The Rise of a New Left

The Rise of a New Left

How Young Radicals Are Shaping
the Future of American Politics

Raina Lipsitz

First published by Verso 2022
© Raina Lipsitz 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-426-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-429-5 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-428-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For my mother, Maria Scrivani,
who always sees the good.

Contents

Preface

1. Young People Power the Rise of Bernie Sanders

2. New Kids on the Block

3. Youth-Run, Movement-Driven Organizations

4. Sanders-Style Populism Comes to Pennsylvania

5. A Country on Fire

6. New Pipelines, New Strategies, New Leaders

7. Why the Left Needs Organized Labor

8. Where We Are and Where We’re Going

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

One hot June night in 2018, I got a text from an editor. “OMG, she won!” it said. “She” was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young congressional candidate I had just profiled for the Nation. When we first met, she was virtually unknown outside of certain corners of the Bronx and Queens. That text crystalized the shift I had felt in the political landscape starting around a year earlier.

A week before she won, I made the two-hour subway journey from Brooklyn to the Bronx to meet this neophyte in the drab, airless space filled with teetering stacks of papers, boxes, and snaking wires that doubled as a car service and her campaign headquarters. I’d read up on her before our interview and she sounded like a compelling young woman with no chance in hell. I figured she’d be interesting to meet and might one day end up in state government or running a large nonprofit. It was a brutally hot day, I had trouble finding the building, and, by the time I arrived, I was a frazzled, sweaty mess.

Inside was a tiny inner room in which the candidate was conducting media interviews. While waiting my turn, I sat on a couch in a chaotic outer area redolent of the common room in my college dorm. Several volunteers—all young men of color that day, one of whom would soon run for Congress himself—were circling the room frenetically, earbuds trailing from their ears, making phone calls, stabbing at laptops, and occasionally calling out to one another and laughing. Most wore T-shirts emblazoned with the campaign’s logo; a few were in conventional office attire. Unusually for a campaign office, they all seemed not just hyped-up and overcaffeinated but deliriously happy, as if they were working for a megastar on a legendary film set in L.A. rather than a nobody in a repurposed car service in the Bronx.

I admired their zeal and dedication, but they were clearly the scrappy underdogs of the race. To me, an elder millennial who had already spent years in a series of uninspiring office jobs, they were kids: just out of high school or college, brand-new to politics, and still full of enthusiasm and hope. It was clear that everyone in the office adored her, but I didn’t yet fully understand why. She was smart and hardworking, but humble and unassuming—winning qualities, but not necessarily ones that inspire fanatical loyalty. She seemed likely to succeed at something someday, but it didn’t occur to me then that she was weeks away from appearing on CNN, Meet the Press, PBS’s Firing Line, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, and MSNBC as the fresh face of a revived American left. Until deciding to run for office, she had been a nonprofit worker and a bartender. I’d been in and around New York political circles since 2005 and hadn’t heard her name until a few weeks before I met her.

Yet there was clearly something about her that inspired devotion. Just twenty-eight when we met, she was noticeably different from both her volunteers and me. Defying the ungodly heat in a trim black sheath dress with faux-leather cap sleeves and short, stylish boots, she was intimidatingly poised. Amid the chaos of her makeshift office, she exuded competence and calm, like a younger and less corporate but equally adroit version of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. (By contrast, I was gulping water and mopping my sweat-slicked face with wadded-up tissues extricated from an overstuffed purse.)

It was also clear she wasn’t just another “She-E-O” in waiting. Her background and worldview were markedly different from those of most successful women I’d read about or known. Born to a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, she grew up in Yorktown in Westchester County, a place she once described as “a good town for working people.” She attended Yorktown public schools, graduating from Yorktown High School in 2007 and Boston University in 2011. Women that confident often come with the kind of pedigree Americans are taught to admire: Ivy League degrees, high-powered jobs, executive experience. Ocasio-Cortez had been an activist, a Bronx organizer for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, an educational director working with adolescents, and a server. As with so many of her peers, the daily realities of her peripatetic and precarious life—one college had been expected to ease—had set her on a different ideological path. Had she been born a decade and a half earlier, she might have become a stereotypical Gen Xer: too cool for and not especially interested in politics. Instead, she became one of the best-known representatives of an emerging and newly militant American left.

Her surprise primary win, after which everyone rightly assumed she would handily win the general election in her heavily Democratic district, made her a major star—as well as a “fundraising powerhouse” and a “national symbol for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” according to WNYC—virtually overnight.

While media outlets and Democratic voters swooned, Democratic Party officials sought to curb their enthusiasm. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Ocasio-Cortez’s victory merely represented the politics of one deep-blue New York district and cautioned against getting “carried away as an expert on demographics.” Shortly after losing her own seat in 2018, former senator Claire McCaskill dismissed Ocasio-Cortez as a “bright shiny new object,” adding: “The rhetoric is cheap. Getting results is a lot harder.”

Cheap or not, Ocasio-Cortez’s rhetoric worked. People were inspired by it. The first time she ever ran for anything, she wound up in Congress. In demonstrating that another world was possible, she was fomenting a rebellion against those who had spent their careers lowering expectations. And she succeeded by tapping into something larger than herself—a massive but still subterranean political shift that she and her peers were part of and helping to drive.

The same summer I met Ocasio-Cortez, I spoke with Alexandra Rojas for the first time. She was even younger than Ocasio-Cortez, just twenty-three when we first spoke, and it was no clearer to me then that her organization, Justice Democrats, which had been the driving force behind AOC’s campaign, would keep electing progressives to Congress—or that Rojas herself was also on the cusp of stardom.

Like Ocasio-Cortez, Rojas is a strikingly stylish and attractive woman with large, dark eyes, long, straight hair, luminous skin, bright, even teeth, and expertly applied makeup who has graced the pages of Vogue. Thanks in part to their appearance—two parts luck and genetics, one part fashion sense and cosmetic skill—Ocasio-Cortez, Rojas, and many of their peers are difficult to caricature or dismiss as wild-eyed, neo-hippie freaks, and impossible to denigrate in the ways women so often are, as ugly or undesirable. They and their peers are used to being watched, assessed, and judged, to competing for clicks and “likes” and eyeballs on screens. They understand the power of branding and the imperative to transform themselves into appealing, social media-friendly products. They look serious, professional, put-together, and camera-ready.

Rojas’s poise belies her precarity. In 2015, she was living in California, where she hoped to qualify for reduced tuition in the state’s “awesome” community college system once she had been in residence for over a year. She was working full-time and attending Orange Coast College, a public community college in Costa Mesa, part-time. She was active in the student government and trying to keep her grades up in hopes of transferring to the University of California at Berkeley or UCLA. At the time, her interest in politics accompanied more conventional ambitions, like making herself attractive to employers and landing a good job so that she could “take care of [her partner and family] the same way that they’ve taken care of me.”

At some point she discovered that she wasn’t going to qualify for in-state tuition after all. If she finished school and successfully transferred to a University of California school as she had originally planned, her projected tuition costs would rise from around $25,000 to upwards of $55,000 a year. She was already working three jobs to pay for rent and keep up with school; it simply wasn’t feasible to take on more. Her siblings had taken out loans, but Rojas told me she “didn’t want to basically take out a mortgage at 18 or 19 and put myself and my family through that.”

A friend had sent her a video of Sanders’s campaign launch, which took place on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont. While she had been intrigued by Obama and other politicians to varying degrees, she was only 13 when Obama was elected, and watching Sanders was the first time she was “moved in a real way” by a leader who seemed willing to contend with the structural obstacles to progress in the US. She quickly became “one of those crazy Bernie people that got the bug” and started volunteering.

“School is always going to be there,” she said, describing how she felt at the time, “but the political revolution won’t be.” She decided to drop out and go to work for Sanders. After connecting with several like-minded community college students on different campuses, she and her new friends ended up “bugging the shit out of the campaign” to hire them as interns in Burlington. They were a ragtag bunch who had followed similarly unconventional paths into politics: straight from community college to a national presidential campaign staffed by people whose previous jobs included, among other things, running a food truck.

I started down my own path to leftist politics around a decade before Rojas and Ocasio-Cortez. I’m from a family of pro-labor progressives. My paternal grandfather, Richard Lipsitz Sr., was a labor lawyer in Buffalo who supported the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s and staunchly opposed the Vietnam War. He defended clients persecuted for alleged ties to the American Communist Party and successfully argued a landmark 1967 case before the US Supreme Court that struck down a law requiring teachers and other public employees to take restrictive loyalty oaths. My uncle, Richard Lipsitz Jr., is president emeritus of the Western New York Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, which he led from 2011 to 2021. My father, John Lipsitz, and my aunt, Nan Lipsitz Haynes, both belong to the Buffalo chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and have participated in a number of lawsuits against various Western New York law enforcement officials and agencies. As a young reporter for the Buffalo News, my mother, Maria Scrivani, served as vice president of the Buffalo chapter of what was then known as the Newspaper Guild, a role in which she founded the chapter’s women’s caucus and was instrumental in compelling the News to disclose staff salaries, revealing that women staffers were being paid less and getting less prestigious assignments than their comparably qualified male colleagues.

My parents are progressives—perhaps even democratic socialists—but they are not firebrands. They are white people born in the 1950s to professional-class parents. They had high-quality educations, plenty to eat, and stable, supportive families, all of which enabled them to prosper as adults. What they want, and taught their children to want, is for every family to have what ours has been able to take for granted since my grandparents—descendants of Eastern European Jews on my father’s side and Sicilian Catholics on my mother’s—were born in this country: the basics (health care, a safe place to live, enough money to live on) required for a comfortable life. In many places, and especially in other countries with developed economies, that is not a radical proposition.

By the end of high school in the late 1990s, I was beginning to feel that the politics of the era were hollow and inadequate. I craved more and better from both electoral politics and feminism, which seemed to be devolving from a radical, world-changing force—the kind that could force a nation to give you the vote or a company to pay back the money it owed you—into what the writer Jessa Crispin would deride in a 2017 polemic as a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show.”¹

The conviction that something more fundamental than electing Democrats to office was required to truly change people’s lives led me to campaign for Ralph Nader for president as a college freshman in 2000. Because I didn’t turn eighteen until December of that year, I couldn’t vote in the presidential election. I would have voted for Nader, who went on to win just 3 percent of the nationwide vote. Gore won the popular vote but lost the election, thanks to the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. That Gore could lose even though hundreds of thousands more Americans had voted for him struck me and many others as deeply corrupt and unjust.

By 2003, I was a college junior studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland. On February 15th of that year, between 40,000 and 100,000 people in Dublin, including me and many of my fellow students, took to the streets to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. It was one of the largest protests in Irish history. The weather was gray and overcast but not as cold as it could have been in mid-February, especially after we had been marching for a while. The mood was an odd mix of grim and jubilant. We were angry and distraught that we were about to enter a war that no one but Bush and Tony Blair seemed to want, and elated that so many people from around the world had come out in droves to stop it. According to the BBC, between 6 million and 10 million people were thought to have taken part in anti-war protests in up to sixty countries during that weekend alone. The Dublin march drew between twice and five times as many marchers as the organizers were expecting. We felt strongly that the whole world was not only watching, but marching with us.

Just over a month later, a US-led “coalition of the willing”—essentially the United States and some UK troops—invaded Iraq, initiating a devastating conflict that would last for well over a decade and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Anti-war activists found it deeply demoralizing that millions of people taking part in large-scale global protests could not stop it.

At the time there was very little hope on the horizon for those who wanted a more functional and less corporatist democracy: no viable left-wing candidates at the federal level, no clearly successful left-wing formations in the US, and little sense that real change was possible.

After 9/11, the political climate turned even bleaker, curdling into bloodthirsty jingoism and anti-immigrant hysteria. The politics I dreamed of when I was coming of age would not materialize for another fifteen years. When the moment finally arrived, it was women like Rojas and Ocasio-Cortez—ten years my junior and twice as overwhelmed by ever-worsening economic, environmental, and social conditions—who were leading the way. I and many others who had longed for a progressive shift in our politics but had no idea how to create one would follow.

1

Young People Power the
Rise of Bernie Sanders

Just two years before Ocasio-Cortez won her first primary, the astonishing success of a very different candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, had paved the way for her victory. Few in the mainstream press had seen what was coming. The New York Times famously buried Sanders’s announcement of his candidacy on page twenty-one of the paper’s May 1, 2015, print edition: “Sanders, Long-Serving Independent, Enters Presidential Race as a Democrat.”

The tone in establishment media outlets was one of wry bewilderment. How could a fusty old socialist like Sanders, with his wild white hair, off-the-rack suits, and out-of-date ideology possibly be the preferred candidate of millennials weaned on social media? To those who didn’t see the appeal or know anybody who did, the passionate response to Sanders was mystifying, evidence of anti-woman bias against Clinton, or both.

The truth is that Sanders assembled a far more diverse coalition than he was given credit for. His supporters were overwhelmingly young, but not overwhelmingly male or white. According to a 2016 Ipsos survey of young voters, women under thirty-five preferred Sanders to Hillary Clinton by nearly 20 points, compared to just a 4-point margin among men the same age.¹

When he ran in 2020, Sanders’s supporters were even more likely to be women and less likely to be white. According to a national poll² of registered Democrats and independents conducted by Reuters/Ipsos in February 2020, Sanders was the preferred candidate of African American voters, regardless of age. Pew Research Center data³ based on polls of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters taken in the summer of 2019 showed that Sanders supporters were more likely to be female and less likely to be white than those of any other leading Democratic presidential candidate. At that time, 49 percent of Sanders supporters were white and 53 percent were female. (By contrast, less than half of self-identified supporters of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris were women.) Few Sanders supporters were primarily moved by his identity, the historic nature of his candidacy, or a burning desire to elect the first Jewish president. Some were passionate about Sanders in spite of his racial and gender identity; others were indifferent to it.

When I asked Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, if she ever found Sanders’s old, white maleness alienating, she paused before answering. “You know, I didn’t perceive him that way,” she replied carefully. “I’ve met plenty of men in my life that are not perfect. And I think in the context of the world that we live in right now that feels very much on fire, identity is important—but what you say and what you stand for and what you’re willing to put on the line and fight for is what I think speaks to me and the entire generation that feels like the future is really unclear.”

Asked what she made of the then common criticism that most Sanders supporters were white male “Bernie Bros,” Rojas bristled. “I am a twenty-three-year-old, part Colombian, part Peruvian Latina,” she said. “I was inspired by Bernie not because of his identity but because of the vision of America he was painting.”

Before Sanders, Rojas wasn’t actively engaged in politics. Although she had always paid attention to current events, organized students on her campus, and even served as student senate president, she confessed that when it came to national politics, she, like many of her peers, was “pretty turned off.” Community college campuses were, in her view, especially rich sites for organizing; they were naturally occurring “hubs” of diversity, not just in terms of racial and ethnic identity but also life experience: the student body included single moms, high school students, people with full-time jobs, and more. But until the Sanders campaign, few people in national politics seemed interested in unleashing that potential.

Coming into the campaign, Rojas was especially inspired by watching a diverse group of “high-integrity, super-lowego” people “working eighteen hours a day” to get “this one person we all believed in” elected. Sanders’s unapologetically leftist agenda was also a key part of his appeal; Rojas and her friends and family needed the policies he was fighting for.

Just twenty-five when we last spoke, she was already living through a second major economic recession, the second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality, a climate crisis worsening by the day, and a horrifically mismanaged global pandemic that was killing millions. The work that she and her peers have done since 2016 owes a great deal to Sanders’s campaign, where she first experienced what it was like to be “part of a real movement.” It was hard to put into words, she added, but Sanders had “that thing” that gets volunteers to work really hard.

People like Rojas responded so enthusiastically to Sanders in part because he wasn’t cool, or trying to be. He doesn’t sound phony or slick. He doesn’t pander or condescend. A huge part of his appeal is that he is always, inescapably, himself. In 2019 he did an interview⁴ with Bronx-born comedians Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, two charismatic young men of color who quizzed him about how much money certain pairs of designer sneakers cost. On learning that one pair cost $4,500, Sanders recoiled in disgust. “This is a status thing?” he asked incredulously. Yes, his interviewers replied with expectant grins. Sanders pursed his lips and shook his head disapprovingly. “You’re not a big flex-er [show-off]?” teased Nice. “No. I really don’t like that idea of people paying 4,500 bucks [for sneakers],” said Sanders earnestly, shaking his head, gesturing with his hands, and widening his eyes in alarm. “It’s insane.”

Throughout the 2016 contest between Sanders and Clinton, I was reminded of a dialogue between Bart and Lisa and their parents on The Simpsons: “Am I cool, kids?” asks Marge. “No,” the kids reply. “Good. I’m glad,” says Marge. “And that’s what makes me cool, not caring, right?” Bart and Lisa respond in the negative. “Well, how the hell do you be cool?” asks an exasperated Marge. “I feel like we’ve tried everything here!” Sanders didn’t have to pander; he attracted young people by advocating for solutions (free college and trade school and Medicare for All) to their most pressing problems (crippling debt and limited class mobility). As of late 2015, Clinton favored free community college but said students at four-year colleges should have to work to fund at least part of their educations. “Maybe it’s because I worked when I went through college, I worked when I went through law school,” she said at the first Democratic presidential debate in October 2015.⁵ But when Clinton attended college in the 1960s, tuition cost a fraction of what it does today. She struggled to convey not just sympathy for the young people whose votes she wanted, but basic understanding of their everyday reality. And no amount of self-mocking rap parody videos by millennial fans like Lena Dunham⁶ or cringey Broad City cameos could bridge the gap.⁷ In interactions with younger voters, Clinton was, by inclination and experience, Marge: trying desperately to be what the kids wanted, and never quite grasping what that was.

It wasn’t just style, or lack thereof, that drew young people to Sanders. As historian Matt Karp explained in Jacobin, Sanders won younger voters by historic margins in both of his campaigns not with “charisma” but “the most brusquely ideological platform in Democratic primary history.” He talked about people’s everyday needs and said plainly that one of the richest countries in the world owed more to its inhabitants. He didn’t rely on hoary appeals to nostalgia or patriotism or the potentially historic nature of his presidency. To the irritation of many national political reporters, he talked like a broken record, hitting the same points over and over again: health care is a human right, higher education should be free, and the massively rich should pay their fair share of taxes. Most saliently of all, he did not shame people for being poor or precarious. Republicans deploy shame more often and explicitly than Democrats, but mainstream Democrats also frequently invoke “personal responsibility” and/or qualify rights by suggesting they should be available not to all human beings but to “anyone who works hard.”

By contrast, Sanders talked frequently about how a small minority of the rich and powerful were making life difficult for the vast majority out of sheer greed. That is a belief shared by many young people today, especially those who can expect materially harder lives than those of their parents. More and more young Americans are rejecting the myth that our largest social problems can be solved through the magic of hard work and the power of personal responsibility. Many believe they are working too hard with too little to show for it already. Millennials, commonly defined as those born between 1981 and 1996, have significantly higher debts on average than their younger counterparts: they owe an average of $87,448, carry an average student loan balance of just under $39,000, and hold an average mortgage balance of $237,349.⁸ They are expected to become the first generation worse-off than their parents in terms of job status and income.⁹ Many of those who grew up in the long shadow of the Great Recession were desperate for a champion who would acknowledge that society had changed and, in the process, circumscribed young lives. Those who grew up assuming crippling debt to fund the college education they’d been told was essential to a decent future, graduated into a brutal job market, found a job with no or meager benefits, started at low salaries that haven’t kept pace with inflation, can’t afford a house, and/or can’t afford to have children¹⁰ were attracted to the candidate who acknowledged they were drowning and was fighting for the policy equivalent of a lifeboat. Much as Obama once represented the promise of hope and change after the long, ugly period of terror, jingoism, immoral war, and economic stagnancy that marked George W. Bush’s tenure, Sanders represented the possibility of a society that worked for more than 10 percent of the people who lived in it.

The successes of Sanders and Obama—Obama’s preternatural ability to engage young people and attract an unprecedented army of volunteers, and Sanders’s in galvanizing an increasingly diverse coalition of young people and driving the Democratic Party left—paved the way for the rise of AOC and the candidates she inspired. Although she is a unique, once-ina-generation political talent in her own right, Ocasio-Cortez also possesses key attributes of both men, seamlessly blending the intelligence, charm, and cultural savvy of Obama with the sincerity, authenticity, and ideological commitments of Sanders, whose politics she largely shares. Sanders is relatable because he understands the problems young people face and takes them seriously enough to fight for large-scale solutions. Ocasio-Cortez is relatable because she is a young person with a college degree who worked as a bartender, had significant student loan debt, faced financial obstacles to renting an apartment in DC before she was on the congressional payroll, and champions policies (Medicare for All, free college, raising the minimum wage, large-scale investment in public housing) designed to solve these problems for herself and others. She is cheeky, ebullient, and playful, a sunny counterpoint to occasionally dour older male politicians like Sanders. She is not only a woman, but a young Latina woman of color. Even compared to Obama, her rise was meteoric: she won the first race she ever entered at age twenty-eight, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Obama was in law school in his late twenties. Sanders did not become a national figure until relatively late in his life and career.

What other politicians want desperately to convey—relatability, authenticity, down-to-earth-ness—Ocasio-Cortez naturally exudes. She did a 2019 Instagram livestream¹¹ from her then brand-new and sparsely furnished DC apartment in which she was munching on popcorn, quaffing white wine, and answering questions about how to stay focused and grounded amid bullying and insults, all while assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. “Boom!” she exclaimed as she slid the final piece into place, cheering herself on (“I did it!”) and taking a celebratory sip of wine. In another Instagram story, she livestreamed herself making a “salmon cream pasta situation” for dinner while seamlessly answering questions about Covid relief and stimulus checks.

One of her greatest talents is neutralizing sexist insults without rejecting conventional femininity. After Vogue filmed her doing her makeup, the Financial Times published a breathless piece lauding the congresswoman for refusing to apologize for “her love of prettifying” and gushingly quoting her Vogue tutorial: “As the youngest woman in Congress, and as a woman of color, it’s so hard to be taken seriously … I used to think shimmery eyeshadow … isn’t going to help me out. People already try to diminish me … as young and frivolous and unintelligent.” Then she pivots: “[The shimmer] looks fire!” she declares, eyes widening in delight.

Like Hillary Clinton, Ocasio-Cortez has been subjected to sexist attacks, most notably when Ted Yoho, a Republican congressman from Florida, called her a “fucking bitch” in front of a reporter.¹² Unlike Clinton, Ocasio-Cortez eloquently, forcefully, and effectively fought back, quoting, naming, and shaming her antagonist in a widely publicized speech¹³ on the House floor and connecting her experience with the everyday struggles of all women. A digital native, she is fluent in social media to a degree that makes presidential candidate Obama and his young, savvy staff look like Mitt Romney. When House Republicans booed her in 2019, she tweeted, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas,” alongside an emoji of a woman jauntily flipping her hand.¹⁴ When GOP operatives tried to embarrass her by circulating a video of her in college, dancing enthusiastically on a rooftop, she tweeted, “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous. Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!”¹⁵ with a brief video of her dancing her way into her congressional office. The song playing in the background was Edwin Starr’s “War.”

In many ways, she is the perfect foil for Trump and the ideal poster girl for the political moment: a young woman of color who embodies the opposite of Trump’s persona and regularly takes to Twitter to champion the antithesis of his politics. Trump is a racist, misogynist bully; Ocasio-Cortez stands up to racists, misogynists, and bullies. And she is arguably better-suited to lead the newly young and diverse American left than either Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Sanders’s slogan was “Not me; us”—a pointed inversion of Clinton’s egotistical and insipid “I’m with her.” Ocasio-Cortez has the potential to inspire an even broader constituency: people who see themselves in her, people who see her as a contemporary feminist icon, people who share her politics but not her identity, and people who see her as the future of the Democratic Party. Judging by some of her early staffers, even white men want to work for and with her, although, with notable exceptions like Sanders, they tend to be on the younger side. Until she runs in a national election, as a growing number of Democratic voters hope she will, it will be difficult to gauge exactly how broad her appeal is. In a few short years she has already built a national profile. Even her detractors acknowledge that she has become a star.

* * *

You might think a Democratic politician as charismatic, energetic, and media-savvy as Ocasio-Cortez would be hailed as a savior by a party so weak that it lost the White House to Trump. But although many Democratic voters were and remain enthusiastic about Ocasio-Cortez, senior party officials are not as enamored.

Before winning her 2018 primary, Ocasio-Cortez told me she did not receive a single endorsement from an elected official in New York State. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed her in 2020.) She also said that no one ever overtly pressured her to drop out of the race, primarily because they didn’t take her seriously or expect her to qualify for the ballot in the first place. She summarized the attitude of those who would have preferred for Joe Crowley to remain unchallenged as, “Why dissuade a problem that’s going to take care of itself?”

Still, she added, “Anybody who knew anything about politics in New York City told me not to do this … [they said] (a) you’re wasting your time, (b) it’s pointless, and (c) you’ll never have a career in New York City politics ever again if you do this.”

Though she remains a media darling, Ocasio-Cortez has, in just a few turbulent years, made serious enemies in Democratic leadership and become a lightning rod for right-wing fury.¹⁶ As Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, whose clients have included Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, told the Guardian in February 2020, “Anything that indicates AOC is vulnerable would be a godsend to people who don’t like her or are upset about the Amazon loss of 27,000 jobs in New York” (a reference to Ocasio-Cortez’s role in resisting Amazon’s attempt to open a headquarters in Long Island City in exchange for $3 billion in New York State subsidies). Sheinkopf described one of Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 primary challengers, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, as “as wild a card as AOC was two years ago,” adding that she was “likely to lead a spirited challenge and could be very competitive.”¹⁷

Caruso-Cabrera’s challenge was “spirited” in the sense that it was well funded.¹⁸ Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon each maxed out to her campaign. She also took in money from five other Blackstone employees, three other Goldman Sachs executives, and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone and his wife, who donated a combined $11,200—the maximum each could give for both the primary and the general election. Langone is a Republican mega-donor and a vocal Trump supporter.

Caruso-Cabrera said she decided to challenge Ocasio-Cortez when the latter “threw away” the thousands of jobs Caruso-Cabrera and her backers claimed Amazon would have brought to hard-working immigrant families in her district.¹⁹ But the enthusiastic support of Wall Street and Home Depot wasn’t enough to put her over the top. Ocasio-Cortez, who had three challengers in the 2020 primary cycle, won handily with 74.6 percent of the ballots, earning 46,577 votes to Caruso-Cabrera’s 11,337.²⁰ Democratic voters rejected the candidate who had raised large sums of money from Trump donors.²¹

Despite bitter opposition from both the GOP and the Democratic establishment, Ocasio-Cortez remains popular in her district, where in 2019 she had a positive 52-33 percent favorability rating among the district’s voters and 61 percent of Democratic voters said they would support her re-election.²² (Nationally, more poll respondents view Ocasio-Cortez unfavorably—according to a 2019 Quinnipiac poll, 23 percent had a favorable view, 36 percent had an unfavorable view, and 38 percent hadn’t heard enough about her to have an informed opinion.)²³

Keenly aware of her broad appeal, Fox News and other right-wing outlets began generating dozens of unflattering stories about Ocasio-Cortez as soon as she started receiving national media attention. As much as they despise her ideology, the conservative press can’t entirely conceal its envy-tinged admiration of her political skills. Right wingers may hate socialists, but they love winners.

In 2019, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson issued a five-minute “plea to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”²⁴ He began by enumerating the many legitimate reasons for her fame: as the youngest member of Congress, she is already “one of the most powerful politicians in America;” until recently, he said, nobody in Washington had even heard of the Green New Deal, but Ocasio-Cortez has made it the “center” of the Democratic Party’s agenda; she is “impressive in a lot of ways,” “legitimately tough,” strong, one of the only Democrats in the House who is “unintimidated by Nancy Pelosi,” “believes most of what she says,” and is willing to “go to war with the entrenched establishment.”

Unlike Sheinkopf, Carlson credited her with standing up to Amazon when the company tried to extract billions in subsidies from New York State in exchange for locating its headquarters there and standing up to Democratic Party leaders by endorsing Sanders. “She’s an independent spirit,” he continued, “one of the very few in Washington. It’s easy to see why young people listen to her.”

Carlson followed this deluge of praise by decrying Ocasio-Cortez for “pushing socialism on the country,” characterizing her economic views as “stupid” and “wrong,” and describing her as an “unapologetic bigot” who “spews open racism” and “attacks others for the way they were born.”

It’s a revealing attack: in the clips Carlson deploys to demonstrate Ocasio-Cortez’s supposed “racism,” which feature her asking questions at a hearing about whether those in the Global South and communities of color may be bearing the brunt of climate change while most of those driving the crisis are white (the answer was “yes”), she comes across as knowledgeable, serious, poised, and prepared—hardly the “wild-eyed left winger” Carlson is literally begging to stop poisoning America’s youth. Knowing that her identity as a young Latina woman is a strength, he tries to weaponize it by claiming that she hates white people. Most revealingly, he dismisses her ideas out of hand—but, knowing that they sound reasonable to millions of people, avoids making them the focus of his critique.

Conservative attacks on Ocasio-Cortez often backfire by unwittingly showcasing the popularity and commonsense nature of the ideology they are attempting to discredit. Comedian Stephen Colbert had a ball lampooning²⁵ conservative columnist Virginia Kruta’s reaction to a 2018 Ocasio-Cortez rally: “I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education,” Kruta wrote.²⁶ “Yes,” Colbert intoned with mock gravity, “it’s every parent’s worst nightmare: that late-night phone call, a voice saying, ‘Your college-educated child has just seen a doctor, and she’s going to be all right.” Colbert’s bit ends with him declaring: “You know that God’s a socialist, right? Jesus didn’t charge the lepers a co-pay: ‘Look, I would cure your blindness, but you’re out of network!’ ”

As unpersuasive as it is to people like Colbert, the right-wing smearing of Ocasio-Cortez has in some ways succeeded. According to Vox, Ocasio-Cortez is “simply better known among Republicans than Democrats,” which drives up the number of people who view her unfavorably. She has become better known among Republicans because she is a favorite punching bag of the right. A 2019 Washington Post analysis found that she received “a greater density of mentions” on Fox News than any likely or possible 2020 candidate besides Elizabeth Warren.²⁷

According to ProPublica, which obtained screenshots of their posts in 2019, members of a “secret” Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents encouraged members to hurl a “burrito at these bitches,” in reference to Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who were visiting a Texas detention facility, and joked about the deaths of migrants. They also posted an illustration depicting Ocasio-Cortez engaging in oral sex with a detained migrant.²⁸

Right wingers and members of the Democratic establishment alike hate Ocasio-Cortez because they understand how talented she is and correctly see her as a threat to their power. In 2019 leading Democrats sought to undermine Ocasio-Cortez and the party’s growing progressive wing by circulating a poll indicating that swing voters saw AOC as the face of the party.²⁹ This was a potential liability in 2020 elections, they claimed, given that, in the words of one top Democrat, “socialism is toxic to these voters.”

So how did a young woman go from being a bartender no one outside of her neighborhood had ever heard of to a national hero—or Public Enemy No. 1?

As is so often the case, Ocasio-Cortez’s “overnight success” was years in the making. Contrary to popular narratives, she did not leap from bartending to Congress in a single bound. Her path to politics has been more conventional than it might appear at first glance—and was made possible by her family’s relocation to a better school district, her ability to obtain a degree from a well-regarded four-year university, and an internship in a congressional office.

She majored in economics and international relations in college and interned in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office, where she focused on immigration. Her father died in September 2008, just as she was starting her sophomore year. Her mother scrubbed toilets to help keep the family in the modest home her father bought when Ocasio-Cortez was a toddler.³⁰

Mocked by conservative commentator John Cardillo shortly after winning her primary for growing up in a nice home and attending an “Ivy League” college (“A far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she’s selling,” Cardillo tweeted), Ocasio-Cortez replied that her house was nice, her parents had worked hard for it, and she had attended Boston University, which is not an Ivy League school. “Your attempt to strip me of my family, my story, my home, and my identity is exemplary of how scared you are of the power of all four of those things,” she added.³¹

Ocasio-Cortez’s story, identity, and background are indeed threatening to conservatives, as well as to Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, the third-richest member of Congress. In a 2014 address to Goldman Sachs/BlackRock, Hillary Clinton reportedly admitted to being “kind of far removed [from middle-class concerns] because [of] the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy,” adding, “but I haven’t forgotten it.”³²

Having famously worked as a bartender before winning her seat, Ocasio-Cortez clearly has more in common with most Americans—and, unlike Sanders, whose politics she shares, she cannot be dismissed as out-of-touch or “privileged” on the basis of her age, race, or gender.

When Ocasio-Cortez returned to New York after graduation, she worked as a volunteer organizer for Bernie Sanders in the South Bronx.³³ Given the 2008 financial meltdown and her family’s finances in the wake of her father’s death, she also took multiple restaurant jobs to help stave off foreclosure of her family home. As she explained: “My mom had to move to Florida because she couldn’t afford [to stay in NYC]. Our family is largely separated because of the cost of living in New York.”³⁴

What most frustrates her critics is that Ocasio-Cortez is precisely what many Americans claim to admire: a girl from a working-class family that bootstrapped its way to a nicer house and a better neighborhood; an intelligent and ambitious young woman who made it to college but knows what it’s like to work a “real” job. She didn’t have a particularly rough upbringing, nor was she born with a mouth full of silver. That kind of background is supposed to be a distinct advantage in American politics. And the lesson she seems to have drawn from it is not that anybody can make it from behind a bar to the halls of Congress if they just work hard enough, but rather, as she told Cardillo during their Twitter fight, that “the zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity” in life—and it shouldn’t. To conservatives and conservative Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez’s own life story demonstrates that we don’t need socialism: she is living proof that hard workers can still achieve the American Dream under contemporary US capitalism. Her blunt rejection of that myth poses a serious threat to the status quo.

In 2016, Rojas, Corbin Trent, Zack Exley, Saikat Chakrabarti, and several other organizers, most of whom met through Sanders’s first presidential campaign, founded a group called Brand New Congress (BNC). Robb Ryerse, an Arkansas pastor who later became BNC’s executive director, was the first and only Republican candidate the organization backed. (Adrienne Bell is BNC’s current executive director.) Their goal was to achieve “a post-partisan government that works for all of us” by electing “regular working people” to Congress, and Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first candidates they backed. The idea that our government should be run by working- and middle-class people with ordinary jobs is still novel and even radical, given ever-rising campaign costs and few meaningful restrictions on how campaigns are financed.

When Rojas first got involved with Brand New Congress, the idea was to run hundreds of candidates in a usually dormant political season, with the goal of electing a progressive slate that could operate as a bloc within Congress. Rojas and her colleagues were soliciting hundreds of nominations of organizers, teachers, and health care workers who might be willing to run, preferably “charismatic people like Alexandria.” (One of the early challenges was the discovery that relatively few people are both dedicated to their communities and as magnetic as Ocasio-Cortez.) With a tongue-in-cheek nod to GOP rhetoric on Obamacare, the foundational concept was to create a “Brand New Congress” by “repealing and replacing” the entire Congress, regardless of partisan affiliation. Running slates of progressive candidates at the federal level in hopes of sparking a national movement was a bold new idea, as was Brand New Congress’s original hope of transcending the two-party system by running candidates who had sworn off corporate cash on both Democratic and Republican ballot lines.

But by 2017, Rojas and others had grown frustrated with BNC’s nonpartisan approach. The problem with BNC’s model was that, Rojas said, it was virtually impossible to find candidates who were willing to swear off corporate cash, support Medicare for All, and run as Republicans. “It sucks that we’re in this two-party system,” she said, but challenging Democratic incumbents was “a vehicle that proved more effective,” given that, in the Trump era, “it just became impossible to even take the Republican Party remotely seriously.” She and many of her co-founders began to see reforming the Democratic Party as a faster and more effective route to power. To that end, a group of organizers, including several BNC founders and journalists Cenk Uygur of the political program The Young Turks and Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, launched Justice Democrats, aka JD or Justice Dems. Uygur was ousted shortly after the organization’s founding due to controversy over sexist blog posts he had authored in the early 2000s.³⁵ Kulinski resigned in solidarity.³⁶ After Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 win and nearly two years after BNC’s founding, Rojas became JD’s executive director.

Although new and newly prominent groups like Sunrise, Indivisible, Justice Democrats, and the Democratic Socialists of America have worked together to support progressive candidates, especially at the state and local level, Justice Democrats has a narrower focus and a specific strategy of moving Congress left by primarying conservative Democrats in blue districts. As Ocasio-Cortez’s most prominent backer, the group has since struck fear into the hearts of corporate Democrats rightly concerned that her victory would inspire a wave of candidates to mount aggressive primary challenges from the left.

Rojas saw Ocasio-Cortez’s success as unsurprising. “I think there’s been a lot of problems in this country for a very long time,” she told me in 2018, sounding older than twenty-three. “Wages have been stagnant while rents increase, health care costs increase.” It was funny to hear a passionate Sanders supporter like Rojas complain that “white males over seventy run our government,” but of course the vast majority of those white male septuagenarians do not share Sanders’s politics. To her, it just made sense that a “young woman of color [Ocasio-Cortez] speaking pragmatically and charismatically about what this country could look like” would inspire people around the world to realize that “another future is possible.” She also credited Ocasio-Cortez with running on “a bold message of economic and social and racial justice” that inspired people not only to vote, but to work their hearts out for her.

Once Justice Democrats came into existence, the group moved quickly to recruit, endorse, and support Ocasio-Cortez and a number of other candidates. The organization backs only candidates who swear off corporate cash and support Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, free college and trade school, and a federal jobs guarantee. Many JD-backed candidates have also committed to ending for-profit prisons and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When we first spoke, Rojas described the anti-ICE stance as “a more recent policy position” that was “not a requirement.”

In contrast to most other progressive organizations, JD starts with a specific set of policy goals and identifies candidates who will advance it. They do not throw their weight behind candidates who are strong on one issue, e.g., abortion rights, and terrible on others. They are not interested in politicians who say vaguely liberal-sounding things; they back only those they trust to go to Congress and fight for their agenda. And in the increasingly conservative world of American politics, they are often described and/or perceived as “far left,” a designation they reject. They essentially see themselves as New Deal Democrats for a new era: they want to massively expand the United States’ shredded social safety net without selling out or excluding people of color. Their executive director is a young woman of color, and their primary spokespeople are bright, educated, historically literate, diverse young people. But their politics are more important, and far more threatening to their adversaries, than their packaging. In a sense, they are fighting less for a brave new world than for a return to an old one: a time in our nation’s history when the government made massive investments in public goods, put millions of Americans to work, and built up our public infrastructure, but updated and expanded to meet the needs of the modern era.

A key difference between what Justice Democrats is doing and what other progressive organizations have done is that JD seeks to partner with the candidates it helps to elect, as opposed to just endorsing and hoping those they elevate will govern as promised. (DSA is pursuing a similar strategy; in New York, chapter leaders regularly coordinate public statements, actions, and electoral strategy with DSA-backed elected officials.) The idea is to co-govern with legislators who share the organization’s political vision. It’s the antithesis of the Working Families Party’s 2020 endorsement of Biden, the least-bad candidate in the general election. Of course, it’s easier for groups like Justice Democrats and DSA to truly co-govern with elected officials at the local, state, and congressional levels than it is for groups like the Working Families Party to do so with an American president, particularly one who has shown little interest in actively sharing power with progressive groups. In theory, having elected officials who believe in co-governing with the people who put them in office, rather than the corporations who write them checks, would obviate the need to “hold them accountable.” You don’t have to issue threats or ultimatums to keep politicians in line if they share your vision and values in the first place.

In DSA’s case, this model of co-governance is, at least in theory, easier to achieve. While individual chapters have wide latitude, the national organization endorses only candidates who fully subscribe to a specific theory of change and set of policies. To qualify for DSA’s endorsement, a candidate must be and run as a socialist. DSA doesn’t do “paper” endorsements; it only backs candidates its members have voted to endorse and only when it’s confident it has enough capacity in the form of volunteer labor to support those candidates in the field. Most elected officials feel some obligation to the volunteers and voters who put them in office. Yet even DSA has found it challenging to keep politicians in line once they have ascended to positions of power. This is partly because the organization, so often characterized as an ultra-woke organ of the “far left,” is actually a big tent. Most DSA members support certain policies but have a wide range of attitudes toward voting, the Democratic Party, and overall political strategy. Some are Marxists; some are anarchists; others are committed to reforming the Democratic Party. DSA opposes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2017, and voted to establish a BDS and Palestine Solidarity national working group in 2019.

In 2021, some DSA members attempted to oust Congressman Jamaal Bowman from the organization for taking a trip to Israel and meeting with right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, and refusing to back BDS.³⁷ Despite DSA’s official position on Israel, members disagreed about how unforgivable a breach Bowman’s actions were, how much leeway he should be given to act in accordance with his constituents’ wishes (his district includes a significant number of pro-Israel voters), and how kicking him out would affect DSA. Some felt he should be bound to principle, regardless of the political consequences; others felt expelling a Black man who supports the vast majority of DSA’s agenda, remains one of the farthest-left members of Congress, and began publicly identifying as a socialist to secure DSA’s endorsement would discourage potential recruits without empowering Palestinians. The DSA chapter in Bowman’s district did not call for his expulsion, and the national organization has so far declined to do so.

In November 2020, the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America formally censured Alderman Andre Vasquez, who had received Chicago DSA’s endorsement and then voted “yes” on a city budget the organization opposed.³⁸ As DSA’s national director, Maria Svart, told me, “With power comes complications.” Svart described what happened in Chicago as an instructive organizing “experiment.” As an organization, she added, DSA was in the process of examining its relationship with those it has helped to elect: what it means to build power with them, wield power independently of them, and help them accomplish shared goals. There are, Svart said, different models to consider, including models from US history as well as from other countries. “It’s a very exciting problem to have,” she added.

JD’s support more often takes the form of fundraising, ads, and professional campaign staff. Once they help someone get elected, particularly if that person isn’t worried about getting re-elected, there is little reason to assume they’ll continue feeling indebted to the organization. Rescinding an endorsement, which JD has considered doing but has yet to do, would send a strong message to leftists familiar with the group that a particular politician was no longer a progressive in good standing. But that’s about all it would do. JD’s efficacy hinges to a large extent on its recruitment process: it has to choose the right people to begin with and hope they stay committed to the cause. In the current universe of progressive PACs, Justice Democrats’ biggest advantage, aside from its fundraising might, is the strength of its brand identity. To people who follow politics, the organization’s endorsement is significant; it means that, if elected, a candidate will become either a member or an active supporter of the Squad, whose easily identifiable brand of lefty politics, relative youth, working-class backgrounds, and racial and/or gender diversity have inspired fanatical devotion in some and hostility in others.

Picking candidates you’ll never have to consider expelling or un-endorsing remains a challenge for both DSA and JD. Given that they have no voting record to scrutinize, it’s especially challenging to ensure that first-time candidates are sincerely committed to their stated goals. When I asked Jackie Fielder, a then twenty-six-year-old democratic socialist organizer running an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for state senate in Northern California, how her constituents could trust her to be who she said she was, given that she had never held public office before, she sounded genuinely baffled by the question. “I live around them, we’re friends, it’s not hard to stay accountable,” she said, adding that she was “part of the community” she hoped to serve. It seemed not to have occurred to her that it is possible to betray your community. (It’s also hard to prove that you would never do something you haven’t yet had the opportunity to do, like sell out to large corporate interests.)

Rojas said Justice Democrats’ nominating process has helped yield trustworthy candidates with broad community support. Prospective Justice Democrats cannot nominate themselves; they have to be nominated by a community member. “We want people who are basically solicited by everyday Americans all over the country,” she said. That doesn’t mean that you have to be “a hero dragging someone out of a burning building”—you just need a clear record of service to your community and peers who are willing to vouch for you.

“You don’t find those types of people by just going for activists, or, like the Democratic Party does, by approaching nonprofit executives and rich people who can afford to run,” she added. “You ask people everywhere … a big part of our process is just sourcing lots of nominations.” She estimated that the organization had received over 15,000 nominations through its public nomination form. Rojas and her colleagues then consider which districts appear competitive across a number of data points and focus their efforts on races that seem winnable.

Justice Democrats believes that no congressional representative “deserves” to hold onto their seat forever, and they should all feel more beholden to their constituents. Rojas said the organization has endorsed in over 70 races, “and not just competitive primaries … we also endorsed a lot of red-to-blue seats.” In the last election cycle, she added, they were “a lot more selective and a lot more intentional about where to invest the movement energy” generated by the handful of victories they got in 2018, including the “Squad” of Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. The organization is also focusing on helping winning candidates develop strategies for progressives to better consolidate and leverage their power in the House.

Rojas sees the idea of running candidates who espouse a specific platform, belong to an identifiable movement, and are working to build something bigger than a single election as both critical and compelling. “This is such a profound moment that all I can honestly think about is what are we going to do to build the next generation of leadership—not as a slogan, but as a way to fundamentally fix things,” she said. Presidential politics are important, she added, especially since they draw the most attention, but it’s very easy to “get lost in the pendulum that swings back and forth with the presidency.” Congressional elections, by contrast, require comparatively few resources, and it’s easier to funnel volunteer energy into defeating disappointing incumbents.

In 2020, Rojas did her best to harness the enthusiasm generated by Sanders’s run and funnel it into down ballot races, even when it became apparent that Sanders would not win the nomination. Having slightly more “Bernie Sanders analysts” (Rojas has a contract with CNN) on cable news was, she believes, useful in some competitive House races. And building and strengthening progressive infrastructure is as crucial as winning races. In Cori Bush’s Missouri House race, Rojas and her organization focused on “building the basic level of infrastructure and ecosystem of support that it takes working people to get into Congress” and “supporting local movements like Black Lives Matter on the ground and uplifting them with national messaging.” Part of building that infrastructure was identifying and reaching likely donors: who wants to open their wallets to help send working-class candidates to Congress? And part of it was recruiting young, appealing people to go on TV and talk about specific issues and actions, like the 2020 protests and Black Lives Matter, from an accessible, leftist perspective.

Recruiting and running unorthodox candidates has its challenges. Candidates seeking the support of the Democratic Party are commonly asked to make a list of personal and professional contacts and the amount of money they can expect to raise from each. Justice Democrats–backed candidates like Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush do not begin their careers with much personal wealth or social and professional connections to wealthy people. (Ocasio-Cortez’s particular blend of personal charisma and political stardom has certainly expanded her network, and the more good press JD candidates and elected officials get, the more money they can raise.)

Of Jessica Cisneros, a JD candidate in South Texas who lost her 2020 primary against eight-term incumbent congressman Henry Cuellar by just 2,700 votes, Rojas explained that the fact that around 30 percent of Cisneros’s district lives in poverty had posed a major challenge. In a district like that, even “the best person in the world” is unlikely to know enough affluent people to adequately fund a congressional campaign. Justice Democrats and Cisneros herself had to “hustle really, really, really hard” to raise as much as she did, Rojas said. It helped Cisneros, whose plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 was a centerpiece of her campaign, that environmental activists rallied around her. She won the support of both the Sunrise Movement and more established environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). In February 2020, national progressive organizations including NARAL Pro-Choice America, the LCV Victory Fund, MoveOn Political Action, Planned Parenthood Votes, and EMILY’s List’s independent expenditure arm WOMEN VOTE! teamed up to give Cisneros’s campaign $1.2 million.³⁹

However worthy a candidate may be, it’s even harder to persuade people to invest in a campaign when they seem unlikely, or even just less likely, to prevail. Jamaal Bowman, Rojas added, has helped “thousands” of working-class families, very few of whom could afford to contribute to a political campaign. Bowman himself couldn’t afford to leave his “day job” as principal of a Bronx middle school until halfway through his race.

Rojas considers Justice Democrats to be “in deep community with” the leaders of groups like Sunrise, the Working Families Party, and DSA, both ideologically and in terms of their leadership. Not coincidentally, all of these groups are run by women and/or people of color. Rojas specifically mentioned Varshini Prakash, the executive director of Sunrise, and Sochie Nnaemeka, state director of the New York Working Families Party. Like Rojas, Prakash and Nnaemeka are young women of color.

In addition to that of Justice Democrats, Bowman had the support of the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and a coalition of local community organizations in the Bronx and Westchester, where he was running. While these groups have come together around candidates like Bowman, they have different ideologies and structural strengths. Justice Democrats can aid campaigns more swiftly than the others because, as Rojas explained, “we don’t have a membership structure like DSA or a coalition model like the Working Families Party.” The fact that a relatively small number of staffers makes the final decision about endorsements allows JD to be “laser-focused” on certain congressional districts, and to invest in campaigns up front, rather than waiting for its members to vet candidates and vote on endorsement decisions. Justice Democrats has also been able to team up with a number of local Indivisible chapters “that aren’t super-huge fans of Bernie Sanders” but are inspired by “this new generation of leaders.”

Previous “new generations” of politicians were lauded for pioneering stratagems like triangulation and no-holds-barred attack ads. Yet even in the heat of political combat, Rojas and her peers retain an air of wholesomeness—more Parks and Rec than Veep. They are much likelier to issue earnest appeals to “people power” than to deploy sarcasm or snark, and they are not averse to sharing personal stories or showing emotion. At a recent talk on Medicare for All featuring Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, whose 2018 run for governor of Michigan Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez supported, El-Sayed stressed the importance of remaining kind and compassionate while making the case for Medicare for All, even when you can’t believe how obtuse your interlocutor is. At the same time, they are not starry-eyed idealists; they take what they are doing seriously, and understand the limits of passion without a plan. “Just like anything, it can be frustrating,” Rojas said of attempting to coordinate with other groups on the emerging left. “But it’s one of the most beautiful things ever. Not to be cheesy about it.”

Rojas came to New York about a month before Ocasio-Cortez’s primary, where she helped ramp up the campaign’s texting, calling, and volunteer recruitment efforts. She told me in 2018 that she loved being “in the trenches” with Ocasio-Cortez, bouncing around between Queens and the Bronx and helping to mobilize out-of-state volunteers. She couldn’t even guess how many hours she put in. All she knew was that JD’s network grew with every new endorsement. Soon, JD-backed candidates and staffers were flying around the country to support one another’s campaigns. The organization doesn’t require endorsees to support others’ campaigns; it was something most of them were doing organically and spontaneously. Part of making sure volunteers stayed engaged was plugging them into other races once the one they were working on was over.

