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“The only way to read this move is in the context of the elections that are coming up. Donald Trump is going to start rolling out a series of maneuvers and tactics to give open and covert support for Flávio Bolsonaro." Rania Khalek , July 17, 2026

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. Incumbent Democrats and establishment candidates are falling across the country to more progressive opponents, most notably in recent primaries in Colorado and New York. What’s driving these surprising results? A host of factors, including more liberal attitudes among Democratic voters, the robust get-out-the vote operations that the Democratic Socialists of America have built in cities like New York, and the party base’s frustration with the Democratic leadership for losing twice to Donald Trump. In the latest edition of Right Now, Julia Azari and Seth Masket, two professors who specialize in studying party politics, break down which factors are most and least important in this recent leftward surge in the party. Azari teaches at Marquette University; Masket at the University of Denver.

Forget the $10,000 tickets and the travel bans and the fact that the last three World Cups have been hosted in Russia, Qatar, and Donald Trump’s United States—FIFA President Gianni Infantino is a romantic. “Football, or soccer, as it is called here, is the world’s universal language,” Infantino said in March. “It’s about hope. It’s about joy. It’s about happiness. It’s about coming together. It’s about uniting the world.”Fair enough. Of course, Infantino said those words at a meeting of Trump’s preposterous Board of Peace—an organization ostensibly created to solve world problems but whose funds are totally controlled by its chairman (none other than Trump himself). He said them shortly before announcing that his organization would spend $50 million building soccer stadiums in war-torn Gaza and concluded his remarks by donning a Trump-branded red “USA” hat.The World Cup has always been political—its second iteration, after all, was hosted in Benito Mussolini’s Italy. But has it ever been more political? Infantino invented the farcical “FIFA Peace Prize” for Trump to assuage his bruised ego after he lost the real one and has joined the president at his inauguration, on state visits overseas, and repeatedly in the Oval Office. He has dutifully gone along with the president’s xenophobic travel bans and said nothing as players and officials have been detained and questioned for hours, invasively searched, and even banned from entering the nation entirely. Trump may have declared victory in the Iran war shortly after the beginning of the tournament—though the war would soon restart—but the Iranian national team wasn’t allowed to stay in the country overnight—it was not even allowed to linger for an hour after playing a game in punishing heat. Football may be about hope and joy and happiness, but it’s also very much about money and power.Russian oligarchs are out—sorry, Roman Abramovich—but American ones are in. Half of the 20 English Premier League teams are owned by residents of the 2026 World Cup’s principal host nation, many of them hedge funds. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all have their own teams in England and France; Qatar’s Paris Saint-Germain has won the European Champions League two years in a row. The rise of petrostate ownership means that oil prices and Middle East conflict can dictate transfer policy and often raise uncomfortable questions. What does it mean when Newcastle United—owned by Saudi Arabia—participates in a Pride event? And what does it tell us when a state-owned Saudi club massively overpays for a Brazilian striker from a Russian team owned by oil and gas giant Gazprom?  And then, of course, there’s the 2026 World Cup, which is occurring in the shadow of Donald Trump’s second, decidedly more sinister and xenophobic administration. Want to understand the world? Soccer is not a bad place to look.That, at least ostensibly, is the premise of Franklin Foer’s 2004 book, How Soccer Explains the World, which was rereleased with a new foreword earlier this year in advance of the 2026 World Cup. It’s a bold and—for an American, at least—presumptuous title, but it’s also a somewhat misleading one. How Soccer Explains the World is really three books in one. It’s a travelogue, in which Foer, a former editor of this magazine, travels the globe to glean lessons from fans and social scientists. It’s a plea to Americans like himself—educated, erudite, indoor kids—to open themselves up to the magic of the world’s game. And it is an attempt to stitch together his reporting into a larger theory about how soccer points to the future of a globalized, interconnected world; he notes the persistence of tribalism, nationalism, and antisemitism and the fact that globalization not only creates its own winners or losers but provides its own incentive structure for corruption. There are parts of this book that very much anticipate a world—and a sport—dominated by oligarchy and greed.Yet travel books—and books about sports, for that matter—are inevitably time capsules and Foer’s feels like one somewhat out of step with his own time, let alone ours. Published a year after the start of the Iraq War, Foer’s rosy look at globalization was already passé as the U.S. took on a more aggressive, hostile, and xenophobic posture to the rest of the world. It arrived at a pivotal moment in the rise of U.S. soccer but also one for the economic trends he describes. It was still possible to be hopeful, albeit faintly so, about globalization in 2004. In 2026, it looks considerably different. The fact that the world’s most popular sport is a reflection of the world is neither a novel nor a particularly interesting observation on its own. Writers have been drawing political conclusions from the sport for roughly as long as it has been played, and the canon of soccer literature is full of works solely or partially devoted to its politics, notably Ryszard Kapuściński’s 1969 The Soccer War, about a conflict between El Salvador and Honduras that started during a World Cup qualifier, and Eduardo Galeano’s 1995 Soccer in Sun and Shadow, a poetic history of the sport.Soccer in Sun and Shadow and How Soccer Explains the World are mainstays on bookstore tables during every World Cup and are both regularly featured on the dozens of lists of books to read before every tournament. They’re strange bedfellows. Indeed, How Soccer Explains the World feels in many ways like a response to Galeano’s book, which decried the commercialization and homogeneity of the post–Cold War, globalized, unipolar world.“These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else,” writes Galeano in his canonical 1995 book. “Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of century, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.” The 1994 World Cup, the first held in the United States, looms over Galeano’s book. Today—especially in contrast to the 2026 tournament—that tournament is largely remembered as a big, beautiful party in which the U.S., newly dominant on the global stage, welcomed the world.For Galeano, soccer is a perfect entry point to a world dominated by U.S. hegemony—culturally, politically, and economically—as well as a vehicle for elucidating Latin American politics. If some of his commentary is inevitably dated, his larger argument—that the sport is inherently polluted by money—still resonates. “The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty,” he writes. “When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.” How Soccer Explains the World accepts the premise—which in 2004 was hard to deny—that globalization was the world’s dominant force and that soccer “seemed much further along in the process of globalization than any other economy on the planet.” Foer, moreover, writes that he expected to find “the power of mega-brands like the clubs Manchester United and Real Madrid, backed by Nike and Adidas … prying fans away from their old allegiances” but instead found something different: Fans, players, and clubs were retaining aspects of their local or national cultures while, in many ways, using globalization to benefit in their own way. Soccer, particularly European soccer, in the early 2000s was in the midst of a remarkable cross-cultural transformation, in which top European clubs routinely featured players from across Europe, South America, and Africa and in which playing styles that once characterized local teams or nationalities were jumping borders and fusing with each other. The era of Dutch “total football” was over. A new era had arrived, in which a Portuguese coach managed a North London team owned by a Russian oligarch with a striker from Cote D’Ivoire. Foer was clearly intoxicated by this transformation. (It was hard not to be—this was the era when I fell in love with the sport in upstate New York, where I attended a high school where I was, to the best of my knowledge, one of two fans of European soccer.) As the book progresses, it increasingly becomes an argument for globalization as soccer or soccer as globalization: that by heralding a more interconnected world, the sport can bring freedom, prosperity, and even peace where it is currently absent.Foer, to his credit, is a reporter—and a very good one—more than a polemicist. And more than two decades on, the most interesting thing about How Soccer Explains the World is the tension between being a travelogue and an airport book. In the former category, it is almost uniformly excellent: Foer is curious and incisive, with a great eye for character and detail. As an outsider—an American and a Jew—he is able to move seamlessly between fans of Glasgow’s Catholic team—Celtic—and its Protestant outfit—Rangers—in a chapter about the persistence of sectarian rivalry in a society that had otherwise “eradicated discrimination in the public sphere.” That chapter mixes first-person reporting among ultras—or hooligans—that is funny and self-effacing with social science and reporting to advance a fairly sophisticated argument. The bitterness and fractiousness of the rivalry, he argues, stem in part from globalization. In Scotland, public discrimination