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For once, Labour has been quick off the mark. It is only 10 days since the party lost a fourth consecutive general election and it is already preparing for its next defeat.

Despite the obvious truth that Jeremy Corbyn must take the blame for the worst result in almost 100 years, Rebecca Long Bailey, his anointed successor, is the favourite to succeed him as party leader. Her election would be the public statement that Corbyn has gone but Corbynism lives on.

Labour supporters, who want to win the next election, should not despair. The partys future success, perhaps even its survival, depends on the genuine democratic socialists in the parliamentary party seizing control of the political agenda. The elevation of Long Bailey would provide an early opportunity to demonstrate that they mean business.

The cause would be best served by an outright refusal to accept the imposition of a leader who does not command their confidence. A formal protest with a recorded vote would be almost as effective. Emboldened, they must then insist that the shadow cabinet is, once again, elected giving its members an independent authority that they would not possess as the leaders nominees. With their status restored, they would be free to challenge the strategy and tactics of both the leader and the advisers who, with Corbyn, must take some of the blame for the bloodbath of black Thursday and are, even now, arranging to remain surrogate leaders in the new regime.

Labour MPs are notorious for their reluctance to fight the ideological battle for democratic socialism. The common response to the complaint that they have watched, but not opposed, the triumphant progress of the far left is the claim that at least they stayed and fought. More often than not, they stayed without fighting.

If they fight now they will, of course, be accused of splitting the party. In truth they will be preventing, or at worst postponing, the real split that is bound to follow a further drift to the unelectable left. The second accusation will be the creation of a party within a party. A distinct and separate party of the far left has been a cuckoo in Labours nest ever since Ed Milibands invention of cut-price membership. Men and women who had spent long, dark nights outside Labour meetings hawking revolutionary newspapers came in from the cold bringing their sectarian intolerance with them.

They became the pathfinders for the most extensive and, it must be admitted, most successful takeover bid in Labour history. At its heart was Momentum, which began life under the guise of Corbyns Praetorian Guard but swiftly evolved into a vehicle for moving the party to what turned out to be the unelectable left. Momentum infiltrated constituency parties, enrolled enough delegates to successive annual conferences to gain a stranglehold on party policy, took effective control of Labours national executive committee and attempted with a measure of success to deselect Labour MPs who did not share its prejudices. Momentum found natural allies in recent conversions from Marxist and Trotskyite factions who, encouraged by the hope of colonising a real and functioning political party, suddenly saw the light.

Compared with Momentum, the Militant tendency which attempted to subvert Labour in the 1980s was a ragbag of second-rate conspirators who took corrupt control of Liverpool but were only an irritant in other parts of the country. No Militant sympathisers were employed in the Labour party headquarters or in its regional offices, and no major trade union leader supported Militants aims. Now full-time officials openly boast of their Momentum membership. Militant remained an obscure sect.

Thanks in part to Momentum, the Corbyn project was endorsed by thousands of good democratic socialists. The radical rhetoric obscured the fatal flaws of Corbyns philosophy the blanket opposition to private enterprise, the support for any tinpot dictator who called himself a socialist, the intolerance of disagreement, the failure to cleanse Labour of antisemitism which proved that, although he hated racial prejudice, there were some racial prejudices that he did not hate enough. There is no doubt that there is still an army of Labour party members who cannot bring themselves to believe that the Corbyn project was destined to end in disaster. They have to be persuaded that Corbyns way could only ever lead to the disappointment of defeat and the betrayal of the millions of families who need a Labour government. No doubt Momentums leaders are still rejoicing about the control they achieved over the party machine. The celebrations are not being replicated in the food bank queues that, following Labours defeat, will only lengthen.

