Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine; Photos Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily Show
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Since last November’s election defeat, the Democratic Party has been subject to an endless battery of postmortems, and a shadow primary is already being fought over who’s got the formula to bring it back to life. Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin characterized the party’s image as “weak and woke” and in need of “alpha energy.” Pete Buttigieg grew a beard and blasted DEI-style training as “something out of Portlandia.” Not to be outdone on the regular-Joe front, Arizona senator Ruben Gallego explained that “every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.” Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss countered that such gestures are derivative “Diet Coke populism” and won’t beat Trump at his own game, while California governor Gavin Newsom has overtly been trying to beat Trump at his own game with a new keyboard-warrior persona that speaks in all caps.
Tactically, there’s a different debate about whether to quietly bait the Republicans into unpopular overreach or to go on the offensive and do MAGA-style norm breaking, such as ultragerrymandering blue states or periodically letting the federal government run out of money as the Democrats ultimately did this fall. The chair of the Democratic National Committee pledged to stop bringing a pencil to a knife fight, while social media is full of progressive Substackers bemoaning the party’s weak-kneed acquiescence. Then came the shocking September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which sent the Trump administration vowing revenge on the radical left and put most Democrats in retreat from any posture that might connote violent confrontation.
So far, nothing the party has done has made a difference. Despite tariff-stoked market instability, paramilitary-style immigration raids, accusations of flagrant Republican bribe taking and quid pro quo graft, the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, and the president’s unshakable Jeffrey Epstein problem, the Democrats continue to languish. A recent Reuters-Ipsos poll showed that respondents felt Republicans had better plans on the issues, including immigration, crime, foreign conflicts, gun control, political extremism, corruption, and the economy. Just when you think things can’t get worse for a party locked out of influence in Washington, a bleak new finding pops up. In August, the New York Times reported the Democrats were bleeding registered voters at such an alarming rate that an analyst concluded, “I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this.” Five days later came a forecast that population loss in blue states, including New York and Illinois, would start reducing the party’s Electoral College apportionment by the 2032 election, furthering the potential death cycle.
Within the broad liberal tent, only three forces have generated any momentum over the past year. The first two are connected: Senator Bernie Sanders’s roving “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which has drawn around 300,000 frenzied people in more than 20 states, and Zohran Mamdani’s earthquake upset victory in the New York City mayoral primary, prompting his Obama-like ascent to political celebrity. Separated in age by 50 years, the subjects of these forces occupy the same left-populist lane, and tellingly, neither is chiefly associated with the Democratic Party. Sanders is officially an independent, Mamdani came up via the Democratic Socialists of America, and each possesses enough sui generis political talent to transcend the tarnished party brand. Days before New York’s general election, Sanders, Mamdani, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who co-headlined the early stops of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and is presumed to be running for Senate or the presidency in the near future — filled Forest Hills Stadium for one more rally, dubbed “New York Is Not for Sale.” The event reinforced the immense enthusiasm gap between Mamdani and his plutocrat-backed opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and further cemented the sense that theirs is the faction with the most political juice in this off-election year.
The third force is the “Abundance” movement, which is exciting not to the general public but to the political class and wonk intelligentsia. Popularized by the book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, it argues that the United States has grown stagnant and unaffordable thanks to regulatory absurdities, NIMBY homeowners, infrastructure-blocking environmentalists, and other obstacles to “a liberalism that builds.” Like the populists on the left, Abundance partisans argue the system is broken. Yet their attitude toward Silicon Valley is more tech utopian than anti-monopolistic, and the targets of their critiques tend not to be billionaires but others in the Democratic coalition, which has led to a civil war between them and the Bernie-Zohran-AOC faction. The terms abundance and anti-oligarchy are too narrow to encompass all the people now associated with each camp, but they have come to represent a feverish grab for the steering wheel as the party searches for a direction.
Although both sides constitute a challenge to a dysfunctional, demoralized Democratic Establishment, Abundance has its ear and tentative support. LinkedIn founder and top Democratic donor Reid Hoffman — an opponent of literal fighter of oligarchs Lina Khan, Joe Biden’s aggressive Federal Trade Commission chair — said he was sending a copy of Abundance to everyone he knew. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, another big Democratic player, created a $120 million Abundance fund at his philanthropy. Barack Obama gave Abundance a coveted spot on his summer reading list, and in July he told the audience at a private fundraiser in New Jersey, “I don’t care how much you love working people. They can’t afford a house because all the rules in your state make it prohibitive to build. And zoning prevents multifamily structures because of NIMBY. I don’t want to know your ideology because you can’t build anything. It does not matter.” This is basically the Abundance thesis in a nutshell.