was swept away when American and Japanese firms took over Glasgow’s steel mills and shipyards after the oil shocks of 1973, opening up economic opportunity where it had previously been closed off based on religious affiliation. But in Scotland, discrimination had been ended by globalization rather than a “civil rights movement to sweep away anti-Catholicism,” which meant that it was never truly reckoned with—which is one reason why the Old Firm, even in 2026, is one of Europe’s (and arguably the world’s) most intense rivalries.Of course, Foer also acknowledges the biggest reason for the persistence of that animosity, which is its significance in Northern Ireland, where tensions between Catholics and Protestants are not a pageant to be played out in the soccer field. It’s an acknowledgment he doesn’t shy away from, but it’s one that troubles any rosy picture of globalization. Discrimination and sectarian tension have shown themselves to easily adapt to—and in many cases transcend—economic forces.Many of Foer’s dispatches resist pat conclusions even as Foer puts his thumb on the scale. In a section on the persistent corruption in Brazilian soccer, he argues that nepotism and cronyism have made the sport’s insular culture immune to the benefits of globalization. One on Iranian women’s quest for equality—the movement against the state’s ban on women attending soccer games was then in full force—suggests that a growing hunger for Western brands, thanks in part to pitch-side advertisements during the World Cup, would lead to a movement for economic and cultural liberalism. Chapters on the Balkan Wars and the rise of Silvio Berlusconi point to the sport’s ability to be co-opted by nationalism, oligarchy, and corruption. These forces are everywhere you look in How Soccer Explains the World and, in most cases, they show astonishing malleability in a globalized world.There is, especially in retrospect, also a sense that a devotion to a flawed thesis means Foer is missing the bigger story. The era he is writing about was already over in 2004. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the world was calcifying; the good feelings that—at least in the United States—followed the end of the Cold War were long gone. Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, bought Chelsea in 2003, heralding a new era of financialization and oligarchic control. There was, even then, a strong sense that globalization was being used by oligarchs and elites to entrench their control, that liberalism, free trade, and cultural exchange were not antidotes to tribalism or sectarianism, and that the rosy post–Cold War projections of rising tides lifting all boats were already wrong. Soccer certainly explains that world too. The relative absence of the September 11 attacks is one of the more curious features of How Soccer Explains the World. It isn’t until the very end of the book, in a chapter on the American culture wars, that Foer directly acknowledges the fact that the world was rapidly being remade. After 9/11, he writes “two camps in American politics have clearly emerged.” One, he writes, embraces globalization and global institutions like the U.N. and the WTO, opposes the Iraq War, and shares “cultural values with Europeans.” They “consider themselves to be part of a cosmopolitan culture that transcends national boundaries.” The other believes in “American exceptionalism,” believes the U.S. should ignore international bodies, and believes Europeans are “degraded.” To these people, soccer “isn’t exactly pernicious but it’s a symbol of the U.S. junking its tradition to ‘get with the rest of the world’s program.’”The division largely tracks, though Foer—like many American white soccer fans—largely handwaves or ignores the sizable number of Latino fans of the sport who were present in the U.S. at the time. At least as far as white American culture in the early 2000s was concerned, soccer was European. Some people thought it was good, and some thought it was bad.How Soccer Explains the World wasn’t just aimed at the former. It was aimed at the millions of liberal, cosmopolitan Americans who weren’t interested in the sport. Its publication should be considered a seminal moment in the off-field history of the rise of U.S. soccer. How Soccer Explains the World was the first popular, serious book about the sport written for Americans by an American.What does soccer tell us now? Our world, to be fair, is rather different now than it was in 2004. How Soccer Explains the World was published before Obama, the global financial collapse, and the rise of global autocracy. It was published before Messi, the (near) fall of FIFA, and the emergence of petrostate and hedge fund ownership. Foer acknowledges as much in an excellent new preface included in an edition published for the 2026 World Cup, as he discusses Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle United, private equity goon Todd Boehly’s purchase of Chelsea, and the explosion of transfer fees.When Foer writes that he failed to anticipate “the day when foreign governments would own English soccer clubs,” it’s hard to blame him. Even if one criticized Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea in 2003, as many did, few saw the explosion of transfer fees and the expansion of state-owned clubs coming. Soccer was ahead of the curve, then as now, but it’s a lousy crystal ball.Foer insists, somewhat defensively, that soccer tells us the same thing it did in 2004. “The thesis of the book,” he writes, “was that the global game of soccer was a leading indicator of the future. Soccer was globalization—and capitalism—in its most advanced form. And the nature of both phenomena is their ever-accelerating velocity, their endless churn.”If that is self-serving, it’s also fair. That’s more or less what the reporting in How Soccer Explains the World shows, even if the conclusions Foer draws are often different. Sniffing at the term “late-stage capitalism”—to be fair, it’s not a favorite of mine, either—Foer argues soccer tells a different story. “The logic of business can always be pushed further, into realms once thought off-limits.” Is that a thesis for an airport book? Certainly not in 2004. But it’s hard to argue with now.

Seconds into our phone call, Brian Schweitzer, Montana’s folksy Democratic former governor, launched into an analogy about dirt roads. In Montana, he explained, you drive along a two-lane highway until you wind up on a gravel road, which takes you to a dirt road and eventually a dead end. Schweitzer’s been thinking a lot about dead ends lately—because he believes that’s where independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar is driving Montana’s Democratic Party.Bodnar, a veteran and former University of Montana president who launched his anti-partisan bid in March, is part of a rising Democratic strategy to win Senate seats in red states: Rather than running as Democrats, opposition candidates are filing as independents. The logic makes sense on paper. Roughly three in five Americans have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, whereas what the party in theory stands for—better health care, lowering the cost of living, and the like—remains very popular.When I worked in Montana for now-former Senator Jon Tester’s 2024 campaign, I saw that contrast every day. Voters across the state told me that while they might like Tester’s dirt-farm-populist schtick, they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him because they really hated the Democratic Party. If the sole problem with moderate Democrats in red states is that they’re Democrats, running someone with some left-adjacent views who doesn’t have that unpleasant D next to their name on the ballot seems like a great workaround.Schweitzer, and nearly a dozen other Montana Democrats I spoke with, disagree. The former governor’s main issue with Bodnar is that he thinks the political newcomer has no shot of winning, independent or not. Alani Bankhead, who won the Democratic nomination for Senate last month, has insisted she won’t drop out of the race, despite recent calls from Montana Democratic legislators for either her or Bodnar to exit. Diluting the anti-Republican vote share basically kills any hopes of defeating GOP nominee Kurt Alme. Hence the dead end.But once you reach a dead end, you still have options. Sometimes, you can turn your car around and head toward a two-lane highway. Other times, you don’t see a dead end sign until it’s too late, and plow right through. Bodnar’s campaign is doing the latter with the state Democratic Party. His candidacy is entirely focused on one short-term win—and if what he’s doing becomes the norm, there might be no rescuing the party from the wreckage.Bodnar would probably like Schweitzer’s dirt road allegory because he really wants everyone to know he’s all about the old-school Montana lifestyle. Bodnar’s campaign launch video focuses less on the reason he moved to the Last Best Place in 2017—to head the University of Montana—and more on the “oath” and “prayer” he took as a member of the military. The following few minutes cut between images of Montana’s wilderness, small towns, and Bodnar posing next to animals he recently shot, all with a 1980s electric guitar riff running in the background.Beyond all the Montanan machismo, though, the main thing Bodnar wants his viewers to know is that he’s definitely not a Democrat. Sure, he might be the main opposition to a Republican in a two-party system, but don’t mind that. He tells the viewer that both parties are “failing us” and “to blame” for rising costs and that they all “pit us against each other while they line their own pockets.” “Montanans are an independent people,” he says, and thus “they deserve an independent voice fighting for them.” To drive the point home, his website touts endorsements from noted moderates like former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger.In a recent interview, Bodnar told me he filed as an independent to fight the system that has caused so many people to feel “politically homeless.” “I’m running against a national political system that has stopped showing up in Montana,” he said.Despite what his posturing might suggest, Bodnar is very much a Democrat. His