Deeply tied up in our understandings of race and racism. and so in the piece that i worked for salon this week i talked about this in terms of what happens during the post reconstruction moment when there s a sort of rollback. basically we have progress and then we have massive backlash and it comes from the right. so the liberals sort of ethos is one of inclusion and we see all kinds of inclusion happening at the policy level. and then all after sudden we get this massive backlash from the right that the left kind of capitulates to. and it s unclear to me why we don t think this is happening exactly in the same ways again. the. that is a very provocative analogy because reconstruction has a specific point in american history and strikes me that s the kind of thing the kind of metaphor that makes you, jonathan, uncomfortable, right? this is precisely the thing we re doing. everything is a war or reconstruction. ....