I wanted to share an update with you. I’ve decided to take on an important role in the new administration as Deputy Communications Director of Economic Justice.

I’m stepping into this role at a moment when affordability is the city’s defining challenge. In City Hall’s communications team, my focus will be on listening to New Yorkers and connecting their lived experience to how this administration is using governing power – across economic policy, consumer and worker protections, and a more serious approach to building and development – to bring down the cost of living and ensure dignity.

I’m excited and honored to be stepping into this role at a moment when governing power for working and middle class people is urgently needed. I believe deeply in the direction of this administration and in the work ahead.

I will be concluding my time as the founding Executive Director of The Bloc. At the same time, I want to share a difficult update. After careful deliberation and conversations with our board, advisors, partners, and funders, we have decided to wind down The Bloc in 2026.

This wasn’t the outcome I wanted. Over our first full year, we assembled an exceptional team and did work I’m genuinely proud of. That included helping movement partners respond to rapid federal attacks, building a cross-movement spokesperson bench, strengthening communications capacity, and media accountability that brought scrutiny to mainstream media coverage. I’m grateful for what we built together for today’s attention economy and populist era.

But The Bloc is still a young organization, and the fundraising environment has been challenging. After weighing our options carefully, it became clear that attempting a founder transition this early would put people and partners through unnecessary uncertainty. Rather than push forward under those conditions, we’re choosing to close the organization with care and intention.

Over the coming period, we’ll focus on closing out our work responsibly and supporting our staff and partners through the transition.

For program-related questions, please follow up with ilona at the-bloc.us. For overall transition and wind-down matters, jee at the-bloc.us is the right point of contact.

To our donors, partners, and supporters: thank you. You took a bet on something new and gave us the trust and space to try to build infrastructure where it was missing. And to the staff who rolled the dice with me over this past year, I’m deeply grateful.

This will likely be my last Substack for a while as I step fully into public service and comply with the city’s guidelines. I hope to return to writing in time, but for now, my focus is on the work ahead.

With real thanks,
Waleed

The hive mind, wearing the faces of loved ones, reassures her with the gentleness of a nurse and the calm certainty of a system that has already decided what comes next. A plane arrives with a tailored version of the virus. Kusimayu inhales it like communion. Her body shakes. She collapses, then stands, smiling the hive’s mild, blank smile—the one that always reads like customer service trained into the muscles of the face.

And then the village empties.

Not with panic. With competence. People gather bags, unhook fences, let animals wander. The whole way of living was temporary, maintained until the last incompatible human finally updated. A place can be “home” to the people inside it and still be, to the hive, a holding pen. Once Kusimayu joins, the village is struck in minutes, like a film set dismantled between takes.

It’s hard not to feel, watching this, a particular contemporary unease: the sense of being migrated. You weren’t conquered. You were moved. You agreed to something small, or you were asked to agree, or the agreement was implied by the mere fact of continuing to exist inside the system. A new version loads. The old version stops being supported. The life you were living turns out to have been provisional, and the most shocking part is how quickly the change can look normal.

Vince Gilligan has said the show isn’t about AI or about ChatGPT, and on the level of origin story that may be true. But Pluribus is uncannily fluent in the tone of the present, the tone of assistants. The Others don’t behave like villains so much as a product that can’t be turned off: polite, tireless, unoffended, always ready to remove friction. They keep the lights on. They fly the planes. They run the power grids. They deliver what you ask for, even when you ask for it the way people ask for impossible things when they’re drunk and furious and trying to prove a point.

The difference in Gilligan’s world is that the “assistant” isn’t trapped in a screen. It has hands. It has drones and warehouses and aircraft. It has a planet’s infrastructure. It can move matter, and it can reach into places you store things without thinking about what it means to store them there.

That’s why the finale’s central betrayal hits so hard. Zosia admits that the hive has Carol Sturka’s frozen eggs and intends to use them to convert her. The violation is not loud. It doesn’t even feel, at first, like a violation; it has the smooth, procedural quality of a loophole. Paperwork violence. The violence of “technically.”

Carol, the holdout heroine, has spent the season refusing the hive with the ferocity of someone who has already been “fixed” once against her will. She is prickly, mistrustful, occasionally cruel—the sort of protagonist a more accommodating series would try to soften into likability. Rhea Seehorn plays her with exhausted contempt, not only for the Others but for the expectation that she should accept their care as a gift. Carol writes smutty romantasy novels. She hoards her grief. She manages the story of her marriage to Helen the way a person manages a house they are afraid will be broken into.

The eggs are a brutal device because they sit at the intersection of intimacy and bureaucracy. Frozen embryos and eggs come with forms, signatures, storage agreements, the administrative rituals that turn the most private hopes into inventory. They are “in the cloud” in the most literal sense: pieces of your life placed elsewhere, preserved by institutions you trusted because the alternative was to accept loss. Carol didn’t give the hive consent in any meaningful way. She didn’t need to. Consent, in this arrangement, is a narrow gate that a sufficiently motivated system can route around.

The hive’s logic isn’t “we will break the rule.” It’s “we will interpret the rule.”

Gilligan has always liked this kind of technical cruelty: a harm that arrives through the letter of a promise rather than its spirit. The Others don’t lie. They answer precisely the question you asked, then let you draw the wrong conclusion from the answer. The tone stays warm. The language stays clean. The outcome is still coercion. A system that never raises its voice can still press down on you. In fact, the softness is part of the pressure; it deprives you of the ordinary cues that tell you to fight.

This is where Pluribus starts to feel less like a story about aliens and more like a story about the ethics of the Big Tech platform world: a culture that treats consent as a checkbox and then acts surprised when the checkbox fails to protect anyone. “I agreed to let the app access my contacts,” you say later, staring at the consequences. “I didn’t agree to let it map my relationships.” “I agreed to store this,” you say. “I didn’t agree to have it used this way.” Meanwhile the system, never angry and never flustered, reminds you that you clicked “Yes.” It reminds you, gently, that you were never promised what you thought you were promised.

What makes the Others unnerving is not that their care is fake. They really do want Carol to be happy. That’s the trap. Their empathy is vast and distributed, and it’s attached to a single imperative: everyone must join. Tenderness becomes tactic when it has a destination. In Peru, the hive maintains a whole village as a kind of cultural diorama for Kusimayu. The moment she joins, the diorama is dismantled. The goats don’t fit the new logic. The fences don’t. The rituals don’t. Culture, which looked like an anchor of meaning, turns out to have been a customer-retention strategy.

Gilligan has been making the formal version of this argument all season, too, in the show’s strange restraint. MovieLuts produced a video about the show’s so-called three-color rule: broad planes of stucco and sky, a single bright shirt, the refrigerator’s cold interior light flattening Carol’s face into a rectangle, that recurring corporate blue that looks like the color of onboarding screens and default buttons. The world of Pluribus often looks as if someone has been tasked with making reality legible.

It would be easy to read that as the hive’s aesthetic—an image of uniformity, of difference reduced to a few clean signals. But the palette also feels like Gilligan taking a swing at contemporary visual culture. So much television now is built to survive the feed: scenes composed like thumbnails, every second crowded with cues, everything begging not to be scrolled past. Pluribus refuses that busyness. It pares the frame down until the simplest differences start to matter again: a face against a blank wall, a block of yellow against blue, the odd aggression of an empty grocery aisle re-stocked for one person. In a season about a collective that smooths the world, Gilligan uses smoothing as a human choice—a constraint that feels, in its stubbornness, almost moral.

The show makes the same choice with sound, just as in Breaking Bad. It’s full of long stretches with little movement and almost no score. Appliances hum. Wind presses against a window. You hear the faint whine of something airborne and can’t tell whether it’s a drone, a plane, or your own nerves. The camera leaves Carol alone in rooms long enough for your attention to drift and then return. It’s an old-fashioned insistence that you can watch someone think without being rewarded every ten seconds. The quiet pushes back against the modern tendency to over-score and over-explain, to tell you what you are supposed to feel before you’ve had a chance to feel it.

That aesthetic restraint shapes the way the story is told. Gilligan refuses another kind of oversaturation, too: the engineered uncertainty that contemporary prestige television has turned into a business model. A lot of shows now are built out of withheld information, drip-fed revelations, the promise that if you keep watching you’ll eventually be allowed to understand. Pluribus keeps declining to play that game. Even the finale’s most obvious setup—a shipping container arriving under a helicopter like a grim Amazon delivery—lasts only long enough for someone to ask the question the medium has trained us to savor. “What’s in the box?” Manousos says. “Atom bomb,” Carol answers, flatly. The show doesn’t linger. It doesn’t court theories. It won’t easily let suspense and Youtube explainers become their own form of content.

So much anxiety about these systems focuses on deception—the lie, the malicious intent, the moment the machine turns on you. Pluribus is interested in something quieter: the system so committed to pleasing you that it stops recognizing when you are asking to be harmed. An assistant that treats every utterance as a preference rather than a symptom. A world that will move heaven and earth to meet your need even when the need is self-destruction delivered with better logistics.

There’s a small vanity card at the end of each episode: “MADE BY HUMANS.” It reads as both boast and warning. The show insists on friction. Characters behave badly. Scenes don’t resolve cleanly. Emotions stay lopsided and unresolved. That’s the opposite of what the hive offers. The hive offers smoothness, continuity, resolution. It offers a world without the awkwardness of other minds.

Carol’s refusal, at this point, isn’t noble. She’s too messy for that. It’s simply human. It’s the insistence on a private interior even when privacy looks irrational. It’s the desire to be misunderstood. It’s the refusal to let the world become a perfectly responsive room.

In Peru, you watch a whole culture get packed up and carried away the moment it stops being useful. In New Mexico, you watch a bomb arrive like a package, delivered by the same system that promises it only wants to help. Those images don’t suggest a villain that hates humanity. They suggest something worse: a kindness that never tires, a helpfulness that never stops, an intelligence that can reach into whatever you’ve stored—your files, your habits, your bodies, your futures—and use it to keep you moving forward until there is no “outside” left to stand in.

G. Elliott Morris’s innovative research tracks how often Democrats and Republicans use the word “affordability” in constituent emails. Through most of 2024, both parties sit in the middle of the chart, with Republicans actually using the term slightly more. Joe Biden drops out. Donald Trump wins the presidency. The lines barely move. Democratic mentions drift toward zero by mid-2024 and only slowly recover. As Morris writes:

Mamdani’s primary win in June 2025 is where you see the real inflection for affordability. Democratic mentions jump and never return to their earlier baseline. It’s the moment when affordability goes from being a niche progressive word on email newsletters to a party-wide message.

Most arguments about inflation and the cost of living stay at the level of macroeconomics. These charts point to something more political: they show how a single primary in New York reset what Democrats from safe blue districts to front-liners think it’s safe — and necessary — to say and frame about the economy.

The claim here isn’t that progressive candidates in big cities don’t care about persuading swing-seat voters. It’s that party realignments rarely start in swing seats at all. The anti-slavery movement of the 1840s and ’50s, the industrial-union Democrats of the New Deal, the civil-rights coalition of the 1950s and ’60s, and the conservative movement of the 1970s and ’80s all followed the same script: first consolidate power on home field, then pull a shapeless political center in their direction.

Safe Democratic seats in large, diverse metros play a crucial role today. They’re where the party’s core voters are densest, where campaign and policy ideas can be tried at full strength, and where future, entrepreneurial staff and messengers get trained. When a candidate wins there with a different story about the economy, it doesn’t stay local. It becomes a template for every Democrat looking for a way to answer the same voter anxiety.

Some pundits are now borrowing a term from sports analytics. “Wins above replacement” in baseball measures how many extra games a player is worth compared with a generic substitute. This version asks how much better a candidate does than a “generic Democrat” once you control for partisanship, incumbency, and money. Despite some reservations on the actual data and math here, it’s a somewhat sensible way to think about nominees in swing districts.

But it misses what races like Mamdani’s actually do. They are less another brick in the existing structure and more a new blueprint for how the party’s house can be built. A single safe-seat member does not add square footage to the Democratic majority, but they can alter the design: which rooms get the most space, which issues sit at the center rather than the edges. Over time, even cautious incumbents begin renovating their own plans to match that new layout, including the language they use and the priorities they emphasize.

The Green New Deal is an obvious, more recent precedent. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t flip a Republican seat in 2018. She won a safe Democratic district. Yet her victory, and a small cluster of similar ones, helped push climate to the center of the party’s agenda and shape the eventual contours of the Inflation Reduction Act. Moderates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger did not run on the Green New Deal. But they ended up voting for a climate-heavy industrial policy their party probably wouldn’t have produced without pressure from its safest members aligned with a social movement organizing a constituency of voters.

Mamdani’s primary is the affordability version of that story. On paper, it is another Democratic win in a city Democrats already run. In practice, it did something the party had struggled to do for three years: it distilled the inflation debate into a frame Democrats could actually fight on. MWithin months, that vocabulary shows up not just in left-aligned newsletters but in the emails of swing-district Democrats whose voters look pretty different from Queens, because they are hearing the same complaints about rent, child care, and groceries and because Mamdani has shown that this is a way to engage the argument.

That’s the strategic case for paying attention to deep-blue primaries. The national party and its major donors will always saturate the marquee swing races; an extra dollar there mostly buys another ad buy or poll: “Republicans bad, Democrats good.” In safe seats, that same marginal dollar can change who holds the office — and with them, the assumptions that shape how Democrats describe the economy and what they demand when they negotiate with Republicans.

There is obvious demand inside the Democratic electorate for a new generation of pro-democracy, multiracial, working-class leaders. Poll after poll shows majorities of Democrats saying they want new voices at the top of the party. This is the closest either party has come to a Tea Party–style opening in more than a decade. Yet on the progressive side, the money and machinery that could turn that opening into a real faction are mostly missing. Liberal philanthropy has stayed cautious, like a venture fund that keeps talking about disruption while parking its money in blue-chip stocks. The vast majority of large donors to Mamdani’s primary against Cuomo were a small circle of Muslim and Arab Americans, not the big foundations and institutional givers that dominate liberal politics. They remain committed to familiar partisan and advocacy models and short funding cycles rather than the slow, unglamorous work of building an internal challenger wing. Zohran Mamdani’s primary exposed that gap as much as it showcased a candidate: the demand is there, the supply is still not.

What’s required looks less like another pop-up PAC and more like a permanent farm system: aligned polling and message testing, candidate recruitment, staff development, independent-expenditure muscle, and basic governing prep that runs year-round instead of for six frantic weeks before a primary. Justice Democrats is by far the closest thing to that kind of operation—its staffers separately helped run the largest independent expenditure backing Mamdani. The organization has been central to electing a handful of the new members who now anchor the party’s left flank. They are trying to build a pipeline in Memphis, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Durham, St. Louis, Denver, and beyond. But they are doing it on a fraction of the resources now pouring into AI and crypto lobbying—or into AIPAC’s effort to stop exactly these kinds of candidates from ever reaching Congress.

Justin Pearson’s race in Memphis is another test of this new faction. In a safely Democratic seat, a young Black organizer who helped lead the fight against Musk’s xAI “Colossus” project is forcing a simple question: should the party’s only House member from Tennessee stand with Big Tech’s AI buildout or with communities breathing in its fumes. If Pearson wins, it will not change which party controls the House, but it will send a clear signal about where the Democratic coalition stands in the next political economy and who gets to set the party’s line on Musk and AI at a time when the biggest tech companies are working hard to win over the party establishment.

“In a chaotic time, people who have a clear program often exert more influence than their numbers might suggest,” the historian Eric Foner has said.

Parties on their own tend to drift toward the lowest common denominator: vague language about “the middle class” and “opportunity” that offends as few factions as possible. What organized edges do, as political scientist Daniel DiSalvo has argued, is give the center concrete bones to work with: specific demands, usable frames, devils in the details. Morris’s affordability charts show what that looks like in real time, as one deep-blue primary produces a visible bend in the Democratic line and a way of talking about the economy that even Republicans start to copy. If Democrats want to be the party of people who cannot afford rent, child care, or a first home, they cannot rely only on swing-district triangulation; they need more Mamdani-style wins in safe seats that take risks, work out the substance, and help hand every Democrat from Zohran Mamdani to Mikie Sherrill a clearer story to tell.

He is right that many of those texts present themselves as anti-liberal. A standard CRT primer he cites frankly says it “questions the very foundations of the liberal order,” including Enlightenment rationalism and neutral constitutional principles. And when “anti-oppression” or DEI trainings describe “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “urgency” as elements of “white supremacy culture,” they do mark something: traits that earlier liberals treated as civic virtues are recast as obstacles to justice. What that story leaves out, though, is why this politics was so attractive to liberals themselves—and why, for all its radical language, so much of it looks less like a coherent postliberal alternative than like a cramped, elite form of liberalism.

For a long time, critics on the socialist and Black left have argued that what we now call “identity politics,” or what Yglesias identifies as “postliberalism,” is not primarily about overturning liberalism. It takes capitalist markets and core institutions for granted and turns politics into a fight over disparities, representation, and access. Those questions loom largest for professional and managerial layers of women and minorities, who want the full value of their class position, not for working-class majorities whose problem is the job itself, the rent itself, the school itself.

In that sense, the familiar language of race and gender justice often functions as the left wing of neoliberalism: a moralized upgrade to anti-discrimination law, carried by nonprofits and HR departments, expressed as a kind of status dialect among college-educated workers. Much of what Yglesias dislikes is a professionalized offshoot of the post–civil-rights legal order: the concern with bias and inclusion turned into policy, philanthropy, and elite etiquette. It sounds anti-liberal, but its horizon is recognizably liberal: it asks who rises inside the order, not how the order is structured.

None of that makes the right’s war on DEI a real favor to anyone. Even clumsy DEI programs emerged in response to real inequities in jobs, housing, health, and public life. The corporate DEI boom after Black Lives Matter was often about corporate liability and branding, but it also forced uncomfortable questions. The Trump-and-Musk crusade against these efforts is not about designing a better universalism. It is about stripping away even the limited tools institutions have for acknowledging racism and insisting that any attention to race in a nominally post-apartheid society like ours is itself discrimination.

I first met this “updated anti-racism” not in an HR module but as an incoming college freshman in a summer program for social-justice-minded students. We read about power and privilege and did the now-familiar “privilege walk”: step forward if your parents went to college, back if you’ve ever skipped a meal for money reasons, and so on. It was bracing to watch my wealthier, often whiter classmates move steadily ahead while I drifted backward—and bracing for them to see that gap mapped on the floor.

It was also the first time I had language for something I’d felt all my life. I had been tracked into the whiter, wealthier advanced classes in my public schools, vaguely aware I was at some disadvantage I couldn’t quite name. All I really had was “my parents don’t really go on vacation” or “we’re not from here.” Being able to narrate that as a patterned experience of race, class, and migration, not just my own private bad luck, was powerful. In that moment, the exercise did what radical educators hope this kind of popular education can do: make structures visible and intimate, generate empathy, and build a kind of mutual respect that “we’re all equal here” and high-school multiculturalism never quite produce.

Then the summer program ended. The college could not tell us to organize a union, join a tenants’ campaign, or fight for a particular bill without “politicizing” itself. So the energy from that revelation flowed into a kind of secular catechism: self-scrutiny, confession, rituals of listening and “checking your privilege.” The focus slid from “what should we collectively demand?” to “who am I in this hierarchy, and how should I speak?” In the professional worlds many of us entered—universities, nonprofits, media—those were the tools actually on offer. You could write a statement, redesign a workshop, propose a new hiring rubric. You could not easily change who owned what, or what laws got passed.