campaign is staffed by a bunch of Democratic ex-Tester consultants, he was previously registered as a Democrat, and he says everything past Democratic candidates in the state have said. Tester himself is fundraising for Bodnar, as is former Democratic Senator Max Baucus, who told me Bodnar is “one of the very very best people” to run for office and a “no brainer” endorsement. The only thing not true blue about Bodnar is his party affiliation on the ballot.Even if his smokescreen isn’t hard to see through, what Bodnar is doing makes sense from a national perspective. The U.S. Senate is so biased in Republicans’ favor that Democrats have to fight for any Senate seat where they can get the slightest foothold, including in places that voted for Donald Trump. But in parts of the country like Montana where Trump has reached almost rock-star status, it’s hard to see a lot of voters suddenly deciding to vote for someone representing the party their president called “human garbage.”It’s a lot easier to imagine some of those same voters being fed up with politics and going with the “plague on both your houses” guy. Operatives tried this approach in Nebraska two years ago, running independent Dan Osborn against Republican Deb Fischer. Osborn lost by seven points, but he made the race competitive in its final weeks and is running again this cycle. Under a basic nationwide cost-benefit analysis, the strategy seems to give Democrats nothing to lose and everything to gain.From a local perspective, though, the downsides are clear. Running as an independent probably gives Bodnar a better shot to win in 2026. But such a decision may as well guarantee no Democrat will be able to win in Montana in 2028, 2030, or further down the road. “It destroys, over time, the Democratic Party,” said Mike Jopek, a former Montana state representative.Jopek’s concern—one shared by a number of Montana political figures and strategists I spoke with—is that Bodnar’s candidacy will kneecap downballot Democrats. Since a Senate race is much higher-profile than, say, a state House race, Bodnar will suck up most of Montana’s political energy and money. If he were a Democrat coordinating with the party, that energy and money would disperse itself across every race on the ballot. As an independent, it all goes to one man, and the rest of the resourceless candidates are left to fend for themselves. Bodnar confirmed this himself, saying while he supports “Montana first” politicians without “blind loyalty to a party,” he isn’t coordinating with any other candidates and his campaign is “focused on our race.”Jopek says this is partly a consequence of a broader trend. Political power and influence in the state, he explained, have shifted from parties to “out of state” consultants and PACs entirely focused on the immediate national ledger, not the health of the Montana Democratic Party in the long run. “Over time, those PACs … they’ve really kind of consolidated the power away from the parties, both on the Democratic and the Republican side, and so they really are starting to gain a lot more influence on how politics plays in Montana,” he said.On the one hand, you can’t totally blame those national players. One seat in the U.S. Senate impacts the immediate future of the country much more than one seat in Montana’s House of Representatives. But small downballot victories are important—especially for a minority party—to achieve bigger wins in the future and build more sustainable political power. They’re how you recruit new candidates, get people excited about volunteering for campaigns, and ultimately make voters on the ground realize Democrats aren’t so bad after all. Republicans understand this. In 2010, the GOP launched its national REDMAP strategy, investing in downballot races that helped to grow ground-level infrastructure, win state legislature seats, and ultimately redraw congressional maps in the party’s favor. The holistic approach is still reaping national benefits today, and the Democrats are still trying to play catch-up.Such long-term thinking is especially essential in Montana, because the state has basically no Democratic infrastructure. In the final weeks of Tester’s campaign, senior staff members offered to pay for anyone around the country to fly to the state to knock doors for the campaign. The campaign even hired me, who grew up around Ivy League professors and lived in D.C., to try to convince voters that I held authentic Montanan populist views. If state Democrats in the past had devoted themselves to ground-level organizing, I’m sure Tester could have found better messengers for his campaign.Baucus, a Bodnar supporter, said he’s seen the same problem. He doesn’t think the state party has “sufficient resources,” “quality candidates,” or “a message that’s really connecting directly with the average voter in the state.” For what it’s worth, the former senator said that’s part of why he endorsed Bodnar: While he wants to help the Democratic Party “get its act together in Montana,” he cares more about electing “the best person to represent the state.”The issue with that logic is that Bodnar’s campaign will only exacerbate the problems Montana Democrats face. If you keep telling voters that being a Democrat sucks, sooner or later they’re going to start believing you. “It’s a shame that they’re trying to fool people like this and weaken the party and taking short term over long term,” said local organizer Andy Boyd. “It’s pretty frustrating to watch.”Bodnar agrees that he’s only focused on the short term—only he doesn’t see that as a problem. He said national Democrats (as well as national Republicans) aren’t “showing up in rural America” and that the two-party system has “stopped working for Montanans.” Bodnar said he just wants to improve conditions for the next generation, even “if that means shaking up the political coalitions in this country.”“This race isn’t about positioning one party or another for long-term electoral success,” he said. “This race is about positioning this country for long-term success, so our kids could grow up in a country that is in a better state than the one that we lived in.”But Bodnar’s long-term vision might be shortsighted too. Though we sometimes think about elections as a horse race, there is an end goal beyond winning: One gets elected to pass policies and actually improve people’s lives. It’s not totally clear that Bodnar would be effective at that part of politics.Bodnar’s campaign website features a collection of policy goals tailored to offend no one. He wants a strong military but more international cooperation, a strict border that also allows for “Montana’s farmers” to get “legal labor,” and improved but still private health care. He hopes to eliminate the national deficit not by doing what the Democrats want (taxing billionaires) or the Republicans want (cutting Social Security). Instead, he “can say what neither party will”: that it’s possible to eliminate the national deficit and still invest in the future simply through “honesty,” whatever that means.When I spoke with Bodnar, he added a bit more specificity to some issues, saying he hopes to bring a renewed focus to “food security” amid an eight-year gap since Congress last passed a farm bill. But he also tried to stay on everyone’s good side on other topics, like saying he wants an “all of the above” approach to energy policy.The first-time candidate has also said he won’t caucus with either political party if elected to the Senate—which, while an easy way to show Montanans he’s truly independent, means he’ll have a hard time getting any committee assignments, and thus won’t have any power. “Is he actually so stupid he thinks he can go to D.C. and get anything done without caucusing with the party?” said Jesse Mullen, the 2024 Democratic nominee for Montana secretary of state.Bodnar said he’ll “negotiate for committees the same way every senator does” and take advantage of his power as just one of 100 votes in a closely divided chamber. But it’s hard to imagine a Democratic or Republican leadership prioritizing him, after he just spent a campaign attacking them, over a member of their own party.In all likelihood, the logistics of how Bodnar would operate as an independent senator won’t wind up being relevant. Bodnar insists he has a path to victory by combining independents with people from every party (including even “members of the Green Party”). But the polls say different: Bodnar consistently trails Republican nominee Kurt Alme by double digits.The past says different too. Bodnar-style centrists are why Montana Democrats keep losing in the first place. Regardless of what think tank studies say, candidates who tout the middle, whether independent or Democrat, haven’t won national elections in Montana, or really any Mountain West states, in nearly a decade. Maybe that has more to do with the Democratic brand than anything else, where voters hate the party so much even independents become guilty by association for running against Republicans. But one can’t fix that brand by spending election after election talking about how much they too hate Democrats. That’s a problem locally, where Republicans dominate every aspect of Montana government, and nationally, where small states overrepresented in the Senate just keep getting redder.Brian Schweitzer, again, turned to a road analogy in explaining the solution to Montana Democrats’ woes: “To run a campaign in Montana, you have to understand that Montana is a small town with a long Main Street.” He said current candidates in Montana, regardless of party label, are “lazy,” not willing to do the hard work of canvassing the entire length of Main Street—the grocery store, the school, the bar—to reintroduce themselves to voters and fix the party’s brand.Only when they walk that street will Democrats win enough local races and build the power necessary to prove people like Bodnar wrong, by enacting progressive policies that people want to see and giving Montanans and Americans alike a reason to support their party. That path might be slow—a long, winding, bumpy dirt road, if you will—but at least it arrives at a rewarding destination. That’s a whole lot better than trying to take a quick short cut and finding yourself at a dead end.

