“If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election …” Wouldn't it be nice to climb down into that imaginative rabbit hole and stay there for a while? The possibilities are so reassuringly normal—as opposed to the strange nightmare in which we find ourselves today. For the purposes of this roundtable, however, I wish to consider only one small potential consequence of a Hillary win: and that is what it would have been like to read Catherine Gallagher's new book if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. I would probably have experienced Telling It Like It Wasn't as a fascinating intellectual history of a mode or a discourse that has enormous political purchase today, largely as a result of its “affiliation with legal and political historical justice projects.” Although thinkers of all political persuasions use this mode, Gallagher explains, the political counterfactual has played a particularly prominent role in “the pressure exerted by the civil rights movement in favor of a Second Reconstruction, affirmative action programs, and claims for reparations” (124–25). It has served as a way to right the wrongs of history, in other words, and as such has served us extremely well. Or, at least, that is how I would have felt if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. But she did not. As a result, rather than simple intellectual pleasure and political hopefulness, reading Telling It Like It Wasn't filled me with a strong sense of dread.