Its enemies viewed Abundance as unacceptably market-friendly even before billionaires pledged fealty to it. The progressive journalist and former Sanders speechwriter David Sirota has been tearing into its supporters for months, framing the battle between Abundance and anti-oligarchy as zero-sum. “Feel like if the Abundance Bros were around during the Gilded Age, they’d tell us the big social problem was that there were too many health rules slowing down production at Chicago meatpacking plants, not the Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust,” reads one of his countless anti-Abundance X posts.
It’s not just the posters who have dug in. When I asked the 84-year-old Sanders what he thinks about the Abundance agenda, he told me that while it is true that there’s annoying waste and bureaucracy in the public sector, this is a baffling thing around which to organize a political movement. “If anyone thinks that that is the major crisis facing American society, they are very much mistaken,” he told me. “The major crisis facing American society is that you have a small number of billionaires who have enormous economic and political power. They are very greedy. They want more.” The advocacy group Demand Progress even commissioned a poll on the subject that found voters preferred a hypothetical candidate who called corporations too powerful over one who railed against “bottlenecks” that impeded projects.
The left’s antipathy toward Abundance has been exacerbated by the perceived affinity between the most prominent pundits of the liberal-centrist class, such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias, whose technocrat-Obamian sensibilities birthed the modern political blogosphere, and the centers of power in Washington. In the run-up to a September Abundance conference in Washington, D.C., an anti-monopoly think tank and anti-corruption group teamed up to produce a 50-page report called “Debunking the Abundance Agenda” as well as a separate paper on its key figures appended with a corkboard-conspiracy-like diagram. As a result, Abundance has become a byword for a galaxy of triggering associations ranging from Elon Musk–style deregulation to environmental catastrophe. When Klein, one of the Times’ biggest stars, wrote a column lauding Kirk for “practicing politics the right way,” the progressive internet melted down, further convinced that Klein and his faction were at their core bent on appeasing, rather than confronting, powerful forces in American life.
“I think it’s important not to base too much of your thinking about these things on the terminally online poster class,” Klein told me, rejecting the binary of populism versus Abundance. “I have a lot of friends in the anti-monopoly world.” In his view, his left-wing critics are committed to a simplistic narrative. “The left populists want to say that there’s a cut to make in political life: ‘There’s the real people, and there’s the corporations and billionaires, and if we can just break their power, we will be able to achieve the society we want.’ Abundance has a more complex and shifting theory of power. As I always say in these conversations, the reason Texas builds more homes than California isn’t because Texas solved oligarchy and California didn’t.”
If anything, the Abundance heads imply it’s their project that could actually deliver something like Bernieism to the masses. The way they see it, Biden’s legislative record included major investments in clean-energy infrastructure and other big-government projects that hardly got off the ground because of red tape, which in turn doomed the Democrats, who had little to show for their labors on Election Day.
As Mamdani prepares to sweep aside his opponents in the purgative fire of unapologetic leftism, the party Establishment has made it clear it is reluctant to follow him. Jockeying for the 2026 midterms is already taking place from Maine to Michigan to California, pitting potential candidates against one another on what has hardened into the central axis of the party: the socialists vs. the moderates, the anti-oligarchs vs. the Abundance crew, the radicals vs. the squares. Each side is convinced theirs is the forward-looking one. What’s remarkable about this fight, as became evident over the past six months as I traveled to Sanders’s raucous rallies and took in the centrists’ pointy-headed slideshows, is how much the two sides have in common — and what they are both missing.
Photo: Andres Kudacki/Getty Images
Photo: Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily Show
The first “fighting oligarchy” event I attended ended up being the most dramatic of the tour. It took place on a Saturday night in late June at a convention center in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. To try to reach beyond the liberal bubble, the tour was traveling almost exclusively to Trump country, and this particular event drew a respectable, for a red state, 5,500 people. A line for the rally formed hours before the start time, and helpful young Sanders people were running around in the heat handing out waters. Out there with them were merch vendors whose inventory ran the gamut of liberal messaging, as if they were hedging bets on who here in real America was going to show up. One guy sold mildly impolite pins that would have played well at a “No Kings” rally: a sombrero-wearing Trump next to the word PENDEJO, a rainbow one that read VAGITARIAN. Others were capitalizing on Sanders’s punk-curmudgeon appeal, selling T-shirts of the Black Flag logo with his name around it. It was hard to picture that shirt being made for another politician.
