The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics
272
The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics
272eBook
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Overview
The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics.
The Rise of a New Left gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort of elected officials to tell the stories of the young organizers who created the Squad and the new social movements that have roiled US politics, from the DSA to the Sunrise Movement to Justice Democrats. Ranging across the country to describe grassroots organizing in places like rural Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Kentucky, Florida, and California, this book examines the panoply of strategies and struggles of activists working in—and trying to transform—electoral politics and the climate justice, racial justice, and labor movements. Alongside Ocasio-Cortez, we hear from the even younger Alexandra Rojas, one of the strategists who guided her political insurgency.
Propelled by scores of immersive and absorbing conversations on political strategy with young activists determined to reshape the country, this book—by a writer who is herself a member of this generational movement—is a riveting account of a resurgent left.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781839764295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Verso Books |
| Publication date: | 09/27/2022 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 420 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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 start- ing around a year earlier.
A week before she won, I made the two-hour subway jour- ney 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 inter- view 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 necessar- ily 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 wait- ing. 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, exec- utive 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 attrac- tive woman with large, dark eyes, long, straight hair, lumi- nous 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 commu- nity 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 qual- ify 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 will- ing 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 employ- ees 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 instrumen- tal in compelling the News to disclose staff salaries, revealing that women staffers were being paid less and getting less pres- tigious 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 moth- er’s—were born in this country: the basics (health care, a safe place to live, enough money to live on) required for a comfort- able 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 femi- nism, 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 televi- sion 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 presi- dent 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 will- ing”—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 hyste- ria. 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-wors- ening 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.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1 Young People Power the Rise of Bernie Sanders 1
2 New Kids on the Block 31
3 Youth-Run, Movement-Driven Organizations 71
4 Sanders-Style Populism Comes to Pennsylvania 105
5 A Country on Fire 129
6 New Pipelines, New Strategies, New Leaders 153
7 Why the Left Needs Organized Labor 175
8 Where We Are and Where We're Going 199
Acknowledgments 229
Notes 231
Index 245