Recently, amid a broader flare up on the right over how to approach the culture war, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said something that got everyone’s attention: he endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s economic platform. This wasn’t a shock to those who have charted Carlson’s ideological evolution, which has been dramatic. A decade and a half ago, Carlson was mostly aligned with standard conservatism. But the Iraq War and financial crash changed his worldview. “You ought to look up every once in awhile from your ideology and measure it against the results that you anticipated,” Carlson told Glenn Greenwald in an interview two summers ago. “And ask yourself: Is this working? Are my preconceptions, my assumptions—are they still valid?”

One of those preconceptions is that the freer that capital and people are to move, the more we all benefit. But a growing number of conservatives have become alarmed over the ugliest side effects of 21st-century capitalism—atomization, secularization, inequality, inconstancy, nihilism—and reinvigorated an intra-conservative debate over capitalism that had been mostly quiet since the 1950s. Carlson has been voicing a form of Trumpism that Donald Trump suggested on the campaign trail but never managed to articulate in full, let alone fulfill. It offers non-interventionism, economic populism, and moderate social conservatism—two out of three of which the left (if not the center) favors. “Imagine someone who genuinely respected the nuclear family, and sympathized with the culture of rural America, but at the same time was willing to take your side against rapacious credit card companies bleeding you dry at 35 percent interest,” Carlson said on his show earlier this month. “Would you vote for someone like that? My gosh. Of course. Who wouldn’t? That candidate would be elected in a landslide. Every single time.”

As a passage like that illustrates, Carlson can communicate in a way that many seasoned politicians would envy, and a number of pundits have suggested, half-seriously, that he run for president. This is an unlikely possibility. Carlson seems to despise the sail trimming that goes with elective politics, and he also has a long paper trail of inflammatory statements about race, sex, and immigration. But somebody offering Carlson’s deal, economics from the left and social issues from the right—and a non-interventionism alien to the bipartisan center of Washington—is a president waiting to happen. Right now, despite sensible policy proposals from conservatives like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, only the Democratic Party has much credibility when it comes to protecting the little guy from financial catastrophe. At the same time, all but a few Democratic presidential contenders seem determined to alienate the sort of Americans who should be receptive to their economic message.

If we look at polls from places like Pew and Gallup, the statistical portrait of the silent majority is complicated, but it’s hardly unfavorable to Democrats. Over sixty percent of Americans favor increased federal spending on education, infrastructure, and veteran’s benefits. Over 55 percent support spending more on environmental protection. Sixty-two percent believe that corporations don’t pay their fair share. Sixty percent say that government must ensure that all Americans have health coverage. About two thirds support upholding Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion a constitutional right. About 69 percent describe themselves as “sympathetic” or “very sympathetic” to illegal immigrants. Well over 60 percent support same-sex marriage. And a plurality feels our military interventions abroad have made us less safe. On the face of it, then, Americans and Democrats are made for one another.

But the culture war has changed a lot since Pat Buchanan invoked the term in a 1992 speech. Today, we’re often fighting over things that, even a decade ago, were peripheral to our discourse: what accommodations to make for people who identify as transgender, whether black lives matter or all lives matter, and whether “believe women” means weakening the presumption of innocence. Some of these debates are concrete, such as whether to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Others are more philosophical, such as whether traditional masculinity is harmful or whether freedom of speech should be abrogated to prevent “hate.” Take the non-left position on too many of these matters, and you may find yourself grouped with the opposite side. Social conservatism used to mean that you wanted prayer in school, bans on abortion, legal curbs on offensive speech, and laws to discourage homosexuality. Today, it can just mean you got off a stop too early on the wokeness train.

By 2006 standards, Americans are liberal. But, for those who went along for the awokening, the view is different. Let’s go back, once more, to some numbers. Sixty percent think that admiring traditional masculinity is good, not bad. Sixty-seven percent (as of 2016) support the right to make offensive statements about minority groups, and even more support the right to make offensive statements about religion. Fifty-seven percent have a lot of confidence in the police. Sixty-one percent think male-born students should not be allowed to compete in female sports. Seventy-three percent are opposed to the use of race in admissions. Over 70 percent are opposed to abortion past the first trimester. Seventy-nine percent support requiring employers to verify that the people they hire are in the United States legally. And 60 percent think athletes should be required to stand for the national anthem.

Here we see the problem for Democrats. While much of Twitter condemns these views as deplorable, they are held by robust majorities of Americans. They’re far from the hard-right social views of someone like Pat Robertson, but they’re also far from the social views of Atlantic interns. Inconveniently for Democrats with aspirations for national office, the latter group sets many of the rules. Blue America has made such an abrupt leap in mores that anyone who acts like it’s 2010 is asking for career ruin. (Recall that MSNBC host Joy Reid felt compelled to blame hackers for things she had allegedly written less than a decade earlier.) Joe Biden, never much for coherence to begin with, gets as much grief for joking about keeping a girl away from men as he does for flip-flopping on China.

How many old-school Democrats might find themselves tempted to bolt the party, if presented with a candidate offering Carlson’s pitch? Political scientists speak of the economically left and culturally right quadrant of voters as being underserved. But, if the above numbers are representative, it’s not just an underserved quadrant. It’s the deciding quadrant. To put it another way, the center of gravity in American politics is among what you might call Deplorable New Dealers. For these voters, who lack a champion at election time, the question must be: who is less hideous? Is it Republicans with plutocratic economics and retrograde social views? Or is it Democrats with fairer economics and hyperwokeness?

You could argue that this dilemma has existed since the 1960s, when a commitment to civil rights cost Democrats their hold on the South, and that Democrats must stay true to social justice today as they did in the 1960s, lest they lose their soul. But you could also argue that the moral stakes have changed. Twitter and academia treat many of today’s crusades for liberation as the moral equivalents of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but most Americans don’t seem to see it at that way. Many would be willing to live with some misgendering if they could earn five bucks more an hour and avoid being called up for National Guard duty in Tikrit.

Whoever wins the presidency after Trump is likely to have done as Carlson suggested and looked up from his or her ideology, something that has been rare even after all the populist earthquakes around the world. Twenty years ago, our partisan fights were vicious, but there was a broad consensus about how the world works. Free trade would lift developing nations out of poverty and foster the rule of law and political liberalization, as had happened in places like Taiwan and South Korea, even as life in developed countries kept improving. High levels of migration from the developing world would rejuvenate the developed world and leave everyone a winner. Two nations with McDonald’s in them would not go to war with each other, because of their stake in peaceful global development and commerce. Foreign military intervention to protect vulnerable populations, as in Kosovo, was laudable, and failure to intervene, as in Rwanda, was despicable.

Today, we see China overtake the GDP of the United States and grow less, not more, liberal, and life for the working class in much of the developed world isn’t improving. Migration in many countries has led to culture clashes and strains on the welfare state. McDonald’s doesn’t prevent nations from going to war with one another. And humanitarian intervention can destroy more lives than it saves. None of this seems to have changed the views of our educated class. But ordinary Americans, many of whom find themselves farther from economic security and dignity than ever, are in a different place. If they had an ideology, they looked up from it, and they prefer not be called deplorable for doing so. Can Elizabeth Warren reach that group? Or will it be President Carlson instead?