Before the brilliance of Neil Kinnocks Bournemouth conference speech in 1985 extinguished the hopes of Militant, outriders spent two years preparing the ground for his final assault. For Labour to become a party of government again it needs another army of genuine democratic socialist MPs mounting a similar onslaught on the great ideals false friends. Their task will be more than the recruitment of new party members to become a counterweight to infiltrators from the unelectable extremes. They must convince floating voters that democratic socialism is alive, well and ready to wake from its slumbers and is worth voting for. Thanks to the Corbyn project, few people believe that today.

It may be that the parliamentary party is not in a mood to heed the calls to arms. The self-styled moderates have always suffered from an excess of caution. But if there is to be a fight, have no doubt that the real democratic socialists will occupy the high ground.

We are the apostles of true equality and the personal freedom that it must sustain. And we offer the politics of hope not empty slogans about the better world we hope to build but a real chance of bringing it about. A genuine democratic socialist party can win elections. The time has come to rise up against all who stand in our way.

Roy Hattersley served in James Callaghans cabinet and later became deputy leader of the Labour party

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We fought Militant in the 1980s. The far lefts hold is now much worse - The Guardian

The name was on the tip of our tongues.

Shadow International Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner suggested Harold Wilson, but neither of us thought that sounded quite right.

We were chatting in Parliament trying to remember who said: The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.

Yes, us political anoraks really do stand around having that kind of conversation.

Perhaps we need to get a life.

The answer was Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS, and the Labour Partys greatest post-war hero.

As Labour begins its soul searching over why everything went so catastrophically wrong , first indications suggest not giving voters clear priorities for government played its part in stopping Jeremy Corbyn forming one.

Was it nationalisation of public services and utilities? A huge job on its own.

Or free full-fibre broadband for all at a cost of 20billion?

Or compensation for the Waspi women for lost pensions at 58billion?

While certain promises were attractive - up to 31,000 for 3.8million Waspis was tempting indeed - the package as a whole seemed an undeliverable mishmash of wildly expensive goodies.

So it wasnt just Corbyns honest broker Brexit position which Nye anticipated 20 years before the UK even joined the Common Market when he said: People who stay in the middle of the road get run down.

Blaming Brexit for defeat is like citing the Falklands for the failure of Labours last foray into red in tooth and claw socialism under Michael Foot.

In 2019, as in 1983, the voters gave the offer of socialist revolution two fingers.

Britain does not want it and the next Labour leader must grasp that.

Nyes creation of the welfare state in 1948 was very much about priorities, and top of the list was universal health care free at the point of use which changed everyones life.

Winston Churchill might have motivated the voters in wartime, but he failed to prepare for peace.

They returned from battle knowing what theyd fought against, but unsure of the kind of country they were fighting for because Churchill never told them.

It was the 1945 Labour government which showed the way, by making the nation voters came home to better than the one they left.

If Labour is not to be out in the cold for a decade its new leader cannot rely on a strategy of one more push to create a socialist paradise.

The message of hope must be credible.

Bevan also said: Toryism is organised spivvery.

For the next five years we must endure Spiv-in-Chief Boris Johnson as organiser.

But Labour must not allow five to turn into ten.

I was Christmas shopping and piles of Greta Thunberg books were everywhere.

Theres Gretas speeches and Gretas memoirs.

Not bad for a 16 year old.

Cant be long now before we get Gretas Vegan Cookbook, Gretas Keep Fit, and Weather Forecasting with Greta.

While I find the teenagers hectoring irritating I do now buy her climate change message as the planet faces its sixth mass extinction.

The first, 439 million years ago caused by glaciation, wiped out 86 per cent of life, while the third due to volcanic eruptions, was worse, killing 96 per cent of living things.

And 65 million years ago No5 was a monster asteroid which did in the dinosaurs.

This paved the way for us.

And even before the wheel was invented wed driven half the planets big beasts to extinction.

Time to stop being ecological serial killers destroying 200 species a day.

And while I shall still drive, fly and eat meat I resolve, Greta, to recycle more in 2020.

Fridays Withdrawal Bill vote means we are now on course to leave the EU on 31st January.

