Culture wars are part of the deep structure of populism. To quote Democratic strategist David Kusnet, “There are two populist messages: #1 Left populism: They’re robbing you blind. #2. Right populism: They think they’re better than you. Progressives should stick with #1 and not fall into #2.”

In both recipes, the magic ingredient is resentment. There’s a lot of it to go around. The fragile and failing middle class is very angry, and they should be: If wage increases had continued to match productivity increases in recent decades, as they did after World War II, they would be 43 percent higher than today. This anger isn’t vanishing anytime soon. The only question is whether it will be directed at economic elites (“robbing you blind”) or cultural elites (“think they’re better than you”).

Far-right populism deflects anger away from economic elites onto cultural elites. This works because social class is expressed not just through economics but also through profound cultural differences. One central cultural fissure is the divide between self-development and self-discipline.

Middle-status workers highly value self-discipline and rule-following because that’s what’s needed to show up on time, without an “attitude,” take orders, and succeed in blue-, pink- and routine white-collar jobs. These workers also value the traditional institutions that anchor self-discipline. For example, the lower the education level, the higher the endorsement of traditional gender roles. This makes sense: in the eternal scrum for social honor, class ideals are unattainable, but nonelites can attain gender ideals. It is impossible to become a billionaire, but it is possible, through self-discipline, to be a “real” man.

The logic of life for order-givers is very different. Elites highly value self-development because they need to be at the top of their game to survive and thrive in professional and managerial jobs. Elites’ best move in the scrum for social honor is sophistication, which displays both their high human capital (“I am educated and intelligent”) and their moral capital (“I think things through for myself and am not bound by tradition”).

LGBTQ rights are a clear example of this divide. A 2022 poll found that nearly half of Americans with high-school educations or less, but only about a quarter of those with higher education levels, opposed gay marriage. Support for gay marriage rises as we scale the income ladder. Here we see the logic in action: elites’ concern for self-development extends to sexual expression, while their embrace of a wide range of genders and sexualities displays admirable sophistication.

Savvy economic elites use these class cultural divides to form alliances with nonelites. Think of Rupert Murdoch, via Fox News, intentionally building a coalition with average viewers via culture-war content that rails against “elites,” defined per David Kusnet’s populism #2. Tucker Carlson railed against elites in 70 percent of his shows between 2016 and 2021. Note that the target audience is not the poor: it’s middle-status people in routine jobs who have been pulled into these alliances, fueling the rise of the far right both in Europe and the United States.

The Right’s “they’re looking down on you” narrative taps something real: cultural elites do think of themselves as enlightened, and of nonelites as backward “deplorables.” Conservative elites understand the dynamics of culture wars far better than liberals do. It’s time for the Left to wise up.

Facing repeated defeat in a long string of culture wars, some liberal commentators are calling for the party to become more moderate. That’s never made sense to me. I’ve been a social justice warrior for forty years, since long before the Right turned those words into a culture-war epithet, and I can tell you that the only way to change deeply embedded power differentials is to be a pain in the ass. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans supported gay marriage. By 2022, 71 percent did. That never would have happened if advocates had tamely accepted majority values.

But how you’re a pain matters a lot. And here the success of gay marriage is singularly instructive, providing a formula for defusing the culture wars without giving up on cherished values. When the gay liberation movement pivoted to gay marriage, it demonstrated literacy in the values of ordinary Americans and modeled how to invite them into the struggle for social justice without condescension.

A million mainstream pundits have argued that Democrats have a messaging problem, and huge amounts of donor money have gone into initiatives to change messaging. They haven’t worked for three reasons. First, they typically rely on focus groups that uncover the same blue-collar cultural values again and again, without a deeper understanding of how those cultural values are cherished for their ability to turn servitude into honor. Second, too often the assumption is that the only problem is a messaging problem, which can lead to campaigns that feel like attempts to manipulate less-educated voters, further reinforcing the “looking down on you” narrative. Third, and most important, changing messaging often isn’t possible unless it’s accompanied by something deeper: changing priorities.

Here’s an oft-forgotten fact: gay marriage was not a priority for many in the gay liberation movement. In the 1990s, many leaders saw marriage as patriarchal and “would have preferred a different battle,” as Matt Coles, who led the American Civil Liberties Union’s marriage equality initiative, told me. Gay activists at the time were far more interested in legal protections against discrimination and the broader liberation of sexual expression. In that context, inclusion into the retrograde institution of marriage seemed to many activists like an uninspiring fight.

