneapolis to Albuquerque. Led by a new generation of young primary challengers, a broader realignment may be taking shape in the party — one that is more progressive, economically populist, and unapologetically pro-Palestine.

The forceful return of the Left has exposed the fecklessness of centrist Democrats, whose efforts to reclaim the party after President Trump’s victory last year have utterly failed. Back in November, moderates promised a sober reset: a return to pragmatism, competence, and electability. But they have since been out-organized, out-communicated, and increasingly out of step with a base that no longer sees triangulation as a virtue. With the midterms looming, it’s clear that the center isn’t holding, and the Left is on the march.

Over the last two months, a pair of Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates, Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, have surfaced as contenders for mayor in two blue cities. In June, Mamdani — a democratic socialist who campaigned on city-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses — won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. His victory was followed by that of Fateh, who received a major boost when the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the state’s version of the Democrats) endorsed him over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. It was the Minneapolis DFL’s first endorsement in 16 years.

Like Mamdani, Fateh’s pitch to voters focused almost exclusively on cost-of-living issues. He promised to implement widespread rent control, raise the city minimum wage to $20, and implement free transit. He is now well-positioned to win the general election later this year — even if Gov. Tim Walz has endorsed his rival Frey.

Progressives elsewhere are taking note. In Seattle, Katie Wilson looks set to defeat Mayor Bruce Harrell in a Democratic primary by promising affordable housing and better public transit. In a written statement, Wilson sounded almost like a MAGA Republican with her promise to take on “career politicians backed by corporate interests,” who have “presided for years over skyrocketing costs of living and out-of-control homelessness.” Similarly, in Albuquerque, NM, Alex Uballez is challenging Democratic Mayor Tim Keller on a progressive platform to combat income and housing inequality.

“Cost of living has for several years in a row now been top of mind for voters at all levels of elections,” says Michael Baharaeen, chief political analyst at the Liberal Patriot newsletter. “For better or worse, this new contingent of socialist and progressive candidates has a message on this stuff. They are speaking about things — whether they’re workable ideas or not — that people really care about.”

Many remain skeptical. Citing Mamdani’s plan to tax “whiter” neighborhoods harder or Fateh’s pledge to expand city funding for progressive causes (including a “Trans Equity Summit”), they claim that these figures merely represent a “new phase” of wokeness — not a rejection of it. To them, the populist gloss is just that. “When I hear a politician being described as economically populist, I want to see if the working class is actually voting for them or not,” says the political economist and UnHerd contributor Michael Lind. “The public grocery store idea does not come from the working class — it comes from the nonprofit sector. It’s a classic case of ‘pity charity liberalism.’”

Given that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat Mamdani by a wide margin among lower-income and black voters — the only two groups he won — it is difficult to cast Mamdani as a tribune of the working class. Still, there are signs he is trying to address that weakness. After the Midtown Manhattan shooting, for example, the Democratic nominee went directly from the airport after his wedding trip to Uganda to visit the family of a slain police officer. Later that day, he walked back past posts calling to defund the police, which he admitted were “out of step.” This may not sound entirely convincing, but it is a significant, if cautious, course correction.

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Cuomo, for his part, tried to run a conventional campaign focused on public safety in the primary. But Mamdani, despite starting with almost no name recognition, succeeded in shifting the conversation. He reframed the race around housing, affordability, and the cost of living, which proved so effective that Cuomo, in his campaign relaunch, mimicked both Mamdani’s visual style and his economic focus. What was meant to be a law-and-order referendum has since become a debate on rent, wages, and whom the city is for.

The fact that Mamdani remains a viable candidate speaks to a deeper shift in the Democratic Party. Ten or even five years ago, it is doubtful that figures like him or Fateh would have emerged as serious contenders for office. In any other Democratic leadership contest, a candidate who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” or who declined to support then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary — over his stance on Israel — would have been dead on arrival.

But these are different times. Democratic voters have undergone a dramatic shift on Israel — so much so that even former senior Barack Obama advisers are now calling for a re-evaluation of the party’s position. Chris Van Hollen, a US senator from Maryland, declared it was a “big lie” that Hamas has systematically stolen UN aid, while 24 Democratic senators supported blocking the sale of more than $675 million in arms sales to Israel. Meanwhile, in the House, 13 progressive lawmakers have signed onto a letter urging the Trump administration to recognize a Palestinian state, and at least one plans to introduce a pro-statehood resolution.

It would be a stretch to credit Mamdani and his fellow progressives for this shift, but their refusal to tone down criticism of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has forced once-taboo positions into the mainstream. This dynamic was in full display during a mayoral debate, at which the candidates were asked to name the first foreign country they’d visit upon being elected mayor. Nearly all the other candidates named Israel, offering effusive praise for the Jewish state. Mamdani, however, indicated that he would stay put in the Big Apple, visiting local synagogues to connect with Jewish New Yorkers. The stance won him applause from the Left — and even many on the MAGA Right.

In fact, Israel’s blocking of aid to Gaza has twisted centrist Democrats into knots, with fears spreading that the war in the Middle East could become a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries. In the face of mass starvation and an IDF push to take over the entire Gaza strip, the only consensus the party’s moderate wing has managed to reach is this: criticize the Netanyahu government, but not the Jewish state.

This stance has produced some painfully tin-eared moments online. Challenged on a popular YouTube show on why she wasn’t taking a stronger position on Gaza, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan deflected, insisting, “I would offer that Democrats own nothing in Washington,” before shifting the conversation to the difference between sending offensive and defensive weapons to Israel. Even on that point, she struggled. Asked whether she would support a ban on offensive arms to Israel, she meekly responded: “That, to me, would certainly be a place to look.” In the end, she skipped the vote on the offensive-weapons resolution for an appearance on the Stephen Colbert talkshow.

The center, then, is no longer setting the terms of the debate; it’s struggling to keep up.

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The upheaval is playing out at the ballot box, too. In safe blue districts across the country, a new generation of candidates — almost all under 40 — is mounting primary challenges against long-serving Democratic incumbents. In New York, a 26-year-old Jewish democratic socialist is taking on Rep. Dan Goldman, drawing inspiration from Mamdani’s high-profile run. In California, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing a challenge from a onetime aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In Illinois, a progressive content creator is running to unseat a 14-term congressman. And in a pair of open Senate races, Gen X and Millennial Democrats have launched bids to fill seats vacated by retiring Boomers in New Hampshire and Michigan. As Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician endorsed by Bernie Sanders who is running in Michigan, told Politico, his position on Gaza is a “symbol for something greater. Gaza, unfortunately, has become a Rorschach test for values. Do your morals apply anywhere and everywhere?”

What these races show is that the anti-establishment feeling that fueled Trump’s return is moving in both directions. As polling analysis by the election-data site Split Ticket illustrates, Democrats now view their party about as negatively as Republicans viewed theirs from 2009 to 2015, when Bush-Romney neoliberal dogma ruled the GOP. That insurgency reshaped the GOP from the ground up, dragging the party toward populism. A similar dynamic may now be unfolding on the Left. Polling in June found that roughly half of Democrats are “unsatisfied with current leadership,” with 62% calling for the “party leaders to be replaced” — a level of disaffection that suggests something bigger is stirring inside the party.

