I look around at the millions of people who support Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, who have begun to embrace ideas like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and tuition-free college, who are warming once again to labor unions, and who are becoming convinced that there’s something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and I think to myself: I really hope Michael Moore is having the time of his life.

When I was a teenager in the aughts, it was fashionable to poke fun at Moore. I never knew why. Now I know it was because he believed that there was an alternative to crushing poverty, inequality, alienation, oppression, and war — and he never stopped saying so, through decades when an alternative was impossible for most people to imagine.

I liked Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine when it came out in 2002. It mapped the web of interests driving the proliferation of consumer firearms and exposed the human toll of their lust for profit and power. Why, exactly, was he a laughingstock? “He just won’t shut up,” people said. He wouldn’t shut up about neoliberalism, about militarism, about the distortions of corporate-owned media, about profit-seeking in health care, about what working-class people deserve and aren’t getting and who’s to blame.