As an organization, Justice Democrats cares more about issues than identity. The idea is to get people excited about being “part of a movement that embraces big ideas,” not sell a particular ideology. This is true both because many of its leaders are not wedded to specific political identities of their own and because they are pragmatists who want to expand their base. “I didn’t come into this work, like, ‘I’m a democratic socialist,’ or ‘I am a Sunrise-r,’ or ‘I’m an Occupy person,’ ” Rojas told me. “I came in as, ‘I just want to do whatever it takes to actualize our vision.’ ” They wouldn’t say “socialism,” Rojas told me, but they do have “very specific policies” that you have to support “to be a Justice Democrat.” Those policies are essentially a kind of neo–New Deal defined and driven by diverse young people who have suffered under the economic order of the last fifty years. I got the sense that they steer clear of “socialism” more for branding purposes than out of a desire to distinguish their agenda from DSA’s. The two organizations champion many of the same policies, but JD cares more about winning a congressional seat in Tennessee, Texas, or West Virginia in the next cycle or two than it does about slowly, methodically, and one-major-urban-center-at-a-time building socialist power throughout the United States and beyond.

Not for the first time, I was struck by Rojas’s almost comically businesslike tone. In style, presentation, and interactions with the press, the leaders of Justice Democrats and the candidates they support have little in common with the radicals of an earlier era. They wear well-tailored monochromatic blazers and collared shirts and sleeveless sheath dresses and pant-suits, especially when they appear on TV (and, even more often, on Zoom). They use language more closely associated with project managers than with left-wing agitators: efficiency, measurable impact, actualization, implementation. They are mostly college-educated and occasionally self-taught members of a generation bred to compete in a particularly brutal job market. Thanks to their youth and politics, they are still, for now, outsiders, but it’s easy to imagine them joining (or taking over) any club—or, as they essentially have, starting their own.

Although they often speak about the importance of having people of diverse backgrounds in positions of power, the leaders of Justice Democrats are not interested in diversity for its own sake. They value leaders who can speak to issues from personal experience and explicitly connect their backgrounds and personal identities to broader policy goals. They will, for example, feature leaders from immigrant families in discussions of immigration policy and parents of Black and Latino children when the subject is police brutality.

Part of learning how to persuade others is figuring out what worked on you. Rojas joined the left largely because of Sanders and his campaign, not because she read a lot of Marx. (Everyone’s path is different; at the 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, one young woman said she had become a socialist after “reading a lot of Marx.”) Rojas attributed her own awakening to hearing Sanders speak “in a language that spoke to me.” That’s why she believes it’s so important to promote and expand “the popularity of our ideas” without getting too bogged down in theory. Until four years ago, she was not conversant in “the nuances and the terminologies” that come with “the academic part of the left.” Justice Democrats are, she said, “really effective” communicators precisely because they do not come from a “wonky leftist perspective.”

Rojas summed up her own ideology as follows: “I want people who don’t abdicate their responsibility as leaders in positions of power and will actually implement solutions that match the scale, scope, and urgency of the crises that we’re facing.” There are, she believes, plenty of viable policy solutions out there, including Medicare for All and a Green New Deal; the missing ingredients are strong leadership and political courage.

Four years later, there are still naysayers—both on the right and within the Democratic Party—who insist that Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 victory was a flash in the pan, a fluke that heralded no broader change.

But it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the crop of insurgent candidates who ran alongside her in 2018 and those who emerged in the 2020 election cycle, many of them women, people of color, and/or first-time candidates, and many of whom directly credited Ocasio-Cortez with inspiring them to run, from Cori Bush in Missouri to Nikil Saval in Pennsylvania to New York’s Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones. Many of these candidates, especially those who won their primaries in 2018, like Ocasio-Cortez, ran in safe, blue districts where it was extremely unlikely that defeating a Democratic incumbent would result in a Republican winning the seat. And many have since carved out a more radical path than Ocasio-Cortez, who has come under fire in recent years for perceived moderation of the politics that made her a household name in the first place. Like Sanders, who is a democratic socialist but not a DSA member, Ocasio-Cortez has not endorsed the nonviolent BDS movement. And in 2021 she enraged some DSA members and others on the left by voting “present” for the funding of Israel’s Iron Dome rather than forcefully opposing it. Some in DSA claim she’s no better than any other progressive Democrat—not particularly ideologically committed to socialism and suspiciously eager to forge alliances with powerful non-socialists. For now, her defenders seem to outnumber her critics on the left. She is, after all, “far left” by US congressional standards. And in just a few years, she has already become too popular to disavow; at this point, given her district and the likelihood that she will continue to be re-elected, barring adverse gerrymandering, she is more of an asset to DSA than the organization is to her.

It has also become increasingly difficult to ignore the growing universe of left-wing PACs, progressive candidate and staffer recruitment and training programs, and youth-led organizations fueling these candidates’ rise. Thanks to the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, the surprising strength of Sanders’s presidential campaigns, the Democratic Socialists of America’s post-2016 membership surge, the rise of new organizations, and shrinking trust in mainstream pundits and media outlets—many of which predicted that Trump would never secure the Republican Party’s nomination, let alone become president—a new “new left” is, for the first time in fifty years, ascendant in the United States.

2

New Kids on the Block

Where are these armies of newly radicalized young people coming from? According to conservatives like Andrew Moran, writing on right-wing websites like Liberty Nation News, they are a “breed of monster largely … confined to parents’ cellars … a pale young man, sporting a neckbeard, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, and committing heinous acts behind a Guy Fawkes mask … [feeding] on Red Bull energy drinks, arguments on social media, and YouTube videos by The Young Turks.”¹ Or as Hillary Clinton put it at a February 2016 fund-raiser, in reference to Sanders supporters, “children of the Great Recession … living in their parents’ basement.”² Doubtless some are; in October 2016, Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper he agreed with Clinton: “What she’s saying is what I suggested a moment ago. There are young people who went deeply into debt, worked very hard to get a good education, and yet they are getting out of school and they can’t find decent-paying jobs. And that’s a major problem. They are living in their parents’ basements. And that’s the point … I personally do believe we do need a political revolution, that we do need to transform the society, create decent-paying jobs, make sure that Donald Trump and his billionaire friends start paying their fair share of taxes.”³ In 2019, Business Insider reported that “People with annual incomes below $75,000 expressed the highest satisfaction with Sanders out of the major candidates recently surveyed by Insider,” adding that this could be explained “in part by the fact that Sanders performs extremely well among younger voters, who tend to earn less than older ones.”⁴ New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz wrote in 2020 that “the overeducated, precariously employed college graduate” is the model millennial socialist.⁵

My reporting has borne out the point about economic precariousness—a condition that conservatives, with some exceptions, tend to confuse with personal laziness—if not the basement dwelling (plenty of young socialists in large cities have roommates and some live with parents, but these facts say more about economic conditions than personal failings). The vast majority of the young people I met—those who were pouring their hearts into long-shot political campaigns or running for office themselves—were debt-ridden, educated (or trying to be), and in some way precarious: they were either from immigrant and/or working-class families or in danger of slipping from the perch their more prosperous parents had managed to secure at a time in the United States when basic economic security was easier to come by.

While reporting on Ocasio-Cortez for the Nation, I met Shaniyat Chowdhury, a TV-handsome rugby player and former Marine. He worked on Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign and ran a long-shot insurgent primary challenge of his own against long-time Queens incumbent Rep. Gregory Meeks in 2020 (Meeks won by a wide margin).

The 2008 crisis was a formative experience for AOC and her peers. Born to Bangladeshi immigrants, Chowdhury was twenty-six years old and a member of Ocasio-Cortez’s outreach team when we met.⁶ I was struck by the similarities in their life experiences: Chowdhury’s family had also faced foreclosure after the financial crisis hit. His father, who worked in a casino restaurant, was laid off, then became seriously ill. “My mom ended up taking two jobs,” he told me, “but it wasn’t enough [to keep up with the payments], because of my dad’s illness.” At the time, he and his siblings were too young to work.

Chowdhury’s explanation of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was simple. “You wouldn’t be surprised … if you’d seen how hard people worked,” he told me. “People were here day in, day out, sometimes sleeping here because they wanted to be up by the crack of dawn.” The campaign also worked to expand the electorate—and did so, by 11 percent in the category of voters under forty, according to Ocasio-Cortez’s original primary campaign manager, Virginia Ramos-Rios.⁷ This willingness to invest time in people who weren’t in any obvious or immediate way going to “pay off” (immigrants who aren’t citizens and can’t yet vote; young people who are eligible to vote but are unregistered or unlikely to do so) was consistent with the campaign’s emphasis on long-term relationship building, as opposed to showing up every few years to ask for votes. Ocasio-Cortez told me about an older Bengali couple she met while canvassing: “They couldn’t speak any English, but they were so excited that someone had knocked on their door to talk about the community.” The couple invited her inside, where she met the rest of the family, only maybe one of whom, she recalled, was a registered, eligible Democratic voter. Taking the time to listen to people most consultants would dismiss is important, she told me, and not just for winning elections. Sitting down with that family represented “what we’re really trying to accomplish” which is “organizing centered on the dignity of all people.”

Candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and Chowdhury are not the only new left candidates whose families of origin have faced a variety of challenges, many of them related to the 2008 financial crisis and US immigration policy. When I met him in Philadelphia in 2020, Nikil Saval, a mild-mannered democratic socialist and one-time editor of the literary magazine n+1 who looks more like a guy you’d meet at a bar in Williamsburg than a Pennsylvania state senator, told me that his family’s financial situation played a key role in his political awakening. His parents, who are immigrants from India, owned a pizza restaurant in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the family’s finances “went south” after their landlord sold the building that housed the restaurant. His parents were in their fifties, and business had been declining for a while. Unsure how else to support themselves, they decided to sell their house and move back to Bangalore for a few years, disrupting what Saval described as a standard middle-class upbringing. Having parents who had to leave the country was, he said, “really scary.” Without family, he felt marooned in the United States and had to take the first job he could get when he graduated from college.

That turned out to be a job in publishing. It was, in many ways, his dream job, but his starting salary was $28,000 a year, and his rent (he lived in New York at the time) was $1,000 a month. As someone who loved books and being around other literary types, it pained Saval to realize that publishing was “an exploitative industry like any other.” He was particularly incensed when his then employer paid former Fed chair Alan Greenspan over $8.5 million for his memoir. Saval, who had thought of himself as being “on the meritocratic path,” was beginning to realize that the path he had chosen wasn’t viable. Interested in unionizing his own work-place, he began to learn about organizing and started volunteering with a union. Something had shifted. He was becoming a socialist.

The conviction that it shouldn’t be so difficult for working people to live stable and comfortable lives fueled Ocasio-Cortez’s rise. Millions of Americans suffer from economic precarity, housing insecurity, and anti-immigrant laws and policies. That suffering has only increased during Trump’s presidency and, beginning in 2020, a global pandemic.

When young climate activists pressed her to support the Green New Deal at her San Francisco office in 2019, Sen. Dianne Feinstein responded sarcastically to one young woman, “Well, you know better than I do,” adding, “So I think one day you should run for the Senate.” (“Great, I will,” the woman shot back.)⁸ “If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing,” President Barack Obama exhorted disaffected Americans in his 2017 farewell address. “If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself.”⁹ And in 2016, confronted by a young Somali American woman about past racist remarks at a campaign stop in Minnesota, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton engaged for a few seconds before saying: “You know what, dear? You have a different opinion,” and, “Well, why don’t you go run for something, then?”¹⁰

In this book, I have focused primarily on leftists who decided to “go run for something.” That’s what I’ve been reporting on in the last several years, and it’s where the new left has most noticeably and measurably gained power. Some leftists see reviving and radicalizing the American labor movement as far more crucial than electing another half-dozen progressives to Congress. Some see electoral politics as a dead end rather than a viable avenue for radical social change. Many argue that electoral gains won’t lead to durable power or comprehensive and long-lasting change in the absence of strong social movements. These arguments have merit. It’s clear that young leaders like Ocasio-Cortez and young organizations like Sunrise have already moderated their tone and rhetoric, if not their policy preferences, in hopes of gaining or keeping electoral power and/or influencing those with more of it. But especially for young organizers, the path to electing an Ocasio-Cortez to Congress is far clearer and more direct than the path to revitalizing organized labor or building a Black Lives Matter movement capable of achieving the kind of landmark legislation brought about by a previous generation of activists. Focusing on electoral gains may be myopic, but the strengths and weaknesses of that approach and the lessons it has yielded are much clearer in the short term than those of ongoing efforts to strengthen a broader movement. Everyone on the left knows who Ocasio-Cortez is. What exactly “the movement” is, who’s part of it, and how to make it stronger and more effective apart from electing more leftists to office is far less clear.

Since 2016, I have met and interviewed dozens of candidates who, dissatisfied with Democratic leadership and inspired by the success of candidates like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, have accepted the challenge to seek elective office themselves. A few have cited Obama as an inspiration. None have mentioned Hillary Clinton or Dianne Feinstein. When asked who she had supported in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Erica Vladimer, who challenged longtime incumbent congresswoman Carolyn Maloney from the left in a 2020 primary, replied, “I would say my activism, like many people’s, stemmed from the results of the 2016 election.” Vladimer implied that Clinton, as the front-runner, was the obvious (and, in retrospect, wrongheaded) choice. Audrey Gelman, a die-hard Clinton acolyte and founder of the Wing, a women’s co-working space and social club, came to a similar conclusion in 2018, explaining on Instagram that “it’s important to make room for people who supported Hillary in 2016 who learned a tough lesson from her loss” and “candidates like Alexandria [Ocasio-Cortez] have challenged my view of what’s possible in American politics.” Clinton’s loss signaled to many people who hadn’t been very politically engaged and/or did not see explicitly leftist candidates as viable before 2016 that moderate, establishment politicians were not adequate to the moment—and it was possible that a new type of candidate was.

Progressive and democratic socialist candidates usually cite one of three people as inspirations: Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, or Elizabeth Warren. All five candidates I interviewed for a Nation magazine article on the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2020 candidate slate—four out of five of whom went on to win their races—shared stories of personal or familial hardship. Despite the fact that all five had also volunteered for Sanders or cited his presidential campaign(s) as the impetus for their candidacy, several key characteristics distinguished them from their role model. The most obvious are age, race, and gender: all are people of color and immigrants or children of immigrants, and all were born and/or raised in the areas they were seeking to represent. Four of the five were under forty-one when we spoke, and three are women.

As much as they admire Sanders, this new crop of left-wing—and, in the case of those backed by DSA, socialist—candidates are more interested in enacting his vision than imitating his personal style, which, unless Sanders’s apparent artlessness counts as a style, isn’t what attracted them in the first place. Phara Souffrant Forrest, a DSA-backed candidate, nurse, and lifelong resident of Crown Heights, won a New York State Assembly seat in 2020. Recalling Sanders’s unlikely appeal to a thirty-one-year-old Black woman like herself, she giggled. “This Vermont man had me thinking here in Brooklyn—wow, we should have a man from Vermont with a Brooklyn accent to be my president! Yes! Yes! I’m speaking this $15 [minimum wage] language, yes!”

Then she paused, reflecting on his still-fresh primary loss. “More coalition, more coalition,” she murmured. “We got to do more, that’s it … Can’t leave it all up to Bernie.” She said she wished he had spent more time tailoring his message to society’s most vulnerable groups. “If you are still having people of color, women, still question if your new system has them in mind, then you really need to go back and build your coalition a little tighter,” she said. “The platform was great, but the coalition still needed to be worked on.”

And so, she added: “That’s why we need people like me on the local level to say that ‘Bernie Sanders was not crazy.’ He was saying something that we need, and we need to be all on the same page, and then we’ll be ready to have something on the national level. But until we have all these assemblymen, state senators saying the same thing, all these housing groups saying the same thing, it’ll be hard to get a Bernie Sanders in [national] office.”

Jabari Brisport—a gay, Black, vegan socialist who lost a Green Party and DSA-backed challenge to an incumbent city councilor in 2017 and won a state senate race with DSA’s backing in 2020—is a coalition member Sanders did manage to attract. In 2020, Brisport won an open seat in Brooklyn, in what was originally a three-way race, by over 10,000 votes. “DSA gets maligned in the press as an organization for gentrifiers, and it’s just not true,” he told me. “We are specifically running candidates that are from our communities.”

When I asked him about diversity within DSA, the expansion of which is an organizational priority, he said, “New York City is a city that is majority minority; most people that live in New York City are minorities. That’s not the case in DSA; the majority of people in DSA are not minorities. So you know, we don’t reflect the city yet, but where we build is by reaching out and talking to people at the doors.”

Sometimes, he added, people need to be asked about their politics in greater depth and explicitly encouraged to join an organization. “I’ve always made a joke that if you put up a flyer that says, ‘Socialism meeting on the corner at seven o’clock,’ you know, fifty white people would show up because of that flyer,” Brisport said. “But that’s not the case with other groups; not everyone hears the word ‘socialist’ and says, ‘Oh, let me go to that meeting.’ Other people need other approaches. And that comes from working together in tandem, in [shared] struggle, on campaigns, whether they’re electoral or movement-based. It comes from actually engaging with them on the local level, in their own struggles, and it comes by augmenting the voices that are already here and what they’re doing.”

Brisport, who grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights, is particularly sensitive to critics’ suggestion that DSA is an organization of and for white gentrifiers. “It’s weird to be from a neighborhood that has already gentrified,” he said, “and also be fighting for communities that are at the current forefront of gentrification. I remember when the wave of gentrification came through Prospect Heights, specifically because that was in the mid-2000s and it was just literally seeing more white people in the streets. [At first I thought], ‘Ok, that’s interesting, I just see more white people.’ And then stores started closing. This local bodega we called the Green Store run by a Haitian guy got boarded up because the rent was too high and he moved back to Haiti. My local movie theater became an American Apparel. Local stores were getting shut down [to make way for] ones that are a little more bougie, a little more gentrified. And it was hard seeing that. It was hard seeing the neighborhood finally start getting attention once there were more white people there.”

Reflecting on his changed neighborhood brought up painful memories. “There was a neighborhood playground in Prospect Heights called the Underhill playground at Underhill and Prospect Place, and my parents actually forbade me to play there when I was a kid, because my friend and I found a crack pipe in the dirt,” he said. “That was how neglected that park was; there were literally crackheads hanging out there and leaving their stuff in the dirt. And then of course once the neighborhood gets gentrified all of this city money comes in and there’s … I mean the whole thing was beautified, but it wasn’t till after a bunch of white people had moved to the neighborhood.”

Brisport’s identity, lifelong connection to his neighborhood, and firsthand experiences with anti-Black racism have not prevented his political opponents from branding him a race traitor. In Summer 2020, after Brisport and around 200 protesters picketed outside of City Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo’s home to demand police budget cuts, Cumbo retaliated by leading a protest outside of Brisport’s apartment. Minister Kirsten John Foy, an activist and former Northeast Regional Director of the National Action Network, a civil rights organization founded by Rev. Al Sharpton in 1991, attended Cumbo’s rally, where he reportedly denounced Brisport as a “nigger coon” for treating Cumbo, an elected official and a Black mother with a young child, in what he deemed an unacceptable manner.¹¹ “They’re the reason Harriet [Tubman] carried a gun,” Foy said, apparently referring to Brisport and his fellow organizers, “Because only someone with that character would bring a white lynch mob, and that’s what it was, a white lynch mob to a Black queen’s home to terrorize her and to terrorize her child.”¹²

Cumbo herself said in a Facebook post that she was “deeply concerned about the future of Brooklyn and this new movement to utilize Black candidates as a trojan horse to push a majority outside and inside white agenda.”¹³ The New York City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, of which Cumbo is a member, recently condemned DSA’s tactics on Twitter: “We reject efforts by those who seek to appropriate our message and gentrify our movement with their ideologies, rather than our realities, and denounce their attempts to menace a Black mother and her baby, and bully an ally and community leader by threatening entry into his home” (the “ally and community leader” in question was Danny Dromm, whose home was also picketed by DSA members).¹⁴

Days later, a dozen young people of color from a coalition of organizations—including VOCAL-NY, the Democratic Socialists of America, Citizen Action of New York, the Working Families Party, and the New York Immigration Coalition—at the forefront of the growing movement to defund the police held a press conference a few blocks from a City Hall encampment of anti–police brutality protesters. The speakers were interrupted at regular intervals by honks of support from passing cars and young Black men on bicycles whizzing by, fists in the air, shouting, “Black Lives Matter!”

“We are here as proud Black community leaders who are pissed off at the direction and the stalemate of progressivism that is happening in our communities,” declared Jamell Henderson, co-chair of Citizen Action of New York’s NYC chapter. NYC-DSA co-chair Bianca Cunningham spoke next. “I stand before you as a proud Black woman, a proud Black socialist, who’s concerned about our community,” she said. “I am sick of the inaction of [Black elected officials] in this community. Don’t talk to me about how ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Show me by voting ‘no’ on a budget that does not reflect cuts to the NYPD. Don’t talk to me about your identity because I can tell you I’ve been here, with the people, in the street, in the last month, actually for years, I’ve been [occupying City Hall] for seven days, and guess what, I have not seen you … you have a mandate from the people, and you are not exempt from accountability, you are not exempt from criticism.”

Cumbo’s clumsy race-based attacks only hardened the resolve of the groups and leaders behind the Occupy City Hall campaign. But for those seeking to undermine and discredit the rising left, it has proven effective to smear multiracial coalitions as racist. In October 2020, I was planning to attend a “wide awake” Sunrise NYC’s Youth hub was organizing at the Brooklyn home of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. The plan was to show up at Jeffries’s home at 6 a.m. and loudly and publicly pressure him to support a Green New Deal. Several days before it was scheduled to take place, the action was called off. The organizers “had to cancel,” they told me in an email, “because the part of Sunrise that organizes all the wide awakes flagged ours because [Jeffries] is a Black politician. Several wide awakes in the past that have targeted Black politicians have been skewed by the media to make it look like Sunrise is only targeting Black politicians. Obviously that is not what we are trying to do so we thought it was best to cancel the wide awake and host a rally about voting instead.”

What’s in a Name?

For many on the emerging left, clear policy commitments and a willingness to take bold stands are more important than labels. As Aru Shiney-Ajay of the Sunrise Movement told me when I asked if Sunrise was a socialist organization, “Our basic approach is, we believe we should have a government that is actually ready to take care of its people … whatever you call yourself, if you believe that basic tenet of freedom and dignity for all people and that it’s the government’s job to actually help provide that and enforce that, then you’re welcome in Sunrise.” She added, “I think there are a lot of people who consider themselves various things within the movement.”

I have tried to preserve a distinction in this book between democratic socialists and those who, like Elizabeth Warren, are seeking to reform capitalism, not eliminate or roll it back. Within the left, these distinctions matter, both during and apart from a presidential primary. But to most mainstream media outlets and much of the general public, “the left” is an umbrella term that is often (and often inaccurately) used to encompass a wide range of people, from Democratic voters to Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez supporters to Green Party voters to those who, for ideological reasons, don’t vote at all. Most of the people whose voices appear in these pages are leftists, by which I mean “aligned with the left wing of the Democratic Party” or “operating outside and to the left of the Democratic Party.” In a US context, all democratic socialists are on the left, but not all leftists are democratic socialists. Sometimes I use “progressive” and “leftist” interchangeably, to indicate that someone who is not necessarily a socialist supports left-wing policies and reforms that are not part of the Democratic Party platform.

I avoid “liberal” in part because the right’s decades-long assault on the word has caused liberals themselves to abandon it—many now prefer the term “progressive,” despite its distinct historical meaning—and in part because “liberal” and its sinister cousin, “neoliberal,” have become terms of opprobrium across the political spectrum. Right wingers and conservative Democrats like Rahm Emanuel think that liberals are, to quote Emanuel, “fucking retarded,”¹⁵ and socialists think they have failed to meaningfully oppose the right and transform society. The New York Times seems to use the words “liberal” and “democratic socialist” interchangeably, which makes little sense, except as a means of erasing socialists entirely. All of these words mean different things to different people, which is why I try to describe people in their own words.

When I asked Shiney-Ajay if she considered herself a socialist, she paused. “I feel pretty neutral about it,” she answered eventually. “Honestly, I’m like, ‘Yes, sure’ … the word just feels like it means so many different things to so many different people that it feels hard to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is something I deeply identify with,’ or not.” What she does know, she added, is that “the way that our society works” is not working for most people.

Even many self-identified socialists do not necessarily use the term when talking to voters—or reporters. Although the Democratic Socialists of America eventually endorsed him, Jamaal Bowman, who won a long-shot primary challenge to sixteen-term incumbent congressman and chair of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee Eliot Engel, did not call himself a socialist when I interviewed him for Gothamist in 2019. While acknowledging that the policies he supported were “absolutely aligned” with democratic socialism, he did not, at that time, claim the label.

“You know, when I share my policies, people always ask me if I’m a democratic socialist. I don’t call myself that,” he said. “I’m an educator, and I look at the world from the perspective of an educator, of a father, of a husband, of a person who’s worked in community. I just feel like it’s our responsibility as a nation to make sure that we are meeting the needs of every woman, man and child in this country. And if we’re not doing that, then we’re running an unjust nation. So because these are my values, people call me a democratic socialist, but I never refer to myself as that. I’m an educator.”

When the story was published, Justice Democrats spokes-person Waleed Shahid contacted me about the quote, suggesting that Bowman hadn’t said that he wouldn’t describe himself as a democratic socialist. Although the issue was quickly resolved—when I sent Shahid a recording of the interview, he thanked me and expressed no further concerns—I was surprised that he was worried a quote I thought was anodyne and unremarkable might alienate a key voting bloc. I assumed Bowman was answering strategically, in hopes of appealing to a universe of voters broader than democratic socialists. When I asked Shahid about this in 2020, he had no idea what I was talking about. “There have been many quotes I’ve been worried about,” he said, laughing.

Once I refreshed his memory, Shahid said, “I think Jamaal is someone who grew up in a working-class family, and has worked with working-class people of color his whole life, and honestly, something like socialism or whether or not you’re a socialist has never really come across his radar … when I first started working with him, he did not really know what that was, other than some vague association with Bernie Sanders.” What I was seeing, he added, was really “two things happening at the same time: one, people, including Jamaal, becoming genuinely more interested in ideology and frameworks and history and secondarily … especially in New York, this is a constituency that needs to be won over and one of the primary things that [DSA] cares about … is whether you are willing to identify publicly as a socialist.”

Bowman’s hesitation may also have been a function of the evergreen fear of being labeled “red,” which has been a feature of US politics as long as there have been Americans who identify as socialists and communists. Perhaps because calling oneself a “socialist” is not much of a liability in his district, Red-baiting wasn’t a big factor in that race. But until he won, it wasn’t entirely clear that being labeled a socialist wouldn’t doom Bowman’s campaign. And as we saw throughout the 2020 election, even being an avowed non-socialist doesn’t keep you from being attacked as one; Republicans spent the entire race characterizing Biden as a radical socialist. It didn’t work, but it scared mainstream Democrats, especially those old enough to remember times it did, and led to a spate of setting-the-record-straight columns meant to reassure the voting public that Biden is not, in fact, a socialist.¹⁶

By contrast, Shahid told me, Justice Democrats–backed candidate Jessica Cisneros, who narrowly lost a primary challenge to conservative South Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar in 2020, never identified publicly as a socialist.¹⁷ “She personally didn’t feel comfortable with it and felt like, ‘I don’t really attach myself to ideological labels, and I’m not that familiar with this.’ ”

On a “realpolitik” level, Shahid added, there is no DSA chapter in Cisneros’s district. In his view, a viable candidate should be sure to address constituencies that carry votes or volunteers. Cisneros didn’t stand to lose much in South Texas from rejecting a label she had never embraced in the first place. Bowman, whose district spans the Bronx and Westchester, had a DSA endorsement to gain—which he ultimately did, several weeks before the primary, when he won the support of both Lower Hudson Valley DSA and the national organization. (In addition to Bowman’s early discomfort with identifying as a socialist, DSA’s slowness to endorse was related to the presence in that race of Andom Ghebreghiorgis, a first-generation Eritrean American, former special education teacher, and DSA member who had earned the backing of Mamaroneck High School’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter. In the end, Ghebreghiorgis dropped out and endorsed Bowman, freeing DSA to endorse Bowman without alienating Ghebreghiorgis and his supporters.)

A couple of months after our conversation, I noticed that Bowman had changed his tune in an interview with the socialist magazine Jacobin, noting that when he talks about Medicare for All, housing as a human right, investing in public education, and a federal jobs guarantee, “people call me a democratic socialist.” Then he added, “I’m fine with that. There’s some stigma associated with the word ‘socialism’ even though the current capitalist model we have isn’t working for the majority of Americans … If you want to call me a socialist then call me a socialist.”¹⁸

By the time the Intercept asked if he was a socialist, Bowman’s answer had evolved to encompass his previous responses to the question. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m an educator. It just so happens my policy aligns with socialism. I guess I’m a socialist.” He laughed. “I’m a progressive, left-leaning, someone that fights for human rights. I was never big on the labels at the beginning of this race. I identify as an educator, and as a Black man in America. But my policies align with those of a socialist, so I guess that makes me a socialist.”¹⁹

Though Bowman may have won over a relatively small but key group of voters once he began calling himself a socialist, many of his supporters admire another trait that he shares with two of his most famous endorsers, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez: authenticity. When I interviewed him for Gothamist, I was struck by his answer to a standard question about why he’d decided to pursue a career in education. “Quite honestly, I needed a job out of college,” he told me, adding that he had “started looking into corporate America for job opportunities and didn’t find the right fit at that time.” It was blunt and unrehearsed in a way most candidates aren’t, especially with reporters. When a pro-Israel PAC ran an attack ad against Bowman claiming he owed “thousands” of dollars in taxes—$2,053.36, to be exact—he ably dismissed it in interviews as evidence of his opponent’s desperation and cluelessness, saying, in effect, that none of his Bronx neighbors would find $2,000 worth of debt disqualifying: “ ‘That all you got on you, man?’ ” he laughingly imitated a fellow Bronxite. “ ‘You must be doing pretty good!’ ”²⁰

Candidates running as socialists have learned to play that particular identity up or down depending on their audience—partly for strategic reasons and partly in the interest of connecting with voters on their own terms. Brisport told me he doesn’t necessarily use the term in conversations with constituents. “We’re not hiding it,” he added, “it’s just, that’s not been our focus.”

He brought up his 2017 city council run, saying, “In my experience … people agree with the ideas but are unfamiliar with the term. I even had an older woman at an event at a senior center ask me what it means to be anti-capitalist because she was interested, but she had never heard the phrase ‘anti-capitalist’ before. She wanted to learn more about it. And when she heard, you know, breaking away from the for-profit housing industry or for-profit this and for-profit that, breaking away from those industries, she was nodding her head, agreeing.”

Congressional candidate Samelys López, who was backed by DSA, the Working Families Party, Bernie Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez’s Courage to Change PAC in 2020, grew up in homeless shelters in the Bronx. Her mother is a Dominican seamstress who left an abusive relationship and worked in sweatshops to support her children. “We take a very simple approach [with constituents],” López said. “We just talk about the bread-and-butter issues. We talk about what people are going through. We ask people, ‘Do you think this is right that you’re going through this? Do you think it’s your fault that you’re going through this?’ And oftentimes they’re like, ‘Well, it’s actually not my fault, because I work two to three jobs to survive, and every day I come home tired.’ ”

To López, the phrase “democratic socialism” is less important than the type of society its proponents are aspiring to create. “I feel like there’s a general consensus in the community that the system is just not built for us and that we need a different reality, a different kind of paradigm,” she told me. “Whether that’s democratic socialism or something else in [my constituents’] eyes, I think that people understand that we need to figure things out because it’s just not working. Overwhelmingly people love the idea of a universal housing guarantee, universal child care and health care, because there’s so many people that are suffering right now, and not getting the care that they need to lead dignified lives.” López’s top priority is to alleviate that suffering. She lost her 2020 race—a difficult 10-way match-up for an open seat—but she came in fourth and earned over 3,800 more votes than veteran politician and former New York City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, an impressive feat for a first-time candidate.

Brian Nowak, a bespectacled, then thirty-three-year-old white man with close-cropped hair and visible tattoos, was deeply involved in Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Inspired to run by the fact that Sanders began his political career as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Nowak won a seat on the Cheektowaga Town Council in 2017. Nowak, a current member and former vice chair of DSA’s Buffalo chapter and the first member of his family to earn a college degree, has lived in Cheektowaga, a town in Erie County, New York, and an eastern suburb of Buffalo, for fifteen years. Many residents commute to Buffalo for jobs in retail, manufacturing, and municipal government. Nowak described Cheektowaga as conservative, blue-collar, and largely white (“a lot of Polish folks”), adding that the demographics are changing in part because it has become more affordable for people of color, some of whom are being priced out of Buffalo. The town, he said, has one of the lower median incomes in Western New York.

When we met in Buffalo in 2020, Nowak told me that although DSA encourages its candidates to do so, he didn’t want to run as an “open socialist.” (By “open socialist,” he later clarified, “I mean ‘capital S’ Socialist, as in a member of a socialist political party or loyal primarily/only to a socialist organization … It was my preference to run for office on my ideas and explain how, even though there may be ‘small s’ socialist ideas in my platform, if implemented, things like a socialized healthcare system can improve quality of life and improve our use of resources.”) His neighbors in Cheektowaga, he said, are “independent-minded,” opposed to rigid, ideological positions, and drawn to politicians who are also independent.

According to Nowak, Cheektowaga voters lean Democratic but are still willing to split the ticket. Many of the town’s Trump supporters voted Democratic in a 2016 state assembly race. “A lot of folks are Democrats but they are ideologically all across the board,” he said. “People surprise you.”

The issue that drew him to DSA was single-payer health care, in part because it’s an issue that “brought fiscal conservatives and DSA types together” at the local level. Abortion and gun control are more controversial subjects, Nowak acknowledged, but the Black Lives Matter movement was making modest gains. During the 2020 protests, a few individuals stood on street corners holding sympathetic signs, and a number of houses displayed BLM signs and flags. Nowak found that “surprising” but encouraging in a town like Cheektowaga, where many residents see Black Lives Matter protests as an expression of hostility toward white people. “The areas we can get buy-in are living wage, right to organize, and health care,” said Nowak. “We have to hold the line on that.”

David Duhalde, DSA Fund chair and former deputy director of DSA, helped craft the current requirements for candidates seeking to secure a national DSA endorsement. DSA, he told me, used to endorse non-socialists all the time. In 2006, the organization’s PAC gave $100 to conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman’s opponent, Connecticut millionaire and now governor Ned Lamont. Lamont returned the money after the New York Post called attention to the donation. That, coupled with a lack of endorsement process for socialist Dan La Botz’s 2010 Ohio US Senate run, led Duhalde to argue for a narrower and stricter process for determining national endorsements.²¹ “We’re a socialist organization,” he said. “We should only endorse people who are running as socialists, because that’s our mission.” Local chapters, he added, “should never be inhibited from endorsing whoever they want.” Only candidates seeking the national organization’s endorsement are required to run explicitly socialist campaigns.

In a 2017 online article in Democratic Left, a publication of DSA, Duhalde outlined the new requirements for earning a national endorsement from the organization:

1. Be an open socialist

2. Be running to win—not just send a message

3. Be nominated by a local DSA chapter²²

“We really need to know if people are willing to advance our values if we’re going to spend time and resources on it,” Duhalde told me. “So having broad values that could fit into Our Revolution or Indivisible is not enough to merit very limited staff time and volunteer resources.”

Still, he said, he understood where candidates like Nowak were coming from, adding, “We got a lot of pushback from Southern chapters, too, where it’s much harder to run as a socialist.” But he maintains that DSA had to set a standard at the national level. If a candidate wants to harness the considerable volunteer power of the country’s largest socialist organization—one that has demonstrated its capacity to mobilize thousands—the least they can do is openly identify as a socialist.

Ayanna Pressley and the Rest of the Squad

In addition to a policy agenda including but not limited to Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and cancellation of student debt, the new left has a specific set of beliefs about how best to wield power and drive change. Though she is often written and spoken of as if she were ideologically indistinguishable from Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez—a function of all four being women of color, relatively young and new to elective office, and part of a cohort known as the “Squad”—Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley has a separate and distinct political identity and career trajectory.

Reporting in the Intercept revealed that before pledging to decline corporate PAC money in her 2018 Democratic congressional primary, Pressley had, as a member of the Boston City Council, accepted money from corporate, police, and lobbyist-run PACs. She also endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, and, while campaigning for Clinton, took a swipe at Sanders: “[Clinton] knows that plans without price tags are simply pandering” (Pressley now supports Medicare for All). The Intercept’s reporting alarmed Justice Democrats, which had already committed to backing Pressley. In his 2019 book, We’ve Got People, Ryan Grim wrote that Justice Democrats, with a very small staff, had “little time for the kind of vetting” that more established groups typically conduct. The group’s approach, he wrote, enabled them to scale up quickly, but also left them open to nasty surprises, like Pressley’s dubious fundraising history and earlier skepticism of “plans without price tags.”²³

The leaders of Justice Democrats were, in Grim’s telling, “livid.” JD’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas, he wrote was “particularly infuriated” and felt “betrayed.” Rojas pushed internally for the organization to rescind its endorsement. In the end, the group had what Grim characterized as a “tense” phone call with Pressley, in which the candidate made her case for retaining JD’s endorsement, reaffirmed her commitment to the group’s progressive vision, and pledged to issue a new statement reiterating her opposition to corporate PAC money after the primary. “I don’t think it’s smart for the progressive movement to just always be shame, shame, shame, when someone fucks up once, or even has a whole history of fucking up,” Rojas told Grim. JD, she added, was navigating a new area “to have these progressive leaders like Ayanna who are sort of new to this movement space, but they’re ready to fight, and that’s because of the work that we’ve done as a movement to push them to be there.”

When I asked Rojas about this in the fall of 2020, she told me she was glad they had stuck by Pressley. Notably, she did not say that she or JD had been wrong to impose a litmus test; instead, she credited organizations like JD and IfNotNow, a group that describes itself as a “movement of Jews to end Israel’s occupation and transform the American Jewish community,” with helping Pressley to see the light. “I think Ayanna Pressley, whether it’s that issue or earlier, she has particularly moved on Palestinian human rights … after listening to groups like IfNotNow to really understand the issue,” said Rojas. “And I think that’s a huge win for our movement.”

Creating space for people to change their minds, she added, was also important. “Ayanna Pressley is not someone who supported Bernie in 2016. She supported Hillary Clinton … And I think that that’s okay, as long as you’re on board with all the policies that we’re fighting for right now,” she said. “I’m glad we didn’t end up un-endorsing, and we both stood by our principles and talked it out.”

Which policies JD candidates are expected to support is clearer now than when the organization was first founded. Its website now lists the group’s policy platform (“A Platform for Justice”), which is divided into three sections, under which are listed a number of priorities: “An Economy for All” (Cancel Student Debt, Tax the Rich, Fair Trade, Expand Social Security, Federal Jobs Guarantee, Free Public College and Trade School, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and Secure a Living Wage), “A Society for All” (Third Reconstruction, End Gun Violence, LGBTQ+ Equality, Justice Reform, Housing as a Human Right, and Reproductive Rights), and “A Democracy for All” (Defend Net Neutrality, Immigrant Rights, Voting Rights, Democracy Reform, and Progressive Foreign Policy).

In the last couple of years, the group has broadened its focus and defined its terms, while leaving room for individual candidates to support the organization’s overall platform without committing to specific controversial policies and forms of protest. The language under “Immigrant Rights” includes the phrase “abolish ICE”: “In 2003, ICE was created as a reaction to 9/11. Since then, it has turned into an organization that regularly violates basic human rights. We don’t need a special enforcement agency charged with targeting undocumented immigrants and should abolish ICE.” The language under “Progressive Foreign Policy” is notably less specific, and mentions Israel and settlements but not occupation or the BDS movement:

We must end the forever wars and prioritize peace and diplomacy. We must reduce our military spending. We must work together with the international community to promote fair trade deals that lift up all workers and end the climate crisis. We must ensure that our aid to other countries is aligned with our values. America gave Saudi Arabia billions in weapons and watched the civilian death toll of their vicious bombing campaign in Yemen climb. The United States continued sending Egypt arms as they violently cracked down on peaceful protesters. Israel received $38 billion in aid and promptly announced new settlements. We must use our financial leverage with other countries to encourage alignment with our shared values. We must also care for our veterans and invest in the VA.

Further illustrating the difference between Pressley and the rest of the Squad was the former’s decision to endorse Elizabeth Warren for president; the rest of the Squad endorsed Sanders. Pressley could be described as a Warren Democrat—an ally on certain issues, but one with aims, strategy, and ideology different from those of the average socialist.

In a 2019 Boston.com interview, the congresswoman characterized her views as “progressive” in a way that seemed designed to obscure or leave ambiguous the meaning of the term: “My values have always been progressive. My approach to actualizing my progressive values has always been one through coalition building.” Part of the problem, she said, was “people forcing a narrative of binary choices. Are you insider or outsider? Are you privileged or poor? Are you radical or sane? … I’m working, and I have been for a very long time.”²⁴

This undoubtedly resonated with admirers of both Pressley and Warren. But it left prominent young socialist and Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara cold. In reference to the Boston.com interview, he wrote in a 2019 Guardian column (“Surprised Ayanna Pressley ‘broke’ with the squad to endorse Warren? Don’t be”), “I knew … that my project was a very different one than Pressley’s when I read [the Boston.com interview] … That’s the opposite of what the emerging New Left is and ought to be doing—naming enemies, politicizing issues, creating polarizations, all to push the kind of change that can improve millions of lives.”²⁵ Those on the socialist left of Sanders and Sunkara pride themselves on being clear about which side they are on in any given conflict and on any given issue. Those who identify as “progressive” rather than “socialist” prefer the elasticity afforded by the former term–-or, depending on your perspective, the nuance and pragmatism it allows.

Sunkara ended on a more generous note: “Pressley will be an ally in many of these struggles, but out of respect for her own beliefs and tactics, let’s stop conflating her vision with ours.”

A Medicare-for-All Democrat in Trump Country

One of the most common criticisms of the new left is that its policies are unpopular and its candidates doomed to fail outside of large, blue metropolises. The campaigns of former congressional candidate Nate McMurray, who supported policies like Medicare for All and the legalization of marijuana and twice ran for Congress in a deep-red district, show that what may be true for now won’t necessarily be true forever.

To the uninitiated, Western New York’s frequent MAGA signs and occasional Confederate flags may come as a rude surprise. But New York State is vast and diverse, and its 27th congressional district, where McMurray ran for Congress in 2018 and 2020, is enormous: it’s home to around 713,000 people and a substantial number of cows, rural counties filled with green meadows, family farms, and run-down general stores, as well as parts of more populous and urban counties like Niagara and Erie, with their revamped supermarket chains, gleaming health care corporations, and big banks headquartered in Buffalo.

In 2018, around 42 percent of registered voters in NY-27 were Republicans or Conservatives, and about a third were Democrats.²⁶ In 2016, Trump won the district by nearly 60 percent, the highest percentage in New York State.²⁷ Niagara County residents voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012; in 2016, they went for Trump by a margin of nearly 18 percent.²⁸

Amber Hainey, a progressive activist who has spent most of her life in rural Livingston County, told me that what the area lacks in racial diversity (it’s around 92 percent white) it makes up for in socioeconomic diversity. Many residents work in agriculture, the service industry—Walmart and Wegmans are top employers—or county or local government. Some are scraping by, some are solidly middle class, and some live in suburban McMansions.

From 2013 to 2019, Republican Chris Collins represented NY-27 in the House. In 2016, he became the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president. In 2019, he resigned, shortly before pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to federal investigators in an attempt to cover it up, and after over a year of maintaining his innocence.²⁹

Back in 2018, McMurray had mounted a spirited challenge to Collins, who was then under federal indictment, but had yet to resign. McMurray lost that race by just 1,087 votes³⁰—a margin that retired psychologist and McMurray supporter Celia Spacone called “nothing short of spectacular,” given that 60 percent of Republican primary voters retained a favorable view of Collins even while he was under federal indictment and 81 percent had a favorable view of Trump.³¹

Then Erie County Comptroller and staunch Trump supporter Stefan Mychajliw, echoing area radio hosts and GOP leaders, called McMurray “a radical progressive who makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look conservative.”³² When we met, McMurray bluntly rejected that notion. “Everybody wants [marijuana] legalization,” he told me. As for health care, he added, “I would win over whole rooms of Republicans that hated me by talking about Medicare for All.” McMurray is not a socialist, but he ran as a proud progressive in a district where most would advise running as far to the right as possible. When we met, he said that while Bernie Sanders had been “a huge inspiration,” his own views were closer to Elizabeth Warren’s, and he shared her belief that it’s crucial to “save capitalism.”

When Collins resigned, GOP leaders plucked New York State Senator Chris Jacobs, whose family controls a business worth billions, from a crowded field that initially included New York State Senator Rob Ortt, who was indicted on felony corruption charges that were later dismissed, and ultra-conservative Fox News contributor Beth Parlato. It was a risky move, given how Republican Chrises have fared in the area: seven years before Chris Collins was indicted, Rep. Chris Lee, who represented the neighboring district of NY-26, resigned after a shirtless photo he sent to a woman who was not his wife surfaced online.

The district’s eight Democratic-county chairs also had to select a candidate to run in the special election. To many, McMurray was the best and most obvious choice: he was already known throughout the district, and he had come very close to winning in 2018. By late 2019, seven of the eight county chairs had lined up behind McMurray, giving him the 51 percent support he needed to become the Democratic candidate. Given the size of Erie County, an endorsement from Erie County Democratic Committee Chair Jeremy Zellner counted for the other 49 percent.

Zellner played it coy, pointedly noting to the Buffalo News that he was “not moved by the other county chairs.” Some speculated that McMurray had rubbed certain people—namely Zellner—the wrong way in his previous campaign. McMurray answered questions about his relationship with Zellner gingerly. The “party rank and file” and rural county chairs supported him “in huge numbers,” he told me, adding, “Party politics, for a lot, is about ring kissing and groveling your way up … I’m not a ring kisser; I’m not a groveler.”

Zellner’s reluctance to wholeheartedly back McMurray, whom he ultimately endorsed, may also have tied into his own political ambitions. Local Democratic officials joined far-right Republicans in characterizing McMurray as a left-wing fire-brand. Some Democrats expressed concerns that a pro– Medicare for All progressive like McMurray could hurt down-ballot candidates in purple areas—precisely the type of candidate Zellner had expressed interest in becoming. (At the time, Zellner was considering running to replace retired New York State Assembly member Robin Schimminger, a conservative Democrat.)

Before Jacobs became the GOP nominee, the Republican candidates spent most of the primary competing for the title of “Most Loyal to Trump.” Even in that pre-pandemic time, when Trump’s electoral future looked comparatively bright, McMurray wasn’t worried. A then forty-three-year-old white man who looks every inch the Eagle Scout he once was, he likened his district to “a Norman Rockwell painting after a few years of decline.” Western New York, he said, “is in the same condition a lot of Southern communities are that voted very strongly for Trump.” For the people who lived there, McMurray said, supporting Trump was “a Hail Mary.” Trump had, after all, made a lot of promises that sounded pretty good, especially to residents of deindustrialized and job-starved areas.

But McMurray thought the show that had once worked so well for Trump was getting old. “If you put diesel fuel in a regular engine, it will go for a few blocks, but eventually it seizes,” McMurray said. “And that’s kind of the situation we’re in. He gave a lot of false hope, and that false hope is running out.”

In addition to Medicare for All and legalizing marijuana, McMurray favored a ban on assault weapons. Hainey, the local activist who supported him, said that in a district full of folks sporting “God, Guns & Trump” T-shirts, supporting gun regulation of any kind was a potential liability. “Lots of people agree there should be some regulation,” she said, “but a small but loud, vocal minority opposes any regulation.” She added that while residents were generally hostile to Democrats, “Bernie resonated more locally … having medical insurance when you’re sick—that resonated.” Even Melodie Baker, a self-described moderate Democrat who was briefly in the race, acknowledged the local enthusiasm for Sanders, “especially with his position on health care.”

Both McMurray and Baker also emphasized that the district was more diverse than many realize. McMurray talked about the “huge, underreported” population of migrant workers who are “essential” to the region’s dairy industry. Baker said NY-27 is “more diverse than what the numbers say,” because people from the Middle East are counted as white. Some residents, she noted, had been hurt by Trump policies like the Muslim travel ban.

To McMurray, Trump’s election showed that Americans “value sincerity and authenticity over ideology.” We know “who Donald Trump is,” he said. “And people like me don’t like him, but other people like him because at least they know what they’re getting.”

Now secular but raised Mormon, McMurray seemed genuinely grieved that America has strayed so far from, as he put it, “the values that have made us such a happy people.” But he wasn’t deterred by his district’s conservative leanings or the dark turn in our national politics. He was confident he could win over even those who disagreed with him by being direct and transparent.

“Politics is about conviction,” he said. He planned to meet with area gun clubs, explain his position, and say to members, “Look, I respect you guys, I understand that you might not agree with me, but I’m going to tell you how I feel so at least you get my point.”

He also expressed a desire to reclaim patriotism from the right. “Somehow the Republican Party has associated itself with being pro-America,” he said. “I wave the flag at my rallies … that’s our flag.” Representing America at its best is powerful, he added. “I think if more progressives focused on that, you’d see a wave of people come back to the Democratic Party.”

McMurray’s formula reminded me of certain conservative critiques of the left, namely that leftists are hostile to America and you can’t win over large swaths of the US electorate by denigrating a country that many, including many immigrants, still take pride in belonging to and consider a beacon of hope. The idea that the left ought to inspire and uplift people rather than depressing and shaming them seems obvious and sensible in theory but difficult to apply: how do you address the urgency of fighting climate change or ending deadly police violence without upsetting people? Or as the comedian Al Madrigal put it in a 2012 Daily Show segment about the banning of a Mexican American studies program in Tucson: “I’m a Black kid. Try to teach me about slavery without me feeling resentment toward white people.”³³

In the end, McMurray’s yearned-for blue wave did not materialize to the degree, or in the places, he had hoped. In contrast to his stunningly narrow 2018 loss, he lost by nearly 21 points in 2020.³⁴ Biden won New York State by a large margin, but Trump held onto most of the New York counties he flipped in 2016, and Democrats underperformed in House races across the country.³⁵ There is no patriotic messaging—or perfect candidate—that can de-Trump a conservative area within an election cycle or two. But it’s worth wondering how much the remarks of regionally powerful fellow Democrats, and the reluctance of some to support McMurray unequivocally, hurt his campaign. Maybe a Democratic Party willing to go all-in on popular policies like Medicare for All and the legalization of marijuana, and unequivocally invest in promising progressives like McMurray, would still have lost in a district as conservative as NY-27. But so did the party that disparaged policies and candidates with local appeal and momentum.