The Democrats have yet to find their own answer to Trump. But the most obvious contender is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has successfully straddled both wings of the party, serving as a bridge between the establishment and progressives. She has the highest net approval out of any Democrat not running for president, and she is still young enough to position herself as an outsider candidate.

Unlike most of her colleagues, AOC has also cultivated a political identity that operates largely independent of the Democratic Party’s institutional machinery. But the real test will be whether she can break through beyond the progressive base and win over moderates and independents — the very voters needed to beat Trump’s successor.

She is also exactly who, like Mamdani, Republicans want front and center in the Democratic Party. Just as Trump painted her and The Squad as the face of the party during his first term, the president is now targeting Mamdani in a similar fashion. This could have a deleterious effect on Democratic efforts to win back independents and moderates ahead of next year’s midterms. As Karl Rove aptly put it on Fox News last weekend, “the more that we get people like this representing the face of the Democratic Party, the harder it is [for them] to win back voters in the middle of American politics.”

For that to happen — to win back a national majority — these progressive challengers actually need to win their races first. Beyond that, a lot will also depend on the progressives’ ability to stay singularly focused on issues like the cost of living and Republicans’ attacks on hugely popular entitlements, while eschewing “peak woke” slogans like police abolition and “queer liberation.”

Still, their success so far signals a deeper shift underway in the party. What once looked like fringe discontent is beginning to coalesce into a coherent, organized revolt. Far from being isolated local phenomena, their victories would legitimize a new template for Left-wing politics: one rooted in economic populism with a deep skepticism of the party establishment. In a few years’ time, it may not be Mamdani, Fateh, and others who seem like outliers — but the party leadership, scrambling to catch up.

It’s tempting to focus on what unites the populist energy on both sides of the aisle: a shared hostility to a ruling class that has overseen the downward mobility of labor and the shrinking of the middle class. But what divides today’s Right-wing populism from its Left-wing counterpart is equally important. If either side hopes to craft an agenda that appeals beyond its base, it will have to grapple with what it’s missing.

Both camps diagnose the same problem: a corrupt elite that has disinherited the American working class and lined their pockets with the proceeds. But when it comes to the solutions to that problem, the Left and Right have different answers. Yet each side is missing a piece of the puzzle.

Before Trump, the GOP was defined by social conservatism, free-market economics, and foreign interventionism. It was for war and free trade, and against gay marriage and abortion. But Trump took an ax to every one of those commitments.

He abandoned free trade and questioned foreign entanglements, believing that America should mind its business and focus on US interests, rather than the Sisyphean task of spreading liberal values across the globe. And, while gesturing toward a moderate social agenda, he made economic populism his true platform. In his second term, he’s only doubled down: mass deportations, tariffs, and a revived industrial policy. He made illegal immigration a centerpiece, launching nationwide deportation campaigns that have drawn both condemnation and praise. He escalated a global trade war, levying tariffs across America’s trading partners. He issued executive orders to expand AI training to help blue-collar workers access good-paying technology jobs, and claims to have brought in more than $10 trillion in manufacturing investment.

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This is the core of why he won the majority of working-class Americans: his economic populism got to the heart of what they felt they had lost thanks to disastrous trade deals like NAFTA, or disastrous immigration policies endorsed by the elites of both parties that allowed the foreign-born population of the United States to balloon to 15 percent. In industries that swelled their ranks with illegal migrants, wages stagnated. Immigration and the economy were the top concerns for voters in the 2024 election — two issues which often overlap for workers on the lower rungs of the labor market. Trump’s promise to deport every illegal migrant won him votes from workers who had never supported a Republican before, including millions of Hispanics. His populism — call it Protectionist Populism — spoke directly to them. Because this promise is so central to his success, his recent comments about allowing illegal farm and hotel workers to stay has engendered immense pushback from the base.

But this is not the only populism on offer now. The Left has its own version — one equally hostile to what it calls “the oligarchy,” but proposing different solutions. Sanders campaigned for president on free college, free health care, and a higher minimum wage — funded by taxes on the rich. AOC and Mamdani have adopted this model, too.

Rather than limiting the supply of labor or foreign goods to drive up wages, the populist Left proposes taxing the rich and beefing up the welfare state. Instead of empowering workers to demand more from employers, it would redistribute wealth through subsidized housing, health care, transit, and childcare.

This marks a turn away from the identity-first politics of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, who leaned on the historic nature of their gender and race in their campaigns for President. Left-populists today offer something more universal: class war. The rich, they argue, are too rich — and they should “pay their fair share” so that the working class and the poor can receive more benefits from the government, given that their low-paying jobs aren’t likely to represent anything close to a living wage. Let’s call this redistributionist populism.

But here’s the surprising twist: despite its economic focus, redistributionist populism appears most popular among the young and the educated. Voters without college degrees preferred Cuomo; those with advanced degrees preferred Mamdani. Mamdani beat Cuomo with New Yorkers earning more than $100,000 a year, but Cuomo crushed him among those earning under $50,000. Mamdani also lost decisively in neighborhoods with the highest concentration of black voters.

The redistributionist message, paradoxically, was unpopular with the very people it was supposed to help, while it was most popular with young, disillusioned, overeducated urbanites.

That’s not to say their preferences are illegitimate. They vote, too, and have become the Democrats’ new base since the working class drifted to Trump. But their overwhelming support signals that Mamdani’s success in New York City isn’t likely to translate much further, not least because of the position Mamdani has taken on immigration. Mamdani opposes ICE raids and was seen in a widely circulated video attacking Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar. It was a revealing moment.

The Democrats once opposed immigration on the very grounds that the Right now does: It depresses workers’ wages. But now that their base is educated professionals — the consumers of low-wage labor — it is very much in their financial interest to increase the number of workers allowed illegally into the country. They mostly talk about immigration in moral terms, stressing things like compassion for the global indigent and due process. But the economic logic remains — and lately, they’ve become less shy about saying so, fully admitting that they oppose mass deportations because they are taking away a pliant workforce. As Gov. Gavin Newsom recently bemoaned during the riots over ICE raids in LA, Trump’s “agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers, and seamstresses.” Or think of the outrage from Democrats when ICE agents raided a meatpacking plant in Nevada where dozens of illegal migrants were using forged papers. (Weeks later, the waiting room to apply for jobs was full of American applicants.)

Meanwhile, the MAGA movement’s Protectionist Populism really does resonate with many workers. Interviewing working class Americans across the country recently, I found a consistent message: they overwhelmingly preferred Trump’s protectionism to neoliberalism or redistribution. They rejected the paternalism in the Left’s ideas about how to help them, and appreciated the autonomy baked into Trump’s vision. A better wage meant independence. A closed border meant a job worth keeping.

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It is not just anecdotal. In poll after poll, the majority of Americans support deporting undocumented migrants. The Democrats’ attempts to reclaim their status as the party of the working class will fail until they stop fighting against the wishes of the majority of Americans — especially on immigration.

Yet there’s a glaring blind spot in Protectionist Populism: namely, health care. It’s the one issue where working-class voters are still aligned with the Left over the Right. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira has pointed out, the two most popular demands among working-class Americans are less immigration and more access to affordable health care. There is huge overlap between Americans who want a much more populist approach to health care and those who want a much more hawkish approach to immigration. Teixeira’s reporting showed that stricter proposals on illegal immigration also aligned with support for Medicare negotiating drug prices. He wrote, “these pro-Medicare populists favor the idea that we should simply, ‘Round up undocumented immigrants, detain, and deport them to their home countries’ by 24 points.”

