The move horrified members of the progressive left—it was bad politics, they thought, typical of their elders’ timidity, and worse still, little in it would help the child migrants in what Ocasio-Cortez had called “concentration camps” on the border. Their pushback against it, which included tweets by Chakrabarti, outraged the party leadership.

John McWhorter: AOC’s critics are pretending not to know how language works

This has made Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, until now little known, a political target. Maureen Dowd branded Chakrabarti “the real instigator” in The New York Times, and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor, labeled him “a snot-nosed punk.” But the backlash is about much more than either of them. What is happening is a containment operation against the Millennial left.

In some ways, my politics overlap with Chakrabarti’s—the Harvard-educated tech millionaire who was a founding engineer at the online-payment company Stripe before volunteering to work for Bernie Sanders—but we have no shortage of disagreements. What we unquestionably share, though, is a Millennial perspective.

We’ve both seen successive promises made by the Boomer elites go horrifically wrong. If you are our age—he’s 33 and I’m 31—the great events that shape your worldview are not a series of Western triumphs, but a succession of spectacular failures. Our formative experiences were the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the election of Donald Trump. That makes it hard to defer to a veteran like Pelosi on strategy, when her generation has racked up so many failures.

The Democrats are experiencing a clash of generations. As in all such clashes, each side thinks the other is delusional. When the Millennial left looks at the establishment, it sees leaders senescent with decades in the House, blindly clinging to bipartisan civility that no longer exists, unable to view men like Mitch McConnell as their opponents and not their colleagues, and believing that white voters are the only path to victory in 2020. The Millennials see themselves as the realists here.

Read: House Democrats don’t know what to make of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The Boomer establishment thinks the opposite, rubbishing the frustrations of the Millennials as naive follies. They see the squad—the name the four freshman congresswomen endorsed by the Justice Democrats, all progressive women of color, have chosen for themselves—on a trajectory that loses the party the white voters it needs to win in 2020. Dismissing talk that minority turnout can make the difference, they want these young representatives to know their place and quiet down.

Both sides insist the party’s midterm victories validate their approach. And with projections that back up both strategies, the approach to 2020 is up for grabs. But, as if Pelosi were determined to prove she was past her prime, she chose to have this fight over the migration crisis—where the new left sees compromise as not only morally abhorrent, but also politically pointless.