If Hayes is right, what has been missing from much of leftist discourse isn't just economic inequality or the struggles of working families. What's missing is discussion of luck.
After all, what could be more iconoclastic to the edifice of the neoliberal and conservative systems? Declaring the Masters of the Universe incompetent is a given. Calling them evil is commonplace and mostly worth a chuckle. Using words such as heartless, bumbling, uncaring, greedy, inept, callous, and self-serving barely makes a dent.
But to call Lloyd Blankfein "lucky", or to say that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were simply "fortunate"--that's something altogether different. That's revolutionary. It cuts against the dominant discourse of the institutional left and right to reorient the entire social contract. It challenges not only the ethic of equality of opportunity, but also the legitimacy of much of the inequality of outcomes.
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