Settling for Joe

After Sanders suspended his 2020 presidential campaign, many of his young supporters were deeply demoralized. But those committed to electoral work soon turned their attention to down-ballot races, while others continued to organize around specific issues and policies, like passing a single-payer health care bill in New York State. Although DSA did not endorse Biden for president, a number of DSA members participated in get-out-the-vote efforts in the months before the general election. Members had different feelings about volunteering for Biden specifically, but no one I spoke with saw the prospect of another Trump term as anything less than an existential threat. For partisan Democrats, the primary goal of 2020 was to get Joe Biden elected. For others on the broader left, it was simply to remove Trump. But once Biden became the official nominee of the Democratic Party, he also became its face—one that left much of the party’s base lukewarm at best.

Just before the coronavirus crisis hit the United States in early 2020, teenagers were posting TikTok clips of themselves wailing in anguish, “Please don’t make me vote for Joe Biden!” After Sanders and Warren suspended their campaigns, supporters of those candidates launched an organization urging progressive voters to “Settle for Biden”—not exactly a ringing endorsement.

A 2018 clip of Biden disgustedly telling Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times, “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are … give me a break!” had resurfaced and was making the rounds. When Biden exclaimed, “Give me a break!” the audience laughed. “No, no!” said Biden, holding up a hand to indicate that he was serious. “I have no empathy for it … Because here’s the deal, guys. We decided we were gonna change the world. And we did. We did. We finished the civil rights movement in the first stage. The women’s movement came into being. So my message is, get involved. There’s no place to hide.”

In August 2020, I attended a virtual Young Americans for Biden Convention pre-show with Pete Buttigieg, who had aspired to make history as the youngest and first openly gay person to become president of the United States. There was a lot of talk about kindness, humility, and empathy, and none of politics or policies, aside from a few vague references to our need to beat Trump as a “movement.”

Voto Latino CEO María Teresa Kumar appeared onscreen. “You are the most progressive generation ever!” she gushed. “You know climate change is real!” (A day earlier, the Democratic National Committee had quietly removed language from the party’s platform calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks.) “You don’t care that someone needs a path to citizenship!” Kumar continued (presumably meaning, “you don’t discriminate against immigrants”).

As it turned out, Mayor Pete, whom a half-dozen chat participants seemed eager to meet virtually, was only “joining” the event via a pre-recorded video. In the chat, excitement about hearing from Mayor Pete gave way to confusion and disappointment when it became clear that Buttigieg was present only in the form of a prerecorded video. The confusion increased once the video opened with Buttigieg addressing … Hawkeyes. Eventually it became clear that the organizers had played a video intended for Iowa voters, rather than one meant for young Americans.

One young person who had joined the chat late made a valiant attempt to ask Buttigieg a question about how Democrats could get money out of politics. His peers had to explain that (a) Buttigieg was not actually participating in the event and (b) we’d been treated to the wrong prerecorded video. Even through a computer screen, the deflation was palpable.

Not All Leftists Are Young, and Not All Young People Are Leftists

Although many new left candidates are young, female, and/or people of color, with the fresh perspectives those identities can bring, they have also been inspired and promoted by older politicians like Sanders, Warren, and Barbara Lee. Both eighty-year-old Sanders and seventy-two-year-old Warren ran significantly to the left of thirty-nine-year-old Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 presidential primary. And the enduring presence in US politics of figures like Sanders, Warren, and Lee, who was born in 1946, show that the emerging left is not entirely, or only, a product of generational change; the broader shift in our politics has also paved the way for older leaders to be celebrated for their consistent commitment to the cause—or to move left. People like seventy-five-year-old Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, who recently fended off an aggressive primary challenge from forty-year-old Joe Kennedy III, have shifted with the times. Despite being thirty-four years older than his opponent, Markey was, in that race, the “youth” candidate, thanks largely to his championing of a Green New Deal, which earned him the support of many much younger Sunrise activists. Some of the most highly regarded US leftists, still revered by the twenty- and thirty-something leftists of today, are in their seventies, eighties, and nineties: Sanders, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, Barbara Fields, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Cornel West is in his sixties. The pioneering feminist bell hooks, who died in 2021, was sixty-nine.

In a 2019 Jacobin column, “The Banality of Insurgency,” Liza Featherstone warned that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory had popularized a narrative about “fresh-faced insurgents” taking on the establishment that could be deployed against veteran progressives. “Socialism—or any progressive project—needs young people in order to succeed,” she wrote. “And a lot of incumbents do need to go … But let’s not let our own feel-good stories elect more neoliberals—or throw out the old white men we might need.”³⁶

Sensing a leftward shift in our politics, a shadow crop of Joe Kennedy-esque opportunists with questionable motives and flexible politics has emerged in recent years, rising up alongside those who appear to be sincere and committed progressives. Journalist Ross Barkan sees the failed New York City mayoral bid of Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive born in 1967 who was once the preferred candidate of many on the New York left, as one such cautionary tale. Morales, who spoke often of being a single mother and a woman of color whose family had lived in public housing, said plenty of leftist things during her campaign, most notably that she intended to cut $3 billion from the New York Police Department’s budget. But she voted for Governor Andrew Cuomo, soon to be a disgraced ex-governor, over progressive challenger Cynthia Nixon in 2018; supported charter schools; and ran for about a decade an organization called Phipps Neighborhoods, the social services arm of Phipps Houses, one of New York City’s largest affordable housing developers and worst landlords. Phipps had been under fire for the poor condition of its buildings, bad labor practices, and penchant for evicting tenants. By the end of Morales’s tenure there she was raking in more than $270,000 in annual compensation.

“Morales exposed how easy it can be for anyone, no matter their work history, to reinvent themselves as champions of causes and movements they never cared for before campaign season,” Barkan wrote in 2021.³⁷ Morales’s campaign collapsed after a number of staffers complained of mistreatment and attempted to form a union in the final weeks of the race. That she mismanaged her campaign doomed her as much as the apparent hypocrisy. To many leftists, even those who believe that women and people of color are underrepresented in politics, the authenticity, consistency, and righteousness of a person’s ideas matter more than their age, race, or gender. Separated from the rest of her life choices, Morales’s identity as a single mom/woman of color/daughter of Puerto Rican parents was not compelling enough to mobilize the New York left.

Beyond Bernie: The New Priorities of the New Left

Biden may have left most young people cold but witnessing or working on Sanders’s primary campaigns has expanded a generation of organizers’ vision of what is politically possible in the United States—and whetted their appetite for more. Once the 2020 primary was over, leftists began asking, in essays and public forums and behind closed doors: What mistakes had Sanders made? What lessons could we learn from his loss? And how could we press forward on the issues he had run on—Medicare for All, free college, cancellation of student debt, raising wages, strengthening unions, enacting a Green New Deal—without the enthusiasm, momentum, and press generated by a broadly popular candidate running a high-profile national campaign?

The answers varied. Some thought the deck was so stacked against Sanders that he was never going to win, no matter what. Others wished he had addressed race more frequently and explicitly and courted Black voters more aggressively. Jabari Brisport, then a DSA-backed state senate candidate, told me it pained him that Sanders had not actively lobbied for South Carolina congressman James Clyburn’s endorsement, even though he was unlikely to get it (Clyburn is widely credited with orchestrating Biden’s decisive victory in the South Carolina primary, which turned the tide against Sanders). Some argued that Sanders’s campaign reflected the growing strength of the American left, not its decline. For many, the high points of the 2020 presidential primary were the brief periods when Elizabeth Warren and, later, Sanders, were considered the front-runners. Low points included Warren’s claim that Sanders had told her in a private conversation that a woman couldn’t win the presidency, and the subsequent tensions that flared between the two most progressive candidates in the race, shattering the tenuous peace the campaigns had established up to that point. Many were further disappointed when Warren backed Biden over Sanders after suspending her own campaign, but others were unsurprised and unconcerned; their bases of support had always been different.

The broader left, including many centrist Democrats, bemoaned the end of a primary that had begun with a large and diverse field that could have yielded a number of historical “firsts” (e.g., the first Latino, gay, or Black woman candidate to receive a major party’s nomination), and ended in defeat for everyone but Biden, a seventy-seven-year-old white male moderate who had lost badly in the presidential primaries of 1988, 2008, and the early stages of 2020. For the socialist left, whose candidate had come the closest to victory, it was a particularly brutal loss. But it’s a sign of the left’s maturation that so many vowed to fight on. DSA members had countless conversations about how to sustain a movement that went “beyond Bernie,” whose campaign slogan was, after all, “Not me. Us.” Some of Warren’s more policy-driven supporters also pivoted from working to elect their candidate to pouring their energy into down-ballot races and get-out-the-vote efforts.

As the party’s nominee, Biden signaled early and often that he was ideologically opposed to large, universal programs. “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration,” Biden ally Rahm Emanuel declared during a CNBC interview. “One is there’s no Green New Deal, there’s no Medicare for All … That’s not even in the [party] platform.”³⁸ Former Delaware senator Ted Kaufman, who led Biden’s transition team, described the federal budget (the “pantry,” in his phrasing) as “bare” and the incoming Biden administration as “limited” in terms of spending because of what Trump had “done to the deficit.”³⁹ (While those remarks infuriated many on the left, who took them to mean that the administration would be unwilling to make necessary investments in the country’s future, a 2021 Politico story described Kaufman as anti–Wall Street and “a quiet force” in championing “more progressive, activist” regulators for roles on Biden’s economic team.)⁴⁰ Biden’s famous 2019 promise to wealthy donors at a New York fundraiser that he would not “demonize” the rich and that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” could not have been more at odds with the left’s fervent desire for many things to fundamentally change.⁴¹

While it was clear that the Biden administration, or at least certain members of and advisers to it, did not intend to pursue a progressive agenda, there were also signs that the left was stronger than it had been during the Obama years. From Occupy to the first wave of Black Lives Matter activism circa 2013-2016 and Sanders’s 2016 campaign, the American left was better organized and more visible than it had been for decades before. And, beginning in 2020, a global pandemic plunged many countries, including the United States, into public health, economic, and social crises. Combined with the left’s pre-pandemic growth, this rapid shift in conditions pushed Biden to the left of where he might have landed in the absence of a global crisis. A December 2020 report in Politico suggested that Rahm Emanuel had actively sought and been denied the role of Biden’s transportation secretary because organized labor, civil rights groups, progressives, and the party’s left wing considered him “too toxic” for a Cabinet position.⁴²

The appointment of New Mexico congresswoman Debra Haaland to head the Department of the Interior was likewise hailed in many quarters as a victory for the left. Haaland, a supporter of Medicare for All, is the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history. In 2016, she traveled to Standing Rock to join tribal leaders in opposing the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. She has also been credited with revitalizing the New Mexico Democratic Party during her tenure as chair. She was confirmed in spite of the fact that both Republicans and conservative Democrats expressed reservations about voting for her.

Even with a disappointing nominee like Biden, who had all of Clinton’s deficits and none of her strengths, leftists were notably more committed to ensuring a Democratic victory in the 2020 election than they were in 2016. The stakes were apparent to everyone who opposed Trump and the GOP’s agenda. A number of left-wing groups, including the Working Families Party, endorsed and worked hard to elect Biden, in spite of serious ideological and policy disagreements with him and his running mate, Kamala Harris, whose record as a prosecutor directly conflicted with the demands of many young organizers.

The fact that the left does not consider Biden a trustworthy or permanent ally has in many ways strengthened it. No one on today’s left believed that electing Biden was, on its own, enough to ensure progress on any given issue. Few saw him as a progressive hero who, once given a chance to lead, would magically morph into the second coming of FDR. Unlike in the Obama years, calls for organizers to be “patient” with Biden were much rarer, in part because Biden is not the history-making figure Obama was and has not faced the same direct and personal racist hostility, and in part because today’s organizers have made it clear that they are out of patience, and time. Many young people now feel that no one is coming to save them. That has made figuring out how to push for meaningful change, both outside and inside of electoral politics, all the more urgent.

Though this new left does not yet have a solid hold on American political power, its historic rise shows clear signs not only of resilience but of sturdy growth. Thanks in no small part to the successes of both of Sanders’s presidential campaigns, the commonsense strategy of championing big, bold ideas favored by large majorities of Americans has won over not only the left but segments of the so-called center, realigning our national discourse in the process.

This new moment has the potential to permanently reshape our country for the benefit of 99 percent of the population. The 2020 presidential election represented a turning point: it meant the defeat of Trump, if not Trumpism. But major national elections aren’t the only turning points that matter. Just as a powerful new progressive movement arose in the shadow of Trump’s 2016 victory, the new left can continue to organize, build, and grow, regardless of what the Biden administration does or fails to do, as long as it stays focused on the big picture.

Given the failures of the last four years, it is easy to criticize the Democratic Party. Building power outside of it and gaining power within it are much harder.

3

Youth-Run, Movement-
Driven Organizations

The American left is now contesting for power in a serious way, in multiple places and at multiple levels, for the first time in fifty years. While more members of the political establishment and mainstream media are now willing to credit groups like JD and DSA with running serious campaigns, many remain skeptical of the left’s ability to govern once in power. As Rich Azzopardi, a notoriously combative spokesman for New York’s disgraced ex-governor, Andrew Cuomo, once told me, “there’s facts and there’s bumper stickers, and you can’t run a government on bumper stickers.”

Voters themselves appear to trust leftists to govern effectively once they are in office. Ocasio-Cortez and the other members of the Squad were re-elected by wide margins and remain popular in their districts. Despite being one of the largest ideological caucuses in the House, with ninety-five congressional representatives and one senator, the existing Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) has been relatively weak for years, in part because its members do not vote as a bloc. In the brief period when the 2020 Democratic presidential primary came down to Sanders and Biden, Biden picked up twenty additional CPC endorsements;¹ Sanders netted just one more. Even the Squad has not voted in lockstep.

Rojas acknowledged that “we’re pretty new to governing as a movement.” As gifted and intelligent as she believes the Squad to be, she acknowledged that there is a steep learning curve for anyone who is brand new to Congress. The Squad is operating “within an institution that was built decades ago,” Rojas pointed out, and a Democratic Party “apparatus and mindset” that has permeated DC for decades. That can make for some challenging power dynamics, especially when the White House, the House, and/or the Senate are under GOP control. Rojas predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that once Joe Biden won the presidency and the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, Justice Democrats– backed incumbents, who are not beholden to corporate donors, would become “extremely critical” to advancing a progressive agenda. Some obstacles are clear to casual observers; others become apparent only from the inside. Ocasio-Cortez earned praise in 2018 for being transparent on social media about the less savory “inner workings” of Congress, such as new member orientations that feature corporate CEOs but no representatives from organized labor.²

Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, then co-chairs of the CPC, spent part of 2020 working to strengthen the caucus via a combination of internal procedural reforms and coordinating with outside groups like Indivisible. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin of Indivisible have waxed optimistic about the growing power of the CPC, which, they wrote in a 2020 op-ed, now includes not only the original Squad but “newly elected progressive insurgents like Marie Newman, Cori Bush, Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman,” as well as Jayapal and “committed progressives” like Ro Khanna and Lloyd Doggett.³ The CPC reformed its own caucus rules, Greenberg and Levin wrote, to make it easier to “negotiate and vote as a single bloc on specific legislation to secure progressive improvements or remove dangerous provisions.”⁴ The ultimate goal is to create a progressive bloc as powerful as the party’s still-dominant moderate wing, so that Democratic leadership will need progressive votes, and be forced to make concessions to secure those votes, in order to pass major legislation.

Obama had larger majorities in both houses of Congress and still failed to act on several major progressive priorities, I pointed out. Rojas replied that it would be an “absolute failure and squandering of everything that the universe is putting in front of us right now” to pursue Obama’s approach of appeasing the right, adding, that we “owe it to every single person to fight like hell” to ensure that doesn’t happen again. In her view, “everything has got to be on the table because everything is on the table for the Republicans.” Especially during a period when they control the White House and Congress, it’s up to the Democrats to stop tinkering around the edges and solve issues like immigration and health care once and for all. The congress of 2021, she pointed out, looks “a hell of a lot different” than the congress of 2009, and Biden is in a different political and historical position than Obama was—which is why it is “imperative” to hold his feet to the fire.

At the end of the day, what Rojas and her peers are fighting for isn’t radical at all. They want a country where every child can get a high-quality education and the government is committed to keeping US residents healthy and safe, in part by developing a plan to combat the climate crisis so we can “continue to live.” Justice Democrats is, Rojas told me, “just a vehicle to get there.”

A number of other progressive PACs have emerged in recent years. Ocasio-Cortez launched one of her own, Courage to Change, in early 2020. She framed it as the left’s answer to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which vowed in 2019 to blacklist any political vendors, such as Justice Democrats, who work with Democratic primary challengers, and a way to “even the playing field” for those challenging established incumbents.⁵ (In what was hailed as a progressive victory, the DCCC ended its blacklist in 2021 under pressure from groups like JD and elected officials like AOC.)⁶

Like Justice Democrats, Courage to Change seeks to elect “working-class champions” to Congress. In February 2020, it endorsed its first—and all-female—slate. Of the original slate, two won decisive general election victories in November, one (Jessica Cisneros in Texas) lost her primary by around 2,700 votes, and one (Kara Eastman in Nebraska) won her primary by a wide margin but lost the general election by around 15,000 votes.⁷ Courage to Change ultimately supported fourteen candidates in the 2020 cycle. Five won their general elections: Cori Bush of Missouri, Marie Newman of Illinois, Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, and Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman of New York.⁸

Call It a Comeback: The Resurgence of American Socialism

While the last several years have seen a resurgence of socialism, there have been a substantial number of socialists in office (and, more broadly, a vibrant American left) in the United States at various points throughout our history. The US Socialist Party was once a powerful third party. Its founder, Eugene Debs, received nearly a million votes during his 1920 bid for the presidency, even while incarcerated for delivering an anti-war speech. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, more than 1,000 socialists—including two members of Congress, dozens of state legislators, and over 130 mayors—were elected to public office throughout the United States, including in states like Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.⁹

After its heyday in the early twentieth century, US democratic socialism has at various times dropped and risen in popularity, achieving a limited resurgence in the 1960s and ’70s—in 1970, Ron Dellums, an African American from California, became the first avowed socialist to win a seat in Congress since World War II¹⁰—and again in the last decade. Even in years when American socialism was largely dormant as a political force, many still associated it with popular domestic policies and social equality. A 1949 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of Americans believed socialism stood for equality,¹¹ including equal rights and equal distribution of wealth. Overall, a combined 50 percent of respondents associated socialism with progressive policies.¹² According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans believe socialism would be a good thing for the country, and Democrats view socialism more favorably than capitalism (57 percent have a positive view of socialism; only 47 percent have a positive view of capitalism).¹³ A different Gallup poll taken around the same time indicated that 47 percent of Americans would vote for a socialist candidate for president—significantly lower than the proportion willing to vote for a gay or lesbian candidate, a Muslim, or an atheist.¹⁴

The Democratic Socialists of America has existed as an organization since 1982—the year the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the New American Movement, becoming what is today known as DSA, and the year I was born. At the time of its 2015 convention, DSA had just over 6,000 members nationwide. By 2021, it had more than 90,000 dues-paying members. According to the organization, roughly 22,000 of those members live in the Northeast; 20,000 in Hawaii, Alaska, and the American West; 13,240 in the Midwest; 9,416 in the Southeast; and 6,615 in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Mountain States. Today there are more DSA members living in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Mountain States than there were in the entire country just seven years ago. In late 2020, the organization launched a membership drive in hopes of recruiting upward of 100,000 members. This is comparable to the Communist Party of the United States, which had approximately 85,000 members at its peak in 1942.¹⁵

That socialism is again in vogue is primarily a function of the issues—Medicare for All, cancellation of medical and student debt—that DSA and politicians like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are best known for championing and which feel especially urgent today. For young people who grew up watching presidents party with and get treated like celebrities (see: Bill Clinton and Christina Aguilera, Barack Obama and Beyoncé) it’s especially appealing that new left leaders project humility and moral seriousness. Many respond favorably to politicians who behave like ordinary public servants, not members of untouchable elites. Asked what drew him to New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, Omar Abouhamama, then a sixteen-year-old volunteer from Astoria, Queens, told me he enjoyed helping the campaign pack groceries and prepare meals to deliver to neighbors in need. “I don’t [usually] see politicians in the street helping people out themselves,” he said admiringly of Mamdani.¹⁶ Especially for younger people, who are less likely than their forebears to belong to religious and civic organizations, DSA offers a powerful sense of camaraderie and the opportunity to be part of a community.

Svart also credited right-wing Red-baiting of Obama with catalyzing the renaissance of DSA: “There were some people who thought, ‘Well, if Obama’s a socialist, then it must not be such a terrible thing,’ ” she said, adding, “of course, as socialists, we know Obama’s a neoliberal.” Eventually many younger people, including some who had put a lot of energy into electing Obama, became dissatisfied with his performance. Average Americans, she said, increasingly found “what the state was delivering” deeply inadequate. Many people, Svart noted, were also “dissatisfied” when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party’s nominee, and terrified when Trump was elected. Members who joined DSA after 2016 were motivated primarily by a few things, she said: fear of Trump, anger at the Democratic establishment, and “fear that the liberals in the Democratic Party would be incapable of and/or uninterested in truly challenging Trump.”

In Svart’s view, DSA’s expansion reflects Americans’ growing sense of powerlessness. Restrictive US labor laws have put union membership out of reach for many; others are extremely frustrated with their union’s leadership. Nearly a third of US workers belonged to a union in 1965;¹⁷ fifty-five years later, just 10.8 percent did.¹⁸ Anger at the Democratic Party is not limited to national politics; many Americans have found it difficult to get involved in their local Democratic Party chapters as well, Svart said, whether because they’re “super corrupt” or just “rigid and dysfunctional.” The Democratic Party in many places and at every level, she added, is primarily “a constellation of consultants and people in the party who exist to funnel money to people that already have money.” Add the fact that “civil society” has “withered” in the last few decades, and it’s no surprise that young people are flocking to an organization that offers a sense of community engagement and opportunities to make real change.

Political scientist Robert D. Putnam made similar points in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, which posited that Americans have grown increasingly disconnected from their neighbors, communities, and families—so much so that they were even “bowling alone” rather than in leagues. That isolation has only deepened and accelerated in the last twenty years, and especially in the last two, due to the pandemic. DSA chapters organize neighborhood-specific canvasses that are often followed by social activities like bowling or grabbing a drink at a local bar.

As Dave Weigel of the Washington Post noted in 2019, the right seems torn between presenting DSA as a growing threat to the American way of life—one so dire that Trump felt compelled to vow in his 2019 State of the Union address that America would never be a socialist country—or pathetic lightweights. In Weigel’s words, depending on the day, “socialists are a terrifying force ready to overthrow the government, or a collection of snowflakes to laugh at.”¹⁹

The conservative publication Quillette ran a story in 2019 under the headline, “DSA Is Doomed.” Purportedly written by a Queens construction worker and designed to demonstrate DSA’s supposed hypocrisy, it included many colorful anecdotes about DSA meetings the author had attended at which the pretentious college kids who run the organization had condescended to him, an actual working-class white man. It turned out to be a hoax; “Archie Carter” was not a Queens construction worker at all, but a twenty-four-year-old “left-populist” from Illinois. Quillette had never bothered to confirm his identity.²⁰

In 2019, the Center for Jewish History in New York hosted a panel discussion on “the polarizing resurgence of socialism today, its historic successes and devastating failures, and how New York’s predominantly Jewish socialist movement paved the way for change a century ago.” The talk featured David Duhalde, as well as a Washington Post columnist, a historian, and Karol Markowicz of the New York Post. The audience consisted mainly of people in their seventies, plus a smattering of people in their thirties and several children.

Markowicz’s family left the former Soviet Union for Brooklyn when she was young. “People say not to fear socialism. Well, I am afraid, and you should be, too,” she said. Slowly turning in her seat to face the audience head-on, she urged us to “Be afraid!”

There was a murmur from the audience, some of whom nodded in solemn agreement. The younger people rolled their eyes. For most Americans under forty, socialism simply isn’t as terrifying as it is to some who lived through the Cold War or fled repressive regimes. According to a 2019 AP story, even young Miami Cubans from families that share Markowicz’s experiences and views are increasingly drawn to today’s brand of democratic socialism.²¹ This is partly a response to the growing social isolation identified by Putnam and Svart. DSA’s social component is attractive, especially to members who are young, far from family, looking for like-minded companions, and/or new to an area.

Coverage of the socialist left in the mainstream press has been mixed. The New York Times has been by turns alarmist, dismissive, and lightly sympathetic. After quoting the co-chair of Ohio State University’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter, the paper wrote that YDSA’s “effort to take on an aggressive and expansive agenda reflects the enormous energy on the far left … and part of the appeal of democratic socialism in this cycle: setting an array of big goals to help deepen a movement that goes beyond one-off protest events and marches.”²² (Some DSA members would reject the “far left” designation.) For many young progressives, the Times acknowledged, “democratic socialism is a far better representation of their ambitions … than the agenda of the Democratic Party, which they see as overly influenced by corporate interests, big-money donors and moderate traditionalists.”²³ A Times article on the 2019 DSA convention ascribed to “a certain kind of mainstream liberal” anxiety that “left-wing purity”—meaning the organization’s decision not to endorse any 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee who wasn’t Sanders—“might detract from unseating President Trump.”²⁴ Ultimately, the Times declared that whatever happened in the next election cycle, “it was plain that DSA constitutes a true movement, and of some mass.”²⁵

Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, which he founded in 2015, wrote in a report on DSA’s 2019 national convention that spending time with DSA members makes him feel as if he is “part of something humane and powerful and useful.” He also described the convention as “impressively well-organized for a left-wing gathering,” adding, “We might as well be at a conference of dentists. (I mean that as a compliment.)”²⁶

Writing in the New Republic, Doug Henwood—who, like me, is a DSA member who occasionally attends meetings in Brooklyn—described today’s DSA as a “group of mostly young people” who “treat one another in a respectful, comradely fashion, and try to think and talk through seriously what they’re doing.”²⁷ That seriousness of purpose is often overlooked or understated by the media, which prefers to focus on the group’s social aspect and newfound cachet. See the 2019 New York Magazine story, “When Did Everyone Become a Socialist? Pinkos Have More Fun,” which described socialism as “AOC’s calling card, Trump’s latest rhetorical bludgeon, and a new way to date in Brooklyn,”²⁸ and “ ‘Back That Azz Up,’ Comrade (at Least 6 Feet),”²⁹ a 2021 story in the same magazine which groused that socialists are socially awkward: they dance badly, and their idea of fun party talk is lamenting the state of abortion care in America today (I can’t speak for all socialists, but as for me: guilty as charged).

Many DSA members are annoyed by these kinds of stories. Some feel they have been personally mocked or misrepresented; others fret that the movement itself has been trivialized, which of course it has been. But there is little point in denying the element of “radical chic” at play in DSA’s sudden expansion: some people are there because it is, in certain places and circles, cool. Whether there’s anything inherently wrong with that is another question. As with any cause, some will eventually lose interest and drift away; others will get drawn in and become more deeply involved. It is possible to be sincerely committed to a cause while also enjoying the social occasions and opportunities for dating, dancing, and drinking it presents. No less committed a liberationist than the anarchist/socialist/feminist Emma Goldman is reputed to have said, “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution” (a paraphrase of, “I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it”).³⁰

Though both Henwood and Robinson have formed positive impressions of the organization, they remain clear-eyed about the challenges ahead. “How the hell do you coordinate the actions of a group that recently had ten times fewer members?” Robinson asked in his convention report, pointing out that the organization now has around 200 chapters, “all of which have to figure out how to advance ‘democratic socialism,’ an idea with a hotly disputed definition.”

DSA, Robinson added, is a big tent organization, “which means you have Marxists, anarchists, and Sanders-ish left social democrats all trying to work together,” naturally leading to differences of both strategy and vision. Some DSA members are well to the left of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Most are strikingly pragmatic, especially but not exclusively those who have joined in the last four years. They want to win power, not debates. They want to win elections, stop luxury developments, and help distribute food and medicine to their neighbors. They want to grow in numbers and influence, not evaporate into the ether, leaving only fraying banners and dormant Facebook pages behind. Robinson’s report raised a number of critical questions the organization is still in the process of hashing out: “Should we focus on union organizing or electoral politics? Should we have centralized organizations or decentralized ones? What positions should Democrats have to adopt to secure a socialist endorsement? If we disagree about these things, how can we work together in spite of it?”

Despite these challenges, DSA has already made modest but concrete electoral gains. Democratic socialists now make up 12 percent of the city council in Chicago, the third-largest city in the United States.³¹ There are currently five members of the United States Congress who belong to and/or were endorsed by DSA: in the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush, and in the Senate, Bernie Sanders. Incumbent Rep. Danny K. Davis was endorsed by Chicago DSA in 2008 and faced a primary challenge from a DSA member in 2019.³² Svart told me the organization does not publicly release the names of members unless they have been given explicit permission to do so. She did confirm that Bowman, Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib are current members. She also noted that, contrary to popular belief, Sanders himself has never actually joined, “although he is a friend and has spoken at our conventions; obviously, we very much support him.” She laughed, wryly adding, “He’s not a joiner.”

The Young Democratic Socialists of America Learn Old Skills

For young people drawn to political careers, it’s increasingly appealing and even professionally rewarding to go down one of two paths. One is to double down on Trumpism—a path most of those with careers in today’s GOP have at least partially embraced—à la Madison Cawthorn, the ultra-conservative twenty-five-year-old who, in 2021, replaced AOC as the youngest member elected to Congress since the 1700s.³³ The other is to join Ocasio-Cortez and her democratic socialist colleagues in fighting to drag the Democratic Party left.

DSA’s youth section is known as the Young Democratic Socialists of America. It’s arguably the organization’s most crucial arm because it introduces mostly young people to socialist organizing at a stage of life when they have plenty of time and energy to spend on it. Membership in YDSA is open to any DSA members who are full or part-time students, campus workers (including, but not limited to, adjunct faculty, teaching assistants, and non-traditional students), or youth who accept the aims, constitution, resolutions, and decisions of the organization. Members over thirty years of age may not hold elective office. Today’s YDSA is composed mainly of college and high school students organizing their own and other campuses. There are YDSA chapters at 119 college and high school campuses nationwide, including Dartmouth, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, University of South Florida, and Western Kentucky University.³⁴

Labiba Chowdhury, national YDSA co-chair, joined the organization in 2018, while enrolled at CUNY City College, a public college in New York City. “What drew me to YDSA was knowing we need truly transformative change and feeling disillusioned with the Democratic Party,” she told me. She didn’t even know if there was a Young Democrats chapter at her school, she said, and in any case, she had been looking to join an organization that was fighting for Medicare and housing for all on a national scale. “Anyone who has a vision of wanting to build a better world with college for all and Medicare for All will come to YDSA because we share those values and we are doing the work to make it happen.”

A daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, Chowdhury was born and raised in Queens. She grew up visiting Bangladesh every five years or so. “Children are literally knocking on your car window begging for food the second you drive out of your driveway,” she said. “Seeing that and knowing Bill Gates also exists in this world was a really radicalizing experience. It shaped my understanding that the world, as it is, is not okay.” When she was younger, she wasn’t sure how to fight for the world she wanted to see. “That’s why I find YDSA so exciting,” she added. “I feel like I finally found my answers.”

Despite feeling as if she had found her ideological home, Chowdhury initially encountered some structural obstacles to getting more deeply involved. A working student, she first joined during a semester when she often had to work during meeting times. But by the fall of 2018, her schedule had changed and she was able to start attending meetings regularly. She has been to every meeting since.

In early 2020, she took a leave from college to become DSA-backed candidate Marcela Mitaynes’s deputy campaign manager. Mitaynes defeated a twenty-six-year incumbent assemblyman in a four-way primary and was elected to the New York State Assembly that November.

“She’s a socialist tenant organizer,” Chowdhury said of Mitaynes. “I’ve never worked for a campaign like this before. Or on any electoral campaign, period. It’s new to me, and exciting, and the more I learned about [Mitaynes’s] background and involvement in these issues, the more excited I got about working for her.”

It was a steep learning curve. But Chowdhury benefited from the knowledge and experience of DSA members who had worked on and shared what they learned from the campaigns of Ocasio-Cortez and New York State Senator Julia Salazar.

Chowdhury said that Mitaynes’s campaign had also benefited tremendously from running as part of a slate (Mitaynes ran alongside Jabari Brisport, Phara Forrest Souffrant, Zohran Mamdani, and Samelys López). “We were all in this together, testing out new ideas and trying to figure out next steps.” Given that all but Brisport were first-time candidates, the pooling of resources, knowledge, and on-the-job learning proved key: every candidate but López, who was in a difficult multi-candidate race with several better-known candidates, won.

I asked Chowdhury if the campaign was paying her decently. At twenty-three, she was still on her parents’ health insurance, and not yet worried about health care. She said she was earning enough money “to live and pay for food and rent.” “It’s important work for the movement,” she told me. “I see the larger picture … I came in knowing that this is the kind of job where you’re going be working twelve to fifteen hours a day and not necessarily getting the weekend off. I came in knowing what it was going to take.”

Listening to her speak, I flashed back to my own brief tenure as a state legislative aide, which began in 2008 and lasted less than a year. While my boss was very good on most issues, I did not feel that I was serving the public or “the movement” in any concrete way—or even that there was a movement, apart from various weak and uncoordinated progressive nonprofits—and it was clear that my primary job function was to make my boss look good.

“The things that we want to accomplish aren’t going to be accomplished by electing one good person,” Chowdhury added. “The problem isn’t that there’s not enough good people in office; it’s that the system itself is broken. That’s why we need a mass working-class movement and to engage people on issues beyond just voting … There is no short-cut solution.”

Few of the young organizers I’ve met, including those who admire Sanders, seem to view him in the way many of my peers and I once saw Obama. I wanted to believe in Obamaas-savior; I wanted him to cleanse the country of the Bush dynasty and usher in a bold new era of hope and change. I will never forget the ecstatic hollers and thunderous applause that greeted the onscreen appearance of a helicopter transporting George W. Bush out of the White House once and for all during a live broadcast of Obama’s inauguration at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. During Obama’s first campaign, I heard what I wanted to hear. What I didn’t hear, I projected.

Some people saw Sanders in similar terms and were similarly disillusioned. My partner once spotted a woman in our Brooklyn neighborhood sporting a Star Wars–themed T-shirt that read, “Help Us, Bernie Sanders: You’re Our Only Hope.” Millions were bitterly disappointed when Sanders ended his campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and some on the left were angry when he aggressively campaigned for Hillary Clinton and Biden. But most people I’ve met in the last four years are far from blind loyalists, in part because they came of age in such traumatic and destabilizing times, from 9/11 and endless US occupations to ongoing climate catastrophe, persistently high rates of gun violence, two separate economic meltdowns, and a global pandemic. They were not counting on anyone, not even Sanders, to save them. As an eighteen-year-old Black man from Atlanta put it at a 2020 Sunrise meeting, describing his and his peers’ relationship to politics before discovering Sunrise, “We didn’t like Obama or Hillary or any of those clowns.”

In February 2021, YDSA organizers from across the country—including states like Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and West Virginia—gathered for their annual winter conference. Thanks to the pandemic, it was virtual.

I attended an opening breakout session, a number of talks, and various panels, including one on organizing a YDSA chapter on a conservative college campus and one on organizing a high school chapter.

Most of the attendees were first- or second-year college students, but a number were still in high school. They all seemed earnestly eager to learn and hone real organizing skills: how to apply for funding, how to run a phone bank, how to get people to show up to meetings, and how to get them to come back. A number talked about how Bernie Sanders and/or joining YDSA had completely changed their lives. “I took the usual stupid teenage route into leftism: podcasts,” one kid said, rolling his eyes. A kid from Florida said that after years of being called “a commie,” he figured he might as well just double down on that identity. Some brought up the urgency of the climate crisis and pipeline projects they were fighting in their own communities. One young Asian American man said his father confiding in him about the family’s financial struggles had turned him into a socialist. “Your anecdote touched me,” another young man wrote in the chat. “My father sharing his experience of poverty also radicalized me.”

Although it was hard to tell over Zoom, the conference attendees appeared to be predominantly white. But people of color had a clear presence: in addition to attending the conference, they ran a number of the workshops, delivered most of the talks, and made up most of the panelists in the larger panel discussions. A young Black man and a young white woman co-ran the conference. It was difficult to generalize about gender; a sizable minority listed their pronouns as they/them, and while it appeared to skew male, people using she/her pronouns ran a number of the workshops and spoke on panels. In every workshop I joined, when the moderator asked for someone to take notes, a young man would volunteer. Historian, activist, and author Barbara Ransby, who co-convened the Black Radical Congress in 1998, delivered the opening address.

The conference was an odd mix of isolating—interacting online is a poor substitute for being in the same room—and intimate: you can tell a lot from Zoom backgrounds. A student at Yale appeared to be joining from an uncluttered and reasonably spacious dorm room. By contrast, a young woman who moderated a kickoff event on canceling student debt appeared to be sharing a room with an older male relative. She remained impressively poised and focused as the man got up to retrieve a beer, cracked it open, and resettled himself on a couch behind her. At one point, he let out a sharp guffaw.

Many conference attendees cited apathy as a prime barrier. “It’s not that people don’t want to join DSA or don’t agree with us,” said one. “It’s that no one has ever asked them to join.” But students on campuses in conservative states like Alabama, Florida, Indiana, and West Virginia face obstacles bigger than apathy. Their campuses have active chapters of Young Republicans, Koch-funded libertarian groups, and flourishing chapters of Turning Point USA (TP USA), an ultra-conservative campus group so connected to GOP mega-donors that President Trump formally addressed it in 2019. For teen and early twenty-something socialists, these are hostile environments.

Given how emotional, reactive, and combative very young people can be, I expected more stories of open conflict. It was almost shocking how sweet-natured and morally serious the conference-goers were. “I like to make a point of introducing myself to the conservative kids,” one said. “I took a bunch of the ‘Socialism Sucks’ buttons they were passing out, just to be friendly.” That disarming approach, he added, had the dual benefit of confusing his opponents and taking the wind out of their sails.

Others took a more mischievous approach. “The TP USA kids are wimps,” declared a Purdue University student in Indiana. “They’re afraid of me because in person, I try to look tough,” she added with a nervous giggle. “So, try to look tough!”

When it came to building chapters and retaining members, the YDSA organizers’ advice to one another was both commonsensical and touching. “Make people feel like they matter, and you’re excited to have them there, and, like, you would definitely notice if they weren’t,” as one kid put it. It was the sense of community, not just the shared politics, that would keep people coming back.

Sunrise Rekindles the Environmental Movement

In August 2020, with a pandemic still raging in the United States, Varshini Prakash, the doe-eyed but punchy twenty-seven-year-old executive director of Sunrise, whose voice sounds remarkably similar to Ocasio-Cortez’s, opened a virtual event for the book she co-edited with Guido Girgenti, the media director for Justice Democrats (Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can) by honoring the land she was on and the Indigenous people who thrived on it before, and in far smaller numbers after, the “genocide by white settlers.” (Contrary to conservative lore, rituals like pausing to honor the Indigenous people whose land is now primarily inhabited by non-Indigenous people and stating one’s preferred pronouns are controversial even on the left, and especially within DSA—most people do it, but some find it tedious, patronizing, and potentially alienating to those not steeped in the mores of contemporary academic and nonprofit culture.)

After reciting a catalog of traumatic events that had taken place in the last couple of weeks—thousands of coronavirus-related deaths, mass job loss and economic devastation, hurricanes and wildfires, police attacks on Black people and/or protesters—she welcomed everyone to the call, “however you’re feeling about the state of the world: in despair, in rage, in love, in hope, in numbness, in readiness, in isolation, in connection … you’re welcome to be here, and we’re really glad to have you.”

She then asked people tuning in to share in the chat, “What is something that has been top of mind for you, with everything going on in the world, and what has been a source of support or resilience for you this week as well?”

Answers came pouring in from all over the country: “The magnitude of the trauma is overwhelming,” somebody typed. “My grandma has Covid; I go on bike rides with my parents to cope,” wrote another. “Puppy!!!!” another replied. “Mindful breathing,” “Sharing my climate despair with friends,” and “Meditation,” others typed. Even through a screen, it was a palpable parade of grief.

“In a world where we are so connected, as is our pain and our crisis, so must be our solutions and our collective resilience,” Prakash explained. “That is ultimately the vision of the Green New Deal, and of a society and a government and a world that works for all people.” It’s no accident that her organization has become the marquee environmental group of the Trump era, or that its members do not conform to what the New Yorker’s Emily Witt called “the dour stereotype” of an environmental movement “composed of white-upper-middle-class Appalachian Mountain Club members.” In addition to its young and diverse membership, one of Sunrise’s greatest strengths is the extraordinary communication skills of its organizers. Sunrise frequently emphasizes the power of sharing personal stories; in lesser hands, this might be easy to dismiss as hollow marketing language. Yet as one climate activist noted on a recent call, eyes glaze over when you drone on about carbon emissions. People respond more viscerally to accounts of families and communities devastated by climate change.

Sunrise organizers also excel at applying poorly understood concepts like “identity politics” and “intersectionality” in ways that have strengthened their cause, especially with younger people. They have an intuitive grasp of how various social categories and identities overlap and a sincere commitment to centering the experiences of communities on the “front lines” of the climate crisis. This is what makes the book Prakash co-edited a surprisingly compelling read: it is full of lushly detailed stories about organizers’ firsthand experiences of climate change, and low on arid moralizing about carbon footprints.

Inviting people to vent their fear and anxiety—and conjure a world with less of it—is a powerful tool of the new left. One of the last pre-pandemic parties I attended was a “pro-communism, anti–Valentine’s Day party,” the 2020 iteration of which doubled as a fundraiser for NYC-DSA’s candidate slate. New York State Assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest was there, sporting a striking sequined cocktail dress. A hush fell over the boisterous crowd as she began to speak. She asked everyone to picture a time when we had felt happy and at peace: maybe we were at the beach, or sharing a meal with our family. She closed her eyes, saying she was imagining the sun on her face. This sense of peace and well-being could be ours all the time, she added, if we continued working together to build a better world. We could choose abundance, peace, security, and comfort over deprivation, anxiety, precarity, and struggle. I closed my eyes but opened them a moment later to take a quick peek around the room. Some were tuning her out and murmuring to each other, but several appeared spellbound.

Adam Serwer argued in a 2018 essay in the Atlantic that some Trump supporters build community “by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them” and finding in their shared cruelty “an answer to the loneliness and atomization” of modern life. The clubby cruelty Serwer identified has always existed in American life. Redefined and re-popularized by Trump, it has also in recent years expanded and strengthened the right. But listening to Forrest and Prakash, it was clear that the left is now gaining power in part by offering an antidote of its own to the loneliness and atomization that has multiplied during the pandemic: a shared commitment to justice, human dignity, and a livable planet.

Meeting Kourtney B-Dunner, seventeen, and Saniyah Leon, sixteen, two high school organizers with the Sunrise NYC Youth hub, I was struck by their composure. B-Dunner is confident and poised; Leon is more soft-spoken and reserved. While both looked like the earnestly political, high-achieving teenagers they are—slightly built, with glasses, comfortable but well-made clothes, and minimal or no makeup—they were unusually thoughtful and observant.

They had joined Sunrise in part to increase the representation of people of color in the environmental movement, which, as B-Dunner pointed out, is largely middle-class and white. B-Dunner was especially excited to learn about Sunrise’s theory of change, which she described as “people power, political power, and people’s alignment.” She felt connected to Sunrise’s principles and liked the idea of helping to build “a mass class and a mass race movement.”

In my own late-1990s high school days, I made posters, organized movie screenings, wrote op-eds for the school paper, and engaged in careful, earnest, superficial conversations about race. As the child of a parent who had protested the Vietnam War, I spent the ’90s dreaming of the ’60s: what would it be like, I often wondered, to be surrounded by like-minded young people as eager to push society forward as I was? At the time, I had no idea where to put that energy. I knew plenty of young people who were angry about racism, sexism, and environmental degradation, but almost none who were thinking seriously about how to build and wield political power.

By the time B-Dunner and Leon decided to join one, several youth-led movements already existed and were actively recruiting new members. When I asked why they had joined Sunrise, as opposed to DSA or any other political organization, B-Dunner was characteristically direct. “Right place and right time,” she said, in the tone of a shrug emoji. “I like that it was all about youth involvement,” she added. “It felt really inclusive.” At first, she said, participating in Sunrise meetings and events “was a little bit intimidating, because I’m, like, with adults, and, you know, adults are not my age.” She added that that feeling quickly receded; even the adults “basically treated me as an equal.”

Leon said she thought Sunrise was taking off in large part thanks to Trump, whose rise had mobilized millions of supporters—and opponents. The coronavirus crisis had also spurred many to get more active in politics, she added. Many pre-existing social conditions—joblessness, stagnant wages, bad or no health care—were, she said, “highlighted” by the pandemic.

Politicians are, in Leon’s view, the single greatest obstacle to progress on the issues she cares about. “Most of our senators are white Republicans, which I find quite problematic, considering that doesn’t really reflect the demographics of America,” she said, adding, “The people in power aren’t working for ‘the people,’ they’re working for themselves and for corporations and for capitalism and money … if the people in power don’t change, then nothing really changes, unfortunately.”

B-Dunner described Trump’s presidency as a waste of four years. While it was good that he lost the 2020 election, she said, she was aware that “he’s not fully gone … he is still going to be prominent, and probably still a problem.” At the time, she was worried about the Senate run-offs in Georgia, which the Democrats ultimately won, taking extremely narrow control of the Senate.

She paused. “We still have hope that if we push Biden, we can implement change and make sure that he’s upholding what Sunrise wants him to uphold and trying to get more progressive climate legislation.” But ultimately, she added: “It’s still an uphill battle. Even if Trump is out of office, we still have to fight.”

Sunrise appears to have a keener understanding of power than many older environmental groups. As Witt noted in a 2018 story on the group, more than forty congressional Democrats have endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution since Sunrise’s first sit-in, including the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Joe Kennedy. The organization is clear-eyed about whom to target and where to push; as Justice Democrats’ communications director and Sunrise supporter Waleed Shahid has said, the endorsement most crucial to passing legislation is that of the House Speaker. At the same time, the group is primarily focused on building a movement, not lobbying individual politicians. As Prakash explained in Winning the Green New Deal, too many young activists grow up hearing that they need to marshal the strongest evidence and arguments for their position and “focus on the guy in the suit.” Building a movement is more effective, she argued, because “Even if the men in suits say no to our demands—as they will many, many times—we might still be on the path to victory, if we’re building enough people power.”

Knowing how to move the ball has made the group a formidable force in just a few short years. One thing the organization is doing that older environmental organizations have been unwilling to do, in part because of how and by whom they are funded, is confront and criticize Democrats.

The fact that Ocasio-Cortez joined Sunrise’s 2018 sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office also made the event much more attractive to national media. The story went from “Kids Annoy Nancy Pelosi” to “Newly Elected Congresswoman Publicly Challenges One of Her Party’s Top Officials.” Recalling the protest in his 2019 book, We’ve Got People, Ryan Grim wrote that he caught sight of Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, who was “red in the face” and “livid.” “ ‘Can you tell them we support every single thing they’re protesting us for?!’ ” he demanded of Grim.

Grim replied that although that was “mostly true,” the activists’ specific demand was the creation of a select committee dedicated to a Green New Deal, with the goal of producing legislation by March 2020. They also wanted leading Democrats, and particularly the chairs of climate policy-related committees, to reject contributions from fossil fuel companies. Hammill insisted that that was out of Pelosi’s control; she couldn’t force other lawmakers to refuse money from particular industries.³⁵ It is true, as Grim noted, that there is no legal mechanism by which Pelosi could bar other legislators from taking corporate cash, but there are plenty of ways she could make it politically toxic to do so, if that were what she wanted to do.

Several months before the confrontation with Pelosi, Sunrise skillfully turned the remarks of Scott Wagner, then a Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor, against him. When an eighteen-year-old Sunrise activist named Rose Strauss asked Wagner if his inaction on climate change had anything to do with the $200,000 in campaign contributions he had taken from fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and political action committees, he dismissed her as “young and naïve,” before asking, “Are we here to elect a governor or are we here to elect a scientist?”

This exchange was good for Sunrise—Strauss wrote about the experience for Teen Vogue and was interviewed about it by the New York Times—and bad for Wagner, who came across as corrupt and condescending, and, for many reasons aside from the exchange with Strauss, lost his race by a wide margin. As Strauss explained to the Times: “Our generation has the power of social media … We could take this really demeaning response and show he didn’t have it in him to answer the question.”³⁶

Sunrise made headlines again in 2019, when a group of young people and children from several climate justice groups, including Sunrise, Youth vs. Apocalypse, and Bay Area Earth Guardians, confronted California Senator Dianne Feinstein, then eighty-six, on her lack of support for the Green New Deal. “Government is supposed to be for the people, by the people,” said one little girl, to which Feinstein replied: “You know what’s interesting about this group is, I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that … I just ran. I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality, and I know what I’m doing.”

