Is the Pennsylvania senator trolling the left or offering a way forward for Democrats? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells  Photograph by Rebecca Kiger for The New Yorker John Fetterman is an unusual politician: he is acidic in a way elected officials rarely are; he doesn’t look or comport himself anywhere near as formally as other senators do; and he is basically disinterested in a lot of the mundane work of politics. But his populism is also very sincere, and he has managed to expose how the world of politics leaves ordinary people out. What really caught my attention was his decision, after October 7th, to become the most vocal and, in some ways, extreme champion of Israel in U.S. politics—a decision that seemed to come out of nowhere. He isn’t Jewish, serves on no foreign-policy committees, hadn’t travelled to the Middle East, and had not previously expressed much interest in the issue. Fetterman had generally been associated with the progressive wing of his party, which meant that this stance made him both new friends and new enemies. I wanted to know why this politician, in his mid-fifties, would so abruptly define himself by championing a controversial cause. He was somewhat less guarded, and, on Israel, more extreme than I expected. He also was quite clear that he saw the Israel issue as part of a pattern in U.S. politics, in which the Democrats are increasingly being led by their most left-wing figures—he believes to their potential peril. And so the question of his emotional attachment to the Israeli cause became entwined with his broader arc, of how he first came to be one of the Democrats pushing his party in a more progressive direction, and of how he has now become someone trying to get the Party to return to the center. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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