If you have a time capsule to fill, you could do a lot worse than to print out some of the crowing about a woman Thor and a black Captain America. The glee with which these changes have been met, contrasted with the bleak state of structural change and economic justice, will tell you pretty much all you need to know about a certain strain of contemporary American liberalism. We’re mere weeks away from a Supreme Court decision where an alliance of religious crazies and corporatists was able to remove a legal provision requiring employers to pay for emergency contraception, but don’t worry, ladies! You too can now be portrayed as a heavily-sanitized version of a minor god from a long-dead pantheon. Black Americans continue to lag national averages in a vast number of metrics that depict quality of life, and in some of them have actually lost ground, but never fear. The guy portrayed punching people while wearing red white and blue spandex will now be black.

The point of all this, of course, is that it gets some people mad, and that gives others the opportunity to get mad back, and so the sorting function of cultural politics is fulfilled. The question at this point isn’t whether these people will go to the wall to fight for meaningless symbolic politics every time. The question is whether they’ll ever fight for anything else.