The movement’s pivot to marriage “really came from, for lack of a better word, ordinary folks, with the most overwhelming support for marriage coming from people of color and low-income people,” Coles told me. Not until 1990 did he begin to understand the wisdom of centering marriage and its relationship to the movement’s overall objective of minimizing homophobia.

After Coles and others helped pass a domestic partnership law in California, the Alameda County clerk organized a big celebration, with heart balloons and a procession down the grand staircase by couples who had just tied the knot. As Coles reflected to me:

I said, I want nothing to do with this,and I’m not even going to hang around for it because I thought it performative. But I stood there and watched, and a couple of things leapt out at me. The people coming down the stairs were not doctors and lawyers; they were ordinary average people. I looked at their faces and said to myself, I get it now. It’s the prom and the wedding ceremony and everything rolled into one. They’re finally able to say to mom, yeah, I got married.

The push for gay marriage came from people who wanted to join the mainstream, not smash it. Gay liberation activists had the good sense to pay attention. Importantly, Coles and other leaders didn’t back away from other facets of LGBTQ rights. But they listened to nonelites and changed the order of their priorities in order to build a broad coalition.

This involved shifting away from the language that most appealed to the movement’s gatekeepers — the language of discrimination and legal rights — to the language of commitment. The ACLU conducted focus groups where that word came up again and again.

Coles began to understand that this emphasis on commitment — borrowed from the discipline side of the discipline vs. development divide — was critical to combating homophobia on a mass scale. Gay relationships were stereotyped as “tawdry, shabby things,” Coles told me. The key to “changing the way Americans thought about this was to show them not so much the consequences of discrimination as to show them the commitment.”

Gay liberation is a rare social movement that listened to nonelites and tapped the moral intuitions of ordinary people in order to realize progressive values. This is the path past far-right populism, which currently has a nigh-monopoly on the priorities of average Americans.

This advice differs sharply from the conventional wisdom that the only way for Democrats to bridge the diploma divide is for progressives to drop issues that are dear to them and become centrists. While it’s true that college grads of every racial group are more likely to identify as liberal than nongrads of their own group, it’s not true that nonelites are more centrist. In fact, people who identify as moderates are not necessarily more likely than liberals to embrace centrist positions — they’re called “moderates” because they hold a mix of liberal and conservative positions, often passionately so.

In an environment dominated by populist anger, becoming Republican-lite isn’t the answer. The answer is to respect that blue-collar values make sense in the context of blue-collar lives — and to develop the cultural competence to connect progressive goals with working-class priorities.

We won’t get anywhere by becoming tepid centrists who stand for nothing. But we do need to learn to listen respectfully to nonelites, be willing to make the trade-offs, and do the hard work of connecting to average people.

A 2022 report found that the top 10 percent of Americans hold 60 percent of the country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent nabbing 27 percent for themselves. Donald Trump’s bill would further entrench their advantages and expand their fortunes. To call this “wealth inequality” seems inadequate. It’s certainly unequal, but the scale, the magnitude of the disparity, warrants its own word. At some point, we’ll need to invent one to describe and capture the breadth and depth and perversity of this abomination.

Wealth and income inequality aren’t the same thing, but they track similarly skewed distributions of resources — and power. On both fronts, the United States performs poorly compared to its peer nations. When it comes to income inequality, it doesn’t even compare well to chapters of its own history. Historical parallels give some sense of just how extreme American inequality has become — and how deeply compromised, how utterly in the pocket of the wealthy, its executive and legislative branches now are.

In 2012, researchers found that incomes were “much more equally distributed in colonial America than in America today,” even accounting for chattel slavery. They estimated a Gini coefficient — a measure of inequality where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents total inequality — of 0.437. At the time, the top 1 percent took in 7.1 percent of gross income. In 2023, the US Gini score was 0.47, though some sources have it at 0.41. The data and methods vary, but the conclusion is the same: the United States is a land of entrenched inequality.

For comparison, researchers have estimated that the Gini coefficient for the Roman Empire was 0.46 and the Han Dynasty years in China was 0.48. As a 2011 Business Insider headline bluntly put it, “Even The Ancient Roman Empire Wasn’t As Unequal As America Today.” In contrast, European states tend to have scores in the 0.2 to 0.35 range.

None of this data should surprise anyone who’s been paying the least amount of attention to the trajectory of the United States in the previous several decades — particularly since the Reagan Revolution went all in on turning the country into a playground for the wealthy. Decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich have only deepened inequality in the US, both economic and political.

