Encouragement: "Since Trump’s Victory, Democratic Socialists of America Has Become a Budding Political Force."

To which I'd add CounterPunch.

"When Donald Trump won, she started questioning the analyses she’d read in her usual media outlets. She switched from The New York Times to leftist publications like The Intercept, In These Times, and Jacobin. The narratives of American politics that she found there, she told me, were 'just completely different from anything I’d seen.'"

Perhaps you were watching the coverage of the candlelight vigil in protest of Jeff Gahan's public housing putsch and saw a Democratic Socialists of America (Louisville chapter) banner.

Curious? Learn more at The Nation.

Since Trump’s Victory, Democratic Socialists of America Has Become a Budding Political Force, by Anna Heyward (The Nation)

Why an army of young people is joining DSA.

This past October, on a Saturday afternoon in a Unitarian church in Philadelphia, about 50 people were seated in a loose configuration of folding chairs, taking turns raising their hands to speak. Most were in their mid-20s; they wore jeans, sweaters, the occasional nose ring, and backpacks decorated with pins.

It's a long read, so I'll snip to the conclusion.

It’s hard to imagine what DSA should look like, because there aren’t many precedents. The most common political groups either work the way political parties do, requiring some adherence and loyalty to a party line, or through delegation, whereby believers pay their dues and staff members then go out and organize. DSA’s model can be disorderly, because it’s based on radical democratic participation. When every voice is amplified to the same level and everyone’s participation is weighted the same, there are moments when it’s unclear what they’re even doing together.

DSA has a newly youthful feel to it, startlingly dissimilar from the geriatric-seeming organization before 2016. Sometimes, speaking with these newly minted socialists, I wondered whether the lack of clarity could present some advantage. This generation may need a new definition of “democratic socialism,” one that departs from its previous history.