Barack Obama’s fifth State of the Union address received the usual praise from Democrats and many cable news commentators, but the fact is the occasion was rather grim, and his approach in some ways frustrating. With all his talk of raising the minimum wage and other executive actions that would circumvent Congress, he implicitly admitted that progress on Capitol Hill is now all but impossible. At the same time, he couldn’t quite bring himself to invite direct confrontation with the Republicans, who control the House and will continue to block most of his programs. The general verdict on MSNBC was that he was successfully positioning himself above the fray. But is that really possible in today’s Washington? The city seems all fray, all the time.

When it came to policy, the speech highlighted the set of economic concerns that has risen to the forefront of Democratic politics these last couple of years: “Obama Vows to Act Alone on the Economy,” as The New York Times summarized matters the following day. The president spoke of unemployment insurance and similar issues related to the economic struggles of the middle class, emphasizing measures that could be carried out by executive orders. He did not, as many liberals had hoped, speak at length about inequality. Apparently he and his advisers decided that was a bit of a downer for a State of the Union address and chose instead to stress inequality’s sunnier flip side of expanding opportunity. But the point was made, perhaps as much by what wasn’t in the speech—no pleas for reducing the deficit and cutting entitlements, to name two inside-the-Beltway priorities that liberals loathe and that Obama had previously suggested he favored or would at least consider.

There exists these days, among Washington policy intellectuals and advocates who tilt toward the left end of the accepted political spectrum, a certain measured optimism. It’s not about Obama, or any feeling that he might somehow, with his sagging poll numbers, be able to persuade congressional Republicans to fund, say, an infrastructure investment bank. Confidence is appropriately near zero on matters like that. Rather, it’s about the widely held perception that the Democratic Party, after years of, in the argot, “moving to the right,” is finally soft-shoeing its way leftward, away from economic centrism and toward a populism that the party as a whole has not embraced for years or even decades.

This change has occurred not by way of sweeping dramatic gestures on Obama’s or anyone’s part, but subtly and incrementally. Obama’s contribution to the shift has been mostly rhetorical, but of course presidential rhetoric matters, so when he started addressing such issues as income inequality more directly in his speeches, many observers read into it certain clear policy implications.

“This growing inequality is not just morally wrong, it’s bad economics. Because when middle-class families have less to spend, guess what, businesses have fewer consumers,” he said in a speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, last summer. He finished the thought by saying that reversing the trend of growing inequality is “certainly my highest priority.”

But Obama is only part of this story. The large and passionate following gained by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is a major development here. Warren is a native of Oklahoma who grew up poor and became a professor at Harvard Law School and then (as leader of congressional oversight on the Troubled Asset Relief Program) a thorn in former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s side before she handily defeated incumbent Republican Scott Brown to reach the Senate. She has millions of admirers who would dearly love to see her run for president in 2016, whatever Hillary Clinton’s plans.

Warren possesses a knack for earthy articulation of the liberal-populist worldview matched by no one else in American public life today. Videos of her speaking to supporters and donors, or decimating slow-witted cable hosts, go “viral” and get millions of views from liberals who’ve been desperate for years to hear a prominent Democrat talk the way she does. This is part of what she said in what is perhaps her most famous clip, from September 2011:

I hear all this, you know, well, this is class warfare, this is whatev…. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I wanna be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for…. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

We live in an age when hedge fund managers and Wall Streeters complain of class warfare against them, and when, as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig’s important research has shown, all but a small proportion of political campaign contributions are made by “the tiniest fraction of the one percent.”¹ It’s been years since a high-profile politician has spoken like Warren and not only survived but flourished. Warren has aroused populist tendencies in parts of the liberal base and probably emboldened other senators and members of the House to speak more directly on class issues.

For example, Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, while lacking Warren’s ability to strike at the emotional heart of the matter, are two other leaders with populist inclinations. Brown—who was thought by many to be “too left” to win the Ohio Senate seat that he took by beating an incumbent Republican by twelve points in 2006—is a very skillful politician who seems destined to be a voice on economic issues for some time to come. Sanders is a moderate socialist who evidently plans on seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, as a way to pressure Hillary Clinton, widely presumed to be not only a candidate but the presumptive Democratic nominee, to move to the left.²

It isn’t just elected officials who are part of this change. It extends to the partisan liberal media as well. Most of the liberal websites and younger bloggers who have become influential in the capital, who are read avidly by their coevals who work as Capitol Hill and White House staffers, are highly sympathetic with the populist worldview. I would argue that MSNBC has played a significant part in this trend. MSNBC was slow to take to the idea of becoming “the liberal channel”—it seems astonishing, looking back on it, that conservative pundit Tucker Carlson had his own show on MSNBC as recently as 2008—but it certainly has embraced the identity now.

Things have reached the point that Washington-insider Democrats watch MSNBC as faithfully as Republicans watch Fox. But Fox, so adept at plucking those rank-and-file conservative raw nerves, has far more viewers overall. Many of MSNBC’s most prominent hosts—Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Chris Hayes—are fiercely populist in their politics. MSNBC offers its viewers a steady diet of segments on inequality, the minimum wage, un- and underemployment, and related issues, along with interviews with Walmart or fast-food workers. With Democratic offices on Capitol Hill, and TVs throughout the White House, tuned to MSNBC all day and into the night, this programming was bound to exert considerable influence.

Finally, and not least, there are the conditions of middle-class American life itself: a real unemployment rate, according to Jeff Madrick, of nearly 9 percent,³ the official number being low only because so many workers have taken themselves out of the job hunt; the slow pace of the recovery; and across-the-board wage stagnation (except for the top few percent). The public, or at least Democrats and independents, now perceives that inequality, underemployment, and wage stagnation are important and interconnected issues.

The most astonishing piece of social science research I’ve seen in some time was published in late 2011 by two academics, Michael Norton of Harvard and Dan Ariely of Duke. They asked a sampling of Americans two basic questions: What do you think wealth distribution in the United States is today, and what wealth distribution do you think would be ideal? They then matched those two sets of numbers to the existing facts.

Respondents guessed that the top 20 percent of Americans owned just under 60 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 60 percent owned just more than 20 percent. Their ideal distribution, they said, would be for the top quintile to own only about 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom three quintiles to own about 45 percent. The actual numbers: the top quintile owns more than 80 percent, while the bottom 60 percent owns around 5 percent. The results suggested that if Americans knew all this, the political space for a more aggressive left-populism would exist.

Americans don’t know all this, but in more recent surveys they do strongly back an increased minimum wage in the $9 to $10 range, as well as more public investment and other populist measures. All of this has created an atmosphere in Washington in which progressive think tanks are offering white papers that are a bit bolder than normal, not merely supporting the Democratic administration’s agenda (as is typically the case), but trying to direct it.