In 2012, scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page released a paper entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” They found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Gilens and Page didn’t use the word “oligarchy” to describe the US, exercising a measure of scholarly restraint. Still, the word came up in the paper and a few times in the bibliography, suggesting that the theme was quite clearly present. The media, however, has had no such reservations. Coverage of the paper included the term “oligarchy” over and over again. And rightly so. Accounting for wealth and income inequality and the fact that laws quite plainly were being written by and for the few rich and powerful, it was obvious. The United States was — and still is — an oligarchy.

There’s a chance that Trump’s “Big Beautiful” bill could fail — but the battle to secure tax breaks for the rich, as a project, will continue either way. The wealthy in the US write the laws; they own the politicians; they are firmly ensconced in the White House. It may matter whether a Democrat or Republican is president; it may matter whether the Democrats or Republicans hold a majority in the House of Representatives or the Senate; it may matter whether Democrats or Republicans are appointing justices to the Supreme Court; but for the purposes of serving oligarchy, it’s a matter of degree, not of type. The state and its constituent branches are thoroughly captured by and serve the wealthy.

Around the time of the French Revolution, France’s Gini coefficient score was an estimated 0.59, which is high, but not wildly higher than that of much of Europe at the time. Of course, the decades that followed, particularly in the middle of the next century, saw waves of popular revolutions. And while the causes of popular revolution are complex, particularly when sorting the immediate and long-term origins of uprising, there tends to be a common, if not universal, thread among them: namely, that the state doesn’t adequately address the needs of its people.

The United States isn’t on the brink of revolt — but it’s far down the sort of path that has, historically, led to popular unrest, or something far greater. The state has thoroughly abandoned everyday Americans and let oligarchs write its laws and reap the rewards — rewards made possible by the labor and sacrifices of the many. The rise in right populism is a symptom of, and a response to, this reality. Trump is both a beneficiary and cause, though not exclusively, of this populist surge, which is a form of contempt for the people he’s ostensibly meant to serve. His tax bill, which will only make things worse for the workers who support him, is emblematic of this contempt: a policy of extraction, a stress test of just how a people can be pushed before they finally say, “No more.”

So what does Casey Means actually stand for? One place to look is the 2024 book Good Energy, which she coauthored with her brother. The title is both somewhat misleading and typical of her style. While the book’s good energy/bad energy framework may conjure Marianne Williamson and crystals, it actually refers to metabolic health — and the foods, activities, and lifestyles Means thinks support or impair it.

Whether or not one accepts the specific health claims made throughout the book (a full analysis of which would require sifting through the footnotes — perhaps worthwhile, but not undertaken here), the overall picture is neither especially objectionable nor earth shattering. Means thinks we would all benefit from more nutrient-dense foods, movement, sunlight, and sleep. She is, perhaps surprisingly, clear-eyed about the root of the problem — not individual choices, but the systemic conflict between human well-being and profit seeking. “Patients are being crushed,” she writes, “by the devil’s bargain between the $6 trillion food industry (which wants to make food cheap and addictive) and the $4 trillion health care industry (which profits off the interventions on sick patients and stays silent about the reasons they’re getting sick).”

That last line hints at Means’s broader critique of the medical system — a system in which she was, for many years, deeply embedded. These reflections, a sort of ethnography of the surgical labor process, form one of the more compelling elements of the book. Means talks about her frustration with performing surgical interventions to treat ailments that were clearly downstream of more systemic, immune-related conditions. She points out how limiting this bureaucratic organization of the body can be — the mismatch between medical specialties and the messy reality of the human form.

Some reporting on Means has suggested she has obscured the real reason she left her residency. Journalists have interviewed other doctors who knew her at the time, and who suggest she just couldn’t hack it, too overwhelmed and stressed out to successfully complete her training. To her credit, Means is actually pretty transparent about this, and she weaves her own experience of exhaustion, panic, and depression into a broader discussion of the way the grueling labor conditions in hospitals may make doctors less able to perform their jobs and, ultimately, sick themselves.

So what does Means suggest we do about these enormous, deeply structural problems? Well, naturally, she says we all need to buy wearables to track our health data in real time and pay out of pocket for lab work to become informed, empowered, bio-decision-makers. Don’t trust your doctor, she says — trust yourself. Or rather, trust the devices and apps helpfully listed in the book. Specifically, she wants everyone wearing a Fitbit Inspire 2 and suggests we might also consider the continuous glucose monitor sold by her company Levels Health, which offers subscription-based health monitoring on an “AI-powered” platform. Means cofounded the company with former SpaceX engineer Josh Clemente, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) consultant Sam Corcos, and two Google engineers.

