A lot of the Bushwick Bolsheviks are too young to remember any of this, but memory turns up innumerable examples of leftist movements that got lots of media attention at the time but fizzled out without accomplishing anything. Occupy Wall Street was a national obsession eight years ago; actual results were nada. In 2008, Barack Obama thrilled the left when he said he was on the brink of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Didn’t happen, and pretty much his only accomplishment, ObamaCare, is now implicitly dismissed by the left when they call for replacing it with Medicare For All. Before Obama, there were the Howard Deaniacs and the Nader Nerds and before that, there were the anti-globalist window-smashers of the 1990s and before that, there were the Summer Vacation Sandinistas and Fidel Castro fanboys … like Bill de Blasio and Bernie Sanders.

De Blasio was last seen begging the world’s richest man to come build a huge non-union facility in Queens, and Sanders is the personification of the Old Man Yells at Cloud gag on “The Simpsons.” A movement built around forgiving college debt for unemployed global-justice twerps doing podcasts at sustainable brewpubs in poseur Brooklyn is going to run out of steam before its influence spreads past Hoboken.