Timothy P. Carney reports on “Pennsylvania’s Blue Wave” at aei.org and writes:

MECHANICSBURG, Pennsylvania — Pennsylvania is arguably the swingiest of swing states.

The Keystone State has voted for the winner in each of the last five presidential elections, and it has been a tipping point in each of the past three elections.

It is one of only four states with one Democrat and one Republican in the Senate. In the state government, Republicans and Democrats have split power for the past decade. The state House of Representatives is divided 102 to 101.

But this will not last.

A blue wave is likely to hit Pennsylvania this year, easily carrying Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) to reelection, and very possibly handing the state Senate, and thus a governing trifecta, to Democrats. In fact, the blue wave already began two months ago as Democrats dominated in local elections and statewide judicial races in 2025.

It’s true that President Donald Trump has revived Republican fortunes in this state. Not only did he win twice, but he also had large coattails, helping Republicans win the Senate races in 2016 and 2024.

But Trump will never be on a ballot here again, and that ought to make Republicans even more worried about today’s political currents. This may not be a mere tidal wave. Tidal waves eventually recede. The 2025-2026 Pennsylvania blue wave looks to instead be a sea change, in which the Keystone State becomes solidly Democratic for a decade or more.

Pennsylvania After Trump

The key dynamic in Pennsylvania politics is the political realignment in which the working class is becoming solidly Republican, while upper-middle-class suburbanites are becoming more Democratic.

This realignment isn’t limited to Pennsylvania, and it didn’t start with Trump. Still, Trump put the realignment into overdrive, and Pennsylvania is where it’s most visible.

When Trump ran in 2016, no Republican had won the state since 1988, and former President Barack Obama had won it pretty easily. Then Trump came by and made massive gains in the coal country of central Pennsylvania and in steel country around Pittsburgh.

You can explain Trump’s 2016 outperformance of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney just by counting four adjacent counties running from former steel country south of Pittsburgh, Fayette County, to Blair County in central Pennsylvania, with Cambria and Somerset in the middle. These counties have far lower incomes and educational attainment than the rest of the state, and they handed Trump his victory: Trump’s excess margin of victory across the four counties, compared to Romney, more than covers Trump’s statewide margin of 44,292 votes in that election. This is Trump country.

Look at Philadelphia’s collar counties, and you see the opposite trend: The upper-middle-class suburbs, especially Chester and Montgomery counties, tacked hard toward the Democrats.

More here.

In “Hell Cats vs. Hegseth: Meet the military women who are fighting to win purple districts for the Democrats and put the defense secretary on notice,” Joan Walsh writes at The Nation: “In 2018, they called themselves “the Badasses”—a cadre of female national-security and military veterans running for Congress as Democrats, in what turned out to be a wave of anti–Donald Trump victories and a landslide for women candidates. All five—Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, both ex–CIA officers; New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Elaine Luria, both ex–Navy officers; and Pennsylvania’s Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran—won their contests in purple districts that year. They emerged as an effective force of center-leaning liberals that challenged Trump and then helped President Joe Biden enact his social-welfare and infrastructure agenda. In 2024, Slotkin was elected to the Senate, and in 2025, Spanberger and Sherrill won landslide victories to become the governors of their states. Only Luria lost her seat, in 2022; she’s running again this year and has a good chance to take it back…In 2026, their counterparts are the “Hell Cats,” four female Democratic military veterans seeking to follow the Badasses’ battle plan to win congressional seats in purple districts. They are Arizona’s JoAnna Mendoza, a retired Marine challenging Representative Juan Ciscomani; New Jersey’s Rebecca Bennett, a Navy pilot officer taking on Representative Thomas Kean; and Maura Sullivan, a New Hampshire Marine looking to replace Representative Chris Pappas, who is running for an open Senate seat. There’s also Cait Conley, a West Point graduate, former National Security Council official, and Army veteran with six tours overseas and three Bronze Stars, who is up against New York’s Hudson Valley Representative Mike Lawler in one of the only three districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024 that is still held by a Republican. They could be key to the Democratic Party assuming control of the House in 2027, since it will need just three seats to flip the chamber.” More here.

