This arti­cle first appeared at TomDis​patch​.com.

Anticipated or not, a new age of rebellion has begun, one that threatens the status quo from the left and the right. Perhaps its most shocking aspect: people are up in arms against liberalism.

Aris­ing from the shad­ows of the Amer­i­can repressed, Bernie Sanders and Don­ald Trump have been send­ing chills through the cor­ri­dors of estab­lish­ment pow­er. Who would have thunk it? Two men, both out­liers, though in stark­ly dif­fer­ent ways, seem to be lead­ing rebel­lions against the mas­ters of our fate in both par­ties; this, after decades in which even imag­in­ing such a pos­si­bil­i­ty would have been seen as naïve at best, delu­sion­al at worst. Their larg­er-than-life pres­ence on the nation­al stage may be the most improb­a­ble polit­i­cal devel­op­ment of the last Amer­i­can half-cen­tu­ry. It sug­gests that we are enter­ing a new phase in our pub­lic life.

A year ago, in my book The Age of Acqui­es­cence, I attempt­ed to resolve a mys­tery hint­ed at in its sub­ti­tle: ​“The rise and fall of Amer­i­can resis­tance to orga­nized wealth and pow­er.” Sim­ply stat­ed, that mys­tery was: Why do peo­ple rebel at cer­tain moments and acqui­esce in others?

Resist­ing all the hurts, insults, threats to mate­r­i­al well-being, exclu­sions, degra­da­tions, sys­tem­at­ic inequal­i­ties, over-lord­ship, indig­ni­ties, and pow­er­less­ness that are the essence of every­day life for mil­lions would seem nat­ur­al enough, even inescapable, if not inevitable. Why put up with all that?

His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, how­ev­er, the impulse to give in has proven no less nat­ur­al. After all, to resist is often to risk your­self, your means of liveli­hood, and your way of life. To rise up means to silence those intim­i­dat­ing inter­nal voic­es warn­ing that the over­lords have the right to rule by virtue of their wis­dom, wealth, and every­thing that immemo­r­i­al cus­tom decrees. Fear nat­u­ral­ly clos­es in.

In our con­text, then, why at cer­tain his­tor­i­cal moments have Amer­i­cans shown a strik­ing abil­i­ty to rise up, at oth­er times to submit?

To answer that ques­tion, I explored those years in the first gild­ed age of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry when mil­lions of Amer­i­cans took to the streets to protest, often in the face of the armed might of the state, and the peri­od in the lat­ter part of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and the first years of this one when the label ​“the age of acqui­es­cence” seemed emi­nent­ly rea­son­able — until, in 2016, it sud­den­ly didn’t.

So con­sid­er this essay a post­script to that work, my per­haps belat­ed real­iza­tion that the age of acqui­es­cence has indeed come to an end. Mil­lions are now, of course, feel­ing the Bern and cheer­ing The Don­ald. Maybe I should have paid more atten­tion to the first signs of what was to come as I was fin­ish­ing my book: the Tea Par­ty on the right, and on the left Occu­py Wall Street, strikes by low-wage work­ers, min­i­mum and liv­ing wage move­ments, elec­toral vic­to­ries for urban pro­gres­sives, a surge of envi­ron­men­tal activism, and the erup­tion of the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment just on the eve of publication.

But when you live for so long in the shade of acqui­es­cence where hope goes to die or at least grows sick­ly, you miss such things. After all, if his­to­ry has a log­ic, it can remain so deeply hid­den as to be inde­ci­pher­able… until it bites. So, for exam­ple, if some­one had X‑rayed Amer­i­can soci­ety in 1932, in the depth of the Great Depres­sion, that image would have revealed a body politic over­run with despair, cyn­i­cism, fatal­ism, and fearin a word, acqui­es­cence, a mood that had shad­owed the land since ​“black Tues­day” and the col­lapse of the stock mar­ket in 1929.

