The Rise of America's Young Socialists --- For many on the forefront of the far left, the misery of the 2008 financial crisis left a lasting impression

“Well before Lehman Brothers collapsed and capitalism quaked, Gabe Tobias had an arresting view of what would become the global financial crisis.

 

It was in Santa Ana, Calif., where Tobias was working as a community organizer after finishing college in 2006. He was meant to be advising low-income families on healthcare.

 

Soon, though, his work changed.

 

Acorn, the nonprofit that employed him, began to see rashes of families, particularly Hispanic immigrants, complaining that they were being forced out of their homes. The culprit was adjustable-rate mortgages they had signed up for but scarcely understood.

 

"It was devastating," Tobias recalled. "They had everything locked up in their homes. They had nothing else."

 

In the ensuing months, he would become familiar with unscrupulous mortgage brokers' tricks of the trade -- using multiple sets of paperwork to mislead customers, enlisting community leaders to sell dubious products to those who spoke little English, and more. At an early age, he came to a sobering conclusion: "There's an industry that's set up to suck money out of working people."

 

In June, Tobias' friend, Zohran Mamdani, 33, shocked the world when he handily won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor running as a proud socialist. Mamdani's victory has variously been attributed to his charisma, his adroit use of social media, his ability to bring South Asian residents into city politics and the warts of his leading opponents.

 

But it is also something else: the flowering of a movement that began to gestate nearly 20 years ago, when the misery of the financial crisis proved formative for a generation then just coming of age.

 

For many, like Tobias, now 39, that crisis -- and what they view as a feckless response to it -- left a lasting impression about the ills of capitalism and the inability of America's dominant political parties to address the country's problems.

 

Over time, some have found a home in the nativist MAGA movement created by President Trump. But others traveled left in a search for answers. Along the way, they have revived what had been a moribund faction of the Democratic Party and created a cadre of now-seasoned operatives who propelled Mamdani.

 

"A lot of the germs for what's become the resurgent left have come from [2008]," said Tobias, who is now a top strategist for the Democratic Socialists of America, the political home of Mamdani and other progressive stars like N.Y. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "I know a lot of people who work on the left who have personal experience [of the financial crisis]."

 

Veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement that sprang up in response to the 2008 crisis, now hold senior roles in groups like the Working Families Party, which endorsed Mamdani early on, and the Justice Democrats.

 

"People keep saying, 'New Yorkers are more conservative than you think. A socialist will never win,'" said Jasmine Gripper, who began her teaching career in the shadow of 2008 and is now co-director of the Working Family Party's New York branch. "I'm like, 'A socialist is winning, y'all.'"

 

The race was jolted on Sunday when New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced he was ending his bid for re-election.

 

While the mainstream Democratic Party's popularity has sunk to a 30-year low, according to one poll, and its leadership appears uncertain of how to oppose Trump, the far left seems vigorous -- particularly among the young. A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29 hold a "favorable view" of socialism -- something that would have been unimaginable to Cold War generations.

 

Some are venturing even further left.

 

On a recent evening, 15 comrades from the Northwest Philadelphia cell of the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered for their weekly meeting in a classroom at Thomas Jefferson University.

 

The mostly 20- and 30-somethings had eschewed the Mao caps and Che Guevara T-shirts of previous generations. Soon, though, terms like "ruling class," "parasitic," "bourgeoisie" and "dialectic" were bandied about the room as they settled into an earnest discussion of the assigned reading, an article entitled "Morality and the Class Struggle." Several members invoked 2008 when explaining what prompted them to ditch "the milquetoast" left, as one called it.

 

Zach Bickel, 34, blamed the crisis for taking his father's job and causing his community in central Pennsylvania to be "whittled away."

 

"The system never really recovered from 2008," said Nico Melton, 25, who claimed to have become disillusioned while studying at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, the capitalist bastion that is Trump's alma mater.

 

At times, the meeting felt like a support group. Communism, they acknowledged, hadn't worked anywhere in the world it had been attempted -- at least not yet.

 

None of this surprised Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York who has studied the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s and considers himself a progressive. "They didn't grow up with that sense of stigma to all things socialist or communist," he said of his students.

 

Moreover, he noted, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had made their brand of socialism appealing by casting it as a moral imperative. "It's the simple proposition that such a productive and prosperous country shouldn't have poverty and so many people shouldn't have to work so hard for so little while a handful of people own so much," Varon explained.

 

Genevieve Rand, 28, a tenants' rights organizer, put it this way: "Being a socialist -- the traditional conception of that is you're a nerd who reads a lot of books from 200 years ago."

 

No longer.

 

On a recent evening, Rand was going door to door in and around Brooklyn's Prospect Park, canvassing for Mamdani in jean shorts, black tights and a red-and-white "Freeze the Rent" T-shirt. She maintained her good cheer while navigating barking dogs, faulty apartment intercoms, suspicious neighbors and other frustrations. When she made contact, residents seemed receptive.

