Both of these selectively held views rely on a fantasy that voters—that is, responsible voters, not the kind who fall prey to base desires—navigate a simple, unmediated relationship between what they like and what should be. Thus, judging by the frequency with which the argument is made, one of the best things Clinton supporters have going for them is the notion that Clinton’s unexpected challenges are due to a “likeability problem.” “I Used to Hate Hillary Clinton. Now I’m Voting for Her,” announces the headline of a Slate article by the liberal commentator Michelle Goldberg. Goldberg’s politics haven’t changed—they were and remain close to those of Sanders, she tells us. What changed between 2008, when she excoriated Clinton’s political sins, and today, was that her emotional attachments grew up:

For a progressive, how you reconcile conflicting truths about Clinton depends, to some extent, on how much you empathize with her. Supporting Clinton means justifying the thousands of concessions she’s made to the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be. Doing this is easier, I think, when you are older, and have made more concessions yourself. Indeed, sometimes it feels like to defend Clinton is to defend middle age itself, with all its attenuated expectations and reminders of the uselessness of hindsight.

“This is in support of Hillary?” a friend asked. Goldberg’s counterintuitive approach to political rhetoric—We’re the party of defeat!—is in fact the more or less official line of the Clinton campaign. Disciplined by the fetters of middle age, Goldberg narrates her march toward reason as a sentimental journey in which, through a growing identification with Clinton, she comes to like the way concession feels.

History, we were told in the 1990s, was something that happened to other people. The recent past was littered with code-named police actions that, rendered pointless by the evaporation of the cold war, no longer even had the dignity of the unmentionable. Conservatives kept building monuments to the death of communism that no one wanted to visit. Liberals wanted to forget the whole messy business and gave themselves endless Oscars for movies about World War II. Only fools with sheaves of xeroxed newsletters thought they were smart enough to construct a narrative out of a deafening drone. The more distant past, upon inspection, turned out to be much the same, leading some to suspect that history had never happened at all. There were, however, exceptions to the rule: events taken to be unique in their world-shattering horror and exceptional people who had come near them and gotten away no longer quite themselves. We, too, could be exceptional: if we were good and listened hard, history could become something that happened, though only by proxy, to us. Every year on the Day of Remembrance, survivors came to Hebrew school and asked us to feel on our skin the licks of the Shoah’s eternal flame and to guard with our lives its redemption in the birth of a handsome nation. In history class in regular school, we learned nothing at all. And yet the past kept ghosting through like reruns.

Once, when my parents were visiting, I broke this tacit compact on a drive to Philadelphia with my mother and her cousin Janet. Janet and her son had been in a heated email exchange about whether Israel was an apartheid state, and then, she said, his emails had simply stopped coming. “Well, and so we shall cease to speak of such things, and our generation shall rise,” I snapped from the back seat, like I was suddenly the Bible or something. Everyone was quiet; it isn’t nice to tell people they will be swept away by time.

My building is not very tall but it is wide, with wings folding out from the lobby like a parliament. Legally speaking it is a co-op; our landlord converted it in the 1990s in a real estate ploy, then bought and sublet nearly all the shares. When quarantine began, the world shrank to the building’s size and everyone became a mad housewife in their cabin fever. There were frenzies in the tenant WhatsApp thread: a package thief, tacos for 2L abandoned in the lobby. Chimney swifts were spotted on the roof of the haunted 19th-century institutional building — now a Seventh Day Adventist school, someday slated to be dwarfed by condos — across the street. Once someone saw turkey vultures. “Sure it wasn’t management?” someone else asked. It became clear that if rent continued to drain from the apartments, the neighborhood would wash away. We formed a committee and slipped flyers under doors. They came back covered in complaints. Upstairs a patch of black mold was growing in a baby’s room; it measured less than a square foot, so the housing inspectors couldn’t be bothered. I desperately wanted to learn everyone’s problems and names.

There was Selma Gardinsky, a red diaper baby from Brooklyn transplanted to Boston by marriage, where she took a unionized office job and became an organizer in an attempt to catch the party’s eye. She left her husband “without so much as a backward glance” when the union offered her a position back in New York; there, she was recruited by the Communist Party and went to work for it for “the best ten years” of her life. “Whatever else we were or were not as Communists,” Gardinsky told Gornick, “we were not lonely.” There was Bernie Sanders, a socialist from a Brooklyn immigrant family who does not appear in Romance. He became the mayor of a small city in Vermont, then a senator, and finally ran twice for President. “I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns,” he wrote in 2015. “But I do not feel lonely now.” I don’t feel lonely anymore, but it isn’t nearly enough. An infinite amount of care seems necessary. While we gather our strength, the lucky ones among us will grow old.