The Supreme Court’s end-of-term blockbuster cascade of decisions marked new heights of the right-wing majority’s lust for power over the other two branches of government, especially Congress; its disdain for the text of laws and the Constitution and their Framers; and its exhuming of doctrinal artifices, long simmering within the conservative legal movement after being beaten back decades ago.But court-watchers have overlooked what may well prove to be the single most radical, atextual, consequential—and, for long-standing liberal programs and constituencies, most catastrophic—decision of the term.This is the June 23 decision in Landor v. Louisiana Dept. of Corrections and Public Safety. Here, the court denied a federal prisoner, Damon Landor, the right to sue prison guards for damages for knowingly violating a federal statute, by forcibly shaving off dreadlocks prescribed by his Rastafarian religious tenets. The court split 6–3 along partisan and ideological lines, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing the majority opinion with no qualifying concurrences. This lockstep unanimity prevailed, although Gorsuch’s radical rationale flouted positions previously joined or penned by four of his conservative colleagues—including himself—as recently as a three-year old 7–2 decision in which all the conservative justices other than Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito joined an opinion for the court written by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. This June, in Landor, Jackson wrote a dissent fiery by even her high-decibel standards, in which the other two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, joined; she excoriated decades of the court’s ever more right-shifting precedents.Media reports on Landor noted its result—that it canceled the ability of inmates in state prisons to enforce in federal court the provisions of a 2000 federal statute requiring states to accommodate inmates’ religious tenets and expressly conferring on them the right to sue and obtain “appropriate relief.”But the greater import of the decision lies not in its result but in its rationale. Justice Gorsuch exhumed a theory first surfaced in an outlier 2001 decision, Westside Mothers v. Havemann, by a Michigan federal district judge, scornfully reversed by a unanimous Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel and a dead letter ever since. In the words of the only published recognition I have found of the earthquake potential of this term’s Landor rationale, professor Steven Vladeck wrote, the “Westside Mothers theory was treated as a long-shot attempt to rewrite the Constitution—one that failed.” This theory is that a federal law implementing Congress’s authority, enumerated in the first sentence of Section 8, Article 1 of the Constitution, to raise and spend funds “for the general welfare of the United States”—is not a law at all but a mere contract offer to potential recipients of federal largesse. As such, the theory goes on, in another leap similarly untethered to constitutional text or discernible logic, individuals cannot sue any nonconsenting state agency or official who violates conditions prescribed in such spending laws—and Congress cannot constitutionally authorize such suits, as a “necessary and proper” means of ensuring compliance with the conditions.For the past century and a half, individual suits have been authorized by a Reconstruction-era statute to redress state officials’ violations of federal law. That statute, widely known as Section 1983, provides that “every person who, under color of law,” deprives any person “of any rights secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.” As noted above, only three years ago the court brushed aside a defendant’s invitation to “reject decades of precedent, and to rewrite Section 1983’s plain text to read ‘laws (unless those laws rest on the Spending Power).’” But on June 23 of this year, five justices joined a decision expounding precisely that constitutional rewrite.  The largest class of victims of this volte-face will be Medicaid beneficiaries. Medicaid (including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP) is the largest public or private health insurance program in the U.S., covering 82 million individuals, 25 percent of non-elderly Americans, three of five nursing home residents, and 40 percent of all births. All in all, we’re talking about $931 billion worth of expenditures in 2024; approximately two-thirds from federal coffers, the remainder from states.  Over the decades since Medicaid was enacted in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, major provisions have been held to “create rights” enforceable via Section 1983. These include the safeguards vindicated in the aforementioned 7–2 2023 Supreme Court decision, that nursing homes not deploy “physical or chemical restraints for convenience or discipline,” nor “transfer or discharge patients [without] advance notice.” Landor’s head-scratching “contract” theory gutting conditional spending laws first reared its head 25 years ago amid an aborted boomlet of challenges to court enforcement of Medicaid conditions.  Medicaid is by no means the only program threatened by this legal theory. Myriad programs vital to millions of Americans deploy the “cooperative federalism” template that structures Medicaid. To name a few such landmark programs: Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars any state or local government, any subunit of which receives federal funds, from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments bars sex discrimination in any entity operating an educational institution or program receiving federal funds—which in practice is every educational institution in the nation.  Most U.S. environmental laws “work through” cooperative federalism arrangements. The Clean Air Act, for example, as described in May 2025 by the Congressional Research Service, “establishes a framework whereby [the Environmental Protection Agency] is responsible for establishing various nationwide standards, and states bear primary responsibility for implementing those standards, including by regulating on a source-by-source basis.” This list is hardly exhaustive. As Justice Thomas noted in dissenting from the court’s 2023 affirmation of individual court enforcement, “other examples, spanning virtually every domain of national and state policy, abound.”And such individual enforcement has long been recognized as essential to rendering federal guarantees effective. The conservative justices purport to disagree. In Gorsuch’s Landor opinion and on prior occasions, they have asserted that when a state violates federally prescribed conditions, “the typical remedy” is not a private enforcement suit “but rather action by the Federal Government to terminate funds to the State.” But that premise is not only factually false, it is transparently disingenuous, as Gorsuch and his savvy conservative colleagues well know. “In practice,” as Jackson’s Landor dissent notes, “[the Department of Health and Human Services] rarely invokes its authority to withhold funding because doing so would inevitably harm the program’s beneficiaries”: the poor, working-, and middle-class Americans who depend on Medicaid for health care. Stripping beneficiaries of their ability to redress state officials’ violations of federally set conditions strips Congress of its most effective—perhaps only effective—tool to ensure that those conditions are not empty paper promises but life-sustaining benefits for individuals and families.However baseless and contorted, this “spending-clause-laws-are-actually-not-laws” theory gives opponents a handy backdoor ploy to kneecap popular programs without provoking the blowback expectable from overt invalidation or repeal. The theory did not spring from nowhere. Indeed, its acceptance was foreshadowed in 2004, in a cryptic concurring opinion by Samuel Alito when he was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Obviously, it has been a bee in his bonnet ever since. Nor was Alito alone. States’ rights devotees had long recognized that, as libertarian Texas law professor Lynn A. Baker spotlighted in 1995, “the greatest threat to state autonomy is, and has long been, Congress’ spending power.” In 2008, after the dust settled from the failed attempt to subvert that power, spending clause expert Samuel Bagenstos, then a Michigan Law School professor and recently general counsel of President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services, spelled out the carnage that would follow, should any such attempt succeed in the future. Applied literally according to its terms, Bagenstos detailed, that construct “would bar Congress from giving a Spending Clause statute preemptive effect, authorizing a private right of action for its violation, and enacting additional laws necessary and proper to carrying it out.” Bagenstos predicted that anti-entitlement ideologues would keep looking for ways to constrain federal conditional spending authority, but would stop short of the Westside Mothers wrecking-ball extreme.  Until this past June, Bagenstos’s forecast seemed on track—though looking back, there were signs the court’s anti–conditional spending members were straining at the bit. Jackson’s 2023 majority opinion held that two Medicaid provisions “do unambiguously create Section 1983-enforceable rights,” and mocked the notion that “1983 contains an implicit carveout for laws that Congress enacts via its spending power.” But Jackson included a nod to conservatives’ oft-repeated riff that, “for Spending Clause legislation, we have recognized that ‘the typical remedy for state noncompliance is not a private cause of action for noncompliance but [termination of] funds to the State.’” In retrospect, for the four conservative colleagues who joined Jackson’s opinion, that boilerplate was deadly serious. More pointedly, Justice Gorsuch added a terse concurrence stating that, though he agreed that the Medicaid provisions before the court constituted “a law,” not a mere “contract,” nevertheless there was an issue “lurking here … not fully developed by the parties,” hence a “question for another day.”  