 

Her own experience of the 2008 crisis was both intensely personal and mysterious. Growing up in a middle-class household in southern New Hampshire, Rand's parents had always been guarded about their finances.

 

At some point, though, she noticed they began canceling music lessons, after-school sports -- anything that cost money. One day around 2011 they informed her they would be moving in with her grandparents to save money. Some six months later, the family moved to a smaller house in rural New Hampshire.

 

Rand's parents leaned on religion to cope. They became ardent members of an evangelical church with apocalyptic leanings. "It was a lot of upheaval. It was very confusing," she said of those days.

 

Eventually, she escaped to a small New Hampshire college, juggling classes and shifts at a fast- food restaurant. She didn't consider herself particularly political until she encountered Sanders, then in the midst of his outsider campaign for the Democratic Party's 2016 nomination.

 

"He was saying things that made sense about why things were so hard and who was benefiting from it," Rand recalled. "I was seeing this on the internet, and I was like, 'Hell, yeah!'"

 

Rand's first taste of organizing came in 2019, after she moved to Ithaca, N.Y., with a few hundred dollars. She convinced about a dozen of her restaurant co-workers to start a union to boost their wages. The restaurant soon closed but the sense of solidarity she felt with her fellow union members remained.

 

Rand was thrust into the tenant movement by the Covid pandemic, and the sudden fear that she might be evicted from her apartment as she awaited government relief checks.

 

Last year, the volunteer Ithaca Tenants Union she helped to establish celebrated a milestone when the city inaugurated its first-ever council in which renters sympathetic to its cause were the majority.

 

It was achieved with the organizing muscle of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). At first, Rand explained, her membership in the group was less ideological than practical. New York politics, she argued, are dominated by real-estate barons. The only way to level the field was by mobilizing the grassroots. The DSA had proved itself adept at doing so and focused on the issues that most concerned her.

 

"Why should I care about saving democracy if it can't provide me a home to live in or food I can afford?" she asked, calling housing "the economic issue of our time."

 

For Tobias, his entry into DSA politics was also gradual. He worked as an organizer for Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 and had high hopes that the new president would both end the Iraq war and hold Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis.

 

To his dismay, the latter never really happened. "There was just incredible disappointment about those first two years," Tobias recalled.

 

The Occupy movement was then brewing and his own political views were in flux. He saw the Democratic establishment as beholden to donors, and so, the wealthy.

 

Tobias went overseas to work for aid organizations. In between jobs, he was back in New York in 2014 and went to work on a bare-bones campaign that Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and transparency activist, was running against Andrew Cuomo for New York governor.

 

Teachout had little money or name recognition. Cuomo, meanwhile, had locked up support of the labor unions and the Working Families Party.

 

Still, Teachout garnered a third of the primary vote. While her performance was largely overlooked at the time, Tobias called it "eye-opening."

 

Sanders' failed 2016 run was a watershed. It brought together disillusioned young people across the country. Mamdani has cited it as an essential chapter in his own political coming-of-age. Tobias noticed that friends who once called themselves progressives had taken cues from the Vermont senator and were identifying as socialists.

 

The other force driving them together was Trump. Tobias watched his election night victory on a small and grainy television screen in the Moroccan desert, where he was then working.

 

Back in Brooklyn the following year, a friend from the Teachout campaign insisted Tobias help with another campaign: This one for Ocasio-Cortez, who was challenging one of the Democratic Party's most senior members of Congress.

 

It was around then that Tobias met Mamdani. Like so many others, he found him unusually personable and charismatic. Tobias was also struck, he said, by Mamdani's ability to blend the gruel of policy with the syrup of narrative.

 

"He gets how to marry left-wing goals to boring bureaucracy," he said.

 

Tobias sat out his campaign and instead took a position earlier this year leading the DSA Fund, a nonprofit that was established to help elected socialist officials govern. "Zohran winning is like, this is just step one," he said.

 

Rand, by contrast, was in the thick of the campaign.

 

She met Mamdani in Albany a few years ago when she was trying to rally support for "good cause" legislation that would limit rent increases and make it harder for landlords to evict tenants. There were then only a handful of DSA members in the state assembly, including Mamdani.

 

While most Democrats were cool, Rand recalled how the DSA caucus embraced her and fellow activists as comrades. "They saw their seat as belonging to a group of working-class people," she said.

 

When Mamdani launched his mayoral bid this year, Rand rode the bus to the city on weekends to volunteer. Meanwhile, the tenant movement became a bedrock of support for the candidate.

 

Rand sees a through-line -- from the turmoil she endured as a child to a calling as an activist and Mamdani campaigner.

 

"My political identity as a Democratic Socialist comes from these direct experiences of how capitalism and corporate-controlled policies made my life worse," she reflected. "Socialism made it better."” [1]

 

1. The Rise of America's Young Socialists --- For many on the forefront of the far left, the misery of the 2008 financial crisis left a lasting impression. Chaffin, Joshua.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Sep 2025: A1.