...Exhaustion helps explain why ideas once treated as radioactive — socialism, in particular — are now discussed less as utopian fantasies and more as possible exits from a stalled national project. For younger Americans, the appeal is less ideological romance than hunger... They face unaffordable rents, unstable work, medical debt and student loans that metastasize faster than they can be paid down... When people can’t eat, can’t save and can’t think clearly, the abstractions of “free markets” lose their magic. Systems are judged not by theory but by outcomes. Right now, the outcomes for average Americans are brutal. This is...