That question, he wrote, was whether the specific “rights-creating” Medicaid provisions enforced by the court were “secured” by the statute, as phrased in Section 1983. In retrospect, that mind-numbing hyper-technical aside was an invitation to conservative litigators to “fully develop” an argument that could in a subsequent case flip Gorsuch’s vote. Unsurprisingly, Gorsuch’s audience got the hint. Two years later, in 2024 they took his “secured by” work-around gimmick back to the court. Seizing this opportunity, the conservative justices, regretting that they had given Jackson too much leeway in Talevski, improvised a wrenching course correction. The new case was Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. Here South Carolina was alleged to have violated a Medicaid provision guaranteeing coverage of patients’ choice of any “qualified” provider, after the state had dropped Planned Parenthood from its list of reimbursable providers. A 6–3 Supreme Court majority threw out the suit. While South Carolina had indeed violated Medicaid’s qualified provider condition, the flipped majority acknowledged, challengers must demonstrate, at a minimum, that a provision “does not just seek to benefit them or serve their interests but ‘clear[ly] and unambiguous[ly]’ gives them individual federal rights.” Then the majority went on to add an additional, startling wrinkle. While other major decisions dating back to 1980 had mandated individual enforcement of spending clause conditions, they wrote, neither those earlier cases nor the Planned Parenthood case before them involved statutory terms as literally “rights-creating” as those at issue in their 2023 grant of individual enforcement authority. Hence, they ruled, all the court’s pre-2023 jurisprudence was irrelevant: “The statutes at issue in Talevski supply the only reliable yardstick against which to measure whether spending-power legislation confers a privately enforceable right.” Jackson angrily dismissed, as a bait-and-switch, this crumpling of her Talevski precedent to its precise facts. “That view,” she thrusted, “distorts beyond recognition” the long-standing test applied in that decision “and strains our precedential holding that [Section] 1983’s unqualified use of the word ‘laws’ means exactly what it says.”  When the next shoe dropped, this past June, Jackson and her two liberal colleagues amplified their perception of betrayal, branding the majority’s “severance of right and remedies a sleight of hand [that] magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized.”To be sure, in his Landor opinion’s conclusion, Gorsuch included some confusing bobs and weaves—perhaps a signal that at least some of the six conservative justices want wiggle room to leave open the option of zagging back from the brink of a scary precipice. Their ambivalence was called out, acidly, in Jackson’s conclusion to her dissent:Today’s decision might well land a serious blow to Congress’ effectiveness. Or it could end up merely a bothersome statutory drafting guide: If Congress adapts its Spending Clause legislation to fit the Court’s newly prescribed formulas—and if the Court lets it do so—then the majority’s robotic importation of contract principles will have little real-world effect.Jackson made clear her bottom line: “Either way, the suggestion that [spending clause] statutes are not ‘law’ on the same level as other pieces of legislation makes little sense.” Will the justices feel obliged to take Jackson’s latter, innocuous option? The answer is up to liberal leaders. Their pundits, advocates, and—especially, politicians—need to step up to the plate, warn the public about the scale of this threat from an imperialist Supreme Court majority, and confront the conservative justices with credible political retribution if they don’t rein themselves in.This is a tall but not insuperable challenge. In the relevant past, against blatant overreach by the Supreme Court’s right, congressional leaders have deployed trenchant critiques and well-crafted reform proposals. These pushback efforts induced dramatic—if temporary—pullbacks by the conservative justices.Two decades ago, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Republican Chair Arlen Specter, used confirmation hearings to grill Supreme Court nominees Roberts and Alito on how conditional spending and other conservative jurists’ made-up gutting stratagems “plucked out of thin air” constituted the “very essence of judicial arbitrariness and activism.” To finesse this fusillade, Roberts went out of his way to denounce multiple right-wing doctrinal favorites, including those marginalizing conditional spending guarantees now revived this term with his assent. Three years ago, facing bipartisan clamor for judicial reform, especially term limits and Supreme Court conflict-of-interest safeguards, the conservative justices, in particular Roberts, startled observers by backpedaling from prior opposition to iconic liberal enactments and decisions. Roberts repudiated an election-canceling theory he had endorsed eight years prior—that the Constitution confers exclusive, uncheckable power on state legislatures to select presidential electors, free from constraint by state constitutions, judges, governors, or voters. For a 6–3 majority, Roberts reaffirmed a 2015 decision in tension with that antidemocratic theory, a 5–4 decision to which he had written a dissent; most telling, eight years later, he embraced that decision’s “core principle: redistricting is a legislative function … with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the governor’s veto.”Even more “surprising” was, as noted by liberal columnist Jonathan Chait, a 5–4 majority’s “expansive” interpretation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, or VRA. Roberts, infamous for career-long bitter hostility to the VRA, lauded that act for “creating stringent new remedies attempting to forever banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting.” In 2023, the court adopted a code of ethics substantially identical to that covering the rest of the federal judiciary. Although the code lacked a meaningful enforcement mechanism, for these life-tenured justices—who for decades had spurned a code of conduct as unnecessary, useless, and unworkable—“this abrupt 180-degree about-face was grudging surrender to reformers’ superior political momentum,” as I wrote at the time.Not coincidentally, that same term saw the 7–2 Talevski decision that appeared to repudiate the very doctrine gutting court enforcement of conditional spending protections revived this term. The court’s overreach this past term can likewise be turned back. Indeed, the reactionary justices’ palpable arrogance and indifference to law, legal logic, their own recent precedents, and the needs of virtually all Americans, present opportunity no less than challenge. But this time, liberals and rule-of-law-faithful independents and Republicans will have to mobilize support to make real reform, with teeth, a credible political priority and stick with it. In this article, there isn’t enough space to write the playbook for what needs to happen from here. But for starters:Spotlight the dire threat the justices’ rightward tack poses to priority needs of millions of individuals and families who to date have paid little or no attention to the court’s machinations.Spell out the impact on ordinary people’s budgets and lives of gutting vital programs, especially Medicaid, at a time when reactionary politicians, with assistance from their judicial allies, are redistributing wealth upward to billionaires.Retail the liberal justices’ searing sound-bite critiques, such as Justice Kagan’s 2023 riposte to “we-are-not-a bunch-of-partisan-hacks” protestations by Amy Coney Barrett and Roberts. To that, Kagan shot back, “The court shouldn’t be inserting itself into every hot button issue in a way that reflects one set of political views over another.”  Call out the reactionary justices—and brand them “reactionary,” not “conservative”—for playing fast and loose with what the Constitution and laws actually say, with the democratic republic their architects designed, with the justices’ own precedents, and for breaking their promises, in particular Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation commitments noted above, which he now cynically sidelines as mere job interview pretense.Evidently, the justices on the court’s right are riding high on what they seem to regard as a de facto equivalent of the immunity they awarded presidents in 2024. They would do well to take on board the admonition voiced a half-century ago by the revered Justice Robert H. Jackson, “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” If liberals and rule-of-law-treasuring allies puncture the public’s perception of Supreme Court infallibility, they can pare back its finality. 

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 14 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic, and I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Our guests today are two of my favorite political scientists. Julia Azari is a professor at Marquette University. Seth Masket is at the University of Denver. They’re both experts on political parties and how political parties work. And so I want to talk to them about what’s happening in the Democratic Party right now. So Julia and Seth, welcome.Seth Masket: Thank you.Bacon: So what I want to talk about is—Seth lives in Colorado, so he experienced the unseating of an incumbent House member just recently here, and some primaries that were unexpected, in that both the incumbent senators did fairly poorly, and Diana DeGette obviously lost. And we had the New York races where the three Zohran-endorsed candidates won. And you’ve had some other races around the country where the more left-wing, progressive, socialist—pick your term here—candidates are winning. We’re all looking at Michigan, where that Senate race is closer than I would have guessed a couple years ago, let’s say.So let’s jump into the factors here. I’m going to ask you about four or five different things that might be going on, and ask you if they’re a big factor, a medium factor, or not a factor at all, or not really that important to what the story is.So I’ll start with ideology. Is the average Democratic voter becoming more progressive, more left-wing? Particularly on issues of Israel, Palestine, and on maybe issues of billionaires and wealth in politics—which are the two issues where I perceive some change in terms of ideology among Democratic voters. But I’m just curious, when you look at these primary results, do you think it’s about the ideology of Democratic voters moving left? And I’ll start with Seth.Masket: It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Generally, I don’t want to overstate the ideological nature of the American electorate, which is usually not huge, but there is something motivating this. And I have this impression that it’s not necessarily that a lot more people are becoming socialist, but rather that fewer people are afraid of socialism.A lot of the current political system was designed by people who grew up during the Cold War and associate socialism with the Soviet Union and with the fear of war and military expansion and repression. And the Cold War’s been over for almost forty years. And so this newer generation coming into politics, they don’t have those associations. They don’t have those fears. They’re more open to the idea that this could solve some pretty overt economic problems we’re having right now, and they just find the whole concept less toxic.Bacon: Julia?Julia Azari: Yeah. So I think all that’s generally right. I think there’s two things