They line up for hours to see Sanders, snow accumulating on their puffy jackets and knit caps and uncombed hair. They fill college arenas, chanting, “Ber-nie! Ber-nie!” They gather in little knots as they wait for him to appear, engaging in impromptu rap sessions about pot legalization and campaign-finance reform. They are feeling the Bern.

If Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, as he is favored to do, it will be because of the youth movement he has inspired. It will be a stunning result in a state that has historically been friendly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, a dramatic overthrow of the Democratic machine by a rebellious new generation of liberals. And if nobody saw this coming, that may be because nobody was listening to what the kids were trying to tell us.

For years now, a new leftist movement has been rising on college campuses. It speaks a new, radical language of intersectional identity politics. It is obsessed with social justice, with promoting the interests of the historically marginalized— and with policing its own adherents for their violations of its norms.

It has its own buzzwords, inscrutable to older generations of liberals: white privilege, rape culture, microaggressions, safe spaces. It has marched against its proximate oppressors, university administrations, and gotten college presidents fired; it has demanded apologies for the sins of the past; it seeks to exorcise the ghosts of Woodrow Wilson and John Calhoun. At a rally against police violence at Dartmouth in November, a protester screamed at a frightened girl, “Fuck your white tears!” They are the children of the children of the ’60s, and they are tired of being talked over and ignored. They are rebelling against the establishment, just as their grandparents did—only now, their grandparents are the establishment against which they're rebelling. They are the most liberal generation in American history, and they want their due.

Into this simmering mix has come Bernie Sanders, an old-fashioned class warrior with no particular ear for the new slang. He has sometimes gotten it wrong, but he is trying to learn. The new campus left has adopted him as its champion, and now he is riding the wave it has created.

Sanders’s campaign strategy now hinges on getting them to vote, in ever greater numbers. He has been to three college campuses in the past three days. There are more than 200 chapters of Students for Bernie across the country.

“If we can bring out a decent vote on Tuesday, I am confident that we are going to win,” Sanders told the students here at Franklin Pierce University. “And the reason is that we are doing something extremely radical: We are telling the American people the truth.”

Sanders intends this as a sarcastic line: They call me a radical, but what’s so radical about telling the truth? But that’s not how the kids take it. They want radical. It’s what they came for.