Rise Of A New Left With Raina Lipsitz | TMR

Sam and Emma host writer Raina Lipsitz to discuss her recent book The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics. Raina Lipsitz joins as she dives right into tracking the emergence of a new left in the US beginning with the Occupy movement in the early 2010s and the dawning of a new era of American class consciousness, before walking back through the previous few years of radicalization and disillusionment under the Obama Administration, as economic struggles continued and policy on the environment, immigration, and reproductive rights fell to the wayside. Next, they parse through the shift from disillusion to action, as people saw the relationship between power as a marginalized person and power as a worker, and got a political place to funnel this passion with Bernie’s campaign in 2016. Raina, Emma, and Sam, then walk through the major divide between the progressive and corporate wings of the Democratic party, both in terms of how mainstream Democratic leadership undermines progressive candidates (Bernie, India Walton, etc), and in where their actual ideology departs on a policy and electoral level. Wrapping up, they tackle the massive resurgence of organized labor over the last few years, with the politically motivating force of labor power pushing the Democrats forward in 2022, giving more depth to their message than “not a fascist,” and exploring the future of the progressive wing of US politics.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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Brandon Sutton THE DISCOURSE

Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

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Joining us is writer Raina Lipsitz author of the rise of a new left how young radicals are shaping the future of American politics. Reyna is welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me. So let's start and you know I I I certainly have been watching this sort of you know broadly speaking this massive change that appears to have happened at least or at least maybe a trajectory of massive change that has happened. When would you Peg this as the beginning of this rise of a new left? I mean it really depends on how you count. I usually say that it goes back to Occupy Wall Street 2001 I'm sorry 2011. And that's where my book kind of begins. A lot of the book is about what happened post-2015 as an outgrowth of the Bernie campaign. but I think that you can really trace it to Occupy Wall Street and the dawning of a new kind of era of class Consciousness that we hadn't seen it in this country for you know 50 years previously. What what what what is you know and I guess we'll sort of keep circling back to this on some level but what is the main impetus of that class consciousness? Well, one thing I found when I was working on the book is the number of people I spoke to and interviewed for the book who were radicalized essentially in the Obama era right? And so these were a lot of very many of whom had worked really hard to get Barack Obama elected. And then when he was elected I think that they expected that there would be progress on several issues. on the environment. Immigration immigrants' rights. And sort of also on reproductive freedom. And then they didn't see the changes that they were hoping for and the changes that they felt they were promised by Barack Obama and by the sort of New Hope of that Administration.