He is doing all the right stuff for 10 years ago, but it’s all wrong now. His college plan is more ambitious than Biden’s or anything Obama advocated, but those gradations don’t matter anymore; either you want to root out every last driver of inequality or you are, as Teen Vogue called him, “ ‘Petey’ Bourgeois.” Having worked for McKinsey is a Kissinger-grade war crime, as opposed to something all Harvard kids seem to do after graduating. When Buttigieg says that “sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country” as a gay man might give him insight into the experience of black Americans, one gay rights advocate is quick to clarify that this is not “an attempt to appropriate someone else’s experience.”

What unites Buttigieg’s heresies is how recently they would not have been heresies. Even five years ago they would have been, for better or worse, unremarkable — and it’s possible they still are. The gravitational center of the rage against Buttigieg has been Very Online, as has the maximalism of its tone — its insistence that Buttigieg, by thriving within the American architecture of capitalism and privilege, must personally embody all its worst qualities. On left Twitter, it is axiomatic that Buttigieg is not merely a relentlessly ambitious striver but an actual “sociopath.” But offline, in Iowa and New Hampshire, he is gaining in the polls, at the expense of an online-left favorite, Warren. He has been confronted with legitimate questions about his mayoral record on race and policing and has struggled with black voters. But so far, those voters aren’t backing a candidate with a stronger record on racial justice; they are, by a vast margin, supporting Biden.

The same internet ecosystem that has accelerated the shifts within Buttigieg’s own demographic can also distort the extent of those changes’ impact. A survey conducted this year by the Hidden Tribes project found that Democrats who were politically active on social media were far more likely to be white, college-educated and leftward-moving than Democrats who weren’t. The intensity of the Buttigieg backlash feels like a response to the vast gulf that lies between the internet and the Iowa caucuses. It is a disorienting moment: one in which Democratic politics seem at once to have changed completely and to have not changed at all.