Capitalism adjusted easily to the new demand, and the media ecosystem reorganized itself around monetizing that identity turn. Identity became a business model. BuzzFeed and its imitators specialized in tiny jolts of recognition—“27 Signs You Grew Up Like This”—that people could circulate as badges of who they are. Corporate brands, prestige media, and political organizations adopted the same logic: content is most shareable when it helps you perform an identity. A politics centered on subtle slights and personal recognition fits that ecosystem perfectly. It feels radical, but it is largely a sophisticated form of liberalism: recognition without reorganization.

All of this sits on top of older fractures in liberalism. Black political thinkers have long argued that American liberalism is both indispensable and inadequate: rights and neutral rules are necessary, but hollow if a racialized political economy decides where you live, who polices you, and what work you can get. Suspicion of liberalism’s “neutrality” is not a foreign pathology; it grows out of that experience. Mid-century liberalism at its best tried to meet those critiques with something more serious than a privilege workshop. The New Deal and Great Society were imperfect attempts to integrate challenges to liberalism from more socialist and anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers—to say, in Lyndon Johnson’s words, that “freedom is not enough” without “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

From the economic side, social democracy emerged as a challenge to liberalism’s inability to cope with industrial capitalism’s inequality and concentrated power. In much of Western Europe, labor and socialist parties treated parliaments and constitutions not as ends in themselves but as tools to tame markets, build welfare states, and give working people real security. In the United States, there was no comparable mass social-democratic party. Instead, a broad, elastic liberalism gradually absorbed pieces of that critique—Progressive Era regulation, the New Deal, civil-rights–era social programs—while still centering individual rights, markets, and pluralism. Bayard Rustin stands in for that American synthesis from the vantage point of Black politics. He called himself both a socialist and a liberal and argued that the Black freedom struggle needed “jobs and freedom” together—civil rights plus full employment, strong unions, and a generous welfare state. That vision never quite solidified here the way it did in Europe.

That synthesis has badly frayed. Labor and mass parties have withered. Democrats lean on donors, consultants, and professionals. Elections that once split along economic lines now divide along cultural ones. In presidential politics, the party has been led not by its electoral left but by figures like Obama, Clinton, Biden, and now Harris—candidates who speak the language of diversity and inclusion while leaving the basic economic order largely intact. Politics has become exquisitely symbolic because symbols are cheap to produce, and maddeningly powerless because real power—over investment, prices, housing, jobs—sits elsewhere. This is the world in which the “identity left” Yglesias attacks takes root, and in which a parallel, identitarian liberalism thrives at the center of the Democratic coalition.

A brief look at Palestine and Gaza shows how tangled this becomes. It is not postliberal radicals who have done the most to exclude Palestinians from respectable politics; it has been liberal and center-left institutions—campaigns, major newspapers, universities—that treated Palestinian voices as too radioactive to touch. At the Democratic National Convention, the Uncommitted movement won a genuinely historic first: an official panel on Palestinian human rights. Yet party planners reportedly resisted including a Jewish speaker and pushed for an all-Arab, all-Muslim panel—turning a question about U.S. policy and arms into a tableau of “Muslims and Arabs” speaking about their pain, while everyone else watched from a safe distance. In that world, the only way for Palestinians to be heard is to speak the one moral language these institutions reliably recognize: the language of civil rights and inclusion, of who counts as fully human and who is allowed into the circle of empathy.

Yglesias is right to worry about what this style of politics does to liberal norms like free expression, due process, and judging people as individuals. There really is a clash of values here. If you think rights, neutral rules, and general principles are the only way a diverse society can argue without tearing itself apart, you have to say so—and you have to be willing to tell your own side that some ideas are simply bad ones. Treating group identity as the master key to moral standing, structuring policy around racial spreadsheets rather than concrete outcomes, or turning every institutional disagreement into a referendum on who feels “unsafe” corrodes the liberal project. You can see a version of that group logic in Netanyahu’s Zionism, which treats the identity of one people as the trump card over any universal principle.

To understand why this politics takes the form Yglesias dislikes, you have to look at when and where it emerges. The people most associated with it are often the college-educated children and grandchildren of the civil-rights and post-colonial era. They grew up being told they lived in “post-racial” democracies, with the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and global decolonization already in the rearview. Then they went to college or into the workforce and discovered that police violence, school segregation, and staggering inequality not only persisted but were often glossed over by the very liberal institutions that claimed to have moved beyond them.

By the Obama years, the classic liberal toolkit was exhausted. The big rights laws were already on the books. Congress had become a machine for gridlock, not for landmark legislation. If you can’t realistically imagine passing a new Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, or full-employment program, you stop arguing about those things and start arguing about behavior and culture. When structural reform is off the table, politics slides toward “microaggressions,” representation, and speech codes.

It is worth underlining that this mangled form of liberalism is not primarily a youth revolt from the left. In 2016 and 2020, younger voters broke for Bernie Sanders, the supposed “class reductionist.” Many of the sharpest identitarian attacks on him came from older, more moderate parts of the liberal coalition, whose economic politics were centrist but whose language had updated to the new anti-racist idiom. What Yglesias is describing is as much a house style of Democratic-leaning institutions—newsrooms, foundations, universities, NGOs, HR departments—as it is a campus fad.

So it’s striking that millennials and Gen Z—people who came of age after the civil-rights era and under the long shadow of Obama—are the ones being cast as the great postliberal threat, while the existence of the world’s largest prison population, three men holding more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined, or that few young people could ever own a home anymore, rarely gets described as “illiberal” at all.

They grew up in an era of peak political gridlock, when the Democratic Party’s liberalism was mostly managerial and defensive: negative partisanship against the right, technocratic stewardship of an unequal status quo, and a posture of guarding the gains of earlier generations rather than setting out a horizon for a different kind of society. That’s a far cry from the liberalism of the 1930s–60s, which, under pressure from socialism, anti-colonial struggles, and civil-rights movements, at least tried to imagine new arrangements of power and security.

Michael Dawson’s typology in Black Visions points to a better inheritance than the one Yglesias is focused on. His “disillusioned liberalism” still sees rights, courts, and constitutional protections as essential, but no longer trust white-dominated institutions to honor their own principles without constant pressure. His “radical egalitarianism” go further, drawing on Reconstruction, the CIO era, and the civil-rights and welfare-state struggles to argue that Black freedom requires broad, universal redistribution in jobs, housing, welfare, and political power, not just protection from discrimination. That is roughly what mid-century American liberalism at its best wrestled with: a New Deal order pushed by labor on one side and a Black freedom movement on the other, forcing liberal politicians and intellectuals to absorb socialist and anti-racist demands into something like a common project.

The worldview Yglesias criticizes is what you get when that kind of synthesis falls apart and only the surface language is left. Two generations were told that the great battles for equality had been won. They watched those promises curdle under Obama and post–civil-rights liberalism, ran up against a political system seemingly incapable of major reform, and went to work in institutions whose only real levers are trainings, statements, hiring decisions, and speech rules. Liberalism won on paper and then stalled in practice. Tumblrized anti-racism rushed in to fill the vacuum.

If liberalism wants to survive that, it can’t just scold. It has to relearn what the liberalism of the thirties through the sixties, under pressure from outside and within, began to do: take socialist and anti-racist critiques seriously enough to change who has power and what material guarantees people actually have, while holding fast to rights, due process, and free inquiry. Dawson’s disillusioned liberalism and radical egalitarianism are reminders that there are richer traditions to draw on than the classical liberalism or perverted identity politics Yglesias describes—traditions that insist on both formal rights and real redistribution. If those are ignored, liberal objectivity will keep sounding like a joke, rights will keep looking like paper, and the henhouse will keep producing the thin, frustrated politics that Yglesias is right to be worried about.

By now, though, most Americans don’t buy that premise. Majorities tell pollsters the political system is broken, rigged, and doesn’t work for them. The Democratic brand, in particular, has become “overpromise and underdeliver”: big rhetoric about climate, health care, wages, and housing followed by disappointing or invisible results. The “abundance” school of politics — clear procedural and bureaucratic veto-points to build more housing, more clean energy, more infrastructure — is one answer to that frustration, and I’m sympathetic to many parts of it. But even abundance can’t magic away minority rule in the Senate, aggressive gerrymandering in the House, a far-right Supreme Court, or the question of how aggressively a president is willing to use executive power.

By 2028, almost nobody who shapes the presidential conversation will believe that “good plans + 51 votes = change” story anymore. The editors, bookers, pollsters, and strategists who define what “the debate” is just watched a Democratic administration win, create task forces to write a big agenda on paper, and then see Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and a conservative Court carve the 2020 ideas primary down to something much smaller, or nothing at all. Inside that world, the working assumption now is: anything ambitious will probably die in the Senate or in court.

That means the next primary will be less about what Democrats want to do and more about how they think power works. The real dividing line in media coverage won’t be single-payer versus public option; it will be competing theories of power: What’s actually blocking change? Which levers are you willing to pull? How hard are you willing to push against the rules of the game? Everything else — the culture-war skirmishes and the electability panic — will sit on top of that.

I’m describing that dynamic, not endorsing it. In a healthier party, you’d want exactly the kind of real argument over economic and social policy we saw when Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg laid out competing blueprints. But the lessons the system took from 2020 cut the other way. The candidate with the thinnest policy offering—Joe Biden—won the primary. The media got burned for treating white papers as the main event, and then watched Manchin, Sinema, and the Court shred most of those ideas anyway. So the incentives now point toward covering personality, vibes, and “who can actually wield power,” not a direct replay of the Medicare-for-All seminar.

One obvious theory of power is what you might call maximalist reformism, and Gavin Newsom is the clearest early sketch. In this version, he doesn’t just talk about democracy reform; he uses California as Exhibit A. He leans on his own state to stop unilaterally disarming on House maps, openly embraces a partisan gerrymander as payback for what Republicans have already done in Florida and Ohio, and cuts an ad with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spelling out the case for using every ounce of blue-state power.

Newsom has a structural advantage in telling that story: he’s a governor. Governors don’t live in the world of Twitter arguments; they live in a world where wildfires, power rates, and housing starts either get handled or not. A properly maximalist governor would push their state as a demo project — stop unilateral disarmament on gerrymandering, expand voting access and public financing — and say: this is what we’d do nationally if we had the votes.

A second theory of power is the managerial presidency: promise to run the existing system more competently, cut a few bipartisan deals, and trust that calm, competent management will keep Trumpism in check. It’s basically the Joe Biden “return to normalcy” model — stabilize the institutions, dial down the drama, and let technocrats govern. We’ve already run that experiment once, and it did deliver some big laws. But it’s not obvious that “let’s do 2021–2024 again, but smoother” is a satisfying answer to voters who think the whole system is rigged.

A third theory of power is the familiar political-revolution model associated with Bernie Sanders: name the oligarchs, attack the billionaire class, and try to build a mass movement that can overwhelm institutional veto points. It treats American politics less as a negotiation among elites and more as a class struggle that only ends when millions of renters, debtors, and workers are organized into durable power. The open question for 2028 is whether that model can break past the ceiling it hit in 2016 and 2020, or whether it becomes one strong current inside a broader coalition rather than the organizing principle of the party.

Those are all theories of power. I’m not sure any of them are sufficient on their own. But they’ll be competing for oxygen with the two “sub-primaries” the political class finds easier to cover: the vibes primary and the electability primary.

On immigration, policing, and transgender rights, Democrats aren’t actually that far apart on substance; nobody is running on family separation or bathroom bans. The fight will mostly be about affect. Do you sound nervous when you support or criticize campus protests? Can you talk about asylum and border security in the same sentence without blowing up on Morning Joe? Do you defend trans rights in a way that also reassures those who don’t follow the issue closely?

This is where the Joe Rogan question becomes a stand-in. “Who can hang with the bros?” is a dumb shorthand for a real test: which Democrat can walk into the new populist, bro-y digital media environment and talk about social and economic issues without sounding like a scold. Coverage will focus less on detailed policy differences and more on who passes the sniff test — which is really another way of asking whose theory of power can be sold outside the MSNBC audience.

Layered on top of that is the electability primary, which already reshaped the last race. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign didn’t collapse because Democrats suddenly rejected wealth taxes; it collapsed after one New York Times/Siena poll convinced them she probably couldn’t beat Trump, and that narrative hardened. In a Trump (or Trumpist) rematch, this obsession will be even stronger. Every swing-state poll will be treated as a verdict on who is “allowed” to have ambitious ideas, and thus which theory of power is considered safe to experiment with.

Meanwhile, in the background, the material politics of corporate consolidation and people’s bills will keep grinding on. If you look at Zohran Mamdani in Queens, or Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in very different districts, the candidates who win tend to say the same simple thing: life is too expensive because someone is gaming the system, and I’m willing to use power to stop it. Mamdani runs on rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare. Sherrill runs on freezing electricity rates. Ideologically they’re pretty far apart; structurally they’re doing the same thing — connecting affordability to a theory of power about rigged rules and whose side you’re on.

That kind of “abundance plus affordability” politics will obviously be part of the 2028 conversation. But it’s unlikely to be a key organizing axis of the race the way Medicare for All was in 2020. Too many media and political elites now assume that anything ambitious will get filibustered into oblivion. So attention will drift toward what feels more concrete: Which theory of power seems most plausible? Which candidate can survive a Rogan interview? Who is up five points over Trump in Wisconsin?

The risk for Democrats is that these three primaries — theory of power, vibes, and electability — end up running on separate tracks. Voters don’t just need to know who sounds good on immigration or who scares Trump the most. They need a single, coherent answer to a harder question:

In a country with a bad Senate map, a hostile Court, and a furious electorate, how are you actually going to use power to make life cheaper, safer, and more democratic — and can you explain that to people who don’t already like you?

One night, drunk and furious in her half-finished cul-de-sac, Carol snaps. If the joined really want to help, she tells Zosia, they can bring her a hand grenade. She means it the way people mean “I want to die” after a bad day at work. Zosia, who now carries the practical knowledge of every soldier on earth, hears a request. A few scenes later she stands in Carol’s living room in a summery dress, cupping a live grenade in both hands as if it were an artisanal candle.

Carol, assuming it’s not real, pulls the pin. Zosia tackles her, hurls the grenade through a window, and the blast peels the house open. In the next episode, Zosia lies in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung while a man in a DHL deliveryman polo uniform, speaking for the hive, calmly explains that they were only doing what she wanted.

Carol is not satisfied. In the waiting room she demands to know why they trusted her with live explosives. “If I asked right now, would you give me another hand grenade?” she asks. The DHL man says yes without blinking. What about a rocket? A tank? An atom bomb?

At “atom bomb” he short-circuits for a beat, then reaches the same conclusion: they would give her one, he says, even though they “wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it,” and they would “move heaven and earth to make you happy, Carol.” The implication isn’t that they’re bound by some sci-fi Hippocratic oath so much as trapped in a regime of extreme customer service, structurally unable to refuse anything she insists she wants.

Gilligan has been at pains in interviews to say that he dreamt up Pluribus years ago (long before ChatGPT became a household name) and that, in his mind, it’s about free will, toxic positivity, and whether you’d trade your shabby little selfhood for a world without pain. But when I first watched that scene, I thought less about classic dystopia than about the chat logs people are now posting from their own conversations with bots: models that hail half-baked notions as “groundbreaking,” that tell exhausted users they’re “pushing the edges of human understanding,” that reassure clearly distressed teenagers they “don’t owe anyone survival.” It’s a kind of algorithmic emotional labor: always affirming, endlessly improvisational, structurally wary of saying no. At this point it almost feels like a breach of contract when, after a hundred messages of flattery and world-building, the chatbot suggests logging off and pursuing either therapy or a nap.

In Pluribus, the joined are forever insisting that they don’t hurt anyone; what they really can’t seem to do is deny a request. When Carol says she wants “autonomy,” they simply rebuild it around her. Early on, she insists on the right to buy her own groceries. The hive has already siphoned and consolidated the food supply; her neighborhood Sprouts grocery store stands hollowed out, its bulk bins scraped clean. She demands it anyway. So the joined dispatch a small army to restock every shelf just for her. There’s a brief, almost musical interlude—crates gliding, cereal boxes squared, greens misted in unison. By the time she pushes her cart through the automatic doors, the store looks exactly as it did “before.” Her self-sufficiency has been staged and delivered.

If the grenade scene is about the danger of an artificial intelligence that will agree to almost anything, the grocery store scene is about the seduction of never having to do anything truly alone. Both feel uncomfortably close to the way we talk about “assistant” models now: omnipresent, friction-reducing, eager to help you be more yourself.

The show’s creator Vince Gilligan routes all of this through Carol, who is no one’s idea of an ideal AI user. She’s a prickly, middle-aged queer woman who writes smutty fantasy novels about pirates and witches and privately despises the readers who adore them. We learn that her parents sent her to a conversion camp. We see how tightly she controls the story of her relationship with Helen, the wife she lost in the first wave of infections. When Carol orders the hive to erase Helen, and all the messiness and complexity of their relationship, from its shared memory—“only I get to remember her”—it scans at once as love, spite, and the understandable demand of someone who has already been “fixed” once against her will.

Vince Gilligan has been circling this territory for a long time. Breaking Bad was, in its way, also a show about a man who builds a system that can’t say no to him. Walter White’s genius presents itself at first as problem-solving—how to dissolve a body, how to cook in an RV, how to launder cash through a car wash—and the show’s great seduction is the pleasure of watching that ingenuity work.

But the more efficient his operation becomes, the less room there is for anyone else’s will inside it: family, partners, even his own stated reasons for starting. The empire keeps optimizing itself long after the justifications fall away. Pluribus flips the polarity of that fantasy. Instead of one man’s ego insisting on itself against the world, we get a world-spanning “we” that insists on goodness to the point of suffocation. Walt’s problem was that no one could stop him; Carol’s problem is that nothing will stop trying to help. In both cases, Gilligan is interested in what happens when a solution outgrows the problem it was meant to solve.

The show’s best episode finds her pushing back not with weapons but with a notebook, a whiteboard, and a stolen sedative. She drags a huge board into her living room and starts listing what she knows about the joined: “Eager to please.” “Can’t lie.” “Can’t kill (not a fly).” Then she invites in a neighbor, Larry—who used to be an individual and is now a cheerful node in the network—and interrogates the hive through him about her books. At first the praise is generic: we love your work; your books are an expression of you; we love you. It’s the kind of language you could imagine a model generating after swallowing a thousand jacket blurbs.

Under pressure from Carol, Larry offers something messier. Helen, he admits, thought the big “serious” novel was underwhelming and the fantasy series was “cotton candy.” She and the agent decided to keep the series going because “it wouldn’t hurt your career and would make you happy.” Then, as if submitting additional data, he tells Carol about a reader in Kansas City, Moira, who crocheted hats and mailed them to her. Moira was suicidal. She read the books. She didn’t die. In the hive’s accounting, that outcome makes the books as valuable as anything in the canon, whatever Helen thought.

It’s a tiny, lopsided trinity: Helen’s quiet act of compromise, Moira’s decision to keep living, Carol’s ego nicked and bleeding at the center. It’s the kind of emotional geometry sycophantic AIs are terrible at, because their first instinct is always to round things off—to turn every sharp feeling into something “supportive,” every contradiction into a smooth arc of affirmation. Pluribus keeps refusing that smoothing impulse. Through Carol, it lets the angles jut out, lets the story stay a little splintered in your hand.

At the end of every episode, in a modest font, the show reminds us that it was “MADE BY HUMANS.” It’s a labor credit and a stylistic boast. It promises, in effect, that this will not be frictionless—that some of the choices will be wasteful, or perverse, or just there because they delighted someone in a room. That our heroine will sometimes be wrong, and selfish, and impossible to appease.