Yet that same X‑ray tak­en in 1934, just two years lat­er, would have revealed a firestorm of mass strikes, gen­er­al strikes, sit-down strikes, rent strikes, seizures of shut­tered coal mines and util­i­ties by peo­ple who were cold and light­less, march­es of the unem­ployed, and a gen­er­al urge to unseat the ancien régime; in a word, rebel­lion. In this way, the equi­lib­ri­um of a soci­ety can shift phas­es in the blink of an eye and with­out appar­ent warn­ing (although in hind­sight his­to­ri­ans and oth­ers will explore all the rea­sons every­body should have seen it coming).

Lib­er­al­ism vs. liberalism

Antic­i­pat­ed or not, a new age of rebel­lion has begun, one that threat­ens the sta­tus quo from the left and the right. Per­haps its most shock­ing aspect: peo­ple are up in arms against liberalism.

That makes no sense, right? How can it, when come Novem­ber the queen of lib­er­al­ism will face off against the bil­lion­aire stan­dard bear­er of Repub­li­can­ism? In the end, the same old same old, yes? Lib­er­al vs. conservative.

Well, not real­ly. If you think of Hillary as the ​“lim­ou­sine lib­er­al” of this elec­tion sea­son and The Don­ald as the right-wing ​“pop­ulist in pin­stripes,” and con­sid­er how each of them shim­mied their way to the top of the heap and who they had to fend off to get there, a dif­fer­ent pic­ture emerges. Clin­ton inher­its the man­tle of a lib­er­al­ism that has hol­lowed out the Amer­i­can econ­o­my and metas­ta­sized the nation­al secu­ri­ty state. It has con­fined the rem­nants of any gen­uine egal­i­tar­i­an­ism to the attic of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty so as to pro­tect the vest­ed inter­ests of the oli­garchy that runs things. That elite has no quar­rel with racial and gen­der equal­i­ty as long as they don’t dam­age the bot­tom line, which is after all the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of the lim­ou­sine lib­er­al­ism Hillary cham­pi­ons. Trump chan­nels the hos­til­i­ty gen­er­at­ed by that neolib­er­al indif­fer­ence to the well-being of work­ing peo­ple and its scarce­ly con­cealed cul­tur­al con­tempt for heart­land Amer­i­ca into a racial­ly inflect­ed anti-estab­lish­men­tar­i­an­ism. Mean­while, Bernie Sanders tar­gets Clin­ton­ian lib­er­al­ism from the oth­er shore. Lib­er­al­ism is, in oth­er words, besieged.

The Six­ties take on liberalism

How odd! For decades ​“pro­gres­sives” have found them­selves defend­ing the achieve­ments of lib­er­al reform from the piti­less assault of an ascen­dant con­ser­vatism. It’s hard to remem­ber that the lib­er­al vs. con­ser­v­a­tive equa­tion didn’t always apply (and so may not again).

Go back half a cen­tu­ry to the 1960s, how­ev­er, and the bat­tle­field seems not dis­sim­i­lar to today’s ter­rain. That was a peri­od when the Viet­nam anti­war move­ment indict­ed lib­er­al­ism for its impe­ri­al­ism in the name of democ­ra­cy, while the civ­il rights and black pow­er move­ments called it out for its polit­i­cal alliance with seg­re­ga­tion­ists in the South.

In those years, the New Left set up out­posts in urban bad­lands where liberalism’s boast about the U.S. being an ​“afflu­ent soci­ety” seemed like a cru­el joke. Stu­dents occu­pied cam­pus build­ings to say no to the bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of high­er edu­ca­tion and the university’s servi­tude to anoth­er lib­er­al off­spring, the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. Women sev­ered the knot tying the lib­er­al ide­al of the nuclear fam­i­ly to its gen­dered hier­ar­chy. The coun­ter­cul­ture exhib­it­ed its con­tempt for liberalism’s sense of pro­pri­ety in a thou­sand ways. No hair­style con­ven­tions, mar­riage con­tracts, sex­u­al inhi­bi­tions, career ambi­tions, reli­gious ortho­dox­ies, cloth­ing pro­to­cols, racial taboos, or chem­i­cal pro­hi­bi­tions escaped unscathed.