Trump himself seemed to grasp this. He has shown a willingness to force drug companies to negotiate prices, yet his Big Beautiful Bill showed Republican lawmakers willing to drop millions of people from the Medicaid rolls and endanger rural hospitals. The GOP seems to be acting on muscle memory, ignoring that its base is no longer the rich but the working class. The base has changed, but in too many ways, the party hasn’t. Republicans in the House and the Senate are still committed to giving tax cuts to the rich (wildly unpopular) and treating health care like it’s a commodity.

It’s no surprise that health care is the only area where the Left holds the advantage, because the Right won’t seize it. Whether it’s the protectionist populism of the Right or the Redistributionist Populism of the Left, each has recognized a piece of the puzzle. A broader perspective that combined much less immigration with much more access to affordable health care could lead to a windfall for whichever party seizes it first. If either side were willing to embrace the complete wishes of the hardest working Americans and embrace a platform that pushed both for expanding health care access and for radically reducing immigration, they would have a ruling majority for a very long time.

In a normal race, the prospect of a Muslim-American socialist (not to mention anti-Zionist) candidate running America’s largest city would be seen as fanciful. But these are not normal times. The incumbent, Eric Adams, has been forced to run as an independent amid corruption allegations. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is the unloved frontrunner. And the city, which has experienced sweeping demographic changes over the last 10 years, has become Trumpier. This has fuelled an anti-establishment feeling that could, paradoxically, benefit outsider candidates like Mamdani.

As voting starts on 14 June in the Democratic primary, the result of this race will ripple far beyond the city’s five boroughs. Should Mamdani pull off an upset, progressives elsewhere in the country may challenge incumbents in their own states, using the victory as a chance to reshape the national party and pull Democrats to the Left. Meanwhile, if Cuomo wins, it will be seen as proof that voters don’t want radicals — just a “return to normalcy,” to borrow Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan.

As things stand, the odds remain stacked in Cuomo’s favor. Despite the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 and a federal investigation into his handling of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic, the 67-year-old maintains a prohibitive lead over his opponents. The latest polls put him around 10 percentage points ahead of second-placed Mamdani, and in a projected run-off, he would win with 56% of the vote to Mamdani’s 44%.

The gap, however, has been narrowing. In March, Cuomo enjoyed a nearly 30-point lead over Mamdani, but as that advantage has shrunk, fears are growing that he may be getting complacent. Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the former governor has adopted a Bidenesque basement strategy, eschewing the media in favor of a few limited public appearances across the city.

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Mamdani, meanwhile, has run a sophisticated grassroots campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to AOC’s original bid for the House of Representatives. Through a combination of intensive door-to-door canvassing and buzzy policy proposals like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Green New Deal, the then-28-year-old bartender pulled off a huge upset by unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary back in 2018.

Taking a leaf from her book, Mamdani touts free buses, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. He promises to fund these initiatives with higher taxes on the extremely wealthy and corporations, even though there is little sign that the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is receptive to such plans. Yet even so, Hochul is up for re-election next year. If Mamdani does win, she may feel obliged — or even pressured — to offer something up.

Cuomo, by contrast, has made public safety the centrepiece of his campaign. In his announcement video, he gravely indicted the city’s leadership for its anti-anti-crime stances: “We know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway.”

It is a strong message — but one that might have landed more effectively during the 2021 election than today’s. For while those concerns persist, they aren’t felt as acute as they once were: the migrant crisis is subsiding, violent crime is down, and tourism has rebounded. “Cuomo is running a crisis campaign when people don’t feel that way,” says Dan Turrentine, a Democratic strategist. “New Yorkers want a more positive message.”

The relative improvement in the city’s mood has created space for Mamdani’s more expansive (or panglossian) economic proposals. Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year. “Trump has actually made things easier for a democratic socialist,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When the president says Walmart can eat the cost of tariffs, it makes Mamdani’s idea of government-run grocery stores seem less crazy. Trump says things no one from either party has dared to, which gives the extremes on both sides license to go further.”

That a city as blue as New York increased its support for Trump consistently over three election cycles shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader conservative shift. Rather, it is a sign of growing frustration with the establishment, which has hurt Cuomo’s campaign more than the others. Even though he has never been mayor, progressives have framed Cuomo as the incumbent and tied the city’s failures to him. During last week’s debate, the 67-year-old faced relentless attacks from his opponents about his decade as governor. At times, he was left on the backfoot.

“Cuomo has been battered — the Left is determined to break him down,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran strategist who worked on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. “It’s a bad time to be an establishment centrist Democrat because everything is changing. And when everything changes, that hurts those in the middle the most.”

Recognising Cuomo’s weakness, progressive candidates have been doing something they almost never do: cooperating. Learning from their mistakes in the last mayoral election, progressives have launched a concerted ABC (Anyone But Cuomo) campaign, which could negatively impact the former governor under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. The push was epitomised by AOC, who told voters in her Mamdani endorsement: “do not rank Andrew Cuomo on your ballot at all. Leave the bubble next to his name blank.”

Mamdani’s late surge means that it’ll be more likely for progressive voters to coalesce around his candidacy. But his shortcomings are hard to ignore. His legislative record is thin — he has passed a grand total of three bills during his time in the New York state Assembly — and his free-bus pilot scheme was not renewed. Then there is his ferociously anti-Israel stance, which risks alienating many of the city’s 1.3 million Jewish residents. Asked about whether he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in last week’s debate, Mamdani could only offer a mealy-mouthed response. “I believe Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said.

There is also another inescapable truth that becomes all too evident at Mamdani’s rallies. Ironically for an Indian-American born in Uganda, his supporters are almost exclusively white, largely concentrated in the gentrifying neighbourhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. This was confirmed by the recent Emerson poll, in which Mamdani leads white voters with 57% support, compared to Cuomo at 43%. Among black voters, however, he pulls less than 26%, and Hispanics are even colder on him.

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For a candidate who claims to represent the city’s (largely nonwhite) working class, this is a glaring disconnect. It’s a testament to the tension between whom progressives like Mamdani claim to speak for versus who actually shows up to support them. After all, it was the city’s voters of color — long a moderating force on the Democratic Party — who handed former NYPD captain Eric Adams the mayoralty and who, by wide margins, tell pollsters they want the same or more policing in their neighbourhoods, not less. Mamdani, by contrast, supports community-led alternatives to public safety — a stance that very few working-class New Yorkers would likely support.

Cuomo’s base is far broader. He’s backed by Jews in Manhattan, black churchgoers in Brooklyn, Latino families in southeast Queens, and older homeowners across the boroughs — the coalition that forms the bedrock of the city’s electorate. He has also promised to add 5,000 additional NYPD officers, which would likely be well received by these communities.

Taken together, these factors give Cuomo a clearer path to victory than Mamdani, but the implications of this race stretch far beyond New York. For the rest of America, it could offer a revealing lesson about the Democratic Party’s unresolved identity crisis. Whichever faction prevails will claim a mandate: a Mamdani victory might embolden progressives like AOC to pressure establishment figures — including Sen. Chuck Schumer, who faces re-election next year — to shift further Left or risk a primary. A Cuomo win, meanwhile, would strengthen the hand of moderates arguing that the party must reclaim the centre to stay competitive. With party figures across the country jockeying for consideration in the 2028 presidential race, all eyes will be on how this one turns out.

