But when workers heard the ruling class say “tighten your belts,” they correctly understood that such a program was never going to apply to the wealthy. It would always mean: lower your expectations. And accept a worse tomorrow for your children. The entire history of the labor movement was clear: it was the class enemy who told them to do more with less. In 1980, the Democrats’ share of the union-family vote dropped from 63 percent to 50 percent. Reagan won with Morning in America while Carter lost with his Protestant hand-wringing over decadence and materialism.

Volcker and Carter weren’t environmentalists (nor were they anti-environmentalists), but their belt-tightening policies fit all too neatly with an environmentalism increasingly focused on consumer cutbacks. And the corporate drive to make such regulation a matter of voluntary consumer choices quickly made it a middle-class lifestyle, the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision. As companies moved jobs overseas to cut down on labor costs, it was all too easy to blame environmentalists and diffuse the power of the environmental-labor united front.

The unprecedented success of Bernie Sanders’s run and his enduring popularity should have been a wake-up call to much of Leftworld: the country is ready for working-class politics, and even for the s-word, as long as we talk about it in everyday, tangible terms.

And yet, much of the radical left learned the opposite lesson from 2016. We have been staking out increasingly wilder terrain, moving the goalposts well beyond what most of the last century’s socialists or communists thought possible. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with horizons — we need them. But the basic challenge of left-wing politics is to train our eyes on horizons that others can see. Social democracy failed not because it traded utopianism for reform but because it swore off horizons entirely, and began to look inwards, upon its own parties and parliaments. In rhetoric, the radical left is different; but in practice, the mistake is similar: victory is defined as whatever makes the already-initiated tick. Ultra-leftism and reformism are united by their scorn for mass action.