Sound familiar? It should do. It is now, and it is us.

On the one hand, we have a property-owning class with a particular interest in restricting housing supply at the expense of those who want to get on the property ladder. On the other, we prioritise pensioners at the expense of all other welfare recipients: between 2010 and 2020 the value of the state pension increased by around 8%, whereas unemployment benefits have fallen by 6%. Real disposable incomes are set to fall by 7.1% over the next two years – but not for pensioners, who are, as ever, protected by the triple lock. Economic pain for thee, but not for me.

These conflicts overlap heavily with what feels like the main divide in society: of the old vs the young (although the “young” increasingly stretches up to 50). We are engaged in intergenerational economic warfare. Younger people are forced into a worse quality of life than their parents’ generation. They are expected to live with less space, and spend more for the privilege. They are expected to work for less, and travel further to do so. They are expected to wait longer to buy a property, and rent in an increasingly unstable market while they save up. They are expected to pay ever-more tax, to fund a generation who are actively hostile to their interests.

This two nation country is the result of 12 wasted years of Conservative government. Instead of fixing the roof while the sun was shining, as George Osborne told us he would, the Conservative Party has built “a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners”: a voter base that relies on increasingly tetchy boomers who are happy to pull the ladder up after them. Fundamentally, the Conservatives have presided over the intensification of a two-nation country.

It is a particularly baffling state of affairs given most of our most recent Conservative prime ministers have described themselves as one-nation Conservatives — Cameron, May and Johnson have all laid claim to that mantle. Sunak has been cagier, but he did win the support of the One Nation group of MPs.

Even Ed Miliband tried to appropriate the ideology! He saw one nation as “A vision of a Britain where patriotism, loyalty, dedication to the common cause courses through the veins of all and nobody feels left out. It was a vision of Britain coming together to overcome the challenges we faced.”

In his Autumn Statement, Jeremy Hunt (another self-described one-nation Conservative) told us that “You do not need to choose either a strong economy or good public services”. And in a sense he’s right – we do not need to choose either of them, because we have chosen to have neither.

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This is not some abstract policy debate. Presiding over a two-nation Britain is dangerous for the Conservative Party and for society. As Disraeli also said: “The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing. It is not a confederacy of nobles, it is not a democratic multitude; it is a party formed from all the numerous classes in the realm.”

CCHQ should be petrified of that fact that a Tory voter under 50 is almost as rare as an affordable property in London. A recent YouGov survey found that just 14% of 18-24s and 13% of 25-49s would vote Conservative, compared to 59% for Labour among both groups. Recent polling by Ben Ansell finds that just 15% of all private renters would vote Tory, and among under 50s just 14% of undergraduates and 10% of postgrads would go blue. Demography is not destiny for any political party, but these are worrying numbers.

A two-nation system is bad for society. It is not for nothing that Disraeli warned against it: a perpetuation of the unfair status quo would, he feared, lead to social instability. Improving the lot of the people was not only morally right, it was also a clever act of self-preservation on behalf of the Tory elite.

The real kicker is that it does not have to be like this. We do not have to worship at the altar of the NIMBYs. As far back as 2010, the Conservatives were level-pegging with Labour in terms of winning the support of 18-24-year-olds. Across Europe, young voters often back parties of the Right. There is no iron law that says the Conservatives cannot win the youth vote. It’s a demographic they need desperately to win over.

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To do so does not mean they need to look to the past. As Stanley Baldwin noted in 1934, “The responsibility – and it is a great responsibility – that rests with a leader is to try and adapt the policy according to the deep-laid foundations of the Party principles to meet whatever may come in this world.” The Tories they need to recognise that the status quo is not working. And if they want, as they profess, to be the party of one-nation principles, they need to change, and fast.

The key thing is to address intergeneration unfairness. This would mean stronger protection for renters and higher standards demanded of landlords. It does not mean rent freezes, which have consistently been shown to crash supply and reduce quality, but it does mean that extortionate fees, demands for up to 12 months’ rent in advance, and onerous deposits should be ended. Of course, the housing market will not be fixed until the planning system is fixed. There is a plethora of ways to do this, but a move to zoning, alongside design codes and allowing councils to benefit more from changes in land value due to planning permission decisions all seem like good places to start. Areas with increased house building should be rewarded.