Everything here was slightly different from what it was on the coasts. For example, I met an influencer who goes by Katnaps5 and was livestreaming into her phone before one of the musical openers came on. She had been tasked by the Tulsa County chapter of Indivisible, a progressive organizing group, to run its social-media channels. “We desperately need some type of glimmer here. We’re the only state that voted red in every county. Depressing as hell,” she told me as both of us were suddenly on her feed. One of her projects was to convince fellow activists to let “ex-MAGA” people join the movement because otherwise how would they find enough people to do the work? A little later, I talked to Alexandria Weaver, 29, whose 7-year-old with special needs was on Medicaid. She was worried about what the slated federal health-care cuts might mean for her daughter’s insurance coverage. Weaver is a Democratic voter but not hardcore about politics. She attended with her mother, a teacher, and her boyfriend, Kyler Hibbs, a “Second Amendment guy” and “outdoorsy type of person” who said he “came to support her and be involved.”
Sanders delivered his thunderous nearly hourlong speech in a hangarlike auditorium. It was basically the same speech he delivered during his two presidential runs, full of appalling statistics about wealth inequality and indignation at the bottomless greed and political influence of the rich. This time around, Sanders’s specific point was that Trump is not merely corrupt and lawless but a tool of his tech-industrialist backers. In the early days of the tour, this meant underscoring Musk’s chaotic influence in Washington. Now, his focus had shifted to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended tax breaks for the rich while cutting safety-net spending for the poor. He summed it up as “really quite disgusting.”
As Sanders inveighed against the legislation, someone handed a sheet of paper to his senior adviser, Faiz Shakir, who was hovering to the side of the dais. The paper had a blown-up image of a Truth Social post that I couldn’t read from my vantage backstage. A moment later, a woman in the audience shouted, “We just bombed Iran.” Shakir ran up to the dais and handed Sanders the printout of the post, which turned out to be Trump announcing the conclusion of Operation Midnight Hammer, in which seven Northrop B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew from a base in Missouri to drop 14 30,000-pound “bunker busters” on three Iranian nuclear sites, an attack augmented by submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles and 125 support aircraft.
Sanders read in silence, shaking his head, as the audience watched him. “This is a statement from Donald Trump,” he said finally. “Quote, ‘We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran …’” He stopped there, summarizing the rest with “et cetera.” The room broke into a sustained chant of “No More War.”
At that point, nobody knew if the strikes signaled the start of U.S. involvement in a new Middle East land war. Sanders quieted the crowd. He had warned about such an outcome 20 minutes earlier, citing the funerals he’d attended in Vermont of young men who had died fighting in Iraq. As he spoke, he got quiet, then loud, then quiet again, like a Pixies song. “All over this country, the American people do not want MORE WAR, MORE DEATH,” he said. “You know, it MIGHT be a GOOD IDEA if we CONCENTRATED on the problems that exist in OKLAHOMA and VERMONT.”
The bombings diverted Sanders from the economic message that forms the heart of his sermon, but they also tapped into a deeper vein of populist anger. On the Iran strikes, as with the adjacent matter of U.S. military support for Israel’s war on Gaza, Sanders would find common cause not just with the anti-Establishment progressive left but betrayed America Firsters such as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Representing the insider Democratic position, Biden’s secretary of State, Antony Blinken, wrote a Times op-ed in the following days titled, “Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds.”) A cross-partisan antiwar faction would solidify in the months ahead as the Trump administration, without congressional authorization, began bombing boats carrying alleged drug runners off the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela.
I thought back to one of the merch vendors outside. Steve Goodman, a middle-age Ohioan, had been selling gear at NASCAR races before glomming on to the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. He was probably the kind of new recruit Sanders envisioned when plotting this tour: working class, male, disillusioned. When I asked Goodman what was on his mind, he wanted to talk about the president’s Middle East saber-rattling, which at that point — three hours earlier — was all talk. “This guy’s whole campaign was ‘Oh, I promise I won’t get this country in a war,’” he said of Trump. “And where we at? We’re on the verge of a war.”