When one of the activists said she was sixteen, Feinstein replied, “You didn’t vote for me.” (Recent reporting suggests that Feinstein may have been in cognitive decline for several years. Her arrogance and dismissiveness may or may not be preexisting conditions. At a 2017 San Francisco town hall, she responded to heckling from anti-war protesters, “Okay, if you believe you know more than I do about it, you go right ahead.” Later she added: “You’re pretty good at yelling … You can sit here and pound your fists and I can show you what I’ve gotten done.”)³⁷

The confrontations with Pelosi and Feinstein drew politically valuable attention from major media outlets. In addition to raising the profile of the Green New Deal, confronting powerful Democrats sent an important message that newer groups like Sunrise were not afraid to play hardball, even with politicians long perceived as allies. Nor were they going to be mollified or silenced by tactics corporate Democrats had used effectively in the past, like Feinstein’s initial attempt to put forth a weaker bill that was, in her view, “realistic” enough to pass. (She was forced to shelve that bill by activist pressure sparked by the confrontation in her office.) By combining a show of force with a threat it has proven it can follow through on—do what we think is necessary to protect our future, or we will show up at your office and embarrass you—Sunrise had brazened its way into a stronger position.

The “adults in the room,” as corporate Democrats like Feinstein are forever claiming to be, never saw it coming. As Prakash told the Intercept at the time, “We’re clear that we need to push politicians of both parties to champion the scale and scope of action we need … we don’t think you should get a pass just because you believe in climate science and have a ‘D’ next to your name … when we push Democrats to go on the offense, it makes them more effective.”³⁸

Yet when it came to passing actual legislation, or even getting a vote on a nonbinding proposal like the Green New Deal, Sunrise fell short. Pelosi eventually formed a select committee to study climate change solutions, but she refused to commit to holding a vote on the Green New Deal. When Mitch McConnell held a Senate vote on the proposal in March 2019 in an effort to fracture the Democratic caucus, the measure failed, with all Republicans, three Democrats, and one independent voting against it and 43 Democrats voting “present.”³⁹

The DC Insiders’ Guide to Fighting the Right

Just over a month after the 2016 election, Leah Greenberg and her husband, Ezra Levin, who had both worked as congressional staffers, put together a guide to resisting Trump and his agenda that quickly went viral. Within months, they had co-founded Indivisible, a group dedicated to electing progressive leaders, rebuilding democracy, and defeating the Trump agenda. In addition to a national staff based in DC, the group now has over 6,000 local chapters nationwide. Some are large and well organized; Indivisible’s Brooklyn chapter has helped organize many a rally outside of Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home to pressure the senator to block the worst of Trump’s agenda and champion progressive priorities. Others are smaller and/or more focused on supporting local progressive candidates and pushing progressive measures in state legislatures. As of this writing, the Indivisible chapter in Kearney, Nebraska, was monitoring redistricting in the Nebraska state house.⁴⁰

“The feedback that I got from some friends on the Hill afterward was, ‘This guide is really, really great, and it’s going to make my life much harder—why’d you do this to me?’ ” Greenberg recounted, laughing. “A lot of it is, ‘Here is how you can make the day of a regular congressional staffer more complicated.’ ”

What sounded like a relatively anodyne set of recommendations from earnest young Washington insiders—Call your representatives! Show up at their offices!—was so radical for hidebound DC that some congressional staffers did not want to be publicly associated with it. “We probably had 20 people give us comments and additions to the guide, and we offered to credit everyone involved as authors. Most of the people who had previously worked on the Hill were like, ‘This is great, but I don’t really want to be associated with it because I need a next job.’ ”

Despite its aura of wholesome civic-mindedness, Indivisible has re-popularized tactics—sit-ins, “occupations” of congressional offices, bird-dogging (orchestrating and recording potentially damaging confrontations with elected officials and/or forcing them to go on record)—deployed by radicals in earlier eras. And despite having been founded by Democratic staffers, the group is not afraid to challenge Democrats. As Greenberg put it, “We don’t have to have a full alternate policy agenda in order to ferociously resist what is happening. It is crucial the Democrats be in that posture and not be orienting around their usual compromise position.” Pausing to reflect, she added, “That wasn’t popular with everyone.”

Like most Democrats, Greenberg believed that Trump posed a unique and existential threat. But she also recognized that “our institutions have failed us in order to produce an outcome like this,” she said.

Although Indivisible did not endorse a candidate in the 2020 presidential primary—local leaders feared it would be too divisive—Greenberg told me that Elizabeth Warren was consistently and throughout the primary “the preferred candidate of a plurality of Indivisible leaders and [members of] our email list.” During the primary, members were asked to sign a pledge to “make the primary constructive, rally behind the winner, and do the work to beat Trump.” Unlike DSA, Indivisible endorsed Joe Biden in the general election.

Local Indivisible chapters have been involved in protests against police brutality and other efforts also supported by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and the MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators) caucus of the UFT (United Federation of Teachers). Some chapters hosted bimonthly events in Summer 2020 for volunteers to write and send postcards to “likely voters in key states who may have been removed from the voting rolls as a result of Republican voter suppression.” The group also held phone- and text-banking events to “Take Back the Senate, Get Out the Vote, Help Voters Vote by Mail, and Win in 2020!”

Indivisible emphasizes structural issues like ending gerry-mandering, protecting voting rights, pushing for court reform, and tightening campaign finance laws. “The short version being that Republicans have spent the last forty years winning and then changing the rules to stay in power,” Greenberg said. “And we can’t continue to play a rigged game—we actually have to shift the structures so that we have a more genuinely representative democracy that’s not rigged. That’s our North Star; it’s what we’re oriented toward in 2021.”

Asked what Indivisible’s “litmus tests” for candidate endorsements are, Greenberg said the organization does not have a formal platform, but it does require congressional candidates seeking its endorsement to fill out a screening form. A bad answer on the form can be a “deal breaker.” Indivisible-backed candidates must also reject corporate PAC money and support a full repeal of Trump’s tax cuts.

Greenberg believes that people who decry “litmus tests” in politics are usually operating in bad faith. “The reality is, everyone everywhere within the Democratic Party draws litmus tests, and we’re just arguing about where the line should be,” she said. Nobody in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, she argued, would back a candidate who was anti-choice or didn’t believe in climate change. (That may or may not be true in 2022, but there are several examples to the contrary in the recent past. In 2017, Rep. Ben Ray Luján, then the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, joined Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in reassuring anti-choicers that there was no abortion “litmus test” for Democratic candidates: “we have to be a big family in order to win the House back.”⁴¹ And in 2014, New York governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters: “I don’t want to get into a political debate at this time about climate change causes, et cetera. Forget the causes. Is it global warming? Is it reliance on fossil fuels? Forget the causes. What is inarguable is the result.”⁴²)

Whether it’s better for the left to avoid labels or proudly claim a specific identity, endorse candidates or avoid endorsements, or welcome into the fold partial allies who support Medicare for All but not abortion rights are crucial questions that are still being debated, especially in more conservative parts of the country. “There’s just an emotional level to an Indivisible group [in a red and/or rural area] that is different from a community in a blue state,” Greenberg told me. “A lot of times, that is the first time that people who consider themselves progressive or even just Democrat-oriented at all have gotten together in community.”

“There are often really powerful impacts to even just a small group of people being really visible in their community,” said Greenberg. “I say this as somebody whose family is from small-town Alabama, a town where there is not an Indivisible group right now. Most of the time, if you’re in a place that’s dominantly conservative and there’s not very many people who are willing to speak up and represent different perspectives, then the perspective you’re getting on ‘what is a progressive’ is filtered to you entirely from Fox News and Sinclair [a right-wing telecommunications conglomerate].” That’s what makes it extra “powerful and important,” she said, for a set of people to stand up and say, “ ‘Hi, I am a nurse, I am a teacher, I am your neighbor; here are my set of beliefs on health care.’ ” Even small acts of visibility can make a big difference. “I’ve heard several different stories, too many for it to be purely anecdotal, about Indivisible groups putting on the first gay pride parade, or having the first gay pride float in a town parade,” Greenberg added, “and the impact that’s had for people.”

Indivisible is an important part of the new left universe and an obvious home for people who identify strongly with the Democratic Party but want the party to be bolder, more effective, and more accountable to its base. Its members see powerful Republicans as their primary enemy, followed by obstructionist Democrats like Joe Manchin. It is progressive and reformist, not socialist or radical. Its “litmus tests” are not as clear and specific as those of other groups. That flexibility has enabled it to attract more than a million members and thousands of group leaders nationwide. According to Greenberg, Indivisible is “broadly interested in moving the Democratic Party to the left on social, economic, and racial justice issues.” Some members drifted away after Trump was voted out in 2020. But especially in large, urban centers like New York, many have remained active and committed to pushing the party left.

The Democratic Party and Its Pundits Respond

These groups are exhibiting a clear-sightedness and strategic seriousness that has been missing on the left for decades, but the results so far have been mixed. While Justice Democrats and DSA have racked up an impressive number of electoral victories and now have a small but notable presence in Congress, the Democratic Party chose Biden, who made no secret of his opposition to policies like Medicare for All and across-the-board cancellation of student loan debt, as its nominee. Still, it’s clear that powerful figures within the media and the Democratic Party have taken note of—and begun responding to—the rising left.

Critiques of, and explicit challenges to, the Democratic Party establishment have not always been met with grace and good humor by top Democrats. In 2019, veteran Democratic leader Rahm Emanuel, who is widely believed to have suppressed evidence of the police murder of a Black teenager to secure re-election as mayor of Chicago, publicly disparaged Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC’s former chief of staff and current president of a progressive think tank, as “a snot-nosed punk.”⁴³

But where senior Democrats like Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi have fought back against left-wing challengers via insults and downplaying the threat, others have sensed the changing times and shifted their perspectives accordingly. Septuagenarian Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, a standard liberal Democrat who voted for the Iraq War, fended off a robust primary challenge in part by embracing the “radical” agenda of groups like Sunrise, whose passionate support fueled his win. “The time to be timid is past,” an emboldened Markey declared in his victory speech, adding, “The age of incrementalism is over.”⁴⁴

Ed Kilgore, current New York Magazine political columnist and former policy director for the Democratic Leadership Council, a group founded in 1985 to pull the Democratic Party right, published a piece in 2019 titled, “A New Role for Democratic Centrists: Helping the Left Win,” in which he argued that “the time has come for a change of leadership in the Democratic Party, with the long-suppressed left finally getting a chance to show its political and substantive prescriptions are what the country wants and needs.”⁴⁵

Brad DeLong, a UC Berkeley economist who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration, gave an interview to Vox around the same time. In it, he argued that Democratic politics and policy ought to be fueled and driven by the broad and popular ideas of the left, rather than by small-bore, market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support that never materialized.⁴⁶

Even Peter Daou, one of Hillary Clinton’s most vocal supporters in 2016—he once denounced Sanders’s campaign as “a hate mission against one woman”—had, as of 2019, switched his allegiance to Sanders, declaring him “the only candidate who has sparked a true movement.”⁴⁷

In April 2021, Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Committee, issued a statement supporting Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a powerful incumbent Democrat. In it, he castigated Justice Democrats for backing Rana Abdelhamid, a DSA member who was challenging Maloney in the 2022 Democratic primary. (As of April 2022, DSA had not endorsed in that race and had no plans to: “We are currently staying out of that race, and while I never say never … I am pretty confi-dent that we will not be endorsing anyone in [Maloney’s district] this year,” an NYC-DSA spokesperson told me in an email.) “Make no mistake about it,” Jacobs wrote, “This challenge is not about progressive causes. This challenge is about one thing: power. Maloney has it and the DSA wants it.”⁴⁸ Leftist Twitter reacted with glee. As DSA member Honda Wang tweeted: “Jay Jacobs has one thing right: DSA isn’t interested in the moralizing and hand-wringing which has characterized the past half century of the US left. We want power.”⁴⁹

Socialists have not yet taken over the Democratic Party. But they are certainly contending for power within it—and few in power are willing to give it up without a fight.

4

Sanders-Style Populism
Comes to Pennsylvania

If a primary goal of the new left is to transform government, it’s especially crucial to build power and win converts in battleground states like Pennsylvania. Jonathan Smucker grew up outside of Bird-in-Hand, a small, rural, working-class community with large Amish and Mennonite populations in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Although he was raised Mennonite in a conservative community—“life really revolved around church; we were there at least three times a week”—he had become a leftist by age seventeen.

An unassuming, forty-something white man with a gentle manner that belies his strong beliefs, Smucker is mild and generous in conversation and patient and teacherly in explaining how he formed his worldview. In public appearances, he clasps his hands in front of him or moves them around for emphasis while speaking. After leaving home, he immersed himself in the relatively small and powerless activist community of the mid-1990s, joined the anti–World Trade Organization protests of 1999, and gradually grew disillusioned with what he saw as the left’s self-defeating insularity. Around the same time, he began to realize that most American political leaders—in both major political parties, most large nonprofits, and most powerful unions—had, for the last fifty years, occupied the top 10 to 20 percent of the economic spectrum. The once-strong connection between the Democratic Party and its working-class base had frayed to a slender thread.

Smucker considers his own community a case in point. An enervated left had ceded large swaths of the state between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—a vast area that was once home to pro-worker progressives—to the ascendant right. The left wasn’t solely to blame, Smucker acknowledged; major economic shifts like deindustrialization and globalization had also played a role. But the fact remained that educated progressives like Smucker and his wife, Becca Rast, who is also from the area and is currently Justice Democrats’ managing director, were leaving their hometowns in droves. And the Democratic Party and many progressive organizations were writing those towns off.

Smucker decided to move back to Pennsylvania and apply the organizing skills he had honed in big cities to neglected rural areas. He and Rast moved back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in January 2016. At the time, they were both working for national progressive organizations. Though they were unsure of the timeline, they knew they wanted to start organizing locally and statewide. Trump’s election kicked them into high gear. Smucker and Rast had been developing an organizing theory in collaboration with leaders of Sunrise, Justice Democrats, and other groups, and organizers who, like Smucker, had come out of Occupy Wall Street and Sanders’s 2016 campaign. They could see that the United States was in a “populist moment,” and hoped that their organizing model would help harness some of that energy. Eventually Smucker co-founded Lancaster Stands Up, a progressive group in Lancaster County, which expanded and grew into Pennsylvania Stands Up, a statewide umbrella group with a number of local member organizations, including a Philadelphia-based organization called Reclaim Philadelphia.

Beyond the Choir, another organization Smucker co-founded, along with a movement organization called Momentum, helped to train and strategize with leaders who would go on to form and be part of organizations like Sunrise, Justice Democrats, and Pennsylvania Stands Up. Smucker said he sees these leaders as “highly aligned” and “part of the same tendency.” They held a series of strategy retreats in the years between Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 election. “I don’t think there’s anybody in that tendency who’s not a socialist,” he added.

Although they are working toward many of the same goals as DSA and many of their leaders are socialists, the groups that Smucker cited do not explicitly or publicly identify as “socialist.” (This is true of many on today’s left, including some members of DSA, to which Smucker also belongs.) This is because the organizations he is most closely aligned with are, he said, “very practically focused.” The idea is to broaden the base of support for progressive policies, especially in places and communities often dismissed as lost causes. To that end, he said, “we’re not going to be attached to this word or that word.” Smucker sees his role not as converting people to a particular cause but walking them through “a pedagogical process where they’re forming [their own] ideology.” To him, political analysis is far more valuable when it’s accompanied by “the practical political skills that it takes to build and wield power.”

Smucker said he appreciates much of the work DSA has done and wishes he’d had more time to invest in the organization in Pennsylvania, especially the more “strategic and power-oriented” tendencies within it. It annoyed him that the Lancaster, Pa., chapter of DSA initially “had nothing to do” with Lancaster Stands Up (LSU), even though many of LSU’s leaders also belonged to DSA. Some DSA members, Smucker said, dismissed Lancaster Stands Up as “liberals” simply because its members weren’t “leading” with “the fact that we’re socialists.”

Some DSA members did eventually come around and begin actively collaborating with LSU, Smucker acknowledged. But he was “never going to prioritize” building a DSA chapter over “building a mass organization.” He added that he knows and appreciates that many DSA chapters are “building and contributing to issue and electoral campaigns while building their chapter at the same time.” But in general, and although he considers them “valuable institutions,” he sees DSA and socialist magazines like Jacobin as overly focused on analysis at the expense of developing practical skills. He was frustrated by what he saw as a side of DSA that was more interested in promoting a “book club version” of socialism than in building real-world power.

He wanted to be clear that his critique wasn’t just about individual groups and leaders; there were important economic and historical forces to contend with as well. Taking a step back, he said: “This is nobody’s fault, right? We’re at the end of a forty-year period of decline of the kinds of institutions on the left that build up leaders and skills. And so we have this generation of political orphans that are figuring it out.” While he understands the challenges, he also believes the left is “in a race against time” to cultivate the skills, candidates, campaigns, organizers, and strategies required to “outmaneuver the Democratic Party establishment,” shift the momentum on life-and-death issues, and win.

Of course, he noted, it isn’t all or nothing. “I think that there are really important elements of this [practical approach] within DSA and Jacobin, too. I’d like to see it go more in that direction, with more of a premium placed on those skills. Fundamentally, I believe in contingent outcomes, political outcomes.”

Looking back to the 1930s, Smucker juxtaposed the triumph of FDR and the New Deal coalition in the United States with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in Europe. “The left was stronger in most of those countries than it was in the United States,” he pointed out. “It doesn’t always boil down to the competencies, but political competencies can make a huge difference.” Whether or not we have the skills required to seize a particular historical moment, he added, is “the one factor of many factors, including economic factors, that we have the most control over.”

Another aspect of our politics that Smucker sees as within the left’s control—and in need of improvement—is how organizers talk about and relate to populism. Much of the post-2016 political discourse in the US centered around what he sees as a false dichotomy: whether the broader left, and the Democratic Party in particular, should emphasize race or class. In the minds of many mainstream political commentators and strategists, the two are largely separate: you can either appeal to voters of color by focusing on racial justice or you can de-emphasize “identity politics” (itself a misunderstood term) and appeal to the white working class. Pennsylvania is a useful example, Smucker explained. “We’re not just talking to predominantly white communities. Most of the smaller cities that we’re organizing are majority people of color—places like Lancaster, Coatesville, Harrisburg, Reading, York, and Allentown. And then the surrounding areas are overwhelmingly white. But we’re organizing both places.”

People wouldn’t see this as an unnavigable contradiction, he added, if they had a better understanding of what populism is and how it works. Liberals don’t get it, partly due to their class disposition (most prominent liberals are not working-class). From Smucker’s perspective, many on the left don’t get it, either, or don’t understand how to use it to advance their goals. And as often as columnists for the Washington Post and New York Times try to conflate them, there are, he noted, fundamental differences between the reactionary populism of Trump and the inclusive, progressive populism of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.

Thanks to deteriorating political and economic conditions, fewer and fewer US residents see our political leaders as credible and legitimate. Smucker dates this modern crisis of authority to around the second term of the Bush administration, which culminated with the Great Recession. “That’s the first moment where the political elites actually caught wind [of the problem],” he said. “Political elites are always the last to get the memo about crises of authority and legitimacy, because part of how they got to be elites is they lost touch with working people.” That’s why rhetoric like “We the people vs. the corrupt establishment” is a powerful way to tap into rising populist sentiment. It’s also, Smucker noted, “ambiguous and vague.” The analytical left “gets it wrong,” in his view, because they’re looking to spell out “a neat class analysis as their public-facing message.” Since most people are not paying very close attention to politics, if one party—the Democratic Party, in 2016—is calling for a return to the status quo, and the other is running somebody who has the superficial trappings of an outsider who wants to disrupt the political class, many will find the latter more compelling. People respond to the theater of it, and how it makes them feel.

“We often pay attention to how Trump ‘punches down’ at immigrants, Muslims, and others,” Smucker said, “and that is a big piece of reactionary populism. But Trump’s appearance of ‘punching up’ is just as essential to his appeal. And he does that by punching up at the top 10 percent. Not the 1 percent or the 0.1 percent, but the cultural elites: the Democrats in Congress, academia, media, and Hollywood. And it works, because when you feel angry at the top and left behind, the people in the top 10 percent, the educated classes, look a lot like the top from your vantage point.”

Elite condescension, Smucker noted, is real, and people respond to it accordingly. He brought up Hillary Clinton’s comment about deplorables and strategist James Carville’s famous line about Pennsylvania. Often remembered as “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle,” it managed to insult both Pennsylvanians and Alabamans in one fell swoop. Economic forces, Smucker asserted, are “like the weather. People feel resigned to them. But they respond viscerally to human condescension.”

Sanders-style populism, by contrast, is “actually more compelling if we’re doing it right.” It involves naming an enemy that most people have in common, such as the rapacious economic elites responsible for the suffering of the lower classes. Trump’s reactionary populism is narrower and more limited in its appeal. And it can be deflated when the opposition party fights the uglier brand of populism with an attractive and inclusive version. As Smucker sees it, the problem is that the Democratic Party “has been unwilling to do that.”

The left, he continued, often makes the mistake of making everything “about us,” instead of “speaking boldly from the voice of the people we’re organizing with.” He offered an example of rhetoric he considers tone-deaf and ineffective: “ ‘The left delivered for Joe Biden. Now, Joe Biden needs to deliver for the left.’ ” He believes it’s more compelling when organizers use the words that people use about themselves: “ ‘Working-class people, young people across racial lines, and the grassroots organizations we built together delivered for Joe Biden. Now he’d better deliver for working people.’ ”

For decades, both major parties have been fighting over the segment of the population that regularly votes—mostly affluent suburbanites, who oscillate between Republicans and Democrats. Both parties began to take it for granted that most working-class and poor people would stay home, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the number of people who didn’t bother to vote gradually increased, and that abstention has cost the Democratic Party more than it has cost the GOP. There has been, Smucker added, “a massive rebellion against the leadership of both political parties” in the last decade or so, making those who feel disconnected from their party less likely to vote while spurring those who feel especially passionate about candidates like Trump to turn out in large numbers. This gave rise to two parallel insurgencies. In Smucker’s view, the Republican electoral insurgency began in 2009, with the rise of the Tea Party and the defeat of entrenched establishment figures like former Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Smucker sees Trump’s presidency as a legacy of the Tea Party.

By contrast, he said, you could argue that the Democratic insurgency started with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, but most Occupiers were “allergic to electoral power.” So there wasn’t much sustained and effective electoral organizing on the left until around 2015, when Sanders announced his first presidential run. And Sanders, Smucker noted, was just one candidate. The way he sees it, the left didn’t start a meaningful battle for political power at the federal level until around 2017, with the primary campaigns of Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad. That’s why the Democrats haven’t achieved the same consolidation of “insurgent, rebellious energy” as the GOP. In the last twelve years or so, the Republican Party has managed to inspire and activate its right wing while retaining most of its base. Democrats have run insurgent campaigns here and there, but Sanders lost and the left holds only a small number of seats in Congress. Without an energetic populist like Sanders promising transformational change at the top of the ticket, many voters who might have turned out for a Sanders-like candidate simply stayed home.

Smucker said that organizations like Pennsylvania Stands Up “mitigated that as best we could,” as did other left-leaning, grassroots coalitions in places like Florida and Georgia. PA Stands Up made a special effort to connect with those who were ambivalent about the Democratic Party. Smucker estimated that the group delivered around 54,000 votes to Biden in the state of Pennsylvania, mostly by convincing Pennsylvanians that Trump posed a unique threat to the country (Biden ultimately won Pennsylvania by more than 81,000 votes). “The Democrats really better deliver,” he said, “because people aren’t going to vote against Trump in 2022 or 2024.”

Living and working in “Trump country,” Smucker has a better intuitive sense than most DC-based strategists of what motivates his neighbors. He worked hard to help elect Jess King, an insurgent candidate who ran a promising 2018 congressional campaign in conservative Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Yet despite King’s tenacity, authenticity, and impressive field operation, her Republican opponent beat her badly on Election Day. Smucker attributed her loss to a combination of mid-race redistricting (the district went from R+6 to R+14 partway through the race) and “history-defying” Republican turnout. It was, he said, extremely unusual for the party that controlled the White House to turn out so heavily in a midterm election. King’s campaign revealed both the promise and potential of a reinvigorated left and how it’s lagging compared to the right. “We actually hit our ‘win number’ based on how the party in power has turned out in midterms for the past fifty years,” he said. “And we lost by 18 points. That’s how high Republican turnout was.”

Smucker rejects a “neatly symmetrical” comparison between the Tea Party and the new left. The Tea Party insurgency, he said, “gained a whole lot of seats, gained political momentum, sabotaged the Obama administration, and won the presidency [with Trump] by running on what were actually very unpopular policies, but red meat to the Republican base,” he said. The left has the potential to perform even better because, “We actually have popular positions!” The fact that most of the policies the left supports—from single-payer health care to marriage equality to decriminalization of marijuana, criminal justice reform, taxing the rich, infrastructure investment, and tackling the climate crisis—have “super-majoritarian or majoritarian” support is, to Smucker, the main difference between the left and the Tea Party. That’s why he finds it “insane” that the Democratic Party is so reluctant to “go bold” on positions that are “actually really popular” within and beyond their base.

Of course, he added, “Politics make a lot more sense when you realize the careerists who are involved, their class position, and the insularity of the political class … there are people who would rather be in charge of a party that loses than lose their jobs or status in a party that wins.” Add to that the outsize influence of corporate donors, and the fact that many senior Democratic leaders were deeply scarred by the conservative backlash that fueled the rise of Ronald Reagan and succeeded in an earlier era by positioning themselves as reasonable moderates. “That’s kind of their trick, right?” Smucker said. “But we’re not living in the 1980s anymore.”

It’s no longer the ’80s, and the United States is far from the most advanced country in the world, as Hannah Laurison, an American in her forties who grew up in the Netherlands and has lived all over, including in Oakland, the UK, and, since 2016, Pennsylvania, can attest. A co-founder and former executive director of Pennsylvania Stands Up, Laurison has pale skin, large, light eyes, and an urgent demeanor. Before 2016, she worked in nonprofits, with a focus on food justice. Her time in the UK brought into sharp focus the stranglehold the right has on US politics.

Republicans have controlled both houses of Pennsylvania’s state legislature since 2011, but Democrats controlled both chambers and the governor’s office in 1993. Other state legislatures have also flipped from blue to red in the last five to twenty-five years. Wisconsin Democrats controlled the legislature in 2009 and 2010; it has been under Republican control since 2011. Democrats held the West Virginia state legislature from 1992 to 2014; Republicans have held it since 2015. Because it has gone in the opposite direction, New York State serves as an important model for Pennsylvania Stands Up. From 1995 to 2006, New York was governed by a Republican, and Republicans controlled the New York State Senate (Democrats have controlled the NYS Assembly since 1992). There is now a small but growing squad of socialist legislators in Albany, and state senate Democrats secured a supermajority in 2020, giving them veto-proof control of the legislature and the ability to override the will of more conservative Democrats like the former governor Cuomo.

That dream is a long way off in Pennsylvania, where the GOP retained control of the legislature in 2020 and GOP lawmakers, in a remarkably Trumpian move, refused to seat a duly elected Democratic colleague in hopes that a federal judge would overturn the results of that election, which had already been certified by the state. (The judge, a Trump appointee, ruled in favor of the Democrats.) While progressives were instrumental in delivering Pennsylvania to Biden, Democrats suffered losses in down-ballot races. Conservative Democratic legislators blamed young progressives for these losses, claiming their opponents’ tying them to calls to defund the police doomed their campaigns. Progressive organizers and legislators like Summer Lee, a state representative backed by DSA and Reclaim Philadelphia, bluntly rejected that narrative. As Lee tweeted shortly after the election, “You did NOT lose in your suburbs where you’ve allowed racism to fester because of ‘defund police’ or ‘progressive messaging.’ You lost because the Democratic Party has no down ballot strategy, no message that resonates with the masses, no field strategy, no vision.”¹

The GOP certainly did its best to portray all Democrats—including those who, like Biden, explicitly reject the politics and policies of left legislators like Lee—as hell-bent on abolishing the police, which probably hurt some moderate candidates in some districts. It’s also true that the party lacked a coherent down-ballot strategy and a message with mass appeal. Left organizers do not see it as their job to worry about how calls to defund the police will “play” in certain districts. They want to address, and want their elected representatives to address, the underlying causes that led to mass nationwide protests in the summer of 2020. To young leftists, a few lone Democrats seemed to be demanding justice, while a much larger contingent was demanding that young people and people of color support Democrats without expecting much in return. Biden and the left disagree on far more than questions of emphasis and strategy. In many cases, they simply do not want the same things. As Ocasio-Cortez told New York Magazine in 2020, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”²

Pennsylvania Stands Up has managed to elect a small number of legislators statewide and has successfully pressured others to take stronger stands on certain issues. It is also investing in a very long-term strategy, at a time when young people in particular feel they can’t afford to wait. Laurison said her group understands the scale of our national crises and is attempting to address them on multiple fronts at once: through long-term electoral strategy, including candidate recruitment, as well as via local mutual aid efforts to help people in need get groceries and medicine and help those who are arrested navigate the bail system. The aid served a dual purpose of helping those in need and encouraging them to consider why they needed help in the first place. Working on elections, she added, is “how we get to the point where we don’t need these sorts of down-river interventions” as much as we do under a dysfunctional government.

“Looking back, I would say I was like a fish or a frog in the boiling water,” Laurison said. “I accepted the constraints that the 501(c)(3) nonprofit industrial complex [organizations barred from participating in political campaigns] placed on my organizing, and for twenty years worked really hard to address the racial inequality and injustice that results in food insecurity and hunger through advocacy and policy work.” Over time, she became increasingly aware of the limits of that approach. It was “very sobering” to realize that, although she had been part of some national policy victories, the fundamental balance of power hadn’t shifted. “If anything, people were more vulnerable than they had been at the start of my career,” she added, “as we gutted welfare and as inequality continued to widen in the US, and as white supremacy raged on uncontrolled.”

Working on similar issues in the UK, where she was not forced to separate politics from issue-based advocacy, was, she said, “completely eye-opening.” A standout moment came while watching a USDA official glowingly describe a US-based summer lunch initiative at a conference in Scotland. It was the type of program Laurison had spent her career fighting for and had always thought of as beneficial and commonsensical: it meant food and a place to go for hungry kids and jobs for out-of-work cafeteria workers when school wasn’t in session. The official finished her presentation and started taking questions. An audience member stood up and said: “But you have 20 million hungry children [in the US]. What problem does this program solve?” That, Laurison thought, was the real question, and one too few in the US were willing to confront head-on.

Smucker believes it’s important to keep building on everything the left has been doing well, including but not limited to mounting successful primary challenges. Candidate recruitment is challenging not because it’s difficult to find people who are willing to run on a Sanders-like platform, but because the left needs people with the right skills as well as the right ideas. Recalling Jess King’s appeal, Smucker said she had made a great candidate not just because of her policies, but because she’s “a very warm and relatable person.”

How they “relate to people, their social skills” are, in Smucker’s view, as crucial to a candidate’s success as their politics. Kings, AOCs, and Bernies are not a dime a dozen. Smucker would especially like to see more candidates and campaigns like King’s: strong challenges in conservative areas that could help counter the narrative that Sanders-style candidates can’t win outside of deep-blue districts.

“I used to be somebody who thought you should build up the movements, and candidates take away that energy,” Smucker said. “Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 runs totally flipped that on its head. What Bernie was able to do was to activate a much bigger base than what the whole rest of the left combined was able to activate … [his campaign] was basically a social movement in electoral drag, using the mechanism and structure of an electoral campaign to scale up involvement.” Recruiting strong candidates in neglected areas is “a pretty good shortcut to building a grassroots force in these areas.” But only if it’s a really good candidate with smart staffers, a strong field operation, and a well-structured campaign set up to quickly absorb a mass of volunteers.

The good news, from Smucker’s perspective, is that the left is in “a lot stronger position than we were four years ago,” with stronger organizations, more cohesive movements, and a growing cohort of “people’s candidates” in office. “It’s not enough,” he added, “but it’s something.” And the momentum is shifting, in part due to the pandemic. Massive public health and economic crises have put new pressure on Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and other top Democrats to deliver the help so many Americans need. How much pressure they feel is up to us.

’It’s a Catch-22’: Getting Out the Vote in Philadelphia

Two days before the 2020 presidential election, my partner and I drove from Brooklyn to Philadelphia for a last-minute shift with a group called Seed the Vote, which was partnering with Pennsylvania Stands Up and the Working Families Party to get working-class Philadelphians to the polls. A garish “Women for Trump” billboard flashed by, followed by a giant image of a smiling, white-toothed Joe Biden sandwiched between two billboards advertising the services of personal injury attorneys. The placement made Biden look like just another grinning Philly-based ambulance chaser. Dozens of Biden/Harris signs clung limply to lampposts, soggy and peeling from a recent rainstorm. Protests had swept through the city the week before our arrival, sparked by the police killing of a young Black man named Walter Wallace Jr. Someone had spray-painted, “Cleaned out, empty” on the exterior of a boarded-up T-Mobile store. A giant casino appeared to be open for business as the pandemic raged on.

The next morning, we reported to a parking lot in front of a shuttered Walgreens in a Black and Latino North Philadelphia neighborhood. It was a cold and blustery day, but the sky was sunny and blue, and the volunteers, a number of whom had driven in from New York, were shivering but optimistic. A young Asian American woman arrived just as an icy gust tore through the parking lot. “Yeah, wind!” she yelled. “Woo hoo! The winds of change!” The people around her grinned. The organizers were mostly middle-aged Black people, and the volunteers were a range of ages and mostly white. As we milled around, stamping our feet to keep warm and pulling on our Working Families Party–issued sweatshirts (“VOTE TODAY PHILLY,” they blared), the organizers made sure we all had masks, hand warmers, hand sanitizer, and granola bars. A tall young man without a mask walked up to the box of granola bars, unwrapped one, and shoved it into his mouth. Then he pushed through the crowd, mumbling, “‘Scuse me,” and left.

About ten feet from our group stood a local TV anchor-woman—young, Black, pretty, and sharply dressed—with a camera crew. Because the wind kept drowning her out, she had to do several takes of her intro segment. “I’m here on a very windy day in north Philadelphia, where a group of volunteers are about to engage in a last-minute effort to get out the vote in this primarily African American community,” she said, over and over again. One of the organizers turned to a volunteer. “You know when we were out here yesterday, somebody on one of those little neighborhood-watch sites reported that 20 people were trying to ‘break in’ to a Walgreens?” she said, shaking her head and sighing.

Along with two white women from the Hudson Valley, my partner and I were assigned to stand outside a supermarket called Cousin’s and ask everyone we encountered if they had a plan to vote. “I don’t want to vote,” one woman declared defiantly. “I don’t vote, baby,” another murmured softly. A third denounced voting as pointless. “It doesn’t fucking matter! It doesn’t make a difference!” she shouted. “I voted for Biden, but I hope Bernie gets some more influence … Bernie got robbed twice!” said a middle-aged Black man. He likened voting for the Democratic nominee to “being in a relationship with someone who keeps cheating on you. It’s like, there’s no trust left. How do you salvage that?”

It was sad but not surprising to encounter so many people for whom politics had not worked, and who had learned through painful experience that voting would not change their lives. But interacting with so many sharply funny and opinionated strangers filled me with an unaccustomed swell of patriotism.

Late in the afternoon on the same day—Election Day Eve—I went to Philadelphia’s City Hall. The largest municipal building in the United States, it is regal, imposing, and coldly beautiful. Even though it was freezing, around 20 people were on a makeshift stage outside, with about a dozen looking up at them.

This press conference was meant to get Philadelphians to the polls. Kendra Brooks, the first Working Families Party member elected to the Philadelphia City Council, issued a rousing call. “Black people have been taken for granted, overlooked, and ignored by mainstream politicians for too long … the Black vote is not a given!” she declared. Rick Krajewski, a young Black Pennsylvania legislator, yelled into a microphone, “I know a world is possible where we end racism, sexism, and capitalism!” Activists have been yelling similar things into microphones for decades. But to those accustomed to politicians distancing themselves from activists and anti-capitalism, it’s thrilling to hear that kind of talk from the mouths of elected officials.

When the event wound down, Amanda McIllmurray, a founder and political director of Reclaim Philadelphia, introduced me to two of her colleagues, Sergio Cea and Kelly Morton. We walked to their office, where no one had been in months, for a socially distanced conversation around a large conference table.

Morton, a then forty-three-year-old blond white woman with a megawatt grin, is the organization’s lead organizer. Cea, a young-looking West Philadelphia organizer who mock-grudgingly told me he was thirty-five—“Never ask a gay man his age,” he chided—is a founding member of the group’s Queer and POC caucuses. McIllmurray is a tall, energetic, and fast-talking, colorfully dressed twenty-seven-year-old. Having seen her photo on the Reclaim website, in which she is wearing violet lipstick, I had no trouble spotting her at the press conference: a bright-eyed, fast-moving young woman with a mop of curly hair.

Morton talked about Sanders’s 2016 campaign. “It was the first organizing I had ever done,” she said. “It was a different energy to fight for something instead of just against … [That’s why] I have a different sense of what is politically possible.” She joined Reclaim at the behest of the field organizer she’d been working with on the Sanders campaign, and recalled that the first initiative she got involved in was a direct action against the Democratic National Convention host committee, which included people like a senior Comcast VP who had raised money for former Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, a Republican best known for slashing a billion dollars from the state’s education budget. “I was like, ‘Here’s somebody who is actively supporting somebody who just screwed over all the kids … this guy should not be representing the Democratic Party,’ ” Morton recalled.

Cea had also supported Sanders in the 2016 primary. “I had seen what Reclaim had done with Larry Krasner [the Philadelphia DA elected on a platform of criminal justice reform],” he said. “I always was super into local politics, but I was a big ‘slack-tivist.’ So that’s where Reclaim leaders found me: online. And then one of the leaders had a one-on-one with me and, over time, deeply invested in me.”

In 2018, Cea ran for office in West Philadelphia as part of the organization’s Committee Person Campaign, an effort to elect more progressive representatives of the Democratic Party at the local level. “I did not have a lot of expectations for myself,” he confessed. “I’m a high school dropout. I’m queer. I’m Latino in a majority Black neighborhood.” As a son of immigrants, he added, “I don’t have long-term roots anywhere.”

His colleagues pushed him to open up about his own life while canvassing, and to ask his neighbors what they cared about. Cea was elected with dozens of like-minded peers throughout the city.

For Sanders’s 2016 campaign, McIllmurray was a delegate and field organizer. She became known around Philadelphia as “the Bernie girl.” Though she had done plenty of volunteering and protesting, Sanders’s campaign marked the first time she got involved in electoral organizing. “A really big catalyst in politicizing me and radicalizing me was right after I graduated high school,” she said, “when Michael Brown was murdered, and there was a string of high-profile murders of Black people.”

She said that she “ended up going to every march and rally I could. And the first big one that I went to, I still remember the name of it, was called ‘Philly Is Baltimore.’ I think that was after Freddie Gray was murdered … as the march went on and on and it got later and later, the crowd got less and less white, and the police got more and more violent.” A number of the organizers were arrested. “My one friend who I went with was called a ‘monkey’ by a police officer,” McIllmurray recalled. “Another friend had her breast grabbed by a police officer. Another friend was handcuffed and arrested and dragged down steps. And cops pepper-sprayed the crowd.”

For McIllmurray, that was “the moment when I went from ‘I have to go to every march and rally I can’ to ‘I have to do everything I can to transform anything I could.’ ” Although she was working two jobs at the time, she started volunteering for Sanders.

One of the primary goals of organizing is to move people from caring about an issue to taking action to address it. One-on-one conversations help. People respond to transparency, openness, and vulnerability, Morton said, and they will open up to you in turn. The goal is to shift “the way they’re thinking about politics” from the way Morton used to think about it herself –”something that is … disconnected from my personal life,” to the way she thinks about it today: “something that is very personal … [where] there is power to be taken back.” It’s also crucial, she added, to help people believe in their collective power, and craft “campaigns that bring that political possibility together with strategy and people power, and then also getting candidates who are willing to enact that if elected—it’s all of that together.”

But, Cea noted, “I’ve always lived in these bright blue areas where the problem wasn’t that I had Republicans representing me; it’s that I had Democrats representing me who didn’t share my values.” He offered Philadelphia’s majority Black city council as a prime example. “The problem isn’t that we need to vote for a certain race or a certain party,” Cea said. “It’s that we need candidates who have a bold vision and share our values. What was really helpful for me,” he continued, “was the race for Larry Krasner as district attorney … he was running against other Democrats. It was never the Republicans that we had to worry about for district attorney. And we overcame all of that, all of the money, all of the endorsements, all of the Democratic Party support [for Krasner’s opponents].”

According to McIllmurray, what’s best about Reclaim is that “We focus on each individual leader” and ask, “what is their stake in this? Was their family evicted? Should they be a leader in our housing work? How do we make sure that they have the tools they need to grow as a leader in our community? And I think that really sets us apart … we have a really intentional training program. We do a lot of political education. We take very seriously developing community, and developing within that community.”

I asked about some of the most popular tactics for undermining and discrediting the left, like dismissing white organizers as “gentrifiers” who don’t understand the needs of Black and brown communities, questioning the authenticity of Black organizers’ “Blackness,” and/or dismissing organizers of all races as spoiled college kids whose views may be popular on campus but not in the real world.

“People attack us about that all the time,” said McIllmurray, “‘Oh, you must all be college-educated liberals.’ ” She paused. “Well, I’m not a liberal. No one in my family went to college, because we’re poor as fuck. Rick [Krajewski] and A’Brianna [Morgan]—[Black organizers who work with Reclaim]—went to the University of Pennsylvania … sorry that we’re not falling into all of your stereotypes about what humans should be.”

Cea added, “When we get into these anti-gentrifier conversations, we have neighbors turning on each other when they’re both suffering through the same kinds of things, instead of fighting together against developers, against moneyed interests that are the real problem. You know, it’s not the hipster coffee drinker on a bike moving into your neighborhood that’s destroying your community—it’s the redlining.”

When I asked a question about “the left,” McIllmurray gently but firmly responded, “We try really hard not to frame things as left versus right. We really try to frame things like, ‘bottom versus top,’ like ‘the 99 percent.’ ”

“The majority of people actually agree with us,” McIllmurray continued, echoing Smucker. “We just have to find them and organize them … And especially in places that do tend to be more conservative, we need to show that they have a shared stake with us, even if they don’t have a shared analysis … One way that we saw this happen, this coming together of really unlikely allies, was in Nikil Saval’s race.” Historically in Philadelphia, she added, “we’ve seen the building trades go up against our [progressive] candidates. And a lot of people really believe that even though the building trades are organized labor … they’re never going to be with us,” she said.

“I say bullshit to that,” she asserted. “We were able to move the electricians’ union, the laborers’ union and some other unions to be in alignment with Nikil’s campaign and to endorse” Saval.

“I think it was because we were really clear about our commitment to being pro-worker,” she added. “We also talked really honestly about how the labor movement has been screwed over … Certain sectors are really distrustful of the progressive or left community for good reason. And we don’t try to tiptoe around that; we have frank conversations about it. But we can’t win a homes guarantee for all and we can’t win a Green New Deal if we don’t have electricians, if we don’t have the people building the homes.”

Referring to Saval’s race, she added, “The other thing is, the incumbent was bad on those issues, whereas Nikil had been an organizer in the labor movement. So we also need to make sure that we find people [to run] who have that experience and have built those relationships over years of trust and aren’t just saying they’re going to do the right thing, but have shown that commitment through their actions.”

“I come from a labor family,” said McIllmurray. “My dad was a Teamster. He drove a truck for Coca-Cola. And my mom was a lunch lady, and she was a member of Unite Here. A lot of my family are in building trades unions. So I think it’s really important, particularly for people like me, who kind of live between these two worlds, to be like: ‘Hey, guys, we actually all believe in the same thing. We’re all fighting against our bosses. We’re all fighting against the rich. We might disagree on some of the social issues, but ultimately, if we build allegiances around this, we can all win. We can all have this whole pie and tell the rich to go fuck themselves.’ ”

Later on the night I met the Reclaim organizers, my partner and I met some friends for Mexican takeout. We ate in the backyard. It was freezing, but they had a fire going and enough wine to ward off the chill. Recounting my day, I noted that people seem to feel more invested in local and state representatives who are active members of the community, as opposed to national politicians. When I mentioned some of the new left legislators I’d encountered, including Elizabeth Fiedler, whose campaign McIllmurray had managed, one of our hosts perked up. “That’s so true,” she said. “People here love Liz Fiedler! I did a little phone-banking for her and people would say: ‘Well, I’m just not sure about Joe Biden; he sounds a little too progressive for me. But that Elizabeth, she’s doing great! You tell her “hi” for me.’”

We all laughed. Unlike Biden, Fiedler is an actual socialist, endorsed by both national DSA and the organization’s Philadelphia chapter. But her ties to the community made her more palatable to certain non-socialist voters than a centrist like Biden.

What’s happening in Pennsylvania is also happening in New York, Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky, Florida, Minnesota, and elsewhere. Much of the work being done at the state and local level is an outgrowth of the 2016 Sanders campaign, progressive nonprofits, and left-leaning segments of organized labor. After 2016, and especially after 2020, many on the left realized that we could not afford to wait for a president to rescue us. Sanders and Warren would continue to lead the institutional left from the Senate, Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad would lead in the House, and veterans of the Sanders campaign and others would continue to do the work on the ground. There would be no Sanders administration, and no shortcut to power of the kind we had hoped for. But there would still be plenty of work to do, and a world to win.

5

A Country on Fire

For most of 2020, millions of Americans were alienated, alone, displaced, and distraught. A massive conflagration, at that point the largest in California history, burned more than 471,000 acres in August.¹ Entire towns in Oregon and Washington were partly or mostly destroyed. Wildfires blotted out the sun in the Bay Area, and parts of the San Francisco skyline disappeared behind a blood-red mixture of smoke and fog. The California Department of Public Health urged people to stay indoors during intense periods of wildfire-related air pollution, and studies showed a link between exposure to polluted air and higher Covid death rates.

Thanks to the advent of a pandemic that is still raging as of this writing, millions had lost jobs and been isolated for months; hundreds of thousands were sick and dying; and children were stuck at home because schools were closed or operating remotely. Everyone who had to—and could—was working from home, many while simultaneously caring for and supervising the schooling of young children. Families without home computers and internet access were finding it difficult or impossible to keep kids in school. By the end of 2020, Trump was evicted from the White House, and life for millions of Americans was worse than ever.

Nothing demonstrated the arrival of a newly emboldened left, and the challenges it faces, more clearly than the eruption of antiracist protests that spring and summer. The daily and nightly protests sparked by Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd were massive: polls suggested that 15 million to 26 million people protested police violence and Floyd’s murder in June alone.² Hundreds of protests took place around the world and in at least 1,700 cities and towns throughout all fifty states.³ Roughly 6 to 10 percent of adults in the US participated, and according to an Associated Press tally, police arrested more than 10,000 people.⁴

Especially compared with the Obama-era wave of Black Lives Matter protests circa 2013 to 2016—which were sparked by the equally horrifying deaths of, among others, Trayvon Martin in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Missouri, Philando Castile in Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Louisiana—public support for the 2020 protests was substantial. In June 2020, 74 percent of Americans said they viewed Floyd’s killing as a sign of broader racial injustice—vastly more than the 43 percent of Americans who said that the deaths of Black people at the hands of police were a sign of a larger problem in 2014.⁵ Most of the protesters were young and/or college-educated. Surprisingly to some, studies indicate that most were white.⁶

Depending on where you were, it felt like everybody was in the streets for weeks on end. In some cities and towns, protests consisted of three people or fewer, or were limited to individuals holding up Black Lives Matter signs at random intersections. It reminded me of the 2017 Women’s March, when satellite marches sprang up around the world and throughout the United States, including in small towns that had rarely, if ever, seen protests of any size. In New York’s rural Greene County, which is 90 percent white and voted overwhelmingly for Trump, around 1,000 people—Black, white, and Latino, young and old—showed up to protest Floyd’s murder. It was a stunning turnout for a tiny, conservative county (population: 47,000).⁷

One intensely humid summer day in 2020, hundreds gathered in New York City’s Washington Square Park for a rally to defund the police. A young woman of color was shouting into a microphone. “Defund, de-stigmatize, de-carcerate, and decriminalize!” she declared, momentarily stumbling over the words. She then called on four white men in the crowd to stand behind her and hold up a large, heavy banner. “It’s time for white men to do the work!” she yelled to cheers and applause. There was a brief scramble as half a dozen young white men surged forward, eager to adopt the role of foot soldiers and heed the general’s call. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning, followed by a crack of thunder. The sky opened and sheets of rain poured down. One of the speakers crowed that nature itself was on our side.

Young Black Radicals and the ‘Great Humbling’

Meanwhile, in Miami, a national organization called Win Justice had helped assemble Florida for All, a statewide coalition of progressive groups. The mission was to get out the vote for progressive candidates in races up and down the ballot and throughout the state and organize around issues like immigrants’ rights and racial justice, voting rights, and environmental justice. Members included the Service Employees International Union Florida (SEIU FL), New Florida Majority, Florida Planned Parenthood PAC, Organize Florida, FLIC Votes, Faith in Florida Action Fund, and Dream Defenders.

While these groups had come together to support certain policies and candidates—and, they had hoped, to deliver Florida to Biden in the 2020 presidential election—Dream Defenders has the most explicitly radical mission. It was founded in 2012 after George Zimmerman killed seventeen-year old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. When Zimmerman was acquitted, Dream Defenders occupied the Florida State Capitol for thirty-one days and thirty nights, demanding a repeal of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. They didn’t get the repeal, but they did lead the longest occupation of the state capitol in recent memory and generate national attention.

A Black-led organization, its members identify as abolitionists “fighting for a world without prisons, policing, surveil-lance and punishment”; feminists (“Black feminism at its core is about fighting against hierarchy, violence, disposability and domination and for a world in which all humans—men, women and gender nonconforming people—are seen and valued”); and socialists (“we can live in a world where we all take care of each other, where everyone has what they need to live a full life, and the needs of the common good are prior-itized over the selfish desires of a few”). They are also proud internationalists: “We stand with oppressed peoples internationally and fight against all forms of racism and hate—antisemitism, islamophobia, transphobia and sexism … The same tear gas used in Ferguson is also used at the Mexico Border, in Standing Rock and in Palestine.”

Dream Defenders’ relative youth, radical politics, open partisanship, and Obama-era roots place them in the vanguard of the new left. And the obstacles they have encountered to building a more just world reveal as much about the political moment as their open embrace of abolition and socialism.