In fewer than two weeks, voters will find out who will lead the Democrats into the general election at the end of this year. But as Hank Sheinkopf, who has worked on some 700 campaigns around the world, said, all bets on this race are off. “One given in New York politics,” he says, “is that nothing is predictable.”

Progressives arguing over whether we should only be talking about democracy and “kings” or the oligarchic power of the super-rich — that’s a stark reminder that our century is growing to resemble the 19th: a world of hyper-exploitation and overweening tycoons; trade protectionism and blatant imperial land grabs; constitutional instability and simmering class conflict. There is no better guide to such a juncture than the 19th century’s greatest dissident thinker, Karl Marx.

Marx’s value as a Virgil-like guide to the darker depths of our condition is highlighted by a pair of recent books: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold, which explores the role of republicanism in shaping Marx’s thought, and Capital’s Grave by Jodi Dean, which seeks to update Marx for a world that Dean thinks is starting to look less like the classical industrial capitalism he wrote about than a kind of high-tech feudalism. Though varying wildly in both style and substance, both books remind us that 19th-century debates about economic inequality remain all too relevant to 2025.

Polls suggest that Slotkin is, in fact, wrong about the limits of the public’s vocabulary. But the issue in dispute between her and Sanders and AOC goes deeper than semantics. Slotkin evidently wants to stick to what 19th-century radicals called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than broaching the “social question” of economic power and hierarchy.

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Putting aside Slotkin’s concerns, the deeper problem with “oligarchy,” popularized by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, is that the term isn’t terribly specific. After all, most societies since the agricultural revolution have been “oligarchies,” in the sense of being dominated by one kind of elite or another. If we want to be precise, the better term hovering just offstage of most popular discourse is capitalism.

At the most basic level, capitalism is a system in which most economic enterprises are owned by private individuals (“capitalists”). The rest of the working-age population, in order to survive and reproduce themselves, are forced to sell their labor power like any other commodity in exchange for a price — wages. Nearly 160 years since it was first published, the most historically important analysis of what’s distinctive about this system remains Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital.

In it, Marx argued that capitalism is similar to medieval feudalism, ancient slave societies, and so on in that “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or wage-laborers) have to perform “surplus labor” in addition to “necessary labor.” Necessary labor is the labor you do to meet your own needs and those of your dependents. Surplus labor is the time you spend laboring to enrich a ruling class, whether it’s made up of slave-owners, feudal lords, or modern capitalists.

Capitalism is dissimilar to these other systems in two ways, however. First, unlike feudal nobles who were just trying to extract enough for themselves and their families and retainers to live in luxury, capitalists are engaged in market competition with one another, giving them a bottomless incentive to squeeze every possible drop of labor from their workers. Marx memorably called this capital’s “vampire-like thirst” for surplus labor.

Second, unlike slaves or serfs who are legally bound to their masters, modern wage-laborers are “doubly free,” as Marx taught. They are free in the sense that they’re able to move around and make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them; they’re also “free” from any alternative means of supporting themselves.

As Marx documented in the last part of Capital, the British working class came to be “free” in this second sense through a long and brutal process of enclosures, whereby peasants were driven from their ancestral lands and forced into urban labor markets — a passage described in much greater detail by the Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi in his magisterial The Great Transformation, first published in 1944.

Many non-socialist 19th-century radicals shared much of Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism. But they disagreed sharply with his proposed cure. They dreamed of reversing the process by which the working class had lost access to its own means of production. Bruno Leipold gives us a fascinating look at these debates in Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. The author, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, showcases the ways in which classical republican themes about freedom from arbitrary power influenced Marx’s own thought. Even so, Marx forged his own views in opposition to the leading “republicans” of his time (who played up the republican virtue of small farmers and small artisans and saw this as the basis of the society they wanted to bring about — or revive).

Nineteenth-century radical republicans were far from indifferent to the “social question.” But they worried that collective ownership by workers would turn into the subordination of workers by a tyrannical state. The experience of the deeply flawed and authoritarian experiments in state socialism that played out in the following century shows that this was indeed a valid concern, even if some of us continue to believe that better forms of socialism are possible.

Non-socialist republicans’ preferred alternative was to use various mechanisms, including leasing state-owned land to small farmers and establishing grants for artisans, to turn back the clock and restore small-scale production. Here, Marx’s side of the argument has been vindicated by subsequent economic history.

Factory and network effects involve increasing returns to scale, rendering mom-and-pop production simply irrational, not to say impossible, in the age of the machine. Rather, high-tech modern production involves the collaboration of vast numbers of people (often spread over a vast swaths of territory). There is no way to turn back that clock without a staggering reduction in the standard of living of working-class citizens of developed societies, and it’s difficult to imagine the workers of the world uniting to achieve less than they have under capitalism.

Even so, by the time he was doing his most mature work, Marx had absorbed much of the radical republicans’ point. In the historical sections of Capital, he praised England’s population of independent small farmers as “the proud yeomanry of which Shakespeare speaks,” who became the “backbone of Cromwell’s strength” during the short-lived British republic of the 17th century. But he argued that the only way to recover republican freedom under industrial conditions is for working people to collectively take over and democratically run the factories and large farms that were already becoming prevalent in his era.

Today, parts of this analysis are directly applicable to us. Other parts of Capital, though, can give a contemporary readers the same feeling they might have reading Charles Dickens novels: that they’re getting a lurid glance at an alien world that has, quite fortunately, receded into the past: only think of his harrowing accounts of child workers chained and flogged to keep them going into the 13th and 14th hour of labor, and other horrors of the kind.

The historical successes of the labor movement and the regulatory state in curbing such abuses are so enormous, in fact, that when we see a return of labor practices without these protections, we temporal natives of the 21st century are tempted to take up far older reference points. Discussing proposals for labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.”

Rendon is no economic historian, and he may have been simply reaching for a vivid way of evoking unjust forms of power and domination. But Jodi Dean takes the analogy seriously in her new book, Capital’s Grave: Neo-Feudalism and the New Class Struggle. In it, she argues that capitalism is in the process of giving way not to the collective ownership and workplace democracy Marx envisioned, but to a high-tech form of “neo-feudalism.”

Dean, a political theorist at Hobart and Smith Colleges, doesn’t go as far as to claim that our society today is already neo-feudal. But she does think that’s the direction in which we’re transitioning, and that the capitalist or semi-capitalist order around us already has many neo-feudal elements.

Feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of class society involved a whole lot more direct, non-economic coercion than capitalism: witness the fate of the Hebrews under the Egyptian yoke. Although early capitalism did involve some brutalities of this kind, capitalism for the most part relied on what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of hunger to goad workers into the factory. This was progress, of a kind. Meanwhile, the imperatives of competition at least forced the exploiters to constantly innovate and make production more efficient.