Tories credit that ability for their election success, while Labour MPs moan how Brexit cost them votes.

But what they all agree on is that they never, ever want to campaign in the depths of winter again.

To hear them talk last week youd think theyd just returned from an expedition to the North Pole.

So theyre jumping for joy at the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliament Act which sets election dates every five years.

It means the poor lambs wont have to wade through snow, ice and drizzle in December, 2024.

The FTPA was only introduced by David Cameron in 2011 to reassure Lib Dem coalition partners he wouldnt stab them in the back by suddenly scuttling to the polls.

Another chunk of Daves legacy Boris Johnson is delighted to strip away.

Tory whip Stuart Andrew told me: I got through six weeks of the election without a cross word with my partner.

"Then we fell out putting up the Christmas tree.

The shepherd boy in the St Mildreds Church, Tenterden, Kent crib scene drew crowds because of his uncanny resemblance to Boris Johnson.

Rev Canon Lindsay Hammond reassured his flock: The shepherd boy is safely in the care of a grown-up shepherd.

Pity we cant say the same of our PM.

MPs returned to the Commons with entertaining Tales of Spoiled Ballot Papers which theyre allowed to check at counts.

Tory Alec Shelbrooke had one defaced with: Jeffrey Epstein did not commit suicide.

But best was the one spotted by Romseys Caroline Nokes on which was written: Not voting for this evil, stupid woman!!

But those !!s were in the box where the X goes. So counted as a vote for Caroline.

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Nelson's Column: why the end could be Nye for Labour's socialist revolution - Mirror Online

I want people to get a fuller story of the political situation thats out there, and jokes and memes have always left me in a place where Im like, Oh, that made me laugh, and then, Why did that make me laugh? Let me investigate what this things about.

Posted on December 17, 2019, at 2:09 p.m. ET

Young leftists are breaking down the points behind their political ideology on TikTok to make it easier for the next generation of voters to understand and get pulled into socialism.

Leftist TikTok creators are booming on the platform, putting out content in just the last month that has collectively amassed hundreds of thousands of views and sparked conversations with other users about leftist movements. For some, creators told BuzzFeed News, TikTok is just an entry point to combat what they see as a battle between the populist left and right for the next generation of voters.

Yo yo yo! Inviting yall to the motherfuckin revolution, Gem Nwanne said in their rendition of a TikTok trend where creators parody party announcements over bars of a Chief Keef song. Location? Around the world. Time? Right the fuck now! Cost? Your privilege. We talkin BYO skillset! No cops!

In another TikTok posted a little over a week later, Nwanne hopped on another trend where they danced to a clip of I Gets Crazy, a deep-cut Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne song, while listing out the stages of radical politicization. In the clip, Nwanne bops to the song as the different stages of radicalized political thought pop up onscreen. In the 10 second clip, all full-time workers should be able to afford food and shelter quickly progresses into take back the means of production, eat the rich & secure the safety of all people as Nwanne dances more erratically. The video has over 195,000 views and 40,000 likes.

Those audio and video give creators the freedom to twist and riff for a moment of virality, thousands of likes, or hopefully a few thousand follows from the millions of people that have logged onto the app.

Nwanne said that when they first started using TikTok, they only wanted to use it to watch memes. Their friends had told them it was a funny, lighthearted space on the internet similar to Vine, which had shut down in early 2017.

Since Nwanne started making their own TikToks in early November, theyve already grown their account to over 14,000 followers. They joined the ranks of a number of other leftist creators whove been making content about leftist ideology, dragging presidential candidates and their supporters dances, and supporting candidates like Bernie Sanders (whose hashtags, like #bernie2020, have over 30,000,000 views on the app).

I noticed that there was this whole coalition of Gen-Z thats doing political content, and theres a whole other side of TikTok thats extremely conservative, I mean literal cops. I noticed there was a lack of diversity among the people that were making this political content, said Nwanne. They werent talking about race and they werent talking about queerness. They werent talking to my people.