A one-nation platform would also mean re-evaluating some of the punitive elements of our current system. The sky-high interest rate on student loans, the five-week wait for your first universal credit payment, and the two-child limit on child benefit should all go. Nobody in receipt of welfare should be living in absolute poverty – as a country, we are better than that. We currently spend more on pensions than we do on education (which somewhat reflects this government’s priorities) and it is not unreasonable to look at means testing pensions, which come in at around 10% of total spending and 5% of GDP.

Levelling up would also be key, recognising how much pride people feel in the local. This would mean investing both in physical and cultural infrastructure. Ratcheting up council tax for funding is not the answer, given the inherent unfairness in the model. A proportional property tax, of around 0.5% of the current value of a property (double for empty second properties), would see 77% of households pay less tax, but increase the overall tax take. There should also be some element of redistribution between councils, in recognition of the fact that some places have a greater need than others. We should all be in this together.

One-nation Conservatism is often seen as being on the Left of the party – a home for bitter remainers, wets, or secret social democrats. That is not true. It is simply a recognition of the core principle of conservatism: a nation cannot survive if it is at war with itself. The Conservative Party has forgotten this important insight, and sadly Sunak and Hunt are unlikely to remember it anytime soon – this is boomer Britain, after all.

Nitschke features heavily in The Inevitable: Despatches on the Right to Die, Katie Engelhart’s recent book on assisted suicide. Here, Engelhart describes how for the majority of people seeking euthanasia, pain isn’t their fear. Rather, “losing autonomy” is “their primary end-of-life concern”. Others, she reports, “worry about ‘loss of dignity,’ loss of the ability to engage in enjoyable activities, and ‘losing control of bodily functions’”.

This is a growing problem for the generation perhaps most closely associated with the push for autonomy and self-determination: the one that came of age around the Sixties. In other words, the boomers, born between 1946 and 1964. Philip Nitschke (b.1947) is, as his partner puts it to Engelhart, a “child of the Sixties”.

How to stay in control of something – death – that can’t be controlled? This is a generation who grew up amid boundless optimism about the seemingly limitless potential of technology to extend human freedom and potential infinitely, and smash every seemingly natural constraint – even that of biological sex.

The invention of the Pill enabled women to defy a previously irreducible difference between the freedom of men and women to pursue risk-free sexual self-expression. And it was arguably that extension of sexual freedom to women that kicked off the “swinging” Sixties, and informed much of the boomerism that has followed.

A generation marinaded in the positive nature of cultural, political and bodily freedom is thus now confronting, in every ageing boomer body, its own Boomerdämmerung. According to Engelhart, Nitschke himself sees his movement as boomer-driven: “Boomers getting into their twilight years,” he says to Engelhart, “just want access to lethal drugs.”

Not every person born during this period rages thus boomerishly against the dying of the light. Some want to evade it altogether. Late-era boomer Jeff Bezos (b.1964), now the richest man in history, is reported to be funding a new venture to research eternal life. Elsewhere, boomers are seeking to greet the Boomerämmerung not with a heroic last stand, but a form of ascension into virtual realms.

The latest news story to dress this response to Boomerdämmerung in feel-good clothing comes from Seventies pop sensations ABBA, who announced last week that they’re releasing a new album for the first time in four decades.

Two new tracks – the ballad I Still Have Faith In You and the upbeat Don’t Shut Me Down – are already available, making the band the hottest trending search in YouTube’s music category at the time of writing. Both tracks are recognisably ABBA-ish. But the most arresting thing about the band’s relaunch is not its surprise appearance after so many years saying “never”. It’s the way the new venture combines classic ABBA energy with a very 21^st-century boomerism.

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For ABBA aren’t coming back in person, like Led Zep frontman Robert Plant did in all his craggy glory alongside Alison Krauss, for the superb 2007 country album, Raising Sand. No; they’re embracing the tech-enabled boomer fightback against ageing. But though Björn Ulvaeus is an outspoken advocate of assisted suicide, ABBA are not shopping for a ‘Sarco’. Instead, they’re coming back as holograms.

In this, they have extensive boomer precedent. Biotech entrepreneur and boomer transhumanist Martine Rothblatt (b. 1954) talks in From Transgender to Transhuman (2011)about how, in the future, “people of flesh will upload into software the contents and processes of their minds”, resulting in the emergence of a new species, homo creatus. Rothblatt makes heavy use of another futurist (and boomer of the same vintage as ABBA): the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil argued in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology that the pace of technological innovation is accelerating, propelling us toward an event he calls “the singularity”.