For Sanders, the central divide in American life has never been between the two political parties but between the country’s ruling class and everyone else. In this way, it is his great handicap as well as his great genius that he can reduce anything in the world to one idea. “What the Establishment wants you to believe is that you have no power, that you can’t accomplish anything,” he bellowed near the end of his speech. “I don’t care if you are a progressive, a moderate, or a conservative. This country belongs to all of us. Not just the handful of billionaires.”
In this respect, the tour has been a proof of concept. Sanders has taken the show to Idaho and West Virginia and beyond to demonstrate that his muscular brand of class politics has appeal in the very places the flaccid coastal Democratic Party does not — and therefore that the way out of the wilderness and back into power is for Democrats to follow his lead. A few days after Tulsa, as if to twist the knife, Sanders appeared on an episode of the The Joe Rogan Experience. Wherever mainstream liberals dared not tread, there was Bernie.
Sanders wrapped his rally speech, looking gassed, then did handshakes and photos as “Power to the People,” by John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, played him off, as it does after every “Fighting Oligarchy” stop. I followed him out the back door onto a loading dock. He appeared genuinely shaken by the bombing news and tried to cancel our interview. “We got a war that started,” he told me in his clipped, indignant way. “I gotta find out what’s going on.” Eventually, he agreed to talk for a few minutes, and I found folding chairs for us to sit on.
After relaying his disgust with the Iran campaign for a minute, Sanders laid out his diagnosis of the Democrats’ problem. “Working people all over the country perceive quite correctly that while the Democrats have been quite strong on issues like women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, environmental stuff, not bad, they basically turned their backs on the working class in terms of economic issues,” he said. “That’s what I think the election showed.”
If “fighting oligarchy” was 5,500 Oklahomans you had never heard of, Welcome Fest was your X feed come to life. One Wednesday over the summer, I headed to a hotel on K Street in Washington, D.C., for a daylong confab promoting what people used to call “vital center” liberalism and featuring numerous Abundance devotees. The conference attracted a lot of journalists, not only because it offered an easy opportunity to snark online about the lameness of “centrist Coachella” (no one thought of “Boring Man,” apparently) but because of its genuinely notable lineup including the most relevant thinkers and politicians of this wing of the party.
Those milling around the ballroom or speaking onstage, in no particular order: Substack writers Yglesias and Josh Barro, whose irreverent refusal to respect liberal pieties, and market-friendly blogging, deeply irritate the left; pugilistic Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres, another progressive bogeyman; Abundance co-author Thompson; cult data guru David Shor; Democratic congress-people Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington), who have earned devoted followings by managing to win in Trump country; Senator Slotkin, ditto; and many other smaller-bore pundits and X power users whose names mean little in the real world but everything to people in this room — from YIMBYs for Harris founder Armand Domalewski to bad-boy operative Sean McElwee, who was ousted from his polling firm in part for gambling on political races.
Welcome Fest was a production of Welcome PAC, a newish outside-spending group backed by donors including Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg, James and Kathryn Murdoch, Rory Gates, various Waltons, and Americans Together, a centrist organization founded by former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and his daughter, Heather, a onetime pharma CEO. It seeks to identify and back Democrats who have demonstrated the ability to outperform average — i.e., “replacement level” — congressional candidates and therefore win purple-area swing seats. The theme of the event was “Responsibility to Win,” as opposed to righteously lose. Its general theory of how to do that is to empower candidates not to take doomed activist-y positions, as when Harris answered a now-infamous ACLU survey question in support of taxpayer-funded gender surgery for federal prisoners and detained immigrants. In her introductory remarks, Welcome PAC co-founder Lauren Harper Pope put the mission in appealingly simple terms: “to ensure Democrats are on the right side of public opinion.”
Befitting the D.C. setting, the proceedings had a pallid, laptop-class feel. In this environment, it was true that Yglesias needed no introduction, but he took it to an extreme, declining to say who he was or what he would be discussing before taking us through a slide deck. When Shor posed questions to Slotkin onstage, it was genuinely hard to tell if he was reading them off his phone or just checking his phone.