Nwanne, a former college Republican and a former member of Democratic Socialists of America, said their motivation for their TikTok is to break down the ideas behind socialism and leftist politics to get people interested and make them as accessible as possible for younger people who might not know that their political ideas just might be the basis of a leftist ideology.

The idea is to break these things down into the smallest bits, use accessible language, put them to music, get something to look at and smile at, and make jokes, said Nwanne. Its explaining these concepts without all of the academia. I think the thing that keeps so many people of color and working-class people away from leftist ideas is how theyre presented, and my entire goal was to make this stuff as accessible as possible.

Other TikTok creators told BuzzFeed News that theyd noticed more teens on the app posting content about anti-capitalist positions, even though they might not be specifically speaking from a position of someone whos done research about democratic socialism or leftist politics. Jokes about eating the rich and critiques of billionaires like Bill Gates have gone viral on the platform.

Just replace the government with TikTok teens, reads one tweet of a popular TikTok video. In it, a teenager visits a website that lets you spend Gates money and notices that no spending makes a significant dent in his wealth. The video wraps with the teen telling the camera, and then theres me telling myself not to buy food on my lunch break at work to save some money. The videos been retweeted 92,000 times and has been viewed 5.5 million times.

Isra Hirsi, the cofounder of the US Youth Climate Strike and the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, hopped on a trend where creators dance to the chorus of a Flo Milli song. While she dances under a sign that says capitalism taking ur man, the lyrics Yea bitch, I got your man, an, an! If you bad, ho, come catch him if you can, an, an loop. She then dances under signs that read insane student debt, not being able to make a living wage, and overly expensive medical bills, rent and the fear of never being financially stable as the reasons that capitalism snatched your man. Her tweet of the TikTok has been viewed over 300,000 times.

If you scroll through the #bernie2020, #socialism, or #progressive hashtags, youll find creators dancing under the question who doesnt deserve healthcare? over a photo of Sanders to Mitski repeatedly singing Nobody. Or youll see Mikhail King, a 27-year-old creator, dancing to an edited version of the cha-cha slide that keeps pushing to the left to help explain where his political leanings went as he got older.

Kings TikTok account will lead you to a series of videos that critique candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg over their health care stances, a clip using audio of Cardi B to talk about radicalizing liberals, and jokes about corporations not wanting to pay a living wage.

I want people to get a fuller story of the political situation thats out there, and jokes and memes have always left me in a place where Im like, Oh, that made me laugh, and then, Why did that make me laugh? Let me investigate what this things about, King said in an interview. My goal is to make a joke where maybe someone might not get it, but theyll look up the information and say, Oh OK, sick!

He added that he hopes the content that hes put out about candidates can make other people start to question or at least take a closer look at the positions of who they support, or to think about what a leftist candidate might be able to accomplish. King added that hes creating this content to help people figure out where they might align politically and that videos like the viral Bill Gates TikTok help people explore those options.

Because of the shared experience of economic disparity in the country, more and more of these kids, at a younger age, are exposing themselves to these arguments that are populist in nature regardless of it being right or left, King explained. Teens, like the Bill Gates girl, are doing better things, without even realizing it, I think. That video is really great at getting a point across without being like, Hey, this is a lefty position. Its like, Heres some information, do with it what you will.

Destiny Willis, a 19-year-old TikTok creator, started making content about leftist politics in early December and has already amassed over 100,000 likes on her videos. She said that because she only recently became interested in democratic socialism and leftist politics, shes found the community on TikTok to be a place to discuss those ideas and hear what other people think.

Ive always taken a humorous approach to learning and to things that upset me in general. I use humor as a coping mechanism, and as Im learning about how capitalism isnt really working for a lot of people it makes me feel anxious, it makes me angry, and sort of depressed. And my natural way of working through that is through humor, Willis said. TikTok has been really helpful with that, as lame as that might sound.