“What if we treated humans like rockets” she muses, discussing Clemente’s contributions to the start-up, “equipping them with sensors before systems fail. . . ?” This turn is a little jarring at first, given that the book begins with a critique of the anti-holistic bias in medicine and estrangement of humans from nature. That is until one recalls the long history of fraternization between back-to-the-landers, hi-tech evangelists, and the military-industrial complex — the cybernetic utopian milieu surrounding Stewart Brand and his proto–Silicon Valley set.

At first, Means’s vision seems to demand that everyone become their own doctor. But somehow, she arrives at something bleaker: a world where the doctors are AI and the patients are outfitted with an arsenal of digital devices. Not quite “machines of loving grace,” but tiny electric scolds and spies, perpetually harvesting the secrets of our bodies to sell to the highest bidder.

For all her concern about the profit motives of the food, medical, and pharmaceutical industries, Means seems untroubled by the implications of opting into large-scale, privately run biosurveillance. A quick search for one such platform — an AI-powered therapy platform called BetterHelp  — reveals that it was recently fined $7.8 million by the Federal Trade Commission for selling users’ private data.

Also missing from the book is any real discussion of the obstacles people might encounter in attempting to pursue her “Good Energy” plan. Means does, rather ruthlessly, suggest that anyone whose sleep is disturbed by a pet jumping on their bed should consider rehoming said pet. But her discussion of how to become a “counterculture circadian warrior,” bucking the contemporary lifestyle habits that keep us up staring at screens late into the night, concludes without any mention of the expansion of nonstandard and unstable work schedules across the US economy in recent decades. Though Means reflects at some length on how the fragmented work schedule and high-stress environment in the hospital affected her and her colleagues, she fails to extend that insight to workers outside the medical field.

In Good Energy, what begins as a structural indictment ends as a shopping guide — directed to the savvy health “consumer” with time and income to spare. Though the problems Means identifies are rooted in the economic system, she is wholly committed to a purely market-based solution — a point she drives home when she assures the reader, “I am a huge believer in personal choice and individual freedoms.” That commitment renders Means’s prescriptions wholly inadequate to addressing the problems she identifies. She advocates for a “bottoms-up [sic] revolution,” but inaccessibility makes this revolution a dystopian one. Some may be able to buy their way out of the squalor of “modern industrial life,” but everyone else will be left to wade through the wreckage.

This process will show that the Israel lobby, while influential, is not dictating US policy. This theory has been a popular one, but it has always risked underplaying the self-interest of the United States. Rather than being pulled along grudgingly, with the tail wagging the dog, the opposite is and has been the overriding dynamic: the US has invested in Israel as a garrison for securing its imperial objectives in the Middle East. As Joe Biden said in 1986: “[Supporting Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

Biden’s thinking made sense for that phase of US imperialism, but this approach is now being challenged as this asset depreciates and, indeed, becomes a liability. Simply put, the region demands stability as multipolarity takes effect, and the Gulf states want authority in this field. The United States also prefers a reconfiguration that can protect its financial and long-term strategic interests, having accepted that endless military interventions in the Middle East prove deleterious. As the US prepares for escalating competition with China, it seeks a resolution in which its objectives can be flexed commercially through Gulf collaborators against a backdrop of regional integration.

This is why they have accelerated talks with Iran, and why it is likely Iran will agree to a deal. In addition, the United States has concluded hostilities with the Houthis and, quite remarkably, without Israeli support or coordination. As mentioned above, they have also engaged in direct talks with Hamas, much to the ire of the Israeli cabinet. On his recent tour, Trump conducted high-level talks with representatives from several key states in the region, but not Israel. The USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier has since left the Red Sea, with three fewer fighter jets. It is little wonder that Netanyahu grasps that Israel will need to “wean ourselves off US military aid.”

As interests reposition, the United States is also coordinating with the Saudis on the nature and implementation of a lasting cease-fire in Gaza — a difficult and messy process, as disentanglement generates its own dilemmas. This is partly why one day a report will suggest the Trump administration is planning to expel a million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, and the next, the US embassy in the country denies it. It is plausible that briefing and counterbriefing reflects schisms inside the American establishment over the question, which takes us to the future of Gaza itself, largely obliterated by Israel with the support of its NATO allies.