Rachel Gilmer is Dream Defenders’ co-executive director, and Nailah Summers is the group’s co-founder and, when we spoke in December 2020, its communications director. Both women were about to turn thirty-three, and they were feeling discouraged. Biden had won the election, but lost Florida by a significant margin: roughly 375,000 more Floridians cast their ballots for Trump.⁸ And the state legislature had remained firmly under GOP control; Republicans had retained their majority in the Florida Senate and gained a 78 to 42 advantage in the Florida House.⁹ Gilmer and Summers said that they and their fellow organizers had been referring to those outcomes—disappointing midterm results, a devastating presidential primary loss (Dream Defenders had endorsed Sanders), significant Democratic losses in the state legislature, and Trump’s overwhelming victory in Florida—as the “great humbling.” Two years earlier, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump acolyte, defeated Andrew Gillum, a progressive Black Democrat. It was bleak terrain for run-ofthe-mill corporate Democrats, let alone Black socialist feminist organizers.

There were a few bright spots. In 2018, 64 percent of Floridians voted to restore the franchise to people with past felony convictions.¹⁰ (Voting rights were not restored to people convicted of murder or felony sexual offenses.) And in 2020, Florida became the first state in the American South to vote to institute a $15 per hour minimum wage, which means the state’s minimum wage will rise from $8.56 to $15 by September 30, 2026. The measure passed with 60.8 percent of the vote, just clearing the 60 percent minimum required for approval.¹¹ In many parts of the state, raising the minimum wage proved far more popular than either Trump or Biden.

“I think individual candidates get politicized and labeled,” Summers said. “It’s a combination of people being able to see an issue more clearly than a person, and the right spends so much time talking shit about whoever the candidate is, and they don’t spend as much time talking shit about the measures.”

Gilmer also saw a glimmer of hope in Florida’s ballot initiative results. “With the uprisings this summer, we saw regular protest marches happening in parts of Florida where I don’t know if they’ve ever seen progressive, visible political activity in that way, happening for months. I think that there is a huge opportunity to harness that energy and actually be organizing some of these rural parts of the state that are just completely ceded to the right, and that progressive organizations have no infrastructure or investment in.”

Gilmer continued: “Part of our ‘great humbling’ is that, in this year when the NBA had shirts that said ‘Black Lives Matter’ and there’s all these TV commercials where people are saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ and [singer-songwriter] Shawn Mendes is calling Dream Defenders and saying, ‘I want to come to a protest,’ and we’re visibly seeing mass amounts of people in the street—it’s not inevitable that all of that is going to lead to actual material changes in our communities. It’s not inevitably going to lead to political power.”

Both women had come to their politics as students, and both described Dream Defenders as their “political home,” although they had found their way to it from different points of origin. Summers grew up in Miami. Her grandparents came to the United States from Cuba in the 1960s. “They were working class in Cuba,” she said, “and they came over to New York … My grandpa was a cook in a hotel in New York, AFL-CIO. My grandma was a union seamstress in a factory. But they always joked that my aunt, who’s a Democrat, and my mom, who’s a Democrat, and me, that we’re ‘socialists.’ ”

Growing up, she added, she was more conscious of racism than socialism. “There’s a lot of anti-Blackness that made me really want to get away from there,” she said, referring to Miami. “I’m half-Cuban and half-Black, and that had a big impact on the way I saw race growing up.”

Later in our conversation, she said, “Even my friends growing up were very, very, racist … I had this period of anger, and learning more about movements, learning more about organizing, learning more about even Black history that I hadn’t gotten in school, that put me on this sort of inevitable trajectory.” When Trayvon Martin was killed, she felt like she “couldn’t take it anymore” and threw herself into local efforts to hold Martin’s killer accountable, helping to found Dream Defenders in the process.

Gilmer, who has lived in Florida since 2015, grew up thousands of miles away, in Oregon. “My dad’s Black and my mom’s Italian and Jewish,” she said, “and honestly, growing up in such a white place, I always felt very isolated around my identity and … had a lot of internalized racism around both class and race, and really just wanting to fit in in the white suburban town I grew up in.” Going away to college, where she took a class on James Baldwin, and getting involved with a youth organization in her college town were formative experiences for Gilmer, who had spent her whole life “feeling like there was something wrong with me.” Those experiences taught her that “there’s nothing wrong with me or my family, and there’s a lot wrong with the world.” She also became more aware of how people were organizing to change it. After graduating, she went back home to Oregon, where she got “very involved” with the “very white” Portland Occupy. A year later, when Trayvon Martin was killed, she was riveted by Dream Defenders’ takeover of the state capitol. “It was really, really inspiring … to see young Black people confronting power in that type of way,” she said. She could see herself doing that kind of work for that kind of movement. A few years later, she moved to Florida.

Like other young organizers throughout the country, Gilmer and her fellow Dream Defenders eventually had to face the fact that, despite having attracted a following and inspired folks across the country, they had not yet amassed any “actual power.” That led to a period of grappling with questions of organizational strategy. “What does it mean to be trying to build power in a state like Florida?” Gilmer said, recalling some of those questions. “What is our plan?” She went to Florida to help Dream Defenders “figure out who it wanted to be and what it wanted to do.”

Initially, Gilmer said, she and many of her peers saw socialism as “a white thing.” But around the time of the Zimmerman verdict, she traveled with a group of organizers to Brazil to meet with members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST, in Portuguese). Meeting fellow Black people in another part of the world who “saw themselves very clearly as part of a socialist political tradition,” she said, helped her to see the bigger picture, one often obscured by US blindness to other countries and perspectives. A couple of months after the Brazil trip, a Palestinian American co-founder of Dream Defenders who had grown up in South Florida brought a keffiyeh to the organization’s first march. “When we went to Palestine with him,” Gilmer recalled, “that was another moment of meeting these international revolutionaries who … so clearly identified as part of this socialist political tradition.” Seeing themselves as part of a global community of people of color struggling to meet their basic needs under capitalism was, Gilmer recounted, “very politicizing.”

When I asked about the challenges of engaging in explicitly socialist organizing in a state like Florida and a city like Miami—although Dream Defenders has chapters throughout the state, Gilmer and Summers are both based in Miami—Summers lowered her voice to a half-whisper. She was getting her car serviced in a predominantly Cuban neighborhood, she explained, and “I’m not even going to have this conversation indoors.”

It was, Gilmer said, a tough question, and one the organization was still grappling with. In her view, Florida has been “ground zero” for some of the most important “movement moments” of her generation, such as Dream Defenders’ take-over of the state capitol and surviving students’ efforts to lobby for gun control in the wake of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. To Gilmer, it was both moving and significant that so many young Floridians refused to accept the slaughter of teenagers as inevitable and were determined to force “a national conversation” about guns. They understood that many Florida politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, are in bed with some of the world’s most corrupt corporations, a fact that has had “a direct impact on people’s ability to get their basic needs met.”

Many of the state’s young organizers have spent their entire lives under Republican rule. They know what it’s like to survive in a place where workers have very few rights and residents have very little access to health care and affordable housing. In Gilmer’s view, “the political conditions that have shaped our state” have also made Florida fertile ground for movement building. Dream Defenders, she noted, “didn’t fall from the sky;” actions like the sit-in at the capitol are “a direct product of the conditions that young people in particular have grown up with.” She and her peers turned to socialism, she said, once they began to understand the “deep connections” between the state’s high incarceration rate and “politicians being in bed with people making money off of it.” If young organizers could see, analyze, and fight back against the injustice around them, they could also inspire other Floridians to join in.

In 2020, Dream Defenders focused on turning out voters, specifically young Black voters who didn’t necessarily identify with a particular political party and weren’t voting at the same rates as their older, white counterparts, amid a pandemic. “We did a lot of work with our base to get them to see why we needed to get behind Biden … and why we needed to defeat Trump,” Gilmer said. It was an uphill battle with a candidate like Biden at the top of the ticket, because he was, in her view, “just so unmotivating” to young people, many of whom were hungry for a politics markedly different from what they’d grown up with. “Florida’s been under Republican trifecta control for the past twenty years,” Gilmer told me. “The Republicans have a long game. Florida is a part of that strategy; the Koch brothers put more money in Florida than anywhere else … we’re up against a lot when you look at the infrastructure that the right has in this state.” Andrew Gillum’s 2018 gubernatorial run was an exciting moment for Florida leftists because he was, as Gilmer put it, “by far the most progressive candidate” in the Democratic primary. Gillum, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, won the primary by running on abolishing ICE, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, raising teacher pay, and ending mass incarceration. He lost the general election to Ron DeSantis by just 32,463 votes out of more than 8.2 million cast.¹²

To Gilmer, “that is definitely a sign of where the electorate is at”—and of Biden’s comparative weakness as a candidate. Looking ahead to the midterms in 2022, she added, “the big battle” will probably be with establishment Democrats who argue that the Democratic Party and the groups that support it need to moderate their candidates and demands. “Their response to being called ‘socialists’ is moving to the middle,” Gilmer said, adding, “How does that even make sense, when Biden is so middle-of-the road and was already being called a ‘socialist’?”

To organizers like Gilmer, Summers, and their fellow Dream Defenders, it is obvious that the party has more to lose from continuing to invest in candidates as demotivating as Biden than it does from moving “too far” left. That more Americans voted in the 2020 election than in any other election in 120 years was, in their view, a repudiation of Trump, not a testament to Biden’s appeal. The fact that in GOP-controlled Florida, Biden, who appealed to skeptical voters by bragging that he “beat the socialist” in the 2020 presidential primary, lost to Trump by a wide margin, while the Sanders-backed Gillum came within striking distance of the Trump-backed DeSantis, gives Florida organizers hope—and a crucial point of comparison. Organizers need to continue to demonstrate that “actually progressive candidates give us way more of a fighting chance” in general elections than moderates, Gilmer said, noting that the Florida Democratic Party is mainly composed of consultants who wouldn’t support Gillum in the primary. She expects the Florida Democratic Party to experience an internal battle over its future in the next two years. “I think that will be a lot of what Dream Defenders is fighting for,” she said, “to show that a progressive agenda is actually much more viable than a moderate one.”

While they see new opportunities to organize in the coming years, Dream Defenders is realistic about the difficulty of the task ahead. GOP majorities in both houses of the state legislature mean some “really dangerous” bills have a good chance of passing. DeSantis was then pushing a particularly frightening bill, early versions of which would have expanded Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, allowed armed citizens to shoot suspected looters or anyone engaged in “criminal mischief” that resulted in the “interruption” of a business, and granted protections to people who drive cars into crowds of protesters, even if they killed or injured someone while doing so. (The bill passed and was signed into law in April 2021; Dream Defenders and other groups sued, and in September 2021 a federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional and unenforceable. DeSantis vowed to appeal the ruling.) Gilmer sees bills that extreme as “an opportunity for us to bring more people onto our side.” At the same time, she’s aware that the GOP now controls the state’s redistricting process, meaning that it will be even harder for progressives, or anyone running as a Democrat, to win elections in 2022.

“It’s just really scary what we’re up against,” she said. “And we are leaning in more and more to the need for deep coalition and the need for deep alignment, not only among some of the groups [we discussed], like DSA and Sunrise, but also with other organizations on the ground in Florida, because the level of investment that the right has in the state and the level of infrastructure they’ve been able to build in terms of candidate recruitment vehicles, policy think tanks, even grassroots organizations—the right has a shit-ton of infrastructure, and we need to figure out how to build up the same level of infrastructure so that we can actually contend for power in a real way.”

She brought up Florida for All as an example, and credited the group with winning the ballot initiative to re-enfranchise people with felony convictions. “Dream Defenders is definitely not operating on its own,” she added. “The only way we are going to win in Florida is by being in these deep alliances with these other groups and really thinking beyond our organization. And [asking ourselves], ‘How do we build a robust movement ecosystem in a state where the right has done that so well?’ ”

Can a Radical Stay Radical in Congress?

In 2021, Sen. Joe Manchin told progressives fighting for federal legislation to strengthen the social safety net that they ought to “elect more liberals.”¹³ Many of his critics agreed. In the last several years, newly robust social movements have yielded a crop of “movement” politicians and elected leaders rarely seen in the US since the 1970s. Some of the best-known American politicians to come out of the civil rights movement, such as Andrew Young, James Clyburn, and the late John Lewis, were undeniably influential in their prime and, particularly in Clyburn’s case, retain power and prominence today.

Clyburn, a South Carolina congressman who, as majority whip, is now the third-ranking Democrat in the House and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, is widely credited with resurrecting Biden’s faltering presidential campaign by endorsing him in the South Carolina Democratic primary. (Despite playing up his own civil rights bona fides throughout the 2020 presidential campaign and haranguing young people to get more involved in contemporary struggles, Biden’s own contributions to the defining social movement of his youth consisted of walking out of a restaurant that wouldn’t serve a Black football player and picketing a segregated movie theater, then misremembering and exaggerating both incidents.¹⁴) Young was a close friend and adviser of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, the group of young organizers who fought segregation in public transportation by riding buses across the South in 1961, and an organizer of the March on Washington. Clyburn led a local youth chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and took part in many protests, including a 1961 march on the South Carolina State House, for which he was jailed.

Yet despite these men’s well-documented history of activism, contemporary organizers have criticized all three for moderating their views and tactics in service to corporate backers, institutional imperatives, and establishment allies like the Clintons. Responding to disparaging remarks Young made about Black Lives Matter protesters in 2016, Francys Johnson, then president of the Georgia NAACP, said, “While not discounting Andrew Young’s historical contributions to this nation’s progress, Mr. Young cannot cloak himself with the memory of Dr. King and expect that serious students of the civil rights movement will not call foul on his statements denigrating legitimate protest only to appease his establishment and corporate friends.”¹⁵ That same year, Lewis walked back remarks he had made in announcing the Congressional Black Caucus’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton that appeared to minimize Bernie Sanders’s involvement in the civil rights movement after photos surfaced of Chicago cops dragging Sanders out of a 1963 demonstration.¹⁶ Clyburn generated headlines for blaming Democratic losses in the midterms on young organizers’ calls to defund the police in 2020. In 2021, he earned the scorn of younger Black progressives like Ohio congressional candidate Nina Turner and the rapper Killer Mike for what they perceived as his selling out to Biden (Killer Mike suggested Clyburn had traded a Biden endorsement for nothing more “tangible” than having Juneteenth declared a federal holiday).¹⁷ Clyburn, for his part, endorsed Turner’s most credible primary opponent. Turner lost.

Much like the movement veterans–turned–politicians of a previous era, new left lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez have organized, led, and joined actions related to the social justice struggles of their time, from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock to Sunrise’s occupation of Nancy Pelosi’s office to protests of the migrant detention facilities at the US border to the massive Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. At a New York State virtual town hall organized by State Senator Liz Krueger in June 2020, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, described his participation in the protests following Floyd’s death as follows: “We were pepper-sprayed and I was ultimately arrested, even though I had a neon shirt on with my name and title … Unless you have the experience with [police brutality], or the personal encounter with it, it’s hard for you to get it. And I think my experience, as unfortunate and as tragic as it was for me, was helpful to make it real for some of my colleagues.”¹⁸

He continued: “We have this discussion in our community of who is ‘deserving’ of certain things. And people say, ‘Criminals deserve that treatment.’ And I disagree with that sentiment. But I also disagree with the sentiment that, ‘Well, if you do everything you’re supposed to do, and if you’re a good kid, and if you listen to orders, and if you go to school, and if you get a good job, and if you’re on the right path, then you’ll stay out of trouble … The first time that I’ve ever been pepper-sprayed and manhandled by the cops was as a state senator, going to a protest against police brutality.” For people of Myrie’s age and political persuasion, the politics of waiting your turn, hewing to the party line, and never sticking your neck out have gone out of fashion.

Members of this new wave of movement politicians tend to share their constituents’ struggles: getting brutalized by the police, not having health insurance, struggling to get by on the minimum wage. That personal stake is what drove many to get involved in politics in the first place. As Cori Bush said when she was elected to Congress in Missouri: “I’ve been that uninsured person … I was a single parent … struggling paycheck to paycheck … I was that Covid patient … as the first Black woman, nurse, and single mother to have the honor to represent Missouri in the United States Congress, let me just say this. To the Black women. The Black girls. The nurses. The single mothers. The essential workers. This. Is. OUR. Moment.” Conservatives criticized Ocasio-Cortez for saying in 2018 that she couldn’t afford to rent an apartment in DC until she began drawing a congressional salary, but the statement resonated with anyone who has ever been between jobs or had to save money to move, especially from a city as expensive as New York to one as expensive as Washington.

Activists from social movements, including organized labor and the civil rights, gay rights, feminist, and anti-war movements, have ascended to positions of power and influence before. The question is whether and to what extent they will remain faithful to the cause once in office. Politics, we are often reminded, is about compromise. Nobody who achieves, let alone holds onto, a powerful role in US government does so by accident or without trade-offs. The careers of the new generation of activists-turned-politicians are just beginning. The institutions, as the fight to eliminate the filibuster in the US Senate illustrated, are extremely slow to adapt and difficult to change. Even people who hold sincere and consistent principles and have made real sacrifices do not necessarily retain every shred of the passion, stamina, and stomach for battle they had in their youth. Anyone who has been beaten, arrested, fired, ostracized, or threatened may at some point choose an easier life. Most people, especially as they get older and more invested in their careers, factor into their decisions—consciously or not—money and position, reputation, family considerations, relationships with colleagues, access, influence, and personal comfort. And the longer you stay in office, particularly if you’re drawing a six-figure salary, the less you have in common with the average American.

It’s not that every one-time activist is destined to sell out or disappoint future generations. Most will never be prominent enough to get the chance. Some, like Rep. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan, take consistent, principled stands throughout their careers. But doing so takes more than personal courage and commitment. It requires social movements and organizations strong enough to keep elected officials accountable and help them resist the powerful lure of establishment credit and respectability. At this moment in time, being a lefty firebrand is, in certain quarters, more rewarding than it has been in decades. AOC and Cori Bush have the wind at their backs. In the long term, the strength of that wind will matter more than who it’s propping up.

A Prominent Lawyer Takes to the Streets

With protests raging throughout the United States, Louisville, the largest city in Kentucky, was no exception. Louisville cops had killed Breonna Taylor, a young, unarmed Black woman whose senseless death was one of many that had sparked the uprisings in the first place.

Joining the fight was Sadiqa Reynolds, the first woman to serve as president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League in the affiliate’s nearly century-long history. (The National Urban League was founded in New York in 1910.) She was born in the Bronx, resided in North Carolina, and completed her education in Kentucky, where she has lived longer than anyplace else. A Black woman with a pronounced dimple and a lovely if guarded smile, Reynolds speaks confidently but chooses her words with care. She has said she does not like to share her age in interviews but appears to have been born in the 1970s.

Reynolds is neither an elected official nor an organizer. (When I asked about rumors that she might one day run for office, she said “No” emphatically, adding, “I don’t know what ‘someday’ holds, but it seems to me highly unlikely and it is not an aspiration.”) For the head of a venerable and nonpartisan organization, she is unusually outspoken in a way many locals admire and others find unsettling. Her approach differs from that of younger and/or more radical organizers in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Miami. But without identifying as a member of it, she has clearly been influenced by the newly strong left. At the 2020 Louisville Urban League’s annual IMPACT Report Luncheon, shortly before we spoke, she had urged Louisville residents not to “waste this crisis” and called on those with “power and privilege” to “develop some backbone” and “admit the wrongs of city leaders, some of your corporations.”

Plenty of wrongdoing corporations have themselves adopted pro–Black Lives Matter rhetoric and made modest contributions to Black-led nonprofits. But Reynolds’s willingness to criticize corporations, the city of Louisville, and the Democratic Party struck me as unusually frank for the leader of a historically pro-business organization. And unlike most prominent Louisville lawyers, Reynolds spent weeks in 2020 protesting in the streets.

With the caveat that she leads a nonpartisan organization that focuses on “the policies, not the politicians,” she shared her personal views on Charles Booker, the young Black man who challenged Amy McGrath in the Democratic senatorial primary that would determine who would take on Mitch McConnell (at this writing Booker is running to unseat incumbent Sen. Rand Paul in 2022). The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee supported McGrath, who won the nomination by 2.8 percent and lost to McConnell by 19.6 percent.¹⁹,²⁰ Booker went on to found an organization called Hood to the Holler, which aims to assemble “broad coalitions,” break down barriers of race and class, and fuel a people-centered movement to build political power. Reynolds admires Booker, who, she said, “brought an energy that Kentucky had not seen … He was able to get through to people [in ways] they did not believe a young Black man could.”

McGrath, on the other hand, “tried to play it down the middle … she could afford to be middle-of-the-road. And so there was no excitement … There was nothing to excite a new voter about her,” Reynolds said, adding, “There was nothing to excite those who have been voting forever, who were committed to voting, [either] … if they were staunch Democrats, they were going to support her, right?” It was, she said, a “failure” of the Kentucky Democratic Party “to continue to send these milquetoast politicians.” She hastened to add that she didn’t know McGrath personally, but “as a politician, she did not inspire anyone.”

Booker performed much better in the primary than many predicted he would, but his campaign’s late start and McGrath’s advantages in fundraising and establishment support hurt him. “We’re going to have to take some chances,” Reynolds said. “The Democrats keep not wanting to take chances. At least what you could say about the Republicans is, they will. If Trump wasn’t taking a chance, I don’t know what was. But the Democrats do not—they just lack courage.”

Booker’s campaign caught fire thanks in large part to the anti–police brutality protests. People started paying closer attention to Booker, who was active in the protests, Reynolds said, when “racial issues became so obvious they couldn’t be denied.”

Endorsed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in June 2020, Booker pitched himself as a “real Democrat” who would be better suited than McGrath to give McConnell a run for his money. Reynolds said Booker’s “authenticity” was a key part of his appeal. He certainly would have presented a clearer contrast to McConnell than McGrath, who ran on blaming McConnell for impeding Trump’s agenda and quickly earned the label of a “pro-Trump Democrat.”

Reynolds was disinclined to discuss her impressions of the 2020 Democratic presidential field. “It is amazing to see a woman of color who identifies as a Black woman be vice president of the United States,” she said carefully. Yet across the country, she noted: “Democrats are putting forward average candidates to do average work, to move the needle just a little bit. And I think young people are tired of that … we’re really creating in this country this need for extremes in order to actually get something done. The politics of compromise has not worked fast enough.”

Six months after the protests had abated in most places, Reynolds was still noticeably passionate. At the time of our conversation in December 2020, there were still people occupying a park in Louisville and vowing not to leave until the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor were fired and prosecuted (two officers have since been fired; none face criminal charges for causing Taylor’s death).²¹ People in Louisville “heard the 9-1-1 tapes,” Reynolds said, and “We want somebody to pay for that.”

Reynolds said she was “really shocked” to see nonviolent protesters “met with tear gas and pepper bullets” during the protests. Yet participating always felt “necessary,” in part because she had come to believe that intense periods of mass protest can be more effective than years of patient negotiation.

Floyd’s murder had opened some eyes. In the aftermath, white acquaintances approached Reynolds to confess they had always assumed that victims of police killings were probably doing something to provoke a violent response. But what happened to Floyd was simply “undeniable.” The sheer brutality of his killing had forged a new group of allies.

Reynolds was heartened by how multiracial the Louisville protests were and how much agreement she now saw “across lines of race.” Yet she was not optimistic about the ultimate outcome. “Some little things have changed,” she granted, before returning to the subject of Taylor’s death. “Can you imagine if that would have been a twenty-six-year-old white female who had worked all day in the hospital and came home after dinner, laid down, and was killed by the police?” she asked. “That girl was killed in March … there’s still so many questions. There’s no way police could kill a white woman and not answer those questions immediately.”

Suddenly her words poured forth, bursting the dam of her professional reserve. “There’s so much evidence that our lives don’t matter,” she said. “That is the frustrating part … we can’t move forward in the way that we should, because we deserve justice. And you can’t keep pushing stuff under a rug. You can’t keep ignoring people. It just doesn’t work like that.”

Although his death pained her, Reynolds was not as active in the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. She spoke “feverishly” at one of the two major rallies that took place in Louisville around that time, but she was working for the mayor and felt limited in how outspoken she could be. “It is exhausting to watch us be murdered, and then put on trial,” she said, referring to coverage of Martin that focused on his behavior rather than on the circumstances of his death. “We’re never good enough to just be mourned. Never good enough to just get justice.”

In addition to exposing murderous racism, 2020 made class-based injustices harder to ignore. Reynolds attributed any positive changes stemming from the pandemic to the newly inescapable knowledge that poor people were “capable of killing rich people.” The Jeff Bezoses of the world may never truly believe that we’re all in this together, but they don’t want service and domestic workers exposing them to a potentially deadly virus.

One of the greatest obstacles to progress, Reynolds said, is our “capitalist” society. “People don’t want their lives disrupted … even if that means other people have to suffer. In many cases, we’re led to believe that real change, real root cause work, will cost so much. But over the long term, it’s going to be so much less expensive,” she said. “When we really invest in the things that change the world, we will change the world. But until then, we’ll just keep putting these Band-Aids on the things that we’ve broken.”

The shocking disruptions of America’s inaugural plague year had woken a lot of people up. Reynolds believed many would remain politically engaged in the long term and hoped the US would make meaningful progress in the years ahead. “But if [anyone’s] not ready to, there certainly is a younger generation that is very ready to hold folks accountable, very ready to take to the streets, to do whatever is necessary to get to justice.”

American Empire Strikes Back

Animating the mutual aid groups, occupations, and encampments that sprang up in the summer of 2020 was the conviction that if the government couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of its people, the people would take care of one another. The government response to these efforts demonstrated a primary reason for the relative weakness of the US left: because people with guns and powerful allies in media are dedicated to crushing it. In addition to rallying new allies to the cause, the response to Floyd’s murder drew swift and brutal repression.

To fearful suburbanites and property owners, the word “occupation” conjures armies, terror, and force: “they” (illdefined and diffuse groups like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the “radical left”) were taking over “our” cities. The backlash to what were overwhelmingly peaceful protests and non-violent encampments was sickeningly disproportionate. Egged on by right-wing and establishment media outlets and a president who thrived on inciting violence, police officers drove into a crowd of protesters in New York.²² They broke a protester’s arm,²³ shoved a young woman to the ground so hard she had a seizure,²⁴ and pulled a gun on unarmed protesters in front of a landmark bookstore.²⁵ The journalist Sarah Jones saw them charge a crowd of protesters “near the Barclays Center [in Brooklyn] … there was no provocation that I witnessed. They rushed protesters down the street, spraying mace, wielding batons.”²⁶

On June 1, 2020, in Washington, DC, Trump further inflamed protesters by having police officers and members of the National Guard clear Lafayette Square, the site of a large and peaceful protest against police brutality.²⁷ Law enforcement officials targeted protesters with tear gas and flash-bang explosions. They did this so that the president could have his photograph taken clutching a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. The US Park Police (USPP) issued a press release claiming that fifty-one of its officers were injured “in the line of duty” during demonstrations that took place between approximately May 28 and May 31. According to the agency, eleven USPP officers were taken to the hospital and released; three were admitted. The agency acknowledged that its officers had “employed the use of smoke canisters and pepper balls,” but claimed they “did not use tear gas or OC Skat Shells to close the area at Lafayette Park.”²⁸ No official denied that law enforcement had used chemical agents against protesters. On June 1 and June 5, the DC Metropolitan Police Department spent $130,000 on tear gas canisters and grenades in preparation for “possible civil disturbance.”²⁹

Throughout the summer, Portland, Oregon, one of the whitest big cities in America, became the center of the most sustained protests in response to Floyd’s murder. Residents held nightly protests for months on end, long after the protests in other cities had subsided. Relishing the opportunity to play strongman, President Trump sent US marshals and customs and border patrol officers to Portland, ostensibly to protect federal property. On July 11, 2020, a US marshal shot an unarmed twenty-six-year-old protester in the head with a “less lethal” impact munition.³⁰ The man, who was hospitalized for weeks, suffered a depressed skull fracture in his frontal lobe, impaired impulse control, and loss of cognitive function.

Apparently not content to wait around for another target, federal officers began driving unmarked vehicles around downtown Portland, forcing protesters into them, and detaining them without explanation.³¹ Organizers, protesters, and even some Democratic elected officials were outraged. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley characterized it as “absolutely terrifying,” “unacceptable,” and “the type of unmarked paramilitary presence that you would expect in a dictatorship, not in a democratic republic.”³²

Angered by the protests, as well as by anti-Trump sentiments expressed by state and local leaders in cities like Portland, Trump doubled down. In September, his Justice Department identified New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle as “jurisdictions that … have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities” and were “permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction in American cities.”

A couple of weeks after federal agents began terrorizing protesters in Portland, New Yorkers watched in horror as a group of men in plain clothes grabbed eighteen-year-old Nikki Stone off the street and shoved her into an unmarked van. Stone was wanted for graffiti and for vandalizing police cameras. As the BBC reported at the time, it was unclear whether the men who forced her into the van had badges or anything else that identified them as police officers.³³ Uniformed police then surrounded the van to prevent other protesters from coming to Stone’s aid.

Amnesty International documented 125 separate instances of police violence against US protesters in the course of just eleven days, between May 26 and June 5, 2020.³⁴ These incidents took place across forty states and the District of Columbia, and included numerous alleged instances of excessive force—beatings, the use of tear gas and pepper spray, and the firing of “less lethal” munitions—by state and local police, National Guard troops, and federal agents. Law enforcement officers targeted medics, legal observers, and journalists as well as protesters, attacking certain individuals so violently that they lost eyesight, suffered seizures, and sustained severe wounds. According to a Physicians for Human Rights report covering a broader period (May 26 to July 27), law enforcement officials shot at least 115 protesters in the head, face, and neck with various projectiles, including bullets and tear gas canisters. Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; and Los Angeles all had large and sustained protests at which law enforcement officers shot significant numbers of civilians in the head.

To the young people leading the protests, the true horror was not the anarchy of riot-riven cities, but the United States itself: a nation controlled by millionaires willing to force people back to work in a pandemic to protect corporate profits—and starve those who were unemployed, undocumented, or unable to produce. Those who took part in the uprisings saw firsthand how violently police officers and federal agents responded to unarmed protesters. Some came to the protests as radicals. Others were radicalized by what they saw.

6

New Pipelines, New
Strategies, New Leaders

The 2020 protests had some effect on our politics, but its scope and depth are not yet clear. They arguably helped to ensure the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd; it’s also possible that police officers will continue to escape serious consequences in similar cases going forward. As of this writing, no significant police reform legislation has been passed at the federal level. Democrats introduced the Justice in Policing Act in Congress, where Republicans promptly lobbied to remove its central provision: ending qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields individual police officers from lawsuits. The House passed the bill in 2020 and 2021. In May 2021, Rep. Clyburn suggested he would support it even if it didn’t end qualified immunity. Without that provision, the bill would do little aside from banning chokeholds, which many of the nation’s largest police departments have already done. Negotiations around passage in the Senate broke down in September 2021, after Republicans rejected even a substantially weakened version of the bill that would not have ended qualified immunity.

Organizers with a number of groups under the Movement for Black Lives umbrella crafted and pushed for a far more substantive piece of legislation known as the BREATHE Act, which would, among other things, require the establishment of a “time-bound plan” to close all federal prisons and immigration detention centers, dismantle ICE and the Drug Enforcement Administration, bar police departments from using surveillance and military-grade weapons, establish reparations for Black people and victims of police violence, and redirect funds set aside for policing and incarceration to social welfare, health care, education, and environmental programs. Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib are sponsors, but it’s far less likely to pass both houses of Congress than the Justice in Policing Act—which, as of this writing, has also failed to pass—in part because it faces significant opposition from both Democrats and Republicans.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of people could take to the streets for months on end without forcing a concrete change in federal policy—as we saw after the massive climate marches of 2019, 2017, and 2014; the Women’s March; Occupy Wall Street; and the 2003 anti-war demonstrations—suggests that mass protests are not, on their own, sufficient. Our institutions and officials are perfectly willing to defy the will of the people, no matter how many of us show up.

There is more reason for optimism at the state and local level. Thanks to progressive groups affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives, large cities like Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have in recent years elected district attorneys who have vowed to reform our criminal justice system. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who was recently re-elected in Chicago, has reduced charges for low-level offenses like shoplifting, helped people facing drug charges get treatment and avoid jail, and vacated the sentences of at least 100 wrongfully convicted men. Travis County DA Jose Garza in Texas has vowed not to prosecute people for low-level drug offenses. Chesa Boudin, who ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration and holding police officers who harm people accountable, was elected to the San Francisco D.A.’s office in 2019. (He was recalled in a June 2022 special election.) George Gascón, Boudin’s predecessor in the San Francisco D.A.’s office, was elected district attorney of Los Angeles in 2020. Gascón pledged not to seek the death penalty or try juveniles as adults, overhaul the office’s conviction review unit, and reopen a number of cases in which his predecessor had declined to charge police officers who killed people. Progressive activists in Philadelphia organized to elect D.A. Larry Krasner in 2017, and Krasner’s election has fueled the growth of that city’s left. A civil rights and defense attorney who has represented both Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philly, Krasner has sued the Philadelphia Police Department and City Hall more than 75 times, promised never to seek the death penalty, and helped to exonerate seventeen wrongfully convicted people since taking office.

Meaningful change has eluded big cities in other ways, particularly when it comes to the mayor’s office. In 2021, New York City, home to some of the largest protests of 2020, elected as mayor Eric Adams, a law-and-order Democrat and former cop who soon vowed to bring back the use of solitary confinement and had an internal investigator in the city’s correction department fired for investigating use-of-force allegations too conscientiously. Lori Lightfoot, who was elected mayor of Chicago in 2019 on a platform of reforming the police, has since come under fire for failing to fulfill basic campaign promises. Among other things, in September 2021—over five months after a Chicago police officer shot and killed thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo after a brief chase—the city missed a court-ordered deadline for reforming the department’s foot pursuit policy.¹ Anxiety over rising crime likely helped get Adams elected, and debate over whether and how to formulate calls to defund the police—a policy that may or may not have popular support, depending on how it’s explained and whether respondents feel safe in their neighborhoods and/or in interactions with the police—is still raging on the left.

None of this means that protests don’t matter at all; it’s important to demonstrate the scale of the opposition to unjust and unpopular laws and policies. But to be effective, they must be part of a larger strategy. Today’s leftists have taken that lesson to heart. In addition to pressuring those in power, they are working to put more leftists in positions of power. As Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, explained in 2018, “We want to recruit candidates, we want to train candidates, we want to recruit campaign and Hill staff, we need better think tanks—there’s this whole infrastructure that the establishment has right now that perpetuates the current status quo, and that’s what’s not working, right?” The new left, he explained, needed a “pipeline” of its own, and a way of identifying candidates and staff who are not only ideologically aligned with organizers on the ground but capable of advancing a specific agenda if elected.

The biggest problems in American life—police violence, racism, the climate crisis, gun violence, lack of child care, powerlessness at work—are now decades old. Even the coronavirus crisis wasn’t new; the virus itself was, but the inadequacy and inequity of our for-profit health care system and the staggering economic precarity of so many American families was not. Problems that grow and worsen over decades require either new solutions or old ones (e.g., the New Deal) that should have been updated and expanded rather than discarded.

Going Beyond Bernie at the University of Chicago

All the lefty think tanks and pipelines in the world can make only limited progress without candidates and elected officials willing to champion their agenda. One of the most urgent challenges facing the left is how to keep the momentum going without a star candidate for national office.

Emily Pelliccia, who was twenty-one when we spoke, grew up in the “lefty bubble” of Ithaca, New York, joined DSA in 2018, the summer after she graduated from high school, and attended the University of Chicago, where she was active in the University of Chicago for Bernie chapter.

The university’s Bernie chapter was one of the largest and most dedicated in the country; its members were exhilarated by its scope and size. “We made a total of six trips to Iowa, and on [the weekend of the Iowa caucuses], we brought over 100 people,” Pelliccia recalled proudly.

The morning Sanders won the Nevada caucus was deeply thrilling for Pelliccia and her peers. The group had attracted more than just students; faculty members and employees and community members not directly affiliated with the university joined student organizers like Pelliccia for phone banks and canvasses. Members of DSA and other socialist organizations, teachers, and other Chicagoans for Bernie celebrated together.

After that, things soon fell apart. Watching Sanders flame out on Super Tuesday was deeply depressing. Shortly thereafter, in-person canvassing was suspended due to Covid and the university sent students home.

Pelliccia and others wanted to keep the momentum going by converting the Sanders group into a DSA or YDSA chapter, but without a national campaign to funnel volunteer energy into, the enthusiasm was difficult to sustain. “Part of that was that people were so disillusioned, and they just saw DSA as part of the same project that Bernie’s campaign represented, and if that had failed, ‘Why would we put faith in DSA?’ ”

Sanders’s defeat also exposed fault lines that had existed among the group’s members all along, but were largely obscured by the shared goal of electing him. Some liked Sanders because he didn’t emphasize certain social or cultural issues and wasn’t especially or rigidly “woke.” They hated what they saw as the left’s obsession with, for example, pronoun use, and were “culturally to the right” of many DSA members. Others considered DSA too ideologically timid; as Pelliccia put it, “They see DSA as liberals who are disillusioned with other liberals, but are essentially liberals themselves.”

A friend of Pelliccia’s, an immigrant from Texas who grew up without health care and is now a medical student at the University of Chicago, was one of the original group’s most passionate members. Pelliccia said he had grown up “culturally conservative” and had gradually come to leftist politics on his own. He was extremely committed to Sanders’s campaign, in large part because he needed “a lot of what Bernie was fighting for.” He was also convinced that Sanders would win. “On all our car rides to Iowa, we’d be trying to sleep,” Pelliccia recalled, “and he was like, ‘I want to talk about Bernie and the future that he envisioned.’ ” Once the campaign ended, Pelliccia said, her friend “completely lost faith” in political work.

It was a feeling she had struggled with herself. The campaign was so intense and absorbing and inspiring and historic, it was hard to imagine feeling the same way about anything else. And she had seen how much it had meant to people all over the country, not just U of Chicago students. During a trip to Iowa to recruit people to caucus for Sanders, Pelliccia and her fellow volunteers met a young man I’ll call George while knocking on doors in a trailer park. George lived in a trailer with his mother. Garbage bags were stacked up to the ceiling. George had had a stroke and used a wheelchair to get around. Because he didn’t have health insurance, the stroke left him with a mountain of medical debt. He was largely dependent on his mother and couldn’t do much on his own. He was also the biggest Sanders supporter Pelliccia had ever met, and so dedicated that he figured out how to get to the campaign’s field office in town nearly every day.

Although she was relieved to meet someone she could count on to show up for Sanders, Pelliccia found caucus night distressing. “It feels like picking teams in a high school gym class,” she said. She wanted everyone to “want Bernie for the right reasons,” but, in practice, most people just wandered in and chose a candidate based on who made them “feel the most flattered.” She was horrified to realize that, in spite of his evident enthusiasm for Sanders, George was a liability; some caucus-goers appeared to be put off by his wheelchair and lack of polish.

Nevertheless, Sanders won the Iowa caucus, and George was thrilled to be a part of that victory. Sanders volunteers had driven him to events around town, and he could sometimes get rides to the field office, which was filled with activity and excitement and fellow Bernie fans to talk to. Without the campaign, and with nowhere to go and no one to drive him, he was forced back into a life of isolation and dependence.

Back on campus, Pelliccia and some fellow students made an effort to continue the work of the campaign by launching a DSA chapter. Their first meeting drew around 15 people. It was a different crowd from those who had joined the school’s Bernie group: mostly first- and second-year students but no graduate students, even though a number had expressed enthusiasm when Pelliccia and her co-organizers first sent around a form to gauge interest. Respondents, she said, were pretty evenly divided among graduate students, undergrads, and community members, including university employees.

“To be honest, it sort of feels like we’re starting from scratch,” she told me. “Everything that I hoped would happen when the Bernie campaign ended, with U of Chicago for Bernie sort of transitioning into a DSA chapter and using all the momentum it had to get people who weren’t already involved in DSA to join DSA … that did not happen.” It helps that Pelliccia and her co-organizers have access to the UChicago for Bernie email list, which has more than 1,000 names, and social media accounts with a lot of followers. But even with those advantages, it’s been hard to get people to stay engaged, and difficult to recreate the energy, momentum, and sense of shared purpose generated by a national campaign.

Also missing were directives from a central organization. Because Sanders’s national campaign coordinated directly with UChicago for Bernie, each step in the process was clear. Pelliccia’s fledgling group does have the structure and support of both national DSA and Chicago DSA, she said, but she sometimes feels overwhelmed by the need to choose a few issues to focus on from such a wide range of urgent priorities. It also requires significantly more effort and creativity to build a sense of urgency around making difficult-to-quantify progress on an issue compared with the concrete and finite goal of electing a candidate to office.

Pelliccia hoped to gain traction in the coming year with campaigns to guarantee housing and defund the Chicago Police Department and was looking to partner with local groups working on similar efforts. Many campus groups were apolitical or anti-political, she said: reading and discussion groups with no activist component, or activist groups with no reading or discussion. She hoped to build a UChicago DSA chapter that combined political education with action.

As Pelliccia and her fellow organizers learned, even campaigns built around the best of intentions, the most admirable of candidates, and the most passionate of supporters cannot transform the political landscape of the United States alone or overnight. Being inspired by a candidate—even so inspired that you drop everything and commit full-time to the campaign, as many young Sanders volunteers did—and caring about the issues are not enough. Without skilled organizers, institutional support, and strategic, sustainable follow-through, the enthusiasm that candidates like Sanders generate is just as likely to evaporate as it is to change the world.

Connecting Issues to Politics

Shana Gallagher, who was twenty-six when we spoke, had hoped to be a marine biologist one day. But eventually she realized that the rapid pace of climate change would make it difficult or impossible to study sea life, much of which would be extinct by the time she completed her education. Coral reefs are disappearing, and up to 1 million plant and animal species, including 40 percent of amphibian species and over 33 percent of all marine mammals and reef-forming corals, face extinction due to global heating.²

An energetic brunette with big eyes, a broad smile, and a low, serious voice, Gallagher speaks quickly and confidently, with the ease and adaptability of somebody who grew up all over the place. Born in California, she moved with her family to Hong Kong at age eight, then to London, then back to the United States. She attended boarding school and the United World College in the UK and Tufts University in Boston, and has been a “campaign nomad” ever since, moving around a lot for various jobs. When we spoke, she had just accepted a position as organizing director for Mike Siegel, a progressive congressional candidate in Texas. (Siegel lost his race but won 45.3 percent of the vote.)³

Gallagher believes our campaign finance system is broken and elections are not a fast enough way to make the change we need. Yet she became invested in campaign work partly as a result of taking a job on Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 senatorial campaign in Texas, which she believed was committed to the crucial work of organizing. “I’m probably the only person who ever took a campaign job to save money,” she noted wryly. “Beto was offering a better salary than my crappy organizing job.”

She continued: “It’s a shame, but it’s true that no single issue galvanizes people like a candidate does. Because they project everything they want onto the candidate.” Still, her foray into the electoral realm had shown her how much elections matter.

Eventually she became the national student organizing director for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. Before joining the Sanders campaign, she had briefly worked on O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, and was disappointed by the differences between the latter’s senatorial campaign and his presidential run. Unlike his earlier campaign, she noted, O’Rourke’s presidential campaign was “clearly not doing student organizing, or organizing of any kind, but that’s another story.” Gallagher told me she had decided she would work for any campaign that believed in student organizing and was willing to invest in it, “and the Bernie campaign was the only one that believed clearly in empowering young people.”

Still, young people failed to turn out in big enough numbers to make Sanders the nominee. “It makes me very upset,” Gallagher said, “But the Bernie campaign was never, on its own, going to solve systemic youth voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression.” There is little civics education in American schools, she pointed out, and voting and civic engagement are not norms in every family or community. Because voting in the US can involve waiting in line for hours, many students were forced to choose between voting and working, or voting and attending class.

“The other side of that coin is, I feel really strongly that democracy reform is the meaningful path to climate change,” she said. “Most young people feel disempowered; literally for their entire lives, they have seen a broken, dysfunctional Congress. Lobbying and the influence of money on politics has increased dramatically in the last few years. Young people think, correctly, that their vote doesn’t matter. They are not inspired to vote. Bernie getting young people’s support never meant they were all going to vote for him.” Of the students she was attempting to organize, Gallagher told me: “People were either going to vote for Bernie or they were not going to vote, overwhelmingly. A lot of young people will say, ‘I don’t vote, I don’t do politics.’ ”

Much of what she said reminded me of my conversation with Leah Greenberg of Indivisible. “Our democracy is fundamentally broken,” Gallagher noted. “Most people, especially young people … don’t make the connection between democratic reform and moving forward on their issues.”

After Sanders suspended his campaign, Gallagher encouraged members of the Students for Bernie chapters that she and her colleagues had helped organize to join Sunrise, Student Action (the student arm of People’s Action, a national network of progressive organizations seeking to advance racial and economic justice), YDSA, and Dream Defenders.

Of her time with the Sanders campaign, Gallagher said one of her greatest points of pride was helping students understand why a healthy labor movement is essential to winning and enacting progressive policies. “If organized labor were as strong in the US as it was fifty years ago,” she said wistfully, “I think Bernie would have won.”

Redefining ‘Common Sense’

In recent years, a number of groups have emerged to answer Chakrabarti’s 2018 call for stronger progressive infrastructure. (Chakrabarti himself now runs a progressive think tank called New Consensus, which aims to solve problems like climate change, economic stagnation, and racial and rural wealth gaps by proposing solutions “modeled after mass economic mobilizations of the past.”) Matt Bruenig founded the “socialist-leaning” People’s Policy Project in 2017 to publish “ideas and analysis that assist in the development of an economic system that serves the many, not the few,” promote left-wing policy proposals, and work with legislators and publications to provide data and analysis for stories and initiatives. Bruenig worked closely with the Sanders campaign in the 2020 primary.

Sean McElwee, whose “smartest man in the room” persona has rubbed some otherwise allies the wrong way, helped found and is the executive director of Data for Progress, a think tank that uses “state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes.” Despite rising to prominence partly by popularizing the phrase “Abolish ICE” on Twitter, McElwee has since portrayed himself as the level-headed, data-loving pragmatist of the left: a guy who wants to win elections more than he wants to score points on social media.⁴ Never mind that DSA and allied groups’ electoral organizing has yielded some of the most serious gains the left has seen in decades; McElwee often implies that he is the resident grownup in most leftist spaces—a particularly grating stance from a twenty-something wunderkind. He supported Warren in the 2020 primary and later advised the Biden campaign. His critiques of Sanders have drawn anger from many on the socialist left, including Bruenig, although Bruenig also gave credit where he believed it was due: McElwee’s organization had done some good work, Bruenig wrote, and the “model of commissioning issue polls that show left-wing policy is popular and then offering those polls as exclusives to journalists is a good way to get the ideas in front of more eyeballs and move the discourse in the process.”⁵ A 2020 Jacobin essay that criticized McElwee for “kneecapping” Samelys López also acknowledged that there is “no doubt” that McElwee has “produced useful work, especially Data for Progress’s academic-style studies on voting and public opinion.”⁶

David Segal, executive director of the progressive online organizing group Demand Progress, began co-leading the Progressive Talent Pipeline project in 2018. Women made up half of the Pipeline’s initial roster; people of color made up about 40 percent. Recruits are trained on the appropriations process and congressional rules, given an overview of macroeconomics, advised on how staffers can work effectively with activists, and given an overview of key policy areas like immigration and criminal justice. Those who are placed in congressional offices are furnished ongoing training and support, including research assistance, skills development, and opportunities to participate in strategy meetings with allies and experts. As a 2019 Roll Call article on the project explained, it “grew out of a recognition that the political left lacks the well-resourced network of launch pads for early- and mid-career policymakers and communications experts that exists on the right.”⁷

Separately, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) unveiled a new policy center of its own in 2018. The goal, according to CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal, was to “connect all the policy research, work that’s being done on the outside, the organizing network, and the strategy to the work that’s being done on the inside”—a “really crucial” piece of infrastructure that’s been largely absent on the progressive side.⁸ Most House progressives already have relationships with left-leaning groups and organizers. But until these outside groups can figure out how to work together with—or wield power against—congressional Democrats as effectively as the NRA does with congressional Republicans, progress will continue to stall on the issues leftists care about the most.

It can take years to build a functional pipeline, especially one designed to funnel a new kind of talent. The proliferation of serious efforts to bring progressives into the halls of power is a key development of the last five years. Another is the burgeoning effort to make progressive organizations more disciplined and effective. Judging by the number of organizers I spoke with who brought it up, one of the most important groups to emerge in the last several years is the training institute and “movement incubator” Momentum.

Its executive director, Lissy Romanow, told me that the organization began to form around 2013 (she joined as its first executive director in January 2017). A group of young organizers from the climate justice movement, the labor movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the immigrants’ rights movement came together to discuss various victories and defeats and strategize about how to move forward. The thing they all had in common, Romanow said, was the feeling that although they had won a handful of battles, they were “losing the war.” (She hated to use a “war” analogy, she added, but had yet to come up with an equally evocative alternative.)

While the project was not “self-consciously generational” in theory, in practice it primarily attracted organizers younger than or around the same age as Romanow, who, at thirty-six, described herself as “definitely on the old end.” Romanow and her peers had begun fighting to rebuild a vibrant American left during the second term of the Obama administration. As Romanow put it: “Even though the Dreamers [people who lived in the US without official authorization after being brought to the country as minors] had won on DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] … there were also record deportations happening at the same time. And there was no way to protect their parents from being deported.” Similarly, while organizers had managed to stall construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, climate disasters were already engulfing the planet with no remedy in sight—and no one in power seemed to care.

In Romanow’s view, young organizers were not just disappointed in the Obama administration; they had lost faith in American political institutions in general, and were increasingly questioning a theory of change that had produced virtually no change at all. Movements, she added, are what happens when the government is no longer meeting people’s needs or enshrining popular will into law.

Pale-skinned and sober, with large, dark eyes and a frank manner, Romanow grew up in the suburbs of Boston and was living in New Haven, Connecticut, when we spoke. She said she was lucky to have been mentored by a number of women of color during her tenure as a community organizer at a statewide organization in Massachusetts. Yet in spite of the organization’s success in certain campaigns and the seriousness and dedication of much of its staff, “I just didn’t see the lives of the members of the organization changing,” she said. “There’s so many people who are one paycheck away from losing their home … I just kind of lost the faith … that if we just won these campaigns, one after another, that eventually these minimum wage campaigns would add up to a living wage. I just stopped believing it.”