I would maybe add there about ideology. I forgot what our scale is for—Bacon: So the scale is: is it a big factor, a medium factor, or not really a factor at all? So it’s a three-point scale. And we’ll press Seth on an answer afterward, but I didn’t get his. But anyway, what were you saying, Julia?Azari: I think put it to high, medium.Bacon: Yeah, OK. It’s a three-point scale. High, medium, low.Azari: Yeah. I’ll give it like a two and a half. Sorry, this is what happens with political scientists. But OK, so two things.One is the socialist label. So I think that’s right, that the label’s not as toxic among people who were born after the Cold War ended. But also, what’s interesting to me is that what the label indicated in past political conversations was, this person wants a huge government takeover—and you know what it actually is, right? The government and the people own the means of production. That’s not actually the agenda, as I understand it. For the Democratic socialists, the actual agenda sounds much more like some combination of the New Deal Democratic Party in the ‘40s and your average Labor Party in Europe. It’s not really radical reimagining of the structure of the economy. It’s just more social supports, basically. So I think that’s part of the story.The other piece—I think when you lay it out the way you’ve laid it out, the socialism, the economic agenda, the millionaires and billionaires, the Gaza issue—it’s a new way of thinking about how to assemble a Democratic coalition. So it’s not overestimating the overall ideology of the American electorate, and that everybody understands every issue and understands how they bundle together, but that there may be pockets of the population for whom these issues are very important.And I think that’s how to understand the Gaza issue. Most people in the US are not paying attention to foreign policy and don’t prioritize those issues. But for a small subset of people, they’re really looking for a politician to address concerns that they’ve had for a long time and haven’t seen in the electorate. And so this is entrepreneurship of mobilizing a new coalition in a new way, and bringing them into conversation with people who are joining the electorate through age—what do you call it—cohort replacement. I think that’s the story. So I think if we understand it as different pieces, as opposed to one overarching ideology, that gives us more purchase.Bacon: So to pin you down, is it a big factor, a medium factor, or a small factor, the ideology part? Either one of you can answer.Masket: Sorry. I had high medium.Bacon: You said high medium. OK. What did you say, Julia?Azari: I think I also said two and a half, but I’m uncomfortable with the word ideology.Bacon: OK. All right. High medium, I like that. OK.Second factor would be what I’m going to call frustration with the Democratic Party, the Democratic establishment—a term I don’t always love. But anyway, a general sense that the Democratic Party screwed up by running Biden in 2024 when he was too old, and then did not fight enough against Trump early last year, had to be pushed to resist and didn’t do enough. The votes for various Trump Cabinet members that various senators voted for. That kind of frustration with the DC leadership, Congress overall. Is that a high factor? Talk about that, and then do the scale again—Julia, this time.Azari: OK. So I guess, like you, I’m really skeptical of the establishment term, and I have a really unsatisfying non-answer, because I think it’s omnipresent, and I think it’s usually framed backwards. Whoever is doing well is now the anti-establishment candidate. I’m thinking back to 2008 and Barack Obama.I do think that frustration is probably real among people who are highly engaged, and potentially the people that are voting in these primaries—especially the frustration with the procedure in 2024. And Seth and I have done some actual survey work on this, and I asked open-ended questions, and people definitely brought that up, and also the age factor and the gerontocracy.Bacon: Brought up what, exactly?Azari: Specifically, they brought up the procedure, or lack of one, in 2024.Bacon: The lack of procedure to do what?Azari: To nominate Kamala Harris.Bacon: OK. So the picking of Harris without a vote of any kind. Without a formal—OK.Azari: Yeah. And I think this also goes back to work in political psychology about losing. I think there’s a sense that the Democratic establishment is synonymous with losing, and people will do all sorts of things in their mind to avoid that feeling. So in one way, it’s really important, but in another way, I don’t know that it distinguishes it from other types of developments that we’ve seen in the past. Does that make sense? So it’s either a one or a three, not a two. You’re never inviting me on again.Bacon: Seth, go ahead.Masket: Yeah. I’m going to give this a high importance. And in some ways this is bigger than ideology, as far as I could tell, because it’s more of the symbolism of insider versus outsider.We saw a lot of this in the recent Colorado Democratic primaries. These perceptions were very big in the first congressional district, where Diana DeGette, a long-term incumbent, loses to Malat Keros, a twenty-nine-year-old challenger. A lot of Keros’s pitch was that, I have a lot of respect for DeGette’s career. She was a leader on abortion issues, but what has she done for us lately? What is she doing to stand up to the administration now? Why isn’t she in the street? Why isn’t she just more visible?And that’s like a general anger we’ve seen toward folks like Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer, where it’s not necessarily disagreeing with their policy stances. It’s not disagreeing with the work that they’re actually doing. It’s just, we’re saying they need to be doing it more. They need to be doing it louder, more aggressively.So we saw some of that. But I’d also add another race in Colorado here. This was the Democratic gubernatorial primary between Michael Bennet and Phil Weiser, which was very much framed as an outsider-versus-establishment story when these were two really establishment candidates.Bacon: The attorney general is running against a senator to be the governor nominee. So no one’s an outsider, yes.Masket: Yeah. And somehow that got framed as Michael Bennet was the insider. He had a lot of DC-area support, and Weiser pitched himself as the challenger who was going to shake up the system. Ideologically, there’s no difference between them. Most policy stances, their demeanor, their backgrounds are not hugely different. But it seemed to matter to a lot of voters going into this.Bacon: And Bennet had voted for a few Trump nominees, not a ton—but that was something Weiser was able to really focus on, right?Masket: Yeah.Bacon: Next factor: the DSA as an organization specifically—not the ideology, but the DSA and its get-out-the-vote operation and so on. And I think that’s a big factor in New York particularly, but I want to let you all talk. In New York it seems like there’s a very organized DSA. So talk about the DSA itself and the role it’s playing. Start with Julia.Azari: Sure. So I would actually give this a three. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. One race we haven’t talked about is the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, which—the primary’s in a couple weeks. And at different points in time, the Democratic Socialist candidate has been winning. She very well might win. And the main factor for me seems to be there that no one else is organized.Bacon: Tell people her name, for people who don’t—Azari: Sorry. Yeah. Francesca Hong is her name. And the other candidates are—pick a Democrat in Wisconsin, and they’ve probably been running. But the lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, and former lieutenant governor and 2022 Senate candidate Mandela Barnes are the leading ones. And both pretty establishment Democrats.Hong has been running on a pretty straightforward economic democratic socialist platform, and like I said, has been very competitive in the polls. In my urban neighborhood in Milwaukee, she is winning the signage war. Honestly, some people are saying it feels like no one else is running.So I think that does speak to the DSA as an organization. Not that they’re necessarily doing anything out of the ordinary, just that they’re doing something. And that unlike these other viewpoints in the Democratic Party that are trying to figure out how they position themselves relative to the Trump administration, relative to the legacy of the Biden administration, they’re not very organized, and the DSA is quite organized. So to me, that really seems like a critical factor, is the coordination.Bacon: The coordination piece. I want to follow up here, because we’ve heard a lot about the DSA in New York, and I read a little bit about the DSA in Denver. And New York and Denver, I think, are perceived to be cities with lots of rich yuppies, for lack of a better way to say that. You’re in Milwaukee, right? I don’t perceive Milwaukee as being like a DSA... Milwaukee does not have the reputation of a place that would be strong for DSA—and Milwaukee is candidly heavily Black, and not as upper income as Denver or New York, I don’t perceive at least. So is there a real strong DSA in Milwaukee? Because I don’t think I knew that.Azari: I feel like whatever I say here, someone I know is watching it and they’re going to be mad at me. But there certainly is a well-organized DSA in Milwaukee, and Milwaukee is an interesting place. As you pointed out, it’s heavily Black. It’s also fairly Latino. But it has a long socialist history. And it has a very strong working-class identity. And so I think the DSA in Milwaukee probably looks a little bit different than those places, but actually maybe mobilizes more people who are active in the trades and in unions.And people are very mobilized around those issues because of the Scott Walker governorship a decade ago. And so this is a Republican governor who really gutted labor protections in Wisconsin, and so that will really mobilize working people. Yeah, it’s a different political tradition, but actually Milwaukee is a very fertile ground for socialist movements.And I think there is a real sense—if we’re talking about who is feeling the economic impacts of things that have happened, cities that don’t have that upper echelon are certainly feeling it. So that’s some of what’s happening. People really want to see something different, and so Hong’s message has been landing.Bacon: Seth, DSA. She said it’s a high, as opposed to medium or low. Do you agree? It was interesting. I didn’t expect that.Masket: So are we coming for the white yuppies in Denver?Bacon: I did not—I think yuppies are good. It wasn’t an insult. It was more just—Denver and Milwaukee are different. There’s no way around that.Masket: Yeah, correct. I was going to give this a medium importance, and