The proposal for a Trump-Netanyahu “Riviera” in an ethnically cleansed Gaza was never going to be accepted by the region; the AI rendering of such a grotesque spectacle posted by Trump on social media was too on the nose. But the material effect of this proposition was to hasten the Egyptian plan for Gaza, which rejected the ethnic cleansing of the strip. This plan was supported by the Arab Summit, and quietly Britain, France, Germany, and Italy also backed it. Contrary to some initial reports, the US didn’t reject it. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said it was a “good faith first step from the Egyptians.”

Israel has been driven into a corner: it needs regional normalization, but its negotiating position has been undermined because of its criminal and genocidal actions. With each hour it remains on its current course, its position becomes weaker. Moody’s Ratings warns of “severe implications for the government’s finances” and “a further erosion in institutional quality,” as a result of high political risks. Israel could lose some $400 billion in economic activity over the next decade, according to some estimates.

Despite this, the United States will now make deals with Arab states without raising normalization as a prerequisite. In return, Trump has secured a $600 billion Saudi investment pledge, including in one of the largest arms deals in history. This also disrupts the ironclad US commitment to Israel’s “qualitative military edge,” which is meant to guarantee it military supremacy in the Middle East. Trump also made clear in his keynote speech that Western intervention was a failed enterprise and nodded toward the uprooting of American soft power NGOs by ending US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding.=

This gives the regional players and the Gulf Cooperation Council a historic opening to discipline Israel and advance a Palestinian state. It should be said that any such objective on their part would not be altruistic, given the lack of action these regimes have taken to stop the genocide in Gaza. They are incentivized to ensure their regional sphere in the new global order is anchored in a way that is favorable to them. Saudi Arabia, in this vein, sees Israel as a security threat to its ambitions for the region because its depraved expansionist approach to the Palestinians generates cyclical violence and political unrest. The righteousness of the Palestinian cause is quite incidental (which is why it is, inexcusably, in no rush to act).

The Palestinian question is, at the same time, hardwired into regional interstate competition and serves as a platform to bring Israel to heel. The questions are: to what extent and at what pace? Another important factor is the demand for regional harmony being made by international capital – given the trade geography of the global economy – which can no longer tether itself to the US bombing new markets open.

While a narrower set of interests around arms manufacturing prefers permanent conflict, there are broader and far more differentiated flows of commerce impeded by it. This partly explains why the Financial Times has been outspoken for a cease-fire since as early as October 2023, and why other establishment publications like the Economist are slowly breaking from Israel’s Gaza policy.

Pressure is growing, and relationships are straining. Britain, France, and Canada this month released a joint statement condemning Israel’s military expansion and the lack of aid entering the strip; for the first time, the threat of targeted sanctions was broadcast. In response, Netanyahu claimed this represented a “huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7th.” The latest statement is itself cynical, given that its signatories have been unrepentant in their provision of arms, technical support, and political cover for Israel.

However, these nations have reputational interests, global security concerns, and economic competition to consider. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Rachel Reeves has said that Britain is targeting a major Gulf trade agreement, following recent negotiations between the European Union and India. Such arrangements will be thrown into disarray should Israel be allowed to conclude the genocide and ethnically cleanse Gaza, given the consequences entailed for the region.

In Spain, last week more than three hundred officials and investors convened in Riyadh for a Spanish-Saudi Business Forum in which substantial deals were made. At the same time, Spain is calling for an arms embargo on Israel and is urging its European allies to do the same. It has also called for concrete moves toward a Palestinian state. These and other items were discussed at a high-level summit known as the “Madrid Group” on Sunday, which included representatives from European countries, including France, Britain, Germany, and Italy, along with envoys from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco, the Arab League, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Israel is becoming a problem for the West to deal with, inhibiting its private sector and regional deals, rather than a rational and profitable partner.

Netanyahu, isolated and losing strategic value to the United States, has no viable path forward. It is possible he is negotiating his own “day after,” using his only remaining leverage: inflicting further misery on Palestinians and barbarically ratcheting up the stakes. His recent trip to Hungary was related to the International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings. And while it is true the ICC is a colonial instrument, there is no guarantee that the drive to consolidate blame around one individual can be avoided; we can expect a harder Western turn against Netanyahu as states seek to distance themselves from the catastrophe they have jointly unleashed in a bid to reset relations with the Middle East, as well as the Global South.

