As we enter the late 2020s, the legacy of the Beatles — history’s biggest band, by any measure — is facing a final reckoning. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the group’s last surviving members, are now eighty-four and eighty-six, respectively. This should remind us that what might be called the “Beatles generation” is reaching the end of its natural lifespan, its icons departing the stage to become musty archival heritage. All things, as the late George Harrison once acknowledged, must pass.

Partly as a result, the second half of the decade looks set to be a heyday of fabology (that is, critical appraisal of the Fab Four). But many of the retrospectives, gratingly, will seek to claim the Beatles for the cause of cultural liberalism. The last few years have seen a rash of books by “centrist dad” media figures, from Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs to Stuart Maconie’s With a Little Help From Their Friends (the titles sum up the soggy, middlebrow bias of these texts). Even more ominously, a blockbuster Beatles biopic is now in production. Directed by Sam Mendes, a filmmaker who churns out vaguely progressive-nationalist fare in the vein of 1917, Britannia, and the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre, “The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event” will likely trigger a British Invasion for the TikTok era when it drops in April 2028.

The battle for the soul of the Beatles, and their sociopolitical significance, is well and truly on then. On the one hand, there is something understandable, even appropriate, about attempts to locate the band at the cuddlier end of capitalism. The first mass-marketed boy group, the Beatles undoubtedly began as front men for the consumerist strain in postwar social democracy. A bolder thesis is that they saved American capitalism from itself at a crucial moment in the mid-1960s, pacifying a populace that had been destabilized by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and helping to downgrade a radical zeitgeist into a harmless hippie bacchanal that ultimately served the socioeconomic status quo rather well.