In “The Health-Care Defense,” Amy Davidson Sorkin writes about the battle to save the Affordable Care Act.

“Citizen Kane” offers us only a glimpse or two of Charles Foster Kane’s ill-fated run for governor of New York. The most memorable is the boisterous speech that Kane, by this point a famous and well-connected newspaper publisher with an ego as large as his fortune, delivers to his supporters outlining the vaguely populist themes of his campaign. “The working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests,” he bellows. “The decent, ordinary citizens know that I’ll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed!”

After Kane’s loss, he’s confronted by an old friend, who drunkenly assesses the contradictions of his public career and his self-image as a champion of the working class. “You used to write an awful lot about the working man,” he sneers. “He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift.”

Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.

This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”

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To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”

Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”

Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I'm not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”

On the whole, the experience of the Trump Presidency does not inspire much confidence that wealth is a political insulator or purifier of motives. For starters, Trump only self-financed a small portion of his campaign, and ultimately took in millions from donors large and small, while also benefitting from contributions made by mega-donors like Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson to Trump-supporting super PACs. Trump’s wealth has not prevented his Administration from developing shady ties to some of those big donors and other special interests; his extensive business holdings, including his hotels, have, in fact, facilitated bribery in plain sight. And his populist rhetoric has been belied by a policy agenda, including a tax-cut package in 2017, that has been well in keeping with the inequality-exacerbating orthodoxy of conservative economics.

All of this has reinforced the sense that the wealthy embrace many of the policies that they do not only because some are beholden to or own this or that particular company but because the wealthy, as a class, share certain common interests. This is the locus of the distrust toward the rich that has built within the Democratic Party post-recession, the underlying suspicion behind the rise of millennial socialism and its superstars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One of her chief policy advisers, Dan Riffle, uses the Twitter handle “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.” When the New York Times asked the 2020 candidates whether anyone could truly deserve to have a billion dollars, Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand said no. (Sanders and Warren, a bit more cautiously, emphasized the need for the wealthy to pay their “fair share” in taxes. “My guess is when you have that, you’re not going to have too many billionaires left,” Sanders said.) As of last year, according to Gallup, a majority of Democrats do not believe that America benefits from having a class of rich people. These are the currents Steyer will be swimming against. Buying name recognition with ad dollars won’t necessarily bring him buy-in from progressives.

By odd coincidence, Steyer announced his candidacy the day that Ross Perot, a wealthy populist of a different stripe, died. A consensus has emerged among political historians and journalists that Perot’s outsider campaigns likely did not tip the outcomes of the 1992 and 1996 Presidential campaigns. But he did, through his fortune and reputation, help promote a particular set of ideas, particularly a rough-hewn brand of free-trade skepticism that survives to this day. Steyer might similarly influence discourse during the primary—but any wealthy politician advances, too, in their own person, another set of ideas. Steyer’s candidacy and career rest on an argument that the benevolent rich can truly be relied upon as the benefactors of the working class. Fewer and fewer Democrats agree.

On Sunday afternoon, the Guatemalan government issued a statement cancelling a highly anticipated meeting, scheduled for Monday, in Washington, between Jimmy Morales, the President of Guatemala, and Donald Trump. The subject of the meeting was a deal between the two countries that would allow the U.S. government to begin sending asylum seekers to Guatemala under the terms of a so-called safe-third-country agreement. The idea was to outsource part of the American asylum system to Guatemala, despite the fact that many of the Central-American asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border are Guatemalans fleeing poverty, hunger, and violence in their home country. “Opposition to the deal was widespread in Guatemala,” Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a newly elected member of the Guatemalan congress, told me. “Morales was acting alone.” Over the weekend, the country’s Constitutional Court was considering three separate petitions filed in an attempt to block the deal; on Sunday night, a few hours after Morales cancelled his plans for Washington, citing the pending legal case, the judges issued their ruling: Morales was forbidden from negotiating the deal on his own, without consulting the Guatemalan congress. According to a member of the Trump Administration, “if the injunctions didn’t happen in Guatemala, then the deal would have been signed on Monday.”