Today, Dean sees the dialectic of history going into reverse. Rather than doing productive labor, the workforce of the 21st century is increasingly concentrated in the service sector, and capitalists are increasingly turning toward “accumulation strategies” that rely not on out-competing other capitalists through greater efficiency, but hoarding wealth through political corruption, rent-seeking, and predation. She sees an analogy to medieval kings enriching themselves through conquest, for example, in the process of “blitzscaling,” whereby wealthy investors pour money into companies like Uber with the understanding that they’ll be unprofitable for years as they undersell and obliterate the competition.

One problem with all of this is that, in seeking to update Marx’s analysis, Dean shows that she misunderstood it. Marx emphatically doesn’t exclude “service workers” in toto from the commodity-producing working class. In explaining the distinction between productive proletarians and unproductive servants, for example, Marx uses the examples of a cook in a hotel and a cook in a private home. The former is helping to generate the revenues out of which his capitalist is paying him. It’s hard to imagine that Marx could have picked an example closer to a Starbucks barista (the archetypal “service worker” in our time) without access to a time machine.

And a deeper problem is that so many of the trends Dean is talking about are reversions not to the pre-capitalist Middle Ages, but to the very form of capitalism Marx was writing about in the 1860s. What is Uber if not a high-tech application to the transportation sector of exactly the kind of casual and insecure labor practices previously tamed by organized labor and the regulatory state?

Nor did the monopolistic robber barons of the 19th century restrict themselves to accumulation strategies that would meet the approval of libertarian economics professors. Andrew Carnegie had no more scruples than Elon Musk about calling in political favors.

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Dean sees “parcellated sovereignty” as loosely analogous to medieval practices of vassalage in everything from the rise of private security contractors to national sovereignty being limited by international treaties. But the Pinkertons that robber barons like Carnegie would bring in to crush strikes were far less hesitant about spilling blood than contemporary security contractors (at least in developed nations); and the most salient shift in recent geopolitics has been the collapse of the postwar system and the re-emergence of the kind of spheres of influence and land-grabs that defined the military and diplomatic histories of the 19th century. We even have a land war where one of the most hotly contested issues is the status of Crimea.

Finally, the 21st century increasingly resembles the 19th in the role of antitrust politics as a popular solution to the problem of economic oligarchy. Witness the enthusiasm of the mainstream American Left (and even portions of the populist Right) for the Biden administration’s crusading antitrust czar Lina Khan. In conditions where the logistics of production have made a quantum leap from those of 19th-century capitalism, though, the limits of this approach are more obvious than ever.

Antitrust may well deliver enough benefits to ordinary people as consumers to be worth the candle. But it can’t do much about the conditions in which the vast majority of the population spend their working lives. We can make firms as small as they can be consistent with the conditions of modern production, and it would still be mathematically impossible for most adults to make their living as owners, rather than workers. If the republic of labor Marx wanted can feel impossibly utopian given the current state of the Overton Window, a republic of small farmers and small artisans has long since become a technological impossibility as a matter of cold fact.

Whether a powerful workers’ movement of the kind that emerged around the world in the 19th century will coalesce in 21st-century conditions is an open question. The future isn’t settled. What’s certain is that, if labor doesn’t find new ways to assert itself, whatever comes next is going to be bleak.

This is, of course, part of her cachet. “Take up space” has become a feminist war-cry, a clapback at the offensive old mores that say women should be small and slender and quiet. Feminist indictments of diet culture and beauty standards will frequently note this: that women are too often given the goal of shrinking themselves. In politics, the phrase has begun to be invoked alongside old-school notions of shattering the glass ceiling. To be unapologetically large, to let yourself sprawl, is a radical act.

It is to this war-cry, presumably, that Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC refers. But the title of the new biography of our youngest ever congresswoman works on multiple levels. For one thing, it’s a good description of the book itself, printed on luxuriously heavy stock so that it bears the heft of a pint-sized coffee table tome. It’s also a fitting description of its subject, who is so ubiquitous as to be inescapable.

And yet, for all the mental and media real estate occupied by Ocasio-Cortez, she’s far more famous for being who she is than for what she’s accomplished. Which brings us to the double entendre: before it became something that brave and iconic women do, taking up space was primarily the purview of useless objects.

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This layer of meaning is almost certainly an accident. Perhaps it was the opinion of the New York magazine editors who commissioned Take Up Space that by the time of publication, AOC would surely have accomplished enough to avoid the book’s title being received as an awkward joke about her relative inefficacy as a politician. But as it turns out, Ocasio-Cortez is a lot better at getting attention than she is at passing laws. In a nonpartisan report issued last spring, she was rated one of the least effective members of Congress. (Among New York state legislators, she came in dead last.)

Given the limited scope of its subject’s accomplishments in her short career as a public servant, Take Up Space feels premature as a political biography — and in that category, it’s also a little weird. For instance, almost dead centre in the book is a two-page, full colour, high-definition spread depicting AOC’s open mouth, like a Playboy centrefold for oratory fetishists.

Elsewhere in the book, there is a graphic, novelised narrative about the congresswoman’s visit to the detention centres at the Mexican border, in which she appears as a heroic figure surrounded by over-the-top comic book-style villainy (in one panel, a guard stands outside a pen of sleeping women and screams, “WAKE UP, WHORES!”, an incident I was shocked I hadn’t heard about until I realised that it was invented by the writers as an example of a thing that might have happened).

There’s a chapter devoted exclusively to her greatest Twitter dunks, each one diagrammed to illustrate the machinations of her political genius. There’s a collection of quotes from real teens, gushing about how AOC inspires them: “I love that people feel like they could know her as a friend,” says Carolyn, 19, while 18-year-old Hannah frets, “I hope AOC can one day be President. I just worry that people are going to hurt her.”

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As a political biography, it’s odd, yes. But as partisan pornography, it’s undeniably fantastic. The value of this book is the mirror it holds up to a culture in which public service and celebrity have become uncomfortably intertwined, and in which traditional power has come to take a backseat to the more slippery, nebulous, socially-centered concept of influence.

The contributors, gifted essayists all, have written with poignant clarity about their progressive icon: her path to public life, her representation of womanhood and Bronx boricua culture, the sparkling wit that makes her fans swoon and her enemies froth with impotent rage. But there’s also a breathless fawning quality to the writing that is unsettling. The book gushes over AOC’s relatability, her authenticity, her eloquent public addresses on Instagram. She “always does her research” and “murders with fact”. She has reshaped our very notion of what it means to be American. She is “spectacularly confrontational”.

This style is familiar. New York magazine’s coverage of the young politician has always contained shades of access journalism: a sense of reporters flattering their star subject so that she will sit down with them for lunch. On New York magazine’s website, coverage of Ocasio-Cortez’s political accomplishments is intercut with such hard-hitting headlines as “Don’t Talk About AOC’s Boyfriend’s Feet” and “Out With Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez, AOC’s Hot Li’l Bro“.

But what this book reminds me of, more than anything, is one of those big gushy spreads in the celebrity weeklies, even if it is overlaid with a thin veneer of highbrow political journalism.  The Unprecedented AOC is a bit like People‘s The Sexiest Man Alive, only it’s made to peek out of a New Yorker tote bag instead of seducing you from the grocery checkout line. It’s an unabashed celebration of the woman who is as much an icon to America’s highly-educated progressive urbanites as Donald Trump was to the anti-elitist crowds who shrieked in ecstasy every time he called someone a loser on Twitter.

