Events, dear boy, events. That’s what Harold Macmillan is supposed to have said when he was asked what it was that a prime minister most feared. Like most of these famous statements, Macmillan probably never said it. But these days, events are, for me, something, on the whole, that I welcome rather than fear.

Our political conversations are so stuck, with people rehearsing the same lines of the same arguments; it doesn’t matter how bitter those arguments are, the familiarity of the lines are a comfort. It’s like a church hymnal.

But then something comes along—an Occupy, a Black Lives Matter, a Sanders, a BDS, and long before that, a Seattle—that no one who was not involved in the planning or organizing, expected, and the conversation is pushed out of that groove. Suddenly we’re talking about something else; suddenly, we think something else is possible, there is an alternative. Suddenly everything we thought we knew, we no longer know.

I know the counter to this: Trump. But Trump, however unexpected, hasn’t changed the conversation. He’s just intensified the conversation we’ve been having since the 1970s (the fear of the radical right, the sigh of the neoliberal settlement). Ironically, despite so many of us saying Trump couldn’t win, his election has simply confirmed everything we already knew.

So while everyone continues that conversation, reading from the same hymnal, arguing about the same things we always argue about (and the left has its own stuckness when it comes to these arguments), I remain watchful, hopeful, for that event. What other choice do I have?