HOW
THE FIRST MAJOR LEFTWING GENERATION SINCE THE SIXTIES HAS SHAPED
ELECTORAL POLITICS
The
mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist
explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest
woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald
a new, youth-inflected radical politics.
The
Rise of a New Left
gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort of elected
officials to tell the stories of the young organizers who created the
Squad and the new social movements that have roiled US politics, from
the DSA to the Sunrise Movement to Justice Democrats. Ranging across
the country to describe grassroots organizing in places like rural
Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Kentucky, Florida, and California,
this book examines the panoply of strategies and struggles of
activists working in—and trying to transform—electoral politics
and the climate justice, racial justice, and labor movements.
Alongside Ocasio-Cortez, we hear from the even younger Alexandra
Rojas, one of the strategists who guided her political insurgency.
Propelled
by scores of immersive and absorbing conversations on political
strategy with young activists determined to reshape the country, this
book—by a writer who is herself a member of this generational
movement—is a riveting account of a resurgent left.