And in that sense, she’s not so unprecedented after all.

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This is the real key to AOC’s massive profile, the reason why a book like this can exist at all: after being blindsided by the ascendancy of Trump, first to the presidential nomination and then to the White House, the Left needed its own enfant terrible to shift the paradigm. Someone who could elevate getting mad online into an art form. Someone who grasped the power of memes. Someone who understood that when they go low, the moral high ground is a sucker’s game. When they go low, you don’t go high; you drop to your knees and punch them right in the nuts, and then you laugh.

Of course, the power to trigger one’s political opponents often goes hand-in-hand with extreme sensitivity to slights. Much like the boorish Trump to whom she emerged as a foil, AOC can be remarkably thin-skinned. She has occasionally used her massive platform to attack not just other politicians but private citizens (including a group of underage boys who had posted pictures of themselves doing irreverent things to the Congresswoman’s cardboard likeness).

When conservative commentator Ben Shapiro offered to donate $10 million to her campaign in exchange for an open debate, she likened the offer to being catcalled. And when she’s not boasting about serving drinks with a floater of GOP tears, she takes plenty of shots at more moderate members of her own party, whether it’s calling for the replacement of Nancy Pelosi or sniping at Democrats who want her to stop calling to defund the police.

Some people point to all of the above as the reasons why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the future of the Democratic party. Others point to it and note that she’s basically Donald Trump, albeit with much better hair.

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Both groups probably have a point. Trump, for all his inefficacy in the White House, was a game-changer in the world of party politics — and intraparty conflicts. His 2016 campaign marked the dawn of a new era: one in which spectacle was all, and substanceless peacocking won. Trump didn’t build his wall or jail his opponents, but he did successfully drag political discourse down to the intellectual level of a bunch of fifth graders, standing in a jeering circle around a bully while he gives the class weirdo a wedgie. And that’s his legacy. It’s politics as popularity contest, a comic-book battle between good and evil, and progressive media organisations have been all too happy to join the fray.

It’s unlikely that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have risen to the same iconic status if Trump hadn’t steamrolled his way through the landscape first. But he’s gone now, and the young politician stands at a crossroads: between influence and power, between celebrity and service, between the brief and blazing reign of the It girl and the more gruelling, less glamorous life of a career politician.

It’s a stark illustration of how she channels her energy that today, just over two years after being sworn into office, AOC has racked up thousands of tweets, millions of followers, half a dozen magazine covers, one command appearance at the Met Gala, and… zero bills signed into law. It’s almost as if one’s effectiveness as a public servant is dictated by something other than the popularity of one’s personal brand. And while Ocasio-Cortez was indeed unprecedented at the time of her election — if only because she is the youngest woman ever to serve in US Congress — that distinction will become less impressive as the years wear on. If she wants to take up space in our history books, she’ll have to do more than tweet.

But unlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

As a result, this new variant of socialism seems more feudal than Marxist. As Edwin Aponte, editor of the socialist blog The Bellows, has observed, Marx opposed utopian socialists, with their dreams of a return to the cohesive social order of feudal times — instead, he favoured using technology and economic growth to lift them up.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may not realise that the much-admired European socialist system was built on the back of a private sector. But the truth is that virtually all the successful welfare states — Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia — rose on competitive economies: Swedish steel, Dutch chemicals, German machine tools and cars were critical to funding socialist programs in capitalist countries. But as this model slowly crumbles, as Europe loses its competitive edge to China and elsewhere, this lesson appears to have been forgotten. And in its place has risen a New Socialism that serves Wall Street, the City and the tech oligarchy.

The usual response from environmental activists is that the rapid transition to “zero carbon” will create oodles of new, well-paid jobs. In reality, however, these jobs generally pay less, offer fewer hours and are rarely unionised. The reality facing the middle class is an acceleration of our class divides and lower living standards. It’s long been de rigueur on the Green Left to cut back on homeownership, limit use of private cars or even fly on vacation. In other words, those who will suffer most are the very people whom socialism is supposed to save. Already energy poverty is on the rise in those places — from California to the EU — where punitive fuel costs have been increased.

Elsewhere, supply chain problems and inflation are now dismissed as “high-class problems”, even if it also means high prices for essentials such as milk, gas and rent. The Atlantic, a premier voice of the gentry Left, grumbles that “America’s central organizing principle is thoughtless consumption”, echoing the kind of homily handed out by Medieval clerics to disgruntled serfs.

Yet nowhere is the hierarchical nature of feudalistic socialism clearer than in the property markets. Social democrats may have once celebrated people owning homes or cars, but new green-tinged policies would lead to those becoming an option only for the rich, while opening a vast market for financial firms to buy single family homes and turn them into rentals. Just look at California, where Green progressives wield almost unlimited power, and which is now home to rising inequality, the nation’s highest poverty rate and the second lowest percentage of homeowners.

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Of course, this mindset is not confined to the Left. In the UK, for example, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have proposed climate-based rules that would force homeowners — their political base — to retrofit their homes for thousands of pounds, while forcing them to abandon affordable gas heaters for less effective electric ones. This reflects what one socialist neatly labels “eco-Thatcherism in Britain“.

But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

Ultimately, many of the old Left-wing parties may end up losing out to the ascendant Greens, who could be the real winners of the rise of New Socialism. It is not inconceivable that they could take power across Europe — particularly in Germany where the country’s traditional industrial base has shrunk. In the US, although there’s not much chance of the Greens challenging the ruling political duopoly, there are clear signs that the Democrats could find themselves torn between the need to represent both progressives and the party’s blue-collar base.

Yet it didn’t have to be this way. The Left’s Green policies might be big on virtue, but moves to eliminate energy and industrial jobs make no sense if we are going to depend on fossil fuels for at least the next few decades. It seems futile to be shutting down domestic pipelines, curbing energy production and raising electricity prices while begging the Saudis or the detestable Putin regime to drill more.

A more traditional socialist would promote domestic production, particularly natural gas, while also trying to shift production away from coal-dependent China, the world’s primary emitter. China’s Xi continues to build new coal plants and arrange for long-term oil supplies from the Middle East. Unlike our Left-wing parties, Xi knows the grip on keeping power rests on meeting the aspirations of his subjects, not dampening them.

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To remain relevant, the Left needs to return to the basics. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, and allow for improvements in daily life. Throughout history, economic growth has been critical to making societies wealthier, while making it far easier to distribute salves to the poor, invest in environmental improvements and work to improve conditions for historically disadvantaged minorities. Good jobs and “economic expansion,” notes economic historian Benjamin Friedman, are the best antidote for “rising intolerance and incivility”.

Is there still hope for a more socially beneficial kind of socialism? Certainly, elements of the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill could help American industry compete with China. People, more than anything, want roads, bridges and ports fixed. But all this risks being undone if the Democrats continue to press for more extreme measures: more moderate Democrats will lose their seats, and the GOP will gain control of the House.

Many on the Left deny the electoral reality, and claim the party can only win by moving towards more assertive redistribution, anti-racist and draconian climate policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans are redoubling efforts to forge a social democratic agenda, crafting an aggressive programme of tax breaks for working families, upholding educational choice in states such as Virginia, and committing to aggressive re-shoring for industry. Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio has even called for a “divorce” with the financial and corporate elite.