Lib­er­al­ism adjust­ed, how­ev­er. It has since tak­en cred­it for most of the reforms asso­ci­at­ed with that time. Civ­il rights laws, the war on pover­ty (includ­ing Medicare and Med­ic­aid), women’s rights, affir­ma­tive action, and the era­sure of cul­tur­al dis­crim­i­na­tion are now a de rigueur part of the CVs of Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dents and the party’s top politi­cians, those run­ning the main­stream media, the chair­men of lead­ing lib­er­al foun­da­tions, Ivy League col­lege pres­i­dents, high-end Protes­tant the­olo­gians and cler­ics, and so many oth­ers who proud­ly dis­play the ban­ner of lib­er­al­ism. And they do deserve some of the cred­it. They may have gen­uine­ly felt that ​“Bern” of yes­ter­year, the one cry­ing out for equal rights before the law.

More impor­tant­ly, those lib­er­al elites were wise enough or mal­leable enough, or both, to surf the waves of rebel­lion of that time. Wis­dom and flex­i­bil­i­ty, how­ev­er, are only part of the answer to this rid­dle: Why did mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry lib­er­al­ism man­age to reform itself instead of crack­ing up under the pres­sure of that six­ties moment? The deep­er expla­na­tion may be that the upris­ings of those years assault­ed lib­er­al­ism — but large­ly on behalf of lib­er­al­ism. Explic­it­ly at times, as in the Port Huron State­ment, that found­ing doc­u­ment of the ur-New Left group, Stu­dents for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Soci­ety, at oth­er times by impli­ca­tion, the rebel­lions of that moment demand­ed that the lib­er­al order live up to its own sacred cre­do of lib­er­ty, equal­i­ty, and the pur­suit of happiness.

The demand to open the sys­tem up became the heart and soul of the next phase of lib­er­al­ism, of the urge to empow­er the free indi­vid­ual. Today, we might rec­og­nize this as the clas­sic Clin­ton­ista desire to let all-com­ers join ​“the race to the top.”

Look­ing back, it’s been cus­tom­ary to treat the six­ties as an era of youth rebel­lion. While more than that, it cer­tain­ly could be under­stood, in part, as an Amer­i­can ver­sion of fathers and sons (not to speak of moth­ers and daugh­ters). An old­er gen­er­a­tion had cre­at­ed the New Deal order, itself an act of his­toric rebel­lion. As it hap­pened, that cre­ation didn’t fit well with a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty whose south­ern wing, embed­ded in the seg­re­ga­tion­ist for­mer Con­fed­er­a­cy, rest­ed on Jim Crow laws and beliefs. Nor did New Deal social wel­fare reforms that pre­sumed a male breadwinner/​head of house­hold, while exclud­ing under­class­es, espe­cial­ly (but not only) those of the wrong com­plex­ion from its pro­tec­tions, square with a yearn­ing for equality.

More­over, the New Deal saved a cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my laid low in the Great Depres­sion by installing a new polit­i­cal econ­o­my of mass con­sump­tion. While a won­drous mate­r­i­al accom­plish­ment, that was also a social­ly dis­abling devel­op­ment, nour­ish­ing a cul­ture of sta­tus-seek­ing indi­vid­u­al­ism and so under­min­ing the sense of social sol­i­dar­i­ty that had made the New Deal pos­si­ble. Final­ly, in the Cold War years, it became clear that pros­per­i­ty and democ­ra­cy at home depend­ed on an impe­r­i­al rela­tion­ship with the rest of the world and the gar­rison­ing of the plan­et. In the famed phrase of Life Mag­a­zine pub­lish­er Hen­ry Luce, an ​“Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry” was born.

Upris­ings against that ossi­fy­ing ver­sion of New Deal lib­er­al­ism made the six­ties ​“The Six­ties.” Polit­i­cal emo­tions were at a fever pitch as rebels faced off against a lib­er­al ​“estab­lish­ment.” Mat­ters some­times became so over­heat­ed they threat­ened to melt the sur­face of pub­lic life. And yet here was a ques­tion that, no mat­ter the tem­per­a­ture, was tough to raise at the time: What if lib­er­al­ism wasn’t the prob­lem? Admit­ted­ly, that thought was in the air then, raised not just by new and old left­ies, but by Mar­tin Luther King who famous­ly enun­ci­at­ed his sec­ond thoughts about cap­i­tal­ism, pover­ty, race, and war in speech­es like ​“Beyond Viet­nam: A Time to Break Silence.”