An excerpt from “The Bankruptcy of the Democrats’ Elvis Presley Approach to Immigration” by Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot:

Of course, there is much not to like about how ICE has gone about their business, all of which has been copiously documented. This has been red meat to those sectors of blue America and their political representatives whose revealed preference is not to deport anyone.

The ICE/interior enforcement issue hits the Daily Double for the “In This House, We Believe” crowd. No human is illegal. Check. Kindness is everything. Check. These may be utterly useless as guides to effective, sustainable immigration policy but they sure do get the juices flowing.

That’s why, from Los Angles to Minneapolis, Democratic activists have felt completely justified in interfering with ICE activities and Democratic politicians in refusing to cooperate with a duly constituted federal law enforcement agency. And that’s why, especially with the tragic recent death of Renee Good, calls of “Abolish ICE!” are beginning to ring out across wide sectors of the Democratic Party. There is no good ICE, only bad ICE. There is no legitimate ICE, only illegitimate ICE.

This is the logical terminus of an attitude that starts with no human being is illegal and kindness is everything. Since ICE’s remit is that illegal immigrants are, in fact, illegal and that the law must be followed, even if the outcome is not particularly kind, it only makes sense to get rid of the agency.

This is a terrible idea in so many different ways. As a very useful new memo from the reform Democratic group Searchlight points out:

[S]aying you want to “Abolish ICE”…means that you support getting rid of the agency responsible for enforcing immigration and customs laws, creating a lawless system where people who enter the country illegally can stay here indefinitely, leaving no agency charged with finding and removing them. This will, inevitably, incentivize others to come to the United States illegally. “Abolish ICE” is not some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement, or to change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers. It’s advocating for an extreme.

Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE…[W]e will always need a federal agency charged with deporting people who are in the United States illegally.

That’s clearly correct as a matter of policy. Democrats need to reflect that in how they talk about ICE or the momentum will continue to shift toward those in the party who simply want to get rid of the agency entirely.

And that would be a disaster. The reasonable—and popular—desire to reform ICE practices would inevitably be subsumed in a contentious debate about abolishing the agency. This is not likely to turn out well for the Democrats despite the solid basis in public opinion for some reform and pullback of ICE activities. Abolishing ICE will likely never be generally popular, despite its sky-high popularity with Democrats where there has been a recent spike in support.

Instead, as the Searchlight memo points out, Democrats will be setting themselves up for a rerun of the “Defund the Police” debacle, also driven by a viral incident (and also in Minneapolis!). A maximalist demand like “Abolish ICE” will serve only to signal a lack of Democratic commitment to immigration enforcement, just as defund the police signaled a lack of Democratic commitment to public safety. This is highly undesirable both for the Democrats politically and for the general cause of reforming ICE practices.

Trump’s border crackdowns in his first administration. Seizing on some well-publicized excesses, Democrats pilloried Trump for being cruel and inhumane and promised to be different. And they were! They were kind and humane—and also completely ineffective at controlling the border and preventing abuse of the asylum system once they got back in power, producing the huge wave of illegal and irregular immigration that discredited the Democrats and helped Trump win the 2024 election….

Democrats instead need to get beyond mindless slogans like “Abolish ICE” and blanket opposition to everything ICE does and embrace what I have termed immigration realism. That approach means taking on board the following realities of immigration into this rich country of ours:

1. Many more people want to come to a rich country like the United States than an orderly immigration system can allow.
2. Therefore, many people are willing to break the laws of our country to gain entry.
3. If you do not enforce the law, you will get more law-breakers and therefore more illegal immigrants.
4. If you provide procedural loopholes to gain entry into the country (e.g., by claiming asylum), many people will abuse these loopholes.
5. Once these illegal and irregular immigrants gain entry to the country, they will seek to stay indefinitely regardless of their immigration status.
6. If interior immigration enforcement is lax, such that these illegal and irregular immigrants do mostly get to stay forever, that provides a tremendous incentive for others to try to gain entry to the country via the same means.
7. If you provide benefits and dispensations to all immigrants in the country, regardless of their immigration status, this further incentivizes aspiring immigrants to gain entry to the country by any means necessary.
8. Tolerance of flagrant law-breaking on a mass scale contributes to a sense of social disorder and loss of control among a country’s citizens, who believe a nation’s borders are meaningful and that the welfare of a nation’s citizens should come first.
9. There is, in fact, such a thing as too much immigration, particularly low-skill immigration, and negative effects on communities and workers are real, not just in the imaginations of xenophobes.

