In the last half-decade, the US left’s political fortunes have begun to rise again, if only haltingly. Polls show widespread dissatisfaction over the state of American capitalism and millions threw their support behind a self-proclaimed socialist in the Democratic primary.

After forty years of decline and retreat, the Left is undergoing a mini-revival. This development has been driven by millennials, whose political awakening has unfolded through Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and, most recently, the Bernie Sanders campaign. In all of this, we can see the rise of a potential mass base for a left political program.

Yet if the past five years have highlighted the growing audience for the Left today, they also show the limits of that radicalization. In their inability to sustain high levels of mobilization, the gap between public sentiment and the Left’s actual organizational capacity and social weight is obvious. In the tendency for political debates to collapse into empty posturing, self-promotion, and moralism, we can see all the pathologies of a left that’s suffered decades of defeat and isolation.