Fetterman’s betrayal of progressives is why young people are turning off politics

“We have started a progressive movement here in Pennsylvania. It’s not going away. This isn’t over. This is not how our story ends.” — John Fetterman on April 26, 2016, after finishing third in a Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

This is how that story ended last week, more than seven years later. Now having achieved his dream of election to the U.S. Senate, and after becoming a leading national figure in the Democratic Party, Fetterman flatly declared in an NBC News interview: “I am not a progressive.”

And the man who once anointed himself leader of the Keystone State’s left-wing movement he now rejects has been busy gathering the receipts to back up that statement. In the same interview. Fetterman — who burst onto the state political scene in 2016 with bold pro-immigration statements, backed by the story of his wife Gisele’s coming to America as a young undocumented migrant from Brazil — said he now supports restrictions on the flow of migrants.

Fetterman told NBC News that immigration is still “near and dear to me” but that it makes sense for Democrats to make a deal with right-wing Republicans demanding tougher policies at the U.S. southern border as the price for aid to Ukraine and Israel. “It’s a reasonable conversation — until somebody can say there’s an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don’t know about,” he said.

Some progressive voters who might be turned off by Fetterman’s new take on immigration were already furious with the senator over the ongoing war in Gaza. That conflict has seen the first-term Democrat not only join most people in condemning the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas but also become one of Israel’s most zealous defenders, refusing to discuss Palestinian civilian casualties and brushing off hundreds of calls to his office and noisy protests begging him to call for a cease-fire. In fact, he has seemed to mock protesters, waving an Israeli flag at one gathering.

All this after Fetterman, who started his rise as the mayor of tiny Braddock in Western Pennsylvania, introduced himself to statewide voters by openly comparing himself to left-wing icon Sen. Bernie Sanders in that 2016 race and then telling progressives again as he successfully ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 and for a year or two after that he was one of them.

“Chip in whatever you can to help us take this progressive momentum all the way to the ballot box on May 15,” Fetterman asked supporters on Twitter, now X, during that 2018 race. That was one of a number of times he explicitly said he was a progressive or endorsed progressive policies or values. In return, core Democrats fueled his decadelong rise from obscurity to Capitol Hill with thousands of small donations, or by knocking on neighbors’ doors.

Now, some of those early supporters say they were betrayed, or even feel lied to. I tried to reach Fetterman this weekend by direct-messaging him on X/Twitter, but have not heard back, at least yet. I wanted the senator to tell me if he’s changed, or if he thinks times have changed — or if something else inspired last week’s declaration. For now, I’ll have to cite his top aide Adam Jentleson, who insists Fetterman “is just being consistent. He spent the entire campaign” — referring to 2022, when Fetterman adopted some more centrist stances like support for fracking — “telling people he wasn’t a down-the-line lefty.”

I asked Pennsylvania voters on social media how they felt about his anti-progressive jab, as well as his positions on Gaza and immigration. A few praised him as an iconoclast, someone who’s willing to buck the conventional wisdom. “He is not afraid to be his own man with his own opinions,” Elen Snyder, just elected as a Democratic supervisor in Newtown Township, responded. “I don’t care what his label is supposed to be as far as progressive or not. His words and actions say it all.” X user Donna L agreed that “I like him no matter what he calls himself.”

But I heard from a lot of Fetterman 2022 backers who feel, in the words of one, “duped,” and who have no interest in donating or volunteering for him ever again. Mike Doyle, a Democrat who once ran for a state House seat in Northeast Philly, backed Fetterman in the 2022 general election but now said: “We contributed a LOT of money (for our income bracket) and I now regret every single penny we contributed.” Added an X user who goes by Kumquat Gasket: “I worked my butt off to get him elected. I canvassed every weekend, helped with rallies for him in South Philly, ran a training to help combat the Republican attacks on him.

“I feel betrayed.”

