[...] Women of color couldn't be asked to wait for the white male capitalist class to fall before addressing the blight of racism or sexism on their lives - nor, for that matter, could men of color or white women. It was not solidarity to sweep internal issues under the rug util the real enemy's defeat. Nor was achieving a state of purity before doing politics. But a middle ground was possible. Feminism and antiracism shouldn't have to wait.

[...] Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I'd been prepared to believe. I'd have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

Leftist men celebrated the fall of liberal male hypocrites, liberals the fall of conservative ones, conservatives and alt-rightists the fall of the liberals and leftists. [...] It seemed not to occur to them — or maybe just not to matter? — that any person, any woman, had suffered. [...] As the adage goes: in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.

MUST HISTORY have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in order for others to be free? And how to figure it when those freedoms are not symmetrical? A little more power for you might mean a lot less power for me in practice, an exchange that will not feel fair in the short term even if it is in the long term. There is a reason, presumably, that we call it an ethical calculus and not an ethical algebra.

Some things are zero sum — perhaps more things than one cares to admit. To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren’t so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. Changing the rules of the game might begin with revising what it means to win. I once heard a story about a friend who’d said, offhand at a book group, that he’d throw women under the bus if it meant achieving social democracy in the United States. The story was meant to be chilling — this from a friend? — but it made me laugh. As if you could do it without us, I thought, we who do all the work on the group project. I wondered what his idea of social democracy was.

[...] It was the 1970s and no charges were pressed, boys being boys. That night, my father beat my brother mercilessly with a washing machine hose in the dank basement of our house. The chaos of a violence like that is astonishing. The cacophonous screaming. The inability of anyone to stop it. The cold pallor that hangs in the air afterward. A chasm emerged between us—me, floating off like some wandering balloon; my brother tethered tightly to a familiar story of trouble and poverty, like most of the kids in our neighborhood.

The literal opposite of missing would probably be present, but in my mind it’s free, the radical opportunity to be present. This brings me back to Walden, which honestly, I despise now, for its naive arguments about what is necessary for life. Thoreau never asks a basic question: What is a livable life? What does a human need to enact one’s not-lostness, one’s freedom? Though Bruce was incarcerated for only two days, it was for a civil offense, not a criminal one. What’s recognized in the moment of random, unexpected jailing is the fragility of one’s freedom.

IN SEARCH OF historical analogies for our present crisis, pundits often compare the present to the Civil War or to the reassertion of white supremacy immediately following the end of Reconstruction. But it is the longer Gilded Age that our own moment more closely resembles. In the 1890s, the US suffered the most violent labor conflicts in the world; in the 1930s, developments in the US caused the greatest global capitalist crisis in history. During all these years, it was routine to wonder whether the country was falling apart. Industrial society produced inequalities and physically destroyed workers in its factories; political institutions seemed incapable of responding. The constitutional system’s endless veto points made it nearly impossible for the poor to use elections to better their lot. Business elites wielded outsize power at virtually every level of government, which they exercised to defeat social programs and to criminalize labor organizing and protest. It was a political world marked by sensational conflict, in which class war wasn’t a metaphor. Nor, as in the person of Sanders’s hero Eugene Debs or in black labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph, was socialism a mere rumor. During the Great Depression, a major political party even became partly indebted to the labor movement. For a brief period, labor helped provide the Democrats with supermajorities—backed by an implicit threat of social revolution, which was necessary to implement meaningful reform.

Cold-war rhetoric also downplayed the extent to which systematic forms of political and economic subordination defined the experience of racial minorities and indigenous peoples within US borders. The cold-war vision presented the achievement of racial equality as a matter of simply completing the project of liberal integration. Unlike the dominant views on the left before the 1940s—when even establishment academics took for granted that the Constitution was a counterrevolutionary document—the new assumption of the cold-war order was that American institutions were essentially just, and the only necessary change would be to open these institutions to worthy members of black and brown communities. Little attention was paid, as it had been in sections of the left in the 1930s, to how racial and class subordination were intertwined, let alone to how American capitalism was both racialized and inherently oppressive. One should not romanticize that period; the incipient forms of 1930s organizing, against the backdrop of persistent racial discrimination within the labor movement, hardly suggested a clear path to liberation. But what marked that pre-cold-war era was real ideological openness, a variety of genuine political possibilities—some emancipatory, some deeply destructive—at least in comparison with what followed.

This closing off of ideological alternatives partly explains why the cold-war order was bound to unravel. The bargain between business and labor led to the entrenchment of economic hierarchy and the defeat of social democracy. Where in the 1930s radical elements of the labor movement had influence in the Democratic Party, following the cold-war crackdowns on communism, labor radicals lost it all. Government provision of social programs and business’s acceptance of collective bargaining came with a stipulation: the union had to change from a class-conscious instrument of mass democratic organization to a more limited special-interest group. The AFL -CIO left issues like control and management to business, and parroted cold-war patriotism. For union leaders like Walter Reuther, fearful of McCarthyism and optimistic after decades of union growth, this was an acceptable exchange. Over time, it cost unions the ability to contest the terms of the state, which chipped away at domestic labor gains while promoting a pro-business foreign policy through force of arms.

WELL INTO THE 2010S, American political elites of both parties shared a common vision. They remained gripped by a cold-war imagination that saw the ascendancy of American liberalism not as a unique confluence of events generated by the combination of the Depression, war, and Soviet competition, but rather as the country’s natural and permanent progression. Men like John McCain and Obama believed so deeply in this story because they had worked and suffered for it, and it had given their lives a larger meaning. And for periods in American life, if one kept to the proper circles, it could actually feel true: wealth was indeed generated, excluded groups were included, and threatening adversaries were defeated.

The problem turned out to be that neither the ideals nor the institutions were up to the challenges to come. Structural economic problems had been mounting for decades, and new problems had been created in the meantime. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were international adventures larger than any since the Vietnam war. The global financial crisis underscored the precariousness of middle- and working-class economic security and exposed the scale of the divide between haves and have-nots. As the country reeled from near-economic collapse, the carceral state’s generational effects on poor and black communities led to mass protest and social rebellion. The years 2014–16 saw more civil unrest than any time since the early 1970s.

[...] American political institutions actually require precisely the opposite to work: a near-angelic degree of social cohesion (if not agreement on political ends) among empowered elites. The cold-war order had in fact been forged on two related facts. The first was an organized working class that helped deliver the supermajorities needed to defeat barriers to mass democracy in the 1930s, and then mustered enough electoral strength in the decades that followed to expand, or at least protect, the social safety net their efforts had secured. Just as essential, the confrontation with the Soviet Union fostered cohesion among political elites in ways that produced the conditions for compromise, most dramatically evidenced during the period of 1960s civil rights legislation. When the Republican senator Everett Dirksen helped break the Southern filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, declaring, “The time has come for equality of opportunity. . . . It will not be stayed or denied,” he was speaking the same liberal universalist language as Lyndon Johnson and was motivated, regardless of the partisan divide, by much the same vision of the country and its global mission.

With working-class organizations weakened, it has become hard to see how any political coalition can elect a supermajority capable of overcoming the Constitution’s roadblocks. At the same time, the US’s enemies, from marginal global players like North Korea to weak nonstate actors like al Qaeda or ISIS, hardly present an existential competitor in the style of the USSR. There are no longer external incentives for elite agreement. Instead, a combination of intense party polarization and the profound influence of money have left the legislative branch constitutively unable to confront fundamental social issues. And as Obama’s post-2010 time in office made clear, even the ever-more-powerful executive branch is limited when it comes to reshaping domestic policy.