In a video thats already gotten 14,000 views, Willis milly-rocks to a Playboy Carti song as text flashes across the screen: Fixing capitalism with regulations would require those in power because of capitalism to relinquish that power. Those in power have no incentive to change a system that directly benefits them. The video ends with her asking the audience SO NOW WHAT.

In the comments of that video and others, Willis discussed the ideas around socialism and leftist politics with people whod commented on her page. Other creators are also engaging with followers whove had more questions about leftist politics. Nwanne said that theyve been putting together an accessible reading list for people who might want to learn more because of their content. Theyve already received direct messages asking for reading materials and said that theyve had discussions with followers about leftist politics on the platform.

King said that theres already a diverse set of leftist creators on the platform who are drawing people into leftist politics through memes and trends, and others whove broken down the concepts further in explainer videos that have also influenced his content.

Theres not necessarily a feedback loop between all of us, but there are creators all across the platform who have different lived experiences or perspectives, King explained. Theyre hitting notes that I might not be able to hit. It becomes a beautiful chorus of perspectives. So we have this edgy guy in the corner, theres that person whos breaking down the concepts, theres another person talking about the experiences of minority groups, and then badabing! Badaboom! Weve got ourselves a leftist coalition.

Read more here:
"A Beautiful Chorus" Leftists Are Using TikTok To Break Down Socialism For The Next Generation Of Voters - BuzzFeed News

Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., May 22, 2018(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)The Case against Socialism, by Rand Paul (Broadside Books, 368 pp., $28.99)

Just three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialist political activism has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation. Survey data show the labels growing popularity among college students, while Karl Marx holds the title of the most frequently assigned author from the philosophical canon in American university classrooms. Far from bearing the stigma one might reasonably expect to accompany a movement that killed 100 million people in the 20th century, socialist ideology retains a position of high esteem in elite academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles.

One recurring source of the problem is the intentional cultivation of a definitional fluidity that operates at the convenience of socialisms adherents. Modern politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez euphemize the term by prefixing it with the label democratic (it strains credulity to imagine that fascism, for example, would ever be afforded similar leeway in rebranding itself). Meanwhile, failing socialist experiments such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela extolled among leftist intellectuals as a modern socialist success story only a few years ago are brushed aside with the familiar refrain that they never achieved real socialism. The practical result of these ubiquitous word games is a political climate in which socialists never quite reckon with their own track record.

In The Case against Socialism, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) sets out to critique the resurgent fashionability of socialist philosophy and, in so doing, hold it to historical account. Written in a conversational style, the book is organized into six thematic investigations. He begins with the Venezuelan fiasco, then turns to modern progressive themes such as the alarmism over inequality presented in Thomas Pikettys work, which he correctly dubs a misdirection campaign serving as an umbrella justification for far-left policies.

Paul dissects the confused attempts to rebrand the Scandinavian welfare state as democratic socialism by pointing to the unambiguous retreat of Scandinavian countries from their fiscally unsustainable and stagnating mid-20th-century government bloat. He then surveys historical atrocities carried out under socialist governments, assesses the promises and claims of socialist activists against evidence, and concludes with a discussion of modern expressions of socialism in American politics, such as the proposed Green New Deal.

The product is an interesting and readable, if sometimes polemical, case that the reader will find informative in the context of conversations about socialist thought. Though comprehensive in scope, the narrative occasionally strays into tangential asides that deploy the term socialist loosely as a descriptor of the political Left in general and that draw from sources of uneven quality. In a few places, Paul attempts to direct his broadside against socialism at current instances of congressional overreach, such as the investigation of tech-corporation speech policies in the Trump-era Twitterverse and the rise of the surveillance state. While this latter example was an undeniable and defining feature of the 20th-century Soviet regime and its many copycats, its present-day creep into American society owes at least as much to the domestic effects of foreign interventions embraced by the political Right, as was recently documented by economists Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall in their 2018 study Tyranny Comes Home.