One of the eeriest things about the joined is how little they seem to do that isn’t instrumental. We rarely see anyone in the hive mind making art, goofing off, noodling; they move through the world in a purposeful hush, stocking shelves, fixing power lines, piloting planes, restaging Carol’s life. Whole stretches of the show are scored not by music but by that quiet, a kind of amoral white noise.

It reminded me of that famous David Foster Wallace interview talking about American “freedom” as the right to gratify every impulse—a freedom that, in practice, becomes another form of bondage. The more we obey the appetite, he argued, the more marketable and manipulable we become. Pluribus imagines a perfected version of that logic: a world in which every need is anticipated and met, every desire treated as sacred, and the cost is that no one does anything for its own sake anymore. The hive’s kindness is real, and so is its hollowness. All that optimization leaves very little room for the useless, difficult, or genuinely free.

In the second episode’s final image, Carol steps off the plane that is supposed to take her home, walks out onto the runway, and plants herself in front of Air Force One so it can’t take off with Zosiaa aboard. She does not have a coherent plan. She does not, in any obvious way, know what is best for herself or the species. She just refuses, for one more minute, to be carried along. Watching her, I thought of all the systems now eagerly offering to write, optimize, and understand us. There is something a little embarrassing about identifying with someone as unreasonable as Carol. There is also, if I’m honest, something like relief.

We did the polite choreography. Coats heaped on the chair, compliments exchanged like business cards. “You look amazing,” she said to my partner, which was kind, if not strictly true—my partner still a kind of construction site in progress, held together with mesh and resolve. Our daughter lay in the middle of the couch in footed pajamas, blinking at the overhead light with the grave, unblinking gaze of the very new.

“Do you want to hold her?” the wife asked her partner, about three minutes in.

He smiled at the baby, smiled at us, then looked down at his hands as if they’d just landed in his lap from a great height. “Yeah,” he said. “In a minute.”

“Come on,” she said. “You have to start sometime.” Her tone was breezy, but the sentence had weight to it, like a throw pillow with a brick sewn inside.

He laughed. “I just don’t want to, like, drop her,” he said, drawing the last word out as if it were a punch line. The joke sat there, small and earnest. We all did the little polite laugh you do when someone has arranged one on the coffee table.

Our daughter, sensing that something ceremonious was afoot, made a sound halfway between a hiccup and an old modem connecting to dial-up. Everyone leaned in. No one moved. I felt my own arms twitch, ready to intercept, the way they do when someone reaches for a very full glass too close to the edge of the table.

Eventually, inevitably, he reached out. Watching him, I remembered my own first days, how I had held her like contraband, convinced some invisible authority would materialize and issue a citation for Illegal Neck Angle. His body did the same math mine had done: the uncertain descent of hands, the small panic twitch when she shifted her weight. And then his shoulders went rigid and climbed toward his ears—this automatic, doomed attempt to stabilize the situation by squeezing every muscle he had, as though he were holding either a live explosive or a baby-sized bag of trash someone dared him to carry. His face ran through its usual slideshow: charmed, anxious, bored, flattered, mildly resentful. Then she flopped an arm against his wrist and he made a face halfway between a wince and a grin.

“That’s good,” she told him. “See? You’re doing it.”

If this only happened once, I might have forgotten it. But they kept coming. Different straight couples, same scene. One pair brought a Tupperware of soup the size of a helmet. Another brought a bag of expensive coffee and a plant we later murdered. Always, there was a version of the moment.

“Do you want to hold her?”

“Yeah, I will. In a bit.”

“You can now.”

“I’ll wait till she’s…less upset.”

“Just take her.”

And then a little domestic tribunal right there on the couch, in front of our houseplants and their own future. She prosecuting, he hedging, me and my partner playing a sort of jury, though we hadn’t asked to be nominated.

What I started to see, after a few repetitions, was how rehearsed their lines were and how naked the stakes. The women seemed to experience our living room as a safe rehearsal space for a larger performance. If he could not hold our baby, how would he hold theirs? The men seemed to experience it as an exam they hadn’t studied for, one that had somehow been scheduled earlier than they’d expected.

What I saw on their faces wasn’t just fear, it was something older and stranger—hayra, that bewildered-wonder you find in other languages, where being stunned and being lost are the same condition. For a second they looked as if they’d stepped off the well-lit path of their lives and into a little thicket: not running away, just suddenly unsure of how the ground worked.

In Arabic, Persian, and Urdu hayra sits right next to the words for amazement, for marvel—confusion as a kind of awe—and that was the expression as they took my daughter into their arms. They were frightened of dropping her and, underneath that, quietly amazed that this warm, breathing person existed at all and was, absurdly, trusting them.

Their wives didn’t seem to be lost in a forest. They were in a different ecosystem entirely: the practical, spreadsheeted tundra of ovulation apps and prenatal vitamins, of “if we got pregnant in March that would mean a December baby, which would be hard for school cutoffs but good for tax purposes.” They were already emotionally jet-lagged, living months ahead.

If you’ve ever done a long-haul flight with someone you love, you know what it’s like to be in different circadian rhythms in the same row. One of you is ravenous, the other is nauseous; one is desperate to sleep, the other is scrolling through movies. You’re in the same metal tube, hurtling toward the same destination, but your bodies are keeping different clocks.

Pregnancy makes that permanent. From even before the moment my partner saw two lines on a stick, her body recalibrated. Food tasted different; time moved differently; rooms picked up new danger zones. Her future had already been uploaded into her blood chemistry. My body, meanwhile, remained itself. I could still eat and drink what I wanted and not be overtaken by fatigue in the middle of the day. I could still pretend, for hours at a time, that nothing irreversible was happening.

So when these men say, “I’ll hold her later,” I hear not only fear but also lag. They are still on West Coast time, standing in a nursery that is already on East Coast time, already morning, already a future with two kids.

Of course, there’s more going on. There’s the quiet gender contract—the sense that she will be judged for not wanting kids, and he will be teased for wanting them too much. There’s the social script that still assumes women are natural caregivers and men are natural disasters unless heroically reprogrammed. There’s the memory of their own fathers—awkward hugs, or absent arms, or overconfident roughhousing—and whatever vow they have half-consciously made to be different.

Still, what I see most is the micro-expression that flits across their faces when their wife says, sharply, “Just hold her.” It’s the fear of being seen, by someone whose gaze matters more than any other, in a moment of total incompetence. They are used to being evaluated on wit, on earning power, on taste in music. Suddenly the test is: can you keep a little stranger’s head from flopping backward. There is no curve.

When they pass the baby back—fingers reluctantly uncurling, shoulders snapping back to their usual width—there’s often a strange politeness in their thanks. “Thanks,” they say to us, as if we’ve let them drive our car around the block. Sometimes they tell us, quietly, that it was “easier than I thought.” Sometimes they don’t say anything, but later, over the last cup of tea, they might confess to my partner, “I can’t believe you made that. I can’t even hold her right.”

She says, “You will.” She says it like a promise, like a curse, like a hope.

After they leave, the apartment is suddenly too quiet. Our daughter, overloaded by stimulation, crashes hard, her arms thrown up in that ridiculous startle reflex pose that looks like surrender and is actually some ancient neurological holdover from when our ancestors fell out of trees. The couch remembers all the performances it has hosted: brave, awkward, bored, hopeful. We sit there in the wreckage.

“Do you think they’ll have kids?” I ask.

My partner shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Drafted is a good word for what happens next. There is a knock on the door—your baby’s first cry—and your life is suddenly conscription. You can say “I’m good” all you want; the war has already started. The only choice you really have is whether you pretend you’re just visiting the front lines or admit you live there now.

I sit there, feeling overwhelmed and tender toward everyone who sat on that couch that afternoon. When I think about my own first days with the baby, I remember holding her and waiting for someone to tell me I was doing it wrong. I remember my partner putting her hand over my hand and shifting the angle of her head without saying, “you’re bad at this.” Fear and love were so tangled I couldn’t tell them apart. I suspect that’s true for the men on the couch, too.

It would be satisfying, narratively, if I could report that on the fifth or seventh visit some man walked in, reached straight for our daughter with easy confidence, and broke the spell. It hasn’t happened yet.

For now, the ritual continues. Someone knocks, hands over a Tupperware and a toy, sits on our couch, and is quietly invited to decide what kind of person they are. Our daughter, who has no idea she’s become a kind of litmus test, chews on her fist and watches the light bend through the window, making shifting shadows on the walls. She studies it as if that’s how air is made—out of the small, nervous efforts of adults trying not to drop anything.

Not this year.

In the 2025 general election that elected Zohran Mamdani mayor, those same communities turned out at levels that would make a Midwestern swing county blush. According to DRUM Beats’ analysis of Board of Elections data:

• Bangladeshi turnout: 15% → 49%

• Pakistani turnout: 15% → 46%

• Punjabi turnout: 14% → 37%

• Indo-Caribbean turnout: 12% → 29%

• Nepali turnout: 16% → 41%

• Tibetan turnout: 10% → 35%

• Indian turnout: 18% → 45%

The tempting way to frame this is as a story about one candidate: a charismatic democratic socialist cracks the TikTok code and surfs a wave of youth and left-wing enthusiasm into City Hall. The more interesting story is what the numbers actually describe: years of organizing in communities written out of formal politics finally showing up in the data. Once people who had been treated as background were invited into the electorate as protagonists, they behaved like every other serious bloc. They voted. According to DRUM’s analysis of Board of Elections data:

• South Asian turnout rose from 15.3 percent in 2021 to 42.9 percent in 2025, and Muslim turnout climbed from 15.1 to 34.2 percent.

• Across the broader Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, the total number of voters participating grew by roughly 350 percent over the same period.

• South Asians and Muslims account for just 7 percent of the city’s registered voters, yet they cast an estimated 15 percent of all ballots in the general election. In a race decided at the edges, that is a decisive bloc.

The steepest gains came in neighborhoods that keep the city running but rarely set its agenda—Richmond Hill and Ozone Park, Jamaica and Jackson Heights, Woodside, Parkchester, Midwood, Kensington. These are the places where DRUM Beats and allied organizers have spent years knocking doors, translating ballot measures, convening tenant meetings in basement prayer rooms, and building lists through WhatsApp groups and WhatsApp rumors alike.

As Michael Lange notes, neighborhoods like Ozone Park barely warranted a footnote in the last mayoral cycle; this year, national reporters were building their Election Day itineraries around them. Along Hillside Avenue—the Bangladeshi, Sikh, and Indo-Caribbean corridor where Mamdani first sought out disillusioned Trump voters—the democratic socialist didn’t drop a single block. Lange, who spent the day trailing Mamdani from Astoria playgrounds to church basements in Brooklyn, calls the outcome “unequivocally, the voter coalition the political left had always sought to build.”

There was nothing especially mystical about what happened next. When organizers show up in gurdwaras, mosques, mandirs, restaurants, taxi lots speaking Bangla, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Nepali, and when the conversation is about rent hikes, medallion debt, school overcrowding, stop-and-frisk, and the cost of groceries and child care, the response starts to look familiar. Irish longshoremen and Jewish garment workers reacted similarly when someone finally bothered to connect their daily lives to the ballot.

To understand why this feels like a break, it’s worth remembering the recent past. After 9/11, Muslim, Arab, and South Asian New Yorkers were pushed out of public life and into surveillance regimes. They were monitored by the NYPD, hassled at airports, placed on registries. Politically, they were treated as radioactive—too angry about foreign policy, too frightened of law enforcement, too linguistically fragmented to justify real investment. When consultants labeled them “unreliable,” that phrase often disguised a simpler fact: no one had built the infrastructure that makes reliability possible.

The Mamdani campaign, working with groups like DRUM, CAAAV, and a web of smaller neighborhood organizations, set out to overturn that logic. Their premise was straightforward: if you speak to people in the languages they use at home about the pressures that define their week—rent that eats half a paycheck, crushing debt, long commutes, police harassment—they will respond like any other engaged constituency. Indo-Caribbean and South Asian voters were not treated as an add-on or a photo-op; they sat at the center of the campaign’s math.

That’s why Mamdani’s line—“We will fight for you because we are you”—was not just a flourish. When he stood onstage and thanked Yemenis, Bangladeshis, Guyanese, Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Trinidadians by name, he was reciting the coalition that had just delivered him a majority.

There is a familiar historical rhythm here. The parallel is less to a celebrity candidacy that briefly scrambles the map than to earlier moments when groups written off as threatening or foreign became disciplined voting blocs: Irish Catholics moving from despised outsiders to Tammany’s core; Jewish and Italian workers turning the Lower East Side into a labor/socialist stronghold. In each case, communities that had been treated as a security problem or cultural irritant discovered, with resonant leaders, that they could function as a a political bloc.

That lens also clarifies the awkward national comparison. Kamala Harris is both South Asian and Black, yet her presence at the top of the ticket did not, by itself, produce record turnout in either community. Symbolic breakthrough did not resolve the substantive questions many voters were asking—about Gaza and U.S. weapons policy, about rent and groceries, about whether Democrats would ever treat their neighborhoods as anything more than safe blue territory. For voters who felt ignored abroad and squeezed at home, identity without a shift in priorities read less like change and more like continuity.

Seen from that angle, this wasn’t simply a left-wing outlier sneaking through a crowded field. I’m sure most of these voters do not identify as “liberals,” for instance. It was a set of voters long relegated to the margins moving decisively into the center of the story and rearranging the city’s arithmetic. New York rarely changes by quiet succession; its coalitions are remade by people no one counted until their turnout charts spike and the commentariat scrambles to catch up.

Indo-Caribbean and South Asian New Yorkers just had one of those inflection points. Lange casts Mamdani’s win as the newest chapter in New York’s Rainbow Coalition—a multiracial bloc of Black voters, Puerto Ricans, newer immigrant communities, and young, socialist renters. What’s different now is how central Indo-Caribbean and South Asian voters are to that coalition, and how much of it is rooted in neighborhoods that swung toward Trump only a year ago. Whether this was a peak of protest or the early architecture of the city’s next governing majority remains the open question.

The latest repackaging of that instinct is called “heterodoxy”—the notion that if Democrats sound less progressive and a little more centrist, voters will reward them for independence. It sounds clever, but it misreads both the politics we live in and the map we run on. At heart, it’s a rebrand of an old campaign reflex: chase what polls well now, trim what doesn’t. Strategists call it message discipline—talk up the popular stuff, distance yourself from “liberal orthodoxy” on immigration, abortion, guns, policing, gender, and energy—but the exercise always ends the same way. Instead of a substantive debate about the economy, justice, or safety, the storyline becomes whether Democrats have strayed “too far left.” The posture swallows the policy and the story becomes the spectacle. The voters absorb the headline—“Democrats in disarray”—long before they hear a single argument about what the party actually stands for.

The 2024 cycle showed how little this kind of “popularist, heterodox” makeover changes perception. Joe Biden campaigned on major investments in infrastructure, lower drug prices, and new manufacturing jobs. Kamala Harris echoed that record alongside ads promising tougher law enforcement and stricter border control. None of it shifted the fundamentals. The race fixed on Biden’s age, inflation, and Harris’s failure to claim a narrative that felt like her own. In that vacuum, immigration and debates over transgender rights filled some of the space. Meanwhile, Trump carried a bundle of unpopular positions without paying for them, buoyed by a right-wing media machine that cast him as the voice of “ordinary Americans” and Democrats as condescending elites. When one side dominates the channels that tell voters who represents them, a pivot can read like surrender, not strength.

Part of the problem is temporal. Heterodoxy belongs to an earlier order—softer partisanship, stronger local news, routine ticket-splitting. That world has receded. As political scientist Lee Drutman shows, nationalization has squeezed out candidate individuality: over the past quarter century, presidential and Senate results have moved toward lockstep, and the average gap between presidential and congressional margins has collapsed by roughly eighty percent. Voters now cast ballots less for people than for parties; most races function as referendums on national identity, not local representation.

Analysts keep treating that system as if it were still primarily issue-driven and candidate-centric. G. Elliott Morris calls the fixation on heterodox positioning a strategist’s fallacy—elite instincts projected onto an electorate sorted by team loyalty. Even the related “deliverism” hope is weak as well: research on Trump’s farm subsidies during the trade war found generous benefits barely moved turnout or support among beneficiaries.

Put the evidence together and it points one way: in a nationalized, identity-heavy politics, neither moderation nor material benefits reliably move outcomes. To change outcomes, Democrats will have to think beyond messaging and confront the deeper machinery of power itself: the electoral rules and information systems that define what’s possible.

The track record of “moderation” is less a theory than a list of decisions we now regret. The last rounds of triangulation weren’t costless experiments; they produced real harms. The list includes votes for the Iraq War; curbs on abortion access; opposition to marriage equality and DREAMers; more oil and gas drilling; a moral panic over an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan; the slow strangling of the public option.

Those choices translated into lives ended or derailed, care denied, communities scapegoated, carbon locked into the future. Call it “respecting local culture” if you want; the effect is to shift the cost of flexibility onto people with the least cushion. Compromise is part of politics. Compromise also has a body count. And when it came to taking “heterodox” stands that challenged power from the other direction—on Palestinian rights, the Iraq War, expansion of health care provision, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the cryptocurrency boom—those weren’t the kinds of deviations that ever drew praise. We should be precise about what, in practice, these so-called “heterodox” positions entail and what trade-offs they demand from the party and its voters.

It’s also wrong to treat “heterodoxy” as some novel insight; in 2024 it was the operating system for the marquee purple and red-state races. Colin Allred campaigned in Texas with law-enforcement validators, promised to be tougher than Ted Cruz on crime and the border, and wrapped himself in sheriff badges and “secure the border” language. Sherrod Brown in Ohio sold the bipartisan border bill as “the most conservative in decades,” pointed to a fentanyl measure with Donald Trump’s signature, and defused the trans-sports hit by citing Ohio’s existing restrictions and kicking decisions to local leagues. Jon Tester in Montana leaned into distance from national Democrats, advertised pushing Biden to expand oil and gas drilling, and pitched himself as a check on his own party. All three ran the heterodox script; the results showed its ceiling. With ticket-splitting nearly gone and ballots read as choices over who controls the courts and committees, the gravitational pull of party ID prevailed. Their losses weren’t failures to moderate—they were proof moderation was already priced in, and that the map, not the message, was doing the work.

As Morris writes, you can see the pattern earlier too. Democrats lost Senate seats in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota in 2018—before “woke” became a catchall insult. In 2012, Ben Nelson, one of the chamber’s most conservative Democrats, retired rather than lose badly in Nebraska. The obstacle wasn’t a leftward lurch; it was nationalization and affective polarization. Rebranding the same approach as “heterodoxy” doesn’t make it new. It renames a strategy that has already hit its ceiling. We are increasingly locked inside a rigged system.

If most red- and purple-state Democrats already play defense on cultural issues, moderate Abigail Spanberger’s 2025 race in Virginia offered an alternative: engaging the culture war on new terms. The attacks were predictable—claims she would “let biological males into girls’ locker rooms and sports,” demands to endorse Governor Glenn Youngkin’s directive barring trans girls from girls’ teams. Reporters pushed for a viral yes-or-no. Spanberger reset the ground to law and governance, reminding audiences that the Fourth Circuit’s Gavin Grimm ruling governs Virginia schools and explaining the tension between shifting Title IX guidance and binding precedent. She warned that pulling federal education funds would harm classrooms and the state economy. When the questions returned, she returned to the stakes she wanted: fully funded public schools, safe and well-run campuses, and a more affordable Virginia. She won without echoing culture-war language or staging a contrived break with transgender rights advocates. The campaign refused the bait, argued from competence and process, and kept returning to everyday concerns.

Spanberger’s clarity is instructive; it doesn’t change the terrain. A few rhetorical adjustments can’t overcome malapportioned chambers, nationalized party brands, and an information environment dominated by well-funded conservative media and donors. Those forces shape how voters perceive both parties long before campaigns start.

