found herself accidentally added to their listserv blasted an all-caps reply-all, Mendiola recalls: “She wrote, ’I AM A RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE WE DO NOT SHARE ANY VALUES PLEASE TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST.’ I replied with a private apology, and an invitation to come discuss ideas.” She hasn’t yet. Their first “direct action” on campus was a silent protest, hoisting a banner that read “DOWNWITH KOCH INFLUENCE” during a talk by Sheryl Corrigan, the director of environment, health and safety for Koch Industries. “It definitely worked,” he says, “The cops ended up coming at me.” He and another student were questioned by police in the university’s Huntsman Hall – and the campus and local papers both covered their protest. “I’ve never had so many people ask me, ’Who are the “Kotch” brothers,’” he laughs. Like many millennials, Mendiola started calling himself a socialist in 2017. “But I was a lot further left than Bernie,” he qualifies, “I considered myself an anarcho-syndicalist.” Most of the critiques he hears from classmates concern Venezuela’s dystopian hellscape of a socialist experiment. Some of Mendiola’s critics on campus become tentative friends, like one libertarian classmate, Chris, whom he met during a demonstration a few weeks ago. “We had a tabling event on campus, and he came up to us and took one of our little pamphlets and said, ’What about the dictatorship of the proletariat?,’” he recalls. “We were a little confused. We were like, ’What about it?’” “Then we realized we have things in common:
Her campaign volunteers were primarily young millennial members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Their eager embrace of socialist tenets – free health care, college, housing, and a universal basic income for all – has less to do with their having been born into a post-Cold-War world, she tells me, and more to do with those millionaires and billionaires Bernie Sanders mentioned. “It comes down to how the economy failed a majority of Americans,” Konst explains, turning down the volume on cable news so we can hear each other. “Occupy [Wall Street] was a response. Senator Sanders’ rise was a response to institutions’ not talking about working class people.” And so surely, she doesn’t go so far as to say, was Trump’s rise. “Late-stage capitalism has dominated our politics for too long,” she adds, invoking the 1930s-era catch-all term lately repopularized to refer to any and all perceived unfairness. “The era of compromise is effectively over.” I’M LIKE, ’THIS ISN’T THE COLDWAR’ Young socialists are everywhere. Even Utah State University, in the deeply conservative canyon town of Logan, has a democratic socialist club, thanks to 25-year- old junior Diego Mendiola. Since he organized the group in mid-January, finally finding an adviser from the philosophy department after every political-science professor he approached recoiled from the “socialist” label, the mailing list has grown to more than 50 members. One girl who
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April 2019
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