Reports about a possible agreement between the two countries have been circulating for more than a month, but some of the concrete details of what the arrangement would actually look like emerged late last week. The New Yorker obtained a draft of the agreement, which stated that the U.S. would be able to send asylum seekers from any country to Guatemala, including, in theory, those who never even travelled through Guatemala in the first place. As such, the over-all agreement seemed to go even further than a traditional safe-third-country agreement. According to a person with knowledge of the deal, there were additional stipulations in a second document, called the “implementation plan,” which made clear that the Trump Administration intended the agreement to apply primarily to asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador. Still, at an earlier stage of deliberations over the policy, there had been a discussion inside the Trump Administration about taking advantage of the agreement’s broad language to send more people to Guatemala. Ultimately, that position was considered too extreme, though the language of the agreement itself, which allowed for that possibility, remained intact.

“The Guatemalans did not know what they were getting into,” the Trump Administration official told me. “To this day, Morales believes this agreement is not a safe-third. They don’t want anyone to call it that.” One reason for Morales’s confusion seems to be that there were no real examples of an analogous deal for him to use as a point of reference. The U.S. does have a safe-third-country agreement with Canada—if asylum seekers arrive at a Canadian port of entry, immigration authorities will send them back to the U.S., on the grounds that they could receive a fair hearing in the American system, and vice versa—but it’s different from anything under consideration at the southern border. For one thing, the number of asylum seekers from Central America is significantly higher there, and has been on the rise. There are also serious concerns about whether Guatemala could provide a safe and stable environment in which Hondurans, Salvadorans, or anyone else travelling through the country could actually seek asylum. Manfredo Marroquín, a Guatemalan human-rights advocate and recent Presidential contender, who filed one of the three petitions to the Constitutional Court, told me, “Signing this agreement would be putting at risk the constitutional rights of Guatemalans, because the government would be forced to give to others what it hasn’t given to Guatemalans—safety, employment, health care, and education.”

Part of Morales’s considerations related to Mexico, Guatemala’s northern neighbor, which is also in the midst of tense negotiations with the Trump Administration over a safe-third-country deal, according to the person with knowledge of the negotiations. Although the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly opposed such an agreement, it conceded last month, under pressure from Trump, that the option was on the table. “The Guatemalans likely thought that partnering with the U.S. on this would help them highlight how Mexico isn’t doing enough,” the Administration official told me. “Mexico has been against signing this kind of agreement, which the Guatemalan government knows. The Guatemalans wanted to not be seen as the problem.”

A Presidential runoff in Guatemala will be held in August, and Morales has six months left in office; pursuing the deal, Jordán Rodas, Guatemala’s human-rights ombudsman, told me, “was yet another way he was trying to ingratiate himself with the Trump Administration” before the end of his term. Sunday’s court ruling in Guatemala has effectively ended speculation about the viability of a deal between the two countries. Because Morales lacks support in congress to pursue the agreement, and the Constitutional Court has barred him from acting alone, it isn’t clear what the President could do to revive the talks with Washington. “Morales wanted to end his time as close as he could to the U.S.,” the person familiar with the negotiations told me. Rodas, who also filed one of the court petitions, told me, “We cannot trust that this government won’t try this again, but it’ll be very hard now. It was very important that, once again, the Constitutional Court has asserted the rule of law.” (On Twitter, Francisco Villagran de Leon, a former Guatemalan Ambassador to the U.S. who is a visiting scholar at George Washington University, said, “It wasn’t Jimmy Morales who canceled the meeting. It was Trump. Jimmy didn’t want to miss an opportunity to go to the White House, but they told him not to go. They didn’t want to expose Trump to the fiasco of signing something that the Constitutional Court in Guatemala could have disallowed.”)