Attending a 2014 Momentum training, Romanow finally felt like she could acknowledge her fears. The organization she had worked for in Massachusetts had put energy into organizing a specific group to demand certain policy reforms from legislators. Momentum taught her that was just one approach—what Momentum calls “structure-based” organizing-–and opened her eyes to a much broader range of options, including mass protest.

Momentum also articulated “a really clear theory of change” about how to win reforms that are “commensurate” with the scale of the problems. In the view of Romanow and many of the organizers she met before and through Momentum, there is no “clear math” showing that years of incremental reforms will ever add up to what is needed, “and certainly not on the timeline that most people need it.” The organization’s essential theory of change is that, in order to build the political will required to push through necessary reforms, progressive organizers “need a lot more leverage.”

They can build that leverage, she explained, by “activating a broad swath of the public” around certain demands and “giving them an opportunity to participate … over time to create urgency around the demand.” At the same time, they can focus on winning passive support from a broader group. “At the very beginning of a movement or a movement cycle,” she said, “the public will often be like, ‘No, we think this is unrealistic; we don’t believe in this,’ and then, over time, through sustained mobilization over a period of years, you can change what people perceive as ‘common sense.’ ”

Many Americans have witnessed this in their lifetimes, as once-marginal movements for the rights of Black, female, and/or LGBTQ Americans have attracted mainstream support. Since the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, the Movement for Black Lives and other organizations have convinced a much larger share of the public that police violence is a problem. Large majorities of likely voters now support significant police reform, if not defunding the police. That didn’t happen overnight or as the result of a single, or even dozens, of heinous act(s).⁹ It took decades of organizing and marching and millions of people in the streets to broaden support for the police accountability and oversight some were demanding six, ten, twenty, thirty, and fifty years ago.

Momentum also helped Romanow refine her understanding of what it means to win, pushing her from seeing success as “winning a legislative reform in the short term” to figuring out how to lay the foundations for larger-scale and more sustainable victories in the long term. “Not that it doesn’t ultimately mean passing legislation,” she added, “but in order to pass the legislation we need, it’s actually worth it to take five years to build the common sense around that legislation, rather than winning a much more partial victory without [laying the groundwork for] what’s ultimately necessary.” The purpose of social movements, she added, is to change our collective sense of “what’s normal and right and good in society.”

Seeing Our Differences as ‘Bridges, Not Moats’

A common criticism of, and frequent source of frustration within, the left is that it champions too many causes at once. How can we hope to succeed as a movement when we stand for so many different things and have to tailor our message to dozens of different constituencies? This problem is often blamed on “identity politics,” a poorly understood concept that originally meant the opposite of what it has come to mean today. Pioneered by the Black socialist feminists of the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s, the original concept was that Black liberation, feminism, and the movement for economic justice were not necessarily, and should not be treated as, disparate and conflicting movements; it was only by coming together to fight against all forms of oppression that activists could free all people. “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources,” the women of the Collective wrote in a 1977 statement, adding, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”¹⁰

Today, “identity politics” is more commonly understood to refer to people’s tendency to self-segregate and form exclusive political alliances around specific identities—a counter-solidaristic contraction that benefits the relatively few at the expense of the many.

Unlike in the 1970s, the new left has largely embraced identity politics as it was originally conceived: the idea that fighting oppression of all kinds, including anti-Black racism and police brutality, misogyny, and economic injustice, is essential to human freedom. Black feminist organizer Barbara Smith, who coauthored the Collective’s statement, endorsed Sanders for president in 2020, writing that she believed his campaign and his understanding of politics “complements the priorities that women of color defined decades ago.”¹¹ The Democratic Socialists of America website now hosts links to working groups devoted to prison abolition, Afro-socialists and socialists of color, anti-fascism, disability rights, eco-socialism, housing justice, immigrants’ rights, international issues, mutual aid, queer socialists, religious socialists, socialist feminists, and veterans—all under the banner of uniting “the multiracial working class” in solidarity rather than allowing it to be divided by fear. The Working Families Party describes itself as “a multiracial party that fights for workers over bosses and people over the powerful.”

There are still ongoing debates, both within these organizations and on the broader left, about what, exactly, that means, and how best to put it into practice. A misguided notion persists, particularly among those who are not on the left, that leftists must choose between addressing economic injustice and racial oppression. But very few young socialists and leftists today would dismiss the fights for Black liberation or reproductive freedom as necessary and legitimate terrains of struggle. And few serious young Black radicals do not also champion some socialist and/or redistributionist policies. Like Smith, they see the struggles for basic economic security and Black liberation as inextricably linked and are committed to fighting on multiple fronts at once. This sense of shared purpose is a strength; the broader the coalition and the more unified our vision, the easier it will be to accomplish certain policy and legislative goals.

Yet the realities of organizations like DSA are sometimes at odds with their stated ideals. In its current manifestation, DSA is still majority white and majority college-educated. And many leftist spaces are still perceived, not unfairly, as male-dominated. (“Yes, another woman!” a young Indian American woman exclaimed when I walked into a party hosted by a small socialist magazine in late 2019.) Racial and gender diversity are areas in which the new left is consciously striving to improve, and not merely for the sake of optics. As Sarah Leonard, a writer and editor who edits Lux, a socialist feminist magazine she launched in 2021, and to which I have contributed, explained, “I want everyone to be on the left. And I want everyone to have a way into the left that appeals to them, that they relate to and think, ‘Oh, this can be my home on the left.’ ”

Leonard, who was thirty-two when we spoke, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, grew up mostly outside of Boston, and now lives in Brooklyn. She often looks serious in photos but has a ready laugh and a warm manner face-to-face. Despite having radical sympathies from an early age—an outgrowth of her interest in punk—her adolescent politics were “weirdly realist.” She worked at Planned Parenthood and opposed the Iraq War as a college student in the Bush years.

Around the age of nineteen, Leonard began to realize that the Democratic Party was not up to the task of opposing an increasingly ruthless and effective GOP. She started reading Marx, took a course with the historian Barbara Fields, whose perspective on race “transformed” her thinking, and began to realize she was a socialist. Leonard joined DSA around 2010. “It was tiny,” she recalled of the DSA of that era, “and not very energetic.”

Today, Leonard has a great deal of appreciation and respect for the people “who kept the flame [alive] during the years when the left was exhausted and defunct and defeated.” If organizations and outlets like DSA and Dissent magazine had not existed when the left came roaring back to life, she said, “it would have been way harder to educate ourselves, to get organized, to figure out what we were doing and just to have some place to go.” It was also an asset to the growing left that a relatively young woman, Maria Svart, has led and helped to expand DSA since 2011.

In Leonard’s view, one of the primary advantages of socialist feminism is that it expands the reach of socialism by broadening its conception of workers and deepening its understanding of the interconnectedness of different forms of oppression. Socialists are the ones advocating for solutions—child care, health care, more power at work—to most women’s everyday problems. Socialist feminist analysis is, Leonard said, “a big part of what makes socialism feel relevant right now.”

In 2016, “It felt like I was constantly being asked to choose between socialism and feminism,” she said. “Either you supported Hillary Clinton, or you were a ‘Bernie Bro.’ ” Since she was neither, it “pissed [her] off” that the two things which together form her politics “were being set against each other when, to my mind, they need each other to be relevant.” Without socialism, she noted, much of contemporary feminism is only relevant and applicable to elites. And without feminism, socialism can’t effectively or comprehensively address many people’s experiences under capitalism or identify the forces that help prop it up.

Even within DSA, and especially as the organization grew, she had the impression that many of her comrades still considered feminism “a bit of a sideshow.”

To counteract that impression, she started leading reading and discussion sessions for NYC-DSA’s feminist working group. She wanted people to understand that the “most vibrant and relevant bits” of socialism were “shaped by feminist thought,” and to celebrate female thinkers and writers as crucial to the socialist project. “It’s kind of hard to maintain that sense of being a central constituency if you don’t see yourself reflected anywhere,” Leonard noted. All of this led her to found Lux, which was named in part for the Polish-German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg.

She also wanted to make something that would mimic the women’s magazines she had enjoyed reading in her younger years. Magazines like Sassy, which served from 1988 to 1996 as a feminist alternative to more widely read teen magazines like Seventeen and YM, were a source of inspiration. “One of the things that’s so great about something like Sassy is, to a large degree, it evades the male gaze,” Leonard said. “Men can read it, but it’s not for them; it’s not catering to them. It’s not trying to look serious to men. It’s talking about what’s serious to its readership.”

To Leonard, the brand of feminism that high-profile, wealthy, and personally ambitious women have promoted in recent years is actually “incredibly unambitious.” It’s about accepting that the world is how it is, she said, and learning to compete in it by not sleeping too much or taking too much maternity leave. By doing “all of this hard work all of the time,” she acknowledged, some women can indeed ascend to the top of the corporate ladder, just like some men. But the vast majority of women cannot relate to “Girl Boss”–style feminism. It can also serve as cover for bad corporate actors (see: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose feminism helped shield the company from scrutiny of its gender equity record) and disastrous foreign interventions (see: Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton).

Lux borrows the late author bell hooks’s broader, simpler, and more inclusive definition of feminism: “the struggle against sexist oppression,” which renders it an ongoing practice rather than a static identity; something everyone can participate in. Central to this vision is the idea that anything short of full equality does not count as feminist. “You can’t have rich women being equal to rich men or poor women being equal to poor men and call that a feminist victory,” Leonard explained. This more holistic feminism demands social and political changes far more radical than anything Sandberg has proposed. It also makes feminism a collective rather than an individual project, and moves it from the realm of “small, personal choices” to one of broader social transformation.

Leonard and her comrades are especially eager to push back on the trivialization of women’s issues as petty, personal, and unserious. The original meaning of the old feminist slogan “the personal is political” was that a particular class of people (i.e., women) experience the same kinds of “personal” problems (overwork, sexual predation, low pay) due to larger, systemic forces—and those problems require broad political and social, not just individual, solutions.

That is part of why Leonard sees the fortunes of feminism and the broader left as inextricably intertwined. That feminism was far more radical in the 1960s and 1970s than it has been in the 2000s makes sense; many feminists in those years were alumni of other movements, namely the civil rights and anti-war movements. People involved in the struggles of that time often describe it as an era in which everything was changing at once, Leonard said, and those changes felt meaningful and exciting. The same social and political shifts that have revivified the left in recent years have helped revive radical feminism as well.

In Leonard’s view, it’s no surprise, and no accident, that “most interesting political struggles right now are being led by women,” from teachers’ and nurses’ strikes to left-wing political campaigns to the prison abolition and anti–police brutality movements. “Women have always been the shock absorbers of capitalism,” she said. “When governments say, ‘We’re going to cut social services, everyone’s going to have to work two jobs to make ends meet, there’s no guaranteed health care, there’s no child care, and you’re just going to have to make all that work out,’ ” she added, “who absorbs that shit? Women do. Women do the vast majority of work that’s abandoned by the state.”

She believed that socialist feminists would be fighting the same battles under a Biden administration that they did under Trump. Conditions have been steadily deteriorating for women in particular, she said, especially during the pandemic, but one positive outcome is that more people today are “very aware that you can’t rely on the courts”—it was Biden, after all, who failed to keep arch-conservative and alleged sexual harasser Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court—and which could lead to a surge of grassroots organizing around reproductive justice issues. Women, she said, cannot depend on the Biden administration to defend their rights.

One point Leonard hopes to make through Lux is that “identity politics,” in its original sense, is a good thing. “It’s been kicked around a lot over the last five years as a bad kind of politics that divides people,” she observed. But it actually has the power to broaden and strengthen the left. “You work from the place you are, from your own identity, and that gives you a particular point of view; it may let you see things that other people don’t see,” she said, paraphrasing the Combahee River Collective. “But every bit of that identity is a bridge to other people who share that bit of who you are … These [aspects of our identities] are bridges, not moats.”

7

Why the Left Needs Organized Labor

To fight and win, the new left needs more than moral outrage, passionate candidates, and record-breaking protests: it needs powerful, growing, and sustainable organizations. It also needs to help revitalize and forge stronger connections with organized labor—and not just because, as Shana Gallagher speculated, a robust labor movement might have been able to put Sanders in the White House. Marxist academic Adolph Reed Jr.’s 2014 Harper’s essay “Nothing Left” is an elegy for the powerful labor movement and once “dynamic” left that existed in the US throughout the twentieth century. It had since been replaced, Reed argued, with a desiccated and powerless left “infected with electoralitis” and “tethered … to a Democratic Party that has long since renounced its commitment to any sort of redistributive vision.” The essay is a lacerating read for leftists, but the final paragraph hints at a path forward. Some on the left claim Obama’s election demonstrated their side’s appeal: he didn’t govern like a leftist, but in some ways he ran as one. But to Reed, Obama’s success in presenting himself as “the literal embodiment of an otherwise vaporous progressive politics” was “most fundamentally an expression of the limits of the [US] left.” It was therefore incumbent on the left “to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one.” This was, he added, “a long-term effort, and one that requires grounding in a vibrant labor movement. Labor may be weak or in decline, but that means aiding in its rebuilding is the most serious task for the American left.”¹

Rebuilding the US labor movement is a key part of what today’s left, particularly DSA, is trying to do. In 2019, the New York Times published a story with a provocative headline: “In New York, the Far Left Is Targeting a Close Ally,” which opened: “A group of far-left activists huddled in the basement of a labor union in Manhattan, aiming to upend a Democratic institution that they felt had grown stale.” The activists’ unlikely “target” was unions, including the Communications Workers of America, which was hosting the meeting. According to the Times: “The plan did not go over well. The union … kicked the activists out.”²

In summarizing the conflict, the Times cast DSA in the role of outside agitator: “At its heart, the debate is one between pragmatism and idealism, working within the system versus burning it down.”³ The actual strategy, according to those who pioneered it, is to encourage people to join unions and work from within to pressure leadership to take bolder positions, including standing up to Democratic and Republican officials alike. DSA’s stated goal is to strengthen the labor movement, not blow it up. The “pragmatism vs. idealism” framing was odd and misleading, but it’s no surprise that the Times was able to elicit hostile quotes from longtime union leaders by characterizing young organizers’ critique as a desire to burn it all down. (“It’s the New York Times,” DSA national director Maria Svart said of the story, practically rolling her eyes through the phone, “So you have to recognize the class interests that are reflected in that characterization.”) As Jeremy Saunders of VOCAL-NY explained, “This growing left sees labor as its natural allies, but is frustrated by some unions who too often side with those same politics and politicians who refuse to fight for justice.”⁴ (Noting similar tensions within the Working Families Party, journalist Ross Barkan once wrote of the WFP, which was essentially an arranged “marriage” between organized labor and progressive activists, that the alliance, though deliberate, could at times be strained, since “labor leaders are more accommodating to political power brokers than party activists.”)

Among other campaigns, NYC-DSA’s labor branch is pursuing a “rank-and-file strategy” of encouraging members to seek union jobs, and work to transform unions from within. NYC-DSA outlined this strategy in detail in a Medium post which noted, “This project is by its nature a multi-year project.” On a recent call, one organizer estimated that around 10 percent of DSA members also belong to unions, including but not limited to those in the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), an opposition caucus within the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

Many leading Democratic politicians initially or always opposed raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, for example. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), has publicly undermined Medicare for All by suggesting that employer-sponsored private insurance plans can and should coexist alongside a broader public plan.⁵ She recently came under fire for working with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer to secure nearly $3 billion in pandemic relief funding for private schools, despite public school advocates’ years of resistance to Republican efforts to funnel federal money to private schools.⁶ With friends like these, many leftists wonder, who needs enemies?

Michael Kinnucan, an antsy, soft-spoken former electoral organizer with NYC-DSA and popular Facebook political commentator who has since moved to Philadelphia to work as a research analyst for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), described DSA as “very labor movement– oriented.” We were sitting on a bench in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park one sunny September afternoon, and he was smoking a cigarette. Since we weren’t yet vaccinated against Covid, I asked if he’d be comfortable if I took off my mask. Gesturing at his cigarette, he waved the question away: “Well, I’m giving cancer to everyone around me, so who am I to say?”

Having worked with some of the notoriously conservative building trade unions, Kinnucan has insight into both the new left and the world of old-school, and sometimes reactionary, organized labor. In his view, DSA’s stance toward unions “marks a pretty significant shift in the US progressive left.” When I noted that the Working Families Party, an organization founded to multiply the power of both by uniting organized labor with leftist organizations, had had mixed results, Kinnucan said: “Union guys, especially in the trades and the Teamsters and so forth, love to say that progressives just don’t get them. I’ve heard a lot more [of that] from that side. No one in DSA thinks, ‘Oh, we can just wait for [old, white, conservative union members] to die.’ ” Ten years ago, he added, “the attitude of, ‘These are old white men’ or ‘We just don’t need to think about or deal with unions’ was more prevalent. And I think the changes come from both sides. Every year there are more unions who are sort of realizing, ‘We’re losing on our own; we have to be in coalition.’ ”

On the subject of the WFP, Kinnucan added, “There’s never been a progressive organization as completely committed to the labor movement as the WFP, and there was a real structural thing there, whereas unions now—the surviving remnants of the great American labor movement are down to the level of private sector organization we had in 1900. [Unions] are surviving to a very large extent through political means rather than through direct action or strike power. So they’re very political organizations. They’re very, very, very vulnerable to political threats. And there’s just not any way that they can pursue an adventurous, edgy electoral strategy. It’s a structural fact about the modern labor movement. And that structural fact … leads progressives to be dismissive, and it leads people on the labor side to be even more conservative and transactional than they need to be, because that’s the [model that they know].”

Kinnucan sees two versions of DSA’s rank-and-file strategy: “The vision of the rank-and-file strategy in its bad, twenty-three-year-old Trotskyist form is, ‘We just need to replace those union bureaucrats with socialists and that’ll fix it,’ ” he said. “The vision of the strategy in its good form is, ‘These unions are not going to change their political strategy because they get a better political director; unions need to have a stronger, more confident relationship with their base, and for that base to see its self-interest as identified with the self-interest of the broader working class. And that is, first of all and in part, an organizing problem … DSA members who are pursuing the [good] rank-and-file strategy … are not, first of all, about running for office in their union. They’re first of all about making the union stronger at its grassroots, so that it can afford to be less transactional at the political director level.”

The Changing Faces of Organized Labor and the Progressive Movement

Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA, AFL-CIO, is, according to the New Republic, the “most powerful labor leader in the country.”⁷ A compelling speaker and effective negotiator, she embodies precisely the kind of union leadership the new left hopes to foster more of in the coming years. She has become a rising star in the labor movement thanks to her evident passion, energy, and take-no-prisoners demeanor (it doesn’t hurt that she’s also a blonde with movie-star looks). She has been outspoken in defense not only of the 50,000 workers she directly represents, but of workers everywhere. She shared her own story of sexual assault in solidarity with those who have experienced the sexual harassment that is rampant in her industry, and she frequently decries racism and xenophobia. She was widely credited with forcing Trump to end a government shutdown in early 2019 by threatening a general strike. She has a warm relationship with Sanders, whom she introduced at an event on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, and she spoke at DSA’s 2019 national convention.

Many on the left adore Nelson because, unlike some in the labor movement, she does not see the interests of organized labor as separate and distinct from those of women and people of color. And like her leftist admirers, she is critical of the trade-offs she believes many unions have made in recent decades. “We spent too much time trying to cut deals with the boss or build favor with politicians and too little time organizing members to fight for what we deserve,” she baldly declared of union heads at a Chicago DSA dinner.

Labor writer Sarah Jaffe wrote in the Nation that Nelson’s “swagger” and “combative language” epitomize the “renewed fighting spirit” of today’s labor movement, which has, in Jaffe’s telling, “largely come from female workers” like teachers, retail and hotel workers, nurses, and flight attendants, as opposed to the “caricature” of the working class as “white men in hard hats” persistently peddled by Trump and much of the media.⁸ In public-sector unions, which gained 132,000 members from 2018 to 2019—despite the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling, which was intended to cripple them by cutting off a critical source of revenue—women now outnumber men.⁹ The demographic and industrial shifts in organized labor to some extent map onto similar shifts in the Democratic Party.

In media narratives, if not yet in actual power within the party, the Democratic Party’s rising stars have gone from white male centrists like Bill Clinton, James Carville, and Rahm Emanuel to socialists and progressives of color like Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman. (Of course, white male centrists still attract fawning press; Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg comes to mind. But despite being the youngest member of Biden’s cabinet, Buttigieg is hardly the political rock star Bill Clinton once was, and he does not excite young people the way the Squad does.)

Shifting demographics in the labor movement may correlate with, but did not cause the rise of an emboldened left in the Democratic Party and American politics at large. Yet it’s no accident that women and people of color are leading both. The decimation of unions has, by many measures, hit them the hardest. They have borne the brunt of rapidly deteriorating social and economic conditions, stagnant wages, student and medical loan debt, lack of health care, and—since March 2020—a horrifyingly mismanaged public health crisis that forced millions to combine full-time work with full-time child care and supervision of their children’s educations. Groups like Justice Democrats, Sunrise, Indivisible, and DSA are led or jointly led by women, and they operate campaigns—for example, to cancel rent and abolish student and medical debt—that would benefit women and people of color most of all. These groups also deliberately and primarily recruit and support candidates who are women and people of color.

This is partly ideological; many on the new left believe that, in the words of Ayanna Pressley, “The people closest to the pain should be the closest to the power.” And it’s partly a strategy to broaden the left. As evidenced by support for Sanders among young women and people of color, and Black activist support for Elizabeth Warren, many on the left care as much or more about a candidate’s policy proposals and record as they do about their race and gender. But they also want to build a world where they don’t have to choose: a society with justice for all, and one in which women and people of color have power, too.

Unions vs. Medicare for All and a Green New Deal

Unless or until groups like DSA and Sunrise are able to strengthen the connection between their organizations and a broader base of union members, it will be very difficult to win legislative battles for priorities like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal at the federal or state level. As I learned in reporting on New York State’s single-payer health care bill for the Nation, some major unions not only oppose New York’s statewide single-payer health care bill on paper; they have gone so far as to arm their members with insurance-industry talking points and dispatch them to argue against the bill in public forums. At a 2019 forum on the New York Health Act at Brooklyn College, attendees bearing orange folders told one of the event organizers they were from the UFT. The folders contained sixteen pages of background information on the bill, drawn from the Realities of Single Payer website, Politico, Vox, and other sources. A section labeled “Questions/comments to make” included this gem: “I read somewhere that New York state would have to raise an additional $139 BILLION in new taxes to start to do this plan. How is that a realistic [sic]?” and language about how the idea of new taxes “makes my blood run cold.”¹⁰

Despite widespread support for single-payer health care from rank-and-file members, the leaders of unions like the UFT have taken a top-down approach to the issue. UFT president Michael Mulgrew supported the decision of an umbrella group to which his union belongs to send a letter opposing the bill to New York’s top elected leaders at the time: Governor Andrew Cuomo, State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. MORE member Peter Lamphere told me in an email that Mulgrew had “caved to Cuomo and some of the more conservative elements in the union movement … MORE has a position in favor of [statewide] single payer and we campaigned on this in the UFT elections.”¹¹

Lamphere also said that the UFT never held an organization-wide discussion of the bill and its merits. Instead, Mulgrew unilaterally decided to publicly oppose it. Mulgrew acknowledged to me that member fears about single-payer health care have “not come up much at meetings.” Apparently concerned that his members were not concerned enough, Mulgrew raised the alarm himself, saying at a 2018 executive board meeting: “We are in support of single payer for the United States. If we enact this in New York State, it will blow a hole in the budget the public schools will not recover from,” and making a similar remark at a UFT meeting in 2019.¹² The suggestion that the state bill would “blow a hole” in New York’s budget is remarkably similar to language used by then Gov. Cuomo, who was also notably unenthusiastic about the bill. When I asked Mulgrew if the now ex-governor’s reservations had factored into the UFT’s position, he replied: “Absolutely not. I never even spoke to him about it.”

Asked whether UFT members had ever voted to oppose the bill, Mulgrew said the Municipal Labor Committee, to which the UFT belongs, decided to send an opposition letter. “You’re an elected rep from your union,” he told me. “If you had to, every time you were asked to vote or to give your opinion, stop and go back to your union, you’d never get any of that work done.” In other words: Just trust us. Direct democracy is a real time suck.

Leaders of the new left say they don’t want to blow up the labor movement any more than they want to blow a hole in New York State’s budget. What they do want are leaders who listen to their members and are willing to put people power—and union weight—behind major progressive goals, even and especially when that means standing up to powerful elected officials.

This is an ongoing tension. The New York chapter of WFP experienced a schism in 2018, when some union officials fought to endorse Cuomo for re-election. Progressive activists favored Cynthia Nixon, a long-shot candidate who was challenging Cuomo from the left. WFP’s ultimate decision to endorse Nixon led to an exodus of organized labor, including 32BJ SEIU, CWA, and RWDSU. It was widely reported at the time that Cuomo had threatened to withdraw his support on key union priorities unless unions withdrew from the WFP. Unions like 1199SEIU, UFT, the Hotel Trades Council, and TWU had left years earlier, some due to a similar 2014 fight over whether or not the WFP should back progressive attorney and activist Zephyr Teachout, who ran to Cuomo’s left in the 2014 Democratic primary. A similar threat, implicit or explicit, was in effect in 2014 as well. Although the WFP ultimately backed Cuomo that year, the fact that it had even considered doing otherwise prompted the departure of several Cuomo-allied unions. Given Cuomo’s long public record of vindictiveness, it was a devil’s bargain some union heads felt they had little choice but to make. Others had more in common with Cuomo politically than they did with WFP’s progressive activist wing.

WFP agreed to back Cuomo in 2014 only after extracting a promise from the governor to bring the state senate under Democratic control and fight for passage of the DREAM Act, a minimum wage hike, public financing of elections, and decriminalization of marijuana. Although Cuomo reneged on his promise, progressives eventually achieved all of these goals, in part by recruiting progressive challengers to defeat Cuomo-allied Democrats in primaries. Public financing of elections passed as part of the budget process in early 2020 but included a Cuomo-engineered provision that made it harder for minor parties like the WFP to maintain their ballot lines. These victories came about with no help from the then-governor. While officially championing many of these policies, Cuomo often actively worked to undermine or torpedo them behind the scenes. (New York’s political landscape has shifted considerably since August 2021, when Cuomo resigned amidst cascading scandals, including multiple credible sexual harassment allegations. And although few on the left consider his replacement, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a progressive champion, they recognize that she is an improvement on her predecessor. As Sochie Nnaemeka, director of the New York Working Families Party, said of Hochul in 2022, “We’ve all been traumatized by Cuomo. She moves very differently politically … She has shown real ability to collaborate, to consult.”¹³)

Attend meetings and strategy calls with progressive activists and you will hear how crucial a robust labor movement is to winning any left-wing demand. Organizers with advanced degrees and white-collar jobs speak earnestly of the need to collaborate with and support working people. As one comrade declared at a recent DSA meeting, “Strike support is your duty as a socialist.” But for some within DSA, it’s difficult to know where and how to start, especially if you do not come from a working-class background yourself. It is clear what unions have to offer progressive organizations like the WFP and DSA: money, institutional resources, valuable endorsements, office space, and the ability to quickly mobilize large armies of volunteers. Aside from occasional strike support, it is not yet clear to many unions what less established and less powerful organizations like DSA have to offer them.

That’s why some union officials, and some rank-and-file members, still believe it’s wiser to remain in a semi-functional marriage with powerful incumbents who can guarantee them a “seat at the table” during important negotiations. It took snowballing scandals over his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, suppression of an accurate death count, a damning report from the state attorney general’s office detailing his sexual harassment of staff, and top Democrats, including Biden, calling for his resignation to finally spur Cuomo to step down in 2021. For over a decade and until very recently, he was the most powerful man in New York; as of 2022, he was hinting that he may yet again run for governor of New York. Groups like DSA, Sunrise, and Justice Democrats may be gaining power, but they are not yet the mightiest force in one of the most populous, politically powerful, and heavily unionized states in the country.

At a 2020 virtual event for the book Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, which featured a number of new left organizers, including Alexandra Rojas of Justice Democrats and Varshini Prakash of Sunrise, I posed a question about organized labor: “Some union folks resist the Green New Deal because they don’t want job training; they want jobs as good as the ones they have now. How do we get all unions on board with the Green New Deal by ensuring that workers don’t lose out?”

Prakash replied, “I wish we had the time to dig into all of [your questions] because they are juicy, but I’m going to pose one question in particular that I’m really interested in.” After reading my question, she asked Guido Girgenti, Justice Democrats’ media director and a founding Sunrise board member, to answer first.

Girgenti cited International President of SEIU Mary Kay Henry’s chapter in Winning the Green New Deal, saying that one of Henry’s strongest points is that there’s no need to offer workers who are transitioning out of high-carbon sectors “worse jobs.” We just pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to keep vast sectors of the corporate economy afloat during a pandemic, he noted; there’s no reason we can’t create “good-paying union jobs doing conservation, building solar panels, etc.”

Abruptly, he pivoted to paraphrasing the labor leader Bob Master of the Communications Workers of America’s (CWA’s) contribution to the book. We need to make the case to labor, he said, that the Green New Deal is not just another in a long line of policy battles. It’s a direct response to the climate crisis, which is going to “define the economy for the next century.” If unions stay “in a defensive crouch,” Girgenti said, they risk falling even further behind. Master, he added, drew an analogy between the current moment and the New Deal era, when the American Federation of Labor (AFL) myopically focused on organizing craft or skilled laborers while excluding wide swaths of unskilled immigrant workers. When the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) stepped up to organize those unskilled workers and take advantage of the New Deal, the AFL lost power and prominence. “You don’t want to be like the AFL in 1934, 1935, thinking that you’re going to do the same politics and keep winning,” Girgenti warned, channeling Master, “because you might get leapfrogged by organizers and leaders and workers who are claiming their role in the new economy.”

It’s a reasonable point, but as he spoke I was imagining how union leaders born in the 1950s might react to being lectured about history and “the new economy” by a man half their age.

Ian Haney López, a law professor at Berkeley, spoke next. He began by praising organized labor: CWA, he noted, has been “at the forefront” of coming up with a useful race-class analysis, “a story that says, ‘Hey, racism is being weaponized against us.’ ” The Green New Deal isn’t just “a route to a new sector of the economy,” he added; it’s also a powerful way for organized labor to fight back against the main force—racism, in his view—that has led to the “drastic diminishment of organized labor over the last fifty years.”

López likened union opposition to the Green New Deal to Reagan Democrats: union members motivated by racial resentment to vote for anti-union politicians. Unions, he said, could benefit from the Green New Deal’s “story,” which could help them persuade their members to focus on building cross-racial workplace solidarity and stop organizing their politics around racial resentment. It was also an opportunity for union leaders to tell members to “get on board” with an anti-racist, pro-environment agenda because fighting against racism and for a Green New Deal is the best thing they can do “for [their] own family.”

López’s overall point—that the best way to strengthen the labor movement is by addressing race and class together—was valuable and nuanced. But I knew from reporting on New York State’s single-payer health care bill that some of the bill’s most vocal opponents are Black union members who fear, in part because union officials have led them to believe they should fear, that any change to the current system will cost them money and bargaining power.

If union opposition to progressive policies is largely a top-down phenomenon, it seems crucial to address it from the bottom up. Just as there were Reagan Democrats, many union members voted for Trump, some out of racial animus. Rather than condemning them as toxic racists, a strong and healthy union would help its members to see why and how supporting Trump was bad for working people and harmful to organized labor. Building an effective coalition means uniting disparate constituencies with a wide range of attitudes and biases in service of a larger goal. Sometimes that means overlooking, setting aside, or downplaying disagreements. This is effectively what the Democratic Party and its allies did to elect Biden; leaders like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and organizations like the Working Families Party made frequent public statements to the effect of, “We disagree with Biden on a number of issues, but coming together to defeat Trump is, at the moment, our most urgent priority.”

How, when, and with whom to compromise is one of the most important questions facing the new left. Many young organizers, particularly those in Sunrise, find it necessary and compelling to emphasize the racial justice component of the Green New Deal. And some were frustrated by what they saw as Sanders’s lack of facility in addressing race-based inequities. Others, particularly those in rural and conservative areas, think it’s more important to lead with superficially but not actually race-neutral goals, like saving the planet and creating union jobs.

Strategic questions over how best to build union and working-class support for major progressive policy goals reflect a broader tension on the left, one often laid bare by media narratives around Sanders’s campaign: does making the case for particular policies in universal, class-based terms mean you are ignoring—or require you to ignore—race and racism? When is forging alliances with anti-choice, pro–single payer Catholics a smart way to broaden support for Medicare for All, and when does it endanger women’s rights? These are often presented as zero-sum questions: race versus class, reproductive justice versus health care for all. The underlying premise is that it is impossible to address all these things at once: we have to pick and choose, and there will inevitably be winners and losers.

In a 2021 New York Times interview, Sanders stressed what he sees as the importance of reaching out to young people, people of color, and everyone who believes in economic and social justice while at the same time “aggressively” courting working-class Republicans. “And if we can do that,” he added, “if you can get 10 percent of Trump’s support and grow our support by addressing the real issues that our people feel are important,” we can build “a coalition that is not going to lose a lot of elections.”¹⁴ Sanders acolytes, including many DSA members, see the wisdom in this. But many progressives object on principle to seeking common cause with Trump voters, who are presumed to be racists and/or misogynists. Figuring out how to balance the needs, rights, and comfort of particular groups against the need to expand the coalition of Americans demanding progressive policies is essential to moving forward.

The next person to weigh in on my question about union support for a Green New Deal was Julian Brave NoiseCat, a vice president at Sean McElwee’s think tank, Data for Progress. “In Rewiring America, Saul Griffith makes the research-based claim that we could create 25 million jobs in the next five years by electrifying the United States,” he said, adding that progressives should focus not just on “the creation of those jobs,” but also on the “trade-off that moderates are going to put in front of us.” Folks want to save money on their energy bills, we want to create jobs, and we also want those jobs to be good union jobs, he said, summarizing the theoretical conversation. Moderates, he added, are going to say we can’t have all of those things at once.

NoiseCat, a now twenty-nine-year-old member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie raised in Oakland, California, echoed Girgenti’s point that proponents of the Green New Deal must fight “arm in arm” with unions for good, clean jobs. “In the conversations about labor and a just transition, [there is very often] an emphasis—rightly—on the jobs and the material reality,” he continued. He mentioned a conversation with a former adviser to a West Virginia politician who told him that even though coal jobs are no longer a large part of that state’s economy, West Virginians still see coal as a core part of their identity. “We need to take care of those workers,” he said, but we also “need to be thinking about … what work means and how people value their dignity and labor.”

There are, he noted, “all these green jobs out there that are not usually thought of that way. It’s not folks who are necessarily installing solar panels, but folks who are taking care of our grandparents or our parents, the folks who are teaching our kids … Those are green jobs, too, and I think it’s really, really important that, especially as we shift toward a more caring economy … that we stop having this very gendered, very sort of blue-collar, white dude–driven notion of what a green job and what labor is and looks like.”

To me he seemed to be glossing over the considerable challenges ahead. For people whose jobs, gender, and/or race are integral to who they are, the transition from coal to care work will require more than a slight attitude adjustment. People like that, not all of whom are white men, don’t just want jobs equivalent in pay and benefits to the ones they have (and in some cases, have had for decades); in many cases, they want jobs that make them feel useful, valued, and respected as men. To achieve a Green New Deal its proponents need to win over not only those who already agree with them, but those whose attitudes they find reactionary, distasteful, short-sighted, and wrong. As Sanders and others know, men with out-of-date, “white dude–driven” notions still have a great deal of political power, whether or not they should.

Sunrise’s responses to my question reminded me of a popular 2017 video created by the satirical site the Onion. It depicts a fifty-something blue-collar white guy intoning: “I voted for Trump because I thought he’d create a better America for everyone. But after reading 800 or so pages on queer feminist theory, I realize now just how much I’ve been duped … I come from a small steel town in Pennsylvania. If I had known the foundational texts on intersectional theory, I would have never chanted, ‘Lock her up! Lock her up!’ We were told that Hillary Clinton was the enemy, but it’s clear now that the true enemy is a patriarchal capitalistic society that maintains its ascendance by making powerful and ambitious women appear threatening, only to protect my status in a system purposefully designed to protect cis het white men like myself … I get that now, after I attended a gender-fluid, non-binary poetry slam at Swarthmore. A couple of other guys from work attended it, too, and now it’s all we talk about on the line.”¹⁵

The joke can be read in a couple of ways: (1) Trump voters, presumed to be older, non-college-educated white men with traditional blue-collar jobs, don’t need to—or cannot—be educated, because they are irredeemably racist and sexist and averse to reading or (2) anti-Trump activists are tone-deaf to the point of self-parody, and speak only to and for a niche audience of elite, college-educated liberals. Both are reductive takes, but the latter isn’t too far off the mark. The video resonated with enough people to have been viewed nearly two million times. The Sunrise organizers certainly weren’t speaking as abstrusely as the average queer feminist theorist, but they did sound as if they were talking to people like themselves: college-educated professionals with jobs as think tank analysts and Berkeley professors.

Their response also reminded me of one of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 missteps. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said at a CNN town hall.¹⁶ In context, she was acknowledging that those jobs were disappearing, in part due to an environmentally necessary transition away from fossil fuels. But, as she explained at the time, “We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget [the coal miners] … we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

Clinton’s campaign also released a $30 billion plan that called for increased job training, small-business development, and infrastructure investment, and sought to protect miners’ health care and pensions. None of that sounds sufficient—people want jobs that pay at least as much as the ones they’ve had, not vague promises of job training—but at least she acknowledged that we owe those workers something. As was so often the case throughout her disastrously tone-deaf campaign, Clinton was criticized for the wrong reason: for failing to more skillfully sugarcoat an economic reality, rather than failing to offer adequate support to workers in dying industries.

Explaining why, as one headline put it, “Labor unions fear Democrats’ Green New Deal poses job threat,” Yvette Pena-O’Sullivan, executive director of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), which represents workers in construction and other industries, told Reuters in 2019, “We will never settle for ‘just transition’ language as a solution to the job losses that will surely come from some of the policies in [the Green New Deal].”¹⁷ Amanda McIllmurray, one of the organizers I met in Philadelphia, told me she avoids the phrase entirely: “When workers hear that we’re going to have a ‘just transition,’ they know that means they’re going to get fucked. So we can’t really use [that language] around a Green New Deal.” Most workers won’t rise up in support of a cause unless they trust you to protect their interests. Building that trust takes time and effort.

A Green New Deal for the Building Trades

In photos, union carpenter Laura Gabby, who was thirty-six when we spoke, looks like an avenging warrior princess in a hard hat. She grew up in Spokane, Washington, went to high school in Nevada, and has lived in New York City for around fifteen years, about half of that time in the Bronx. She was inspired by but not especially active in Sanders’s 2016 campaign and joined NYC-DSA at the end of 2016. Sometimes, she’d discuss Sanders with her coworkers. More of her fellow union members than she would have expected were enthusiastic about Bernie, but she also knew plenty of Trump-supporting union guys—and in her industry, they were nearly all guys. Still, Trump’s election came as a shock.

It also made Gabby realize that the Democratic Party’s broader strategy was not working, and that Sanders’s campaign had highlighted a different path forward, one with the potential to win. Gabby had considered herself “anti-capitalist” before joining DSA, but never felt like she had “done enough reading” to call herself a socialist. But Sanders’s politics made intuitive sense to her, some labor organizers she knew and trusted were getting involved with DSA, and joining the organization felt like a logical next step.

The fact that many of her coworkers were Trump fans was off-putting but unsurprising. A lot of the workers she encountered in New York City building trades circles had had contact with Trump in the 1980s and ’90s, when he was building a lot in New York, mostly with union labor. Some of her coworkers remembered those jobs fondly and had developed the erroneous impression that Trump was “a union guy,” Gabby said.

Gabby graduated from college in 2008 with a degree in public health. Despite the recession, she was able to find work in her field, but she had to piece together a string of low-paying, part-time jobs. After a few years she was still struggling to pay off $84,000 of student loan debt. At the time, she was playing soccer seven days a week. Many of her soccer friends worked in construction or landscaping, and Gabby started thinking about how much she enjoyed physical labor and being part of a team. She happened to see a subway ad for a program that helps women pursue employment in the building trades and soon joined the NYC Carpenters Union.

Going from a field like public health, which Gabby described as “like 90 percent women,” to the building trades was “a huge culture shock.” On the first carpenter job she ever took, “it was like they’d never seen a woman,” let alone worked with one. The fact that there are more women in the field now—not “vastly” more, but enough so that Gabby is no longer the only one on any given job site—has been a big improvement.

Becoming proficient at the work also helped. “Nobody can take that away from you, once you know the trade,” she said. “A lot of guys would look at you and be like, ‘Why bother, she’s not going to last’ … because a higher percentage of women do drop out.” She noticed that men who were senior to her would often let younger men try and fail, but whenever Gabby tried to do something, “somebody would run over” to rescue her, often insisting it was “too dangerous.” One day she built some scaffolding “without anybody’s help and without anybody’s permission,” and all of a sudden, “It was kind of like, ‘Oh, okay, she’s serious about this.’ ”

As a DSA member, Gabby is trying to build support for a Green New Deal within her union. It’s a tough sell for some in the building trades, if not as tough as its opponents claim. Most of the workers Gabby knows aren’t so much opposed as disengaged. She has seen occasional references to the policy in a 12,000-person building trades union Facebook group she’s in, but it’s really just “a few activist types” who bring it up. Gabby sees a Green New Deal as a great opportunity for herself and her fellow carpenters, with the potential to provide “tons of work.” She also thinks it “needs to be done” to save the planet.

To the extent that there is organized opposition to a Green New Deal among the building trades, Gabby said it’s more often coming from leadership than from the rank and file. At North America’s 2019 Building Trades Unions’ US Legislative Conference, which Gabby said was attended by far more union officers and staff than average workers, national union leadership came out “extremely hard” against a Green New Deal. They presented their opposition as “standing in solidarity” with pipeline workers, but Gabby suspected it had more to do with antipathy toward its best-known sponsor, Ocasio-Cortez. The hostility to the policy was “even more over-thetop” than she had been expecting. All of the 2020 presidential candidates were there, as was Nancy Pelosi, and Pelosi made a joke about it—some variation of her earlier dismissal of the GND as the “green dream or whatever.” Gabby said Pelosi was simply playing to her audience; it was “what the building trades leadership wanted to hear in that moment.”

Despite national leadership’s stance, Gabby had heard of efforts by environmental groups and local union leaders to shore up industry-wide support for a Green New Deal and other state and local efforts to address the climate crisis in New York. However, she added, most members know little to nothing about these efforts. Gabby herself hadn’t heard of them from her union or her coworkers. Instead, she read about them in Jacobin.

In spite of these challenges, organizers within both labor and the new left are working hard to identify and call attention to common ground. Both Medicare for All and a Green New Deal have significant union support, at least on paper, if not as much as champions of either would like. When the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed in early 2021 optimistically predicting that “Big Labor May Save New York From AOC’s Socialism,” Alexa Avilés, then a DSA-backed New York City Council candidate, quickly penned a letter pointing out that Ocasio-Cortez was backed by ten major unions and New York’s AFL-CIO in 2020, and that Avilés’s own campaign had attracted significant support from organized labor, including six of New York’s most politically influential unions—“everyone from hotel workers to nurses to janitors”—and the New York City Central Labor Council.¹⁸ “When unions and DSA come together, workers win,” Avilés concluded.¹⁹

In early 2021, Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced a resolution in Congress calling on the federal government to create a job guarantee program through the Labor Department. The program would provide a job with standard benefits and an hourly wage of at least $15 an hour to anyone who wants one. Union leaders like Sara Nelson and groups like Sunrise have come together in support of this effort, which, as the writer Hamilton Nolan put it, “aims to achieve racial, economic and environmental justice all at once.”²⁰ By drastically reducing unemployment, Nolan wrote, a federal job guarantee would make it harder to discriminate against job seekers. By forcing private employers to raise pay and benefits to match or exceed what the government is offering, it would raise labor standards for working people across the board. And people who secure employment through it could take on much of the green infrastructure and environmental sustainability work that climate activists have long been demanding.

A Green New Deal may well be worth fighting for despite opposition from affected industries, some of which is based on legitimate, material concerns and some on knee-jerk hostility toward perceived upstarts like Ocasio-Cortez. That hostility can be difficult to disentangle from racism and sexism, but it’s also a reaction to real and perceived threats to political power. Confronting the climate crisis head-on is the only way to prevent more and greater environmental catastrophes down the line, even if people lose jobs in the short term. But there is a cost to being glib about the potential downsides of the policies the left is fighting for, and the very real obstacles to protecting workers in affected industries. Even in their current, weakened state, unions are still crucial centers of power for American workers. Especially when they come together, they still have the juice to push through—or derail—major pieces of legislation. One of the left’s greatest challenges in the coming years is to demonstrate to labor and union members that they, too, have a great deal to gain from working in coalition with new progressive allies—and nothing to lose but dysfunctional relationships with double-dealing politicians.

8

Where We Are and Where We’re Going

In 2020, Trump ran against the precise kind of socialism—brutal, authoritarian, repressive—that every major Democratic presidential candidate, including Sanders, repeatedly disa-vowed. He railed against the “unhinged left-wing mob” trying to “vandalize our history,” “desecrate our monuments,” and “punish, cancel, and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands.”¹ City and state governments have removed some monuments to Confederate generals in recent years, but an all-powerful left capable of smiting its enemies has never existed in the United States; if it did, we’d have a national health service, or at least Medicare for All. Yet the fact that Trump and senior GOP leaders still see Red-baiting as a good way to motivate their base suggests that the left is ascendant or perceived as such. Perhaps it’s both: fear of socialism seems a bit less absurd in an era of real, if modest, growth of socialist organizations, media, and presence in office. Conservative Democrats clearly share Republicans’ fear that the AOC wing of the Democratic Party will continue to gain in power and prominence. Shortly before he was elected mayor of New York City, at a July 2021 fundraiser cohosted by a Republican city council member, Democrat Eric Adams declared that he was running “against a movement,” adding, “All across the country, the DSA socialists are mobilizing to stop Eric Adams.”² (NYC-DSA did not endorse a candidate in New York’s 2021 mayoral race, but its members opposed Adams.)

Although DSA and smaller socialist organizations like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Socialist Alternative have gained members in recent years—PSL does not release membership numbers; Socialist Alternative claims around 1,000 members nationwide—no organized force in American politics can credibly be described as the “far left.”³

DSA is not “far left” in an international context, or even in a US one. It is not an extremist organization; unlike certain 1960s and ’70s groups and movements, it does not advocate violence as a means of achieving its political ends. No DSA member has taken a hostage or planted a bomb on behalf of the organization. Nor are DSA members uniformly committed to the project of building a national party; many claim that as an ultimate goal, but most of the organization’s energy since 2016 has gone into running socialist candidates for office at the state and local level. Though the question of if and when to formally break with the Democratic Party is an ongoing subject of debate, most DSA members accept that, in most places in the US, its candidates have a better chance of winning if and when they run as Democrats, for both branding (it’s easier to get people to vote for a member of a party they’ve heard of) and structural reasons (it’s easier for major-party candidates to get their names on the ballot).

When Jabari Brisport ran for City Council on the Green Party line in 2017, he earned more independent votes⁴ than any council candidate had since New York Attorney General Letitia James won a 2003 bid for City Council by running only on the WFP line (in her 2018 bid for attorney general, James declined to seek the WFP line at the behest of Cuomo and other anti-WFP Democratic Party officials).⁵ Brisport’s 2017 showing, though impressive for a third-party candidate, netted him only about 29 percent of the vote. When he ran for a state senate seat as a Democrat in 2020, he won the primary with nearly 60 percent of the vote and the general with over 99 percent.⁶ As distasteful as many DSA members find association with the Democratic Party, the practical advantages are obvious. And although a number of contemporary union leaders are socialists and/or allies of DSA, most are not. If socialists and communists were as well-represented in organized labor as they were for much of the twentieth century, DSA would be coordinating with unions on a far larger scale, not seeking to “infiltrate” and push them left. Even in DSA circles, there is a wide spectrum of opinion about the relative strength of the socialist left compared to the broader left universe: some, especially those who were around in darker days, maintain that socialism is more popular now than it has been in a very long time. Others argue that socialists need to reckon with how little power they have outside of places like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia (it’s no coincidence that DSA has gained the most influence in cities and states with powerful unions; the left is stronger in places with some degree of class consciousness and support for workers’ rights).

Forging a party that truly and consistently represents the interests of working people is a longstanding goal of the American left that has never been fully realized. The Green Party has largely been written off as a well-intentioned dead end, hopelessly disorganized and ineffective. Socialist Alternative, which is much smaller than DSA, helped secure the re-election of Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council in 2019, despite Amazon’s spending, through a pro-business PAC, nearly half a million dollars on her opponent.⁷ Socialist Alternative also helped support John Deere workers’ 2021 strike, which raised worker pay and strengthened retirement benefits. The Young Communist League has supported union campaigns, including the history-making 2022 campaign at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and tenant organizing drives, but it is, for now, marginal.⁸ The Working Families Party has limited power in certain cities and states but is not a force nationwide. Many within DSA believe the organization must eventually help establish a true workers’ party that is officially separate from the Democratic Party, either cleanly (forming openly and without the help of the Democrats) or via a “dirty break” (running socialists on the Democratic Party line until they achieve enough power within it that they can break away and take their voters with them).

