Politicians are like bad boys: never fall in love with them, they’ll always hurt you in the end. But try as I might, and I have tried mightily, I can’t fight it anymore. I’ve fallen head over heels for the junior senator from Pennsylvania.

Friday night tipped it for me. John Fetterman was at home in Braddock, a rundown Pittsburgh suburb where he lives with his wife and three children, when an anti-Israel mob gathered outside and began chanting: ‘Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide; you’re supporting genocide!’ Another Democrat might have requested a police evacuation or issued a cuckish statement of solidarity with the demonstrators in the hopes they would leave him alone, but Fetterman took a rather different approach.

As the mob screamed and waved Palestinian flags below, Fetterman appeared on the roof of his loft apartment, which looks out onto Braddock’s last remaining steel mill. In his hands was an Israeli flag, which he held aloft. And as the chants shrieked louder and louder, he remained there, a US senator, spending his Friday night standing silently, defiantly holding that flag.

Since the 7 October pogrom, in which Palestinian terrorists exterminated 1,200 Jews in Israel’s southern communities, John Fetterman has emerged as a clarion voice in condemnation of that massacre and in support of Israel’s right to defend itself. In an earlier time, Fetterman’s stance would have been unremarkable, even on the left of the Democrat Party. True-blue liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke about Israel, its Arab enemies and the threat of terrorism with a bracing clear-sightedness that is difficult to find anywhere in American politics today but especially among Democrats.

Progressive commentators tend to pin American liberalism’s break with Israel on that country’s shift to the political right. There is probably some truth to this, though as Israeli right-wingers like to point out, their country moved rightwards because of the failure of the Oslo peace process, which was foisted upon Israel in large part by American liberals. The more salient shift has arguably been in the opposite direction. Over the past 30 years, Democrat voters have lurched steadily to the left. In 1994, half of all Democrats called themselves ‘moderate’ while only a quarter identified as ‘liberal’; today, a majority embrace the ‘liberal’ label while only a fifth describe their politics as ‘moderate’.

A Gallup poll published last year showed Democrat sympathy having swung from the Israelis to the Palestinians for the first time since polling began. Left-leaning Americans backed Palestinians by an 11-percentage-point margin. (Independents favour Israel by 17 points while Republicans back the Jewish state by a healthy 67-point margin.) Those with only some college education back Israel 10-points more than those with degrees, while white people are 13 points more sympathetic than people who aren’t white. These are burgeoning demographics, with the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded doubling between 1991 and 2021 and the 2020 census showing that white people now make up less than half of America’s under-18 population.

These political and social changes in America are distilled in Generation Z – those born after 1996. They are markedly less likely to be Christian (a reliable marker for pro-Israel attitudes), more reliant on social media (where extreme anti-Israel narratives flourish) and tend to view Israel as a white supremacist nation like the United States, and the Palestinians as the equivalent of oppressed black and brown Americans. Gen Z, who describe themselves as Democrats rather than Republicans by a 29-point margin, are half as likely as baby boomers to deem it important to ‘protect Israel’.

Fetterman appears to have set his face against these trends. Following the October 7 attacks, he pledged to ‘fully support Israel neutralising the terrorists responsible for this barbarism’. As calls grew for a ceasefire, he said:

Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire. We must support Israel in their efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children. Hamas does not want peace, they want to destroy Israel. We can talk about a ceasefire after Hamas is neutralised.

Confronted with bawling protestors outside the Senate, he retrieved a small Israeli flag and held it aloft as he passed by the angry gauntlet. When American Jews gathered for a peaceful march in support of Israel in Washington DC, Fetterman turned up to march with them — draped in an Israeli flag. The senator was dismissive of South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, remarking: ‘Maybe South Africa oughta sit this one out.’ As of this week, he is one of only two Democrats to refuse to sign on to a Senate resolution backing a Palestinian state — because the motion fails to stipulate the destruction of Hamas as a necessary precondition.

The left is not taking any of this well. There has been a rash of protests outside his offices; former campaign staffers accused him of ‘a gutting betrayal’ in an open letter; and anti-Israel activists paraded a puppet effigy of Fetterman complete with a hoodie bearing the words ‘Silent on genocide’. His stance is particularly stinging for progressives and journalists, who mounted a fulsome defence of his fitness to serve after he suffered a stroke during the 2022 midterm elections. Had Fetterman’s Republican rival Mehmet Oz won the Pennsylvania seat, the Senate would have been divided 50-50. (In one of those delicious ironies that sweeten the political process, progressives had another good reason to back Fetterman: Oz, who would have become the first Muslim senator, was outspoken in his support for Israel.) Meanwhile, Fetterman’s right-wing critics have done a 180-turn and, instead of calling him unfit for office, they are rushing to embrace him. This is especially the case after he broke with his party to speak out against illegal immigration, telling CNN: ‘I honestly don’t understand why it’s controversial to say we need a secure border.’

What has prompted this turnabout? Although a blue state, Pennsylvania has significant pockets of social conservatism. Democrat strategist James Carville once summed it up as ‘Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle.’ Republicans are desperate to win back this Senate seat, but Fetterman isn’t up for re-election for another four years. Tacking right three or so years from now would make more sense. Defying the left at this moment, and doing it so brazenly, puts him at risk of being primaried. Nor is it as straightforward as his veering from progressive Democrat to a more conservative variety. He remains staunchly liberal, calling abortion rights ‘non-negotiable’, supporting an expansion of Medicare, endorsing universal healthcare, backing a wealth tax, refusing donations from corporate lobbyists or fossil fuel interests, and receiving a zero-per-cent rating from the NRA. He is no Clintonite, third-way Democrat.

The truth, I suspect, is that Fetterman hasn’t moved to the right at all. He remains what he has always been: a mainline Pennsylvania Democrat who is for blue collars, hard hats and unions, and against elites, big corporations and free trade. Having served as mayor of an economically depressed town with severe drug and crime problems, he understands all too well what ‘balanced budgets’ and deficit hawkery means for left-behind communities and has no time for unworldly libertarianism on firearms availability. A graduate Gen-Xer, he is instinctively in favour of legal abortion and takes a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to gay and lesbian equality and transgender rights.

What sets Fetterman apart from other Democrats is a seeming unwillingness to go along with every progressive lurch out of fear of the TikTok Taliban and its political tantrums. And while moderation and pragmatism might not seem terribly exciting, they are a thrill in an era of abrupt certainty and strutting self-righteousness. John Fetterman is that rare thing in progressive politics: a grown-up willing to say No to the cool kids, no matter how much they kick and scream.

So, I can’t help it. I love the guy. Will he let me down eventually? Of course he will: he’s a politician. But until then I have a new political pin-up and, whether he’s in the US Senate or on a rooftop in eastern Pittsburgh, you’ll find him draped in an Israeli flag and not giving a damn what anyone says.