10. If more immigration is desired by parties or policymakers, from whichever countries and at whatever skill levels, then immigration should be regular, legal immigration and approved by the American people through the democratic process. Backdooring mass immigration over the wishes of voters because it is “kind” or “reflects our values” or is deemed “economically necessary” leads inevitably to backlash. Wheelbarrows full of econometric studies on immigration’s aggregate benefits will not save you.

Obviously, the current Democratic vogue for treating all ICE activities as illegitimate and susceptibility to dumb maximalist slogans like “Abolish ICE” points them in precisely the wrong direction for dealing with the thorny and complex realities of the immigration issue. They’re just setting themselves up for future failure.

In short, it’s time to stop coddling the “In This House, We Believe” crowd and adopt a serious, grown-up approach to immigration and immigrants…

More here.

From “Contrarian Calls To Action: A how-to guide for making a difference for democracy” by Tim Dickinson, Sierra Stone and Morgan Copeland at The Contrarian:

Democracy is not a spectator sport. Whether you want to exercise your right to vote, join a protest, call your congressperson, run for office, or keep tabs on the week’s hottest issues and protests, The Contrarian has you covered.

Here are our top suggestions for getting involved in the days ahead. These are heated times; we encourage non-violent and lawful activism.

Counter ICE

• Contact your members of Congress to demand a full, transparent investigation into the killing of Renee Good by an immigration agent in Minneapolis. Include calls for justice and accountability. (Find resources to connect you with your legislators below)

• Demand a fight over Homeland Security funding. Democrats such as Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are leading efforts to slash the mass-deportation budget, vowing “not one dime” for Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. Department of Homeland Security funding is part of budget negotiations that must be completed before January 30. Democrats have rare leverage to slash ICE spending or at least impose meaningful reforms, including unmasking federal agents. But some in the party may be looking to duck another showdown and could use your encouragement. Watch our own how-to video here.

• Support the impeachment of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. In the wake of ICE’s deadly shooting, Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL) has called for Noem’s removal, alleging “obstruction of Congress,” “violation of public trust,” and “self dealing.” With more than 50 House Democrats cosponsoring the impeachment, you have an opportunity to thank your lawmakers or encourage others to get on board.

• Help targeted community members protect themselves from ICE. When federal agents are out in force, many immigrants and citizens of color alike are afraid to leave their homes. Families in Minneapolis (and before them in Chicago and elsewhere) have been demonstrating how to show solidarity:

• Distribute know-your-rights cards to help inform neighbors of their constitutional protections regardless of immigration status.

• Hand out whistles to blow if deportation agents are spotted in your neighborhood. (Honking your car horn works, too.)

• Organize carpools for the children of affected parents or offer to do a grocery run or other essential errands.

• Create volunteer teams to monitor neighborhoods near schools and bus stops to ensure it’s clear for kids to move about.

• Record interactions between federal agents with community members and distribute evidence of abuses widely on social platforms and to the media.

Defend the Fed

• Pressure lawmakers to stand up for the independence of the Federal Reserve. The Trump Justice Department has opened an investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell, ostensibly over renovations to Fed offices. Powell released an extraordinary video calling the probe a “pretext” meant to intimidate him into taking Trump’s orders on interest rates. The issue is creating a wedge in the GOP that can be exploited. Top Republican senators, including like Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and banking chair Thom Tillis (R-NC) are expressing their disapproval of DOJ’s overreach, and even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he was “unhappy” with the investigation.

