Toward the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, E. M. Forster spent a miserable period as a student at an élite English prep school, the sort that served as a launchpad for generations of the country’s upper-class men. The young Forster recoiled from the school’s culture of authoritarianism and militaristic chauvinism, which may have found expression in the students’ often appalling attitudes toward their own mothers. At school, “it was a disgrace to have a mother,” Forster wrote in 1939. “Crabbe’s mother, Gob’s mother, eeugh! No words were too strong, no sounds too shrill.” The maternal monster might jump out of the shadows at any moment: “Nearly every little boy had a mother in a cupboard, and dreadful revelations occurred. A boy would fall ill and a mother would swoop and drive him away in a cab. A parcel would arrive with ‘From Mummy for her darling’ branded upon it.” The mother-haver at Forster’s school could never trust in the safety of his awful secret.

It is developmentally appropriate for a child entering adolescence to be humiliated by the very existence of his parents, and to resent them fiercely for making him feel so terrible. Such violent emotions help a boy punch his way out of the chrysalis of selfhood; they fuel the hard and painful work of becoming an independent adult. But a hallmark of “imbecile societies,” Forster suggested, is that they reinforce childish and irrational hatreds by virtue of how strongly they are felt, how manfully they are expressed. Prep school was one such imbecile society. So was the England of 1939, which horrified Forster with its antisemitism and politics of Nazi appeasement.

The contemporary American reader likely needs no convincing that she, too, finds herself in an imbecile society. But it’s nonetheless startling to revisit Forster’s words in 2026, a year that began with laments from our most powerful leaders and institutions that Mommy had disgraced her men again. In early January, after the ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three, during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, the Fox News columnist David Marcus claimed that Good was a “trained member” of “organized gangs of wine moms” who “use Antifa tactics to harass and impede” ICE operations. During a press conference, Vice-President J. D. Vance demanded, “What young mother shows up and decides they’re gonna throw their car in front of ICE officers who are enforcing legitimate law?” During a speech in Detroit, President Trump described “these fake riots” in terms evocative of a coven. “You see the woman?” Trump asked. “That’s all practiced. They go practice, they go to areas, they take hotel rooms, and they all practice together.”

You see the woman? She is a mother, white, liberal, highly educated, somewhere between age thirty-five and age sixty-five; she is the Parents’ Association treasurer door-knocking for local Working Families candidates; she is constructing a cardboard guillotine for the next No Kings protest out of the leftovers from her fifth grader’s diorama project. She is a political minority within a demographic majority: fifty-one per cent of white women voters opted for Trump in the 2024 election, and only a single Democratic candidate has won a majority of white women in sixty years (Bill Clinton, in 1996). She has answered to many names: Soccer Mom, Momboss, Karen, AWFUL (or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal, an acronym that gained some traction in right-wing channels after Good’s death).

But, most often, she is Wine Mom. A recent stroll through my social-media feeds turns up the “normie resist lib wine mom,” the “Occupy Democrats menopausal wine mom,” and the “MSNBC wine mom final boss.” Her electoral manifestation is, often, the “hot suburban wine mom,” whose composite is a former federal prosecutor who styles her honey-highlighted hair in mid-shaft waves, has four kids, and is exactly forty-seven years old. (In November, when Democrats prevailed in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, the liberal commentator Jill Filipovic characterized the winners as a “moderate former CIA wine mom” and a “moderate former Navy wine mom,” respectively.) Currently, she is most prominently embodied as the “based wine mom,” exemplified by Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan of the “I’ve Had It” podcast, and typically understood as a onetime mainstream liberal who has moved dramatically leftward in response to the milquetoast centrism of Kamala Harris’s failed Presidential campaign, the cruelty and chaos of the second Trump Administration, and the fecklessness of the nominal Democratic opposition.

In short, the semiotics of the wine mom are complex. She is always embarrassing to someone, to some degree; otherwise, she takes so many forms that she may be formless. At the very least, the “wine mom” label—whether intended as a mark of disgrace or condescension, or as an ironic term of endearment—is a useful shorthand for a politically activated and well-organized cohort, one that votes for left-leaning candidates in much higher numbers than the working-class diner patrons or disaffected young men on whom Democratic leaders tend to fixate. The results of the upcoming midterm elections, in fact, may depend in large part on wine moms—whoever they may be, whatever they may drink.

