Back in the mid-’60s Stokely Carmichael won a faction fight within the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) against John Lewis and others that made the civil rights group all black. It was a blow to white activists like myself.

The sheer tonnage of talk about the Sanders campaign qua extra-terrestrial phenomenon is so tsunami-like I wonder if there’s anything left to say. Not that all the questions raised by that literary inundation have been settled—far from it.

Your new book, The Age of Acquiescence (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), describes two major periods of wealth acquisition in the United States—the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and the current “Age of Acquiescence.”