Netanyahu also faces a domestic legal swamp involving corruption charges, which are much harder to evade. But the underlying and foundational issue is that the geopolitical recalibration attendant on the emerging multipolar world system relegates Israel’s comparative importance to US policy in the region — not just Netanyahu’s.

Netanyahu and his allies remain in control of the Israeli state — making it all the more dangerous and volatile — but their rule is fracturing and unsustainable. Netanyahu’s policy only eventuates in further curtailing Israel’s fortunes. It should also be said that this conflict is not between a handful of peaceniks and a united Israeli ruling class. Ruptures exist within the business elite, the military, security services, and among prominent political figures. We must also factor in the most fanatical and messianic elements, the settlers and so on, who are likely to become more dangerous as the situation evolves, fragmenting the state’s cohesion further. As the horrors intensify, splits will become more desperate in tone. One politician, Moshe Feiglin, recently argued on Channel 14 that “every child, every baby, is an enemy”; another, Yair Golan, has warned that “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was . . . a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.”

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has himself taken a critical stance, telling a “People’s Peace Summit” that “Gaza is Palestinian and not Israeli. It needs to be part of a Palestinian state.” This, he argued, is the basis for achieving normalization. Former Mossad and Shin Bet heads have also coauthored a letter with a former deputy IDF chief urging Trump not to listen to Netanyahu and to end the “war.” These interventions are, of course, based on self-interest and the knowledge that Netanyahu has run out of road. The mission now is a salvage operation: an attempt to realign Israel and the United States as far as possible. It is notable that Israel’s once-confident defenders in the media are now silent. There is no single propaganda line to coalesce around; the narrative has collapsed entirely. The international Palestine solidarity movement, meanwhile, has been justified in its key demands and its assessment of the scale and objectives of the horror unleashed on Gaza.

This movement has been the vanguard of moral conscience in these past months, and it has also been politically inclusive, despite the smears directed against it. Now in the West, the “great and the good” have started to turn. Although stopping short of identifying the apartheid nature of the Israeli state, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, ‘This Israeli government is behaving in ways that threaten hardcore US interests in the region. Netanyahu is not our friend.” In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland predicts that Trump will betray his onetime ally. The former European Commission vice president Josep Borrell now says that Israel is committing genocide. Emmanuel Macron is due to cohost a summit in New York with Saudi Arabia on setting up a Palestinian state.

To reiterate, these moves are based on interests, not morality. In the case of France, Macron is vying for European and French objectives in the Middle East, for which loyalty to Israel yields diminishing returns. They, like the United States, require a new means through which to interface with the region. Others are looking to the long-term sanitization process of the Israeli state that will be required, by reducing the issue to one especially bad aberration in the form of Netanyahu.

Nothing can be taken for granted in the arguments made here — not least because the Israeli cabinet is likely to become ever more vexed. At every stage, the global Palestine movement must continue to mobilize, institutionalizing and universalizing its positions as it does. It is only because of the determination of the Palestinian people that, against all the odds, they are in the end the crucial and decisive factor in the overarching regional calculation. The struggle of the Palestinian people for dignity, freedom, and human rights has shown in practice what they have always attested to: existence is resistance.

According to much of the mainstream press and indeed Die Linke’s political opponents, it ought to be thanking the most unlikely of figures for its revival. We are told that it was the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz, today Germany’s chancellor, who brought Die Linke back from the brink.

According to this narrative, what made the difference was Merz’s decision, in the middle of the campaign, to push a parliamentary resolution reliant on the votes of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Merz’s breaking of a taboo (it was the first time a Bundestag resolution was approved thanks to AfD votes, although the CDU’s overtures to the far right have a longer history) offered an opening to Die Linke’s joint lead candidate Heidi Reichinnek to shine in her speech denouncing the move, making her a popular icon among progressive voters. With her decisive intervention, she revived a party that otherwise would probably have fallen below 5 percent support.

That, at least, is the dominant account of how Die Linke turned around its fortunes. The 30 million views of Reichinnek’s speech in just one week provided a visibility such as Die Linke could otherwise only have dreamed of. But there are solid reasons to believe that Reichinnek’s speech simply accelerated and amplified an already existing trend. After all, the CDU’s vote together with the AfD came at the end of January 2025, when Die Linke had already been rising in polls throughout the month.