Most of the rebels of that moment, how­ev­er, clung to the ances­tral faith. In the end, they were con­vinced that once equi­lib­ri­um was restored, a more mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, shorn of its imper­fec­tions, could become a safe haven by exclud­ing nobody. Indict­ed in those years for its hypocrisy and bad faith, it would be cleansed.

Thanks to those mass rebel­lions and the per­sis­tent if less fiery efforts that fol­lowed for decades, the hypocrisy of exclu­sion, whether of blacks, women, gays, or oth­ers, would indeed large­ly be end­ed. Or so it seemed. The lib­er­al­ism inher­it­ed from the New Deal had been cleansed — not entire­ly to be sure and not with­out fierce resis­tance, but then again, nothing’s per­fect, is it? End of hypocrisy. End of story.

The miss­ing link

Yet at the dawn­ing of the new mil­len­ni­um a para­dox began to emerge. Lib­er­al soci­ety had proved com­pat­i­ble with jus­tice for all and an equal shot at the end zone. Strange­ly, how­ev­er, in its ensu­ing glo­ri­ous new world, the one Bill Clin­ton presided over, lib­er­ty, jus­tice, and equal­i­ty all seemed to be on short rations.

If not the lib­er­al order, then some­thing else was spoil­ing things. After all, the every­day lives of so many ordi­nary Amer­i­cans were increas­ing­ly con­strained by eco­nom­ic anx­i­ety and a ver­tig­i­nous sense of social freefall. They expe­ri­enced feel­ings of being shut out and scorned, of suf­fer­ing from a hard-to-define polit­i­cal dis­en­fran­chise­ment, of being sur­veilled at work (if they had it) and prob­a­bly else­where if not, of fear­ing the future rather than hop­ing for what it might bring their way.

Brave and auda­cious as they were, rarely had the rebel move­ments of the fabled six­ties or those that fol­lowed explic­it­ly chal­lenged the under­ly­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion of prop­er­ty and pow­er in Amer­i­can soci­ety. And yet if lib­er­al­ism had proved com­pat­i­ble enough with lib­er­ty, equal­i­ty, and democ­ra­cy, cap­i­tal­ism was anoth­er matter.

The lib­er­al elite that took cred­it for open­ing up that race to the top had also at times presided over a neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism which had, for decades, been dam­ag­ing the lives of work­ing peo­ple of all col­ors. (Indeed, nowa­days Hillary expends a lot of effort try­ing to live down the lega­cy of mass incar­cer­a­tion bequeathed by her hus­band.) But Repub­li­cans have more than shared in this; they have, in fact, often tak­en the lead in implant­i­ng a mar­ket- and finance-dri­ven eco­nom­ic sys­tem that has pro­duced a few ​“win­ners” and legions of losers. Both par­ties her­ald­ed a dereg­u­lat­ed mar­ket­place, glob­al free trade, the out­sourc­ing of man­u­fac­tur­ing and oth­er indus­tries, the pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic ser­vices, and the shrink-wrap­ping of the social safe­ty net. All of these togeth­er gut­ted towns and cities as well as whole regions (think: Rust Belt Amer­i­ca) and ways of life.

In the process, the New Deal Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s tra­di­tion of resist­ing eco­nom­ic exploita­tion and inequal­i­ty vapor­ized, while the ​“new Democ­rats” of the Clin­ton era and beyond, as well as many in the board­rooms of the For­tune 500 and in hedge-fund Amer­i­ca, con­tin­ued to cham­pi­on equal rights for all. They exco­ri­at­ed con­ser­v­a­tive attempts to roll­back pro­tec­tions against racial, gen­der, and sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion; but the one thing they didn’t do — none of them — was dis­turb the equa­nim­i­ty of the 1 percent.

And what does free­dom and equal­i­ty amount to in the face of that? For some who could — thanks to those break­throughs — par­tic­i­pate in the ​“race to the top,” it amount­ed to a lot. For many mil­lions more, how­ev­er, who have either been rid­ing the down esca­la­tor or already lived near or at the bot­tom of soci­ety, it has been a mock­ery, a hol­low promise, some­thing (as George Car­lin once not­ed) we still call the Amer­i­can Dream because ​“you have to be asleep to believe in it.”