I totally get it. As an opinion journalist who’s covered Fetterman since that 2016 race, the senator has not been the man I once thought he was, even by the lowered expectations of his moves toward the center in beating back New Jerseyite Mehmet Oz last year. I do applaud when politicians buck partisan politics for a moral center — and Fetterman has done this, as with his call for indicted colleague Sen. Bob Menendez to resign. But ignoring the plight of slaughtered civilians in Gaza and dropping the pro-immigrant vibe that drew people to him in the first place? That feels like any moral center has caved in.

» READ MORE: Is Gaza becoming Joe Biden’s Vietnam? | Will Bunch Newsletter

This feels deeply troubling for reasons that go beyond Fetterman. In embracing Israel’s bombastic response to Oct. 7 while not fighting to overturn Donald Trump’s inhumane border policies that in many ways have continued, President Joe Biden is basically Fetterman without the Carhartt hoodies or shorts. Fetterman’s not on the ballot in 2024 but Biden is, and many of those progressives vowing to stop donating to their senator aren’t super happy with their president, either.

This is particularly true of young voters who — buffeted by student debt and unaffordable rents, facing a future ruled by climate change — have trended more to the left than generations who came before them. Voters under 30 were critical to narrow victories for Biden in 2020 and for Democrats including Fetterman in the 2022 midterms, but their mood has seriously soured. A Harvard poll earlier this month found the age 18-29 cohort so put off by a likely rematch between Biden and Trump that fewer than half are even planning to vote, which would be a disaster for the Democrats.

This is the part of the column where, as a boomer, I’m supposed to hector the callous youth for not seeing the threat of fascism under a second Trump White House. That threat is all too real — which is why the people who need hectoring are the Democratic elites like Fetterman who think they can ignore the people who got them there, or tell them to swallow their bitter brand of political porridge, who think that yelling “Save democracy!” — but offering nothing else — is a strategy. Now top Democrats are using the threat of Trump as a cudgel to quash any sign of intraparty dissent, as happened this weekend when national party leaders forced Pennsylvania Democrats at their Harrisburg confab to abandon a vote against school vouchers that might embarrass Gov. Josh Shapiro.

How are young voters supposed to feel when one party has become an authoritarian cult taking away their rights, and yet the other party won’t fight for the things that truly matter to them? Young idealists thought Fetterman might actually be different before he turned out to be more of the same, just with funnier tweets. Young people disapprove of Biden’s pro-Israel tilt in the war (nearly 70%), want to prioritize climate over the economy (nearly 60%), and don’t support curbing legal immigration (just 27%) — yet struggle to find candidates who’ll stand up for them.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen progressives in a state of existential despair. I graduated from college the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, and “liberal” became a dirty word for more than a generation. But the 2010s brought real hope to folks who believed that America can change for the better — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaign in 2016 — that somehow got overwhelmed by a pandemic and now a prospective dictator.

Last week, my two favorite New York Times columnists — Michelle Goldberg and Jamelle Bouie — showed up almost simultaneously with pieces trying to explain the current deep ennui of the American left. Goldberg wrote that leftists are suffering “a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress” while the dark visions of the far right manage to give people on that side something to actually get excited about it; Bouie lamented that Democrats lack a vision beyond beating Trump, writing: “We need to fight political despair everywhere we find it, which means this country needs an overhaul of its economic system, its political institutions and its public life.”

Many voters want exactly that, but there is no charismatic figure offering a vision of the future that people can get excited about. That’s kind of been the Democratic Party’s brand since the Reagan beatdown years, and shame on me for ever thinking Fetterman might be different.

It would have taken hard work and real courage for Fetterman to pull off his 2016 promise of leading a progressive movement. It’s a lot easier to be a funny contrarian crank. The senator doubled down on that recently when he hired disgraced ex-Congressman George Santos to film a Cameo video trolling the also-indicted Menendez. If there was any irony in hiring a politician who told voters he was one thing and turned out to be something else, Fetterman didn’t seem to see it.

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