cawacko
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None of these young people were alive when socialism dominated Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Venezuela, so they never saw the hardships, shortages, and destruction it caused. Today the word gets dressed up in a different way, but the fundamentals haven’t changed.
Young people aren’t wrong to complain about the high cost of real estate, and many of them blame Boomers for it, but they’re doubling down on the wrong solution. There’s a reason population growth is slowing or dropping in places like New York, Illinois, and California, while growing in more growth-friendly areas.
This is democracy. If they elect a socialist mayor, they will get to see what they think they want in action.
Well before Lehman Brothers collapsed and capitalism quaked, Gabe Tobias had an arresting view of what would become the global financial crisis.
It was in Santa Ana, Calif., where Tobias was working as a community organizer after finishing college in 2006. He was meant to be advising low-income families on healthcare.
Soon, though, his work changed.
Acorn, the nonprofit that employed him, began to see rashes of families, particularly Hispanic immigrants, complaining that they were being forced out of their homes. The culprit was adjustable-rate mortgages they had signed up for but scarcely understood.
“It was devastating,” Tobias recalled. “They had everything locked up in their homes. They had nothing else.”
In the ensuing months, he would become familiar with unscrupulous mortgage brokers’ tricks of the trade—using multiple sets of paperwork to mislead customers, enlisting community leaders to sell dubious products to those who spoke little English, and more. At an early age, he came to a sobering conclusion: “There’s an industry that’s set up to suck money out of working people.”
In June, Tobias’ friend, Zohran Mamdani, 33, shocked the world when he handily won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor running as a proud socialist. Mamdani’s victory has variously been attributed to his charisma, his adroit use of social media, his ability to bring South Asian residents into city politics and the warts of his leading opponents.
But it is also something else: the flowering of a movement that began to gestate nearly 20 years ago, when the misery of the financial crisis proved formative for a generation then just coming of age.
For many, like Tobias, now 39, that crisis—and what they view as a feckless response to it—left a lasting impression about the ills of capitalism and the inability of America’s dominant political parties to address the country’s problems.
Over time, some have found a home in the nativist MAGA movement created by President Trump. But others traveled left in a search for answers. Along the way, they have revived what had been a moribund faction of the Democratic Party and created a cadre of now-seasoned operatives who propelled Mamdani.
“A lot of the germs for what’s become the resurgent left have come from [2008],” said Tobias, who is now a top strategist for the Democratic Socialists of America, the political home of Mamdani and other progressive stars like N.Y. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I know a lot of people who work on the left who have personal experience [of the financial crisis].”
Veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement that sprang up in response to the 2008 crisis, now hold senior roles in groups like the Working Families Party, which gave Mamdani a vital early endorsement, and the Justice Democrats.
“People keep saying, ‘New Yorkers are more conservative than you think. A socialist will never win,’” said Jasmine Gripper, who began her teaching career in the shadow of 2008 and is now co-director of the Working Family Party’s New York branch. “I’m like, ‘A socialist is winning, y’all.’”
The race was jolted on Sunday when New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced he was ending his bid for re-election.
While the mainstream Democratic Party’s popularity has sunk to a 30-year low, according to one poll, and its leadership appears uncertain of how to oppose Trump, the far left seems vigorous—particularly among the young. A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29 hold a “favorable view” of socialism—something that would have been unimaginable to Cold War generations.
Some are venturing even further left.
On a recent evening, 15 comrades from the Northwest Philadelphia cell of the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered for their weekly meeting in a classroom at Thomas Jefferson University.
The mostly 20- and 30-somethings had eschewed the Mao caps and Che Guevara T-shirts of previous generations. Soon, though, terms like “ruling class,” “parasitic,” “bourgeoisie” and “dialectic” were bandied about the room as they settled into an earnest discussion of the assigned reading, an article entitled “Morality and the Class Struggle.” References to the 2008 crisis were also plentiful. Several members invoked it when explaining what prompted them to ditch “the milquetoast” left, as one called it.
