Many in the US political sphere seem convinced that we are on the verge of an apocalyptic moment. On the left, outlets like Jacobin like to point out that income inequality is at the highest it’s been since 1917 — the implication, of course, being that 1917 was the year when the Bolsheviks overthrew Nicholas’s Russia and founded the Soviet Union1. On both the left and right, outlets like the Vice2 and The Federalist3 wonder if the highly polarized political environment will boil over into a second civil war. Both the left and right have their own narratives about what...