The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics

By Raina Lipsitz

A new progressive generation is on the rise in the United States, reflected in the mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America (90,000 mostly twentysomething members), Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and perhaps most famously of all, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

AOC and the Rise of a New American Left is the first book to look closely at this new politics. Propelled by interviews with AOC and the other key figures and organizations who have shaken up American politics, the book includes portraits of groups like Democratic Socialists of America, the Sunrise Movement, and Justice Democrats, explaining who they are, where they come from, and what they want. Investigating the panopy of strategies employed by the new movements and their relationship to politicians from Bernie Sanders to Nancy Pelosi, the book describes how the generational focus on insurgent electoral campaigns both aims to transform the Democratic Party and threatens to be captured by it.

Written with panache by a member of this rising generation, this book immerses the reader in a youth culture the likes of which haven't been seen since Sixties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839764288

Book preview

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