On Monday morning, the Trump Administration revealed that it had also, simultaneously, been planning a sweeping new regulation to limit asylum at the southern border. Announced by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, the regulation, which will almost certainly be challenged in U.S. federal court, states that a person cannot qualify for asylum in the U.S. if she failed to apply for asylum in a third country through which she travelled on her way to the U.S. “In one line, it’s really ending the ability of Central Americans to apply for asylum at the southern border,” Sarah Pierce, a lawyer with the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “As a result of this move, we would be deporting people who qualify for asylum in the U.S. back to the countries from which they fled.”

Megan Rapinoe, the co-captain of the champion U.S. women’s soccer team, is confidently and casually everyone’s current favorite athlete, leader, and lesbian. As I watched her take the podium at the ticker-tape parade in New York on Wednesday, her gestures and posture unapologetically what some of us watching would classify as dykey (others may say, politely, that her presentation was not traditionally feminine), I wondered what this moment felt like for another woman, the first American professional athlete to come out. So I called the tennis player Martina Navratilova, who is currently at Wimbledon, working as a commentator but also playing—in a legends doubles match—and asked.

Navratilova’s own coming-out, in 1981, was conflicted and mangled. Six years earlier, at the age of eighteen, Navratilova, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, had defected to the United States. At the same time that she made the decision not to return to Czechoslovakia, she also realized that she was gay. Navratilova was then one of the world’s top two female tennis players—the other was Chris Evert. She had to talk to the press a lot, and the press was becoming increasingly interested in the subject of female athletes’ sexuality.

Navratilova had a policy of deflecting the question. “I never said no, I wasn’t gay,” she recalled. “I just said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, it’s private’—which I really feel it is, private. But they would never ask that question of a male athlete.” Sports was a manly business: “Of course they are straight, unless they are figure skaters or something. Female athletes had to prove that they were straight. It’s not a girl activity.” There were, of course, lesbians on the women’s tennis tour, but Navratilova said that the proportion was, “percentage-wise, not that much higher than the general population. There were a lot more lesbians on the golf tour, but they were more closeted.”

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In 1979, Navratilova fell in love with the writer Rita Mae Brown, whose 1973 novel, “Rubyfruit Jungle,” remains the only American lesbian-themed massive best-seller. (It was published by a feminist collective and picked up by Bantam, a few years later, when it had sold seventy thousand copies.) Brown introduced Navratilova to the world of politically active lesbians, in which she was a celebrity, and Navratilova began thinking of coming out publicly. The problem was, her application for U.S. citizenship was still pending and could be denied on the grounds of her homosexuality. (This provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act was dropped in 1990, when it was redrafted by Representative Barney Frank, of Massachusetts, who is gay.) Navratilova developed a new way of deflecting the sexuality question: she would now say, “I can’t talk about it now.” Privately, she told some journalists that she couldn’t talk about it until she became a citizen. She also told some of the other tennis players that, once she had her passport, “If anybody asks me about it, I’m just going to say, ‘Yes, I am gay.’ ”

In April, 1981, a woman named Marilyn Barnett sued Billie Jean King, one of the great female players and the founder of the Women’s Tennis Association. Barnett, who had been King’s lover for seven years, claimed that King had promised to support her for life, and was demanding compensation. Navratilova knew Barnett, who was a hairdresser and had travelled with King for several years. “She did my hair, too,” Navratilova told me. King acknowledged the relationship but said that it was an affair she regretted, and affirmed her commitment to her marriage. “She was trying to pretend that she was still straight,” Navratilova remembered. “She wasn’t, but she didn’t come out until the late nineties.”

The lawsuit caused journalists to ask ever more questions about tennis players’ sexuality. Navratilova knew that she was about to be granted citizenship, which would have freed her to come out—except for one thing: “The sponsors had said to the people in charge that if there was another scandal that they would pull their sponsorship from the tour. So first I was protecting my citizenship, and then I was protecting the people I was with at the W.T.A. I felt I was responsible for sixty to a hundred women.” Their livelihoods depended in large part on the sponsorship money that came from Avon, the cosmetics company then behind the W.T.A.