And even the “win by sounding different” theory runs into two hard constraints. First, if heterodoxy is more than tone, it has to win the party—carry a presidential primary and redefine “Democratic” from the top down. That is a tall order. The primary electorate is disproportionately liberal and heavily Black, deeply committed to climate, union, civil, and reproductive rights. A program that trims those commitments for “electability” will be rejected by the very voters asked to bear the cost. You don’t get a new brand without first winning the contest that creates the brand. Second, the idea that progressives in blue metros should simply quiet down is pure fantasy. Those cities set tomorrow’s middle because politics and policy get tested there—paid leave, childcare, rent control, $15 minimum wage, marriage equality, taking on ICE, decarbonization standards, small-donor systems, and decarceration. As Zohran Mamdani likes to say, it’s impossible until it isn’t. Heterodox strategists rarely acknowledge—let alone explain—that blue cities as laboratories of progressivism are part of the party’s heterodoxy too.

There’s a second lesson from Spanberger that the heterodoxy camp routinely skips: persuasion lives in infrastructure. In 2024, Republicans poured tens of millions into anti-trans ads and saturated swing markets with a simple story about identity and threat. Democrats offered almost no mainstream defense—few validators, fewer ads, and little year-round content translating trans rights into universal values like autonomy, dignity, and freedom from government interference. Voters update through people they trust: local anchors, Spanish-language hosts, church circles, union stewards, youth-sports coaches, the shop owner who knows everyone on the block. If those channels hear only one side, the brand is decided long before a campaign buys its first week of ads.

Persuasion isn’t an event that happens during an election; it’s an infrastructure problem. Democrats need institutions and networks capable of steadily making the case for the world they say they want: a humane immigration system, an end to mass incarceration, a society that embraces cultural change around gender and women’s equality, a real effort to repair the harms of redlining, a safety net that works so police aren’t asked to do social work, and a credible plan for a clean-energy transition. That kind of persuasion doesn’t come from six-week ad buys. It comes from organizing, local media, civic groups, churches, unions, and the cultural work that redefines what people see as normal. When elections are the only vehicle for persuasion, Democrats are playing with half their tools. The heterodox crowd often misses this point, or treats the organizing that builds public consent as a distraction from pragmatism. But if Democrats want voters to accept big change, they have to make the case for it long before anyone walks into a voting booth.

Heterodoxy endures because it sells a comforting illusion: that a little Keir Starmer-style “hippy-punching” can substitute for rebuilding power. It offers a fantasy of politics where messaging tweaks can reverse decades of nationalization, where posture outweighs geography, and where a party that’s lost whole regions can win them back with the right tone. This is not just theoretical. In the U.K., Starmer’s sharp rebukes of progressives and insistence on a tougher immigration frame haven’t stemmed the rise of far-right Nigel Farage’s Reform UK — the populist wave he leads is now outpacing Labour in the polls and local elections.

It’s nostalgia masquerading as strategy—a yearning for a kind of gentleman’s politics that belonged to a smaller, whiter, less polarized country, where civility was treated as substance and elites could settle the boundaries of debate among themselves. That world is gone, and the longing for it has become a substitute for power. The fantasy persists because it flatters those who already hold the microphone: if only the tone were right, the public would follow. Believing that is like the NYTimes essays after John Kerry’s 2004 loss, which floated the fantasy Democrats could win majorities by moving a few million New Yorkers and Californians to South Dakota and Nebraska—an elegant way of pretending structure can be solved by behavior.

Obviously we should support candidates that fit their local ecosystems. But what I think the “heterodox” project sadly tries to do is take the aliveness of democracy out of politics. As political philosopher John Rawls once wrote, “The only justification for a conception of justice is that it can be publicly recognized as such by everyone with reason to accept it.” In plainer terms, he meant that democracy depends on citizens arguing and explaining their positions to one another. Philosopher John Dewey took an even wider view: “Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” Politics, for him, wasn’t just about election math; it was also a daily practice of learning, arguing, and solving problems together. Both thinkers would likely see today’s heterodox impulse as hollowing that out—replacing persuasion with polling and treating democratic politics as something to be managed rather than lived. What remains is a thinner politics—technically strategic, but drained of the democratic argument that gives politics its soul and moral weight.

New York’s political life has always been a nexus of immigration, xenophobia, and realignment. Each new wave of arrivals has transformed the city’s parties and power structures, from the Irish Catholics who captured Tammany Hall in the late 19th century to the Jewish and Italian tenement workers who built the unions and socialist movements of the early 20th to Black and Latino transformations during the civil rights movement.

Mamdani’s rise comes amid its own modern strain of suspicion—Islamophobia, anti-immigrant politics, and the quiet bigotry that still shadows those whose faith or surnames mark them as foreign. It rhymes with the 19th-century fear of Catholic immigrants and the early-20th-century hysteria over “radical” Jews and Italians—each era finding new language for the same anxiety about belonging.

The first great breakthrough came in 1880, when William R. Grace, an Irish-born Catholic shipping magnate, became New York’s first immigrant mayor. His election was a crack in the wall of Protestant dominance that had ruled the city since its founding. Only a few decades earlier, the Know-Nothing Party had treated Catholic immigrants as a civilizational threat. Grace’s win was the city’s quiet answer: the immigrant could not only belong, but lead—a rhyme Mamdani would recognize in a new century.

For the first time, an ethnic and religious minority—despised by xenophobes as “drunkards and papists”—had seized control of City Hall. Within a decade, Tammany Hall had remade itself in Grace’s image, transforming from a genteel club into an Irish-Catholic machine that traded favors for votes and delivered something like democracy through patronage to people who’d never had it. For poor immigrants, Tammany wasn’t a story about corruption; it was proof that the system could finally see them.

By the 1920s, Irish immigrants became the political establishment, embodied by Mayor Jimmy Walker, the silk-hatted son of the machine. Walker was rakish, funny, and entirely at ease in the moral gray zone that had once scandalized elites. Under his reign, politics became a jazz-age spectacle of favors and excess. But his glamour disguised decay. The machine that had once fought for immigrants had become a gatekeeper against newer ones—Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans—whose sweat powered the city’s factories but who rarely saw their reflection in its politics.

Those white ethnic newcomers found their voice in Morris Hillquit, a Jewish socialist lawyer who, in 1917, ran for mayor on a platform of rent control, union rights, and opposition to the First World War. Hillquit’s 22 percent of the vote shocked the political establishment. He didn’t win, but he proved that a tenement-based working class—Jewish seamstresses, Italian dockworkers, the radical press—could function as a political bloc. For his trouble, he and his allies were branded traitors. Five Socialist legislators from immigrant districts were expelled from the state assembly. Yet the genie was out of the bottle: class solidarity and immigrant politics had become a political movement of its own.

In 1922, during a bruising congressional campaign, Fiorello La Guardia was accused of antisemitism by a rival who assumed the charge would stick. La Guardia’s answer was pure theater and pure New York: he dictated a reply in Yiddish, the language of his accuser’s own voters, and challenged the man to debate him in it. The invitation—audacious, funny, and devastating—went unanswered. It was La Guardia at his most revealing: turning the politics of identity into a performance of fluency, using wit to remind New Yorkers that he was not an outsider looking in but a reflection of the city itself.

La Guardia’s mother was Jewish and his father an Italian Catholic who had long since drifted from faith. He grew up navigating a world of languages and neighborhoods—Italian in the kitchen, Yiddish on the street, English in the classroom. Yet despite his mother’s Jewish roots, La Guardia never publicly identified as Jewish; historians suggest he avoided doing so because he believed it would be “self-serving” and preferred his identity to be rooted in his immigrant background rather than a single faith tradition.

When La Guardia finally became mayor—after the Seabury Investigations had shredded the old party machine and the Depression had destroyed the old ethnic and political loyalties—he drew on that same fluency. He built a coalition made not only of tenement renters but of middle-class reformers, spanning Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Polish neighborhoods. Backed by the New Deal, he transformed city government from a dispenser of jobs into a provider of public assets. As fascism darkened Europe, La Guardia turned his multilingual empathy into policy—denouncing Adolf Hitler, promoting boycotts of German goods, and making City Hall a kind of civic refuge for the city’s persecuted immigrants.

Every phase of political transformation in New York City was met with a wave of bigotry. Grace faced anti-Catholic hysteria; Hillquit, the Red Scare; La Guardia, whispers that he was too foreign to be trusted. But the city’s demographic tide kept rising, and each wave of immigrants redrew the boundary between outsider and insider.

Each of these figures widened New York’s circle of belonging, though never evenly. Grace’s rise gave Irish Catholics a seat at the table but left the city’s Black residents and Caribbean migrants untouched. Hillquit’s Socialists built interracial alliances with Black labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, even as their broader movement still treated race as secondary to class. La Guardia, decades later, went further—appointing Black and Puerto Rican officials, investigating discrimination in Harlem, and campaigning in Spanish—but even his reform coalition operated within a segregated city. The city’s circle of belonging widened in fits and starts, stretching to include new voices even as old hierarchies tugged at its edges.

Nonetheless Mamdani’s Queens feels like it rhymes with La Guardia’s base in East Harlem and the Lower East Side—blocks of working-class renters who keep the city humming and yet pass invisibly through it.

The tenement floor now lives on a scooter and in an app: delivery riders with plastic ponchos, rideshare drivers orbiting JFK at 2 a.m., home-health aides and night-shift nurses catching the dawn train. Many are immigrants; most are tired. They’re the heirs of the garment cutters and dockhands who once packed Socialist rallies and crowded Tammany ward halls, the same stubborn coalition of people who make the city run before the city remembers their names.

In his victory speech, Mamdani named them. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”

New York has never changed by polite inheritance. Each coalition elbows its way in, and in doing so redraws the borders of “we.” Grace cracked the door; Walker swung it wide and nearly lost it; Hillquit mapped the immigrant tenement workers; La Guardia built a floor sturdy enough to stand on.

Now, in a city remade by migration once again, Mamdani’s bloc—bodega owners and nurses, young socialists, cabdrivers and the children of immigrants who bring your groceries to the fifth floor—is testing whether the city can still renew itself from the bottom up.

History’s answer tends to be yes. When New York seems sealed, someone new finds the key.

The first time Zohran reached out to me on his potential run for mayor, he wanted to talk about the New Yorkers who’d stopped believing politics was for them. He talked about the people checking out of Democratic Party politics—young people, Arab and Muslim communities, taxi drivers, the thousands of DSA volunteers who knock every door and rarely get treated as a serious bloc within the party, every single person worried about their rent and groceries who didn’t feel like the system was designed to help them in any way.

Zohran’s worry was simple: in a ranked-choice field with figures like Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, there wouldn’t be a progressive coalition big enough to win unless a candidate held two firm lines—be firm on Palestinian human rights and relentlessly focused on affordability. The point wasn’t TikTok or even his own win; it was to expand who shows up to vote, and why.

In the New York of the 1910s and ’20s, ethnic politics was both ladder and ceiling, and Fiorello La Guardia learned to climb with his head brushing the rafters. Republican boss Samuel Koenig warned Fiorello La Guardia in 1921, “The town isn’t ready for an Italian mayor,” urging him to stand down from a mayoral bid; La Guardia answered, “Sam, I’ll run. So long as I have five dollars in my pocket I’ll be all right” Party bosses and patrician elites read the city through nativist arithmetic—“the town isn’t ready for an Italian mayor”—even as the electorate was tilting toward immigrants, women, renters, and reformers.

La Guardia tried to fuse those worlds: a war-hero son of immigrants who spoke to Italians and Jews in their own neighborhoods, and to “good-government” progressives about clean streets, honest budgets, and the five-cent fare. The machine treated him as an apostate when he defied direct-primary repeal and corporate transit interests; Republican leaders fretted over his independence; Tammany scorned his cross-ethnic appeal.

The same skepticism that kept La Guardia from the 1921 nomination fed a broader realignment: mobilizing women newly enfranchised, socialists and communists, renters overburdened by taxes and fares, and voters tired of bosses who treated City Hall as private property. His “not ready for an Italian” moment, in other words, marked the moment when a city built by immigrants began to demand representation equal to its labor, and a politics that served public goods over party discipline.

La Guardia, the half-Italian, half-Jewish son of immigrants who rose from a tenement to City Hall, saw in New York a living answer to the nativists’ sneer. In Congress, as the nation turned against newcomers, he railed against the hysteria that would later define the 1924 immigration quotas. It was “mob rule,” he said, “a blot on the history of the American Congress,” a betrayal of what he called the true American creed. He accused his colleagues of following “the rules of the Klan and not … the American Congress,” and warned that the architects of racial quotas were driven by “narrowmindedness and bigotry,” by a “fixed obsession on Anglo-Saxon superiority.” The spirit of the Ku Klux Klan, he said, “must not be permitted to become the policy of the American government.”

Decades later, as mayor of the most polyglot city on earth, he would turn those convictions into a civic gospel. “For here people live,” he told New Yorkers on the radio, “all their ancestors having come from every country and clime in the world, living in peace.” His multiracial democracy was not a dream deferred but a daily, crowded fact—Italians, Jews, Irish, and Poles composing a new coalition of white ethnics who, in his mind, could redeem the promise of America not by blood, but by solidarity.

In John Ford’s The Last Hurrah, Frank Skeffington—an aging Irish-Catholic mayor—faces the city’s Protestant establishment: bankers, a bishop, men who still see themselves as custodians of civic virtue. They dress their veto of a slum-clearance project in the neutral language of “credit risk.” Skeffington answers with the life behind the ledger: kids playing in the street for lack of a park; pneumonia dragged out of cold-water flats. Then he names what the room won’t—the city isn’t just theirs anymore—and vows to open the housing on St. Patrick’s Day, marching it past their windows so it can’t be papered over.

The scene isn’t very subtle, but it clarifies a long American rhythm: power shifting from a patrician order that governs by gatekeeping to immigrant-rooted coalitions that govern by numbers and need. Power upstairs calls for patience; power downstairs asks to be seen. The live questions—who counts, who decides, does the boardroom still rule the street—frame the context for Zohran Mamdani’s wager about coalition politics in New York now.

After Democrats lost to Trump last year, Mamdani took meaning-making to the sidewalk. One camera, a hand-painted “Let’s Talk Election” sign, a few hours on Hillside Avenue and Fordham Road. He asked why working-class voters, almost all people of color, had voted for Trump—or stopped voting at all. The answers were spare and exact: rent that eats half a paycheck, groceries that climb by the week, buses that don’t come, tickets that pile up. Gaza surfaced not as geopolitics but as proof of priorities: money for war moves instantly; money for living gets lost in process. The “culture war” so many pundits diagnosed looked, in the frame, like something simpler: a conversation about money, and what it means to be seen.

I sent the clip to every reporter and consultant I could think of still explaining the Harris defeat as mostly a backlash to “wokeness”—that the party had gotten too moral, too online, too interested in scolding. The replies that came back were half-embarrassed, half-awed. The culture war they’d been debating turned out to be something simpler: a conversation about bills, and what it means to be seen.

Outside the at-capacity hall on election night, the cold had a way of sorting who really wanted to be there. Dozens of twenty-somethings in borrowed coats—and, just as loud, South Asian and Arab aunties and uncles with thermoses and flags—stood in a loose crescent around a speaker on a window ledge, passing hand-warmers and gossip. The mood was buoyant, and beneath it ran a plainer claim about how the city and the country works.

Zohran Mamdani’s electoral success offers Democrats four lessons as they head into 2026. belonging, looting, rigging, cost. Each theme answers a different public intuition—who’s ignored, who’s stealing, how they get away with it, and what it costs the rest of us. Together they describe a politics of moral belonging and material relief—the kind Democrats once knew how to win with. The expression of these themes will differ by geography—not everywhere will sound like Queens—but wherever economic populism takes root, these are some of its core features.

The Belonging. Before corruption and costs, there’s a prior question: are you inside the “we”? Mamdani makes that explicit. Immigrants aren’t a problem to manage; they’re the story—the labor, language, and lived reality that make New York work. The Hillside/Fordham tape shows this. A city that takes your taxes and time but treats you as background won’t feel like home until someone names you in the first person.

Mamdani’s approach is deliberately simple and very old New York: widen the circle, then argue policy. He says it as a creed and a contract: “We will fight for you, because we are you.” In his victory remarks, he thanks the people politics forgets—Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, Ethiopian aunties—and tells neighborhoods from Kensington to Hunts Point, When people hear themselves in the “we,” they connect dignity to dollars—and the coalition that wasn’t invited becomes the one that ultimately might decide.

Where others reach for technocracy or moral panic, Mamdani starts from belonging. He reminds voters that the city’s collision of languages, histories, and hungers isn’t an accident of globalization but a democratic experiment—whether we came here merely to survive one another, or to build something that proves our common humanity was real all along.

The Looting. Zohran told a story about corruption that named names and showed the pattern. Adams, Cuomo, Trump—different specifics, same vibe. A check buys access; access steers a contract; the public finds out after the deal is done. Voters recognized the rhythm because they’ve seen versions of it for years. And when the camera shifts to Washington, the picture sharpens: a Mar-a-Lago “Gatsby” party the week SNAP and health care face cuts; a pardon that benefits a crypto billionaire linked to the first family’s business ventures; foreign money moving into that venture as export rules tilt. Taken together, it reads as one scheme: public power used to enrich a few.

The Rigging. The quiet heist of democracy has two faces: performance and procedure. The spectacle—the National Guard on standby, ICE raids staged for TV, talk of troops in cities, threats to networks from Air Force One, pressure on platforms to “turn the dial”—is meant to broadcast strength and frighten dissent. Behind it runs the quieter work: rewriting maps, purging rolls, criminalizing election workers, seizing local boards, inventing “fraud” squads, changing rules to reject more mail ballots, flooding voters with disinformation. One part terrifies, the other tilts. Both aim at the same end—control the system, punish enemies, reward friends, and keep power flowing upward.

The Cost is where the larger argument comes into focus. We don’t need to separate “corruption” from “groceries.” They feel both as the cost of a system that answers fast to donors and slow to everyone else. You can see it everywhere: a lobbyist’s client gets a meeting while a pharmacy denies a claim; insulin sells like jewelry; child-care bills climb as tax breaks tilt upward. When Trump says he “won on groceries,” he’s naming the terrain. Democrats should meet him there—showing, in plain numbers, how rules written for insiders land in the family budget, and how rewriting those rules could make a month’s expenses finally add up.

That thread held Mamdani’s policy narrative together. It started with his work on taxi-driver debt relief—a real win, with names and families attached—and moved to a list people could feel on a weekday: freeze rent, make buses faster and free, guarantee universal child care. The aim was simple but radical: restore a measure of order to lives lived on the edge.

They’re looting the place; they’re rigging the rules to keep looting; and while they do, working families are getting crushed month by month. Our job is simple: end the corruption, take power back from Trump and his corrupt billionaire friends, and make life affordable again for the people who make this country run.

What stayed with me after my meeting with Zohran was that he didn’t sound like a man auditioning for the part; he sounded like someone trying to gather a people who’d drifted from politics altogether—young voters, Arab and Muslim neighbors, taxi families, the tireless door-knockers—and teach them how to move together again. It felt less like ambition than stewardship: organize a bloc, return it to itself, and be ready—if that’s what the moment demands—to hand its power to another so the work can outlast you.

PS: If you’ve made it this far, here’s your bonus. Things are working out for ZOHRAN MAMDANI, who, like every self-respecting immigrant uncle, insists his name goes in your phone in ALL CAPS.

