On Tuesday night in New York, there was an earthquake.
You couldn’t measure it on the old Richter Scale, but you could feel it in your bones. It felt new. It felt like a new Democratic Party was declaring itself—and it wasn’t asking permission from anyone to do so.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's hand-picked slate of Democratic Socialists swept the city's congressional primaries. Sitting members of Congress were turned out by insurgents half their age. And a chant went up at the victory rallies, not a name, but three letters, “DSA! DSA! DSA!”
Mayor Mamdani, all of thirty-four years old himself, stood in the middle of it, and he told the crowds that this was not the end of anything, but the beginning of something. Watching Mamdani, it felt like a generation taking the keys away from Granddad.
And I, a 66-year-old man, said to myself, “It’s about time.”
But I want to be honest with you about what I also felt, because I suspect many of you felt some version of it too.
I felt the vertigo of being overtaken.
I like to say that I am a member of what sometimes feels like the most despised community in American politics: the proud center-left.
That’s a little theatrical, but only a little. I come out of the old labor, civil-rights, patriotic left—the Hubert Humphrey tradition, if that name still means anything to anyone under sixty. I believe in unions, public purpose, service to community and nation, American pluralism, social insurance for all who need support, civil rights, American power when used wisely, and the idea that democracy is not just the process by which we vote for candidates, but a moral inheritance that we must defend.
The left I grew up loving was the left of the labor hall and the civil rights coalition; of solidarity with the migrant farm worker and the ordinary soldier; of a patriotism that constantly pushed the country into keeping its promises. It took prayer seriously and stood for the national anthem. That left was fierce in opposition to the status quo of those years, but it was rooted in the conviction that America is worth fighting for.
I believe it still is, and that is something I recognize and admire in this fast-rising movement in the Democratic Party—the Mamdani movement, you might call it. They want to make our country better, for all of us.
This movement is answering a real failure, and the failure is ours.
A generation of Americans cannot find an apartment they can afford in the cities their parents built, or a home in the towns they grew up in. The cost of an ordinary life—rent, health care, a child or more—has gone far beyond the reach of the people who do the actual work of the country now.
My political kind had decades to address this and did not. The young organizers knocking on doors in Queens did not invent the anger that fuels so much of this movement. It was already there, behind those doors and so many others, lying out in the street where we passed it by. The anger in this movement is right and proper. But there is also hope in the eyes of those door-knockers in Queens—because the young Americans driving this movement know it’s their turn now, and no old guard, no establishment, no worn-out rhetoric or musty political customs are going to stop them.
And it’s that demographic fact that many older Americans find frightening. Maybe it’s just Mamdani’s charisma and skill, they might tell themselves. Maybe it’s just the latest fad for these kids. Maybe the anger will die down.
To dismiss this movement as merely a fever, a fashion, a children's crusade, is to commit the oldest sin of a tired establishment: mistaking your own exhaustion for wisdom.
And yet.
A kind of permission in the air, the loosening of a taboo.
On October 7, 2023, hours after one of the most atrocious acts of terrorism in history, DSA National issued a statement saying it stood in “solidarity with Palestine,” that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime,” and that the attack “was not unprovoked,” while also saying it “unequivocally condemn[s] the killing of all civilians.”
The sequence there matters. A lot. So does the morality. The slaughter of October 7th was not an “attack” in any military or political sense of the word.
“From the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” are common chants in this movement. Those are phrases that contemplate and call for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Given the history of the last 78 years (to say nothing of the last 3000 years), the people of Israel are not crazy to believe that those calls are not merely about political arrangements.
I know many of my friends will disagree with me on these points, and some may simply unsubscribe and move on. But before you do, let me give you a bit more of how I understand the beautiful, tormented land of Israel and Palestine.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in that region. I am not by any means an expert, just an ordinary journalist, one witness to many of the events that shaped the present moment.
I condemn the actions of Israel towards the Palestinians across decades.
The stealing of Palestinian land meant under international law for a Palestinian state. The brutalization of the Palestinian people on a daily basis. The rising racism in Israel against Palestinians. And, emphatically, Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
A few days ago, reacting to a poll which showed that for the first time in two decades, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis, I posted this on X:
So: I believe there should be a Palestinian state—now—in accordance with UN Resolutions 242, 338, 1397.
My whole adult life I've held the same attitude about the Middle East that most Americans once held: A bedrock commitment to self-determination for peoples, in the mainstream Jeffersonian/Wilsonian tradition.
It is the principle that a distinct people has the right to freely determine their political status and pursue their own destiny in the world.
Israel and Palestine.
I am committed to this approach because I believe it is in the interests of the United States and remains squarely in the best traditions of our own Revolution and the best of our foreign policy.
The hardest freedom we have.
It’s not the freedom to speak—that one is loud and cheap and everywhere. The hardest freedom is the freedom to tell your friends when you believe they are wrong, to stay loyal to the truth instead of the team, to love a movement enough to tell it the thing it does not want to hear.
So let us watch this new movement rising in the Democratic Party with a glad heart and open eyes. Cheer what is brave in it. Name what is poisonous in it. Refuse anyone, on any side, who tells you that loving your country, or your cause, requires you to stop seeing.
That act of witness is not just the job of a journalist. It is the citizen's whole vocation, and in every generation it belongs to each and every one of us.
—Terry