In this event, Kurzweil argues, aggregate machine intelligence will surpass the human kind, triggering a fusion between human and machine. In turn, the fusion of human and machine intelligence will enable people to upload their consciousness to the cloud, escaping the constraints of flesh and mortality entirely, for a new world of infinite possibility.

What such a singularity might mean for those parts of human experience given shape by embodiment, loss, limitation or adversity is rarely made clear in such optimistic accounts of human/machine fusion. Those experiences, though, do form a vital part of what’s lovable about ABBA’s classic oeuvre: their improbable ability to set human complexity, fallibility and pain to a sing-along disco beat.

The theme of Mamma Mia, for example, is a woman who keeps going back to a serial cheater. In some hands this would be dark material for a misery-fest. In ABBA’s hands, it’s a jolly wedding-disco classic. One wonders: would homo creatus be capable of such paradoxes?

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Regardless, this bittersweet-disco energy has made ABBA irresistible for every decade since they first hit megastardom. And ABBA’s two new releases have the age-old mix of human complexity with sing-along cheese that’s most endearing about their music. They’re as catchy and human as ever, with lyrics about love and friendship that feel like they’re written by people too far past the flush of youth to be dizzied by sex or easy promises of ‘forever’.

Tickets have just gone on sale for a tour in which ABBA updates this Seventies paradox with one that couldn’t be more 2021: the “Voyage” experience, where the band will appear as digital versions of their younger selves, called “ABBAtars”, created by George Lucas’ studio Industrial Light & Magic.

Ray Kurzweil premiered the precursor to the “ABBAtars” two decades ago, at a TED talk in which he appeared in the guise of “Ramona”, his “female” digital alter ego. “Ramona”, a kind of holographic puppet, was operated remotely via sensors on Kurzweil’s body, combined with voice-change technology that reformatted his voice in more feminine tones. The result is, as you can see, unsettling to say the least.

But CGI has got better since then, as the rise of “deepfake” footage (and even deepfake pornography) attests. The ‘ABBAtar’ footage that appears toward the end of the I Still Have Faith In You video looks convincingly on a continuum with the video’s many clips of their 1970s footage. Inasmuch as there’s a difference, it’s no more so than the gap between someone today posting on Instagram with and without filters. In other words, comfortably within the acceptable envelope of digitally-enhanced reality as we’re accustomed to it today.

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“Virtual reality…you can be someone else” Kurzweil claimed two decades ago, in the guise of Ramona. We’re now waist-deep into our mass experiment in what happens when the boomer generation encourages its offspring to believe that this is (at least online) literally true. But regardless of the effect such claims may have on those who’ve never known a world without internet, the boomer race to create a de-corporealised haven from the Grim Reaper is growing ever more urgent as the boomers themselves become, corporeally, more haggard.

It’s not clear whether the band will perform as themselves at their ‘Voyage’ events. But why should they? They’ve arguably just come closer than Ray Kurzweil has managed yet to achieving boomer apotheosis: eternally perky, fresh, un-dying versions of their youthful selves, able to continue indefinitely doing what those younger selves did, without ever getting tired, ill or divorced.

Thus, once again, ABBA are the kings and queens of paradox. In the Seventies they stretched the tension between upbeat music and tragic lyrics to breaking-point. And their musical relaunch offers songs about the scars left by time’s passage, in digital avatars that spare the band any unflattering contrast between their dewy youthful public image and craggy, ageing contemporary selves.

The ‘trad’ in me wonders whether any of this is even necessary. My mum gave me her ABBA compilation when I was a tween in the early Nineties, and the same compilation is now my primary-age daughter’s favourite. I can’t think of another band that could unite three generations of women in singing at the tops of our voices in the car. Surely having fostered that kind of intergenerational love of cheesy pop is immortality enough?

Regardless, it’s clear that ABBA weren’t just a key sound of the Seventies, and (in revival) the Nineties. They’ve also captured a key 2020s boomer zeitgeist: the wisdom of age, with a glossy coat of high-tech optimism, over a howling abyss of memento mori.