Honor MLK

• To honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr. on the January 19 federal holiday, search Mobilize.us for an event or google for an MLK Day of Service volunteer opportunity near you.

Upcoming Protests

More here.

From “The Affordability Crisis Is Here, and It’s Hitting the Working Class the Hardest” by Angela Hanks and Julie Margetta Morgan at from the Century Foundation, via Ms.:

While President Trump dismisses the financial squeeze millions of Americans are facing as a “hoax,” families are being forced to make impossible tradeoffs every day to put food on the table. The facts are clear: The affordability crisis is here, and it’s hitting working-class families the hardest.

• One in three Americans skipped a meal to save money. (Up from one in four in our June survey.)
• Nearly three in 10 delayed or went without medical care due to cost.
• Roughly half tapped into their savings to meet daily expenses.
• More than eight in 10 think prices will continue to climb under Trump.

A new survey of 1,426 registered voters, conducted by GQR on behalf of The Century Foundation (TCF), provides fresh evidence of the extent to which families are struggling in President Trump’s economy. While financial insecurity is widespread, younger Americans, people of color and women are disproportionately suffering and increasingly forced to make difficult tradeoffs—from skipping medical care and meals to relying on payday loans and cash advances.

TCF’s findings also shed new light on the distinct challenges facing working-class Americans—a group that backed Trump in large numbers in 2024, but today experience a markedly different, harsher economy than their college-educated peers. Working-class voters feel the pain of Trump’s inflationary decisions most acutely and are more likely to depend on risky, high-cost financial products such as payday loans to bridge the gap between their wages and rising expenses. Lastly, Americans of all backgrounds overwhelmingly support policies that put money back in families’ pockets and curb the influence of corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

This report highlights three core findings from the survey:

• Americans increasingly cannot afford the basic building blocks of a healthy, stable life. Roughly three in 10 voters delayed or skipped medical care in the past year due to cost, while nearly two-thirds switched to cheaper groceries or bought less food altogether. About half tapped into their savings to cover everyday expenses.
• Working-class Americans live in a substantially harsher economy—and they feel the strain of worsening economic conditions more acutely in their lives. Those without degrees are roughly twice as likely to skip medication or a meal, and they are also more likely to fall behind on bills, carry debt and turn to risky payment tools to make ends meet.
• Voters across demographic groups believe corporations and the wealthy hold too much power, and they overwhelmingly support policies that put money in the hands of working people. Large shares also want the government to take decisive action to limit the influence of corporations.

As families struggle with rising costs and paychecks that fail to keep pace, Trump and Republicans in Congress are advancing policies that will further hurt household finances. In fact, our findings here likely understate the true scale of Americans’ economic insecurity, given the survey was conducted in October, before the full impacts of massive health care price hikes set in for some 250 million people—changes that will push even more families to skip meals, delay medical care and take on risky debt. In a sign of just how salient cost-of-living concerns are for voters, Democratic candidates from New York City to Virginia to New Jersey won competitive elections in November by centering affordability issues at every stage of their campaigns.

More here.

The following article, “The Future of the Left in the 21st Century: (Part Three)” by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

This is the final part of a three-part series on the future of the left in the 21^st century (the first part is here and the second part is here). My basic thesis is that the left’s project in the first quarter of the 21^st century has failed and that a left project for the second quarter of this century must be based on core principles that break with the failures of the last 25 years.

Those principles must be based on the fundamental fact that the left has lost touch with baseline realities of how to reach ordinary working-class voters, what policies could actually deliver what these voters want and what kind of politics accords with these voters’ common sense rather than the biases of their professional-class base. They should provide a drastic course-correction toward realism to give the left a serious chance of decisively defeating right populism and achieving the good society they claim they are committed to.

In the first part of this series, I discussed two such principles: energy realism andgrowth realism. In the second part, I discussed two more principles, governance realism and immigration realism. In this concluding installment of this series, I will discuss three final principles: merit, biology, and patriotic realism.

