This month, Democrats took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, after their sweeping electoral victory in November. And the biggest political stories in the country, aside from the fight over President Trump’s proposed border wall, have focussed on the unabashedly leftist members of the incoming class of House freshmen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been pushing a progressive economic and environmental agenda, while Rashida Tlaib created a firestorm by exclaiming, about President Trump, that “we are going to impeach the motherfucker.” They have elicited glee (and a somewhat bizarre level of fascination) on the right and concern in establishment Democratic circles about where these fresh faces are taking the Party.

So where is the Democratic Party headed, and are we seeing the seeds of a sharp leftward turn, much as the Republicans turned to the right a half-century ago?

To talk about the Democrats’ past and future, I spoke by phone with Rick Perlstein, who has written a series of books on the postwar rise of the American right. In the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the political lessons of Newt Gingrich’s rise, the trauma carried by the postwar generation of Democrats, and what people are missing about Ocasio-Cortez’s rhetoric.

People on the left of the Democratic Party seem very excited about this moment and what it might mean for the future of the Party, while people on the center-left and in the center seem afraid. So it seems like everyone is convinced that this is the start of a real change. Do you agree?

Well, I don’t think they’re afraid so much for the Democratic Party as they’re afraid for themselves. This is obviously a changing of the guard. When I watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez operate with such aplomb and skill and obvious erudition, she reminds me of when people like you and me stood around at a cocktail party or a dinner party and inevitably the conversation turned to, Why are the Democrats where they are? Why don’t they take the fights to the enemy? Why don’t they pivot off troll-y comments from the Republicans, instead of playing the game on their terms? Why aren’t they offering clear, bold, long-term, super-jumbo policy solutions that people can remember instead of triangulating everything the Republicans suggest?

And, suddenly, someone emerges who seems to be listening to all this, who is probably part of those conversations. And, suddenly, she has the power to actually act in a way that the Party hasn’t—a party that, almost forty years later, is still traumatized by the success of Ronald Reagan. It’s a profoundly generational phenomenon, and, clearly, it’s scary.

I think if someone were just listening to what you were saying about the institutional Democratic Party, they would not think that party just won a gigantic midterm sweep in a really, really good economy.

Right, they did it.

So is, or was, the status quo of the Democratic Party actually that unhealthy?

I think psychologically there’s a lot of, shall we say, neurosis. Again, going back to this trauma of the Reagan victory, the Gingrich victory, the Bush victories—it’s people who built their political identities around a neurotic response to trauma. It’s, We gotta build a protective shell around ourselves because, if we show our egos, our egos will be destroyed, to put it in psychoanalytic terms.

To have this young person who hasn’t experienced this trauma . . . and one of the things that’s fascinating about this—I’ll call it an often-used word—authenticity that she has is that you see her, in very interesting ways, going back to modes of rhetoric and modes of political communication that you associate with lots of pre-Reagan figures. Although I’ll also say figures like Reagan. It’s like Harry Truman.

What are examples of that?

I don’t know if she sits around and reads political history or looks at old political videos. But I see, on the “60 Minutes” interview, Anderson Cooper throws a question to her that for just about any traditional, old-generation Democrat is a stumper—Oh, the other side says you’re radical. And she had this ready-made answer in the hopper, which was to deploy these very powerful symbols from the American civic religion, and I’m going to quote: “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like social security. . . . If that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”

Now, immediately, when I heard her say that, I heard a very famous quote from J.F.K., who was asked if he was a liberal in the same kind of accusatory tone, and he said, “If by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a liberal.”

I see her Reagan-like brilliance when she comes up with a phrase, like I heard her do in an interview on the shutdown, which she immediately took to a much higher level. She said the people at the border trying to get in “are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out will ever be.” I mean, she mentions that the kids who died in custody—she mentioned that it was Christmastime, which was just so Reagan, to use this resonant emotional symbol. She mentions people coming to the country just with the shirt on their back. She says that the people trying to keep them out are “anti-American.” This is the American civil religion. This is playing the game in a way that a pre-traumatized generation of Democrats was able to play the game.

I think people see her as in touch with this new generation but, in a way, it seems like you’re saying that she recalls a New Deal or New Frontier Democrat.

Well, there’s a real back-to-the-future thing going on here, right? In a lot of ways, the Democratic Party is a complicated, complex coalition, and always has been, with lots of elements, both reactionary and progressive, in it. But, in a lot of ways, she’s returning the Democratic Party to the roots—this idea that the Democratic Party is always going to be fighting for you.

O.K., but you didn’t really answer my question earlier about whether the Democratic Party is unhealthy. This party just won a huge national victory, I think it’s won six of the past seven popular votes for the Presidency, et cetera.

Right, so what do you do with that political capital? That’s the trauma—they don’t even see political capital. They still see the Democrats in a situation of political deficit.

So liberalism and the Democratic Party have always been O.K., but, because they’re so traumatized, and because of the rise of the right, they haven’t been willing to rhetorically, and in terms of actual policies, push forward enough and get enough done?