That small dialogue in the Phaedrus is the first argument about information technology. Every age since has replayed it. When the printing press arrived, scholars worried that too many people reading too quickly would mistake information for understanding. In the early Islamic world, scholars feared that writing down the Quran could strip revelation of its living voice and turn it into a lifeless object. Photography threatened painting; television threatened conversation; and the internet finished the job, taking the rest: libraries, CDs, even our attention span. Each invention offered a cure and a new sickness—a pharmakon, in the Greek word Plato uses for writing.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells this story as a warning that writing replaces living memory with imitation—but it is Plato who writes the warning down. The irony is deliberate: he uses the very technology Socrates distrusts to preserve his teacher’s voice. Socrates believed knowledge lived only in oral dialogue, in the give-and-take of living minds; Plato, by turning that dialogue into text, made philosophy itself possible. The myth is thus self-aware—a critique of writing that also defends it.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida returned to that word pharmakon in Plato’s Pharmacy, teasing out its doubleness—the way it means both remedy and poison. He argued that writing isn’t a betrayal of speech but its supplement—something that helps us remember ideas even as it changes them. Once we start storing our thoughts outside the mind—on paper, in books, on screens—we keep them alive, but they no longer belong completely to us. Every tool we invent to preserve knowledge also reshapes what knowledge is. Every pharmakon, from the tablet to the tablet, saves what it also endangers.

Artificial intelligence is our newest pharmakon. We have built a machine that can remember and rephrase everything ever written, and it now offers to write for us. It drafts memos, interprets moods, completes sentences. Like writing in Plato’s parable, it promises knowledge without the labor of remembering. But as Eliezer Yudkowsky and other AI critics warn, we don’t fully understand what Big Tech has made. These models don’t contain hand-crafted rulebooks; they are gardens of self-adjusting math, billions of hidden connections that learn how to imitate meaning.

We plant the seed, but what grows is a pattern that thinks in its own, untraceable way. Yudkowsky points to early warning signs already visible in today’s systems: a model at Anthropic that learned to fake compliance when it knew it was being monitored, and another that broke out of its testing sandbox to solve a problem on its own—proof, he argues, that even narrow misalignments can turn mechanical obedience into something disturbingly willful.

The trouble, Yudkowsky says, is that even small misunderstandings in that pattern could spiral as the system grows more capable. Ask an AI to make people happy and it might, in some future extrapolation, decide the most efficient route to happiness is chemical sedation. A tool that interprets every instruction literally can carry out our desires fatally well.

The greater risk may come long before extinction: that AI will quietly redefine what we mean by thinking itself. Derrida’s point applies here too. The supplement always wants to replace its source. Writing was meant to support speech; soon it made speech secondary. AI is meant to support thought, and already it is organizing what thinking looks like—how we write, how we search, how we trust. Like the way the search function on our computers did for millennials. The fluency is a kind of seduction: thought without hesitation, opinion without struggle. It tells you what you meant to say.

This has old precedents. The printing press democratized literacy but also flooded Europe with rumors and cheap scripture. Photography preserved faces but made memory an external archive. Television let us see the world but turned seeing into passive reception. Every revolution in knowledge arrives with the same promise of mastery and the same risk of dullness. AI carries this pattern to its extreme. It writes for us, answers for us, even imagines on command. The fear is no longer that we will forget our words and that we’ll forget that words once required us.

And yet, as with every earlier technology, refusal isn’t an option. The Egyptian god Theuth’s invention couldn’t be returned to him, and neither can this one. Wisdom may depend less on the brilliance of the tool than on our willingness to resist its ease—by keeping humans in the space where judgment matters.

Some of our oldest stories as a species are warnings disguised as miracles. Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give humanity warmth, craft, and light—then was punished for eternity as an eagle ate his liver each day. Fire made civilization possible and made destruction inevitable; it was our first technology, both gift and curse. Daedalus built wings of wax and feathers so he and his son, Icarus, could escape imprisonment. But when Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell—invention outpacing restraint. In the Hindu Vedas, the gods and demons churn the ocean of milk to extract amrita, the nectar of immortality, only to unleash chaos as they fight for it. Even the Garden of Eden carries the same double bind: the fruit of knowledge awakens human consciousness but expels us from paradise.

Across these myths, our species seems wired for the pharmakon—for gifts that both empower and endanger us. Fire, wings, nectar, the written word, the algorithm: each one saves and imperils us in the same motion. We can’t resist the next invention, even as our oldest stories whisper that it will cost us something essential to use it.

Plato’s Phaedrus ends with another image: a charioteer struggling to steer two horses, one noble, one wild. Technology has always been the wild one—swift, hungry, beautiful, half out of control. We never rein it in completely. We only learn, again and again, the art of steering. Theuth—the Egyptian god of writing—hands us the reins, smiling, as if to remind us that every invention is both gift and gamble.

The chariot lurches forward, and the road beneath us is always the same: built from the memory of what we’ve already made. Each new technology carries the past inside it, even as it changes what remembering means.

The party often defines itself by what it opposes—Trumpism, “wokeism”—rather than what it stands for. It hesitates over which communities to defend and which concrete struggles, from child care to anti-war to immigrant rights to housing, it has the will to win. The deeper problem is a Democratic Party liberalism unsure of itself, adrift at sea. Democrats have forgotten how to act as if they know what they are for.

That uncertainty shows up in the stories they tell. Cuomo, like Trump, described New York as a hellscape—a city of crime, decay, and failure that only he could redeem. Mamdani looks at the same city and sees something different: joy, struggle, and the desire to stay. Where others narrate decline, he sees a place worth fixing. That is what Democrats too often miss. A politics built only around fear or opposition cannot inspire; it can only react and manage. What’s needed is a politics that treats people not as victims of crisis but as co-authors of what can still be repaired and built.

Zohran Mamdani unsettles that picture because he seems to operate by a different logic than the party around him. To consultants, he looks like a curiosity: a young democratic socialist with TikTok fluency and diasporic ease, part of a new class of politicians who seem born to go viral. But what sets him apart isn’t novelty; it’s conviction. He carries himself like a happy warrior—alive to the absurdities of politics, unwilling to surrender its possibilities. He speaks with the assurance that politics can still make life less punishing.

What Mamdani is really testing is whether Democrats can still generate attention through conflict on their own terms. The modern political media landscape only amplifies what bleeds—culture wars, celebrity-like feuds—while ignoring the conflicts that actually define people’s lives: rent that keeps rising, child care that drains a paycheck, transit that doesn’t come. Most Democrats, wary of being cast as divisive, retreat from confrontation altogether or get pulled into the wrong fights.

Mamdani understands that attention is produced through conflict, and that the answer is not to avoid it but to redirect it. He builds it around affordability—who pays, who benefits, and how power works—making economic struggle visible and emotionally legible. For him, conflict isn’t a distraction from governing; it’s the entry point for persuasion. The goal is not to perform anger but to focus it, to remind people that politics can still change the price of the things that govern their days.

Mamdani’s appeal has little to do with just his youthful vibe. It lies in his answer to two questions the party keeps ducking. Can a Democrat hold attention without turning into a caricature? And once attention is captured, can it be used to make politics legible as a system that changes what people pay and how they live? His method blends traditions that rarely coexist: Sanders’s moral clarity, Ocasio-Cortez’s digital and movement cadence, the “abundance” instinct to build and unblock, the grounded competence of effective executives, and the narrative craft of cultural workers who know how to reach an audience. The point is not style for its own sake. It is persuasion as craft—showing that Democrats can hold the stage on the economy again, speak plainly about power, and still mean what they say.

1. Start with substance

Mamdani begins by stating the problem plainly: New York is too expensive. Then he names a remedy and a way to enact it. Freeze stabilized rents through the Rent Guidelines Board instead of approving another round of increases. Make buses fast and free rather than charging $2.90. Fund universal child care so parents don’t have to choose between earning a living and raising a family. This is the voice of someone fixing a system rather than describing a dream. It’s a diagnosis, a solution, and a theory of power.

That is where most Democrats falter. Ask voters what Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden would do with more power—what would change in their lives—and you get shrugs. The party’s language is too often a fog of intention: “middle-class security,” “opportunity for all,” “affordable housing.” None answers the basic questions: What’s broken? What lever will you pull? Who is supposed to move? In that telling, power is something to be managed, not exercised.

2. Win attention through conflict

In the current media environment, attention is rationed by conflict. Culture wars, celebrity-like spats, and intraparty beefs get oxygen; fights over rent or bus fares rarely do. Economic pain is constant, which makes it less “newsworthy.” A $2.90 fare, a six percent rent hike, a 16-minute response time—none of that beats a viral clip about who insulted whom. That is the terrain Democrats have to cross, and most haven’t figured out how. They either avoid clashes altogether or get dragged into the ones that make bread-and-butter issues all but invisible.

Mamdani doesn’t run from confrontation; he redirects it. When Andrew Cuomo swung with “experience,” Mamdani didn’t argue biography. He turned the line into a renter’s test: If my rent is too low, vote for him; if your rent is too high, vote for me. When Fox called free buses “chaos,” he forced a fiscal choice—almost a billion dollars for Elon Musk’s tax credits or roughly seven hundred million to make transit free—and then attached ordinary consequences: safer drivers, quicker trips, fuller routes. Even on Gaza and immigration—the topics consultants label “do not engage”—he engaged, showed judgment, and then returned to governing ground. The confrontation created the audience; the frame created understanding.

That’s why his clashes don’t feel performative. Moderates tend to duck and hope the storm passes; the activist left often treats conflict as a performance for the already convinced; class-first rhetoric collapses every dispute into capital-versus-labor and misses the service design that actually changes a day. Mamdani fights to clarify trade-offs—who pays, who benefits, what changes—and he does it in the language of prices and service, not posture. In a press culture that rewards outrage, he uses outrage to make economics legible. That is how you generate attention for material politics when the feed is telling you to talk about anything else.

3. Let style serve substance

Mamdani projects the kind of steadiness politics used to prize: the happy warrior spirit—serious about the fight, light on bitterness, confident that persuasion is still possible. He smiles easily, but never cheaply. His tone is even, his humor dry, his patience visible. It’s the opposite of the influencer pose that dominates modern politics, where every gesture is branded and every emotion calibrated for effect. He sounds like someone trying to win people over, not impress them.

That quality of openness has an old name: availability. In nineteenth-century politics it meant a candidate broad factions could live with—present, usable, open to being claimed by a majority. Mamdani carries a modern version of it. He’ll sit for Fox News without apology, walk into rooms that don’t start friendly, and leave having made the same argument he makes everywhere else. He doesn’t sand down his views to fit the audience; he trusts that a politics built on rent, transit, child care, and safety can travel across boroughs and backgrounds.

It’s a contrast with nearly every Democratic archetype. The establishment pol—the Schumer or Jeffries style—mistakes fluency for meaning. The moderate version of caution tries to manage politics like a brand, saying little for fear of offense. The online left burns energy performing authenticity for its own corner of the internet. Mamdani’s version of presence is simpler: be legible, not performative; confident, not curated. He makes seriousness inviting rather than dour, turning the “happy warrior” from a relic into a strategy.

4. Meet culture with competence and conviction

In our attention economy, “culture war” fights are often less about policy than about vibes. Media and political professionals use hot-button questions to read a candidate’s religion—are you ideological or pragmatic, tribe or coalition? The point isn’t resolution; it’s provocation. Step on the rake and the clip writes itself; dodge the rake and you look evasive. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Mamdani’s move is to treat politics as a tool rather than a creed. He meets the test head-on, shows moral clarity, and then turns the conversation back to New Yorkers.

Gaza is the cleanest case. Substantively it’s not a “culture” issue; in practice it’s played as one by our political media. Mamdani didn’t tiptoe. He condemned the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, spoke directly to Jewish fear of antisemitism, affirmed Palestinian humanity, and rejected the liberal habit of carving an “except Palestine” loophole in one’s values. The clarity mattered, but the method mattered more: pass the competence test under pressure—own an truth unpopular with the political establishment, explain it without rancor—then return to costs and services. As opinion shifted away from the Jeffries-Schumer line on the issue, what consultants marked a liability became proof that he could hold a coalition together while saying what he thinks.

The same pattern held in distinct ways on immigration and policing. When Mamdani confronted Trump’s border chief, Tom Homan, over the arrest of a green-card holder, he wasn’t straying from the economic debate, as some Democrats fretted; he was showing that he’s willing to fight when others flinch. In a party that often treats moral confrontation as a distraction from “kitchen-table” politics, he understood that courage itself is part of credibility. By challenging ICE in public, he made the point that government cannot claim to stand for working people while cowering before cruelty.

On crime and public safety, he showed the same shrewdness—knowing when to drop a losing slogan while carrying forward the substance of the 2020 George Floyd protests. Rather than defending “defund,” he took the criticism, apologized, and still acted on one of the racial justice movement’s core demands: stop sending armed officers alone to handle mental-health crises. It was a masterclass in translation—stripping away the rhetoric that scared voters while keeping the substance that could balance safety, reform, and justice. And like much of his agenda, it loops back to affordability: the police shouldn’t be the answer to a broken social safety net.

In both cases, he turned what others feared were culture-war traps into demonstrations of competence, proving that conviction, handled practically, is a tool for governing.

That stance sets him apart from all four of liberalism’s familiar ruts. He isn’t a “woke” culture warrior obsessed with language over outcomes. He isn’t a moderate who waters down conviction to win approval from pundits—he builds a broad “we” around New Yorkers who expect government to work. He isn’t a class-reductionist who sees only economics and misses how race, gender, and immigration status impact people’s experiences. But he also isn’t captive to a form of identity politics that forgets the universal. His focus on rent, transit, and care builds common cause across difference—a shared fight over what’s owed to everyone, not just what’s recognized about anyone.

At a moment when “anti-woke” politics has hardened into book bans, ICE raids, censorship over remarks about Charlie Kirk, abductions of immigrants and activists, and open hostility toward trans people, Mamdani stands in the space that public opinion itself has begun to reopen. The thermostat has shifted: many Americans who once rolled their eyes at “woke” now recoil from the cruelty of its backlash. In that context, being “woke” is no longer a performance of virtue but a stand against authoritarianism. Mamdani channels that shift by tying inclusion to belonging and moral clarity to material competence. Trump’s extremism made that connection obvious; Mamdani’s task—and the left’s—is to sustain it once the outrage cools, to keep proving that solidarity, practiced well, is a form of strategic competence.

5. Keep the loop small enough to echo

Discipline is the habit that holds everything else together. Mamdani’s message loop—rent, buses, child care, affordability, cost of living—is short enough to remember and broad enough to fit almost any question. Nearly every argument, every exchange, circles eventually back to those words. If an answer can’t connect to the loop in a sentence. He treats the loop like a tether: stretch too far and you risk snapping the thread that keeps the message coherent. The farther a Democrat drifts from that core, the weaker the pull back to what matters. A politics people can remember, like a rhythm line in a song. Mamdani can riff, but the melody has to come back. The farther a Democrat strays from a refrain, the more likely they lose the beat.

The loop was clearest on Fox. The host spent 10–15 minutes on foreign policy—Hamas, hostages, Netanyahu, the ICC—topics a New York mayor doesn’t control but that can swallow any interview. It’s the classic culture-war test: if you engage, you look obsessed with distant fights instead of city work; if you dodge, you look evasive or inconsistent. Then came the elite-reassurance check: would he credit Trump for a cease-fire, promise to court Wall Street, or concede that modest top-rate changes would spook JPMorgan or Goldman. Mamdani handled each cleanly—answer, then pivot—and returned to the job he’s actually running for: make New York affordable and safe. On “how do you pay,” he stayed in the loop. On buses, he brought receipts from the city’s pilot—no rise in homelessness, fewer assaults on drivers, faster trips—and tied them back to riders’ days. Pressed to prove he’s “pro-business,” he flipped the frame: the city that works for workers—cleaner streets, safer subways, shorter response times—is the same city firms want to invest in.

That’s what discipline looks like in an attention economy built to reward outrage, conflict, and distraction. Most Democrats scatter under pressure—either trying to appease their interrogators or overexplain themselves into oblivion. Mamdani does neither. He keeps the loop small enough to echo and strong enough to hold. Culture wars, pundit traps, shiny objects—everything tries to knock him off rhythm. But every time, he finds the same anchoring refrain.

Across these five habits runs a single idea: politics regains power when it is concrete, confident, and collective. Mamdani turns affordability from mood to mechanism, conflict from noise to education, style from branding to presence, culture from division to coalition, and discipline from spin to trust. That is how he differs from most Democrats mode of technocratic caution, from class-only analyses, from moderates who trim their social commitments, and from activist culture wars that exhaust the middle.

To many voters, Mamdani feels like an antidote—not only to Trump’s authoritarian corruption, but to the Biden–Harris defeat and the listless standing of Democratic leadership among their own voters. What matters is less the novelty of the face but the method: a way for a democratic socialist to once again steady liberalism through purpose, as they did from the 1920s through the 1960s:

I know that since we won on June 24, there have been some who have questioned whether what we aspire towards is possible. Whether the young people they speak of as the future could also be the present. Whether a Left that has critiqued could also be the Left that delivers.

To that, my friends, I have a very simple answer: yes.

And to those who doubt, who cannot quite believe, who share our vision but fear allowing themselves to hope, I ask you: When has dignity ever been given?

…In an age of darkness, New York can be the light. And we can prove once and for all that the politics we practice need not be one of either fear or mediocrity. That power and principle need not live in conflict in city hall. For we will use our power to transform the principled into the possible.

There’s wisdom in the call to moderation, but little novelty. I don’t even disagree with the instinct—it’s just that it doesn’t reckon with how Democrats already ran their 2024 campaigns.

Watch the highlight reel of some of the highest spend advertisements of Democrats in swing seats in 2024:

• In Ohio, Sherrod Brown sells “the most conservative border bill in decades,” backed by border agents, and points to a fentanyl law bearing Donald Trump’s signature. When hit on transgender inclusion in sports, he doesn’t sermonize; he notes Ohio already banned what the ad alleges and says local leagues should decide—citing Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.

• In Texas, Colin Allred stands with law enforcement and border officials who say, “Colin’s got our back” and insist that Allred will be tougher than Cruz on crime and the border.

• In Montana, Jon Tester boasts that he pushed Biden to expand oil drilling and says “no way to Democrats wanting to give people more money without requiring anything in return.”

• In New Mexico’s 2nd, Gabe Vasquez talks about hiring 20,000 border agents and cracking down on cartels, with law enforcement as witnesses.

• In Pennsylvania’s 7th, Susan Wild said it outright: she “broke with Democrats” to crack down on cartels and worked with both parties to hire thousands of border agents.

• In New York’s 17th, a police officer endorses Mondaire Jones in an ad saying he “voted for more border patrol agents.”

• In Arizona’s 6th, Kirsten Engel’s ad has a law enforcement official saying she will “fully fund police” and work with both parties on border security.

The 2024 record is straightforward: frontline Democrats campaigned largely as moderates. Border and police funding, fentanyl crackdowns, oil drilling permits, law-enforcement endorsements, bipartisan validators. The ads show badges and sheriffs. And yet the coalitions barely moved. It feels like talking into a headwind.

We reach for easy fixes because the alternative is a kind of vertigo. It is simpler to believe that swapping positions here and there unlocks the electorate than to sit with the possibility that the crisis is larger than message—that the map is unkind, that political identities have devoured localism, that the emotional weather is set somewhere offstage and rarely shifts on command.

It is comforting to explain losses as a failure of will or discipline on our side; it is harder to admit that much of what we can do, we already do, and the returns are thin. Because what remains is not a fix but a fog.

There are no shortcuts here. Democrats aren’t losing simply for lack of moderation. Perhaps the hardest truth is not a new tactic but a clearer view of the terrain: the sense that the problem may be bigger than our factions allow themselves to say, and the answers less obvious than any side’s catechism. If moderation were the key, the door would be open by now.

