With the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s ascent to the Presidency, 2008 struck many observers—including this one—as reminiscent of the watershed election year 1932. Even Obama’s personal moderation recalled the careful, budget-balancing F.D.R. of that campaign. It was national calamity and need that would push President Roosevelt in a more radical direction, and it seemed that similar events—bank failures, mass unemployment, epidemic foreclosures, despair—would drive President Obama the same way, toward equally far-reaching policies.

It didn’t happen like that, and for many reasons: this time around, the onset of an incipient depression nearly coincided with the arrival of the new Administration, and the hard times never ran quite deep enough to unite the country; the new President showed his inexperience, governed more cautiously than he had campaigned, and lost the rhetorical power that had connected him to the voters; his opponents, far from beaten, grew more extreme than ever; key institutions like Congress, the media, and corporations were no longer responsive to the demands of democracy; the public had lost its trust. And so we’ve had five years of far-from-unmitigated letdown…

Along with Elizabeth Warren, de Blasio is the most visible face and potent voice of a new political spirit. For the first time in decades, liberalism is once again becoming “a fighting faith” (Whitman’s phrase, revived by Schlesinger). This spirit has almost nothing to do with the perpetual battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, or the Center for American Progress against the Third Way, or Clinton vs. Warren in 2016. It is the political articulation of a wide and deep sense of outrage and disenchantment, which is why it has legs. It has to do with a sense that the deck is stacked in favor of the few, that ordinary people’s aspirations hardly stand a chance.