In the present case, the belief goes, without COVID-19, America would truly be great, and getting greater, regardless of your voting preferences. And our nonstop progress is moral as well as economic: for the professional classes, the arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice (at least for them).

Everything seems the same. But as I get to the front door I know something is different.

As we slide towards the latest installment of the War on Terror™, it’s worth remembering we’ve been here before, traversing the same discursive terrain about the merits of war against a country that starts with the letters I-R-A-. Not only has very little changed, this new gearing up for war and the discourses surrounding it are direct consequences of the failure in 2002 of the US left to base its anti-war resistance on a moral foundation distinct from the logic of empire