Nevertheless, Paul offers necessary and biting criticism of socialists evasion of their own destructive history, and particularly its human toll. The books most poignant stories are a series of personal testimonies from the victims of socialist regimes. Paul presents the firsthand account of Ming Wang, a friend and fellow ophthalmologist who lived through the terror of the Maoist Red Guard as it ransacked his mothers university and forced him to abandon his studies in order to avoid detention in one of the notorious reeducation camps.

We also learn the story of Chen Dake, today an accomplished Antarctic explorer, who found his scientific training disrupted for three years after the Maoists seized him from his family and sent him off to forced labor in the rice fields. In another case, Paul relates an account of a Cuban refugee who experienced forcible resettlement, rationing, and starvation under the Castro regime. His story is anonymized out of concern for members of his family still living under the Cuban state, where retaliation for frowned-upon political speech remains a daily reality.

In an age in which professors and journalists put great stock in lived narratives, such firsthand accounts of socialisms brutality are often strangely omitted from portrayals on the left. And Paul takes note of it, calling out instances from living memory. Before Hugo Chvezs Venezuela turned visibly tyrannical, its economy attracted high praise from leftist academics such as Joseph Stiglitz. Bernie Sanders is repeatedly on record extolling the illusory benefits of the Castros health-care system.

Its a tradition, Paul notes, that has long afflicted the Left. Apologizing for tyrants and tin-pot dictators is a long-running pattern among Western socialist intellectuals, dating back to the 1930s paeans to Stalin that British playwright George Bernard Shaw and economists Sidney and Beatrice Webb penned before the full extent of his genocidal acts was understood. The formula is always the same: initial praise for a socialist revolutionary as he takes power, followed by a quiet retreat once he predictably descends into repression and brings his country to ruin.

The tendency to obscure the connections between intellectual socialism and now-disfavored political manifestations of it is no accident. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Chvez all professed explicit philosophical adherence to Marxist doctrine, and they all employed the tools of their states to aggressively proselytize the same socialist intellectual traditions that many of todays academic practitioners on the far left continue to preach. The stigma that these figures deservedly acquired is a specious reason to exclude them from what real socialism entails.

Modern-day Marxists will bristle with some cause at Pauls section tying socialism to its national-socialist, or Nazi, iteration. At points Pauls case here is both overstated and underdeveloped. He relies heavily on the late George Watsons heterodox historical reinterpretation of Hitler as a thinker in the socialist tradition. Some of Pauls accompanying analysis elides the internal complexities of Third Reich politics, particularly the purge of the Nazi partys Strasserist left wing in 1934. He also relies on testimony of questionable veracity from Hermann Rauschning, a displaced and disillusioned Nazi politician who claimed that Hitler maintained a private intellectual affinity for Karl Marx. Rauschnings tell-all book-in-exile, Hitler Speaks (1940), was promoted by Allied governments as part of the war effort but almost certainly exaggerates his level of contact with its titular figure.

At the same time, however, Paul is on to a point that is too easily cast aside in unsophisticated depictions of Nazism as a wholly right-wing, or even capitalist, political phenomenon. Far from being a capitalist, Hitler looked down upon the merchant-driven commercialism of Britain in particular with disdain. His internal economic policy, as George Orwell put it, has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. A socialist himself, Orwell nonetheless offered this trenchant indictment in 1941:

The State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly.

This observation, which Paul refers to, complicates the simplistic leftright dichotomy of modern political rhetoric about the Nazi horrors. Orwell, writing from the left, anticipates the deeper theoretical framework offered in the postwar period by Friedrich Hayek, wherein state control of the economy, whether rightward or leftward in disposition, is the defining characteristic of a socialist system.