The wine mom first became a household name not as a political actor but as a marketing concept. An epochal moment arrived in 2011, in the era of the mommy blog, when the then popular website Moms Who Need Wine teamed up with the California Wine Club for a subscription program known as the Wine Mom Series. According to the site’s founder, Marile Borden, this branding opportunity reflected a newfound honesty among women about the frazzling demands of motherhood. “Moms are becoming much more real in terms of admitting that the job is a difficult one and that a nice glass of wine at the end of the day sure helps,” Borden told the Associated Press. The Wine Mom series included brands with names such as Girls’ Night Out, Mad Housewife, and Middle Sister; another of the featured wines, MommyJuice, faced accusations of trademark infringement from a competitor, Mommy’s Time Out. (They eventually settled out of court.)

By 2015, the wine mom had been packaged in books (e.g., “The Three-Martini Playdate”), meme-ified by an “Inside Amy Schumer” sketch, and declared passé by a Chicago Tribune columnist (“Wine-swilling mom trope ready for retirement”). The term didn’t acquire a distinct political valence until the first Trump Administration, as large numbers of center-left suburban women were drawn toward political activism, gaining national prominence through umbrella mobilization groups such as Red Wine & Blue. Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard, argued in a 2018 piece for the journal Democracy that newly galvanized legions of middle-aged, left-to-center women were “fueling an American political transformation,” drawing on Putnam’s research in Pennsylvania and Skocpol’s field work across eight counties in four swing states. By Skocpol’s count, about twenty-five hundred women-led grassroots resistance groups formed during Trump’s first term.

Toward the end of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, some liberal commentators were discovering “wine mom” as a rhetorical means of dividing what they saw as the reasonable center from the belligerent Democratic Socialists of America set. A Daily News contributor lamented the “Bernie Bros’ bullying of the neoliberal, Hillary-bot wine moms of the world”; an op-ed in the Boston Globe grieved the Sanders supporters’ “open disdain for the bougie, suburban ‘wine mom’ voters.” As a political smear, “ ‘wine mom’ got picked up first by a self-identified left that’s more online, more ideological, often younger, often less female, to argue that you middle-aged women are doing politics wrong,” Putnam told me. “It’s been striking, in Trump 2.0, to see the online right picking up the idea of the wine mom as something they need to be attacking or criticizing.” (Tucker Carlson got ahead of this curve back in 2022, when he disparaged then Vice-President Harris as a “low-I.Q. wine mom.”)

Lydia Kiesling is a novelist and a mother of two in Portland, Oregon, where she has been active on behalf of causes including universal preschool, affordable housing, and immigrant rights. “I do think there’s a continuum from the Progressive Era eugenicist do-gooder to the busybody Karen stereotype,” she said. This kernel of truth may account for why the prosopopoeia of the wine mom absorbs so much misogynist loathing from all over the political map. At the same time, Kiesling went on, “I appreciate that there’s been some rehabilitation of the wine mom, that people are broadly conceding that these are people in our society who have energy and, often, have a little adjacency to power, and so if this group is feeling radicalized, that’s important.”

The potential energy of organized gangs of wine moms is implicit in the new book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences,” in which Anton Jäger, a political historian at Oxford, draws a familiar but potent picture of an atomized, reactive, and screen-tethered culture, one lacking the sticky ongoing connections that were facilitated by the union meetings and shop floors and rec halls of yore. The “prospects for any renewal,” Jäger writes, “will have to be sought in everyday life—in those circumstances in which people still regularly enter into contact with others, in which common concerns are self-evident.” Such concerns may surface most readily, he goes on, for the individual who “still has to drop their children at daycare, attend parent-teacher meetings, or visit their own parents in retirement homes.” This person sounds a lot like a woman in middle age, whose I.R.L. friendships and unbreakable obligations form many of the invisible threads of community. “Again and again, people will say, ‘I never imagined I’d be making so many new friends at this stage in my life,’ ” Putnam said. “The reason these women stay involved in politics is because they’ve built those close personal ties.”

