Privilege isn’t so much a concept as it as a worldview. It has a simple definition—unearned advantage, likely having to do with wealth—but implies so much more. The approach originated in academia and progressive activism, but its reach now expands to cultural commentary and mainstream (even conservative) politics. It made its cultural debut primarily through two personalities. The first is Girls creator Lena Dunham, noted for being the first-ever entertainment professional who grew up wealthy in New York. Or so it would seem: From 2012 on, a good chunk of the Internet has consisted of critics calling out her (often overstated) privilege. Prior to Dunham-privilegegate (which, as I type, continues; Dunham had recently expressed her privilege by threatening to move to Canada should Donald Trump get elected), online commenters had been accusing one another of unchecked privilege for years. Yet there weren’t really opinion pieces about whether X is privileged and what it all means. Whereas today, that pretty much describes cultural criticism and opinion journalism.

The second is Tal Fortgang, another New York–area-reared millennial. A then-Princeton freshman, Fortgang’s 2014 essay, “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege,” in a right-leaning student publication, was quickly reissued in Time magazine with the provocative headline, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege.” Just about every publication in the English-speaking world (including The Atlantic, with a piece by yours truly) used the Fortgang episode as a starting point for a broader debate about what the “privilege” discussed on college campuses refers to, and what checking it entails.

While “privilege” plays an enormous role in the online shaming culture, both of these are examples of people who’ve parlayed privilege accusation into celebrity. Dunham remains in the public eye, and has incorporated the image the culture has of her into her own work, effectively copyrighting the “millennial brat” persona. Fortgang, though not a celebrity of Dunham’s stratosphere, is making a name for himself as a young conservative journalist on the “privilege” beat. A 2015 essay of his, “38 Ways College Students Enjoy ‘Left-wing Privilege’ on Campus,” appeared on The College Fix. The two faces of privilege are doing all right. The critics of privilege shaming may take some comfort in knowing that these two, at least, have not been shamed into silence.

THE PERILS OF “PRIVILEGE” by Phoebe Maltz Bovy St. Martin’s Press, 336 pp., $26.99

The political conversation about “privilege,” meanwhile, has its own overlapping timeline. The concept is well suited to politics. Long before privilege awareness became fashionable, candidates (often from quite privileged backgrounds) would try to portray themselves as self-made (born in, as Bill Clinton would have it, log cabins of their own creation), and their opponents as out-of-touch elitists. In the 2008 presidential campaign, John Edwards offered up regular reminders of his mill-worker heritage, while Sarah Palin railed against coastal elites. Yet populism well predates the explicitly “privilege” approach. That would only come a bit later, in the years after the term had made its cultural debut: in the run-up to the 2012 elections, candidates and their supporters began framing their cases more explicitly in terms of privilege. President Barack Obama had spoken about unearned advantage and the myth of the self-made man, which led the GOP to make “We Built It” its national convention refrain. The line from “We Built It” to Fortgang thinking his grandparents’ struggles meant he couldn’t be privileged is easy enough to trace. To be a conservative then was to reject identity politics.

It was only in 2016 that politics went full privilege turn. The Democratic contest was all about “privilege,” with Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s supporters incessantly accusing the other side of supporting their candidate because of their (that is, the supporters’) unearned advantages. Privilege accusation, however, is by no means limited to intra-left battles. Conservatives regularly accuse liberals of unchecked privilege, and they have been doing so for years. The old “limousine liberal” cliché became the ideological underpinning of intellectual conservatism. In 2010, political scientist (and controversial The Bell Curve coauthor) Charles Murray wrote in The Washington Post that “the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them—which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege.” This insight led him, two years later, to produce a “bubble” quiz, which if anything anticipated the viral privilege-checklist phenomenon. It asked (and asks; a reissue appeared in 2016) well-educated white liberals to admit they had no idea what NASCAR was, and that they thus were too out of touch to know what’s good for the country. The implication was that if white liberals left their bubble, they’d start voting Republican. Same year, same idea, from political commentator and journalist David Brooks: