Is a new, young left really on the rise? A few weeks ago, Peter Beinart wrote a long online essay which argued strongly in the affirmative. It drew a lot of attention—20,000 “Likes” and almost 5,000 tweets, at last count. And it made a lot of the progressives who read it feel better about politics than at any time since Mitt Romney learned 47 percent was actually the percentage of his popular vote.

Beinart cobbled together an impressive set of poll results to show that Millennials (Americans under 30) swing left on a broad range of issues—from such obvious ones as same-sex marriage, immigration reform, and military intervention abroad to more surprising ones, like favoring labor unions and preferring a bigger welfare state to a smaller and cheaper version. They also embrace the message of Occupy and even prefer socialism to capitalism, although no pollster seems to have asked them to define those famously slippery terms.

Given their views, large numbers of Millennials should be protesting vigorously as the House GOP holds the state and the economy hostage to an agenda straight out of a Rush Limbaugh show. They should be surrounding the Capitol to defend Obamacare and blast the Republicans for denying food stamps to millions of poor people. They should be clogging the phone lines to Congress to announce a grand mobilization to overturn the GOP majority in 2014. It’s our government, they ought to declare. Boehner, Cantor, and their band of militants have no right to bankrupt or shut it down.

Alas, the only Americans who seem upset enough to organize, at least in large enough numbers for the media to notice, belong to the Tea Party—most of whose zealots are old enough to have voted for Ronald Reagan. Where’s that new left when we need it?

Like many pundits, Beinart assumes that decisive shifts in public opinion will result in changes in national policy. He predicts that whomever wins the Democratic nomination in 2016 will have to embrace “youthful, anti-corporate passion” if she or he hopes to win the White House. However, a movement and those politicians who support it need to mobilize the people who share those opinions or their opponents can win the day. A majority of Americans actually hold a positive view of labor unions. But that hasn’t stopped big employers like Wal-Mart and their GOP enablers from blocking attempts to organize workers and increase the minimum wage.