I agree with what Julia was saying here. And I saw some of that echoed in the Democratic primaries here in Colorado as well, where up until maybe the mid-spring, most people involved in Democratic politics were saying, Look, all the incumbents are going to win these races. They’re way ahead in all the polls. They usually win. They just have easier access to money and everything. No one really expected that much out of these DSA challengers and other left challengers. And in part, the incumbent advantages in all those polls was almost entirely name recognition. And like Julia said, it seemed to be the DSA folks were the ones doing the actual organization, and everyone else was just kind of coasting.So yeah, this is a great example of organization. Where I don’t give it a three and give this a two, a medium importance, is that I think this is all downstream of a number of other things going on—of the rising populism on the left, of the anger against incumbents and the establishment that we were talking about in the last question. So I think DSA has been doing some real—they’ve been raising money very well, and they’ve been doing some important candidate recruitment and some important campaign work, but none of that happens without the overall environment.Bacon: Let me probe one more. For me, it’s: in New York, DSA is a three, and everywhere else, I’m not sure about it. I’m not on the ground. I’ve read enough about New York to think the DSA in New York is a three—very organized, so on. I would’ve said Wisconsin was a one, but I feel maybe I was uninformed about them, and I would’ve said Denver is a two. So do we think the DSA of New York is a unique thing, or what’s your sense of that?Masket: That sounds right to me. I think it matters a lot that New York City has a popular DSA mayor who is very comfortable weighing into Democratic primaries a lot, and it just doesn’t have that kind of visibility in other states.Azari: Sorry, the question was where would I weigh it differently—Bacon: The DSA of New York, a distinct thing from every other DSA.Azari: I’m sure that’s true. Can I say two short other things? One is, I think you asked about DSA, but my overall point is more about organization on the left in general.Bacon: Yeah, but there are places—other people have an organization, right?Azari: Yeah, but there’s also like a national media apparatus. So Francesca Hong, our candidate, went on Hasan Piker, and that was a whole big thing.Bacon: You bring it up. That was point number four, but go ahead. Finish your point.Azari: OK. I’m just saying, the organization on the left side of the political spectrum, of doing things like having signage, just having a media apparatus, is coming out of the DSA wing. But I also do want to point out, just as we’re exposing how Wisconsin politics works—like New York, Wisconsin also has a pretty active Working Families Party. So it’s not just DSA. I think we’re using DSA a little bit to stand in for this broader left apparatus, and I’m going to be a stickler about terminology.Masket: It’s like the word DNC, right? It just means everything.Bacon: In New York especially, because I think DSA and WFP were competing against each other in New York. But I think other places, in general, they align with each other.So the fourth factor I wanted to talk about was this media apparatus. I was going to say Hasan Piker, Drop Site News. We can talk about other parts of the media atmosphere, but there is a left media that has emerged. Zeteo, I think is how you pronounce it. I’m trying to think of others that are in that space. But there is a space where the candidates, Abdul El-Sayed, they go on these media platforms, and these people endorse them and so on. Seth, is that a medium factor, a small factor, big factor?Masket: I have a really hard time assessing this one, honestly, because I’m just not super tuned into that part of left messaging. But I know it’s big. And I know this is in many ways an echo of what we saw on the right over the last few cycles with Joe Rogan and a handful of other YouTubers, bloggers, social media influencers.My impression is that there’s a lot of younger, pretty left progressive voters who don’t necessarily show up in primary elections, but can be persuaded to by this kind of messaging, by Hasan Piker and other types like him—who is talking about politics in a way that they get, and in a medium that they’ll follow. And so if they can get incensed by something, they will show up in these primary elections. And so I would give that at least a two, a medium, as far as I can tell. But I have a hard time just knowing how to measure any of this.Bacon: To give my own view, this is one where I have a one. My only reason I say this is because primary voters tend to be older and more politically mature, and people more politically engaged. So I would be curious how many people in the Colorado Senate primary electorate listen to Hasan Piker. I feel like that number must be extremely low. It’s worth knowing, but that’d be the one where I’d be skeptical. But Julia?Azari: Yeah, I’ve been trying to piece together this phenomenon for a long time too. And I’m generally pretty skeptical of causal arguments that start with media, because I think it tends to reflect rather than be a causal force. But I think you have to understand everything we’re saying about the left wing of the Democratic Party in the context of it being relative to what the rest of that side of the political spectrum is doing.And there, where I would give this like a two or maybe even a two and a half, is that it gives these types of candidates a fundraising apparatus outside of the usual channels. Again, this is the Wisconsin example, but I think that’s the other thing—it’s a movement-building piece for the long term. Also, it’s not just you’re reaching voters, it’s you’re raising money.Bacon: And I said Hasan Piker and Drop Site News. What else is a part of this? Because I’m struggling to maintain the big factor, in part because I only really know of one person. Hasan Piker’s got this outsized reputation now because the media’s covering him up. But I’m not actually sure—if it’s just Hasan Piker, that feels to me like we don’t want to overdo it too much.Azari: Sure. But I also think you could have—not to be a troll—but you could have said in like 1991, if it’s just Rush Limbaugh...Bacon: All right, fair enough. That’s good. No, that’s a good answer. Because I’ve been studying Rush Limbaugh my entire life. So is Hasan Piker a modern-day Rush Limbaugh, in a certain sense? Not in terms of politics, but in terms of influence. Is he close to that level, you think?Azari: I think we’ll see. I think we’ll know in a couple primaries. And a lot of the questions you’re asking will be clear in a few election cycles.Masket: I was just going to say, I don’t know—I remember the Carter presidency. That’s how I don’t know. But one thing I would say is that one symbol that Hasan Piker and others are becoming a real presence is that incumbents, establishment, are worried about him, and they’re complaining about him. And talking about trying to disempower him. He’s making an impact. It’s just hard to know how much—is this at the level of Rush Limbaugh in 1991?Bacon: Julia is making me think that—I’ve separated out DSA from WFP from Hasan Piker, but if they’re actually one big organization of left-wing apparatus, then that is maybe the answer to this question, of what we’re talking about here. I should think about them more connected.But the fifth factor that I’m going to ask—and I have one more after this—is Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie Sanders. Is this really about there are three individuals with huge outsized followings, and that they have created a political movement almost on their personalities, and that’s what we’re seeing? Because you notice all these candidates want to be endorsed by one of them. In New York, it was like AOC endorsed the state legislators, and Zohran endorsed the House candidates. Bernie Sanders is endorsing all these people. Is this really a movement about these three people—not Ro Khanna, really these three people, and not Elizabeth Warren? Is it really about these people? Seth, I’ll start with you.Masket: I would say they’re the most prominent people in this, but this is not just a personal machine or anything like that. I think this is a bigger organization. Until last year, Mamdani would not have been in that mix, obviously. I think we could broadly extend it more to the squad a few years ago. There’s plenty of others involved. These folks are just among the most organized, the most famous, and, in some ways, really the most eloquent.Bacon: Julia?Azari: I think that this is a long-standing feature of American politics too—that what we lack in party organizations compared to other countries, we make up for with these figures. Seth brought up remembering the Carter administration. So I don’t remember this, but in 1844, right, the Democrats are in total mess and don’t know who to nominate for president. And so they go to Andrew Jackson on his deathbed and have him sort it out about who’s an acceptable nominee. So I think that’s just always been a feature, because of the way our politics work—single-member districts, presidency. It’s this individualist focus, and the media environment has exaggerated that, but it’s always been there.Bacon: Let me push back a tad and say, it is the case that the left became stronger when one senator from Vermont ran for president twice, and the left movement is looking for one congressman from New York to run for president. I think there is a difference between Ro Khanna running and AOC running. In some ways, you’d rather be endorsed by AOC than by WFP or DSA, right?Masket: Repeat that?Bacon: You’d rather be endorsed, if you had a choice, by AOC than by WFP or DSA. That would be my thesis—if I’m literally outside of New York City, where DSA is very strong, but again, of course, AOC is very strong there. So wouldn’t you rather be endorsed by an AOC than DSA or WFP?Azari: I think the simple answer is yes.Bacon: And so doesn’t that tell us something about these individuals themselves then?Masket: I think it tells us that these are the faces of this movement, and people associate with them. People on the left have positive feelings toward these folks more than they do with an organization. So like Julia says, it makes sense to associate it with that. But I think there actually is something of a movement there. If you took AOC and Bernie and Mamdani out of politics and someone else rose up, you can still identify a through line ideologically there, right? There’s a set of policies—Medicare for All, or reducing or eliminating military funding to Israel, a handful of other things. Conversely, if you think about, is the MAGA movement an organization separate from Donald Trump? I don’t think it is. He’s gone, that’s gone.Bacon: You guys are kind of hinting at the Ella Baker