Inside the Mind of a Young, Angry Leftist

The status quo has shifted dramatically over the past four or five decades to one where inequality is rampant but ignored. Illegal wars are declared and immeasurable lives are lost, but are dismissed for the sake of ‘national security.’ The destruction of our planet remains on most governments’ peripheries despite fires encroaching on backyards. Undoubtedly, if we were to step out of our ivory towers, we would see that the world is in shambles. Given this, to me and many others, the older generation’s dismissive attitude towards our cries for a remedy is infuriating.

Increasingly, young activists have either had the awareness to look beyond their privilege and recognize the problems plaguing the world or been directly harmed by them. For instance, Greta Thunberg champions the international movement against climate change. Malala Yousafzai defies the Taliban through her advocacy for female education. Many of the Parkland survivors challenged the National Rifle Association when numerous adults wouldn’t. Young people have picked the torch up off the ground where our preceding generations left it smoldering. They haven’t done so because they like the attention or the power that being a prominent figure has given them. They have done so because they must. It is in no way the youth’s responsibility to lead the world, yet in many instances that duty falls on us due to the failure of the ruling class. Our leaders have shown a sincere lack of leadership, courage, and commitment to ideas, unlike many of these young reformers. Thunberg’s recent speech at the United Nations epitomized this frustration when she lambasted the world’s ruling class and declared that “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words… People are suffering. People are dying… How dare you.” Greta’s tone is full of fury, and it’s justified. The state of the world compared to its rate of change is far too underwhelming to take the backseat and trust the status quo.

Greta’s anger is paralleled in the American left, many of whose members are similarly as young. Just as Thunberg’s anger is dismissed as radical posturing from a child that doesn’t know better, Bernie Sanders supporters are characterized as ‘toxic,’ ‘nasty,’ and ‘naïve’ in order to discredit their message. In truth, many of the most outspoken supporters of Sanders are toxic and nasty to political opponents, but are far from naïve. Given the level of oppression and neglect felt by much of the working class, as well as the older generation’s general apathy towards such oppression and neglect, this attitude is more than understandable.

Interestingly, this group of infuriated leftists feels a lot, and perhaps a majority, of its outwards animosity towards members of their own political party. This hasn’t always been the case though. Since the disenfranchisement of Southern Democrats in the election of 1960, there was decades of relative unity among the Democrats. More recently, Obama offered someone to rally around to combat the destructive legacy of the Bush administration. However, Obama fell flat on his progressive promise, which enabled a certain Vermont Senator to build a movement demanding more substantial change. The claustrophobic nature of our two-party system opened the door for this disagreement among partisans. The Democratic party is growing a class-conscious tumor that threatens to destroy its modern conception. This party is characterized no longer as a platform but instead as an amalgam of non-Trumpian politicians. The result of this has been an especially tumultuous primary season. The presidential primary’s obviously combative nature can be extended to a lot of the more invisible congressional and local elections. Bernie’s relative success in 2016 and the elections of young progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar in 2018 have motivated many to challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Even Nancy Pelosi’s seat is being challenged this election cycle by Shahid Buttar, who has been no stranger to calling out Pelosi’s conservative positions. This revolt from the Democratic left isn’t just some power grab either. These leftist candidates are tired of being unrewarded for their support of the supposed left wing of the United States. The Democratic establishment’s inaction over the decades has posited young people to rage and rebellion. Akin to activists such as Thunberg and Yousafzai, young people aren’t becoming active or prominent for personal advancement, but instead because of an inability of the center left to challenge the strong and mobilized right. It should be no surprise, then, that almost all these far-left challengers are a young and diverse group. By virtue of their young age, they feel no allegiance to the Clintons, Bidens, and Pelosis of the world. Many politicians’ prestige comes from before we were even born, and thus warrants little respect. Just as the old dismiss the young as inexperienced, the young dismiss the old for their experience.

[pullquote]The Democratic party is growing a class-conscious tumor that threatens to destroy its modern conception.[/pullquote]

This anger is compounded when moderate Democrats pretend that they do represent the left’s interests. For young people to be so engaged and involved only to have people like Joe Biden pretend that he has “the most progressive record” among the presidential hopefuls overestimates our gullibility. Elites such as Biden notice the wind changing and are attempting to capitalize on its growing popularity. Democrats opposed gay marriage while it was unpopular only to co-opt the movement as it became more favorable to seem more progressive. Our elected officials should be enacting change, not responding to it.

It appears most people running for president are far detached from the problems many endure, such as inadequate health care, gross inequality, and a broken criminal justice system. And the consequences of not acknowledging this detachment are severe. For one, the United States has been at war for nearly my entire life. When people were complacent about which Democrats they let win primaries in the early 2000’s, we got Hillary Clintons and Joe Bidens that stood in Congress giving fervent commitment to the president’s unlawful war in Iraq—a war which has directly killed a bare minimum of hundreds of thousands of civilians. To make matters more frustrating, the architects of this unjust war, figures like George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Dick Cheney, are celebrated as doing the honorable job of public service to this great nation and now get to be cheered on Ellen’s show. And this is just one single event. Even within the subject of American empire and imperialism we haven’t mentioned all other post-World War II wars we have instigated. Politics up until recent years has grown acclimated to apathy about our leader’s actions and the system they have become complicit in. But the anger at fence-sitting and bipartisanship with war criminals goes much farther, whether it be directed at needless deaths from not being able afford life-saving drugs or treatments, displacement from global warming, excruciating inequality from the billionaire class as well as neoliberal exploitation of the Global South, police violence, mass shootings—the list goes on.

Obama, the ever-romanticized hero of the Democratic party, is often fawned over in misguided nostalgia, despite never directly confronting a lot of these foundational problems. Yes, he was undoubtedly better than Trump. He made decent progress in areas such as healthcare and the environment. However, it should be noted that he was not the champion of progressive values he had promised to be. His presidency began with a bailout of Wall Street and an extension of the Bush Tax Cuts. Obama also created an inhumane drone program that has killed thousands of civilians, also establishing a precedent for increased usage under the Trump administration. Moreover, Obama very aggressively deported undocumented immigrants. He even said in a 2012 interview that “in the 1980’s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.” He is saying, quite explicitly, what leftists believe. Often, it feels like we don’t truly live in a two-party state. We live in a one-party state that likes to take sides and play politics for fun. That’s why individuals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t even consider themselves in the same party as people like Nancy Pelosi if we lived in a multi-party country. The Democrats represent such little deviation from the status quo that from a ‘radical’ point of view, the difference between Republicans and Democrats, while it does exist, hardly feels substantial.

And when dissent does occur within the ranks of the Democratic Party, it faces a constant uphill battle. There is an obvious standard and decorum to politics that is afraid of being usurped by a new generation of voters. This is all too obvious with rule changes such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stating that it “will not conduct business with…any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus.” What’s more is that several DNC elites have floated the idea of reestablishing the role of the superdelegates in the first round of voting at the Democratic Convention so try and subvert Bernie Sanders’ momentum. The Democratic establishment is scared by the growing wave of dissidents within its party and aims to utilize the two-party system to force new voices into a disadvantageous position. If you want to change anything, you must take on those who still cling to power.

Like Thunberg said, “People are dying,” and presidential hopefuls have the gall to say that we can’t do anything bold. From their ivory towers, they can’t make out the death and suffering that their inaction is responsible for. It isn’t a choice. There is no room for political calculation. There is only the moral necessity to do something drastic and uproot this murderous foundation that has plagued my short life.