Absent from the mainstream narrative are the reasons why Reichinnek’s speech resonated so widely. First among these is the fact that the CDU’s joint vote with the AfD sought to impose an effective stop to asylum-seekers arriving in Germany. This also helps us understand why, when the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens also denounced Merz for reaching out to the AfD, their accusations rang somewhat hollow.  Both these government parties had, during Scholz’s administration, presided over successive restrictions in provisions for asylum-seekers and imposed controls on some and then all German borders in September 2024. Meanwhile, in opposition Die Linke had  defended the right to asylum even as it became increasingly unpopular (a poll this January indicated that 68 percent of Germans wanted to accept fewer refugees). Wagenknecht’s BSW split from it to advocate, among other things, a more restrictive immigration policy.

Second, the leader of the SPD parliamentary fraction might have accused Merz of having opened “the gates of hell” by reaching out to the AfD, with the Greens’ rhetoric only a little less harsh. But both parties remained open to forming a government with the CDU after the elections in the name of “taking responsibility.” No voter might similarly fear that Die Linke would make the deeply unpopular Merz chancellor. In short, whereas the SPD and the Greens had a credibility problem, Reichinnek’s angry speech criticizing Merz was not only well articulated but also authentic, because it built on Die Linke’s prior trajectory.

Considering the policy concessions that the SPD and Greens had made in government to both their own neoliberal-hawk government partner (the Free Democrats, FDP) and the right-wing opposition, observers could only wonder what they’d be ready to do to become the CDU’s junior partner. Joining Merz’s Christian Democrats in government this spring, the SPD has in fact accepted policies such as pushing back asylum-seekers at the German borders and replacing the eight-hour-day regulation with a weekly maximum.

Die Linke’s election effort was helped by the SPD’s and Greens’ mistakes (these parties’ previous voters were the main contributors to Die Linke’s increased vote), as leading members in the leftist party’s campaign privately acknowledge. After years of mainly worrying about attacks from the right-wing opposition, the SPD and Greens were forced to counter an agile and social-media-savvy Die Linke campaign that focused on neglected issues such as the increasing price of supermarket goods and rents, and the lack of fair taxes on the rich. Die Linke’s campaign remained laser-focused on a few key messages that activists stuck to, such as the need for a rent cap and eliminating the taxes on basic groceries. Die Linke’s creation of an app to check abusive heating and renting prices in some of the main cities was also key to positively entering the media conversation and showing that the party could practically help working-class people.

One measure of Die Linke’s recent success is that unlike at the previous congress in Halle, at this month’s edition in Chemnitz there was only scant talk of the BSW. The party founded by Wagenknecht had enjoyed around 8 percent polling support last fall, but it eventually scored 4.98 percent in February’s federal election — missing the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament by just over 9,000 votes.

The elections did not only reward Die Linke’s programmatic proposals as compared to the BSW’s, but also showed the value of its model of party organization. Whereas the highly centralized BSW has around one thousand members — each individually approved by its leadership — Die Linke entered 2025 with 58,532 members before experiencing a sudden surge to 100,000 ahead of the election (it currently has 112,000 members). Die Linke’s intensive street and door-knocking campaign contrasted with a BSW that was barely visible in the streets aside from election placards. After the campaign, one of the main challenges for Die Linke today is to integrate the wave of new sign-ups, which have made the party younger, more Western German, and more female.

The Chemnitz congress was also shaped by the perennial tension between Die Linke’s opposition course at the national level and its government participation in some federal states. February’s elections had given rival opposition parties AfD and Die Linke a combined one-third minority in parliament and, with it, the de facto power to block constitutional changes, notably to the “debt brake” which limits government deficit spending. However, after the election — but before the new parliament met — the Christian Democrats, Greens, and SPD cobbled together a two-thirds majority in the old parliament to exempt military spending from the debt brake and approve a special infrastructure fund.

In the Bundestag, Die Linke criticized the reforms because they maintain the debt brake for nonmilitary expenses while spending on the army is now theoretically unlimited. However, Die Linke members in the governments of Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern voted in favor of the package in the Bundesrat, i.e., the institution representing the federal states, where constitutional changes also need to be approved. Die Linke members in both states argued that the funds for the regional and communal governments in the approved infrastructure package were essential in times of austerity. Yet their decision clearly went against the party line and frustrated the national leadership.

The constitutional changes would have been approved even without Die Linke votes, and its recent polling remains strong in both Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Still, Die Linke can be thankful that the controversial votes took place when the BSW, which has strongly criticized remilitarization, is still recovering from the disappointment of not having entered parliament. What the representatives of Die Linke in both regional governments could not prevent was significant criticism of them at the congress in Chemnitz. Party activists lamented that they had spent the election campaign putting up placards against more military expenditure only for the Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern governments to vote for more cash for the army.