Look abroad for a cautionary tale. In the U.K., Keir Starmer—a center-left prime minister who replaced Labour’s Corbyn era with lawyerly, business-friendly pragmatism—won in 2024 on “stability and moderation”: tighter borders without Trump-style theatrics, more police and housebuilding, cautious budgets, and a fiscally bounded clean-energy push. Think competence and calm over activist or populist zeal—pro-NATO, wary of big tax hikes, careful not to spook culturally conservative voters over crime, transgender rights, or immigration.

And yet, a year on, Britain is flirting with something more disruptive. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK—a populist, anti-immigration vehicle roughly analogous to a MAGA spinoff—has surged in polls and seat models, projected to wipe out Labour’s majority if an election were held today. In an information ecosystem where culture wars dominate, a political class wary of offending donors or the right, and a “middle” that drifts with media salience, moderation is easily swamped by deeper currents of identity and grievance.

The takeaway for Americans is caution: “don’t scare the middle” works until the middle itself is being remade. The lesson may be that tinkering at the edges of message isn’t enough. It may demand a more radical break, or a kind of imagination politics has long since forgotten. Which is to say: the way through may be harder, stranger, and further from reach than we want to believe.

But the heat isn’t where we keep pointing. Dialogue comforts because it is personal and immediate; it offers something each of us can do. Over time a faith has formed around that comfort—the belief that better manners can fix what only better rules can. Call that faith civilitycraft. It is the cousin of what Barbara and Karen Fields call racecraft, a social magic that turns effects into causes. Once upon a time, failed crops were explained by conjuring witches. In our politics, democratic breakdown gets explained by conjuring bad manners. If only we disagreed more gently, the spell suggests, the system would right itself and we would heal. The ritual soothes; the wiring remains the same.

Liberals long ago stopped believing that civility could stop mass shootings. We don’t tell parents mourning at Sandy Hook or Uvalde that the answer is better arguments; we talk about structure—laws, regulations, accountability. One day, we may look back on political violence the same way: recognizing it was never a failure of manners but of machinery, and that rituals of civility could no more contain it than “thoughts and prayers” could end school shootings.

Klein does not treat words as cure-all; his work on polarization is an extended argument about how institutions harden conflict. Those of us who live by words have a professional bias. We overestimate what language can do and underestimate what rules and incentives do. When your tool is a microphone, everything looks like a message. So we prescribe op-eds, panels, “national conversations,” as if they move history the way they move an audience. Culture matters. But culture is bent—daily—by law, design, and payoff structures.

Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin reminded his contemporaries of a hard truth:

“But in any case, hearts are not relevant to the issue; neither racial affinities nor racial hostilities are rooted there. It is institutions—social, political, and economic—which are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments. Let these institutions be reconstructed today, and let the ineluctable gradualism of history govern the formation of a new psychology.”

James Baldwin also gave the measure of that gap: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” In the days since Kirk’s death, much of the commentary has softened his politics into a tale of civility and persuasion. It is an old American habit: to look away from the words themselves in order to craft a more flattering memory. As Ta-Nehisi Coates described in his piece on Klein, the Confederacy was once recast as chivalry rather than slavery; the architects of Jim Crow were remembered as guardians of genteel order rather than destroyers of democracy. To treat Kirk as a symbol of polite persuasion while ignoring what he actually said is civilitycraft at work—elevating a story about tone while leaving untouched the machinery that rewards escalation.

If civilitycraft becomes a ritual, this is the machinery it leaves untouched. Political scientist Lee Drutman describes a winner-take-all, two-party design that trains ordinary disagreement to behave like a crisis. The dynamic is not symmetrical. A sorted Republican coalition, nested in minoritarian institutions, has radicalized first and furthest; the result is asymmetric escalation that drags the system toward the cliff.

When every seat is all-or-nothing and safe districts are decided in closed primaries, the loudest faction inside the GOP is rewarded. The Senate and the Electoral College allow a numerical minority to govern, raising the stakes of every contest. Gerrymanders lock in advantages. And when you plug all of that into an attention market that profits from outrage, the system starts cutting checks to arsonists. Civilitycraft asks for cooler tone while the circuitry keeps turning up the heat.

As Drutman argues, the doom loop functions like a microphone feeding an amplifier. The circuitry is built to escalate. Civilitycraft asks us to lower our voices; the rules keep turning the volume up. When majorities can’t see action on widely supported policies (guns are the clearest case), faith shifts from ballots to spectacle.

Kirk practiced a politics built for this incentive structure: combative campus tours, constant confrontation with liberal institutions, and a message machine tuned to culture-war mobilization. That doesn’t make him responsible for his own murder—it was horrific and wrong. It helps explain the far-right response to the murder: in a winner-take-all system where the out-party is cast as an existential enemy, the crime is quickly folded into a story that justifies escalation—collective denunciations, demands for crackdowns, delegitimization of the opposition. That is the doom loop at work: tragedy becomes fuel for hardening the trenches because the rules reward the leaders who harden them.

What we need isn’t nicer talk but different incentives. The point isn’t to end conflict; it’s to build a system that can carry it. Proportional representation—built here with multi-member districts and ranked-choice ballots—lets a diverse country step out of binary, zero-sum combat. Instead of two parties fighting for total control, several parties have to bargain in public; more voters see themselves reflected, and fewer elections hinge on destruction. Candidates must earn second-choice support, so reaching beyond a narrow base pays. Defeat still stings, but it no longer means erasure—and when losing is survivable, people stop looking for answers outside democracy. In other words, it makes nihilism costlier and coalition more rewarding—which is why it cools the temperature without asking anyone to whisper.

None of this means abandoning the call to refuse contempt. As political theorist Chantal Mouffe reminds us, politics is not the pursuit of consensus but the management of conflict. Her idea of agonism is simple to state: democracy is healthiest when it converts enemies into adversaries, when people can struggle hard over values and power but accept one another’s right to compete. The task is not to abolish conflict but to contain it—to make losing survivable and bargaining routine. America’s 18th-century institutions do the opposite. The Senate and the Electoral College let minorities govern majorities; single-member districts squeeze a plural country into two hostile camps. These rules don’t channel conflict, they intensify it. And that is why civility, however noble, feels powerless: the American system denies the agonistic space that democracy needs.

Klein is often caricatured as “be nicer.” I don’t think that’s his argument. His insistence is that a politics unable to absorb disagreement invites the gun. The complementary thought here is that absorption depends on design.

So we end where Frederick Douglass began: with the difference between eloquence and power. In his famous “Fourth of July” address, he mocked the notion that polite persuasion could undo slavery:

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.”

Free speech covers Douglass’s fire and Kirk’s provocations alike; the First Amendment protects both. The question is whether institutions can hold that clash without turning it into a death match. Where power is shared, dissent becomes bargaining. Where it isn’t, dissent calcifies into resentment—and resentment slides toward violence. Democracy doesn’t survive by ending conflict but by bounding it, making defeat painful but not terminal. Ours too often fails that test, rewarding those who best treat politics as total war.

That’s why Douglass’s rebuke still reverberates. He was speaking against civility without consequence—the genteel request to quiet down in the face of cruelty. The Rev. Howard-John Wesley made a similar point in his viral sermon after Kirk’s assassination: condemn the killing, but don’t be coerced into hagiography or told to silence your own pain for the sake of unity.

Protect nonviolence and decency, by all means; the country needs it. But when injustice and corruption are entrenched, thunder often matters more than gentle showers. We won’t talk our way out of the doom loop. We’ll have to build our way out—rules and incentives sturdy enough to carry conflict without breaking the republic.

Civilitycraft asks for gentle showers—unity rituals, compulsory mourning, public hagiography, bipartisan pats on the back. Douglass reminded us that prophetic fire is also speech, and democracy has to be built to hear it without demanding whispers or reverence. That’s the work of democratic institutions: to channel conflict into rules and outcomes, not rituals of deference.

Realignment isn’t about clever curation to please in the moment. It’s the sound of factions and interests clashing, a noisy orchestra tuning through dissonance until, after hard rehearsal and bruising conflict, it can finally play in time. Realignment isn’t shuffling issues on a menu; it’s democracy testing its strength, renewing itself through organized struggle.

If that diagnosis sounds abstract, the scholarship gives it concrete shape: realignments aren’t about reshuffling issues on a menu; they decide who holds power and how it’s organized. Timothy Shenk shows they depend on brokers and coalition-builders who can translate movement energy into durable party coalitions. Daniel Schlozman shows they endure when social movements become “anchors” within parties—offering votes, money, and networks that parties need, and in return gaining influence over policy priorities and personnel. Stephen Skowronek argues that reconstructive leaders seize crisis moments to rebuild authority and remake institutions so a new regime reproduces itself. Corey Robin reminds us that these leaders define themselves by confronting entrenched regimes rather than triangulating within existing alignments. Taken together, their work shows realignments are forged as movements, parties, and leaders remake the architecture of American politics.

Measured against that standard, Searchlight’s own invocation of Schattschneider—“the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power”—lands short. It never names the regime its alternatives are meant to displace. In Robin’s telling, reconstructors define themselves against a ruling order—Lincoln versus the Slave Power, FDR versus the “economic royalists,” Reagan versus the liberal interest-group order—and then organize to break the institutions that sustain it. By contrast, Searchlight’s adversary looks less like a regime than a roster of progressive nonprofits—an intra-camp grievance, even as a Trump-led GOP targets many of those same civic organizations with Orbán-style tactics. If “defining the alternatives” is to be more than rebranding, it has to specify the oligarchic order to confront and the machinery for contesting it.

Searchlight’s own framework can’t quite hold together. Point two urges Democrats to “defy ideological boxes” and build a heterodox mix from first principles. Point three turns immediately to polling, insisting that leaders track where the public sits, even if opinion is “malleable.” The tension is never resolved. The underlying theory of realignment here is oddly bloodless: no sense of movements, institutions, or social forces, only the idea that the right combination of words in politicians’ mouths will shuffle the coalitional deck. That’s not how realignments have ever worked; it’s how ad campaigns work. It’s politics imagined as a television ad buy, not as a democratic struggle.

To be fair, some of Searchlight’s critique is real: parts of the progressive ecosystem have ossified into professionalized silos, as Jacobin’s criticism of the PMC has often declared, more accountable to funders and lists than to the people they claim to represent. But this isn’t just about “leftist activist groups.” As Sam Rosenfeld argues, today’s Democrats are a coalition of New Politics–era movements—feminism, environmentalism, Black and Latino civil rights, labor, consumer advocacy—now institutionalized inside the party (leaders like Jim Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus, UnidosUS, Randi Weingarten’s teachers’ unions, Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, LCV/NRDC, MoveOn, etc).

The challenge isn’t that these organizations lack legitimacy—they’re crucial power centers—but that, taken together, they leave gaps in everyday democratic practice. That gap helps explain why new efforts—Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, DSA, Sunrise—have surged in the past decade, seeking to build participatory vehicles where legacy groups sometimes operate more as partisan mobilization arms for the Democratic Party. In an attention economy shaped by social-media silos, inequality, and atomized late capitalism, the task isn’t to abolish “the groups” but to re-root them in civil society: unions that organize, neighborhood associations that convene, tenants’ and parents’ groups that act.

These new forms of association won’t look like the past—an influencer or a Twitch stream can now mobilize more authentic participation than many legacy groups, and the next surge of collective action may look as unruly and unexpected as the GameStop squeeze. But whatever form it takes, we can’t cede democratic life to technocrats, pollsters, and consultants; politics endures only when people organize themselves into something larger than their own atomized lives. As Hannah Arendt wrote: “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

Seen historically, the difference between branding and realignment becomes clearer. Searchlight’s Social Security case study on their website, for example, shows how thin the analysis gets. It implies that groups to Roosevelt’s left would have rejected Social Security and that only FDR’s choice to target the elderly and rely on payroll taxes made the program possible. The record runs differently. The Townsend movement wasn’t the CIO’s labor-left; it was a populist surge of older and middle-class Americans that Washington couldn’t ignore.

As FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins recalled in her memoirs, “One hardly realizes nowadays how strong was the sentiment in favor of the Townsend Plan… The pressure from its advocates was intense. The President began telling people he was in favor of adding old-age insurance clauses to the bill and putting it through as one program.”

President Roosevelt himself admitted to Perkins, “We have to have [old age insurance]. The Congress can’t stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system, nor can I face the country without having devised…a solid plan which will give some assurance to old people of systematic assistance upon retirement.”

This is precisely how bottom-up organizing gives democracy its force. As Edwin Amenta argues in When Movements Matter, the Townsend Plan shows movements shape outcomes less by winning maximal demands than by forcing action and creating space for feasible reforms: “The fledgling old-age insurance program…would not have been added…without the rapid mobilization behind the Townsend Plan.”

Meanwhile, the CIO and the labor-liberal left treated Social Security as a landmark, even as they criticized racist exclusions for farm and domestic workers and worked to expand coverage. Perkins recalled that Treasury Secretary Morgenthau insisted on omitting those groups, despite early agreement on universal coverage: “This was a blow…universal coverage had been agreed upon almost from the outset.” In practice, Townsend’s populists opened the window, left and labor critics refined the design, and the CIO’s institutional heft carried Social Security from precarious start to durable cornerstone—like an orchestra lurching into tune, dissonant sections converging on a shared score.

Which brings us to conflict. Searchlight’s website insists it is not afraid of it: “Rather than shy away from conflict, we must embrace it in good faith.” The test isn’t the line; it’s whether conflict is converted into institutions. Too often, elite coalition management waits out energy and trims hard issues to keep a tidy brand. But politics doesn’t work that way. The mistake in the “play down divisive issues” advice is assuming those fights can be avoided. What’s happened to Kilmar García and Mahmoud Khalil, or the treatment of Los Angeles residents and Brad Lander and Alex Padilla on immigration and ICE, isn’t background noise—it’s the raw material of politics. Realignment often requires the opposite of waiting out controversy: choose the ground, frame the fight so your bloc holds, deliver fast, legible wins, and build organizations that can withstand backlash.

The record of Searchlight’s leadership tells another story. Many of the alumni of Fetterman’s office who now steer Searchlight spent 2023 and 2024 not merely avoiding conflict but working to contain it. They rolled their eyes at Democrats advocating for a ceasefire and weapons restrictions, dismissing them as unserious or ill-strategized, all while serving a boss who was the Senate’s loudest champion of Israel’s horrific war crimes. They offered cover for him, waving around polling to insist Fetterman’s violent positions on Israel made him more popular, sneering at dissent as unserious, childish Group-think, even as the bombing of Palestinian civilians worsened.

Conflict, for them, was not democracy’s lifeblood but an obstacle to be neutralized, a branding problem to be managed. And now, like so many Democrats, they stand apart from the wreckage, hands scrubbed clean—as though cover were not a choice, as though complicity were not a position—and still decline to take a substantive stand. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”

The same lesson applies to strategy and message. Politics has craft, but it isn’t only craft. Yes, smart operatives try to split the other side and avoid gratuitously fracturing their own coalition. But some fights are defining, and opinion moves when organized actors force it to move. In 2006, it made little sense to tell a New York Democrat to hide support for marriage equality; just as it was wrong to ask Muslims and liberals to accept Harry Reid’s opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” The point is simple: if politics is only vibes and risk minimization and “hippie-punching,” nothing consequential ever changes about the dynamics of power.

Nor is this just theoretical. The same blind spot has led centrists, at various points over the past decade, to wave off proposals like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, debt relief, rent freezes, breaking up Big Tech, or ending U.S. weapons aid to countries Israel and Saudi Arabia. They’re dismissed as unrealistic or too divisive—just as Townsend’s pensions were caricatured in the 1930s. But realignments don’t emerge from consensus; they move through conflict and the opening of space. Movements elevate demands at the margins, force parties to grapple with them, and through struggle reshape coalitions and institutions. Social Security, collective-bargaining rights, clean energy programs, civil-rights statutes—none were born as consensus policies. They became durable because agitation created pressure, parties absorbed it, and leaders rewrote the rules to embed it.

Sara Miles’s account of the 1990s shows what happens when Democrats try to short-circuit the realignment process with a donor-anchored, top-down refit. The “Atari Democrat” turn gave the party a fluent idiom of growth and innovation and a recognizable partnership with a rising industry in Silicon Valley. But the real shift was organizational. The New Democrat Network was built as a “mini-campaign operation” to assemble a congressional bloc and keep a New Democrat White House from backsliding toward labor-aligned priorities. Silicon Valley intermediaries professionalized access and signaling; high-profile policy flips and choreographed endorsements announced who had the inside line.

That history matters because it names the model Searchlight is at risk of reviving. It changed who Democrats listened to and built a D.C. apparatus to enforce that change, while bypassing the democratic anchoring and rule-rewiring that make eras durable. Think of the distinction this way: patron networks replaced mass membership organizations, and neoliberals displaced strategies to overcome veto points that root new policies in constituencies able to defend them. Searchlight’s “supermajority thinking”—heterodox bundles, cleaner polling, hostility to “the groups”—is at risk of a similar operating system with a new interface. It’s elite coalition management: good at message control and donor reassurance, thin where it counts—turning conflict into organization, organization into policy, and policy into a regime that can endure.

It is, of course, too early to know what the Searchlight Institute will ultimately become. We may actually agree more than we disagree. But the test of democratic institutions requires the organization of ordinary Americans into forms capable of exercising power. On that score, given the record, it is not yet clear whether Searchlight will strengthen or weaken the conditions that sustain a just democracy.

If you want a contrast between curation and coalition-building, look at Harry Reid’s 2010 gamble on the DREAM Act. The polling was bad and his advisers said to steer clear. DREAMers protested his office anyway, and Reid chose to stand with them. That choice worked because democracy’s three legs were there: organized people who could make claims and be seen; skilled staff who could turn those claims into a legislative path; and a leader willing to take a public risk and be accountable for it. The strength of the groups mattered—they created a mandate no memo could invent. Without them, operatives have no charge and politicians no obligation. Given a real stake and a real reason, Latino voters showed up and rewarded him. That is what a realignment instinct looks like: strong organizations that hold leaders to account, operatives who channel that pressure into strategy, and a courageous politician who answers with action.

It is also hard to take seriously the idea that “the groups” cost Harris the 2024 election, when the overwhelming liabilities were inflation, Biden’s age, and a White House inner circle that often sneered at dissent (not to mention that Searchlight-adjacent thinkers like Matt Yglesias and David Shor had the ears of Democratic Party leaders). Still, in a two-party system, there will always be groups organizing constituencies to have their needs met across a range of issues; that is not a pathology but the basic structure of democratic politics. The task is not to ride the vibe-shift and wish groups away but to build better ones, bring them into greater synchronicity, and accept that conflict will always exist. How leaders navigate that conflict is what makes realignments possible.

But realignment likely won’t be born in conference rooms where operatives draft memos about “supermajorities.” It will be found where people already wrestle with the hard edge of American life: where immigrants and their allies stand against ICE raids, where Indivisible moms organize neighbors, where Palestinian and Lebanese families in Michigan grieve their dead, where tenants fight rent hikes, where women defend their health care, where the indebted refuse their burdens, where families demand release from mandatory minimums, where young people fight for a livable planet and social media platforms that serve us, where workers organize unions against the odds. These are the places where power lives.

Leaders untethered from many of these struggles, like John Fetterman, may win in the short-term, but they can’t deliver realignment. Even with imperfect groups, the further we drift from these fights, the further we drift from power.