David Spiegelhalter, the chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk at Cambridge University, suggests that the risk posed to children by Covid-19 is “tiny”, with under-15s more likely to be struck by lightning than die of the virus. Young adults are slightly more at risk, but not by much. Seroprevalence surveys suggest that this age group are more likely than any other to have already come into contact with and recovered from the virus, which makes sense given the daily habits of young adults who are disproportionately likely to live in cities and to have work and social lives that bring them into contact with large numbers of people. Almost all young people experience Covid-19 as a mild illness, and often suffer no symptoms at all, meaning that the age-mortality graph for this disease looks less like a u-shape, and more like a hockey stick.

And here is the political problem. Many young people feel resentment towards the generation born between roughly 1945 and 1965, otherwise known as ‘boomers’, a word often spoken with derision by young adults, and sometimes with a snarl.

Boomers, according to the narrative popular among my peer group, had it easy. Boomer landlords sit atop the housing market and exploit their young tenants; boomer students enjoyed free tuition courtesy of the taxpayer while today’s students pay through the nose; boomer public sector workers are living the high life on gold plated pensions while their descendants suffer the effects of austerity; boomer voters gave us Brexit, against the wishes of the majority of the young; boomer job-seekers benefited from an economy that offered opportunities that today’s millennials, coming of age in the wake of the 2008 crash, can only dream of.

There are flaws in this narrative, of course, since the image of the complacent boomer doesn’t always fit with reality. A quarter of baby boomers don’t own their homes, the vast majority didn’t go to university, and almost a third can expect to enter old age with no financial security, since they have no private pension to call on. Plus younger members of the boomer cohort are likely to suffer terribly as a result of job losses, with a quarter of a million over-50s predicted to never work again.

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But the narrative is nevertheless attractive to a generation feeling the sting of downward social mobility. And now we have a new, even more enraging component to add to this tale of boomer entitlement: the fact that the lockdown has disproportionately protected the over 55s, who are at risk from a virus that is dangerous to them, but not to their children or grandchildren, while causing devastation to the economy. And it is not boomers who are predicted to foot the bill.

This framing relies upon abstraction. Even the young people most sceptical about the need for lockdown, and most resistant to its strictures, have no desire to put their older relatives in harm’s way because, as with all unpleasant political problems, it is difficult to support a policy when the costs must be borne by people you personally know and love.

But when the fear of death has lifted and this crisis ends, how will its story be told? We could well be suffering the consequences — economic and others — of these last six months for decades to come, and the precautionary principle that persuaded so many people that lockdown was a necessary evil will not have the same persuasive power once the panic induced by the pandemic recedes in the collective memory.

For a group of young people already comfortable with the vocabulary of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’, it might not take much to definitively add ‘boomers’ to the list of wrongdoers, alongside other reviled groups. And we might find that the generation who lost out most from lockdown will adopt a divisive myth about the crisis of 2020 that goes something like this: “Boris Johnson’s government destroyed our futures in order to protect Tory voting boomers.”

All it needs is a grain of truth. A longstanding Tory preference among older voters is as strong as ever, with the Conservatives currently leading Labour by 34 points among the over 65s. And children and young adults have endured some unique harms as a result of lockdown, with the closure of schools and the A Level fiasco doubtless leaving some permanent mark on students in this cohort. Meanwhile, surveys suggest that the mental health of the young has been particularly badly damaged by the experience of lockdown. And all this before the forecast global depression even arrives with its full and terrible force.

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The boomer narrative doesn’t require perfect accuracy in order to thrive. The fact, for instance, that the approach adopted by the British government was similar to that of most other Western countries, and a good deal less restrictive than some, will not necessarily counteract the mythological power of a story of old betraying young.

The inaccuracy, for instance, of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ account of the First World War has done little to undermine its potency. The phrase was already in use during the war, was quickly adopted in the years immediately following, and then further popularised in 1961 by Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, a book that excoriated the British leadership on the Western Front. The musical Oh What A Lovely War! and television series Blackadder embedded the image of heartless old generals sending brave young men to their deaths and, despite the best efforts of revisionist historians, this remains the popular view of the conflict. When a story is compelling enough, inconvenient details tend to be forgotten.

