Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of current affairs magazine.

My guest today is Raina Lipsitz.

She is a journalist based in New York, whose work has appeared in publications including

The Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere her.

New Book is the rise of a new left, how young radicals are shaping the future of American politics.

Available from Verso Raina.

Thank you so much for joining us on current affairs.

Thanks so much for having me.

Okay, so let's lay out the territory here. What is, what are the, what's the kind of scope

of the movement that you're describing here? You say the rise of a new left, but you talk in the book

about lots of different groups, different people in different places. How do we begin to think

about what this movement is and what falls into this category of things that are part of this new left?

Sure. So I think I would say that I wrote the book in part because I was a little frustrated by

the coverage of the left I had already seen when I started working on it, which was in 2019 and, well, really started

working on in 2020, but was approached about it in 2019.

And I feel like the coverage before my book had mostly focused on DSA, which is an important

part of the new left, but it's not the only

part of the new left. And I was seeing all of these other strands kind of coming together

in a lot of new organizations that were either founded after Bernie's campaign in 2016

or expanded greatly. So DSA obviously is in the latter category, but then there were other

organizations like Sunrise and Justice Democrats that really were, you know, an outgrowth

of a lot of the energy around the Sanders campaign. And the other thing I would say is just that

...