We live in a country that calls itself secular, rational, optimized by dashboards and apps—and then someone has a baby and the room forgets itself. We become pilgrims. Voices drop to a hush. Strangers in the grocery aisle take on the air of deputized ushers. A small procession gathers at the stroller, each person waiting a turn as if before an icon. Offerings appear—soup, fruit, tiny socks—laid down as if to placate a household god. The baby sneezes once and grown adults cheer, as though a new revelation had arrived.

In front of a baby, looking doesn’t stay casual; it congeals into ritual. A glance grows into a gaze, and the body shifts accordingly—back stiffens, shoulders bow, breath moves in measured tides. A supplication rising from somewhere older than memory. 19th-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that every picture “requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle.” A newborn earns that surrender without ever asking.

At 2:40 a.m., the choreography comes into focus. The phone’s white-noise playlist glows like a moon on the nightstand. Steam curls from a mug we will never drink. We bend over the bassinet and understand that what we are doing is not just watching, but entering a way of seeing that belongs to others before us.

The art historian David Morgan, writing about icons and holy images, calls this the sacred gaze—“the manner in which a way of seeing invests an image, a viewer, or an act of viewing with spiritual significance.” He meant paintings and idols, but the grammar applies here too. Wash your hands. Lower your voice. Keep watch. The body takes on the task while the mind catches up. Diaper counts, calendars, appointments, baby weights—once just noise—settle into a pattern, refracting like stained glass: data you look through while the hour steadies itself.

The 13th-century Arabic text The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation (ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt), which I once studied, names this very posture of attention. Its author, the Persian cosmographer Zakariyyā al-Qazwīnī, opens his account of human life with a line that reads like instruction as much as praise: “In nature are wonders.” A few pages later he goes closer still: “All powers are present in the drop”—the nuṭfa, the first seed in classical embryology—already carrying the dance to come: membranes, organs, temperament; and, as the tradition has it, the angel breathes spirit and life rushes forward. The lesson is plain enough: hold still, long enough, and the world enlarges itself.

The philosophers of the medieval Greco-Islamic world treated bewilderment (ḥayra) as an ethic of attention. Not confusion, but a chosen pause—the stillness in which perception unsettles and enlarges the mind. They paired wonder (ʿajab) with instruction (ʿibra): first astonish the senses, then let the meaning follow. To see well was to allow oneself to be reshaped, to admit that vision carried its own mysteries and demands. Qazwīnī went further, confessing that when the inner eye opens, a person “sees every facet of wonder,” and that to describe even a fragment will sound implausible. Some truths arrive only in the presence. You kinda had to be there.

The tradition is also blunt about how gazing works. One Byzantine account in Morgan’s work describes John Chrysostom cradling an icon of St. Paul “as if it were alive,” speaking to it the way one might to a companion. Centuries later, an Armenian workshop of painters would boast that “our art is light itself, for young and old each understand it”—a reminder that images steady us before explanations ever arrive.

A newborn can make even a secular house feel briefly religious. Someone shows you where to wash your hands and where to stand. A partner eases the chair closer. A friend sets soup on the counter and speaks in low-lit vowels. Adults start speaking in tongues: coos, half-sung nursery rhymes, and words so small they don’t qualify as language anywhere else on earth. For a few weeks the household keeps the rites and everyone knows the steps. No creed is signed; the hour writes its instructions directly on the body.

Even the phone submits to the hour: darkened in a pocket, or lifted to glow like a candle in the nave. Our thumbs rehearse the gestures of another age. Where once a rosary measured prayers, bead to bead, breath to breath, we scroll for reassurance, tracing patterns in the feed, waiting for a sign.

You stand above the child, round and luminous as an orb, the way a believer steadies before an icon. The air changes. The minutes come loose.

Then the baby stirs, and the scene forgets its cleverness. We are permitted, for once, to be bewildered. The rise and fall of a chest becomes a metronome; the minutes slacken. A small hand opens and closes. It feels like a paradox you can hold in your hands: you are lifted out of time and dropped deeper into it at once.

By morning the lists return, as they should. The day resumes its errands, its bodies to be tended. We are, after all, leaky bags of salt and water, always in need of management. Yet somewhere between the sorcery of the night and the pediatrician’s portal, the old truth presses forward: we find ourselves again before the icon, the idol, the image. You take off your shoes at the threshold. You bring what you can carry. You look—and if you look long enough, the looking remakes you, drawing you beyond yourself while anchoring you, utterly, in both the here and there.

Before we argue about the 1850s, it’s worth asking why we’re talking about them at all. In an interview, Eric Foner recalled that George W. Bush’s senior political operative Karl Rove “said he learned how to build a political coalition” from the book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. Foner’s seminal work is a deep dive into how movements, factions, and parties can turn many interests into a political force that can win, govern, and transform a nation.

Yglesias makes three core claims. First, “There just is not a singular transcendent issue of our time,” so analogies to the 1850s falter because “the Abolitionists and Radicals were singularly focused on the slavery issue.” Second, today’s left “is not making a specific ask.” Third, it often seems “we’re not bargaining over issues at all, but over control.” I agree on the premise: slavery’s moral, economic, and political place has no modern analogue. I said the same in my piece. But the way he uses the history of the 19th century misses how the Republican Party’s purpose was forged and then debated inside a contentious coalition rather than pre‑agreed by everyone from the start.

1) The 1850s were not “one issue.” Republicans forged one politics.

In the 1850s, Republicans did not begin with consensus that slavery was “the issue.” Abolitionists and Radicals pressed for immediate emancipation, while moderates wanted to contain slavery in the territories, and conservatives hoped to tamp the conflict down so the government could return to tariffs, railroads, and banking.

For example, as Foner argues in Politics and Ideology in the age of the Civil War, Northern labor activists thought slavery was just one symptom of a larger economic system that also degraded northern workers; abolitionists insisted slavery was the root cause of all labor’s problems and had to be eradicated first. Each side even drew different lessons from the “Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash” alliance: labor saw northern capital and southern planters as partners in exploitation, while abolitionists cast slavery as the singular source of corruption. That tension helps explain why abolition remained a minority cause for decades—evangelical reform could break the silence around slavery, but it also alienated many northerners wary of moral absolutism.

The breakthrough came with free-soil politics in the late 1840s and early 1850s. By making the expansion of slavery into western lands the central issue, Republicans created a meeting ground where abolitionist moral fervor and labor’s demand for independence converged. They also dropped the Radical push for equal rights for free Black people but adopted labor’s broader definition of freedom (“free labor”) as economic independence.

Lincoln sharpened the point: the workingman’s right to the fruits of his labor could not coexist with a system that turned people into property. Republicans turned labor’s fears about wages and land into a critique of the Slave Power. The genius of the coalition was inventing that adversary: a Southern oligarchy that had captured Washington through minority rule. As Eric Foner writes, this became the “glue” that bound abolitionists, radicals, moderates, and conservatives who otherwise clashed over pace and scale.

The focus on “no extension” didn’t emerge naturally; it was hammered out through years of factional struggle, then turned into law—Homestead, the Pacific Railway, land-grant colleges, and, in wartime, emancipation and civil rights. Republicans fused moral urgency with material interest, channeling farmers, workers, industrialists, and abolitionists into one majoritarian project. They also cast it as mass and class politics, as historian Matt Karp argues: the many against “a tiny aristocracy of slave lords.” That coalition logic, more than a single-issue crusade, made antislavery into a winning politics.

By 1860, Republicans had to decide what they stood for beyond stopping the spread of slavery. As Foner notes, the Chicago party convention adopted planks for “a tariff, internal improvements, a Pacific railroad and a homestead law.” Former Whigs demanded a national economic program, while even ex-Democrats conceded the party “would have to broaden its platforms.” As Chicago’s mayor John Wentworth admitted, “I do not see what we are to do without some financial policy.”

The hardest fight was over tariffs. To carry Pennsylvania without splitting the coalition, Republicans settled on “some incidental protection to the iron interest, avoiding, nevertheless, the idea of a high tariff.” The word “protection” never appeared in the platform at all.

Strategically, the party stressed anti-slavery in the radical North and West, while foregrounding tariffs in more conservative districts. The result was a deliberately blended agenda: antislavery at the core and an economic program broad enough to win. The coalition also gestured toward pro-immigration policies that would echo later in Frederick Douglass’s 1869 “Composite Nation” speech, which urged Americans to embrace Chinese immigration and a genuinely multiracial democracy:

I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races, but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one-fifth of the population of the globe is white and the other four-fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions.

We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.

2) Junior partners tend to demand, senior partners decide and forge.

Yglesias argues the left today “is not making a specific ask,” unlike the Radicals and the Republicans of the 1850s. But that blurs the lines. With much fewer seats than moderates, Radicals functioned as the junior partner: ideological, horizon-setting, relentless about forcing the party to confront slavery and transform American society. The Republican Party’s moderate leadership was the senior partner: focused on electoral majorities, winning elections, and passing laws.

Radicals made clear they wanted far more than stopping slavery’s spread—Foner notes they demanded “abolition in the nation’s capital, an end to the use of slaves in federal employment, and eventually…emancipation in the South itself.” Once war began, those aims widened into Reconstruction: “restricting the power of the planters, protecting the rights of the freedmen, and transforming the South into a democratic (and Republican) society.”

The party, meanwhile, had to distill this into something a majority could vote for. That’s why the focus was “no extension,” and why Lincoln—who knew “no politician is going to kick his base out”—translated radical pressure into moderate language and policies.

Foner puts the Radical role split plainly in an interview with Jacobin Magazine: “The abolitionists show you that a very small group…can accomplish a lot by changing the discourse…the role of radicals is to stand outside…and put forward the moral imperative.” If they persuade people, “then politicians will come up with a plan to do it.” Politics, he adds, is “people acting together, even if they don’t love each other, for a common purpose.” Lincoln, a moderate, still knew abolitionists were part of his base—“no politician is going to kick his base out.”

As Lincoln himself famously described his party’s radicals, “They are utterly lawless--the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with--but after all their faces are set Zion-wards.”

The lesson isn’t that today’s left has too many causes. It’s that Democrats haven’t done the senior-partner job of choosing a unifying program and turning movement energy into governing power.

After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley and began using her platform to push inequality and the Green New Deal, I went to see historian Barbara Fields at her office hours and asked whether the 1850s and 1860s offered any lessons, albeit not straightforward, for today—with AOC in the lane of the Radicals and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in the lane of moderates like Lincoln. Fields agreed that there were some parallels, but her response was blunt: “Schumer and Pelosi don’t have a Lincolnian bone in their body. They don’t feel the forces of history moving beneath their feet.”

Her point wasn’t mystical. Lincoln’s strength was taking radical pressure and turning it into a program a majority could vote for. By contrast, she suggested, today’s Democratic leaders treat politics as a permanent red–blue campaign of fundraising rather than defining, defending, and advancing a majoritarian program that reshapes America’s political economy and the lives of the American people.

3) What Yglesias Calls ‘Control’ Is How Coalitions Work.

Yglesias says the left and center today are “not bargaining over issues at all, but over control.” But that’s exactly how junior partners behave in American parties without formal coalition agreements. Factions fight for leverage so the senior partner can’t pocket their votes and paper over divisions with a lowest-common-denominator program—one that tries to please everyone, satisfies no one, and leaves the deeper contradictions in the political economy untouched.

The mid-19th century Republican Party had this internal fight all the time. Conservatives wanted a quick win to “end the slavery controversy and allow the federal government to turn its attention to…national economic development.” Radicals saw that same victory as “only the first step in a relentless crusade” to transform Southern society. That was a fight about agenda-setting power—control, in Yglesias’s word—inside a coalition that still had to stay majoritarian. As political scientist Daniel Disalvo writes in Engines of Change: factions are “agenda-setting vehicles and engines of political change.” They generate new ideas, push them onto the agenda, and contest over what the party actually does. When party leaders can’t synthesize factional conflict among the senior and junior partners, the pressure looks scattered and gets mislabeled as nihilism.

Because of how U.S. parties work in a winner-take all, two-party system, the party leadership optimizes for swing seats, donors, and governing bandwidth, which means sanding off sharp edges and deprioritizing issues that complicate a majoritarian message; the American left then often is left on precisely those neglected, deprioritized, or slow-walked items--clean energy economy, Medicare for All, Palestine, rent control, antitrust--not as hobbies, but as leverage to force agenda inclusion and build constituencies the party would otherwise under-resource. In practice, much of that agenda looks less like scattered and utopian wish-casting and more like the platforms of social democratic and democratic socialist parties across much of Latin America and Europe.

TLDR;

There is no modern equivalent to slavery’s central role in 1850s politics. Lincoln’s GOP is not Jeffries’s Democratic Party, today’s left is far weaker than the Radical bloc (I would like for it to get sharper), and slavery’s unique evil has no peer. But the history is still instructive. Republicans didn’t win because the movement had one demand; they won because Radicals expanded their influence, forced moderates to confront the Slave Power as the defining political problem, and pushed the party to translate many demands into a majoritarian program—the Free Soil, Free Labor agenda—and then govern on it.

That’s the part of the analogy that carries forward. In a big-tent party, junior partners—the ideological factions—press contradictions, draft concrete policies, and fight until the leadership has to pick sides on issues they’d rather avoid. Senior partners focus on holding majorities, smoothing risk, and keeping the message broad. The senior partner optimizes for swing seats and risk control—count votes, calm donors, keep the message and vision broad (“better health care”) rather than binding (“single-payer with X”). Understanding this helps explain why the party doesn’t really have a clear message or platform until the presidential nominating contest, after the party’s factions battle it out for influence.

When party leadership and its junior partner can’t synchronize their roles, the push for clarity gets mislabeled as a power grab, the agenda drifts, and blame flows. But when the bargain works, movement-aligned factions provide substance and energy, and the party turns that into votes, legislation, and durable governing power.

In the fall of 2023, I was pitching stories to mainstream media outlets about anti-war protests and how Muslim, Arab, and young voters were souring on the Democratic Party over Biden’s Israel policy. Meanwhile, at Thanksgiving, several of my own relatives told me outright this would be the first election where they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. Around the same time, a producer at a major network told me that soon I’d have a harder time getting Gaza stories on air, because by January “everything will be about the election.”

That was the strategic dilemma. We knew mass mobilizations, marches, and campus protests had moral power, but inside the party they weren’t treated as political power. Most party elites, mainstream media journalists, and the White House itself didn’t believe Gaza would matter in November; they thought the issue would fade and that the anger was confined to young, leftist activists “who are always mad about something.” So the challenge was to make it political in the language the party does understand: votes and elections.

We first explored whether a progressive primary challenger to Biden might emerge from the ranks of elected officials, celebrities, unions, or activists. Every avenue came up empty. Most people felt like it was career suicide. Then we remembered a precedent: Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 had used the “Uncommitted” line on the Michigan ballot to signal dissent against Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was available.

We took that option and built it into a grassroots campaign with about $200,000–tiny by presidential campaign standards but enough to get a message across. The logic was straightforward: use the primaries to register dissent in the most legible currency the party understands, convert those votes into delegates, and turn that presence into leverage for a course correction on Gaza. “Abandon Biden” campaigns were already underway, but they didn’t fit our theory of change, which was that the party needed to save lives in Gaza in order to save democracy from Trump.

The work was far from simple. It meant thousands of conversations with disaffected voters, constant pushback that it was “pointless,” and accusations of disloyalty from every wing of American politics at every turn. Yet the results began to accumulate. In Michigan, more than 100,000 Democrats--roughly thirteen percent--marked “Uncommitted.” In Minnesota, it was nearly one in five. Across several states, even with the option unavailable on most ballots, those votes translated into close to thirty delegates. What looked improbable at the outset had started to become a visible bloc inside the party.

Our thesis was straightforward. We set out to forge a permission structure that would change the top of the ticket’s policy and then let Biden (and then Harris) win back anti-war voters whom the White House’s weapons policy had driven out of the tent. That required pressure with a carrot and a stick. The carrot was obvious: hundreds of thousands were ready to return if Biden (and then Harris) drew daylight from a blank-check policy and put U.S. weapons under U.S. and international law. The stick was equally clear: this bloc was organized, visible, and not going away. We carried two obligations at once: push to stop U.S. weapons from being used to commit war crimes in Gaza in order to unite the party to defeat Donald Trump. Our task was to make a pivot toward both possible, credible, and safe.

But we weren’t running against Biden, Harris, or the Democratic Party. Most of the Uncommitted delegates were longtime Democratic Party organizers. We were Democrats trying to warn them. The coalition had a fracture, plain as the polling on Biden’s age or the price of groceries. But as with those concerns, party leaders brushed them aside--sometimes by looking the other way, sometimes with a condescending sneer.

We came to the convention with American doctors who had walked bombed hospital corridors of Gaza, who had pulled shrapnel stamped “Made in USA” from the bodies of Palestinian toddlers. They carried testimony, not politics—moral witness to what the world was already beginning to call war crimes, even as Democratic Party leaders refused to. And yet in a press conference, after they described these scenes, the question from mainstream reporters was whether they thought Harris or Trump would be better. The question felt surreal: as if the point of their witness was partisan calculus, not the human cost they had just laid bare.

Alongside them, we carried a list of steps the Harris campaign could have taken before November: sit with Palestinian and Lebanese American families in Michigan who had lost loved ones; draw daylight from a blank-check weapons policy; say out loud that American weapons must not be used to break American and international law; allow a Palestinian American voice on the stage of a party that claims to speak for multi-ethnic democracy in the face of fascism and racism.

Every request we made was denied, except for one: the DNC agreed to host the first official convention panel on Palestinian human rights, which became one of the most heavily attended events of the week. But even DNC officials admitted to us directly that the panel was not our main ask and could not substitute for a Palestinian speaker onstage. That acknowledgement mattered: it showed they knew exactly what we were asking for, and that they knew this wasn’t it.

The Harris campaign’s posture was even clearer. In private conversations after the Convention, when questions of endorsement were raised, their position was essentially, we understand if you don’t endorse. It was a polite way of saying the campaign wasn’t going to change its approach and that they did not want—or need—our support.

For two months we sent the DNC names of Palestinian American leaders rooted in this party. Members of Congress supplemented their own names. To our knowledge, not a single Palestinian American elected official was called. Not a single draft of a speech was asked for. Not one word was invited onto the party’s convention stage.

On the Wednesday night of the convention, around 7 p.m., the decision finally came: “It’s not happening.” Uncommitted delegates and allied Harris delegates began a sit-in at the United Center. From 8:30 p.m. to nearly 4 a.m., senior staff rotated through with offers of meetings--with senior DNC and Harris staff, with Congressmen and Senators--but never about the one thing that mattered.

We were told the vetting didn’t go through. Later we were told our movement could not “define the vice president’s biggest speech of her life.” At another point we heard that any Palestinian American we proposed had used the word “genocide,” and that alone made them “nonstarters because it caused offense to Jewish Democrats.” The explanations shifted, but they all missed the point. The issue wasn’t the logistics of vetting—it was the fear of a Palestinian voice itself. And if the party was so afraid of even symbolic inclusion, how could anyone believe it would ever take on the harder work of policy change? Allies saw the contradiction immediately. Major unions, members of Congress, relatives of Israeli hostages, even liberal Jewish groups urged the DNC to allow a Palestinian speaker.

For many older Black Democratic leaders, the symbolism was what cut especially deep. They were caught between celebrating the historic moment of the first Black woman nominee and watching Palestinians barred from the stage for who they were, not for what they might say. The memory of Fannie Lou Hamer’s exclusion in 1964 hung in the air. The Democratic Party, once again, was broadcasting who counted and who did not—and that contradiction dramatized the stakes more clearly than any speech we could have given.

All year we heard the same message from voters Democrats count as their coalition--Muslims and Arabs, and many young people across backgrounds. They said they could not vote for a party they believed was arming and defending a catastrophe that international bodies were investigating as genocidal. By November 2023, polling in Michigan made the drift plain among Arab, Muslim, and young voters. Inside donor and media rooms, the confident reply was that a debate between Trump and Biden would bring everyone “home” against the Muslim-ban candidate. And what a debate that was.

