neoliberal foes for an audience who funds their dirtbaggery through a flush of online donations. A new dating app, Red Yenta, hooks up socialist singles so they don’t have to answer questions about dystopian Venezuela from the sorts of skeptics they’d meet on Tinder or Match.com. “This generation is different,” Piven perceives. “They no longer feel, as past generations did, that they have time to fix the world’s problems. Their activism has an edge of earnestness, maybe desperation. Everybody has a sense of crisis.” The cultural prominence of socialism is but a secondary symptom of history’s insistent arc toward fairness, Piven then counters. “The real idea is to recover America’s capacity to support social programs that promote fairness,” she says. “This is what we did in the 1930s and continued to do until the Reagan era.” As more and more Americans come of voting age with no memory of the Soviet bloc before the Berlin Wall fell, in other words – the more young socialists you’ll meet. ’THE ERA OF COMPROMISE IS EFFECTIVELY OVER’ Come 2018, candidates inspired by Sanders’ popularity to call themselves socialists ran at every level. The likes of Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Andrew Gillum, and Julia Salazar gained national coverage they wouldn’t have before Sanders – plenty of it critical, much of it fawning. Some of them even won their races. Others, like James Thompson in Kansas and two of the four Pennsylvania state house
candidates backed by the DSA, successfully primaried entrenched Democrats only to lose to Republicans. They’re still at it, though: Thompson, for one, was already back in the news last month when he got picked up for speeding with a suspended license – and, per the Wichita Eagle ’s coverage of his arrest, he’s already planning to run for retiring Republican Senator Pat Roberts’ seat in 2020. More socialist upstarts ran on the DSA’s platform than actually won – but more are running than ever before. One such candidate was Nomiki Konst, 35, a fixture in far-left politics and a frequent cable news commentator ever since the 2016 race. Something of a self-promotional chameleon, her inconsistently accurate biography met new scrutiny during her recent campaign to succeed Letitia James as New York City’s public advocate. She ran to the left of – and ultimately lost to – fellow democratic-socialist candidate, Jumaane Williams. Konst is still weighing what her next role in the socialist revolution should be, she tells me – but, for now, she’s “mainly resting.” But whatever the political future holds, she doesn’t doubt it will be dominated by angsty young socialists.
As more and more Americans come of voting age with no memory of the Soviet bloc before the Berlin Wall fell, the more young socialists you’ll meet.
American Consequences
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