It’s an encouraging sign, even though such moves will be adamantly opposed by the bearers of libertarian orthodoxy who have shaped the party for a generation and have the support of many of the party’s big funders. In the end, then, both the libertarians and feudal socialists could find themselves rejected by the majority of the population. After all, a society bedevilled by rising inequality, racial tensions, a pandemic and complex issues around climate change is as unlikely to accept honeyed words about ‘the market being efficient’ as it would tolerate an increasingly intrusive state that squashes their aspirations in the name of environmental virtue.

Something else is needed: policies that address the competitive economy while preserving upward mobility, economic growth and an environment improved by technological changes. In other words we need a socialism that is rooted in the needs of the working and middle classes — not one that seeks to keep them in their place.

I was genuinely exhausted after a long day, but remember feeling slightly ashamed at the possibility that I’d weaponised the guards’ machismo in the interests of my own convenience. I suppose, though, that it was a textbook example of the now oft-condemned “white women’s tears”.

This supposedly potent weapon is, we’re told, usually directed at less privileged classes of women, typically to avoid being “called out” for some moral infraction or other. This debate-ending power to weep on demand is supposedly predicated on the special, celestial status of white middle-class women as fragile entities whose emotional well-being must not be disturbed — even if that means warping all of politics and culture to accommodate their emotional comfort.

“Our sanctioned victim status shields privileged white women from accountability in interpersonal interactions and in the political sphere”, argues feminist Alison Phipps. But is it really just white women, like my younger self on the Guatemalan border, who get listened to when we weep? The debate reignited yesterday, after Keir Starmer’s tearful appearance on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on Tuesday evening.

The Labour leader recounted a number of painful personal events, including the loss of his mother, the devastating effect this had on his father and a house fire that killed the family dog. Morgan is the master of extracting a visceral confession, and it was affecting to see the usually very controlled Starmer in the grip of deep emotion.

Morgan described the interview as “searingly honest and intensely emotional”; it was an exchange that “shows the real him”. From this perspective, there’s something more real about tears than self-restraint: a stripping-away of artifice to reveal the person that’s really inside.

Britain, long notorious for emotional restraint, started to embrace this emotional openness more than two decades ago with the 1997 death of Princess Diana. Crowds piled bouquets in front of the Palace; people who’d never met Diana wept openly. The Royal Family initially remained in Scotland, only returning to London after public outrage at their reticence. Almost overnight, it didn’t just become acceptable to emote in public; failing to do so demonstrated crippling emotional inadequacy.

Tony Blair, a natural for the emerging aesthetic of public emotional display, declared that Diana had been the “People’s Princess”. She had been, as she hoped (and in a phrase reportedly borrowed from a novel by her step-grandmother, the romance writer Barbara Cartland) a “queen of people’s hearts”.

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How times change. Diana was pursued by humans with cameras; but today the intrusive reach of the cameras is something we do to ourselves, via social media. As in the age of Diana, intense emotion remains a currency: weeping selfies garner a powerful reaction. But with so much more coin in circulation, the market is growing jaded.

The generation that came of age when Diana was still alive may treat tears as an “authentic” manifestation of the “real you”. But now we are all encouraged to be both a tearful Instagram Diana and also the paparazzi swarm. And the question of whose tears garner sympathy, and whose trigger cynicism, is itself becoming a battleground.

One individual regularly lionised as authentic for her weeping (despite being a white woman) is New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Widely celebrated for her emotionally engaged political style and willingness to talk about wellness, compassion and empathy, Ardern herself argues: “you can be strong, and you can be kind”.

Perhaps that’s why Ardern regularly weeps in public: in 2017, for example, she wept while apologising to the family of murdered backpacker Grace Millane; she did the same two years later while commemorating the Christchurch mosque massacre. Again, last year, she openly cried at a service remembering the White Island volcano eruption. Crucially, her tears invariably make the headlines: evidence of her compassion and authenticity.

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Elsewhere, the press luxuriates in stories about whether Kate Middleton made Meghan Markle cry before the royal wedding, or of Markle weeping into her pillow the night before the couple’s notorious Oprah interview. But even our royal emoter-in-chief, Prince Harry, has spoken of how surreal it was to follow his mother’s coffin as thousands who’d never met her lined the streets, sobbing.

Harry may be keen to make a career rejecting his repressed upbringing in favour of emotional authenticity as a route to mental health. But even he has, it seems, some concerns about that era-defining moment of emotion. No surprise, then, to find that our culture more generally is by no means unambiguously in favour of tears.

If the tears are low-status and male, for example, you can buy a t-shirt that celebrates bathing in them, as modelled by feminist Jessica Valenti. Even those tears emitted by Britain’s (male) Secretary of State for Health, on hearing of the first Covid jabs, were mocked as “pretending to cry”.

And despite what Phipps asserts, being a white woman is no guarantee that your tears will reach a sympathetic audience. Theresa May, long panned as the “Maybot” for her lack of warmth, was panned for breaking with her usual buttoned-up form as she announced her resignation. And when the classicist Mary Beard was rounded on for defending the sexually predatory behaviour of Oxfam workers in Haiti, the weeping face she posted in response triggered not sympathy but further condemnation.

It’s sometimes claimed that greater political participation by women will result in moral improvements to politics in general, thanks to women’s superior capacity for empathy and aversion to conflict. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that as more women have entered public life — Parliament is now 35% female, an all-time high — so too our embrace of emotional display in public life has grown alongside it. But while it’s true that women are statistically less violent than men, it’s less certain that this means we’re nicer human beings.

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When I was at school in the Nineties, I often watched the Popular Girls amuse themselves by baiting less popular classmates with carefully calibrated and plausibly deniable barbs. When the victim retaliated, usually with less subtlety, the Popular Girl would respond by ostentatiously crying — a move that usually resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for the girl who had in fact been the aggressor.

Since then, along with the rest of social life, much of our political discourse has transferred to social media. And here, actual violence is off the table — it’s all words on a screen — but verbal cruelty and social ostracism are easy to mobilise if you’re popular. It’s the perfect hunting ground, in other words, for Popular Girl-style covert aggression.

I was reminded of this recently by one of the most noted weepers in American public life: the politician Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. After the Capitol riots, Ocasio-Cortez was mocked by conservatives for over-dramatising her own experience, after convincing herself that an officer who’d come to find and protect her was actually about to kill her. In response to her critics, she grew tearful and talked about being a sexual assault survivor.

The Hispanic Ocasio-Cortez, at least, challenges the idea that it’s the tears only of white women that reign supreme — at least contrasted with Mary Beard and Theresa May. The politics of the breaking voice and artfully dabbed eye are indisputably more female than male; its power-users are always women. But these examples suggest the effectiveness of this method is less about race, than something more like Popular Girls schoolyard ranking.

If you’re ugly, old or badly-dressed, don’t expect crying to work; if you’re male, it’s a gamble; and if you’re not in the in-group, you can forget it. But if your face fits (and you don’t ugly-cry) then you can do what you like. And as long as you sob in public now and then, you’ll be considered a paragon of compassion.

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The policies Jacinda Ardern actually implements are, after all, often considerably less cuddly than her sometimes-weepy public persona. She may shed a tear to mark a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but she also intervened to water down public condemnation of the use of enslaved or forcibly sterilised workers in China’s Xinjiang region. Evidently, New Zealand’s compassionate Prime Minister prefers the pragmatic realpolitik of balancing export priorities to compassion for the plight of China’s Muslim minorities.

