Weary as it is, the still-standing U.S. Left continues to refuse to take no for an answer. However, we face two prominent conundrums: How do we decipher the meaning of “revolution” during a post-socialist and particularly counterrevolutionary period in history? And how do we address an increasingly compromised natural world whose very ability to sustain organic life has been dramatically called into question?
It’s been a few hundred years since anything resembling a revolutionary tornado has touched down on U.S. soil. Whereas peoples living throughout Latin America and the Middle East are quite fluent in the idiom of revolution, U.S. leftists have relegated the notion to a poetic dustbin dwelling somewhere just to the left of the deep past. Many entertain notions of particularistic “revolutions” in domains of the human spirit, art, technology, and even sexuality, yet they cannot expand the concept to encompass society as a whole. This...
