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

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

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. Id read up on her before our interview and she sounded like a compelling young woman with no chance in hell. I figured shed 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 volunteersall young men of color that day, one of whom would soon run for Congress himselfwere 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 campaigns 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 didnt yet fully understand why. She was smart and hardworking, but humble and unassumingwinning qualities, but not necessarily ones that inspire fanatical loyalty. She seemed likely to succeed at something someday, but it didnt occur to me then that she was weeks away from appearing on CNN, Meet the Press, PBSs Firing Line, The Late ShowWith 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. Id been in and around New York political circles since 2005 and hadnt 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 Facebooks 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 wasnt just another She-E-O in waiting. Her background and worldview were markedly different from those of most successful women Id 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 Sanderss 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 lifeone college had been expected to easehad 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 staras well as a fundraising powerhouse and a national symbol for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, according to WNYCvirtually overnight.

While media outlets and Democratic voters swooned, Democratic Party officials sought to curb their enthusiasm. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Ocasio-Cortezs 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-Cortezs 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 herselfa 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 AOCs campaign, would keep electing progressives to Congressor 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 appearancetwo parts luck and genetics, one part fashion sense and cosmetic skillOcasio-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.