The congress also addressed the troubled question of Die Linke’s relationship with the CDU. On May 6, Merz became the first chancellor to need two voting rounds in the Bundestag before being elected. At least eighteen members of the government’s parliamentary majority did not express confidence in him. To organize a second voting attempt on the same day, Merz needed a two-thirds majority to change the procedural rules of the parliamentary session, thus requiring the help of either Die Linke or the AfD. While Merz’s CDU rules out “coalitions and other forms of content-related cooperation” with both these parties, the conservatives held conversations with Die Linke, and the leftist party decided to allow the second vote.

Whether voting together to change procedural rules qualifies as cooperation is debatable. But clearly, without Die Linke’s votes, Merz would have had to postpone his first international visits and wait at least three more days, until May 9, to be elected chancellor. There would have been mounting pressure to know whether Merz actually had a majority and which legislators had not supported him. The vote would also have collided with the first day of Die Linke’s congress.

Did it make the right decision by allowing his earlier election? A congress delegate from Frankfurt didn’t think so. She said it would have been nice “if Germany had lived three days without a king.” Die Linke’s parliamentary group was reportedly relatively divided on whether to allow the vote to proceed, but the “yes” side carried the day. Denying the early repeat vote would have reinforced Die Linke’s antiestablishment profile, a not-insignificant attribute in times of low popular support for the status quo. It is unclear, however, how it would have weathered three days being accused of bringing the country to a standstill (in fact, the situation was far less dramatic, as Scholz would have remained caretaker chancellor).

Equally important, there is no predicting what the CDU’s behavior during those three days could have been. Merz is famously impulsive and could even have prompted a move toward fresh elections, with the AfD poised to swell its ranks even further. These three days would also have opened a window of opportunity for those CDU members who had anyway preferred a minority government with, if needed, extragovernmental support from the AfD.

The conversation about the CDU’s relationship with Die Linke is expected to resurface soon, as the Bundestag needs to elect three new members for the Federal Constitutional Court and they need to be approved by a two-thirds majority. In Saxony and Thuringia, where the AfD surpassed 30 percent support in last year’s regional elections and the CDU rules without a majority, the center-right party has long been in conversations with Die Linke to approve its budgets.

The polarization between CDU and Die Linke has the positive aspect of showing that very different options are available to voters without having to opt for the AfD. Still, the new parliamentary arithmetic at both the regional and national levels will likely force CDU and Die Linke to talk more often.

“Die Linke is back” was a common line in party coleader Ines Schwerdtner’s intervention at the Chemnitz congress, as well as in Reichinnek’s comments. At least at the national level, Die Linke’s immediate strategy seeks frontal opposition to the new CDU-SPD government. In Chemnitz, for instance, Die Linke coleader Jan van Aken accused the ruling parties of being detached from ordinary people’s realities, with inflation and high grocery prices not even mentioned in their coalition agreement.

Unlike the Greens, who wanted to stay in government and will have to justify their recent record in office still for some time to come, Die Linke benefits from having long been in opposition and is currently polling 10–11 percent. Moreover, the Greens and the SPD appear to have no interest in covering their left flanks and are instead in search of centrist voters. Green politicians such as Ricarda Lang and Social Democrats such as Saskia Esken who represented the left wing of their parties have been relegated to a secondary role. Instead, the Greens appear to be taking the course of their only regional president, the centrist Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Württemberg, whereas the SPD is firmly under the control of vice chancellor and finance minister Lars Klingbeil, a member of the party’s conservative Seeheimer Kreis faction.

Considering this and Die Linke’s internal strength, the hopes expressed at the party congress for the 2026 elections are not unfounded. Next year, it will seek to enter the Western parliaments of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg for the first time and finish first in the Berlin elections, after winning most votes in the capital in February’s federal elections.

It will be in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, however, that Die Linke’s objective of recovering working-class voters from the AfD will be most important. In these two states, which also vote in 2026, the AfD doubled the second-place parties in votes in February. The case of Saxony-Anhalt is especially concerning. The AfD collected 37 percent of ballots there and enjoys an unusual strength even in the largest cities. In 2026, the flashy headlines for Die Linke could come from Western Germany and Berlin. Yet it is in the east of the country where any votes hard won from the AfD can prevent the first far-right regional president since 1945.