Yet watching Sir Keir, I had no sense that he was playing a game of tactical tears. A politician who came of age before the sobbing selfie, his emotion — rarely seen in political life — seemed unforced. But I also wondered how much longer we’ll see that kind of authenticity, as pre-internet politicians grow fewer, replaced by millennials steeped in the Mean Girls politics of social media.

There’s much to be said for a more emotionally open, less aggressive and more empathic style of politics — more feminine, in a word. But we should be under no illusions: embracing this will also bring a rise in the public use of emotion, Popular Girl style, as a weapon. And that, in turn, will breed cynicism — even of those tears, like Keir’s, that seem to come from the heart.

Likewise, if you deign to raise concerns about the implications of this sudden impeachment sequel — or any of the other extraordinary actions taken in the past week, such as an ongoing corporate censorship purge of unprecedented proportions — you can expect to be accused of defending or supporting the “domestic terrorists” who carried out the mob attack on the Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, rationalised rushing through Wednesday’s impeachment resolution at spell-binding speed — by far the fastest impeachment process ever — on the grounds that Trump posed a “clear and present danger” to the country, and needed to be removed immediately. “Imminent threats” of various stripes also have a long history of being cited to justify sweeping emergency action, such as the invasion of Iraq. Often upon further inspection, the purported “threat” turns out to have been not so “imminent”, or in fact to have never existed at all.

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But as rushed as the impeachment was, if the purported emergency conditions were truly so dire as Pelosi maintained, she could have theoretically summoned the House to convene the day after the mob attack and impeach Trump right away. Congress convened the very next day after the attack on Pearl Harbor to declare war on Japan, for example. Instead, Pelosi waited a full week, and gave everyone the weekend off in the interim. Trump, alleged to be in the process of orchestrating a violent “coup”, was allowed to remain in office unimpeded with access to the nuclear codes for seven days.

Nonetheless, with a total of two hours of perfunctory debate — and no hearings, fact-finding or meditation on the relevant Constitutional Law considerations — Trump was impeached for the second time. As such, the text of the impeachment article will now be permanently embedded in the fabric of American governance.

One wonders who even had a chance to actually sit down and read it. The article, which charges Trump with “incitement of insurrection”, is far-reaching in its potential implications. “Incitement” is an extremely narrowly circumscribed doctrine in US law, and for good reason: anyone who engages in inflammatory but protected political speech could theoretically be said to have engaged in criminally punishable “incitement” without the shield of the First Amendment. If someone who hears your speech chooses on their volition to engage in violent or criminal conduct, you in almost all circumstances cannot be prosecuted.

This new impeachment changes that equilibrium. The one quote cited from Trump in the article to demonstrate his alleged “inciting” speech was: ‘‘If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’’ That line — which could have been uttered by Trump in about a thousand different contexts over the past five years — is alleged to have “foreseeably resulted in… lawless action”.

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I witnessed countless instances of political speech expressed by activists, journalists, and others during last summer’s protests and riots which under the same standard could have been deemed to have “foreseeably resulted” in “lawless action”, such as attacks on police or destruction of property. But there was always a presumption that the speech was nonetheless protected under the First Amendment. The new “Trump standard” codified by this impeachment could have drastic implications for the the future, should it be applied more widely throughout US jurisprudence. Impeachable “incitement” is also unlikely ever to include statements by a president “encouraging” violence by way of, say, military force.

Still, Trump’s statements on 6 January  — just like a seemingly infinite number of others over the past five-plus years — could surely be worthy of political rebuke or censure. Indeed, Trump has already been rebuked. He’s been roundly condemned by his own party and administration. His main communications platform, Twitter, has banished him. His high-profile supporters are being systematically nuked from social media writ large. He’s been made to issue several humiliating statements conceding defeat and “disavowing” the MAGA mob which marched in his name. The bozo rioters at the Capitol were undoubtedly inflamed by a barrage of lies and conspiratorial delusions that Trump churned out on an almost hourly basis since losing the election — that’s beyond dispute.

But it was still clear pretty soon after the mob intrusion began last week that the most significant consequences from what occurred would arise not from the intrusion itself, which was dispersed by agents of the state in a matter of hours. Rather, the real consequences would stem from the predictably rash over-reaction. The more extreme the characterisation of last Wednesday’s events, the more emotional ammunition that lawmakers have to demand whatever extreme remedial action they had been ideologically committed to pursuing anyway. This goes well beyond the expedited impeachment, and into the corporate censorship purge which has now radically altered the principles undergirding the open internet.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most high-profile member of the Left-wing Congressional “#squad”, has claimed that she narrowly escaped assassination at the Capitol and has thus been “traumatised”. Evidently she will be publicly working through this “trauma” on Instagram. It is also her contention that half of the House of Representatives (over 200 people) had been on the verge of mass execution. This style of political rhetoric has already been marshalled by “AOC” and others to demand corporate censorship on a vast scale, and successfully so; last week she tweeted pressure on Apple and Google to expel the alternative social media platform Parler from their app stores, and the corporations quickly obliged.

Amazon, falling like a domino, then completely terminated Parler from its web hosting service — effectively killing the site. As perhaps the country’s most influential Democrat by online following, AOC is someone who these tech corporations have an interest in appeasing, especially as Democrats enter full control of the federal government on 20 January. Her exceedingly dramatic recounting of what transpired during the mob intrusion is a powerful tool in her arsenal.

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Curiously, the most putatively “progressive” members of Congress seem to be the most exercised about resurrecting concepts that sound like Woodrow Wilson suppressing dissidents in wartime. Mondaire Jones, a highly touted “progressive” incoming freshman Congressman, took to fulminating on the House floor during the impeachment proceeding about “treason and sedition”.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney further declared from the floor of the House that Trump had “wilfully incited an armed insurrection”. Which is again another curious characterisation, because while a Capitol Police officer was in fact killed in the melee, the only person against whom armed, deadly force was used against was Ashli Babbitt, a Trump-supporting Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran who was shot dead at point-blank range by an officer.

Any rational observer who has the capacity to detach from the temporary passions of the moment should be able to recognise that the United States government was never at risk of being “overthrown” by the chaotic band of yahoos who stormed the Capitol. All they accomplished was to delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory by a few hours. They also humiliated the man they apparently thought they were valiantly coming to the defence of; even Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, took to the floor during the impeachment session to declare that “Antifa” was not to blame for the chaos which unfolded, and blamed Trump as bearing responsibility for the events. Indeed, the full force of state and federal law enforcement power is now being deployed against the intruders, and many — perhaps hundreds — will be going to prison.

Reminiscent of the post 9/11 period, the “crisis” of the past week has been seized upon to execute a pre-existing agenda. Impeachment, purges, the militarisation and lockdown of the Capitol — it’s only the beginning, and it’s all happening with hardly even a peep of criticism or moment for reflection. Given this historical continuity with the events of 2001, it was therefore fitting when Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Majority Leader in the House, went out of his way Wednesday afternoon to herald the valour of Liz Cheney — daughter of the architect of US policy after 9/11, Dick — who was one of the ten Republicans to vote along with Democrats to impeach.