This framework helps to explain the trajectory of interwar German intellectual elites such as Werner Sombart, who seamlessly went from being a leading Marxist theorist at the turn of the 20th century (and was even praised as such by Friedrich Engels) to being a leading philosopher-polemicist for national socialism in the Nazi era. The free-market economist Ludwig von Mises zeroed in on an explanation for this pattern after the war: Nazism was best understood as a rightward extension of Hegelian philosophy, just as Marxism is its better-known leftward offspring. Both derivatives were disposed to economic management and control in the service of the state and both relied on delusions of historical inevitability.

However one might assess the other results of his legislative career, Senator Paul has proven a persistent critic of socialist thought, and this book is an earnest plea to take seriously the threat it presents. It is directed toward consumers of conservative political commentary, but its warning is sincerely offered as well to those elsewhere on the spectrum. One only hopes that sensible voices outside conservative circles respond to that sincerity by subjecting todays socialist movements to the historical scrutiny that their many adherents are all too eager to evade.

This article appears as Reckoning with Socialism in the December 31, 2019, print edition of National Review.

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'The Case against Socialism' by Rand Paul Book Review - National Review

In these final days of the 2010s, things are looking rather sunny for the right. Donald Trumps white nationalist crusade and plutocratic cash grab are chugging along steadilyand theres a decent chance itll continue for another half-decade. The Democratic presidential primary is a toxic mess, recently muddied further by the entry of clueless billionaires trying to buy themselves a ticket to the White House. And if a Dem even makes it to the Oval Office, odds are their legislative ambitions will be filibustered into oblivion by a GOP-controlled Senate.

So it might seem odd to argue that one of the defining political stories of the decade has been the rise of robust left-wing politics. But indeed, it has been. And a good way to understand that is to remember what happened in a small park in Manhattan in the early 2010s.

In September 2011, hundreds of radical leftists, inspired in part by the Arab Spring, decided to set up a small encampment in New York Citys financial district with the intention of building a new hyper-democratic society from scratch. Within weeks, Occupy Wall Street encampments sprung up across the nation and inspired protests in hundreds of cities around the world. Occupy sparked a debate about the ways that capitalism undermines and sabotages democracy, and forced elites to think of economic inequity as a moral predicamentall at a time when Barack Obama had won plaudits from economists for shepherding the U.S. out of a dire recession.

But after only a few months, the promise of Occupys voice faded. The leaderless movement lacked a clear purpose and structure, making higher-level organizing difficult. And most major encampments were swept away by winter cold and a coordinated crackdown by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, local police and even some banks. As the camps vanished, so did Occupys power as anything more than a vague objection to the status quo.

Yet today, as we enter the 2020s, many of the ideas that underpinned Occupys call for re-envisioning our political-economic system are taken far more seriously than they were at the beginning of this decade. And thats in no small part because the far left has succeeded by trying a different tack. Serious left-wing players who punch above their weight have emerged in presidential politics, Congress, social movement advocacy, the think tank world, and media offer an increasingly persuasive alternative to neoliberal and center-left thinking, while pulling off electoral upsets and building institutional power.

As the far left has moved from the streets into office buildings, so have its ambitions. The focus has shifted from disruption and changing the conversation from the outside toward an agenda to reshape the world through strategic organizing and an insider approach.

The best starting point for thinking about how left-wing politics have changed over the course of this decade is in fact through an event that took place almost exactly two decades ago when protesters shut down a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization on November 30, 1999. The secretive WTO was a natural target for protest: it had become the most notorious symbol of corporate power run amok among quarters of the left who were skeptical of the belief that there was no alternative to an increasingly merciless model of global capitalism.

The massive protests and civil disobedience, deemed the Battle of Seattle, were organized by people from many quarters of the left, including anarchist activists, NGOs, labor unions, student groups, teachers, and countless other movements. When the disruptions caused the WTO talks to collapse entirely, it was widely hailed as a defining victory for the emerging global justice movement. At a time when socialism was considered profane and many Democrats were effectively compassionate conservatives, the Battle of Seattle represented the potential clout of the far left.

