I met Malcolm Harris once, back in 2011. He was part of an escort of young activists who helped me navigate making a brief address, by means of a “human megaphone,” to the crowd at the People’s Library in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. I’d been living in California, and it was the first time I’d visited the park. Harris and some others steered me in, and afterward we ate Vietnamese food. I was able to place Harris as part of the crowd around a magazine called The New Inquiry. He made an impression.
This was a time of a kind of collective awakening for the US left. It was for me as well. A politically depressed 47-year-old carrying in his body a family legacy of revolutionary disappointment, I was at that time closer to an inactivist. My own awakening was to the simple thought that if the left could wake up, I might be foolish to be depressed. The moment made me vulnerable, and those who’d invited me to experience it with them were kind. They indulged my playing the role of mentor, but really I was there to learn.
After Occupy, Harris became a prolific journalist, one who rapidly diversified his venues from The New Inquiry and Jacobin to legacy outfits like The Nation and The New Republic. He became something of a generational spokesperson with his 2017 book debut, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. Read as a bid to become his cohort’s Chuck Klosterman, the book might suggest that Harris had lowered his revolutionary ambitions. But Kids These Days featured a galvanic thread of anger at all the right neoliberal suspects, and it worked as a bait-and-switch: Come for the generational hand-wringing, stay for the call to the barricades. Harris’s quicksilver colloquial wit helped seal the deal: “For the nonprofit sector and its volunteers to force a fundamental change in direction for corporate America…would be something like a magician’s bunny devouring him alive: It would be a stunning reversal in character, for one thing, but more important, a rabbit’s mouth is way too small.”
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