Still, there was an undercurrent of excitement to the event. Welcome Fest, despite its inclusive name, enjoyed goading the left. Expecting demonstrators, organizers had printed up OFFICIAL PROTESTER T-shirts and had Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” cued if any showed up. Indeed, ten or so people from a group called Climate Defiance charged in during a conversation between Barro and Torres, planting themselves at their feet and unfurling signs that read GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE and FIRE RITCHIE. (Torres and Barro are gay, and Torres is vocally pro-Israel.) “When you grow up in the hood, your astroturfed agitation has no effect on you,” Torres said placidly after the protesters had been dragged off. “I feel like the Achilles’ heel of most elected officials is a pathological need to be loved by everyone.”
Barro and Torres enjoyed the moment in part because it reinforced one of the day’s preoccupations: the need to disassociate from unrealistic “omnicause” groups that force one another to adopt everyone’s positions and therefore lead them into the kinds of politically impotent cul-de-sacs that helped sink Harris’s campaign. The protest also got at larger tensions. Which camp represents the elite consensus, and which represents the will of the people? Who really has power, and who are the outsiders?
Between panels, I struck up a conversation in a hallway with Liam Kerr, Welcome PAC’s other co-founder. He was trollishly dressed in a custom West Virginia Mountaineers football jersey with the name MANCHIN on the back. Kerr’s whole ethos is that despised centrist Democrats are preferable to Republicans and that in deep-red states like West Virginia, these are our choices. I asked him what links the various people he invited, many of whom actually held pretty different ideas. Gluesenkamp Perez is a critic of modern consumerism with protectionist economic leanings; Auchincloss, the Massachusetts congressman, is a suburban free trader who supports Abundance goals like upzoning and permitting reform; Slotkin is a pro-union, strong-on-defense ex–CIA official who advocates for universal health care via a public option.
“Centrists get protested,” Kerr decided. What he meant was that people in this room are okay upsetting various constituencies within their party as long as it helps them win over voters in the diverse range of places they represent. The other team, by implication, possesses urgency and sexiness but is safely preaching to the choir. I asked what he thought of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. “I don’t really know. They seem successful,” he said, before telling me what he really thought. “I think the thing that’s really cool is they’re going to places that sound super fucking Republican and they’re going just outside the city limits of the blue dot. They’re like, ‘We’re in Fucksberg County, Idaho!’ Which is right outside of Boise.”
Though the speakers at Welcome Fest were a motley ideological bunch and mostly shared a Bernieish disinclination toward identity politics and an appetite to reengage working-class voters, they tended toward suspicion of full-service democratic socialism. Kerr’s implication was that the Sanders wing of the party was, as ever, firing up downtown city kids and rural lefties alike with the anti-capitalist, Marxist-inflected language of the university and Bluesky and the media — the language, in other words, of the most despised elites in the country.
As part of its ongoing mission to drive this point home, Welcome would later release a 58-page manifesto that was vigorously screenshotted and promoted by the center-left, renewing hostilities between the party’s warring camps. Titled “Deciding to Win,” it admonished Democrats to “advocate for popular economic policies (e.g., expanding prescription-drug price negotiation, making the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour), rather than unpopular economic policies (e.g., student-loan forgiveness, electric-vehicle subsidies, Medicare for All).” The report stressed that “voters’ frustrations with the status quo are not the same as a desire for socialism.”
As the summer went on, the Abundance-y center continued to build intellectual capital via the new Substack publication The Argument and the new think tank the Searchlight Institute. Meanwhile, pretty much anyone grabbing energy on the left was appearing with the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, from Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, called a “Democratic bro whisperer” for his sympathetic take on male alienation, to Maine’s Graham Platner, whose electric populist campaign was derailed by the revelation of politically incorrect Reddit posts from his past and an SS-like tattoo he got while in the Marine Corps. (Whether this dooms him or miraculously burnishes his outsider credibility remains to be seen. Platner covered the tattoo with a new one, prompting the columnist Jonathan Chait, another Abundance ally, to joke in an X post, “He needs an Abundance Agenda-themed tat.”)
Mamdani’s primary victory only intensified the debate about which wing of the party was ascendant. Progressive organizer Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, posted on X that his campaign would be a harbinger of the 2026 midterm primaries, in which fresh-faced challengers would boot out hidebound boomer Democrats.