In the summer of 1981, Navratilova got her passport. “And two days later this journalist calls me, in Monte Carlo. Now I can’t come out because I’m protecting the tour. So I said, ‘You are not going to write about it, are you?’ He said, ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’ I said, ‘Of course I don’t want you to.’ He said, “O.K., I won’t, then.” And two days later it was in the Daily News.” The headline was “Martina Fears Avon’s Call if She Talks.”

Avon did not in fact drop its sponsorship of the W.T.A. Nor did Navratilova lose the endorsements she had—the racquets and shoes stayed in place. “But I couldn’t get any deals outside of that in the U.S., because I was out,” she said. Even as her career soared, as did the popularity of women’s tennis, advertising agencies stayed away. “They would call my agent about a commercial or something, and she would say, ‘How about Martina?’ and they would say no and then Chris [Evert] would get the deal, or somebody else. It was the kiss of death. Advertisers wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”

I asked how long that lasted, and Navratilova had to think a moment. The only exceptions were Olivia Cruises, a company offering cruises for lesbians, and, in the late nineties, Subaru, the car company that ingeniously decided to advertise specifically to lesbians. Audiences, though, were more accepting than the advertisers. Two months after the article, Navratilova lost to Tracy Austin, and the crowd clapped its support for the one who lost. “So I felt accepted by the general public,” Navratilova said. “They didn’t care.”

Even after the Daily News article, Navratilova couldn’t speak openly about her sexuality. She had left Brown for Nancy Lieberman, a professional basketball player who was in the closet. “Now I was protecting her. We were ‘friends.’ Everybody knew, but I never owned up to [our relationship] because she was still trying to get endorsements and play basketball.” In theory, Navratilova believes, the question of one’s sexuality should be separate from the question of one’s relationship: “I will own my sexuality, but I don’t want people in my private life. It’s private; that’s why it’s called that.” In practice, however, she felt she couldn’t be fully out until her relationship with Lieberman ended, in 1984. Her next girlfriend, the beauty queen Judy Nelson, had no objections to being open about their relationship. A media frenzy ensued. “The first year we were together, the paparazzi followed us everywhere,” Navratilova said. “It was pretty nasty. And the stories were all about ‘her lesbian den.’ And when we split up, they were calling it our ‘love shack’ or something. We’d been together for seven years, and they were calling it a ‘love shack.’ ”

So what did it feel like now, to see the adulation of Rapinoe, the celebration of the soccer team’s victory accompanied by photographs of players kissing their same-sex partners, the ESPN photoshoot of Rapinoe and her partner, the basketball player Sue Bird? “It’s just fantastic,” Navratilova said. “It took a long time. This was thirty years ago that this was going on. It seems like it happened so quickly, gay marriage and all that, but if you are living in the middle of it, it happened very slowly. I am just thrilled that it’s not only O.K.—it’s becoming less and less of a thing. When people come out, it doesn’t make headlines anymore. It’s a non-issue, which I’ve always said—that I hope one day it will be a non-issue. That’s exactly what I’ve been marching for for decades. I’m thrilled. I’m just so thrilled.”

Well, look who just showed up at the metaphysical-supply store. Give a shout if you need help finding anything—this must all be pretty new to you. You know, I’m usually happy to see someone take an interest in the occult, but I can’t help but question your motives here.

It just seems kind of convenient that you’re suddenly into all this now that you’ve been possessed by Satan.

Back in middle school, you always made fun of me for having my tarot deck out on the lunch table. So you can imagine how surprised I was to see this new side of you. It’s almost like doing Lucifer’s bidding has turned you into a totally different person.

You said that I was going to Hell for bringing a Ouija board to your twelfth-birthday party, and now you’re dressed in all black and bleeding out of your orifices. I know one’s interests can change over time, but, when I heard that you were embracing the dark arts all of a sudden, you weren’t the only one with his eyes rolled back.