Leftists including former Sanders campaign staffer Nick Brana, Cornel West, and Nina Turner helped launch an effort to build a not-explicitly-socialist “People’s Party”—one capable of delivering single-payer health care, free public college, a federal jobs program, and a $15 minimum wage—in 2017. The party held a virtual conference in August 2020 that organizers said had drawn more than 400,000 viewers. West and Turner gave rousing speeches; other high-profile participants included 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and actor Danny Glover.⁹ Because it had no discernible impact on the 2020 election, the convention received little coverage in the mainstream press. “We’re not contesting 2020, and we’re not running anyone in 2020,” Brana told the Washington Post. “This is to form a party beginning in 2021, to run in the midterms in 2022 and, perhaps, to run a presidential candidate in 2024.”¹⁰

In the meantime, Justice Democrats, which is attempting to make the Democratic Party great again by realigning it with the interests of working-class people—a strategy that largely failed in the 1960s and ’80s but has some hope of success in the modern era—nearly doubled the Squad in the last election cycle. The newly expanded Squad now has allies like Rep. Mondaire Jones, a progressive who, while not formally supported by Justice Democrats, earned endorsements from Sanders, Warren, AOC, Obama, and the Working Families Party. Like the Squad, Jones rejects corporate PAC money and supports Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. DSA continues to elect candidates to state legislatures and city councils nationwide and is in the process of developing a federal electoral program in hopes of eventually being as influential in congressional races as Justice Democrats has become in the last several years.

It’s possible that even in the next decade we may witness the rise of an independent or third-party candidate capable of winning a substantial share of votes in a national election, as Ross Perot did in 1992. Many still believe Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election, but some analyses suggest he did not.¹¹ Nader earned less than 3 percent of the vote nationwide. The ultimate goal of establishing a workers’ party is not to “spoil” the Democratic nominee’s chances; it’s to ensure there’s a party that represents the interests of working people. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a constituency large and organized enough, or a mechanism strong enough, to crack open our partisan duopoly and make a third party a viable force in national politics. It seems far likelier that the power struggles playing out in each of the two major political parties will continue in the near future: the rising left wing of the Democratic Party will keep primarying and challenging its still-dominant conservative/moderate wing, and the GOP will, at least until Trump’s death, be controlled by Trump loyalists.

This is a legitimate source of frustration. The Democratic Party is both corrupt and hollow: mealy-mouthed, beholden to corporate donors, and incapable of delivering (or unwilling to deliver) even things as popular with voters and potentially beneficial to the party as voting rights legislation. It is less a political organization than a fundraising apparatus and jobs program for consultants. Young organizers are understandably demoralized; if a Trump presidency, mass uprisings, and years-long pandemic do not add up to some kind of inflection point, what will? Just as some Democrats spent the Trump years crowing over every false start in the long road to dislodging Trump—The Access Hollywood tape! The Emoluments Clause! The Mueller investigation! The first impeachment! The second impeachment!—some on the left have made the mistake of believing every fresh crisis will expose once and for all the cruel inadequacies of capitalism and guarantee the rise of socialism. Actor Susan Sarandon was derided for saying of Trump’s election, “maybe things had to get so bad before real change actually could happen,” but she was far from alone in holding that view. Especially in activist communities, many believed that people would naturally rise up and demand more from their government in a time of such profound social collapse. Instead, after millions took to the streets in 2020, police reform legislation languished, reactionaries stormed the US Capitol, and upwards of 986,000 Americans and counting died of Covid. There is no universal response to crisis; whether from despair, indifference, inability to sustain a sense of urgency, lack of clarity about what to do, or some combination thereof, many appear to have acclimated, however reluctantly, to existing conditions. What has changed in the last five years is more than nothing and less than many on the left had hoped. As author and labor organizer Jane McAlevey has noted, there are no shortcuts to building power.

For the left to continue growing, it must expand its geographical reach, and there are some small signs that it has. Maria Svart told me that after DSA’s big Fall 2020 recruitment drive, the three chapters with the highest recruitment numbers proportional to their size were in the South. DSA now has members in every single state and the District of Columbia, and YDSA has over 100 chapters nationwide, many of them in the Midwest and South.¹²

Although the new left is still in the process of figuring out how to run successful electoral campaigns in these regions, such campaigns have come closer to succeeding in conservative areas than they have in decades. Pro-Medicare for All progressives like Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Jess King in Pennsylvania, Mike Siegel in Texas, and Cathy Kunkel in West Virginia—most of whom also supported a Green New Deal—have, in recent years, won Democratic congressional primaries in red states or districts (Kunkel didn’t have a primary opponent, and King’s withdrew from the race before the primary). Marquita Bradshaw of Tennessee and Paula Jean Swearengin of West Virginia, also proponents of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, won Democratic senatorial primaries in red states. But all of these candidates were defeated in the general election. Some came close: Eastman lost the general election by just 2 percentage points in 2018; in 2020, she gained thousands of votes, but so did her Republican opponent, and she ultimately lost by 4.8 points.¹³ Siegel fared similarly; he came within 4.3 points of defeating his Republican opponent in 2018, but ended his 2020 rematch nearly 7 points behind.¹⁴

Jess King lost by around 18 points after redistricting turned her district blood-red.¹⁵ The greatest recent electoral victory for a progressive in a conservative state was arguably Cori Bush’s 2020 triumph in Missouri. Missouri is a red state, but Bush’s district is heavily Democratic. (It was also her second attempt; she lost her 2018 primary by around 28,000 votes.)¹⁶

To opponents of the left, this is evidence that policies like Medicare for All, free college, and a Green New Deal are non-starters outside of deep-blue states. Svart bluntly rejected that conclusion, as well as the contention that Sanders’s losses showed socialism isn’t viable in the United States. “The entire establishment united against Bernie Sanders,” she said. “So it is true that it’s difficult when the establishment is rigging things.” But far from giving up because the system is rigged, Svart said, the left should consider it “a reality that can’t be ignored” when thinking about “how to win a power struggle within the Democratic Party, and [between] the Democratic Party and the left.”

In the 2020 presidential election, a year of record turnout, 80 million people did not vote.¹⁷ This is in part because, as Svart said, the right has “illegally and legally” suppressed the votes of working people, and especially people of color, in every election cycle in our country’s history. But that’s not the only reason people don’t vote. “There are significant parts of the population that feel completely powerless and feel that their vote will not make an impact, and they choose to abstain from the process,” Svart said. I witnessed that phenomenon firsthand in Philadelphia, and FiveThiryEight data collected in 2020 showed that those who rarely vote were the likeliest to say the election didn’t matter.¹⁸ Yet higher turnout does not, on its own, guarantee victory for the left; when turnout increases across the board, it often benefits Republicans. Kara Eastman, Mike Siegel, and Nate McMurray all came significantly closer to unseating Republicans in 2018 than they did in 2020. Even motivating more first-time voters to show up to the polls, versus increasing turnout among those with defined partisan preferences, does not necessarily benefit the left. A surprising number of people who cast their first ballot in 2020 broke for Trump.¹⁹

“Occupy Wall Street was partly a result of people feeling that government didn’t serve them,” Svart told me, “And it’s true—we had very few major, popular public programs where people saw government solving their problems collectively in the last part of the last century. People just didn’t experience it happening in their lives, and they didn’t experience politicians being responsive to pressure from the people … of course [they] feel disenfranchised.” Eighty million is “a huge portion of the electorate”—it’s not that all of those people would vote for a socialist in general, or for Sanders in particular, she added, but a “significant” number would.

Svart encouraged me to consider the trajectories of three candidates who ran in conservative areas in the 2020 cycle: Amy McGrath, who challenged Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, Bradshaw in Tennessee, and Kunkel in West Virginia. The two progressive candidates, Bradshaw and Kunkel, each ran grassroots campaigns and raised less than two million dollars.²⁰,²¹ McGrath, who was backed by the Democratic Party establishment, raised over $90 million.²² Despite massive disparities in funding and party support, all three women won over 35 percent of the vote in the general election.²³,²⁴,²⁵ The question the Democratic Party doesn’t want to answer, Svart said, is what would happen if it invested in “really visionary candidates … and in a field operation to organize [alienated non-voters] in those districts”? The reason they don’t want to answer, she continued, is because the consultants who “made a lot of money off of McGrath’s campaign”—and would not make as much from independent, grassroots campaigns—will “never want to give that up.”

Furthermore, as Svart pointed out, the ability to win an election is an imperfect measure of popularity. Mitch McConnell remains deeply unpopular, even in his home state. A 2020 Spectrum News/IPSOS Poll showed that only 39 percent of Kentuckians approved of McConnell’s job performance as Senate majority leader.²⁶ Yet he won his seventh Senate term by nearly 20 points in 2020.²⁷ Deep-pocketed donors, corporate support, and incumbency are major advantages, especially in Senate races. Partisan gerrymandering has also helped the GOP consolidate power disproportionate to its popularity among voters.²⁸ And it’s clear that many policies are far more popular as stand-alone proposals or ballot initiatives than they are when linked to a specific candidate or party. This explains why Floridians voted overwhelmingly for both Trump and a minimum wage hike.

Nearly every self-described leftist was delighted to see Trump’s presidency come to an end. (There are contrarians in every group.) Most considered his removal from office a necessary condition for progress of any kind. Nor did they mistake the end of his presidency for the end of Trumpism. More than 74 million people voted for him in the last election—more than the number of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008²⁹—and his legacy is very much alive, reflected in the 2021 attack he incited on the US Capitol, the statements and positions of the recently elected members of Congress he has inspired, and his continued dominance within the Republican Party. As sweet as it was to vote Trump out, Biden’s victory in no way signaled a triumph for the left, whose signature demands (Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a fracking ban, the abolition of ICE, defunding the police) he steadfastly opposed.

Nevertheless, the left supported Biden; he won states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin thanks in large part to groups and organizers in Democratic strongholds with sizable populations of nonwhite and left-leaning voters: cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Kenosha. Organizers and young people—hardly mutually exclusive categories—hoped he would reward their efforts.

But the swiftness with which Sanders went from front-runner to loser, accompanied by Biden’s sudden rise, had a dampening effect on some younger organizers and some down-ballot campaigns that were able to generate more enthusiasm with Sanders at the top of the ticket.

The virus, Svart said, has exposed “the insanity and barbarism” of our current system. And with the rapid advance of climate change, she added, “It’s a moment when the reality of the system is laid bare,” Svart said, “And there’s an opportunity to talk about the alternative, and what that could look like.” It’s “more obvious to more people,” she added, that returning to “normal” is neither possible nor desirable. According to Svart, nearly 75 percent of DSA’s candidate and ballot initiatives succeeded in 2020; in 2021, the group won 68 percent of its thirty-seven nationally endorsed races and five ballot initiatives. Victorious candidates included Richie Floyd, who won a seat on St. Petersburg, Florida’s city council, becoming the first socialist elected in Florida in nearly a century,³⁰ and Danny Nowell, who won a seat on Carrboro, North Carolina’s town council.³¹ “We are building our power, and we are continuing to grow, and that can be a source of hope,” Svart said. “We grow because people have hope that there can be an alternative.”

Given the scale of the crises the United States is facing, the growth of the left, and the overlap in the missions of organizations like DSA, Justice Democrats, Indivisible, and Sunrise, interest in formal collaboration is growing. As of December 2020, DSA did not maintain formal relationships with other US socialist organizations or with any of the groups mentioned above. Svart attributed that lack partly to DSA’s unique, member-driven structure, and the difficulty and complexity of navigating relationships with differently structured organizations.

Svart gave a similar answer to a question about DSA’s relationship with socialist organizations abroad. DSA has an international committee which has what Svart described as a “quasi-diplomatic” function: to help establish lines of communication with like-minded movement and party actors outside of the United States. In March 2021, the committee put out a statement condemning “in the strongest terms” the role of US political elites, including Biden and members of his administration, in encouraging Sinophobia and pushing for cold war with China.³²

As much as its growth has been hailed as a victory, DSA is most often criticized from the left for what some see as an over-focus on winning campaigns and elections at the expense of movement building. It’s true that much of the momentum within DSA, and the press coverage it has garnered, has been related to electoral organizing. Yet of all the newly prominent left groups, DSA arguably offers members the widest range of opportunities to build and exercise power outside of the electoral realm. Justice Democrats, Sunrise, and the Working Families Party focus on mounting primary challenges and pressuring incumbents. Even more radical groups like Dream Defenders have poured a great deal of energy into defeating Trump, attempting to take back the state legislature, and supporting progressive ballot measures. The Movement for Black Lives and affiliated organizations have helped elect progressive DAs throughout the country; their non-electoral gains, while real, are much harder to quantify. Smaller and less visible groups engage in strike support, political education, and various other movement building efforts, but DSA is the only organization that many politically active, non-socialist adults have heard of.

“What we are about is building working-class power,” Svart said, adding that the organization is “most powerful when we have this interplay between [our] electoral and non-electoral power.” Much of DSA’s non-electoral work involves organizing tenants. That can take several forms, including organizing, building by building, tenants’ unions and organizing for passage of pro-tenant legislation. Svart believes workplace organizing is the most important work that DSA does outside of the formal electoral arena. The organization’s projects include a restaurant organizing project, which is uniting laid-off hospitality workers to push for Covid relief in the short term and “transformed workplaces” in the long term, and an emergency workplace organizing committee (EWOC), which helps organize workers to demand Covid-related improvements in safety and pay. In 2021 DSA helped support various major labor actions, all of which yielded significant gains for workers: the 10,000-worker John Deere strike, the 60,000 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employee workers and over 30,000 Kaiser Permanente workers who threatened to strike, and the nearly three-month-long Kellogg’s workers strike. In 2019, DSA chapters throughout New York State, led by NYC-DSA and allied tenants’ rights organizations, won a historic suite of housing reforms that made it harder for landlords to raise rents and/or convert rent-stabilized units to more lucrative market-rate apartments.³³

These victories, while useful to the emerging left, were not DSA’s alone. They were also piecemeal and difficult to replicate in the absence of the specific set of conditions, including pandemic anger and variations across industries, workplaces, and regions, that brought them about in the first place.

As they have for other leftist groups, sudden expansion and the overall left-wing shift in our politics have spurred an identity crisis both within and vis-à-vis DSA. The organization’s emphasis on electoral politics is controversial because some leftists believe it saps energy from more urgent priorities. Others see electoral victories not only as crucial to the growth of the left, but a useful way to gauge its power and scare its opponents. With time, money, and volunteer energy in short supply, what should an organization’s main priorities be? And given the existence of so many new and newly expanded groups with overlapping and complementary aims, why hasn’t DSA prioritized organizing, or been able to organize, a more formal “popular front”?

Even without a formal umbrella organization, new left groups were able to block or mitigate some of the worst aspects of Trump’s agenda. By coordinating hundreds of direct actions throughout the country, Indivisible and its allies succeeded in keeping the GOP from repealing Obamacare in 2017. (Defending the signature policy of its most popular contemporary leader was also a priority of Democratic Party leadership, but the grassroots energy Indivisible brought to the fight was arguably essential to its success.) Immigrants’ rights groups arranged for lawyers and activists to swarm airports with offers of pro bono legal assistance when Trump first sought to ban foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Grassroots resistance to Trump’s agenda continued throughout 2018, but mass protests, celebrity arrests, and moving confrontations between sexual assault survivors and elected officials were not enough to stop Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, whom three women accused of sexual misconduct, from joining accused sexual harasser Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.

Thousands also protested the 2020 appointment of ultra-conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, to no avail. Even Ilyse Hogue, the former head of NARAL, one of the largest US nonprofits dedicated to preserving abortion rights, issued a blistering statement assailing Democratic leadership. Hogue—who endorsed Senator Dianne Feinstein for re-election shortly before a 2018 primary in which Feinstein faced an energetic, pro-choice, left-wing challenger—lost patience with the senator just two years later, thanks to Feinstein’s disastrous handling of the Barrett hearing. Hogue’s summary of that performance read, in part: “This nomination is illegitimate and this process is a sham … The Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, failed to make this clear and in fact offered an appearance of credibility to the proceedings that is wildly out of step with the American people … we believe the committee needs new leadership.”³⁴

About a month later, Feinstein announced that she would remain in the Senate, but would not seek to lead the Judiciary Committee in the next Congress. Several weeks before Barrett’s confirmation hearing, I joined a Zoom call between Senator Dick Durbin, the Democrat who would soon succeed Feinstein as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and several progressive groups desperate to block Barrett’s confirmation. Durbin spent the first seven minutes of the call figuring out how to unmute himself. He then reassured the panicky attendees that he had been through Supreme Court confirmation fights many times before, citing hearings that had resulted in conservatives ascending to the Court. He added that he had met with Feinstein, whose rumored cognitive decline was an implicit concern, and he was certain she was capable of running the hearing. He noted that Feinstein understood that if or when she wasn’t, she would have to hand the reins over to him. Whether Durbin would have been any more effective at preventing Barrett’s confirmation, we will never know.

In the end, neither the Democratic Party nor newfound critics like Hogue could stop the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Progressive organizations had sounded the alarm about Barrett and about Trump’s appointment of hundreds of federal judges but failed to prevent either. The loss of the courts has been a devastating blow, one with consequences that will last for decades and pose serious obstacles to progress on a wide range of issues.

Before the pandemic hit the US, most of the left’s victories, aside from forcing some of the presidential candidates to adopt more popular positions, were at the state and local level. In New York State, a coalition of tenants’ groups and organizers, including NYC-DSA, organized to drive conservative Democrats out of the state legislature and get the new “true blue” Democratic majority to pass legislation that strengthened existing tenant protections, extended them to cover more tenants throughout the state, and made them permanent. In Denver, DSA-backed city council member Candi CdeBaca persuaded a majority of her colleagues to join her in voting to end city contracts with private prison firms.³⁵

DSA-backed council members in Chicago have created deportation rapid-response networks,³⁶ distributed thousands of know-your-rights cards to prepare residents for interactions with police or ICE, and led trainings in civil disobedience. They have also worked with other groups to protect Chicago renters by opposing luxury developments and organizing to lift Illinois’ ban on rent control. In Seattle, socialist city council member Kshama Sawant, who was first elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2019, backed a tax on large companies and successfully fought for Seattle to become the first large US city to guarantee a $15 per hour minimum wage.³⁷

The brutality of the Trump years expanded and emboldened the left and, when Covid-19 reached the United States, forced it into survival mode. Progressive electoral campaigns had to suspend in-person operations and pivot from organizing for Medicare for All to making sure people had food, medicine, and the ability to stay in their homes. The 2020 uprisings led to isolated and partial victories in certain cities. The New York City Council voted to cut the New York City Police Department’s budget by nearly $1 billion, which sounded significant unless you were part of the coalition that was pushing for cuts. Organizers believed the city was just shuffl ing money around in a way that didn’t actually disem-power the police. As the New York Times explained in a particularly apt headline, “Nearly $1 Billion Is Shifted from Police in Budget That Pleases No One.”³⁸ Ocasio-Cortez was among the displeased. “Defunding police means defunding police,” she stated at the time. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”³⁹

One of the boldest police reform efforts to date is a 2021 proposal put forth by the mayor of Ithaca, New York, to dismantle the city’s police department, which costs $12.5 million a year to operate, and replace it with a Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety.⁴⁰ The new department would employ both armed public safety workers and unarmed “community solutions” workers. Calls for service would be evaluated to determine whether it would be most appropriate to send an armed or an unarmed officer to respond or to refer the call to another city agency. Mental health calls would be referred to a separate unit composed of social workers. (Ithaca, like several cities that vowed to “defund the police” during or after the 2020 protests, has in fact re-funded them; two officer positions eliminated in 2021 were restored in the city’s 2022 budget, increasing the department’s overall funding.⁴¹) As of March 2022, the city was set to begin implementing the suggestions outlined in a report issued by its Reimagining Public Safety Working Group once the Common Council adopts it.⁴²

In the much larger city of Minneapolis, a majority of the city council pledged to defund the city’s police department in the wake of the 2020 protests. By fall of that year, that pledge had morphed into a promise to cut $8 million from the police department’s budget. The mayor signed a budget in December 2020 that diverted nearly that amount from the police budget to crime prevention programs, mental health crisis response teams, and other initiatives.⁴³ Although the city council recently approved $6.4 million in additional funding for the police department to hire more officers, three council members have proposed replacing the police department with a department of public safety similar to the one proposed in Ithaca.⁴⁴ Several groups, including TakeAction Minnesota, Reclaim the Block, the ACLU of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, Color of Change, the Southeast Asian Diaspora Project, and the Minnesota Youth Collective, formed a political committee called Yes 4 Minneapolis to get a similar proposal on the ballot in November 2021.⁴⁵ The measure ultimately failed, 56 percent to 44 percent.⁴⁶ Even in cities where the concept of defunding the police had significant popular support, changes in rhetoric have proven easier to win than lasting changes to the funding and structure of government agencies.

Meanwhile, the federal government’s response to the uprisings verged on parody. Trump invoked segregationists of a bygone era by calling for protesters to be shot (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”)⁴⁷ and dispatching federal law enforcement officers to terrorize young organizers.⁴⁸ And then there was the clownish response of congressional Democrats, some of whom seemed genuinely horrified by Floyd’s murder and the treatment of those who took to the streets in protest. In a much-memed spectacle of accidental self-satire, senior Democrats, including Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, introduced the 2020 Justice in Policing Act draped in identical Ghanaian kente cloth stoles. They knelt on the floor of the US Capitol for just under nine minutes, in what was intended as a gesture of respect for Floyd. (The officer who killed Floyd was initially reported to have kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.) The legislation, which would restrict the use of deadly force, effectively ban chokeholds, and limit qualified immunity as a defense to liability in private civil actions against police officers, passed in the House, stalled in the Senate, and is currently in limbo. The bill has not become law, and even if it does, it’s unclear how effective it will be at preventing the police from murdering unarmed people. The Los Angeles police banned “bar-arm” chokeholds in 1982, the New York Police Department banned chokeholds in 1993, except when an officer’s life is in danger, and the Chicago police followed suit in 2012. California banned strangleholds statewide in 2020.⁴⁹ In the wake of every ban, police have continued to choke and suffocate unarmed people (see: Mario Gonzalez in Alameda, Eric Garner in New York, and an unnamed 42-year-old man in Chicago).⁵⁰,⁵¹

Also at the federal level, Sunrise and other groups have significantly raised the profile of the Green New Deal in recent years, expanded support for it, and successfully disciplined politicians who are insufficiently committed to championing it. Sunrise’s vigorous support of Senator Ed Markey fueled his 2020 triumph over Rep. Joe Kennedy III. (Kennedy, too, claimed to support the Green New Deal, but Markey won Sunrise’s endorsement, and the election, by building his entire campaign around it.)

Svart brought up DSA’s health care workers’ collective, which seeks to unite various kinds of health care workers to transform the American health care system, and initiatives like the one Laura Gabby is involved with to foster support for a Green New Deal among the building trades. All these efforts aim to “empower people at the point of production,” in Svart’s words. The mainstream media pays more attention to DSA’s electoral work, she added, because “the ruling class has trained people in this country to think about politics as the one place where you can make a difference by voting once every four years.” The organization also takes a fundamentally different approach to climate justice from that of traditional environmentalists, she explained. DSA sees building a multifaceted workers’ movement, not nonprofit advocacy, as “the only way to win a Green New Deal.”

“What we are doing is more relevant than ever and Covid just makes that clearer,” Svart said. “It creates, amid the barbarism, the possibility for change, because there is increased consciousness about actual power dynamics.” The virus poses a unique psychological danger; aside from the obvious health risks, it has led to mass hopelessness and despair. But it has also shifted the way that DSA and other groups think about and organize issue-based campaigns.

Shortly before we spoke, DSA had organized a day of action to demand a Green New Deal and link it to good union jobs and combating the climate crisis, which has the potential to cause future epidemics. The campaign, which was called Fighting for Our Lives, was accompanied by DSA-led campaigns for guaranteed health care during the pandemic and permanent Medicare for All. Especially when the federal government is indifferent at best, cruel at worst, and dysfunctional most of the time, Svart sees it as the role of socialists to help people “feel that there is still hope” and learn to “build power where they are.” In her view the 2020 election and its aftermath had revealed yet again that “the right is extreme, and the neoliberal Democrats don’t care.”

Nearly two years into the Biden administration, it’s obvious how little progress many of the people and groups who helped put Biden in office have made on their top priorities, even with Sanders as chair of the Senate Budget Committee. From immigrants’ rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and comprehensive police reform to the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, cancellation of student and medical debt, free college, and large-scale social spending bills, the left has built significant support for and attracted mainstream coverage of an ambitious agenda. Yet it hasn’t won any of them. Part of the problem is the perception, fueled by the right, that the left is winning, at least in terms of the culture wars. Yet no one on the left believes that, for example, diversity in ad campaigns is as crucial as voting rights or Medicare for All. As Jezebel.com editor Laura Bassett sarcastically tweeted in early 2022, referring to the candy company’s much-mocked efforts to make its marketing campaigns more inclusive, “Losing the voting rights bill and getting woke M&Ms instead feels about right.”⁵²

Immigrants are still being deported, as a record number were when Biden served in the Obama administration. And although Monty Wilkinson, who served as acting Attorney General between Biden’s inauguration and Merrick Garland’s confirmation, officially rescinded Trump’s cruel “zero tolerance” policy, which led to the separation of migrant families at the border, he did not instruct prosecutors never to prosecute people for misdemeanor border offenses, but merely to use their discretion, meaning that children can, under certain circumstances, still be separated from their parents.⁵³ When dozens of activists with the immigrants’ rights group Movimiento Cosecha protested in the lobby of Biden’s campaign headquarters in Philadelphia in 2019, they brought family members of people who had been deported during the Obama administration.

Organizers with the immigrants’ rights group United We Dream gathered outside of a Washington, D.C., ICE building in early 2021 to protest the agency’s continued enforcement of its “racist and cruel anti-immigrant agenda” and the deportation of more than 26,000 immigrants under the Biden-Harris administration.⁵⁴ The administration opened a migrant detention facility in 2021 to hold up to 700 unaccompanied minors, ages 13 to 17. Government officials said they needed the facility because other shelters for migrant children had drastically reduced capacity due to the ongoing pandemic, but immigration lawyers and advocates criticized the move. “It’s unnecessary, it’s costly, and it goes absolutely against everything Biden promised he was going to do,” a San Antonio-based immigration lawyer told the Washington Post.⁵⁵

Bowling Together

Rebuilding the left is a comprehensive, long-term project that requires more than organizing protests and launching PACs. Maria Svart sees one of DSA’s most fundamental tasks as helping to restore the “collective working-class culture” the United States has largely lost. “Most people in the United States experience a completely atomized existence,” she told me, “and to the degree that there are ‘collective’ [formations] like organizations, they are very isolated, very top-down, or feel apolitical.” This is a vast and potentially transformative project that goes far beyond voting or volunteering for candidates. In Svart’s words, it’s about building a “culture of solidarity” and “collective life.” When you look at how we live today—our work, family, and spiritual lives, and even our entertainment, especially during the pandemic—many Americans are missing a meaningful sense of community. Jonathan Smucker made a similar observation in his book, Hegemony How-To. “The explicit purpose of coming together with like-minded people is to effect change,” he wrote, adding that a “less explicit purpose” is to “surround ourselves with community and also with reflections of the values that we hold dear.”⁵⁶ Smucker went on to argue that fostering community among like-minded individuals, while natural and in many ways desirable, is not, on its own, enough to transform society.

That many people feel disconnected became apparent to me one pre-pandemic winter day as I was knocking on doors to encourage my neighbors to support Sanders for president and a DSA-backed candidate for state legislative office. At a small unit in a run-down apartment building, a red-faced, thirty-ish guy reluctantly cracked his door. There was an open beer on the side table next to the couch behind him, where he’d been watching pro wrestling on a giant TV with the volume cranked all the way up. “Look, I just got home from work and I’m trying to unwind,” he said, impatiently but not unkindly. “Can you just, like, say what you gotta say? I’m not gonna vote anyway.” He seemed to think I was a poorly paid canvasser, not a volunteer. I was touched by his generosity—he clearly didn’t want to talk but was willing to hear me out because he thought I had to be there—and I felt sorry for him. I also knew how he felt. Anyone who has spent any part of their life in a crappy job understands the appeal of numb solitude. To him, my insistence that voting mattered was abstract and unconvincing: where was the proof?

DSA chapters host arts and crafts activities, choirs, game nights, movie screenings, and reading groups. In December 2020, I attended an outdoor sing-along of Christmas carols rewritten as socialist anthems. Svart believes such activities are often overlooked, despite how crucial they are to bringing people into the organization. (Indeed, a number of families stopped to listen to the carols, and some even took brochures for the DSA-backed city council candidate we were promoting.) Learning how to make decisions and acquire basic leadership skills can be a real challenge, Svart said, “when most decisions have been taken out of our hands.” It sounded funny, and maybe a bit “neoliberal,” she added, but the individual transformation of people is a “key goal of the socialist movement.” What DSA is really trying to do, according to Svart, is teach “ordinary people” the skills to “actually govern.”

This is not a universally appealing project. There is a deep strain in American political culture of expert worship. Many people would rather support candidates they perceive as the smartest, with the best plans and the most effective combination of skills and traits, than learn new skills and do political work themselves. Truly democratic processes can be frustrating and tedious. For those who are used to having a great deal of control over their own and other people’s lives, a political system where everyone gets a voice, and everyone’s voice has equal weight, sounds more irritating than inspiring. Upper-income Americans tend to want to outsource political labor the same way they outsource other kinds of labor: by writing a check. Not everybody is thrilled by the idea of knocking on strangers’ doors, getting to know their neighbors, and building something together from scratch.

After decades of disempowerment, the left in general and the socialist left in particular is “re-learning” how to organize, expand its power, and use that power effectively—not to win Twitter fights or diversify M&Ms, and not even solely to alleviate suffering, but to reshape society in ways as transformative and enduring as Social Security, the 40-hour work week, and universal suffrage.

How Big Developers, Democratic Officials, and the New York State GOP Stopped a Socialist Nurse From Becoming the Mayor of Buffalo

The upset primary victory of India Walton—registered nurse, community organizer, former executive director of a community land trust, and democratic socialist—offered a preview of the world we could have if the left keeps winning and the considerable barriers that remain. In June 2021, Walton stunned the political establishment by beating four-term incumbent mayor Byron Brown in Buffalo’s Democratic mayoral primary. Buffalo is the second-largest city in New York State, and Brown, a one-time ally of New York’s ex-governor, Andrew Cuomo, was heavily favored to win. Brown became Buffalo’s first Black mayor in 2006. Had she won the general election in November, Walton would have become the first self-proclaimed socialist mayor of a major city in over half a century, as well as Buffalo’s first woman and first Black woman mayor.

Because Buffalo is a heavily Democratic city, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary has for decades been elected mayor in the general. Given that Brown’s only recourse after losing the primary was to run what at first appeared to be a long-shot write-in campaign, many assumed Walton was next in line. For the first time in Brown’s career, the Working Families Party (WFP) had declined to endorse him and thrown its weight behind Walton instead, deeming her the progressive candidate in the race. The group’s backing was crucial to her primary victory, which boosted her into the ranks of national stars like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, both of whom called to offer their support. Walton also earned the endorsements of DSA’s Buffalo chapter and its national organization and was a featured speaker at the group’s 2021 convention.

But if her primary victory showed the strength of an emboldened Working Families Party that has moved left in recent years, it also showed its limits: the local Democratic machine, which was able to keep Walton off the WFP line in the general election on a technicality and would have effectively destroyed her chances had she lost the primary, would not have so easily outmaneuvered a better-prepared organization. Her opponent’s playbook—corporate cash, Red-baiting, racist smears, lie-packed attack ads, and fluent knowledge of New York election-law arcana—was not novel, and a stronger left could have countered it more effectively.

Brown received frequent infusions of cash from wealthy Republican donors.⁵⁷ He courted not just everyday GOP voters but the most powerful and least scrupulous GOP officials in the state. Brown declared that he “did not seek, nor will accept in any form” support from Carl Paladino, a particularly noxious Republican real estate developer and one-time New York gubernatorial candidate best known for making racist remarks about Michelle Obama.⁵⁸,⁵⁹ Yet Paladino reportedly spoke with Brown by telephone shortly after Brown lost the primary, urged him to stay in the race, and encouraged other Buffalo business leaders to back him. The two have a mutually beneficial relationship dating back at least to 2013, when Paladino attended a Brown fundraiser.⁶⁰ Brown has in turn supported many Paladino development projects throughout his tenure as mayor.

Though he is a nominal Democrat, Republicans backed Brown. But it was the support he received from establishment Democrats, including the chair of the New York State Democratic Party, and several major unions (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), and the 150,000-member Western New York Area Labor Federation/AFL-CIO) that stung the most.⁶¹ Though members pressed the Federation to reassess its endorsement decision after Walton won the primary, the group stuck with Brown in the general.⁶² Some unions supported Walton, most notably the Buffalo Teachers Federation (BTF). Yet after throwing its weight behind Walton in the primary, the BTF stayed out of the general, declaring it “too divisive” to intervene.⁶³

The union leaders who backed Brown had longstanding relationships with him and/or believed he had delivered for their members. Even if some privately thought Walton’s commitment to workers’ rights was deeper and more heartfelt than Brown’s, they weren’t convinced she could win. If she couldn’t, backing her would be worse than doing nothing; it would mean not only backing a loser but antagonizing a powerful winner. If the left cannot convince a broader segment of organized labor that working people have more to gain from confronting entrenched incumbents than from keeping them in power, it will continue to be difficult for left-wing challengers to win contested elections, especially for executive office.

Adding to Walton’s woes was the fact that the city’s only daily newspaper, the Buffalo News, put its thumb on the scale for Brown. In its endorsement of the incumbent, the paper labeled Walton “dangerously inexperienced” and wrote that electing her in November would be the “municipal version of electing Donald Trump: expecting great things from an inexperienced and unqualified leader who is sometimes driven by grievances.”⁶⁴ As the journalist Ari Paul wrote in FAIR, the News’s coverage of Walton’s “colorful language and personal issues” reflected “tropes about assertive Black women: They are rough, unsophisticated and bullying. Passion about injustice isn’t seen as a natural or even admirable response, but rather unchecked rage that should be kept from official levers of power.”⁶⁵

The real Walton, who is as warm and thoughtful in person as she is unhinged and scary in print, is precisely the kind of leader the women of the Combahee River Collective helped pave the way for and usher into being, and the kind beloved of new left groups today: a working-class Black woman who is also a socialist; a registered nurse and proud one-time union member who is as pro-Black and pro-woman as she is pro-labor. Like Ocasio-Cortez, she rejects conservative myths about success, refusing to moralize about bootstraps and attributing her own rise to family, community, and unions.

Like many of her peers, she cited Sanders as a primary inspiration. “The first time I ever did petitioning was for Bernie,” she recalled with a smile. “It was different for me to hear a person who was an elected official say that you shouldn’t be working forty hours a week and still getting food stamps.” Growing up in Buffalo, she added, “it was like, ‘The harder you work, the better you do.’ But that wasn’t my experience. That’s just what I was told. So to me, it was kind of an ‘a-ha’ moment, like, you know what actually feels right? You shouldn’t be working two jobs just to make ends meet and still have to rely on food stamps. And then they place all the blame on the workers and say we’re not working hard enough. Well, how hard can you possibly work?”

Walton saw her own brand of socialism as broadly popular and not especially radical. People needed and liked their stimulus checks, she pointed out, and “Social Security programs and Medicare and food stamps and all of those social safety net programs” had also come out of “socialist values.” Toward the end of his life, she added, Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken openly of the need to eliminate poverty. “That’s what democratic socialists aim to do,” she said. “And it doesn’t mean that everyone has to suffer. Rich people are still going to be rich. That’s not going to change. We’re not going to seize anyone’s property or prevent people from doing business. But we are going to make sure that our government prioritizes the majority of us. And now it’s not. We’re passing policies that only benefit a very small group of people. When 30 percent of people in Buffalo are living in poverty, almost half of our children are living in poverty, in extreme poverty, like they’re going to bed hungry, we have a serious issue.”

It’s often pointed out that this type of program is a far cry from “real” socialism—a criticism in socialist circles and a balm to moderates. In cities like Berlin and Barcelona, housing activists have successfully pushed for the municipal government to, after a certain amount of time and/or in exchange for compensation, seize the property of apartment-hoarding corporate behemoths and convert those units to public use.⁶⁶ Walton wasn’t calling for anything of the kind.

Throughout her race, Walton retained a small but passionate base of local support. “When I’m in the grocery store, when I’m walking down Jefferson Avenue or downtown, people are blowing their horns, they’re screaming out of the window, ‘You go, girl, we got your back. Don’t listen to them. We’re voting for you again!’ ” she told me several months before losing the general election. “And it’s all kinds of people: young, old, Black, white … And that is what I cling to every time there’s a negative media piece or whatever.”

The honking and screaming were real, as were the tens of thousands of people who voted for Walton in the general. But they weren’t enough to overwhelm the opposition. Walton’s initial victory showed the viability of a leftist candidate with a compelling life story and deep local roots—and the vulnerability of a complacent incumbent who didn’t bother campaigning in a contested primary. Her general election defeat showed that personal integrity and a passionate but limited base of support are no match for deep-pocketed donors, corrupt Democratic Party gatekeepers, Red-baiting Republican operatives, and a hostile local press. The last several years have shown what’s possible when charismatic left-wing challengers take lazy incumbents by surprise. It’s harder to win once they’ve seen you coming.

In 2021 the writer Fredrik deBoer published a New York Times op-ed declaring, rather grandly, that he was “willing to say something far too few leftists seem willing to: Not only did Mr. Brown win, but he won resoundingly … it’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.”⁶⁷

It’s a fair point, although the pool of leftists willing to issue harsh assessments of left-wing campaigns is larger than deBoer seems to think. Having grown up in Buffalo, the fact that Walton earned 40 percent of the vote in the general strikes me as more significant and promising than it strikes him. In the 1990s, when I was surrounded by neighbors, teachers, and family members who considered the Clintons far-left extremists, Rush Limbaugh a serious political thinker, and Ralph Nader, at best, a joke, the idea that a Black woman running as an open socialist would one day win the Democratic mayoral primary and 25,773 individual votes in the general election never even crossed my mind.⁶⁸ Back then, some of my neighbors despised Hillary Clinton for attempting to keep her maiden name.

Candidates like Walton may not be competing on a level playing field, deBoer wrote, “But the only way for the left to overcome our institutional disadvantages is to compel more voters to vote for us.” He’s right. Anyone who is serious about strengthening the left must contend with its opponents and its failures. Luckily that’s precisely what many young people are doing. DeBoer lamented useless left-wing energy that seems “to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.” This book is about the organizations and campaigns leftists have built in the real world, albeit with varying degrees of success.

As I learned in writing this book, the United States is far from a leftist, let alone a socialist, takeover. Leftists have made fragile inroads in recent years but the future is uncertain. Because millions perceived, and a smaller number personally experienced, Trump’s election as a disaster, many were disconcerted by the discovery that things could get simultaneously worse and better: Trump was voted out and nearly one million Americans died of Covid; Biden was elected and, as promised, nothing fundamentally changed. Progress does not inevitably follow a smooth, upward trajectory. The arc does not bend toward justice unless ordinary people make extraordinary and sustained efforts to bend it, whether by spending a few hours a week talking to strangers or organizing protests or sleeping in parked RVs outside of makeshift campaign offices, all for causes and candidates that may not win. No single leader, not even one as admired as MLK or Sanders or AOC, can achieve justice alone. Working together to build a better world, no matter how elusive an endeavor that can be or how hopeless it may sometimes feel, is a collective obligation and a never-ending enterprise. Reactionaries and corporatists can crush uprisings without ever stamping out the impulse to rise: that is our power, our duty, and our most inalienable right.

Acknowledgments

It would be impossible to name everyone who helped create this book. Many people gave generously of their time. My wonderful family, friends, and former professors offered unstinting encouragement and insisted, when I least believed it, that I was capable of writing one. My parents, John Lipsitz and Maria Scrivani, and my partner, Joe Wessely, supported me in every possible way, from talking me off the ledge to ensuring I had health care. Thanks to the late Nicky Mesiah, a joyful and loving friend who would have been first in line to buy a copy. She is missed beyond measure.

Thanks to the prodigiously talented Ashley Patrick for providing much-needed editorial guidance on an early draft and to my dear friend Carey Seal for reading the entire manuscript. Thanks also to the always kind David Duhalde for fact-checking assertions about the Democratic Socialists of America. Any errors are my own.

I am indebted to everyone who agreed to speak with me, answer my questions, and/or confirm quotations and facts. Thanks to the many journalists and writers whose work has inspired and informed my own, as well as to the editors who have solicited and improved my writing over the years, especially Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and Sarah Leonard. Columbia University’s MFA program in creative nonfiction enriched my life. I learned a great deal from the first-rate faculty, particularly Professor Emerita Patricia O’Toole and Professor Margo Jefferson, as well as from my wildly talented classmates, many of whom have become role models and cherished friends.

Special thanks to Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood for their friendship and support. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to write this book if they hadn’t vouched for me. Thanks to Andy Hsiao for his keen edits and nurturing demeanor, to everyone at Verso who helped bring this book into being, and to my agent, Roz Foster, who answered my many questions promptly and thoroughly, with patience and good humor. Some of the reporting in this book originally appeared in The Conversationalist, Gothamist, The Nation, and The New Republic. Thanks to those publications for giving me the opportunity to cover these and other stories.

Thanks above all to everyone fighting for a more just world.

Notes

Preface

  1 “What Jessa Crispin’s Bracing New Book Gets Wrong About Feminism and Pop Culture,” Flavorwire, 12/31/17, www.flavor wire.com

Chapter 1

  1 Jan. 2016 USA TODAY/Rock the Vote Millennial poll, usatoday.com

  2 Feb. 2020 Reuters/Ipsos poll, reuters.com

  3 Summer 2019 Pew Research Center data, pewresearch.org/politics/2019/08/16/

  4 Desus & Mero, 10/31/19, youtube.com

  5 “Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s argument about college costs, explained,” Vox, 12/19/15, vox.com

  6 “Sensual Pantsuit Anthem,” Funny or Die, 11/3/2016, youtube.com

  7 “Remember When Hillary Clinton Went on ‘Broad City’ and It Sucked So Hard?,” Junkee, 11/4/20, junkee.com

  8 “Here’s how much debt Americans have at every age,” CNBC, 10/13/21, cnbc.com

  9 “Many millennials are worse off than their parents—a first in American history,” CNN, 1/11/20, cnn.com

10 “The US birthrate is the lowest it’s been in 32 years, and it’s partly because millennials can’t afford having kids,” Business Insider, 5/24/19, businessinsider.com

11 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks popcorn, politics and DIY with Instagram followers,” youtube. com

12 “Ocasio-Cortez accosted by GOP lawmaker over remarks: ‘That kind of confrontation hasn’t ever happened to me,’ ” Hill, 7/21/20, thehill.com

13 “Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fire Back on House Floor After Rep. Yoho Calls Her An ‘F’ing Bitch,’ ” Democracy Now! 7/24/20, youtube.com

14 “ ‘Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me’: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fires back after being booed for Pelosi vote,” Lily News, 1/4/19, thelily.com

15 “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Lawmaker mocks college dance critics,” BBC News, 1/4/19, bbc.com

16 “Ocasio-Cortez faces 13 challengers—but can anyone unseat her?” Guardian, 2/17/20, theguardian.com

17 Ibid.

18 “AOC rival Michelle Caruso-Cabrera gets massive donation from Wall Street giants,” New York Post, 6/18/20, nypost.com

19 “Why I Ran for the First Time: Michelle Caruso-Cabrera Is a Jobs-First Candidate,” Shondaland, 3/12/20, shondaland.com

20 “New York Primary Election Results: 14th Congressional District,” New York Times, 8/17/20, nytimes.com

21 “Trump donors pump money into coffers of AOC rival Caruso-Cabrera,” New York Post, 6/7/20, nypost.com

22 Siena College NY 14th Congressional District Poll: “Ocasio-Cortez Viewed Favorably by Majority of Voters in Her District; 48 percent of All Voters, 61 percent of Dems Would Re-elect AOC,” 4/10/19, scri.siena.edu

23 “Conservative media’s war on AOC is hammering her poll numbers,” Vox, 3/28/19, vox.com

24 “A plea to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Tucker Carlson Tonight, 10/30/19, youtube.com

25 “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Traumatizing to Conservatives,” The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, 7/25/18, youtube.com

26 “I’m a Conservative, and I Went to an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Rally,” Daily Caller, 7/23/18, dailycaller.com

27 “The Democrats attracting the most attention on Fox News? Warren, Harris—and Ocasio-Cortez,” Washington Post, 2/20/19, washingtonpost.com

28 “Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes,” ProPublica, 7/1/19, propublica.org

29 “Exclusive poll: AOC defining Dems in swing states,” Axios, 7/14/19, axios.com

30 “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes heat for growing up in Westchester,” Journal News, 7/4/18, lohud.com

31 “Ocasio-Cortez shreds conservative TV host for sharing picture of her childhood home,” Hill, 7/1/18, thehill.com

32 “What Hillary Clinton told Wall Street bankers in private, according to leaked emails,” Vox, 10/7/16, vox.com

33 “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representing New York’s 14th District,” ocasio-cortez.house.gov/about

34 “Meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-Year-Old Running for Congress in the Bronx,” Elite Daily, 6/12/18, elitedaily.com

35 “Progressive Group Ousts Cenk Uygur Over Past Sexist Writing,” Huffington Post, 12/23/17, huffpost.com

36 “Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski Resigns From Justice Democrats!” 12/23/17, youtube.com

37 “Purge at DSA: Why Are Activists Trying to Expel Representative Bowman?” Nation, 11/22/21, thenation.com

38 “Chicago Democratic Socialists of America Censures Alderman Andre Vasquez,” Twitter, 11/24/20, twitter.com

39 “Leading Progressive Organizations Invest $1.2 Million in Major Campaign to Elect Jessica Cisneros,” LCV, 2/28/20, LCV.org

Chapter 2

  1 “Need a Socialist? Check Mom’s Basement,” Liberty Nation News, 6/25/19, libertynation.com

  2 “Clinton gives her take on Sanders supporters in leaked fundraising recording,” Politico, 9/30/16, politico.com

  3 “Sanders agrees with Clinton that his supporters ‘are living in their parents’ basement’ but ‘of course’ it bothers him that she called him a false promise,” CNN, 10/2/16, cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

  4 “Joe Biden is underwater with voters earning less than $75,000 a year, who overwhelmingly prefer Bernie Sanders,” Business Insider, 12/11/19, businessinsider.com

  5 “This One Chart Explains Why the Kids Back Bernie,” New York, 2/15/20, nymag.com

  6 “Shaniyat Chowdhury Challenges Meeks for House Seat,” PoliticsNY, 1/17/20, politicsny.com

  7 Virginia Ramos Rios, LinkedIn, linkedin.com

  8 “ ‘You didn’t vote for me’: Senator Dianne Feinstein responds to young green activists,” Guardian, 2/23/19, theguardian.com

  9 “ ‘Lace Up Your Shoes and Organize’: Watch Obama’s Push for Participation in Politics,” Time, 1/11/17, time.com

10 “Clinton to voter: ‘Why don’t you go run for something?,’ ” Hill, 3/1/16, thehill.com

11 Twitter, Zach Williams, 6/22/20, twitter.com/zachreports

12 “Cumbo Comes Through Brisport’s Block,” PoliticsNY, 6/23/20, politicsny.com

13 Facebook, Laurie Cumbo, 7/22/20, facebook.com/laurie.cumbo

14 Twitter, BLACaucusNYC, 6/24/20, twitter.com/BLACaucusNYC

15 “Chief of Staff Draws Fire From Left as Obama Falters,” The Wall Street Journal, 1/26/10, www.wsj.com

16 “Biden isn’t pursuing socialism. He’s just trying to catch up with other wealthy democracies,” Washington Post, 5/4/21, washing tonpost.com

17 “Texas Primary Election Results: 28th House District,” New York Times, 3/20/20, nytimes.com

18 “If You Want to Call Me a Socialist Then Call Me a Socialist,” Jacobin, 10/24/19, jacobinmag.com

19 “The Rise of the Left (With Mondaire Jones),” Intercept, 6/25/20, theintercept.com

20 Twitter, Daniel Marans, 6/17/20, twitter.com/danielmarans

21 “The more things change, the more they stay the same: A response to Canel and Jacobs,” Platypus Review 144, March 2022, platypus1917.org

22 “DSA Chapters: Propose National Candidate Endorsements by June 1,” Democratic Left, 5/24/17, dsausa.org/democratic-left

23 “Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Seek Minority Votes in Massachusetts,” New England Cable News, 2/17/16, necn.com

24 “Ayanna Pressley says ‘the Squad’ is ‘not a monolith,’ ” Boston.com, 8/15/19, boston.com

25 “Surprised Ayanna Pressley ‘broke’ with the squad to endorse Warren? Don’t be,” Guardian, 11/9/19, theguardian.com

26 NYS Board of Elections Enrollment by Congressional District, www.elections.ny.gov

27 “Once-obscure Rep. Chris Collins sees his star rise with Trump,” USA Today, 2/21/17, usatoday.com

28 “Analysis of New York counties won by Trump in 2016 and Obama in 2012 and 2008 following the 2020 presidential election,” ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org

29 “Rep. Chris Collins maintains innocence in insider trading case, vows to ‘fight this right to the end,’ ” Washington Post, 9/11/18, washingtonpost.com

30 “New York Election Results: 27th House District,” New York Times, 1/28/19, nytimes.com

31 “Collins fares well in poll despite charges,” Buffalo News, 8/9/19, buffalonews.com

32 “Mychajliw tells Orleans County SCOPE he will seek 27th as staunch Trump supporter,” Orleans Hub, 11/19/19, orleanshub. com

33 “Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Ban,” The Daily Show, 4/2/12, www.cc.com

34 “New York Election Results: 27th Congressional District,” New York Times, 4/2/21, nytimes.com

35 “How New Yorkers Voted in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Spectrum News 1, 12/10/20, spectrumlocalnews.com

36 “The Banality of Insurgency,” Jacobin, 10/11/19, jacobinmag.com

37 “It’s Not Enough to Talk Like the Left,” Political Currents (Substack), 5/31/21, rossbarkan.substack.com/p/its-not-enough-to-talk-like-the-left

38 “ ‘This will be the year of the Biden Republican,’ Rahm Emanuel says,” CNBC, 8/21/20, cnbc.com

39 “Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House,” Jacobin, 8/20/20, jacobinmag.com

40 “Kaufman’s revenge,” Politico, 3/3/21, politico.com

41 “Joe Biden to rich donors: ‘Nothing would fundamentally change’ if he’s elected,” Salon, 6/19/19, salon.com