Kerr replied to Litman, “In the last 10 Years, there’s been a total of 2 young, attractive, elite-college socialists using spring races in NYC to become media darlings. That’s not a movement. That’s casting. Expect 1-2 breakout stars per decade, not a revolution.”
It escalated from there. AOC’s chief of staff, Mike Casca, chimed in, accusing Kerr of downplaying the congresswoman’s underdog roots and implying he was being sexist. Kerr came back with “I noted a talent like AOC comes along 1-2 times in a decade. And her chief of staff jumps off the top rope with SHE WAS A WAITRESS.”
Rather than seeing their people’s charisma as an unalloyed positive, many on the left are sensitive to coverage that makes them look as if they’re all style and no substance. The Welcome Fest people have the inverse worry. As Kerr and I chatted, Adam Frisch, a ski-bum finance guy and recent Colorado congressional candidate, walked up. Frisch nearly won his red-leaning district last fall, mounting a competitive-enough campaign to force incumbent Republican Lauren Boebert to switch districts before he eventually lost to someone else. He now works for Welcome PAC.
Frisch said he was not threatened by the popularity of “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies, but at the same time, he would kill for someone with the star power of Mamdani or AOC on his team. “All of us centrists are showing up with data and facts, and I think it’s all correct. But the problem is politics is an emotional conversation,” he said. “It’s like, how do we find these flaming centrists that actually have life?” In the New York mayoral primary, the preferred candidate of the Abundance set was State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a champion of housing density with little name recognition or personality.
The Welcome Fest audience got a preview of coming attractions during a discussion between Auchincloss and Thompson. “The case for MAGA, over four decades, is elites drove this country into the ditch and MAGA is going to overturn those elites,” posited the moderator, journalist Marshall Kosloff. “I really struggle to see center- and center-left-coded institutions also coming up with their own version of a story.” He challenged the pair to do so.
Thompson rejected Kosloff’s premise altogether: “What I would say in response to that is, yeah, stories are for children. Americans need a plan. Americans need solutions.”
The next time I saw Sanders, it was in mid-August in Asheville, North Carolina, his final rally on a five-stop swing through Appalachia and the Southeast. This iteration of his speech was about 15 minutes shorter than in Oklahoma and on the generic side. In Tulsa, Sanders at least pandered to the crowd, name-checking native son Woody Guthrie and the Oklahoma City Thunder. (“Maybe not as exciting as the NBA Finals, but maybe more important.”) Perhaps he was just tired, but I suspect Sanders gets more fired up trying to galvanize forgotten red areas — the whole point of the tour — while hippieish Asheville is nothing if not a bright-blue dot of a place. Looking out at the arena crowd, he would have seen people wearing GOOD TROUBLE and EVERYONE WATCHES WOMEN’S SPORTS T-shirts and other signifiers of creative-class progressivism not otherwise prevalent in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Asheville situation got at Kerr’s nagging insinuation that the tour wasn’t really reaching new voters. Shakir, Sanders’s adviser, said that a third of the people who sign up for these events are not registered Democrats and that 8 percent are registered Republicans. I have no reason to doubt these numbers; more than anyone on the left, Sanders has proved he can appeal to Trump supporters. Yet in the Q&As he staged in small-town West Virginia and Wisconsin, none of the questions I heard came from anybody with evidently right-leaning politics. It would seem, especially in a nonelection year, that most people checking out Sanders’s events are marooned, hope-seeking liberals rather than curious conservatives.
It’s not as though Sanders does this on purpose. His entire speech is designed to appeal to just about anyone who is not an oligarch. Indeed, an irony of the battle for influence in the Democratic Party is that the leading camps share the same preoccupation: the cost of living. In his speech, Sanders tends to rattle off a statistic about how 20 million U.S. households spend half their income on housing. This is exactly the kind of figure Abundance and its fans cite to bemoan the lack of housing supply. The desired solutions are different — Sanders would have the government subsidize 5 million new low-to-middle-income units, while YIMBYs would rezone cities and suburbs to unlock a flood of market-rate development — but they’re not in disagreement about the fundamental issue or the severity of the problem.
The Mamdani phenomenon has reinforced the primacy of affordability as a partywide organizing principle. Though his opponents have depicted him as intolerably radical based on his unwavering support for Palestine and his prior anti-NYPD stance, he campaigned on the difficulty of getting by in New York City. And while his central planks — free buses, universal child care, city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze on stabilized apartments — may be niche or political long shots, they all point in the same relatable direction.
