Thomas Piketty (2020) argues that the nature of the current conjecture is shaped by a clash between an educated cosmopolitan professional class and shareholders committed to maximizing capital accumulation. He calls these respective groups ‘the Brahmin Left’ and ‘the Merchant Right’. As for workers, they are adjunctive to politics. Like Lind's analysis in Chapter 3, there are certain elements of this analysis that hold up, especially when one considers intra-class struggle where one must accumulate or be accumulated. Indeed, some of the sections in this chapter examine cases where different capitalists pursue different strategies, form different alliances and viciously compete against one another.

However, like Lind, Piketty has oversights. In his case it is discounting the role of the working class as well as the development of the terrain in which contemporary class struggle occurs. For example, consider how at precisely the moment when conditions are so favourable for capitalism, in a country where for a century it was said to be impossible (see Foner, 1984), there was a country-wide organized socialist movement that credibly contended for the American presidency. And while it is not yet the case for national politics, in many American cities democratic socialists are within the ‘margin of manoeuvre’, meaning that determinants of success and failure include the moves campaigns make rather than the power of neoliberal politics automatically carrying the day. The coming sections examine how progressive neoliberals responded to this challenge in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and how party officials sought to thwart class struggle ‘from below’. I end by examining how capturing the judiciary can encode a ‘passive revolution’.

Staving off class struggle ‘from below’

In reflecting upon ‘the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order’, and ‘America's bipartisan commitment to protecting and expanding a community of nations devoted to freedom, market economies and cooperation’, Hillary Clinton (2014) believes there is ‘really no viable alternative’. Reminiscent of George W. Bush's remarks in the National Security Strategy, what she means is that there is no other social structure suitably amenable for a capitalist ruling class: no other option but uneven development and dispossession will be permitted.