At first, I worried that I might be coming down too hard on you, so I read your tarot to gain some perspective. First, I drew Judgement reversed, which I think speaks to a lack of self-awareness and a general feeling of insecurity on your part. The next four cards I drew were the Devil, which checks out. The very last card, though? The Tower, which represents a chaotic change in your life—one that you might want to reconsider.

Look, you’re not the only former normie who’s waltzed in here calling herself a witch just because she’s draped in black satin and hovering above the ground on a whisker broom. And you definitely won’t be the last guy to buy a deck of tarot cards just to have it collect dust while he’s busy jet-setting around another plane of existence.

From where I’m standing, it looks like you’re here only so that you and your friends can post yet another video where they’re huddled around a pentagram, pleading for the demon to leave your body. It’s like, look, we get it—you’re the anointed cherub now. You don’t have to wave it in our faces.

If I were you, I’d stop spinning my head around in circles and focus on getting it on straight. Do you really want to go down this road? Take a moment to ask yourself if you’re really into the occult or if you just crave the attention from all the exorcists and priests.

If this is only a passing phase, then I seriously suggest that you move on to the next trend already. I’ll still be here with everyone who’s sincerely into smudging, trying to piece together why the devil chose the most self-possessed person on Earth to be his human vessel.

Aziz Ansari has been evasive. The celebrity figure invokes the right to avoid reality in times of personal crisis. Early reviews of “Working Out New Material,” Ansari’s recent standup tour, picked at the comedian’s seemingly spooked circumventions of what everyone in the audience already knew. Ansari’s comedy had never been one of lacerating introspection, but it had been one of bro-y complicity; he situated himself as a callow, slick-suited jester, a co-conspirator of the millennial life-style cult that praises interracial mixing, feminist dating, social-media optimism, and bleeding-heart politicking. With a sociologist, he’d co-written a courtship digest called “Modern Romance.” On “Master of None,” he fell in love in Italy in black-and-white. The allegation against him, published by the now defunct Web site babe.net, in January of 2018—that he had pressured a young woman, pseudonymously referred to as Grace, to have sex after a date—made Ansari’s expertise seem fraudulent. Not acknowledging as much smelled like creative cowardice.

In “Right Now,” his new Netflix special, Ansari finally musters some honesty. At the outset of the hour, he breezes through an old-faithful setup: an anecdote about a well-meaning New Yorker confusing Ansari for a fellow Netflix mainstay, the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who is also Indian-American. The man, in Ansari’s telling, quickly notices the gaucheness of his blunder, and course-corrects by frantically listing Ansari’s C.V.—the romantic “Master of None,” the antic “Parks and Recreation,” and “You had that whole thing last year, sexual misconduct.” Ansari eyes widen, and his arms violently flail as he pantomimes his own response: “That was Hasan!”

Then Ansari dials down his loud and nasal drawl to sotto voce. Nominally, he has just told a joke, but the audience is making a sound that rings less and less like laughter. Ansari wades from comedy to crafted contrition. For Grace’s story, he has developed a shorthand—“that whole thing.” That whole thing made him feel, he tells the audience, “scared,” “humiliated,” and “embarrassed,” and, “ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way.” The speech is fine and obligatory, elevated to artful by the director of the special, Spike Jonze. Wearing an Easyrig, Jonze is onstage with Ansari, orbiting him from close range. He applies harsh police lighting to Ansari, who is not so much seated on his stool as he is condemned to it. It is so bright that it illuminates people waiting in the wings of the stage, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the special was filmed, people who might be Ansari’s managers and agents and yes-men. The shot is ugly, intriguingly framed.