Zach Bickel, 34, blamed the crisis for taking his father’s job and causing his community in central Pennsylvania to be “whittled away.”
“The system never really recovered from 2008,” said Nico Melton, 25, who claimed to have become disillusioned while studying at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, the capitalist bastion that is Trump’s alma mater. Melton was one of just a few members when the cell was formed about a year ago.
At times, the meeting felt like a support group—in this case, for people suffering from the modern economy. Communism, they acknowledged, hadn’t worked anywhere in the world it had been attempted—at least not yet.
Still, one of the cell’s veterans urged newer comrades to proudly brandish the hammer and sickle during their fall recruiting drive. “Wherever we go, we must show up and show out,” the comrade said. “We are Revolutionary Communists!”
None of this surprised Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York who has studied the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s and considers himself a progressive. “They didn’t grow up with that sense of stigma to all things socialist or communist,” he said of his students.
Moreover, he noted, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had made their brand of socialism appealing by casting it as a moral imperative. “It’s the simple proposition that such a productive and prosperous country shouldn’t have poverty and so many people shouldn’t have to work so hard for so little while a handful of people own so much,” Varon explained. “If you articulate it in those terms, it is not only palatable but, I think, you know, exciting to people.”
Genevieve Rand, 28, a tenants’ rights organizer, put it this way: “Being a socialist—the traditional conception of that is you’re a nerd who reads a lot of books from 200 years ago.”
No longer.
“Socialism,” one woman replied, when asked why she supported Mamdani.
“Plenty of people say that,” Rand confided.
Her own experience of the 2008 crisis was both intensely personal and mysterious. Growing up in a middle-class household in southern New Hampshire, Rand’s parents had always been guarded about their finances.
At some point, though, she noticed that they began canceling music lessons, after-school sports—anything that cost money. Then one day around 2011 they informed her they would be moving in with her grandparents to save money. Some six months later, the family moved to a smaller house in rural New Hampshire. The nearest grocery store was a 30-minute drive.
Rand’s parents leaned on religion to cope with their misfortune. They became ardent members of an evangelical church with apocalyptic leanings. “It was a lot of upheaval. It was very confusing,” she said of those days.
Eventually, she escaped to a small New Hampshire college, juggling classes and shifts at a fast- food restaurant. She didn’t consider herself particularly political until she encountered Sanders, then in the midst of his outsider campaign for the Democratic Party’s 2016 nomination.
“He was saying things that made sense about why things were so hard and who was benefiting from it,” Rand recalled. “I was seeing this on the internet, and I was like, ‘Hell, yeah!’”
Rand’s first taste of organizing came in 2019, after she moved to Ithaca, N.Y., with a few hundred dollars. She convinced about a dozen of her restaurant co-workers to start a union to boost their wages. The restaurant soon closed but the sense of solidarity she felt with her fellow union members remained. Rand was then transitioning her gender and felt especially vulnerable—yet they still stood by her and helped her find new work.
“That was a really formative experience for me,” she recalled.
Rand was thrust into the tenant movement by the Covid pandemic, and the sudden fear that she might be evicted from her apartment as she awaited government relief checks. What began as a narrow issue in Ithaca, a college town, has since become a movement and “a cultural thing,” as Rand put it.
Last year, the volunteer Ithaca Tenants Union she helped to establish celebrated a milestone when the city inaugurated its first-ever council in which renters sympathetic to its cause were the majority.
It was achieved with the organizing muscle of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose late founder, Michael Harrington, described its aim as “the left-wing of the possible.” At first, Rand explained, her membership in the group was less ideological than practical. New York politics, she argued, are dominated by real-estate barons. The only way to level the field was by mobilizing the grassroots. The DSA had proved itself adept at doing so and focused on the issues that most concerned her.
“Why should I care about saving democracy if it can’t provide me a home to live in or food I can afford?” she asked, calling housing “the economic issue of our time.”
Young people aren’t wrong to complain about the high cost of real estate, and many of them blame Boomers for it, but they’re doubling down on the wrong solution. There’s a reason population growth is slowing or dropping in places like New York, Illinois, and California, while growing in more growth-friendly areas.