Merit realism. The quintessential moral commitment of the 20^th century left was to make American society truly colorblind. It was unfair and egregious that racial discrimination could truncate the life chances of black people and visit misery upon them. Therefore, the left advocated and marched for ending discrimination and unequal opportunity. They won the argument, in the process pulling the entire Democratic Party in their direction. Not only was legislation passed to make such discrimination illegal but anti-discrimination and equal opportunity became as close to consensual beliefs as you can get in America.

Americans today believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a 2022 University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” That view elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public.

Similarly, a 2023 Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what Americans deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, it should be noted, equal outcomes.

Read more…

From “What Americans Really Think About Trump’s Venezuela Gambit: New polling offers a revealing look into shifting U.S. public opinion” by Christina Lu at Foreign Policy:

Even as U.S. President Donald Trump hails the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela and ousting of the country’s president as “amazing,” new polling suggests that Americans remain deeply divided over the move.

Prior to last weekend’s operation, polling suggested that Americans were largely against any U.S. military action in Venezuela. A Quinnipiac University poll in December, for example, found that about 63 percent of respondents expressed opposition, while a whopping 70 percent said the same in a CBS News/YouGov survey from November.

But Americans are more evenly split in their approval and disapproval of this weekend’s developments, according to new polling published by Reuters/Ipsos on Monday. The poll, which was conducted on Jan. 4 and 5 and surveyed more than 1,200 adults nationwide, offers an illuminating look into how the American public views the controversial military operation that has come to dominate much of the world’s attention.

World leaders, it turns out, aren’t the only ones with mixed reactions to the U.S. attack. The poll’s findings suggest that the American public also harbors a wide range of views, with no one reaction clearly on top. What is clear, however, is a wariness that the White House will become too deeply mired in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.

“They don’t want to get too involved. They don’t want U.S. troops in Venezuela,” said Alec Tyson, a lead pollster and senior vice president at Ipsos Public Affairs, which conducted the polling.

“That presents really a narrow path here for the administration, where Americans are open to—or perhaps hoping for—some positive outcomes, but they’re very cautious about getting too involved,” he added.

That challenge is reflected in the data: 33 percent of the survey’s respondents approved of the U.S. military action, almost evenly matching the 34 percent of respondents who disapproved. There’s also a deep sense of uncertainty; 32 percent of people said they were not sure how to feel.

Public sentiment is even more sharply fractured along partisan lines. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, for example, backed Trump’s operation. The same amount of Democrats opposed it.

More here.

The following article stub for, “Are There Green Shoots of a ‘Post-Woke’ Left?” by Justin Vassallo, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

In the year since Trump’s reelection, there has been an outpouring of commentary on the confused state of the Democrats but also the disarray of the political left more broadly. One could make the case, as Ruy Teixeira has for TLP, that the modern left, after a brief resurgence in the 2010s following the Great Recession, has hit its nadir due to an excess of cultural radicalism. Another perspective, offered variously by John B. Judis and Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara, counters that despite recent setbacks, the left enjoys more relevance and soft support than it has in several decades.

There is a good case to be made that the bleak prognosis for the American left is overstated. Public trust in political institutions is in free fall in America and across the West, to the presumed benefit of MAGA and “anti-establishment” right-wing populists elsewhere. Yet nearly forty percent of Americans hold a favorable view of socialism—a number that was, ironically, hardly conceivable sixty years ago when Cold War America, though in the birth pangs of its “Second Reconstruction,” was otherwise much more social democratic than it is today. Evidently, more than festering consumer angst over high prices for groceries, concerts, and sporting events is at play here.

In fact, there are indications that the green shoots of a “post-woke” left are already emerging, sometimes far from where the left typically predominates. How this left is construed in the public mind, and whether we can truly deem it as properly of the left in a macro-historical sense, will depend in large part on the ability of insurgents to draw on America’s egalitarian political traditions, in speech and gestures unimpeded by a progressive intelligentsia consumed with America’s sins. Indeed, its ability to flourish will require a studied independence from the repertoire and sectarianism that has characterized the left in the last decade. The central problem for the left as it is presently constituted—or at least the one recognized by friend and foe alike as defining the alternative to right-populism and “zombie neoliberalism”—is that it has heretofore fettered the growth of a flexible oppositional politics, predicated on restoring positive government and the associative power of common people, in the regions the Democrats have abandoned, thus precluding the very realignment in the party system the left professes to seek.