Those ties, as Jäger acknowledges, are often forged in and around schools. In my conversation with Kiesling, she recalled a fellow-activist saying that “your central power is your school—you start there and you radiate outward.” What appears simply as a P.T.A. meeting or a group of parents waiting outside the school gates at dismissal can double as a wellspring of political organization and mutual aid. That’s partly why Moms for Liberty was able to take over school boards so quickly after the pandemic, and it’s partly why a center-left counterstrike dominated by mothers could so quickly take them back. The left-leaning Pipeline Fund, which started in 2018, helped Democrats in Florida pick up fifteen school-board seats in 2024, and plans to back candidates in school-board and other down-ballot races across twenty-one states in the next midterms.

Schools as a grassroots power base also helps explain why the people of Minneapolis were able to mount a disciplined and effective defense against ICE when its agents began kidnapping their children on their way to and from school. “Women with school-age kids in a district where immigrant children are facing disruption—that’s been an on-ramp for political action for a new generation,” Putnam said.

Although the wine mom has certain advantages for effecting political change in an age of hyperpolitics, one still suspects that the commonest usage of the term is rooted in reflexive, sexist disdain. At the end of March, during one of the mainstream media’s regularly scheduled psychotic breaks about the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, the neoconservative Never Trumper David Frum posted to X that he had “asked Claude AI to compare the Hasan Piker audience to the cringe wine moms on MSNOW.” The latter viewership, Frum went on, was “about 25 times larger,” proving that the “Piker promoters are executing a con.” And what could be more mortifying than getting lower ratings than your mother?

Alas, Frum misread the numbers, vastly undercounting Piker’s views. But Frum’s cringier mistake was in revealing his stuck-in-2020 grasp of the generational, class, and gender dynamics that could be reshaping the Democratic Party of 2026. In Michigan, the Senate primary is a dead heat between a leftist-bro-coded candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, and a wine-mom-coded candidate, Mallory McMorrow—but both are running in the progressive lane, where they appear to be boxing in the establishment-funded centrist Democrat, Haley Stevens. In the gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist whose campaign message centers her experience as a single mother, is currently a narrow front-runner in a crowded field. And, in Maine’s Senate primary, the charismatic and highly divisive leftist Graham Platner won endorsements from a swath of prominent women, including the Glinda the Good Witch of wine moms, Elizabeth Warren; according to an Emerson College poll from March, Platner is up by eighteen points among women over all against the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.

Meanwhile, the leftist-podcast bros have been making common cause with the wine moms for a while now. Back in 2024, Matthew Sitman, a co-host of “Know Your Enemy” (billed as a “leftist’s guide to the conservative movement”), declared that the “most insane MSNBC-pilled resistance lib wine mom is probably closer to being correct about Trump than a lot of people in the American political firmament.” Piker recently told Politico of his affinities for “a lot of Barbs and Deborahs out there” who share his “frustration with the failures of establishment liberalism”; he has praised Welch and Sullivan’s “I’ve Had It,” the flagship station of Radio Free Wine Mom, as the “most radical progressive podcast in North America.” Welch recently appeared on one of Piker’s shows, “Fear&,” alongside Brace Belden, a onetime labor organizer and volunteer fighter against ISIS in Syria who now co-hosts the leftist politics-and-crime podcast “TrueAnon.” Belden is a generational talent, both as a broadcaster and as a shitposter, and it was touching to see him politely sharing the mike with Welch, whose wine-mom-banter settings were turned to maximum strength that day. He didn’t wince even when Welch asked, regarding a certain conservative media personality, “Is she, like, No. 1 in the spank bank for you?”

There are always exceptions to the rule of imbecile societies, as Forster acknowledged in his essay. “One or two” of his classmates, he wrote, “who were good at games and had a large popularity-surplus, took up a really heroic line, acknowledged their mother brazenly, and would even be seen walking with her across the playing-field.” He added, “We admired such boys and envied them.” ♦