In 1985, I moved to Hong Kong to work as a journalist at much the same age as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she entered Congress this year. At that age, I held a similar if less zealous belief in the viability of socialism, an ode to the influence of my father, a man of the trade union-based Old Left.
During my college years in the mid-to-late 1970s — calmer pastures after the 1960s student upheavals — a belief in socialism made one an outlier among students, even at the City University of New York. Still, I immersed myself in the canons of the system, reading Marx and other theorists of the Left, studying the history of left-wing and trade union movements in the U.S. and abroad, and even writing a lengthy history thesis related to the Bolshevik Revolution in my senior year.