On the other side of the ledger, Abundance seems to have been misread, or not read at all, by some of its critics. Caricatured as an argument for government-shrinking neoliberalism, it’s essentially the opposite: a treatise for unlocking the power of big government, or “state capacity.” For example, Klein and Thompson hail Pennsylvania’s 2023 rebuild of I-95 after a fire from a fatal gas-tanker crash weakened a highway overpass, causing it to collapse. The state’s secretary of Transportation told them that, under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken one to two years to rebuild it and entailed hiring a design consultant, getting the design approved by the Federal Highway Administration, a lengthy bidding process, and other hurdles. Instead, Governor Josh Shapiro bypassed all that by declaring an emergency; the state hired contractors who were already doing work on the bridge or nearby. The rebuild ended up a kind of blue-collar fever dream, a no-bid union-labor project with environmental permits fast-tracked; the work was completed in 12 days.
It fell to a review in the socialist magazine Jacobin to point out that Abundance should have been embraced, not shunned, by the left. As the reviewers noted, the book begins with a lament over Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s shrinkage of public-sector ambition and concludes by endorsing one of Karl Marx’s theories about private-sector risk aversion. In their view, Abundance had it right; governments shouldn’t just redistribute resources but successfully build things people need: “If our answer to every problem of capitalism is ‘public ownership’ or ‘nationalize it,’ how convincing can those proposals be without material demonstration of effective state capacity?” Or as Klein put it, “If Democrats are taxing people to build high-speed rail, that high-speed rail should exist.”
One reason the schism feels inordinately acute is that online discourse has turned “Abundance” into a bizarre shorthand for all manner of demons. Even on matters totally unrelated to the book, the word can be brandished in ways that make one’s factional allegiances clear. After Thompson criticized an essay by New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt for being flippant about male loneliness, Witt posted on X, “Abundance but homeboy racks up 2 million views from my writing and doesn’t even link to the article. Please enjoy my *book review* about *male supremacist ideology.*” (Thompson did in fact link to it.) “Before Abundance came out, I worried that its argument would be too agreeable,” Klein has written. “I didn’t foresee Ragnarok.”
All this controversy has started to resemble an intra-elite pissing contest. It also obscures an underrated development: the Democrats’ almost total turn away from divisive cultural issues and toward material concerns. The targets of the Abundance agenda — blue-state governors getting in the way of reform — have largely accepted the wisdom of that agenda’s proposals. Over the summer, Newsom overhauled California’s environmental-review law to spur housing development. The opponents of Mamdani’s campaign — blue-state power brokers allergic to socialism and any criticism of Israel — have jumped on his “affordability” message. Meanwhile, the identity-first progressivism of the past decade has been jettisoned and memory-holed in remarkably swift fashion with the left treating the era of personal pronouns and anti-racism as something briefly foisted on them by reputation-washing capitalists. As a dejected Cartman finds out in the new season of South Park, it’s harder than ever to find a social-justice warrior to offend.
But the flip side of the materialist turn is that you won’t see many prominent Democrats taking risky, let alone more conservative, positions on Republican-dominated issues unrelated to the economy. Instead, by emphasizing pocketbook issues, Democrats are hoping they can simply skate over the large cultural divide that remains between the party’s professional-class rank and file and the working-class voters it’s desperate to win back. Sitting on the loading dock in Tulsa, I’d asked Sanders how he planned to appeal to voters who had turned away from the Democrats over, say, their attitudes toward immigration or public safety, as many did in 2024. “What I have found is, politics is not just linear,” he replied. “It’s when people perceive that you are standing up and fighting for them, they will say, ‘You know what? I’m going to vote for Bernie. I disagree with him on the abortion issue, disagree with him on the gay-rights issues, disagree with him on this. But you know what? I think he’s on my side.’”
That may be the case for Sanders specifically, but it also conveniently argues for a politics that doesn’t require changing any of one’s positions. I asked Slotkin a version of the same question: to name an issue on which Democrats are “weak or woke,” as she’d described them. “Separately from any one policy, it’s a vibe check,” she told me.