Giv­en their hand in abet­ting this painful dilem­ma, the new Democ­rats seemed made for the already exist­ing sobri­quet — a kind of curse invent­ed by the pop­ulist right — ​“lim­ou­sine lib­er­al.” An emblem of hypocrisy, it was con­ceived and first used in 1969 not by the left but by fig­ures in that then-nascent right-wing move­ment. The image of a silk-stock­ing crowd to-the-man­ner born, bred and edu­cat­ed to rule, net­worked into the cir­cuits of pow­er and wealth, pro­fess­ing a con­cern for the down­trod­den but not about to sur­ren­der any priv­i­leges to alle­vi­ate their plight (yet pre­pared to demand that every­one else pony up) has lodged at the heart of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics ever since. In our time, it has been the mag­net­ic North of right-wing populism.

Class strug­gle, Amer­i­can style

In 1969, Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon invoked the ​“silent major­i­ty” to do bat­tle with those who would soon come to be known as ​“lim­ou­sine lib­er­als.” He hoped to mobi­lize a broad swath of the white work­ing class and low­er mid­dle class for the Repub­li­can Par­ty. This group had been the loy­al­ists of the New Deal Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, but were then feel­ing increas­ing­ly aban­doned by it and dis­turbed by the rebel­lious­ness of the era.

In the decades that fol­lowed, the lim­ou­sine lib­er­al would prove a per­fect piña­ta for absorb­ing their resent­ments about racial upheaval, as well as de-indus­tri­al­iza­tion and decline, and their grief over the fad­ing away of the ​“tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly” and its sup­posed moral cer­ti­tudes. In this way, the Repub­li­can Par­ty won a sub­stan­tial white work­ing-class vote. It’s clear enough in ret­ro­spect that this con­fronta­tion between the silent major­i­ty and lim­ou­sine lib­er­al­ism was always a form of Amer­i­can class struggle.

Nixon proved some­thing of a polit­i­cal genius and his gam­bit worked stun­ning­ly well… until, of course, in our own moment it didn’t. Fol­low­ing his lead, the Repub­li­can high com­mand soon under­stood that wav­ing the red flag of ​“lim­ou­sine lib­er­al­ism” excit­ed pas­sions and elicit­ed votes. They nev­er, how­ev­er, had the slight­est inten­tion of doing any­thing to tru­ly address the dete­ri­o­rat­ing cir­cum­stances of that silent major­i­ty. The party’s lead­ing fig­ures were far too com­mit­ted to defend­ing the inter­ests of cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca and the upper classes.

Their ges­tures, the red meat they tossed to their fol­low­ers in the ​“cul­ture wars,” only increased the pas­sions of the era until, in the after­math of the 2007 finan­cial melt­down and Great Reces­sion, they explod­ed in a fash­ion the Repub­li­can elite had no way to deal with. What began as their crea­ture, formed in cyn­i­cism and out of the fes­ter­ing jeal­ousies and dark feel­ings of Nixon him­self over the way the lib­er­al estab­lish­ment had held him in con­tempt, end­ed up turn­ing on its fabricators.

A ​“silent major­i­ty” would no longer remain con­ve­nient­ly silent. The Tea Par­ty howled about every kind of polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment in bed with Wall Street, crony cap­i­tal­ists, cul­tur­al and sex­u­al deviants, free-traders who scarce­ly blinked at the jobs they incin­er­at­ed, anti-tax­ers who had nev­er met a tax shel­ter they didn’t love, and decriers of big gov­ern­ment who lived off state sub­si­dies. In a zip code far, far away, a priv­i­leged sliv­er of Amer­i­cans who had gamed the sys­tem, who had indeed made gam­ing the sys­tem into the sys­tem, looked down on the mass of the pre­vi­ous­ly cred­u­lous, now out­raged, incredulously.