42 “O Rahm, where art thou?” Politico, 12/17/20, politico.com

Chapter 3

  1 “Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War,” Jacobin, 8/28/20, jacobinmag.com

  2 “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t even in office yet and she’s already pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of Congress,” CNBC, 12/11/18, cnbc.com

  3 “House progressives are building something new, exciting, and powerful,” Roll Call, 11/20/20, rollcall.com

  4 Ibid.

  5 “DCCC Promises to Blacklist Firms That Work With Candidates Challenging Incumbents,” HuffPost, 3/22/19, huffpost.com

  6 “In a victory for progressives, the DCCC ends its consultant blacklist,” Vox, 3/10/21, vox.com

  7 “Nebraska Election Results: Second Congressional District,” New York Times, 12/5/20, nytimes.com

  8 “Ocasio-Cortez announces slate of all-female congressional endorsements,” Hill, 2/21/20, thehill.com

  9 “Mapping American Social Movements Project: Socialist Party Elected Officials 1901–1960,” University of Washington, depts. washington.edu/moves/SP_map-elected.shtml

10 “Ron Delllums’s Life Holds Lessons for Every Progressive in America,” Intercept, 8/3/18, theintercept.com

11 “Gallup Vault: Americans’ Views of Socialism, 1949–1965,” 8/10/18, https://news.gallup.com

12 Ibid.

13 “Four in 10 Americans Embrace Some Form of Socialism,” Gallup, 5/20/19, news.gallup.com

14 “Less Than Half in U.S. Would Vote for a Socialist for President,” Gallup, 5/9/19, news.gallup.com

15 “Communist Party of the United States of America,” Britannica, britannica.com

16 “DSA Was Only Getting Started,” Nation, 5/20/20, thenation.com

17 “50 Years of Shrinking Union Membership, in One Map,” NPR, 2/23/15, npr.org

18 “Majorities of adults see decline of union membership as bad for the U.S. and working people,” Pew Research Center, 4/15/21, pewresearch.org

19 Twitter, 8/4/19, twitter.com/daveweigel

20 “Exclusive: We Found Archie Carter,” Jacobin, 8/8/19, jacobin mag.com

21 “Some young Americans warm to socialism, even Miami Cubans,” Associated Press, 8/25/19, apnews.com

22 “Why Some Young Voters Are Choosing Democratic Socialism Over the Democratic Party,” New York Times, 10/15/19, nytimes.com

23 Ibid.

24 “Is ‘Bernie or Bust’ the Future of the Left?,” New York Times, 8/6/19, nytimes.com

25 Ibid.

26 “A Gathering of Comrades,” Current Affairs, 8/7/19, currentaf fairs.org

27 “The Socialist Network,” New Republic, 5/16/19, newrepublic.com

28 “Pinkos Have More Fun,” New York, 3/3/19, nymag.com

29 “ ‘Back That Azz Up,’ Comrade (at Least 6 Feet),” New York, 12/23/21, thecut.com

30 “Dances With Feminists,” Women’s Review of Books, Vol. IX, no. 3, December 1991, lib.berkeley.edu

31 “Socialists on Chicago City Council Fight for Affordable Housing, Immigrant Rights,” Intercept, 7/8/19, theintercept.com

32 “In 2008, Democratic Socialists Endorsed Him. Now, a DSA Member Is Primarying Him,” In These Times, 7/16/19, inthese times.com

33 “GOP’s Madison Cawthorn, 25, reacts to North Carolina victory: ‘Time for a new Republican Party,” Fox News, 11/4/20, foxnews.com

34 YDSA website, chapter chart, airtable.com/shrGLIY5edPx qlZCK/tbl40RvaGc1n3A24L

35 Ryan Grim, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement, (Washington, DC: Strong Arm Press, 2019), p. 309

36 “A Politician Called Her ‘Young and Naïve.’ Now She’s Striking Back,” New York Times, 7/25/18, nytimes.com

37 “Too easy on Trump? Dianne Feinstein heckled at San Francisco town hall,” Mercury News, 4/17/17, mercurynews.com

38 “The Viral Confrontation With Dianne Feinstein Had a Political Impact Most Pundits Missed,” Intercept, 3/1/2019, theintercept. com

39 “Senate defeats Green New Deal, as Democrats call vote a ‘sham,’ ” Washington Post, 3/26/19, washingtonpost.com

40 Kearney Indivisible Facebook page, 2/22/22, facebook.com

41 “The Democratic Party Is Selling Out Women at Its Own Peril,” Glamour, 8/1/17, glamour.com

42 “Cuomo abstains from global warming ‘debate,’ ” Politico, 11/24/14, politico.com

43 “Scaling Wokeback Mountain,” New York Times, 7/13/19, nytimes.com

44 Twitter, Ed Markey, 9/1/20, twitter.com

45 “A New Role for Democratic Centrists: Helping the Left Win,” New York, 3/5/19, nymag.com

46 “A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance,” Vox, 3/4/19, vox.com

47 “A Hillary ‘shill’ goes all-in for Bernie,” Politico, 12/2/19, polit ico.com

48 “NY Democratic chair blasts primary challenge against Maloney,” Hill, 4/14/21, thehill.com

49 Twitter, Honda Wang, 4/14/21, twitter.com/HondaWang

Chapter 4

  1 Twitter, Summer Lee, 11/5/20, twitter.com/SummerForPA

  2 “One Year in Washington,” New York, 1/6/20, nymag.com

Chapter 5

  1 “Massive August fire now largest in California history, at 471,000 acres and counting,” Los Angeles Times, 9/10/20, latimes.com

  2 “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, 7/3/20, nytimes.com

  3 “Tracking protests across the USA in the wake of George Floyd’s death,” USA Today, 6/3/20, usatoday.com

  4 “AP tally: Arrests at widespread US protests hit 10,000,” AP, 6/4/20, apnews.com

  5 “74 percent of Americans view George Floyd’s death as an underlying racial injustice problem: POLL,” ABC News, 6/5/20, abcnews.go.com

  6 “One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces,” New York Times, 6/12/20, nytimes.com

  7 “Rural New York Is in the Streets, Marching for Black Lives,” Nation, 6/24/20, thenation.com

  8 “Florida House Democrats give up 2018 gains—and any hope of influence,” Politico, 11/4/20, politico.com

  9 Ibid.

10 “Over 1 Million Florida Felons Win Right to Vote With Amendment 4,” NPR, 11/7/18, npr.org

11 “Florida is raising minimum wage to $15 per hour. Some economists hope to see a national trend,” CNBC, 11/6/20, cnbc.com

12 “Florida Governor Election Results: Andrew Gillum vs. Ron DeSantis,” New York Times, 1/28/19, nytimes.com

13 “Manchin says ‘elect more liberals’ to Democrats who want a pricier reconciliation bill,” Yahoo! News, 9/30/21, yahoo.com

14 “Joe Biden’s shifting recollection on his civil rights activities,” Washington Post, 6/12/20, washingtonpost.com

15 “Andrew Young apologizes for ‘unlovable little brats’ remark,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7/13/16, www.ajc.com

16 “John Lewis: I did not mean to ‘disparage’ Bernie Sanders’s civil rights activism,” Guardian, 2/13/16, theguardian.com

17 “No. 3 House Democrat Steps Into Ohio Race to Head Off a Sanders Acolyte,” New York Times, 6/29/21, nytimes.com

18 “Reforming the Criminal Justice Agenda,” 6/18/20, nysenate.gov

19 “Amy McGrath Is Projected to Edge Out Charles Booker in Ky. Senate Democratic Primary,” NPR, 6/30/20, npr.org

20 “Kentucky U.S. Senate Election Results,” New York Times, 3/6/21, nytimes.com

21 “What to Know About Breonna Taylor’s Death,” New York Times, 4/26/21, nytimes.com

22 Eyewitness News, ABC7NY, 5/31/20, youtube.com

23 “Jewish protestor, staples in head and arm broken on NYC streets, tells his story,” Forward, 6/4/20, forward.com

24 “Who Will You Believe, de Blasio or Your Lying Eyes?,” New York, 6/5/20, nymag.com

25 Twitter, Jake Offenhartz, 6/1/20, twitter.com/jangelooff

26 “Who Will You Believe, de Blasio or Your Lying Eyes?,” New York, 6/5/20, nymag.com.

27 “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church,” New York Times, 6/1/20, nytimes.com

28 “June 2 Statement from United States Park Police acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan about the actions taken over the weekend to protect life and property,” 6/2/20, www.nps.gov

29 “DC Police buy $100,000 in tear gas in preparation for possible ‘civil disturbance’ in coming months,” WTHR, 10/14/20, wthr.com

30 “Donavan La Bella, man shot by US Marshals in Portland, to be released from hospital,” OPB, 7/25/20, .opb.org

31 “Federal Officers Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab People in Portland, DHS Confirms,” NPR, 7/17/20, npr.org

32 “Oregon Senator on ‘Unmarked Paramilitary Presence’ in Portland,” NPR, 7/18/20, npr.org

33 “New York City police accused of ‘kidnapping’ protester,” BBC, 7/29/20, bbc.com

34 “Amnesty International Documents 125 Incidents of Police Violence Against Protesters,” NPR, 8/4/20, npr.org

Chapter 6

  1 “CPD misses deadline for reforming foot chase policy; says more data needed,” Chicago Sun-Times, 9/3/21, chicago.suntimes.com

  2 “Up to 1 million species are facing extinction, according to a new UN report. Without them, we could run out of food,” Business Insider, 5/6/19, businessinsider.com

  3 “Texas Election Results: 10th Congressional District,” New York Times, 2/22/21, nytimes.com

  4 “Sean McElwee and the Art of Left Pontification,” Ross Barkan, 9/16/20, rossbarkan.substack.com

  5 “Should Sanders Have Campaigned Like Warren?,” Matt Bruenig, 4/16/20, peoplespolicyproject.org

  6 “How Sean McElwee’s ‘Normie-Progressive Theory of Change’ Doomed Samelys López,” Jacobin, 9/24/20, jacobinmag.com

  7 “New progressive pipeline funnels jobs to the Hill,” Roll Call, 1/25/19, rollcall.com

  8 “Congressional progressives get their own center,” CNN, 10/9/18, cnn.com

  9 “Where Americans stand on policing today,” Vox, 4/9/21, vox.com

10 “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” American Studies Dept., Yale University, americanstudies.yale.edu

11 “I helped coin the term ‘identity politics.’ I’m endorsing Bernie Sanders,” Guardian, 2/10/20, theguardian.com

Chapter 7

  1 “Nothing Left,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2014, harpers.org

  2 “In New York, the Far Left Is Targeting a Close Ally,” New York Times, 9/19/19, nytimes.com

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid.

  5 “Why Is Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten Attacking Medicare for All?,” Jacobin, 9/26/19, jacobinmag.com

  6 “Schumer and a Teachers’ Union Leader Secure Billions for Private Schools,” New York Times, 3/13/21, nytimes.com

  7 “Sara Nelson’s Art of War,” New Republic, 5/13/19, newrepub lic.com

  8 “Sara Nelson Is Not Afraid to Strike Back,” Nation, 5/10/19, thenation.com

  9 “The New Union Label: Female, Progressive and Very Anti-Trump,” Politico, 12/12/19, politico.com

10 “What Happened to New York’s Plans for Single-Payer Health Care?,” Nation, 5/2/19, thenation.com

11 Ibid.

12 “UFT Exec. Board December 3rd, 2018—Elections and Health Care,” NYC Educator, 12/3/18, nyceducator.com

13 “Kathy Hochul Is the Un-Cuomo,” Nation, 4/5/2022, thenation.com

14 “An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders,” New York Times, 3/23/21, nytimes.com

15 “Trump Voter Feels Betrayed by President After Reading 800 Pages of Queer Feminist Theory,” Onion, 5/3/17, youtube.com

16 “Full Rush Transcript Hillary Clinton Part//CNN TV One Democratic Presidential Town Hall,” CNN, 3/13/16, cnnpress room.blogs.cnn.com

17 “Labor unions fear Democrats’ Green New Deal poses job threat,” Reuters, 2/12/19, reuters.com

18 “Big Labor May Save New York From AOC’s Socialism,” Wall Street Journal, 2/19/21, wsj.com

19 “Big Apple Big Labor Is Becoming Progressive,” Wall Street Journal, 3/2/21, wsj.com

20 “Can a Federal Job Guarantee Unite the Left?” In These Times, 3/3/21, inthesetimes.com

Chapter 8

  1 Fox News, Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 6/21/20, foxnews. com

  2 “ ‘Running against a movement’: Eric Adams declares war on AOC’s socialists,” New York Post, 7/27/21, nypost.com

  3 “What’s the Difference Between Socialist Alternative and DSA?,” Socialist Alternative, 2/14/20, socialistalternative.org

  4 “Opinion: By Forging Alliance on the Left, Cabán Race is Reshaping NYC Politics,” City Limits, 7/25/19, citylimits. org

  5 “James explains Cuomo backing, break from third party,” Albany Times Union, 8/22/18, www.timesunion.com

  6 Ballotpedia, Jabari Brisport, 2020 and 2017 results, https://ballot pedia.org/Jabari_Brisport

  7 “Amazon spent $1.5 million on Seattle City Council races. The socialist it opposed has won,” The Washington Post, 11/10/19, washingtonpost.com

  8 “Amazon Workers on Staten Island Clinch a Historic Victory,” Labor Notes, 4/1/22, labornotes.org

  9 Movement for a People’s Party, “People’s Convention,” 8/30/20, peoplesparty.org

10 “The Trailer: It’s not 2016 for third-party candidates,” The Washington Post, 9/8/20, washingtonpost.com

11 “No, Ralph Nader Did Not Hand the 2000 Presidential Election to George W. Bush,” Reason, 8/3/16, reason.com

12 “Chapters,” dasusa.org.

13 “Kara Eastman Loses Omaha House Race, But Joe Biden Picks Up Electoral College Vote,” The Intercept, 11/3/20, theintercept com

14 “Mike Siegel’s Ambitious Progressive Platform Falls Short in Deep-Red Texas,” The Intercept, 11/3/20, theintercept.com

15 “US Rep. Lloyd Smucker defeats Jess King to secure second term in Lancaster County’s congressional seat,” Lancaster Online, 11/6/18, lancasteronline.com

16 “Missouri Primary Election Results: First House District,” New York Times, 9/24/18, nytimes.com

17 “Poll: Despite Record Turnout, 80 Million Americans Didn’t Vote. Here’s Why,” NPR, 12/15/20, npr.org

18 “Why Many Americans Don’t Vote,” FiveThirtyEight, 10/26/20, projects.fivethirtyeight.com

19 “New data helps explain Trump’s gains among Latino voters in 2020,” Vox, 5/19/21, vox.com

20 Tennessee Senate 2020 Race, Summary Data, Marquita Bradshaw, 8/6/20, opensecrets.org

21 West Virginia District 2 2020 Race, Catherine Kunkel, 5/12/20, opensecrets.org

22 “Final tally shows Amy McGrath campaign spent more than $90 million in failed Senate bid,” Louisville Courier Journal, 12/4/20, www.courier-journal.com

23 “Tennessee US Senate Election Results,” New York Times, 3/6/21, nytimes.com.

24 “West Virginia Election Results: Second Congressional District,” New York Times, 12/6/20, nytimes.com

25 “Kentucky US Senate Election Results,” New York Times, 3/6/21, nytimes.com

26 “McConnell Enjoys Healthy Lead in Senate Race Despite Unpopularity,” Spectrum News 1, 10/31/20, spectrumnews1.com

27 “Kentucky US Senate Election Results,” New York Times, 3/6/21, nytimes.com

28 “Analysis: Partisan gerrymandering has benefited Republicans more than Democrats,” Business Insider/Associated Press, 6/25/17, businessinsider.com

29 “Trump Eclipses Obama’s Popular Vote Record, Reinforcing Speculation of a 2024 Run if He Loses,” Newsweek, 11/5/20, newsweek.com

30 “The Return of the ‘Sewer Socialists,’ ” The Progressive, 12/23/21, progressive.org

31 “Damon Seils Wins Carrboro Mayor; Foushee, Haven-O’Donnell, Nowell Win Town Council,” 11/2/21, chapelboro.com

32 “DSA International Committee condemns the Sinophobia and the push for a Cold War with China encouraged by the United States,” DSA International Committee, 3/16/21, dsausa.org

33 “Landmark Deal Reached on Rent Protections for Tenants in N.Y.,” New York Times, 6/11/19, nytimes.com

34 “NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue Calls for New Democratic Leadership of Senate Judiciary Committee,” NARAL, 10/16/20, prochoiceamerica.org

35 “Denver’s City Council, Led by Democratic Socialist, Stuns For-Profit Prison Operators by Nuking Contracts,” The Intercept, 8/8/19, theintercept.com

36 “Socialists on Chicago City Council Fight for Affordable Housing, Immigrant Rights,” The Intercept, 7/8/19, theintercept.com

37 “Amazon spent $1.5 million on Seattle City Council races. The socialist it opposed has won,” The Washington Post, 11/10/19, washingtonpost.com

38 “Nearly $1 Billion Is Shifted From Police in Budget That Pleases No One,” New York Times, 6/30/20, nytimes.com

39 “Ocasio-Cortez dismisses proposed $1B cut: ‘Defunding police means defunding police,’ ” The Hill, 6/30/20, thehill.com

40 “The Most Ambitious Effort Yet to Reform Policing May Be Happening In Ithaca, New York,” GQ, 2/22/21, gq.com

41 “As police reform stalls, Ithaca restores 2 previously eliminated officer positions,” WSKG, 11/24/21, wskg.org

42 “City publishes another Q&A on restructuring of Ithaca Police Department,” The Ithaca Voice, 3/30/22, ithacavoice.com

43 “Frey signs Minneapolis city budget with police funding cuts,” MPR News, 12/11/20, www.mprnews.org

44 “Minneapolis to spend $6.4 million to hire more police officers,” New York Post, 2/14/21, nypost.com

45 “Petition campaign begins to put Minneapolis police overhaul on ballot,” Star Tribune, 2/14/21, www.startribune.com

46 “Minneapolis Election: Voters Reject Question To Replace Police With New Agency,” CBS Minnesota, 11/2/21, minnesota.cbslo cal.com

47 “The History Behind ‘When The Looting Starts, The Shooting Starts,’ ” NPR, 5/29/20, npr.org

48 “Federal Officers Shoot Portland Protester In Head With ‘Less Lethal’ Munitions,” OPB, 7/12/20, opb.org

49 “Newsom Signs Ban on Police Chokehold, State Mandate to Investigate Killings by Police,” Courthouse News Service, 9/30/20, courthousenews.com

50 “Mario Gonzalez died after police pinned him down for 5 minutes. Now his autopsy is in,” NPR, 12/10/21, npr.org

51 “Veteran Chicago cop charged after allegedly choking handcuffed arrestee in 2019 on South Side: officials,” Chicago Tribune, 1/23/21, chicagotribune.com

52 Twitter, Laura Bassett, 1/20/22, twitter.com

53 “Biden Justice Department officially rescinds Trump ‘zero tolerance’ migrant family separation policy,” NBC News, 1/26/21, nbcnews.com

54 “Immigrant Youth Take Action Outside of ICE Building Demanding President Biden Immediately Stop ALL Deportations,” United We Dream,” 2/17/21, unitedwedream.org

55 “First migrant facility for children opens under Biden,” The Washington Post, 2/22/21, washingtonpost.com

56 Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, AK Press, 2017 (p. 77)

57 “Big donors to Brown and Walton,” Investigative Post, 10/5/21, investigativepost.org

58 “Mayor Brown ‘not seeking support’ from Carl Paladino in potential write-in campaign,” WKBW, 6/27/21, wkbw.com

59 “Paladino Ousted From Buffalo School Board,” New York Times, 8/17/17, nytimes.com.

60 “Paladino exchanges bucks and hugs at Brown fund raiser,” The Buffalo News, 1/11/13, buffalonews.com

61 “Labor support tilting toward Brown despite Walton’s gains,” The Buffalo News, 9/17/21, buffalonews.com

62 Ibid.

63 “Brown and Walton continue to state their cases, with a little help from their friends,” The Buffalo News, 10/22/21, buffalonews. com

64 “The Editorial Board: Re-elect Brown, who knows how to govern, unlike the dangerously inexperienced Walton,” The Buffalo News, 10/23/21, buffalonews.com

65 “How Buffalo News Helped Keep a Socialist out of City Hall,” FAIR, 11/11/21, fair.org

66 “To house the people, expropriate the landlords,” The Conversationalist, 8/12/21, conversationalist.org

67 “Democratic Socialists Need to Take a Hard Look in the Mirror,” New York Times, 11/16/21, nytimes.com

68 “Write-ins are counted: Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown wins reelection, defeating India Walton,” WIVB, 11/19/21, wivb.com; “Brown defeats Walton in Buffalo, New York, mayoral election,” Ballotpedia News, 11/29/21, news.ballotpedia.org

Index

A

Abdelhamid, Rana, 103

abortion rights, 18, 49, 80, 99, 100, 212

Abouhamama, Omar, 76

ACLU of Minnesota, 215

Adams, Eric, 155, 199

affluent suburbanites, as oscillating between Republicans and Democrats, 111

Aguilera, Christina, 76

Albright, Madeleine, 173

alliances, deciding how, when, and with whom, 189

Amazon, 9, 10, 11, 201

American Federal of Labor (AFL), 187

American socialism, resurgence of, 74–82

Amnesty International, on police violence, 152

anti-capitalism, 47, 121, 193

anti-racism, 128–9, 169

AOC (Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria). See Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (AOC)

assault weapons, ban on, 58

Atlantic, essay by Serwer, 91

atomization, antidote to, 91

authenticity

of AOC, 46

of Bowman, 46

as quality politicians want to convey, 7

of Sanders, 46

Avilés, Alexa, 196

Azzopardi, Richard, 71

B

Baker, Melodie, 59

“The Banality of Insurgency” (Featherstone), 63–4

Barkan, Ross, 64, 176

Barrett, Amy Coney, 212, 213

Bassett, Laura, 218

Bay Area Earth Guardians, 95

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, 19, 29

B-Dunner, Kourtney, 91, 92, 93

Bell, Adrienne, 15

Bennett, Naftali, 19

Beyoncé, 76

Beyond the Choir, 106

Bezos, Jeff, 148

Biden, Joe, 2, 18, 45, 60, 61–2, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, 85, 98, 101, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 126, 137, 138, 140–1, 174, 208, 217, 227

bird-dogging, 98

Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus (New York City Council), 40

Black Lives Matter (BLM), 23, 35, 48, 67, 130, 148, 167

Booker, Charles, 145, 146–7

Boston.com, interview with Pressley, 54

Boudin, Chesa, 154

Bowling Alone (Putnam), 77

Bowman, Jamaal, 19–20, 23, 24, 25, 28, 43–5, 46–7, 72, 74, 81, 82, 180

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, 19, 29

Bradshaw, Marquita, 205, 206

Brana, Nick, 202

Brand New Congress (BNC), 15–16

BREATHE Act, 153–4

Brisport, Jabari, 38–40, 47, 65, 84, 200

Broad City, 4

Brooks, Kendra, 120–1

Brown, Byron, 221–3, 224

Brown, Michael, 122, 130

Bruenig, Matt, 163, 164

Buffalo, New York, mayoral primary (2021), 221–6

Bush, Cori, 23, 28, 72, 74, 81, 82, 143, 144, 180, 205

Bush, George W., 6, 85

Business Insider, on young voters for Sanders, 31

Buttigieg, Pete, 62, 63, 180

C

campaign finance, 15, 99, 161, 184

candidate recruitment, 20–1, 29, 116, 117, 118, 139, 156

Cantor, Eric, 112

capitalism

cruel inadequacies of, 203

Democrats as viewing socialism more favorably than, 75

importance of saving, 57

reform of, 42

women as shock absorbers of, 174

Cardillo, John, 13

Carlson, Tucker, 11–12

Carter, Archie, 78

Caruso-Cabrera, Michelle, 9–10

Carville, James, 110, 180

Castile, Philando, 130

Cawthorn, Madison, 82

CdeBaca, Candi, 213

Cea, Sergio, 121, 122, 123–5

Center for Jewish History, panel discussion on resurgence of socialism, 78

Chakrabarti, Saikat, 101–2, 156, 163

Chauvin, Derek, 129, 153

Chomsky, Noam, 63

Chowdhury, Shaniyat, 32–3, 83–5, 87

CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), 187

Cisneros, Jessica, 24, 45, 74

Citizen Action of New York, 40, 41

climate change, 11, 60, 62, 90, 95, 96, 99, 160, 162, 163, 208

climate crisis, 3, 53, 73, 85, 86, 90, 113, 156, 186, 195, 197, 217

climate justice, 95, 165, 217

Clinton, Bill, 76, 141, 180

Clinton, Hillary, 1, 4, 7, 8, 14, 31, 35, 36, 51, 52, 68, 76, 85, 86, 110, 141, 173, 192, 227

clubby cruelty, 91

Clyburn, James, 65, 140, 142, 153

coalitions, deciding how, when, and with whom, 189

co-governance, 18–20

Colbert, Stephen, 12

collective working-class culture, restoration of, 219

college, free public college, 53, 65, 83, 202, 205, 218

Collins, Chris, 56, 57

Color of Change, 215

Combahee River Collective, 168–9, 174, 224

Committee Person Campaign (Reclaim Philadelphia), 122

common sense, redefining, 163–5

Communications Workers of America (CWA), 183, 186, 187

Communist Party of the United States, 75

compromise, deciding how, when, and with whom, 188

Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), 71, 72, 93, 164–5

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 187

Corbett, Tom, 121–2

Courage to Change PAC, 47, 73–4

court reform, 99

COVID-19 pandemic, impacts of, 91, 92, 128, 148, 149, 174, 181, 213–14, 217

Crowley, Joe, 9

Cuellar, Henry, 24, 45

Cumbo, Laurie, 39–40, 41

Cunningham, Bianca, 41

Cuomo, Andrew, 64, 99–100, 182, 183–4, 185, 200, 222

D

Daily Show (TV show), 60

Daou, Peter, 102

Data for Progress, 163, 164, 189

Davis, Angela, 63

Davis, Danny K., 81

DC Metropolitan Police Department, 150

deBoer, Fredrik, 226, 227

Debs, Eugene, 74

Dellums, Ron, 74

DeLong, Brad, 102

Demand Progress, 164

democracy reform, 53

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), 73, 99

Democratic Left (publication of DSA), 49

Democratic Party

attempts to drag it left, 6, 82, 101

as calling for return to status quo, 110

as corrupt and hollow, 203

criticism of, 69

disillusionment with, 83

as drawing litmus tests, 99

DSA members’ association with, 200, 201

in Florida, 138–9

future of, 8

in Kentucky, 146

opinions about, 77

reforming of, 16, 19

as reluctant to “go bold,” 113

requirements of candidates seeking support of, 23

response of to rising left, 101–3

rising stars of, 180

role of women and people of color in, 181

strategies of to elect Biden, 188

as viewing socialism more favorably than capitalism, 75

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, 99

Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, 75

democratic socialists, 21, 29, 33, 36, 42, 43, 46, 47, 74, 78, 81, 82, 164, 221, 225

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, 29, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–9, 61, 66, 71, 75, 76, 77–80, 81, 84, 89, 98, 101, 103, 107–8, 115, 139, 157, 159, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176, 177, 181, 185, 199, 200–1, 202, 204, 208, 209–11, 216, 219, 220

DeSantis, Ron, 133, 138, 139

Dissent (magazine), 171

Doggett, Lloyd, 72

down-ballot races, 61, 66, 115, 208

down-to-earth-ness, as quality politicians want to convey, 7

DREAM Act, 166, 184

Dream Defenders, 131–2, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 162, 209–10

Dromm, Danny, 40

DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). See Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Duhalde, David, 48–9, 78

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 63

Dunham, Lena, 4

Durbin, Dick, 212

E

Eastman, Kara, 74, 204, 205, 206

economic precariousness, of newly radicalized young people, 32

Ehrenreich, Barbara, 63

elections, financing of. See campaign finance

electoral gains

focusing on, 35

making of, 81, 101, 163, 205

electoral politics

DSA’s emphasis on, 18, 81, 209, 211, 216–17

opinions on future of, 35, 68

El-Sayed, Abdul, 25

Emanuel, Rahm, 43, 66, 101–2, 180

EMILY’s List, 24

Engel, Eliot, 43

Escobar, Veronica, 12–13

Exley, Zack, 15

expert worship, 221

F

FAIR, on The Buffalo News’s coverage of Walton, 224

fair trade, 53

Faith in Florida Action Fund, 131

Featherstone, Liza, 63–4

federal jobs guarantee, 17, 46, 53, 196, 202

Feinstein, Dianne, 34–5, 36, 95–6, 212

feminism/feminists

according to hooks, 173

AOC as contemporary icon of, 8

as ascending to positions of power and influence, 143

Black feminism, 132, 133, 168, 169

fortunes of as intertwined with fortunes of broader left, 173

“Girl Boss”–style of, 172

Goldman Emma, 80

hooks, bell, 63

Lux (magazine), 170, 173

“the personal is political,” 173

Sassy (magazine), 172

socialist feminism, 133, 168, 169, 170, 171–2, 174

Fernández, Teresa Leger, 74

Fiedler, Liz, 126–7

Fielder, Jackie, 21

Fields, Barbara, 63, 171

Fighting for Our Lives, 217

Financial Times, article on AOC, 7

FLIC Votes, 131

Florida, trying to build power in, 131–40

Florida for All, 131, 140

Florida Planned Parenthood PAC, 131

Floyd, George, 129–30, 142, 147, 149, 150, 153, 215, 216

Floyd, Richie, 208

foreign policy, progressive foreign policy, 53

Forrest, Phara Souffrant, 90, 91

Fox News, stories on AOC, 10–11, 12

Foxx, Kim, 154

Foy, Kirsten John, 40

fracking ban, 208

free college and trade school, 17

G

Gabby, Laura, 193–6, 216

Gallagher, Shana, 160–3, 175

Gallup poll, on socialism, 75

Garner, Eric, 130

Garza, Jose, 154

Gascón, George, 154–5

Gelman, Audrey, 36

gerrymandering, 29, 99, 207

get-out-the-vote efforts, 61

Ghebreghiorgis, Andom, 45–6

Gillum, Andrew, 133, 137–8

Gilmer, Rachel, 132, 133, 134–5, 136, 137, 138, 139

Girgenti, Guido, 88, 186–7, 190

Glover, Danny, 202

Goldman Emma, 80

Gore, Al, 203

“go run for something,” message newly radicalized young people are getting, 35

Gothamist, interview with Bowman, 46

Gray, Freddie, 123

Greenberg, Leah, 72, 97, 98, 99, 100, 162

Green New Deal (GND), 11, 28, 34, 41, 51, 53, 63, 65, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101, 125, 182, 186, 187–8, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 202, 204, 205, 208, 216, 217–18

Green Party, 200, 201

Griffith, Saul, 190

Grim, Ryan, 51, 52, 94

Guardian, article on Pressley, 54

gun regulation, 58

gun violence, 53, 85, 156

H

Haaland, Debra, 67–8

Hainey, Amber, 56, 58–9

Hammill, Drew, 94

Harper, “Nothing Left” (Reed), 175

Harris, Kamala, 2, 68

Heastie, Carl, 182

Hegemony How-To (Smucker), 219

Henderson, Jamell, 41

Henry, Mary Kay, 186

Henwood, Doug, 79–80

Hochul, Kathy, 184–5

Hogue, Ilyse, 212, 213

Hood to the Holler, 146

hooks, bell, 63, 173

housing, as a human right, 46, 53, 83

I

identity politics, 90, 109, 168, 169, 174

IfNotNow, 52

immigrants’ rights, 53, 131, 165, 169, 217, 218–19

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 17, 53, 138, 153, 163, 208, 213, 218

Indivisible, 49, 72, 97–9, 100–1, 162, 181, 209, 211

Insider, on young voters for Sanders, 31

Intercept

article on Bowman, 46

article on Pressley campaign donations, 51

interview with Prakash, 96

intersectionality, 90

Ipsos, survey of young voters (2016), 1

Israel, 19, 52

J

Jacobin (magazine), 4, 46, 54, 63, 108, 164, 196

Jacobs, Chris, 57

Jacobs, Jay, 103

Jaffe, Sarah, 180

James, Letitia, 200

Janus ruling (Supreme Court), 180

Jayapal, Pramila, 72, 164–5

Jeffries, Hakeem, 41

Johnson, Francys, 141

Jones, Mondaire, 28, 72, 74, 202

Jones, Sarah, 150

Justice Democrats (JD or Justice Dems), 2, 16–18, 20–5, 26–7, 28, 45, 51, 52–4, 71, 72, 73, 101, 103, 181, 185, 202, 209

Justice in Policing Act, 153, 154, 215

justice reform, 53

K

Karp, Matt, 4

Kaufman, Ted, 66–7

Kavanaugh, Brett, 211

Kennedy, Edward (Ted), 13

Kennedy, Joe, III, 63, 93, 216

Khanna, Ro, 72

The Kid Mero, 3–4

Kilgore, Ed, 102

Killer Mike, 141

King, Jess, 113, 117, 204, 205

Kinnucan, Michael, 176–7

Koch brothers, 137

Koch-funded libertarian groups, 87

Krajewski, Rick, 121, 124

Krasner, Larry, 122, 124, 155

Krueger, Liz, 142

Kruta, Virginia, 12

Kulinski, Kyle, 16

Kumar, María Teresa, 62

Kunkel, Cathy, 204, 205, 206

L

Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), 192

labor movement. See also organized labor; unions; working-class movement

as having been screwed over, 125

importance of healthy one, 163, 185

rebuilding of, 175–8

“renewed fighting spirit” of, 180

reviving and radicalizing of, 35

Sara Nelson as rising star in, 179

shifting demographics in, 181

strengthening of, 188

La Botz, Dan, 49

Lafayette Square/Park, DC, 150

Lamont, Ned, 49

Lamphere, Peter, 182

Lancaster Stands Up (LSU), 106, 107

land acknowledgments, 88–9

Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST), 135

Langone, Ken, 10

Laurison, Hannah, 114, 116–17

LCV Victory Fund, 24

League of Conservation Voters (LCV), 24

Lee, Barbara, 63, 144

Lee, Chris, 57

Lee, Summer, 115

“leftist”

not all as young, not all young people as, 63–5

use of term, 42

“the left”

as championing too many causes at once, 168

criticisms of DSA from, 209

as needing organized labor, 175–97

as needing to expand geographical reach, 204

rebuilding of as long-term project, 219

relative weakness of, 149

as re-learning how to organize, 221

representing interests of working people as longstanding goal of, 201

as stronger in places with some degree of class consciousness and support for workers’ rights, 201

as supporting Biden in 2020 election, 208

tactics for undermining and discrediting, 124

use of term, 42

left-wing PACs, growth of, 29

Leon, Saniyah, 91, 92–3

Leonard, Sarah, 170–4

Levin, Ezra, 72, 97

Levitz, Eric, 31–2

Lewis, John, 140, 141

LGBTQ+ equality, 53

liberal

class disposition of, 109

use of term, 42–3

Liberty Nation News, on newly radicalized young people, 31

Lieberman, Joe, 49

Lightfoot, Lori, 155

litmus tests, 99, 101

LIUNA (Laborers’ International Union of North America), 192

living wage, 53

local level

the left’s victories at, 213

reason for optimism at, 154–5

loneliness, antidote to, 91

long-term relationship building, as emphasis of AOC’s campaign, 33

López, Ian Haney, 187–8

López, Samelys, 47–8, 84, 164

Los Angeles Times, interview with Biden, 61

Louisville, Kentucky, protests and political activity in, 144–9

LSU (Lancaster Stands Up), 106, 107

Luján, Ben Ray, 99

Lux (magazine), 170, 173, 174

M

Madrigal, Al, 60

Maloney, Carolyn, 36, 103

Mamdani, Zohran, 76, 84

Manchin, Joe, 101, 140

marijuana

decriminalization of, 184

legalization of, 55, 58, 60

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre (Parkland, Florida), 136

Markey, Ed, 63, 102, 216

Markowicz, Karol, 78

Mark-Viverito, Melissa, 47

Martin, Trayvon, 130, 131, 134, 135, 148

Marx, Karl, 28, 171

Master, Bob, 186, 187

McAlevey, Jane, 204

McConnell, Mitch, 96, 145–6, 147, 206, 207

McElwee, Sean, 163–4

McGrath, Amy, 145–6, 147, 206

McIllmurray, Amanda, 121, 122–3, 124, 125–6, 193

McMurray, Nate, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59–60, 206

medical debt, cancellation of, 75, 218

Medicare for All, 16, 17, 25, 28, 46, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60, 65, 68, 75, 83, 100, 101, 176, 182, 189, 196, 199, 202, 204, 205, 208, 217, 218

Meeks, Gregory, 32

Mendes, Shawn, 133–4

Merkley, Jeff, 151

millennials, characteristics of, 5–6

minimum wage, 17, 37, 133, 176, 184, 196, 202, 217

Minneapolis, Minnesota, police reform in, 215

Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, 215

Minnesota Youth Collective, 215

Mitaynes, Marcela, 83–4

Momentum, 106, 165–7

Morales, Dianne, 64–5

Moran, Andrew, 31

MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators), 98, 176, 182

Morgan, A’Brianna, 124

Morrison, Patt, 61

Morton, Kelly, 121, 123

movement building, 137, 209, 210

Movement for Black Lives, 153, 154, 167, 210

“movement” politicians/leaders, 140–1, 142–3

MoveOn Political Action, 24

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST (Landless Workers’ Movement), 135

Movimiento Cosecha, 218

Mulgrew, Michael, 182–3

Municipal Labor Committee, 183

Mychajliw, Stefan, 56

Myrie, Zellnor, 142

N

Nader, Ralph, 203

NARAL, 212

NARAL Pro-Choice America, 24

Nation

article on Nelson, 180

article on NYC chapter of DSA’s 2020 candidate slate, 36–7

Nelson, Sara, 179–80, 196

neoliberal, use of term, 43

net neutrality, defense of, 53

New American Movement, 75

New Consensus, 163

New Deal, 18, 187

New Florida Majority, 131

“new left”

as ascendant in US, 29

as compared to Tea Party, 113

criticisms of, 55

as embracing identity politics, 169

government transformation as primary goal of, 105

as having no formal umbrella organization, 211

new priorities of, 65–9

pipeline for, 156, 165

as still figuring out how to run successful electoral campaigns in certain regions, 204

as striving to improve in areas of racial and gender diversity, 170

Newman, Marie, 72, 74

New Republic, article on Nelson, 179

“A New Role for Democratic Centrists: Helping the Left Win” (Kilgore), 102

New York, legislative and executive control in, 114–15

New York City Council, Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, 40

New York Health Act, 182

New York Immigration Coalition, 40

New York Magazine

“’Back That Azz Up,” Comrade (at Least 6 Feet),” 80

interview with AOC, 116

on model millennial socialist, 31–2

“When Did Everyone Become a Socialist? Pinkos Have More Fun,” 80

New York Times

on coverage of socialist left, 79

deBoer op-ed, 226

interview with Sanders, 189

interview with Strauss, 95

on money shifted from police budget, 214

“In New York, the Far Left Is Targeting a Close Ally,” 176

use of “liberal” and “democratic socialist,” 43

Nice, Desus, 3–4

Nixon, Cynthia, 64, 183

Nnaemeka, Sochie, 24–5, 185

NoiseCat, Julian Brave, 189

Nolan, Hamilton, 196

“Nothing Left” (Reed), 175

Nowak, Brian, 47–8

Nowell, Danny, 208

O

Obama, Barack, 6, 7, 8, 35, 36, 55, 68, 72, 73, 76, 85, 86, 166, 175, 207

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (AOC), 1, 6–9, 10–15, 17, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32–3, 34, 35, 36, 51, 71, 72, 73, 75, 81, 82, 84, 93, 94, 109, 112, 116, 117, 142, 143, 144, 146, 180, 188, 196, 197, 214, 222, 224

occupations of congressional offices, 98

Occupy City Hall, 41

Occupy Wall Street, 29, 67, 112, 206

Omar, Ilhan, 22, 51, 93, 180

Onion, video on voting for Trump, 191–2

“open socialist,” use of term, 48

organized labor. See also labor movement; unions; working-class movement

changing face of, 179–81

“the left” as needing, 175–97

Organize Florida, 131

organizing, primary goal of, 123

O’Rourke, Beto, 161

Ortt, Rob, 57

O’Sullivan, Yvette Pena, 192–3

Our Revolution, 49

P

Paladino, Carl, 223

Palestine, 19, 52, 136

Parlato, Beth, 57

Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), 199–200

Paul, Ari, 224

Paul, Rand, 145

Pelliccia, Emily, 156–60

Pelosi, Nancy, 9, 11, 14, 94, 96, 99, 102, 195, 215

Pennsylvania

legislative and executive control in, 114, 115

Sanders-style populism in, 105–27

Pennsylvania Stands Up (PA Stands Up), 106, 112, 114, 116, 118

people of color

emergence of as candidates, 28, 63, 164

leadership of in left organizations, 24

role of in Democratic Party and American politics at large, 181

voter suppression of, 205

People’s Action, 162

People’s Party, 202

People’s Policy Project, 163

Perot, Ross, 203

Pew Research Center, national poll (2019), 2

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, getting out the vote in, 118–27

“Philly Is Baltimore” march, 123

Physicians for Human Rights, report on protests, 152

Planned Parenthood Votes, 24

Pocan, Mark, 72

police, defunding of, 40, 115, 130–1, 141, 155, 160, 167, 208, 214, 215

police brutality/police violence, 3, 27, 40, 60, 98, 129, 142, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154, 156, 167, 169, 174

police reform, 153, 167, 204, 214, 215–16, 217

Politico

article on Kaufman, 67

report on Emanuel’s seeking transportation secretary position, 67

populism, 78, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112

Portland, Oregon, protests in, 150–1

powerlessness, growing sense of, 76

Prakash, Varshini, 24, 25, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93–4, 96, 186

Pressley, Ayanna, 22, 51–5, 154, 180, 181, 196

progressive, use of term, 42, 43, 54

progressive candidate and staffer recruitment and training programs, growth of, 29

progressive movement, changing faces of, 179–81

progressive populism, 109, 111, 112

Progressive Talent Pipeline, 164

pronouns, stating one’s preferred pronouns, 88–9, 157

ProPublica, stories on AOC, 12–13

protests

after George Floyd’s murder, 23, 39, 49, 115, 129–30, 149–53, 155, 214, 215

after Walter Wallace Jr.’s killing, 119

anti–police brutality protests, 40, 98, 142

against appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to Supreme Court, 212

for Black Lives Matter, 167

in Florida, 133

insufficiency of, 154, 155, 211

in Louisville, Kentucky, 144–9

Physicians for Human Rights’ report on, 152

in Portland, Oregon, 150–1

PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), 199–200

public education, investing in, 46

Putnam, Robert D., 77, 78

Q

Quillette, “DSA Is Doomed” article, 77–8

Quinnipac, poll (2019), 10

R

racial injustice, 130

Ramos-Rios, Virginia, 33

rank-and-file strategy, 177, 178, 179

Ransby, Barbara, 87

Rast, Becca, 106

reactionary populism, 109, 110, 111

Reagan, Ronald, 114

Reclaim Philadelphia, 106, 115, 121, 122, 124

Reclaim the Block, 215

red-baiting, 45, 76, 199, 222, 226

Reed, Adolph, Jr., 175

relatability, as quality politicians want to convey, 7

reproductive rights, 53. See also abortion rights

Republican Party

as inspiring and activating its right wing while retaining most of its base, 112

Trump’s continued dominance within, 207–8

Reuters, interview with O’Sullivan, 192–3

Reuters/Ipsos, national poll (2020), 1

Rewiring America (Griffith), 190

Reynolds, Sadiqa, 144–9

Rice, Condoleezza, 173

right-wing media outlets, stories on AOC, 10–11

Robinson, Nathan J., 79, 80–1

Rojas, Alexandra, 2–3, 15–16, 17, 21–8, 51–2, 71–2, 73, 186

Roll Call, article on Progressive Talent Pipeline, 164

Romanow, Lissy, 165–8

Romney, Mitt, 8

Ryerse, Robb, 15

S

Salazar, Julia, 84

Sandberg, Sheryl, 172–3

Sanders, Bernie, 1–2, 3–5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 36, 37–8, 47, 54, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 75, 81, 82, 85, 102, 109, 111, 112, 117, 118, 121, 122, 127, 138, 141, 146, 156–60, 161–3, 188, 189, 191, 193, 205, 208, 217, 222, 224

Sarandon, Susan, 204

Sassy (magazine), 172

Saunders, Jeremy, 176

Saval, Nikil, 28, 33–4, 125

Sawant, Kshama, 201, 213

Schimminger, Robin, 58

Schumer, Chuck, 97, 99, 118, 176, 215

Schwarzman, Steve, 10

Secular Talk (YouTube program), 16

Seed the Vote, 118

Segal, David, 164

Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 176

Service Employees International Union Florida (SEIU FL), 131

Serwer, Adam, 91

sexist attacks, 7

Shahid, Waleed, 44, 45, 93

Shakrabarti, Saikat, 15

Sheinkopf, Hank, 9, 11

Shiney-Ajay, Aru, 42, 43

Siegel, Mike, 161, 204, 205, 206

Sierra Club, 24

The Simpsons (TV show), 4

single-payer health care, 49, 61, 182–3, 188, 202

sit-ins, 93, 94, 98, 137

Smith, Barbara, 63, 169, 170

Smucker, Jonathan, 105–10, 111–14, 117–18, 125, 219

socialism, resurgence of, 74–82

socialist

democratic socialists. See democratic socialists

use of term, 45, 46, 47, 54, 107

Socialist Alternative, 199, 200, 201

socialist feminism, 133, 168, 169, 171–2, 174

Social Security, expansion of, 53

Solomon, David, 10

Souffrant, Phara Forrest, 84

Southeast Asian Diaspora Project, 215

Spacone, Celia, 56

Spectrum News/IPSOS, poll on McConnell’s job performance, 207

“Squad,” 22, 51–5, 71–2, 112, 180, 202

Stand Your Ground law (Florida), 131, 139

state level

the left’s victories at, 213

reason for optimism at, 154

Sterling, Alton, 130

Stewart-Cousins, Andrea, 182

Stone, Nikki, 151

Strauss, Rose, 94–5

Student Action, 162

student debt, cancellation of, 51, 53, 65, 75, 101, 218

Students for Bernie, 162

Summers, Nailah, 132, 133, 134, 138

Sunkara, Bhaskar, 54–5

Sunrise Movement, 16, 24, 35, 41, 42, 63, 85–6, 88–90, 91–2, 93–4, 95, 96, 102, 139, 162, 181, 185, 188, 191, 192, 196, 209, 216

Supreme Court, right-wing takeover of, 213

Svart, Maria, 20, 76–7, 78, 81–2, 171, 176, 204, 205–7, 208–9, 210, 216, 217, 219, 220

Swearengin, Paula Jean, 205

T

TakeAction Minnesota, 215

Tapper, Jake, 31

taxes, on the rich, 53

Taylor, Breonna, 144, 147, 148

Teachout, Zephyr, 184

Tea Party, 112, 113

Teen Vogue, article by Strauss, 95

third party, 74, 200, 203

third reconstruction, 53

Thomas, Clarence, 174, 211

Tlaib, Rashida, 22, 51, 81, 82, 93, 154, 180

Toledo, Adam, 155

trade school, free trade school, 53

Trent, Corbin, 15

Trump, Donald, 8, 10, 29, 34, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 67, 69, 76, 77, 87, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 109, 110, 111, 112, 138, 150, 151, 188, 203, 204, 207, 211, 213, 215, 227

Trumpism, 69, 82, 207

Turner, Nina, 141, 142, 202

Turning Point USA (TP USA), 87, 88

U

unions. See also labor movement; working-class movement

“the left” as needing, 175–97

membership in, 76–7

strengthening of, 65

United Federation of Teachers (UFT), 98, 176, 182, 183

United We Dream, 218

University of Chicago for Bernie, 156–60

US Park Police (USPP), 150

US Socialist Party, 74

Uygur, Cenk, 16

V

Vasquez, Andre, 20

Vladimer, Erica, 36

VOCAL-NY, 40, 176

Vogue, article on AOC, 7

vote abstention, 111, 205–6, 220

voting rights, 53, 99, 133

Vox

on AOC, 12

interview with DeLong, 102

W

wages. See also minimum wage

living wage, 53

raising of, 65

Wagner, Scott, 94–5

Wallace, Walter, Jr., 119

Wall Street Journal, op-ed on labor, 196

Walton, India, 221–2, 223, 224–7

Wang, Honda, 103

Warren, Elizabeth, 2, 8, 12, 36, 42, 54, 56–7, 61, 63, 66, 98

The Washington Post

analysis (2019), 12

interview with Brana, 202

Weigel, Dave, 77

Weingarten, Randi, 176

West, Cornel, 63, 202

West Virginia, legislative control in, 114

We’ve Got People (Grim), 51, 94

WFP (Working Families Party). See Working Families Party (WFP)

wide awakes, 41

Wilkinson, Monty, 218

Williamson, Marianne, 202

Wing, 36

Win Justice, 131

Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can (Prakash and Girgenti), 88, 90, 93–4, 186

Wisconsin, legislative control in, 114

Witt, Emily, 89, 93

women

emergence of as candidates, 28, 63, 164

leadership of in left organizations, 24

role of in Democratic Party and American politics at large, 181

WOMEN VOTE! 24

working-class champions, 73

working-class movement, 85, 189, 202, 210, 217, 219

Working Families Party (WFP), 18, 24, 25, 40, 47, 68, 118, 119, 169, 176, 177, 183, 184, 188, 200, 201, 209, 222

Y

Yes 4 Minneapolis, 215

Yoho, Ted, 7

Young, Andrew, 140, 141

Young Communist League, 201

Young Democratic Socialists of American (YDSA), 79, 82–3, 86–8, 162, 204

Young Republicans, 87

The Young Turks (TV program), 16

youth-run, movement-driven organizations, 71–103

Youth vs. Apocalypse, 95

Z

Zellner, Jeremy, 57, 58

Zimmerman, George, 131, 135