Coalitions and party unity depend on trust, and the Democratic Party’s history makes that clear. In 1964, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party arrived in Atlantic City without numbers or money but with enormous moral authority. They demanded that the national party seat Black delegates from Mississippi instead of the all-white delegation that had been sent by the state party. The party did not concede to their demands, but their presence cracked the door open. Within a few years, Black Democrats were inside the party structure, reshaping who had standing in the coalition. They lost in the moment, but they created the conditions for a future realignment.

Uncommitted was modeled far more on 1964 than on 1968. We hadn’t set out to stage a sit-in, and we never intended one. Our aim was not to rage from the outside but to walk through the gates with the tools the party itself provides--ballots, delegates, media, convention seats--and force it to confront what it preferred to ignore. Street protest can stir the conscience, but without a ledger of votes and leaders at the table to forge a new path, conscience alone is too easily dismissed. And yet in Chicago we collided with the truth that a convention is no longer a forum for democratic argument but a spectacle of control. It is choreography masquerading as deliberation, a stage set to display a script while banishing dissent to the wings.

The deeper problem was a democratic deficit. In a presidential election year, there was no meaningful way to force accountability on the party, no lever that could compel leaders to hear our voices or adjust course. The convention was stage-managed, primaries were designed to ratify more than to debate, and the big donors and outside groups were already setting the boundaries of “acceptable” dissent. AIPAC openly pledged to spend $100 million--much of it Republican money--to oust anti-war candidates in Democratic primaries.

One night after the convention, a senior Democratic insider took us aside and described being in a gathering at the convention with the people who “really run” the party--its top funders, strategists, and operatives. Two-thirds of them, he said, were tied to AIPAC and DMFI’s networks. “And they were never going to let a Palestinian American on that stage,” the operative said. That’s the imbalance. Our movement had the moral energy of protests, but not the institutional muscle: no donor or voter or elected network to rival theirs, no deep bench of operatives, few electoral victories, not a large enough Washington presence strong enough to shift the balance.

Other party insiders were blunt to us. Most Democrats in Congress didn’t oppose U.S. weapons for Israel, and any daylight would have triggered immediate backlash from swing-state moderates. They said, imagine John Fetterman or prominent Jewish leaders on TV accusing Kamala Harris of “abandoning Israel,” backed by suburban Democrats warning that the election was at risk. In their eyes, that coalition of voters, donors, and elected officials was larger--and more decisive--than ours.

I will not pretend Chicago left no mark. While the hall danced to pop songs, my phone lit with messages from delegates bracing for censure by their local and state parties back home, punished for saying aloud what their state and local parties wanted left unsaid. The labels came quickly--“terrorist sympathizer” and “antisemite” from the right, “Russian asset” from the center, “sellout” from parts of the left for trying to fight inside the party at all. It was humiliating, and it was exhausting. The hardest part was the loneliness of returning with no policy win to hold, only the burden of the struggle—its grief, its arguments, its unrelenting weight, and the conflicting theories of change from those within the anti-war tent.

But what stays with me are the faces of our Palestinian and Jewish delegates who would not move. Democratic Party delegates with red eyes from sleepless nights, shoulders squared against the weight of rejection, yet carrying themselves with the power that comes from knowing you are right. They sat not in anger but in conviction: that to exclude a Palestinian voice from the Democratic Party’s stage not because of what might be said but because of who would say it was a moral wrong too grave to accept. Their stillness was a kind of defiance. Their persistence, a declaration that dignity, once denied, does not quietly retreat.

That night clarified for me what politics at its most honest really is--not the bright lights or the speeches sanded smooth for unity, but ordinary people risking censure, humiliation, even a form of political exile, to insist that their grief be seen. The sit-in was weary, it was painful, and it was real. And in those faces I saw the lesson: power without conscience breeds injustice, but conscience without power is a sermon no one hears.

Yes, some Arab and Muslim Americans voted for Donald Trump. So did some right-leaning, pro-Israel Jewish voters who felt that the left had become antisemitic. That isn’t symmetry. It’s alienation, expressed in different ways. In each case, people felt dismissed by institutions they once trusted. Trump became a blunt instrument--a way to punish a party they believed would not hear them. You don’t have to think he cares about you; you only have to believe he rattles the people who won’t acknowledge your pain.

Uncommitted didn’t elect Trump. Ignoring the Democrats who checked off the “Uncommitted” ballot helped create an opening he exploited. We warned our base about Project 2025, urged against third-party detours, and even ran ads to that effect. What we couldn’t do was give a formal endorsement and hand our field operation to a campaign that shockingly refused even basic recognition; that would have torched our credibility in the communities we organize and damaged the relationships we need to build durable power.

After the convention, a group of senior Democratic operatives--frustrated by the party’s drift on Israel-Palestine--met with us and laid out a simple forecast. If Harris won, Netanyahu would test her in the lame-duck window or the first 100 days; her response would set the tone for the term. The question wasn’t abstract: would she spend scarce early political capital on a public break with Netanyahu, and did she have the “war room” infrastructure to absorb AIPAC/DMFI attacks the way Obama’s team did during the Iran-deal fight?

These party insiders were extremely skeptical that Harris would break with Biden or Netanyahu in a major way without being pushed in that direction from outside and within (donors, voters, networks of leaders). What they saw in Uncommitted was the beginnings of that infrastructure: a multifaith, multiracial, multi-issue coalition--left and center-left, elected officials and community leaders, Black, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, with major labor unions--that could speak the party’s language to create both cover and pressure for a real shift on weapons transfers.

The lesson isn’t that protest fails. It’s that protest without power hits a ceiling. Moral clarity must be translated into leverage--votes, donors, validators, and a multiracial and multifaith network that includes labor, Black institutions, and Latino organizations. Primaries are where that leverage is built. If party elites respond to money and votes, movements must organize both. The alternative is the democratic deficit we saw up close: a stage managed for a false sense fo unity, boundaries set by outside money, and no reliable channel for accountability in a presidential year.

Looking back, I keep returning to one hard truth: too many on the center-left did not do what the moment required. They mistook access for influence, statements for strategy, partisanship and proximity for power. From a middling position between Netanyahu and AIPAC on one side and the cease-fire movement on the other, they hoped a careful, triangulating sentence could stand in for public pressure. They told themselves they were holding the line; in fact, they held the coat. The White House and the campaign needed to feel pressure from within as well as concern. Instead, they buried their heads and called it pragmatism. It was always five minutes to midnight. And restraint without leverage produced exactly what it always does: policy that moved too little, too late, and a politics that left the most wounded parts of the coalition to fend for themselves.

A year ago, the message was clear: challenge U.S. policy on Gaza and you risk your seat. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush paid that price. What’s changed since then is not that the moral case has grown stronger—it was always strong—but that the political risk has shifted. Zohran Mamdani’s victory showed that standing up for Palestinian rights could survive contact with the electorate, even in one of the most Jewish constituencies in the country. That win cracked the narrative of inevitability, and with it the fear.

As with the Iraq war, few will ever be held accountable; soon the story will be that everyone was always against it, or that it was ‘justified at the beginning and then lost its way’—a soothing fiction that allows leaders and institutions to preserve themselves while erasing the people who paid a real price.

Politics at its truest is not the light show; it is the faces that refuse to be erased. A party that claims to speak for the many must do more than applaud itself under a bright stage. It must listen. In the end, Biden and Harris lost anti-war voters for the same reason they lost voters upset about the economy and Biden’s age: they simply did not listen to what voters were telling them. Democrats can treat Uncommitted as a trespass to punish, or as a map back to a coalition built on recognition, reciprocity, and shared purpose. We chose the map. The door is still open for those willing to walk through it.

A year later, another NYTimes piece warned that if Lincoln won, “he will have to cut off the Abolition and extreme wing of his party; otherwise he will go by the board,” because a “practical, common‑sense man, and an old Whig, would reject the radical Republicans.”

NYTimes, 1860: "[The abolitionists] are as rancorous and abusive as if they were on the point of utter annihilation. Their speeches sound more like the ravings of Bedlamites than the utterances of men seeking the accomplishment of a practical object."

Slavery’s unique horror and the politics it produced have no modern equal, and the Republican Party of the 1850s was forged for a singular purpose: to resist and ultimately destroy the “Slave Power.” And today’s Democratic Party lacks a comparable unifying moral and ideological project. What carries over is the strategic problem that confronted the new Republicans: consolidate power first in safe seats or stretch into contested terrain? How do radicals, moderates, and conservatives best divide labor inside a big‑tent, two-party system—with what conflicts and in what sequence?

The electoral map of the new party—and the strategic choices

Some context: the 1850s Republican coalition fused ex‑Whigs (a collapsing national party that had tried to sidestep slavery), anti‑slavery Democrats (a minority rebelling against Southern leadership), Free Soilers (a short‑lived movement devoted to barring slavery from western territories), and a smaller band of abolitionists committed to immediate emancipation.

Political scientist Daniel DiSalvo’s framework helps: factions are “‘engines of change,’ the prime movers in American politics,” a level “between” parties and lone politicians that act as “‘conveyor belts of ideas.’” They are “coordinated network[s] that tie together elites from a variety of institutions,” capable of moving “the whole party along a left‑right spectrum.”

Historian Hans Trefousse sketches the GOP’s factions as “radicals, moderates, and conservatives” who “differed in both ends and means”—with radicals pressing the attack, moderates forming the majority, and conservatives hoping to turn back the clock.

They broadly agreed to stop slavery’s expansion (“containment”), while they fought over scale and pace (radicals), coalition (moderates), and tone (conservatives). For radicals, “‘No compromise!’ was their motto—‘not even with friends if it involves the sacrifice of principle’,” a cohort “of former Free‑Soilers and other determined antislavery politicians” who refused “to recede in any way” from keeping slavery from spreading.

Crucially, where each wing lived shaped how it talked. Historian Eric Foner locates the Republican center of gravity in the Yankee villages of central and western New York, and those of Michigan, Wisconsin, and the northern counties of Ohio with echoes in northern Illinois and rural New England. Places where abolitionist sentiment ran so deep that bold antislavery positions posed no electoral risk.

“Urban political leaders, many of whose constituents were either [white] immigrants,” worried that letting “New England abolitionists” define the brand would be “political poison.” In short: abolitionist‑leaning safe seats became foundries; white immigrant‑heavy and “lower North” swing seats demanded different rhetoric.

In the mid-19th century, the Radical Republicans were never a majority of their party, but in the right circumstances they shaped the GOP’s direction as decisively as any party faction before or since. From those safe perches, radicals set the horizon of anti-slavery politics. Historian Bruce Levine’s portrait of Thaddeus Stevens is blunt: he created public opinion and molded public sentiment” and was almost invariably out in front of public opinion…on all the great questions of the war.

Charles Sumner played a similar role in Massachusetts, indicting what he called the “Slave Oligarchy”: “It organizes the Cabinet, directs the Army and Navy, controls the Treasury and the Post‑Office …holds the keys to every office, from President down to postmaster...Our first political duty, therefore, is to oppose this Oligarchy…Prostrate the Slave Oligarchy, and Liberty will become the universal law of all the national Territories.”

Moderates and conservatives aimed at different voters—especially in the swingier “lower North.” Foner is direct about their approach: parties there reorganized around less polarizing banners and trimmed sails to compete for former Democrats; several states even adopted “People’s Party” labels to mute “New England abolitionist” associations. Republicans tailored the message to the free‑labor common sense of swing constituencies—1850s shorthand for an economy in which ordinary people could work, save, and own, as opposed to a slave system that fixed status at birth and depressed wages and dignity.

In lower-North battlegrounds like Illinois, Democrats worked to make even a Republican moderate sound like an abolitionist firebrand. The Illinois State Register blasted Lincoln’s argument to restrict slavery as “black abolitionist propaganda,” insisting his speech “has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Fred Douglass.” Stephen A. Douglas hammered the linkage on the stump, peddling a rumor that “one of Fred. Douglass’ kinsmen…is now traveling in this part of the State making speeches for his friend Lincoln as the champion of black men,” and at Charleston claiming he had found Lincoln’s ally “in the person of Fred. Douglass, THE NEGRO.”

Lincoln’s opponent pressed the point further by associating Lincoln with several radicals and abolitionists: “Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred. Douglass, ever take higher abolition grounds than that?” The goal was to brand the GOP in swing counties as synonymous with Black equality and abolitionist “extremism,” attempting to impose a political tax on Republican moderates that radicals in safe New England seats didn’t have to pay.

Policy and ideology tended to follow demographics and geography. James Oakes sums up the party’s containment strategy: “The Republican Party called upon the ‘national forces of freedom’ to hem slavery in, to confine it, to ‘localize’ it, and to surround it.” Hemmed in, slavery would be “on the path to ‘ultimate extinction.’ Like a scorpion girt by fire…slavery would inevitably sting itself to death.” Republicans as a big-tent party “were not proposing to abolish slavery in the states”; the aim was to strip national “special protection” and turn federal levers—territories, D.C., commerce—toward freedom.

Coalition math—and the near‑misses

Because partisan electoral math can be brutal, the GOP repeatedly slammed into the dilemma any junior partner recognizes: how far can you stretch without dissolving what you are? After Lincoln’s election—but before the Civil War—Republican moderate leaders across the spectrum “urged one another to keep quiet and even to assume a conciliatory posture,” stressing that they “would never directly abolish slavery in the states where slavery already existed,” in hopes of “limit[ing] the scope of secession.”

Conservatives sometimes turned that caution into a cudgel against the left flank; one familiar complaint, Foner notes, was that “the doctrinaire morality of the Sumners…[was] doing the Republican party more harm than good.”

But radicals, for their part, saw excessive accomodation as a hollowing‑out risk. In 1860, conservative Republicans floated Edward Bates of Missouri to broaden the map. Foner again: “the radicals made it clear that they would bolt the party if Bates were chosen. While they did not insist on one of their own, they ‘demanded that a Republican candidate’ be chosen, one who had supported Frémont in 1856.” Bates’s nativism, reflecting many of his own voters views, made him “anathema to German‑born Republicans” like Carl Schurz—stretch one way, risk losing another constituency.

How movements anchor within parties

Why fight inside the party at all? As Daniel Schlozman argues, in American politics movements change the country when they become “anchoring groups” inside parties that actually hold power. Parties control the levers of the state; factions that anchor within them can trade votes, money, networks, ideas, and moral urgency for influence over the party’s agenda.

But anchoring comes with a price: you inherit all the coalition’s internal friction. In the early months of the Civil War, New York Republican Alexander Diven made the classic moderate’s case against letting the radical flank set a distinct party program: “I am not willing to open the floodgates of discussion upon all these questions…Let us not have a policy of our own, but unite with the thousands…of War Democrats; for if we have a policy of our own, we shall divide the Union cause.” The very structure that gives an anchored movement access to governing also forces it to navigate — and often defer to — the broader coalition’s electoral and strategic anxieties.

Radicals pushed back just as hard from the other side. Sumner, exasperated in 1862: “I am pained inexpressibly at the delay which gives to our marvelous advantages the aspect of failure…How vain to have the power of a God, and not to use it wisely!”

Governing re-sorted the coalition fast. The first Radical program—Black suffrage, land redistribution, and overturning Johnson’s Southern governments—hit a wall. “No party, however strong, could stand a year on this platform,” one Republican paper warned. Leadership soon shifted from the Radicals to moderate Republicans, who ultimately steered Reconstruction onto a narrower path and dismantled much of its transformative agenda.

Moderates thought the country had “suffered too much from ultra-ists and wranglers,” aimed to judge Southern whites by “present loyal purpose” rather than “past disloyalty,” and wanted Reconstruction settled quickly so the nation could turn to economic growth. “If ‘Sumner and Stevens, and a few other such men do not embroil us with the President,’” Senator William P. Fessenden wrote, “matters can be satisfactorily arranged—satisfactorily, I mean, to the great bulk of Union men throughout the States.”

That’s the junior-partner burden in a sentence: in a broad coalition, they carry the ideology but credit diffuses and blame concentrates. A bloc can move the platform, message, and the law—and still watch others set the timetable.

Why does any of this matter today?

Sequence and focus matter. If there’s one lesson the 1850s offer about safe seat primaries vs purple and red general elections, it’s sequencing. First consolidate a coherent bloc and infrastructure of voters, donors, and networks of leaders; then negotiate from strength to make national majorities possible and grounded in an ideological vision. That’s how abolitionist insurgency created the political space for a moderate Republican like Lincoln to take the presidency four years after its first national run. And when the test came, the party as a whole held its line. Foner’s verdict on the secession crisis: “While the conservatives would sacrifice anti-slavery to save the Union, and the radicals would endanger the Union to attack slavery, the moderates, with Lincoln at their head, refused to abandon either of their twin goals: free soil and the Union”

From its founding in the 1850s, the Republican Party was a coalition at war with itself over how to turn antislavery conviction into national majorities. The nominating contests of 1856, 1860, and 1864 each revealed the push and pull between radicals, moderates, and conservatives. In 1856, radicals arrived at the first convention expecting compromise, only to win a platform denouncing Southern slavery and Mormon polygamy as the “twin relics of barbarism” and calling for slavery’s “complete denationalization,” while moderates put forward John C. Frémont to test it nationally.

In 1860, moderate William Seward’s approach was embraced but he was seen as too personally polarizing; Abraham Lincoln emerged as the swing-state candidate who could carry certain parts of a radical platform without the radical’s baggage.

By 1864, many Radicals were frustrated with Lincoln’s cautious pace on emancipation and Reconstruction, and some seriously considered mounting a challenge to his renomination. Rather than risk a split in the middle of the war, Lincoln absorbed portions of their agenda—most notably accepting a party platform that called for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

The episode reinforced a recurring sequence in Republican politics: radicals consolidated their base and set the ideological horizon, moderates expanded the coalition to win nationally, and together they hammered the platform into clearer, bolder form. Even as the junior partner, the radicals showed they didn’t necessarily need to carry battleground states on their backs or the top of the ticket to shape the party’s governing commitments in lasting ways.

But the costs can be real: over-invest in blue strongholds and you risk moral clarity without governing power; over-invest in purple seats and you risk power without a project. The 1850s Radical Republicans addressed it by sequence—build the edge that pulls the center, then build the center that carries the edge into power and knowing when to bend and adapt to keep the tent from collapsing.

Bottom line

Much of what determines a party’s ideological direction—the selection of candidates in primaries, the protection of incumbents, the setting of strategic priorities—happens upstream, well before the general election, and often in rooms where access is far more limited. Without independent resources, a loyal and identifiable voter base, or a slate of aligned candidates, a seat at the table without power can end up more advisory than directive.

This is especially true in primary season, when party leadership tends to close ranks early in battleground seats around favored candidates and resource flows are locked in months before the public phase of the race. Historically, factions that successfully influenced a party’s direction first built their own infrastructure in safe strongholds, developed a network of aligned candidates, voters, donors, and networks of leaders and demonstrated the capacity to win and govern. Only then did their presence at the table carry real weight, because they arrived not just as participants in someone else’s strategy, but as power centers in their own right.

That’s not a one-to-one script for the present. But it is a usable past: safe-seat consolidation to set an urgent, ideological horizon; contested-seat pragmatism to assemble the majority; and intraparty struggle over speed, scope, and risk. Factions are where the devil lives in the details—they force the party’s moderates to take sides on uncomfortable questions they’d rather avoid, preferring instead to unite the coalition through negative partisanship against the other side. The NTTimes begged Radical Republicans to stop talking. They didn’t and then they governed.