Let’s think about the broader, less immediate meaning of our political era.

This is how I read it and have read it for some time:

The Democratic Party is going hard left. There will be stops and starts but it’s the general trajectory and will be for the foreseeable future. Pew Research sees the party lurching to the left since 2009; Gallup says the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has jumped 23 points since 2000. But you don’t need polls. More than 70 Democrats in the House, and a dozen in the Senate, have signed on to the Green New Deal, an extreme-to-the-point-of-absurdist plan that is yet serious: Its authors have staked out what they want in terms of environmental and economic policy, will try to win half or a quarter of it, and on victory will declare themselves to have been moderate all along. The next day they will continue to push for everything. The party’s presidential hopefuls propose to do away with private medical insurance and abolish ICE. Three years ago Hillary Clinton would have called this extreme; today it is her party’s emerging consensus.

The academy and our mass entertainment culture are entities of the left and will continue to push in that direction. Millennials, the biggest voting-age bloc in America, are to the left of the generations before them. Moderates are aging out. The progressives are young and will give their lives to politics: It’s all they’ve ever known. It is a mistake to dismiss their leaders as goofballs who’ll soon fall off the stage. They may or may not, but those who support and surround them are serious ideologues who mean to own the future.

None of this feels like a passing phase. It feels like the outline of a great political struggle that will be fought over the next 10 years or more.