A small but telling moment during Sanders’s Asheville speech spoke to this dynamic. Post-pandemic, that city has experienced a homelessness and street-disorder -problem set against a backdrop of inclusive-looking bookstores and New Age boutiques. Walking around downtown, one cannot ignore the struggling individuals screaming out, panhandling, sleeping in doorways, scavenging, or nodding off. Sanders might have noticed this because he made a reference to people sleeping on the street there — a problem he succinctly blamed on a shortage of low-income housing.
It is true that Asheville is one of the most expensive municipalities in the state. It’s also true that there’s more to the story. An award-winning nonprofit news outlet called Asheville Watchdog published a 12-part series documenting a number of factors exacerbating the issue: the local rise of meth and fentanyl, the inadequate treatment of mental illness, a recent police-force exodus, a weak form of city government. It is not incorrect to point to a lack of housing, which is also Abundance’s preferred diagnosis of San Francisco’s homelessness crisis, but by talking about housing only, you don’t kill the mood at an arena full of progressives in the way you would if you started talking about investing in law enforcement.
Although Abundance is agnostic about the culture wars, Klein has lately been pushing for a big-tent-ism that embraces third-rail social issues. “I’d like to see us running pro-life Democrats again,” he said in a recent interview with *The New Yorker. “*When Obamacare passed, about 40 House Democrats were pro-life.” It should probably go without saying that Democrats who have managed to win or overperform in places Trump also won tend to occasionally upset other people in the party. Arizona’s Gallego recently questioned the fairness of trans girls playing with other girls in youth sports; Maine’s Golden voted for a GOP bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote and broke with Democrats to vote against shutting down the government, drawing a primary challenge soon afterward; and Slotkin was the only Senate Democrat who voted to block California’s electric-vehicle mandate designed to ban sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.
After the Asheville rally, I got to talking outside with Rena Branson, a 33-year-old composer and singer who told me her Brooklyn-born grandfather used to talk just like Bernie. I asked what she was feeling. “I feel a mix of heartbreak and awe,” she said. “Awe that this man is continuing to fight as hard as he is fighting in this climate. The fact that he’s traveling around and trying to convey a message of hope and a vision for what could be really different — it’s very inspiring. And at the same time, to be honest, I don’t see it happening.”
On a drenched, humid night in September, the Sanders and Mamdani shows merged into one. The senator brought “Fighting Oligarchy” to an auditorium at Brooklyn College, where it doubled as a campaign rally for the candidate. Being in the nation’s media capital, it had a different feel from the other rallies I went to. There were people I recognized: reporters, political operatives, at least one Saturday Night Live cast member. The event, billed as a town hall in which Sanders and Mamdani would take audience questions, had a torch-passing quality. Chairs were set up for the pair, and as they came out together, it wasn’t clear how they would share the stage. Mamdani took charge, delivering an opening salvo that lasted more than 15 minutes. Ostensibly, his purpose was to tell a story crediting Sanders — once a young mayor himself — for giving him the “language of democratic socialism” to describe his politics and laying the groundwork for his own campaign. I wasn’t sure Sanders, left to fiddle with a piece of paper as he waited his turn, was thrilled at being talked about in the past tense. Mamdani paced, the crowd in his hand, and the phrase alpha energy crossed my mind.
There are aspects of Mamdani’s success that cannot be copied by Democrats in other parts of the country. He’s an unusually gifted campaigner, quick-witted and infectiously confident. He also operates in a favorable environment: a true cosmopolitan appealing to the ultimate global citizenry as he faces a weak and scandal-tarred field of opponents. Mamdani’s socialist leanings presumably would not play as well in a Wyoming Senate race. Then there are the things about his campaign that probably can be emulated, such as finding candidates who promise a break from the status quo or appear to authentically stand for something beyond the generic party platform. Even as he moderated his stance on public safety, distancing himself from his old “Defund the Police” tweets, Mamdani never hesitated in his support for Palestine, a move that paid off as Israel’s war in Gaza ground on and public opinion increasingly came to match his own.
But the challenge for both the populist left and the wonky center is the same: to find ways to re-imbue the Democratic Party with a sense of purpose beyond material well-being. Sanders seemed to inaugurate the next phase of this discussion in a recent interview with the comic and podcaster Tim Dillon. “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation, right?” Sanders said, leaning back into the moderate immigration stance he had taken in earlier phases of his career. “Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border.”
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