What made the event iconic was the style of protest, which was heavily influenced by anarchist philosophy and tactics. While plans to mobilize in Seattle had happened for months in advance, there was no central coordinator, the disruptions unfolded in an ad hoc manner, groups and individuals maneuvered spontaneously, and communication on the ground was handled democratically. For years afterward, left-wing activists attempted to replicate Seattles organizational modelwhich in many ways mimicked the way people talk and gather on the Internetat meetings of groups like the World Bank, NATO, and the G7.

Occupys brief and brilliant explosion of energy in 2011 was the most powerful iteration of this model of protestand also demonstrated its limits. Occupy teemed with compelling ideas, but its anarchist principles dictated that the movement remain leaderless and take shape through free-forming local assemblies and direct action. Its resistance to institutionalization and ideological clarity made it astonishingly fragileespecially since it required holding public space in the face of attacks from the state.

But many of Occupys ideas about political economy resurfaced in 2015 when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders decided to run in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. His campaign, which included staff and supporters who had collaborated during Occupy, was a shocking success: despite unabashedly identifying as a democratic socialist, he gave Clinton, the most dominant non-incumbent candidate in modern history, a serious run for her money during the nomination battle, besting her in 23 states. Bob Master, a founder of the New York Working Families Party, said in 2016 that the Sanders campaign was Occupy Wall Street translated into electoral politics. This is the revolt of the 99 percent.

The success of Sanders campaign proved that a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed not only possible to talk about socialism againbut that it could be pursued within the two-party system.

Sanderss run pushed the party platform to the left on issues like minimum wage, the war on drugs, and environmental regulation. And his run inspired a host of new left-wing institutions like the Justice Democrats, a political action committee founded by former Sanders staffers whose platform includes Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. In 2018 they helped coordinate democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs stunning defeat of 10-term incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley, who was the no. 4 Democrat in the House. Ocasio-Cortezs super-progressive squad in the House (representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) are also all Justice Democrats.

The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing institution interested in both working as an outside agitator and engaging with the electoral and legislative process, may end up being one of the most consequential developments of the decade. DSA has been around since the 1980s, but only after Sanders run and Trumps victory has it become more than a completely fringe playersince November 2016, DSAs membership has gone from 5,000 to at least 50,000 members and has seen an explosion in chapters across the nation. It does lots of different things, from lobbying for more progressive housing laws to organizing protests to canvassing democratic socialist candidates; in 2018, more than a dozen DSA-backed candidates won their Democratic primaries. DSA is still small, but it shows promise in how deeply organized it is its commitment to democratic decision-making and its devotion to thinking strategically and pragmatically about how to bring to life a utopian society.

On top of all this, theres been a notable rise of the savvy left-wing press and think tanks that have helped mainstream ideas that wouldve seemed outlandish to anyone outside of radical politics until recently. While theres always been an alternative, ultra-progressive press, whats notable about these outfits is how they deliberately seek wide readership and aim to shift the parameters of popular debate. For example, socialist magazines like Jacobin and Current Affairs have garnered a bigger readership during this socialist resurgence in part because they have an interest in making Marxist thinking as accessible as possible to a mass audience through stylish design, jargon-light analysis, and direct engagement with the daily news cycle. Think tanks like Data for Progress and the Peoples Policy Project have quickly established reputations as respectable and rigorous operations for data analysis, polling, and policy papers in a space typically dominated by right-wing or center-left researchers.

Socialists still have very, very minor power in the scheme of national politics, and there are huge limitations to a socialist movement without a strong organized labor movement backing it. But as we enter 2020, the American left has some tangible answers to the perennial question of what is to be done to achieve their worldview.

This is not to say that protest movements, direct action, and civil disobedience are not valuable or that theyve become outdated in some sensefar from it: todays left would be further strengthened by more militant street mobilizations. But they arent sufficient for building a bid for power that can last.

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In the 2010s, America Forgot It Was Terrified of Socialism - VICE