The "New Left" is old. A revolution is underway on the left.

We have been here before.

Young Ron Wyden

Boomers need to watch out and wake up.  The "New Left" is the old left.

The status quo doesn't work for the new generation, and politicians who don't notice or care will be replaced. 

The old political generation thinks the system is working, and it does work, for them and people like them. Meanwhile, problems and issues change over the course of a decade, and some of members of the old guard cannot see the urgency to reform. Young people do.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The young aren't so invested in the status quo, and they are the ones being screwed by it.

A look back. In the 1960s and 1970s the political left transformed itself.

The left of the early 20th century had been about who got the money. The poor weren't getting it and the poor organized themselves around the issues of workers as workers. The left was a coalition of people who wanted to fix the problem of concentration of wealth at the top and the failure of that wealth to trickle down. The result was trust-busting activity from the Progressives under Theodore Roosevelt, labor laws, the growth of industrial unions, and then under FDR's New Deal, Social Security. It was about class and money.

The Democratic Party and the FDR coalition was the political vessel for the left.

In the 1960s a "New Left" formed. It noticed race and ethnicity, and later gender, and later yet sexual orientation, and understood that these were impediments to a secure economic and political existence. The left became a coalition of people whose grievances were first of all identity status. Economic issues were there, but the problem, as they defined it, started with the disadvantage of prejudice, not the capitalist economic system as it had evolved in the last decades of the 20th century. 

The Democratic Party was, again, the vessel for this movement and Hillary Clinton's campaign was a high point of that tide of identity-based consciousness, reaching a level that even members inside the New Left thought had become overdone. So it started to fracture under its own weight, and because Sanders was voicing an alternative focus: money.

Many Democrats resented this. Why aren't the Sanders people pitching in more behind Hillary, they wondered? It is hard to see what is wrong with a mindset from within the mindset.

New issues mean new problems, which mean new solutions get advanced. Political revolutions happen.

In the 1960s and 1970s the political leadership in the left were white men, veterans of World War Two, who had absorbed the lessons of their era and applied it in their politics. In Oregon, Bob Duncan was such a Democrat, a liberal based of the time, but tone deaf to the status quo's failure to support seniors and unaware of how much his hawkish foreign policy on the the war in Vietnam had offended young people. He was defeated in the Democratic primary election in May, 1980, by 31 year old Ron Wyden.

The new guy.

Wyden represented a coalition of identities--old folks and young folks--and a new version of the left.  Duncan--an old white guy, thoroughly establishment--didn't "get it."

The old left, to be replaced by the "New Left"

Hillary Clinton and the now-old New Left doesn't get it, either--at least not by the estimation of the people whose needs aren't really being served by the economic status quo.

Those people experience houses too expensive for young people to buy, factory workers competing with low-wage countries, with Amazon changing the face of retail, with the gig economy. They see up close that wealth isn't trickling down. They don't observe the struggle to enter the middle class; they live it.

 It is a new economic era for America. and the New Left of Hillary Clinton wasn't addressing it head on. They wanted to ally with the billionaires, not fight them. The old guard Democrats were OK with incrementalism. The system worked well enough, by their estimation.

Not so, says a rising voice on the left, so now there is a new new-Left, which is calling itself by a new name, "Democratic Socialist." This new version of the left is an uneasy ally of the New Left of Hillary Clinton, and its major political thrust is to refocus the left, not tinker with it. Push is coming to shove, to reprise a phrase from the past. They want bolder solutions, now.

 The Democratic Socialists are replacing the policies of the New Left, defining the status quo left of the Clintons as "establishment" or "corporate" or "centrist." Hillary said there were good billionaires. Democratic socialists say that the presence of billionaires amid a disappearing middle class is evidence that the system is rigged and broken. The old guard welcomes Amazon; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sees their subsidies and its effect on retail, and calls them invaders, as gentrifiers, making a housing affordability problem even worse for New York.

The left of Hillary Clinton was blind and tone deaf to problems that were the seed bed for the rise of left-populism. Established politicians of the Boomer generation--Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown--are attempting to voice that new sentiment. Democrats are waking up to the new reality that people under 50 years of age have the votes to change America, if they vote, and they want real change. 

A political revolution may not be possible if led by a Baby Boomer, but they will try to have the credibility to accomplish it. But sometimes it takes a new face, like Wyden's replacing Duncan's.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the authentic voice, and if not hers, then someone like her, in her generation. Boomers look old to Millenials because they are in fact old.