This is democracy. If they elect a socialist mayor, they will get to see what they think they want in action.
The Rise of America’s Young Socialists—From the 2008 Financial Crisis to Mamdani
For many on the forefront of the far left, the misery of the economic meltdown left a lasting impression
Well before Lehman Brothers collapsed and capitalism quaked, Gabe Tobias had an arresting view of what would become the global financial crisis.
It was in Santa Ana, Calif., where Tobias was working as a community organizer after finishing college in 2006. He was meant to be advising low-income families on healthcare.
Soon, though, his work changed.
Acorn, the nonprofit that employed him, began to see rashes of families, particularly Hispanic immigrants, complaining that they were being forced out of their homes. The culprit was adjustable-rate mortgages they had signed up for but scarcely understood.
“It was devastating,” Tobias recalled. “They had everything locked up in their homes. They had nothing else.”
In the ensuing months, he would become familiar with unscrupulous mortgage brokers’ tricks of the trade—using multiple sets of paperwork to mislead customers, enlisting community leaders to sell dubious products to those who spoke little English, and more. At an early age, he came to a sobering conclusion: “There’s an industry that’s set up to suck money out of working people.”
In June, Tobias’ friend, Zohran Mamdani, 33, shocked the world when he handily won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor running as a proud socialist. Mamdani’s victory has variously been attributed to his charisma, his adroit use of social media, his ability to bring South Asian residents into city politics and the warts of his leading opponents.
But it is also something else: the flowering of a movement that began to gestate nearly 20 years ago, when the misery of the financial crisis proved formative for a generation then just coming of age.
For many, like Tobias, now 39, that crisis—and what they view as a feckless response to it—left a lasting impression about the ills of capitalism and the inability of America’s dominant political parties to address the country’s problems.
Over time, some have found a home in the nativist MAGA movement created by President Trump. But others traveled left in a search for answers. Along the way, they have revived what had been a moribund faction of the Democratic Party and created a cadre of now-seasoned operatives who propelled Mamdani.
“A lot of the germs for what’s become the resurgent left have come from [2008],” said Tobias, who is now a top strategist for the Democratic Socialists of America, the political home of Mamdani and other progressive stars like N.Y. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I know a lot of people who work on the left who have personal experience [of the financial crisis].”
Veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement that sprang up in response to the 2008 crisis, now hold senior roles in groups like the Working Families Party, which gave Mamdani a vital early endorsement, and the Justice Democrats.
“People keep saying, ‘New Yorkers are more conservative than you think. A socialist will never win,’” said Jasmine Gripper, who began her teaching career in the shadow of 2008 and is now co-director of the Working Family Party’s New York branch. “I’m like, ‘A socialist is winning, y’all.’”
The race was jolted on Sunday when New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced he was ending his bid for re-election.
While the mainstream Democratic Party’s popularity has sunk to a 30-year low, according to one poll, and its leadership appears uncertain of how to oppose Trump, the far left seems vigorous—particularly among the young. A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29 hold a “favorable view” of socialism—something that would have been unimaginable to Cold War generations.
Some are venturing even further left.
On a recent evening, 15 comrades from the Northwest Philadelphia cell of the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered for their weekly meeting in a classroom at Thomas Jefferson University.
The mostly 20- and 30-somethings had eschewed the Mao caps and Che Guevara T-shirts of previous generations. Soon, though, terms like “ruling class,” “parasitic,” “bourgeoisie” and “dialectic” were bandied about the room as they settled into an earnest discussion of the assigned reading, an article entitled “Morality and the Class Struggle.” References to the 2008 crisis were also plentiful. Several members invoked it when explaining what prompted them to ditch “the milquetoast” left, as one called it.
Zach Bickel, 34, blamed the crisis for taking his father’s job and causing his community in central Pennsylvania to be “whittled away.”
