The protest wasn’t against Pelosi per se, but a year on it’s clear that Pelosi won, and the Sunrise campaign lost. There isn’t a special House committee on the Green New Deal. (There is a new House committee, sure, and a Democrats-only Senate group, but they both focus on the more generic “climate crisis.”) Nor has the larger Green New Deal movement racked up obvious, substantive wins since. It has aimed for billionaires but felled “farting cows.” It has talked up, and then mostly talked down, the ideas of a federal jobs guarantee and Hamiltonian industrial policy. In March, a resolution praising it was decisively defeated, 57–0, during a show vote in the Senate.

And yet, a year later, the fact is unavoidable: The Green New Deal has won. Just as punk was dead by 1978, but every guitar-optional song since has been labeled “post-punk,” the Green New Deal has reshaped the terms of the endeavor. Its brand, you might say, is just too strong. That is because it named something real.

Read: The think tank struggling to write the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal is how Democrats talk about, and propose to address, a revelation that was already sweeping global politics: the truth that climate change is not an environmental issue in the same way as smog or acid rain. Carbon-based fuels, and thus heat-trapping carbon emissions, are not so much sewn into the fabric of our economic system as they are its warp and weft. And while that is slowly changing, any tactless attempt to rip out carbon risks rending the garment. The Green New Deal assumes that carbon is core to modern society, and it proceeds with decarbonization accordingly. As the global historian Adam Tooze put it during a recent lecture: The Green New Deal “turns the question from polar bears and icebergs to political economy.”

Or as a more surprising admirer says: It assumes that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.” That idea—which also underpins, to some degree, the Paris Agreement—is too potent to perish. And if it is winning, it is because it is true.

It has had some effects on politics. In the United States, its first-order consequence is clear: It has increased the scope, and the price tag, of Democratic climate plans. Since June, primary candidates have increased the amount of proposed public investment in their plans by 59 percent, according to a new memo from the left-wing think tank Data for Progress.

But this expansion of scope has led politicians to make broader claims about how society ought to work. Seven candidates now have “strong” environmental-justice plans, and eight have “robust” job plans, according to the same memo. “Everyone, at least in our analysis, has moved in a Green New Deal direction over the past year,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, Data for Progress’s vice president of policy and strategy, told me.