At the very beginning of lockdown, Max Hastings, a military historian who understands the power of popular narrative, wrote with impressive candour about the coming generational conflict. Echoing the sentiments of the most resentful twenty-somethings, Hastings described his own generation as collectively “monumentally selfish”:

“Despite our affluence relative to the young, the grey vote has fought tooth and nail against the BBC’s sensible termination of our free TV licences; deterred politicians from means-testing free travel passes; resisted fiscal curbs on our pension privileges, and the entirely just depletion of personal resources to fund care home costs.”

Expressions of this kind of anti-boomer sentiment will only grow louder without some kind of government intervention. The proposal to end the triple lock on state pensions in order to pay for this crisis may go some way towards repairing the generational rift. As Scott Corfe, the research director of The Social Market Foundation, said in response to this proposal, “[t]here is a clear case for intergenerational reciprocation when it comes to meeting the fiscal costs of the crisis in the years ahead.”

It might also become necessary to increase taxes on assets, or even introduce a means test for pensions — a controversial proposal in the UK, although long established in Australia — in order to settle the lockdown bill. And we should expect those moves to be resisted “tooth and nail”, just as Max Hastings describes. This isn’t an easy problem for the Government to solve, and the age profile of Tory voters disincentives action.

But the effects of this crisis demand some kind of action, if we are to avoid a toxic narrative of exploitation which casts millennials as vulnerable lions, and boomers as entitled donkeys. Covid-19 could have had a classic u-shaped mortality curve, or it could even — like the 1918 flu — have been most dangerous to working age adults. Instead, by a stroke of dumb luck, the young turned out to be peculiarly resistant to this virus. And now, without some effort to remedy the generational inequality feeding the anti-boomer narrative, that flap of the butterfly’s wing could have ugly political consequences.

The story dates back some years. In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther is said to have nailed his ’95 Theses’ to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church. Among the arguments in this document, one of the foundational texts of Protestant Christianity, was the claim that the faithful don’t need tradition, custom or religious authorities to access the word of God, as it’s all there in the Bible.

This signalled a turning away from the general belief that you should rely on kings, priests or other human, worldly authority figures to tell you what was right. Don’t submit to them, Luther argued, read the biblical texts.

Some five centuries on, this anti-authority revolution has gone well beyond Christianity. Today it is hard to think of a mainstream cultural or institutional arena where it’s not generally accepted that authority and tradition should be questioned, challenged and if possible superseded.

First as Nonconformists and then as general non-conformists, we’ve moved beyond questioning the authority of the Catholic church to questioning the Christian church full stop. Having run out of priests and doctrines there, we’ve moved on to questioning everything from history, teachers and Boy Scouts to fathers, and all that lies in between. The aim has evolved somewhat; whereas Luther was concerned with what he saw as a more authentic faith, today we’re agitating for freedom from anything that hasn’t been freely chosen. One Mumbai antinatalist, Raphael Simons, even proposed suing his parents for having him without his consent.

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This collapse of faith in authority poses a particular challenge to liberal parents. One Washington Post writer frames it: “I’m A Die-Hard Liberal. It Ruined My Parenting.” If you believe all humans are (or should be) as free as possible, then how does that apply to children? When children are neither fully rational nor capable of full independence, how does the doctrine of human freedom apply?

For one thing, liberal views make it harder to order your kids about. According to Pew Research, the more liberal parents are, the less emphasis they place on obedience in their children. Only 35% of consistently liberal American parents believe in teaching their kids obedience, compared to 68% of consistently conservative parents. Anyone who believes passionately in freedom for everyone will struggle with the prospect of telling your children to do as they’re told ‘because I said so’.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Even the most right-on anti-authoritarian will drop the metaphysics and do Commanding Mummy Voice when a toddler runs into the path of an oncoming bus. But for those truly committed to the enterprise of freedom, a whole subculture of ‘child-led’ parenting practices has grown up. It’s full of advice to mothers on how to remain available so your child can breastfeed whenever he likes, stop breastfeeding at her own initiative rather than mummy’s, offer a range of weaning food for free choice rather than mush on a spoon, sleep in your bed for as long as they like and so on.

At the radical end of this child-led style lies ‘unschooling’, which takes the view that the structures of education themselves constitute an unacceptable impingement on a child’s autonomy, and that education is better and more effectively pursued by supporting the child to follow their own interests. Such approaches are common targets of conservative ire: the Daily Mail loves to make a spectacle of parents who devote themselves to their children’s absolute freedom, or inveigh at liberal parents raising a generation of ‘little horrors’.

