What better represents Berlant’s archaic “good life” fantasy than homeownership? At the core of the 2008 financial crisis we find this contradictory arrangement: American society is unwilling to pay enough to significant numbers of its citizens for them to buy houses, yet also unwilling to live with the idea of itself as anything other than an “ownership society,” as George W. Bush’s 2004 slogan put it. Individuals and households, for their part, cannot bear to break with their aspirations to participate in this version of the good life. The problem, then, is that we are too straight — too bound to failing norms — to attack the forces disfiguring our lives. Desire for the kinds of stability and comfort neoliberalism has dissolved is precisely what makes the neoliberal advance possible.

Sixteen years ago, the theorist Wendy Brown diagnosed this malaise. In her essay “Resisting Left Melancholy,” she described “a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward-looking and punishing.” Today’s leftists, as anyone who’s done some organizing will know, are still attached to the experience of defeat, since it gives structure to their sense of their own marginal, heroic, and sad position.

Such a political practice ought to terrify its participants as they embark on it, and discomfit those with whom they seek to engage. Like all stigmatized relationships, political engagements adequate to this moment are as likely to feel confusing or frightening as ecstatic or liberating. Affective struggle has to entail becoming connected to the people who can’t see past their confusion or fear, and building solidarity where there is none by insisting on a form of relationship to which few are accustomed and that the mainstream neoliberal subject sees as genuinely queer: camaraderie. What’s more, the willingness to generate discomfort will require insistence on connection even through multiple rounds of rejection. To lose heart at the first refusal — whether to join a union, attend a protest, or just talk about politics — is one of the indulgences of left melancholy, with its grim satisfaction in defeat. I’ve been sent scurrying from the slammed doors of many people whom I’ve tried to recruit to join my union, including countless people who are today members and leaders of the organization. I doubt this process is nearly as painful or costly as coming out of the closet. (Though being queer in America and being a trade unionist may not be so far apart in stigma as they once were.) Still, it does seem to me that the affective kernel at its core — attempting to form new relationships that violate and undermine the collective norm — is essentially the same.