quote. I don’t want to compare these people exactly, but Ella Baker famously said, “The movement made Martin. Martin didn’t make the movement.” Meaning the idea that the movement is creating stars—there would be stars because there’s a movement, and it’s creating leaders in a certain way.Azari: Yeah. I would again go back to the comparison with the development of the right—not that these are going to be identical, but I guess I’m also thinking, how would you answer the question, would a candidate in 1988 rather be endorsed by Ronald Reagan or the Christian Coalition, or Pat Robertson or the Christian Coalition, in a Republican race?Bacon: The answer is Ronald Reagan. But I get the point you’re making. That’s a good way to frame it. That’s exactly right.Bacon: OK. So the last factor is, are we seeing some kind of just reaction to Donald Trump? Is it that Donald Trump is so radical, and DOGE, and having ICE invade cities and having ICE kill people—are we seeing some kind of reaction where the Republicans have gone so far to the right that’s creating a left, in the sense that if he can do Project 2025 and destroy the government, why can’t we do socialism? Is that what’s going on here, a really big reaction to Trump? Versus in 2017, 2018, it was more like, let’s double down on normal, let’s elect Joe Biden. And now it’s, let’s elect Zohran Mamdani, AOC should run for president. Is that what we’re seeing, a reaction to Donald Trump? Julia?Azari: I think everything is a reaction to Donald Trump. It’s hard to downplay the significance. And I think what you’re talking about there is just a broadening of the general political spectrum. But I actually think if we’re telling an organizational story, this is a reaction to the financial crash of 2008. And that’s where this movement builds out of. And if we’re talking about Sanders, that’s really where he’s coming from in 2016. He’s not reacting to Donald Trump. So that’s my take. I give that like a one point five, maybe.Bacon: OK. Seth?Masket: I’m going to place this with higher importance than that, just because, like Julia says, it’s in the background of everything. I think for a lot on the left—and I hear this in a lot of conversations with people—that the second Trump administration has been a lot more consequential than expected. It’s been a lot more jarring for people. And related to that is a sense that a lot of the Democratic establishment, Democratic incumbents, aren’t taking those threats as seriously as they should be. That they’re not meeting the moment, they’re not meeting the aggression of the Trump administration. And so I hear from a lot of more progressive voters like, We need to put in someone who will fight back as hard, and who, if they’re going to do a violation of some norm, then we should do a violation of some norm. For good or bad, I think that’s created a big wellspring of energy there.Bacon: Let me finish with two questions. The first is, are there any factors that I haven’t named that are really obvious when you look at what’s happening, why these socialist candidates are winning, why there’s a progressive surge? Anything you all can think of that is really important that I didn’t ask?Seth Masket: I have a thought on that. We’ve touched on Israel and Gaza as an issue. In some ways, I’m finding it surprisingly central to a lot of these left candidates—that they bring it up as one of the main things they want to work on when they’re in government, and one of the main things that’s motivating them and their supporters.I think part of that is downstream from the way this issue was handled in 2023, 2024, and 2025, where for the most part, the mainstreams of both parties remained very supportive of Israel—at least for a while. Democrats have been recently moving away from that. But for a while, if you were critical of Israel, and you were looking for someone to champion that view, you weren’t finding it in either party. And if you wanted to protest that, suddenly that was the exception to the First Amendment, and you couldn’t protest that on campuses. And so I think that created a lot of frustration for people focused and motivated by these issues, and I think one of the things you get from that is an insurgency movement within one of the major parties.Bacon: OK. Anything else, Julia?Azari: We’ve touched on this, but I would actually really emphasize the economic context. And again, this is maybe coming from a state with less of an upper wealth echelon. But I think that’s really a big part of it—this sense among younger people that purchasing a home will be out of their reach forever, and that general sense. So that’s, I think, hard to underestimate. Or overestimate. I don’t know.Bacon: For the young, that’s true. I saw some data that Zohran and AOC—my sense is some older voters are also voting for the insurgency as well. And maybe those people also have bad economics, but that’s what I want to see now: I think some older voters who might be financially comfortable also want to see change. It doesn’t mean economics doesn’t matter, but those people might have other factors going on as well.So the last thing I want to ask is—I think it’s possible a month from now that Haley Stevens has won the Senate primary in Michigan, Mandela Barnes or one of the more traditional candidates has won in Wisconsin, and you have a few wins by the quote-unquote “establishment,” or the most left-wing candidates don’t win. So if those things happen, how does that change the story at all? Do we downplay what we’ve seen? How does that change the story?Masket: I think in a few months we’ll be trying to assess just how big this moment was. In some ways, I think it’s bigger than 2018. More progressives or DSA people are going to get elected or nominated than happened in 2018. And not as big as the Tea Party of 2010, which really fundamentally took over a party with a lot of new candidates—this is not at that level.But tied into the fact that Democrats are probably looking at a pretty good election year overall, you’re going to have some new pretty far left people in the House next year that we just don’t see that often. They’ll be somewhat more visible than others. They’ll come in with a lot of energy. I don’t know how much that actually transforms the congressional party, but those folks, I can imagine, will be pretty outspoken, and they’ll be really trying to, if not necessarily outvote everyone, at least try to steer the agenda.Bacon: Julia?Azari: Yeah, I think election narratives kind of take on a life of their own. So it can go a lot of ways, but often, if the elections we’re talking about are primaries, then that can really get overshadowed by whatever happens in the general.Bacon: Let me narrow it down. My question is, does the narrative we’re talking about get shut down if the normal candidates win in Michigan and Wisconsin? Because I think that’s very possible in the next few weeks. Does the narrative get shut down? Would we be having conversations like this if the candidates in Michigan and Wisconsin who are more progressive lose?Azari: Maybe. We still have these races where people have overperformed expectations. Sorry, I lost my other thought.Bacon: So the question was, how do Michigan, Wisconsin—the part I was trying to get at was, does that change the overall story if the big swing states end up acting more normal?Azari: I think I’m, once again, challenging the premise of the question, because I think that part of the narrative story right now is struggling with the fact that DSA seems to be—or whatever we want to call it, the left wing of the party—seems to be about 30 percent of the Democratic electorate. And that’s Pew data. And we don’t really know how to talk about that kind of persistent division anymore in American politics, as we’re used to parties being so ideologically sorted.So this question about how big are these policy differences between the two wings, or are they largely stylistic differences, are they focused on a couple issues—that’s a question. And then there’s this question of, what do you do with a significant minority of a party? That’s not a question with an obvious answer.And I think that if Stevens wins in Michigan, if the month ahead is a good month for more establishment Democrats, then the narrative becomes more, what do we do with—that’s the accurate narrative anyway—what do we do with two contending factions that each have a pretty strong base of support? Whereas if this is a DSA sweep—I don’t know if that’s going to be accurate, even if August is a really good month for those candidates—but I think that will be more the narrative going into the general, and then whatever happens in the general will shape the longer trajectory.Bacon: That’s helpful. I guess I hadn’t thought of that. El-Sayed is at 44 percent but loses—that’s obviously not zero, and that’s really high. So in certain ways that means something. That’s an interesting way to put it. That’s helpful.Anything else you all want to add on this subject? We went on a while, but I think we’ve hit most of the main factors here. I guess I’ve left this thinking we are talking about a party within a party. Is that how you would frame it, Julia? Maybe not quite that far.Azari: Yeah, I would frame it as an emerging organized faction within the party.Bacon: And more organized than it was in 2018, and even more organized than it was in 2024. Good. Thank you all. This is Julia Azari and Seth Masket. Tell everybody where they can read more of your work.Azari: Oh, go ahead.Masket: I’m working a lot these days on Substack. You can follow my Substack called The Smotus Report. It’s at smotus.substack.com. Smotus is S-M-O-T-U-S—Seth Masket of the United States.Azari: I am at Good Politics, Bad Politics on Substack with Jonathan Bernstein and David Bernstein, our group blog. I also have—if you were really intrigued by my 1844 comments and you want more history—I have a book called Backlash Presidents, available from Princeton University Press. And I believe Seth has a new book as well.Bacon: I was going to say, Seth’s agent would like us to hype his book, since he missed the opportunity. Your title, the title of your book, is what again?Azari: Backlash Presidents. I left my copy in the other room, but yeah—Backlash Presidents.Bacon: Seth’s is available, it appears. He’s moving his hand.Masket: Mine is called The Elephants in the Room, new from Cambridge Press. It’s all about the Republicans’ decision to nominate Donald Trump in 2024 specifically, and all the changes that happened within the party to make that seem like a good idea.Bacon: Thanks, guys, for joining me. Julia, of course I’ll have you back. I knew you would reject the premise of my questions. You’ve always done that. We’ve worked together for five or six years now. But I appreciate your wisdom, and it’s great to see both of you. So take care. Bye-bye.Masket: Thanks so much, Perry. Bye.

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