Before addressing the left’s prospects and challenges, it is worth elaborating on what the left as a force engaged in electoral politics means in the present context. Granting that there is no monolithic left in America (or anywhere really), there are two main factions with considerable overlap that have defined what it means to be on the democratic left and which, when push comes to shove, duly back the Democrats in most elections. To some, these strands might be self-evident or not wholly distinct. People’s beliefs and judgments of effective politics change over time, even when they don’t adopt an entirely different outlook on power, rights, and responsibilities. Still, the fact that these strands have contributed profoundly to how we interpret the possibilities for American politics, while fundamentally failing to prevent the return of what they abhor, merits review.

More here.

From “What My Party Needs to Do: To win again, we need to speak to voters about the ideas that drew me to the party in the first place: opportunity, security, and justice,” by U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas:

“When did Democrats stop caring about working people?”

I hear that question a lot from Delawareans—nurses and cops, dental hygienists and mechanics. I also heard it plenty in 2024 as I campaigned for Kamala Harris and Senate Democrats. Elected Democrats—me included—still see ourselves as fighting hard for the middle class, protecting the rights of workers, and trying to make life easier for working families. These are the people who are on our minds when we write bills and take votes. But when those same people look at us, they don’t feel that we care about them or their needs. We lost an election in 2024, but more than that, we’ve lost Americans’ trust.

Little more than a year later, the luster is coming off President Trump thanks to his unfulfilled promises and his assault on our rights and Constitution. His approval rating, alongside that of Republicans in Congress, has fallen sharply, and this summer he rammed through one of the least popular pieces of legislation in modern American history. Even so, Americans still trust Republicans more than Democrats on most of the issues that matter, from the economy to safety.

Democrats need to stop telling Americans how to be and what to feel and believe. Instead, we need to listen. Then we need to solve the problems they’ve shared with us. In the last few years, it’s not just our message that was wrong—it was some of our policies, too. People didn’t recognize the impacts of the bills we wrote and the votes we took. That’s why Americans don’t believe us when we preach at them from auditorium stages, cable news desks, and social media posts.

We have to get back to the values and ideas that draw people to be Democrats to begin with.

I would know because they’re what drew me to the party. I didn’t begin my political life as a Democrat. My parents were Republicans, and I was raised on the idea that if you worked hard, you could attain the American dream the way my family had. In college, I helped found the Amherst College Republicans. My freshman summer, I interned with Senator Bill Roth, a Delaware Republican.

It was a wealthy, white bubble, and by my junior year, I realized I had to experience something from the world beyond it. So I decided to study abroad at the University of Nairobi.

In Kenya, I experienced what I came to think of as radical hospitality. I stayed with people who, although enduring terrible material circumstances, were sustained by their faith and family—and who welcomed strangers in openhearted ways I’d never seen in this country. They showed me a kind of worship I hadn’t experienced before either. I grew up going to Red Clay Creek Presbyterian Church, a suburban, mostly prosperous, and mostly white church in Wilmington, Delaware, where, although the sermons were moving and the choir compelling, there was a reserved determination to the services. Now, half a world away, I was at lively, joyful, four-hour church services filled with music and with people truly relying on the hope they gained through worship to get them through hard days.

More here.

At The Liberal Patriot, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira and Michael Baharaeen plug a much-discussed article by Jacob Savage in Compact:

“The Lost Generation,” by Jacob Savage. Savage’s article on millennial generation white men in Compact has gone viral, and deservedly so. His data-packed article makes the following case:

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall….

Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white male millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and resentments. To a man, they insisted on anonymity. There were frenzied pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy…

Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting. We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its optimism in the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.

“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white millennial men have had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave liberal America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me. “I don’t want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone says, this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”

Savage makes a compelling argument, backed up by a trove of statistics. A must-read whether you’re initially sympathetic or not to his position. It will make you think.