We have no reason to succumb to the complex comfort of despair, a retreat to lugubriousness by which failure is foreordained. But to stress the repeated failures of the Left is a necessary corrective, given its history of boosterism and bullshit, and to stress quite how appalling and terrible these days are, even if we can also find in them hope. To take the liberal approach and see Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and his aftermaths, violent and intricate “conspiracism,” the rise of the alt right, the growing volubility of racism and fascism, as deviations, is exoneration of the system of which they are expressions. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains strong.

But even for all this, and for the recent defeat and smearing of left movements in the UK and US, a cause of profound depression and demoralization on the Left, this has also been a moment of unprecedented insurgency in American cities (and elsewhere). History, and the present, are up for debate.

Capitalism cannot exist without relentless punishment of those who transgress its often petty and heartless prohibitions, and indeed of those the punishment of whom it deems functional to its survival, irrespective of their notional “transgression.” It increasingly deploys not just bureaucratic repression but an invested, overt, supererogatory sadism. There are countless ghastly examples of the rehabilitation and celebration of cruelty, in the carceral sphere, in politics and culture. Spectacles like this aren’t new, but they have not always been so “unabashed,” as Philip Mirowski puts it, “made to seem so unexceptional” — and they are not only distraction but part of “teaching techniques optimised to reinforce the neoliberal self.”