What’s often missing from this critique, though, is the fact that this focus on freedom doesn’t in fact remove parents from the picture. Quite the opposite. ‘Child-led’ parenting is labour-intensive. I have mum friends who spend hours singing, back-rubbing or breastfeeding their pre-schoolers every night, because in their view imposing a bedtime boundary on their kids was in some profound way morally wrong. It’s also time-consuming: I remember once watching in bafflement as one especially anti-authoritarian friend waited patiently for her 18-month-old baby to put her arms voluntarily into a bib before starting tea. (It took a while.)

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The upshot of this is a child who can’t easily be raised by a village. If parenting is a matter of being constantly present and attuned to your child’s needs, and following their lead at all times, then how can a mother ever be elsewhere, or doing anything else?

In effect, then, the shadow side of freedom-focused child-rearing is micromanagement. In this, unschoolers share an affinity with another contemporary parenting approach more commonly associated with micromanagement: ‘helicopter parents’. Unschoolers and helicopter parents are both, are in different ways, inheritors of Luther’s tradition: the former fixated on freedom, the latter on salvation through applying the Protestant work ethic, and both pursuing their aims through a pervasive presence in their kids’ lives. In both cases, too, we see an abdication of authority, in favour either of radical libertarianism or a kind of cuddly, enmeshed totalitarianism.

Parents are thus echoing in family life what’s going on in the wider culture. Our individualising and privatising of family life echoes a parallel collapse of social norms, institutions and shared values under the modern questioning of authority. And as Patrick Deneen has argued, the fewer shared social norms we have, the more the state must intervene to ensure order and social harmony. In the state, as in the nursery, freedom and tyranny are two sides of the same coin.

The standard conservative harrumph about kids today, whether at home or rioting in the streets, is that they should just be made to do as they’re told. But in practice, at least as a parent, it doesn’t really work like this. Evidence suggests that punitively authoritarian parenting is associated with bad behaviour and psychological difficulties in children, something echoed recently by Met police chief Cressida Dick to much Right-wing anger.

The more nurturing ‘helicopter’ style of absolutist parenting doesn’t fare much better, with children raised by helicopter parents showing trouble controlling their emotions in childhood and early adolescence. Nor does this resolve when they grow up, with one study showed such children struggle to self-regulate as adults. They also lack confidence in their own agency – that is, their ability to affect their lives or environments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, having grown accustomed to intrusive and ever-present authority in family life, helicopter-parented young adults also express higher than usual support for surveillance and nanny-state policies.

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Others have drawn a link between social-justice discourse of ‘safety’ and ‘harm’ and risk-averse, highly involved modern approaches to raising kids. But unlike Jonathan Haidt, I’m unconvinced that a front-brain, rationalist solution is the answer when the heart of the problem isn’t a rational one.

I’ve long since learned that when my three-year-old is crying uncontrollably, the quickest and kindest solution is not to offer choices, reasoning or punishment but a big hug and confident authority. When I trained and practiced as a psychotherapist, my experience was that this human yearning for kindness mixed with authority isn’t exclusive to children. It wasn’t unusual to meet a client who would try to bend the ‘rules’, test limits, sometimes get very angry at me — only to acknowledge some time later the relief they found in neither succeeding nor being punished for testing boundaries. But if all someone encounters when pushing back is empty space, they will push still harder, and with growing fear.

Two women are screaming at the cops outside the White House. pic.twitter.com/V9wTsoFDzf

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) June 23, 2020

Mixed with the real-world conditions driving today’s increasingly mutinous politics, I see young adults behaving exactly as they were raised to behave, having grown up amid the endgame of our rebellion against authority. Dysregulated activists screaming at authority figures, as though begging a parent to relent. Debates about ‘systemic’ oppression that none of us can fix (because we have no control over anything in our lives), but which must be tackled by authoritarian means anyway. A politics of harm and safety. It leaves me wondering just how much fear and distress lies under relentless search for a boundary, any boundary, that might offer some resistance.

It also leaves me deeply pessimistic about the future. Because while I can contain my own young daughter’s distress with a mix of love and appropriate authority, no institution now exists with the public support to make an equivalent intervention in our public life. We’ve devoted some five centuries of progressive politics to dismantling all the structures that might be capable of doing so. It’s far from clear what comes next.