In the process, the Repub­li­can Par­ty was dis­mem­bered and it was The Don­ald who mag­i­cal­ly rode that Trump Tow­er esca­la­tor down to the ground floor to pick up the pieces. His irrev­er­ence for estab­lished author­i­ty worked. His racist and misog­y­nist pho­bias worked. His bil­lions worked for mil­lions who had grown infat­u­at­ed with all the cel­e­brat­ed Wall Street con­quis­ta­dors of the sec­ond Gild­ed Age. His way of gin­ger­ly tip­toe­ing around Social Secu­ri­ty worked with those whose need­i­ness and emo­tion­al log­ic was cap­tured by the per­son who mem­o­rably told a Repub­li­can con­gress­man, ​“Keep your gov­ern­ment hands off my Medicare.” Most of all, his mus­cle-flex­ing bom­bast worked for mil­lions fed up with demor­al­iza­tion, paral­y­sis, and pow­er­less­ness. They felt The Donald.

In the face-off between right-wing pop­ulism and neolib­er­al­ism, Tea Par­ty legions and Trump­ists now find For­tune 500 CEOs moral­ly obnox­ious and an eco­nom­ic threat, grow irate at Fed­er­al Reserve bail-outs, and are fired up by the mul­ti­ple crises set off by glob­al free trade and the treaties that go with it. And under­ly­ing such posi­tions is a fan­ta­sy of an old­er cap­i­tal­ism, one friend­lier to the way they think Amer­i­ca used to be. They might be called anti-cap­i­tal­ists on behalf of capitalism.

Oth­ers — often their neigh­bors in com­mu­ni­ties emp­ty­ing of good jobs and seem­ing­ly under assault — are feel­ing the Bern. This rep­re­sents yet anoth­er attack on neolib­er­al­ism of the lim­ou­sine vari­ety. Bernie Sanders proud­ly clas­si­fies him­self as a social­ist, even if his pro­gram­mat­ic ideas echo a mild­ly left ver­sion of the New Deal. Yet even to utter the ver­boten word ​“social­ism” in pub­lic, no less insis­tent­ly run on it and get away with it, excit­ing the fer­vent com­mit­ment of mil­lions, is stun­ning — in fact, beyond imag­in­ing in any recent America.

The Sanders cam­paign had made its stand against the lib­er­al­ism of the Clin­ton elite. It has res­onat­ed so deeply because the can­di­date, with all his grand­fa­ther­ly charis­ma and integri­ty, repeat­ed­ly insists that Amer­i­cans should look beneath the sur­face of a lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism that is eco­nom­i­cal­ly and eth­i­cal­ly bank­rupt and run­ning a polit­i­cal con­fi­dence game, even as it con­de­scends to ​“the for­got­ten man.”

To a degree then, Trump and Sanders are com­pet­ing for the same con­stituen­cies, which should sur­prise no one giv­en how far the col­lat­er­al dam­age of neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism has spread. Don’t for­get that, in the Great Depres­sion era as the Nazis grew more pow­er­ful, their par­ty, the Nation­al Social­ists, not only incor­po­rat­ed that word — ​“social­ism” — but com­pet­ed with the Social­ist and Com­mu­nist par­ties among the dis­tressed work­ers of Ger­many for mem­bers and vot­ers. There were even times (when they weren’t killing each oth­er in the streets) that they held joint demonstrations.

Trump is, of course, a con­science­less dem­a­gogue, ser­i­al liar, and nihilist with a belief in noth­ing save him­self. Sanders, on the oth­er hand, means what he says. On the issue of eco­nom­ic jus­tice, he has been a bro­ken record for more than a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry, even if no one beyond the bound­aries of Ver­mont paid much atten­tion until recent­ly. He is now wide­ly trust­ed and applaud­ed for his views.

Hillary Clin­ton is broad­ly dis­trust­ed. Sanders has con­sis­tent­ly out­polled her against poten­tial Repub­li­can oppo­nents for pres­i­dent because she is indeed a lim­ou­sine lib­er­al whose career has burned through trust at an aston­ish­ing rate. And more impor­tant than that, the rebel­lion that has car­ried Sanders aloft is not afraid to put cap­i­tal­ism in the dock. Trump is hard­ly about to do that, but the dis­eased state of the neolib­er­al sta­tus quo has made him, too, a force to be reck­oned with. How­ev­er you look at it, the age of acqui­es­cence is pass­ing away.