OUR ACCOUNTS OF HEROIC social movements tend to begin at the moment of insurgency, when the cameras show up. The years of bitter, lonely, and seemingly futile struggle get the Ken Burns treatment less often. Even of the heroic age of SNCC in Mississippi, the historian Charles Payne writes, “Field reports are filled with stories of spending day after day dragging from house to house without a single positive response to show for it. Most people were simply afraid and confused but reluctant to admit it.” One organizer reported in 1962 that for every hundred people they spoke to, ten agreed to register to vote, three showed up, “and those three were frightened away from the courthouse by the sheriff.” This is not the epic narrative we are taught. But it is the marrow of movement work.

Here’s another story. In the wake of the First Red Scare of 1919–20, the unions were ruined. Their militants were arrested, blacklisted, and deported. Labor’s most prominent political leader, Eugene Debs, was imprisoned for political crime — opposing the war — only a few years after receiving 6 percent of the vote in a presidential election; he ran for President in 1920 from his Georgia cell. The coal miners of West Virginia were gunned down and bombed from the air in 1921. For those who kept the faith in the factories, mills, and mines, fifteen years of ostracism followed. They had no hint that a moment was coming like the 1930s, when small cells of old believers across the country led millions of workers — many of whom had spent years shunning them — to victory.

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The organic integration of the working-class social world is gone. To remember, and keep remembering, now happens only on purpose. Memory looks like an office, with file cabinets and framed pictures from past victories. It smells like printer ink and sounds like bitter narratives of defeat often repeated, with lessons learned. It costs money to keep, and it takes sustained and uninterrupted time to accumulate. To remember and renew is itself an act of defiance: each dollar in dues money, each hour spent in some interminable meeting, passes the tradition on, despite constant efforts to extinguish it.

Just because a political project is difficult, in other words, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it wrong. It could just be that it’s hard — that the opposition is fearsome and you haven’t cracked it yet. Some kinds of success are bought with a dozen or a hundred failures. The key is to be there for the next round, and to know a chance when you see it.

At the end of childhood, some millennials go to college to continue accumulating human capital. Harris is a peerless observer of the harrowing economic costs of “meritocracy,” and his chapter on college abounds in withering aperçus. “College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids,” he writes. “And once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return.” Because the pressure to accumulate human capital is so intense, students will bear enormous costs to do it. Far from the coddled children of stereotype, Harris points out, most college students are “regular people—mostly regular workers—who spend part of their work-time on their own human capital, like they’ve been told to.” Exhaustion, overwork, and even food insecurity are common. Colleges themselves, meanwhile, reap obscene rewards from their gatekeeping position by offering a worse product for a higher price: hollowed-out pedagogy from exploited adjuncts and graduate students, masked with “shiny extras unrelated to the core educational mission.” Aggrandizing administrations bloat on student debt, the key to the whole scheme. Student debt, Harris argues, is a bloodsucking Keynesian stimulus, turning the value of the future labor of young borrowers into the capital to build stadiums and luxury dorms today, jacking up tuition even higher and allowing another round of borrowing and building.

But not every kid-bond matures. Students who can’t keep up are diagnosed, drugged, and punished. The extraordinary proliferation of mood and attention disorders among the young, and their development into a lucrative pharmaceutical market, is only the logical complement of the human-capital-accumulation regime of testing, supervising, and debt collecting. Depression, Harris notes, is up 1,000 percent over the past century, “with around half of that growth occurring since the late 1980s.” While there’s always a question about changing diagnoses with this sort of figure, Harris is convincing that there’s more to this phenomenon than an artifact of measurement. So too the growing punitive apparatus waiting to catch kids who fail: “We can draw a straight line between the standardization of children in educational reform and the expulsion, arrest, and even murder of the kids who won’t adapt.” On this account, mass incarceration, too, is a generational phenomenon, and it makes its first appearances inside schools, which are now heavily policed zones, as are the public spaces in which working-class kids congregate. “Millennials are cagey and anxious, as befits the most policed modern generation,” Harris writes. In this way, the book effectively argues that widely different experiences of neoliberalism—from the grasping student’s anxiety for good grades to the young person of color dodging the cops—are nonetheless part of the same social process.

One manifestation of this generational imbalance of power is the immense difficulty of health-care reform, since major constituencies — not just profiteering corporations, but segments of the markets they’ve captured, and the people who compose those segments — are materially tied to the current system. This is the underlying social basis of the attempts to fend off Medicare for All through appeals to incumbent health insurance, in particular Medicare itself. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is not — contra liberal snobbery — simply ignorance and false consciousness. It is rather, as Esping-Andersen would put it, the slogan of asymmetric chronopolitics. It is important to understand that chronopolitics is nothing more than the political and cultural modality in which class conflict in recent decades has appeared: the conflict between generations is not fundamental but is rather the outcome of specific historical developments, which have turned age into the medium of conflicts flowing from the relations of property. But this does not make generational conflict superficial, any more than the mediation of class through race makes race superficial. There is a genuine divergence in life chances and social power along the lines of age.

It is easy to tell a story about deindustrialization — as most of our politicians of both parties have for the past generation — that presents it as another episode in a perennial sequence of economic development. The old is traded out for the new once again. Those who can’t keep pace by acquiring new skills or transplanting themselves to a new place get abandoned — a tragedy, to be sure. But this is how capitalism works and its casualties are worth it. In more recent discontented times, a rival narrative responds that this was not a necessary outcome but a globalist conspiracy, resulting not from any inner logic of capital but from the corrupt decisions of politicians and financiers; if not for them, everything might have stayed the same. In the course of Vance’s brief public life, he has swung from the first of these positions (the neoliberal) to the second (the populist-conspiracist).

Seemingly opposed to each other, both accounts share a disinclination to assign, or even imagine, any active role for the working-class people who bear the consequences of abandonment. Either they are self-sabotaging social detritus or passive victims of the elite. What they are not, in any way, is capable of making sense of their historical situation and exerting agency upon it — a concept unintelligible to Vance, who in his conversion narrative describes the “economic left” as a coldly compassionate Mandarinate: