Velamakanni, a sophomore studying neuroscience and pre-law, joined the YDSA after becoming fed up with the complacency of the College Democrats on campus. (She met the Democratic Socialist students at a campus protest of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, a comical slice of irony for the young Indian immigrant.) “They were just way too accommodating,” she said of the College Democrats. “It’s not like I want to flip over cop cars or anything, but I want to be an activist, you know? I’m angry. I’m angry because the establishment has caused us to lose faith in the system and the people who uphold it.”

An only child, born of an Indian immigrant culture that measure success by material wealth via professional success, Velamakanni came to Ohio State to be a doctor. But what she discovered along the way—“a sense of solidarity, a sense of community”—led her to study law. She hopes to use the degree to empower the powerless, to help replicate the solidarity and community on a bigger scale. But she worries about the implications. “My biggest fear is I’ll disappoint my parents. Everything is so commoditized in America, I’m afraid I won’t be able to support them, to pay them back for everything they’ve done for me,” she said. “And I’m afraid my family back home will think I’m a failure because of it.”

CONNOR MCCULLOCH, a 21-year-old aerospace engineering student, said he could relate. Raised by a single mother who worked 60-hour weeks for Southwest Airlines—and still does—McCulloch feels enormous pressure to make enough money not only to pay off his student loans, but to help his mom retire with security.

Connor McCulloch leaves a meeting of the Young Democratic Socialists of America on the campus of Ohio State University. | Tim Alberta/POLITICO

“I read about these people who spend decades trying to pay off student loans. What would I do if that were me?” he asked. “That’s why I majored in aerospace, because hopefully it lands a high-paying job. But I’m worried, because it needs to be on the commercial side. I’m not going to build weapons to kill people.”

“That’s why I majored in aerospace, because hopefully it lands a high-paying job. But I’m worried, because it needs to be on the commercial side. I’m not going to build weapons to kill people.” Connor McCulloch

In addition to canceling student debt, McCulloch cares passionately about Medicare for All and universal childcare. Not long ago, he noted, these ideas were considered fringe. And while he isn’t optimistic about a President Sanders implementing them—“I’m concerned about any Democrat’s ability to pass these things into law”—McCulloch, who has never voted in a presidential election, takes a much longer view.

“People have tried to delegitimize these ideas with the label ‘socialist.’ But it’s not going to work for much longer; it’s like a red-scare tactic that loses its effectiveness over time,” he said. “And there’s also a cognitive dissonance. ‘Socialism’ is a scary word for a lot of Americans, but when you get beyond the word and study the ideas, majorities of people support most of these ideas we’re fighting for.”





If Trump benefited from the binary view Republican voters took 2016—that to stay home was to support Hillary Clinton, the greater of two evils—then the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee could suffer for the opposite reason in 2020.

Certainly, your average Democrat feels an extraordinary urgency to defeat Trump this fall. But Democratic Socialists are, by definition, not your average Democrats. I was shocked at how, in nearly a dozen conversations with DSA-aligned young voters, there was near-uniformity in refusing to back anyone except Sanders as the nominee. Two people said they would definitely vote for Elizabeth Warren, but many more said they definitely would not; one of them said her self-identifying as a capitalist was “disqualifying.” As for the other options—Mike Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and, of course, Joe Biden—the consensus was overwhelming: It’s Bernie or bust. “I held my nose for Hillary in 2016,” Kristin Porter told me at Rehab Tavern. “I’m never holding my nose again.”

It’s a volatile combination, youth and ideological purity, that has young leftists convinced they don’t need to compromise—not with themselves, not with the Democratic establishment, and sure as hell not with the Republican Party. Having come of age in the post-9/11 era, with wars and school shootings and economic hardships the norm, these voters aren’t going to settle for a promised return to normal, because in their eyes, normal was never all that great.

“I was 18 when Obama won, a freshman in college, and it felt like we had changed the world. It felt like we were unstoppable,” said DANI HOWELL, a 29-year-old copywriter in Columbus. “But it became clear that one person wasn’t going to change anything. And then I became apathetic and stopped caring altogether. And the more stuff we found out later—like how it was Obama’s administration that put some of these kids in cages, and the drone strikes he was ordering, and everything else—it’s really frustrating. But I’m also mad at myself. Like, what did I expect?”