“The system never really recovered from 2008,” said Nico Melton, 25, who claimed to have become disillusioned while studying at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, the capitalist bastion that is Trump’s alma mater. Melton was one of just a few members when the cell was formed about a year ago.
At times, the meeting felt like a support group—in this case, for people suffering from the modern economy. Communism, they acknowledged, hadn’t worked anywhere in the world it had been attempted—at least not yet.
Still, one of the cell’s veterans urged newer comrades to proudly brandish the hammer and sickle during their fall recruiting drive. “Wherever we go, we must show up and show out,” the comrade said. “We are Revolutionary Communists!”
None of this surprised Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York who has studied the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s and considers himself a progressive. “They didn’t grow up with that sense of stigma to all things socialist or communist,” he said of his students.
Moreover, he noted, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had made their brand of socialism appealing by casting it as a moral imperative. “It’s the simple proposition that such a productive and prosperous country shouldn’t have poverty and so many people shouldn’t have to work so hard for so little while a handful of people own so much,” Varon explained. “If you articulate it in those terms, it is not only palatable but, I think, you know, exciting to people.”
Genevieve Rand, 28, a tenants’ rights organizer, put it this way: “Being a socialist—the traditional conception of that is you’re a nerd who reads a lot of books from 200 years ago.”
No longer.
‘A lot of upheaval’
On a recent evening, Rand was going door to door in and around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, canvassing for Mamdani in jean shorts, black tights and a red-and-white “Freeze the Rent” T-shirt. She maintained her good cheer while navigating barking dogs, faulty apartment intercoms, suspicious neighbors and other frustrations. When she did make contact, residents seemed receptive.“Socialism,” one woman replied, when asked why she supported Mamdani.
“Plenty of people say that,” Rand confided.
Her own experience of the 2008 crisis was both intensely personal and mysterious. Growing up in a middle-class household in southern New Hampshire, Rand’s parents had always been guarded about their finances.
At some point, though, she noticed that they began canceling music lessons, after-school sports—anything that cost money. Then one day around 2011 they informed her they would be moving in with her grandparents to save money. Some six months later, the family moved to a smaller house in rural New Hampshire. The nearest grocery store was a 30-minute drive.
Rand’s parents leaned on religion to cope with their misfortune. They became ardent members of an evangelical church with apocalyptic leanings. “It was a lot of upheaval. It was very confusing,” she said of those days.
Eventually, she escaped to a small New Hampshire college, juggling classes and shifts at a fast- food restaurant. She didn’t consider herself particularly political until she encountered Sanders, then in the midst of his outsider campaign for the Democratic Party’s 2016 nomination.
“He was saying things that made sense about why things were so hard and who was benefiting from it,” Rand recalled. “I was seeing this on the internet, and I was like, ‘Hell, yeah!’”
Rand’s first taste of organizing came in 2019, after she moved to Ithaca, N.Y., with a few hundred dollars. She convinced about a dozen of her restaurant co-workers to start a union to boost their wages. The restaurant soon closed but the sense of solidarity she felt with her fellow union members remained. Rand was then transitioning her gender and felt especially vulnerable—yet they still stood by her and helped her find new work.
“That was a really formative experience for me,” she recalled.
Rand was thrust into the tenant movement by the Covid pandemic, and the sudden fear that she might be evicted from her apartment as she awaited government relief checks. What began as a narrow issue in Ithaca, a college town, has since become a movement and “a cultural thing,” as Rand put it.
Last year, the volunteer Ithaca Tenants Union she helped to establish celebrated a milestone when the city inaugurated its first-ever council in which renters sympathetic to its cause were the majority.
It was achieved with the organizing muscle of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose late founder, Michael Harrington, described its aim as “the left-wing of the possible.” At first, Rand explained, her membership in the group was less ideological than practical. New York politics, she argued, are dominated by real-estate barons. The only way to level the field was by mobilizing the grassroots. The DSA had proved itself adept at doing so and focused on the issues that most concerned her.
“Why should I care about saving democracy if it can’t provide me a home to live in or food I can afford?” she asked, calling housing “the economic issue of our time.”