Those same words could summarize the whole of “Right Now,” which reads to me as Ansari’s first authentic comedy special. I hadn’t previously thought deeply about the cultural presence of Ansari, because his body of entertainment had not invited me to do so. He specialized in increasing the banal pleasure of the crowd. On “Parks and Recreation,” as Tom, he encouraged you to “treat yourself.” He rode around in designer vehicles with Jay-Z and Kanye West in the music video for “Otis” (also directed by Jonze). He was a foodie who at the same time cannily dismissed “foodie culture.” But in “Right Now” Ansari is a fitting ambassador for a certain bourgeois ambivalence. The special bristles with shame, indecision, anger, and guilt. Ansari has feasted, and this is the hangover. Two refrains ground the material, which roves like a drone over events that, in Ansari’s telling, expose the terminal hypocrisy of modern culture. The first is that Ansari hopes that everyone, including himself, wants to be a better person. The other: “We’re all shitty people.”

I got a weird feeling, watching “Right Now,” that the #MeToo story had liberated Ansari, forcing him to kill his old persona and give his new one teeth. “That old Aziz who said, ‘Oh, treat yo’self’? He’s dead,” he says, at the special’s end. He has developed a disdain for the brand of bland likability he formerly hawked, even as he can’t quite escape its skin. He audits his old bits mercilessly, indicting his former willingness to do or say anything for a laugh. Harris, the “chubby cousin” who had been a mainstay in Ansari’s family-manners riffs, is buff now, Ansari assures us, and works out compulsively; he acknowledges that he had been “fat-shaming” Harris for a national audience. He recalls that, in his first standup special, he had described going to an R. Kelly concert. “Clap if you’re done with R. Kelly,” he asks the crowd at BAM, after wondering aloud why it took a “bingeable documentary” to get people to care about the singer’s abuse of young black girls. He similarly flays the response to the recent documentary about Michael Jackson and riskily spotlights a ten-year-old kid sitting in the front row. The point—that entertainment excuses evils, and that we don’t process truths unless they entertain us—is both banal and impossible to emphasize enough.

Ansari makes clear that it isn’t exclusively remorse that is pushing him to reëvaluate the recent past. “Gotta be careful about what you say and about what you said,” he cautions, the irritation bright in his voice. Ansari is older now, and he’s got a bone to pick with “wokeness,” the spoils of which he had previously enjoyed. Ansari mocks progressive white people—his crowd—for ultimately only caring about accruing social capital through performing escalating acts of political correctness, like a game of “progressive Candy Crush.”

“Right Now” is conscious of the manipulative powers of performance, although Ansari is not yet clear-eyed about who it is he wants to lecture. One cheap bit, which involves Ansari repeating the word “niggardly,” feels like he is brushing up against the third rail to prove that he won’t be cowed by his public reckoning. He admits that the new wokeness is not all hollow—in his thirty-six years, he’s never felt white people as attuned to the problems of minorities as they are today. The audience is his toy in a game of fluctuating self-loathing; his crowd work is frequent, casual until it quickly becomes a little cruel. At one point, he lays a trap, meandering toward a story: “A guy orders a pepperoni pizza, the pepperonis are arranged to look like a swastika, but now some people online are saying it doesn’t look like a swastika.” A man in the audience claims to have read about the incident in the Washington Post. Then Ansari reveals that he made the whole story up. “You think your opinion is so valuable, you need to chime in on shit that doesn’t even exist,” Ansari scolds. It’s cutting, and, like many moments in the show, it is impossible not to hear it as a coded personal grievance.

“Right Now” isn’t very funny, and perhaps a “#MeToo comeback” shouldn’t be; I think I’d like Ansari’s special less if it were. I winced a little when, early in the show, Ansari recalled a friend saying that the controversy surrounding Ansari had prompted him to reflect on his own treatment of women in the past. “It’s made not just me but other people more thoughtful,” Ansari says. “And that’s a good thing.” This is a complicated maneuver, a claim to #MeToo allyship that is also showy self-sacrifice. It’s hard to believe that Ansari believes any part of the event was “a good thing.” In a few other moments, he seems to retreat toward crowd-pleasing fare—a joke about the lack of male birth control and his girlfriend’s IUD bruising his penis; a parody of the girlfriend, who is a Danish physicist unlearned in American racism. But the contradictions of “Right Now” are destabilizing enough to draw me back in. Ansari knows that the stakes have been raised.