What the “left” today wants and we need

Comment just sent to New York Times online blog in response to op-ed piece in today's Times by Michelle Goldberg, "The Milennial Socialist are Coming":

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/democratic-socialists-progressive-democratic-party-trump.html?comments#commentsContainer

When I returned to the US 5 years ago from living in France, I quickly realized that I now live in a country that doesn't belong to people like me. And what it most clearly does have to offer us is punishments. (I also know that I was targeted for official harassment, although it is unclear why; the police said some vague things, including noting that I am a writer). 

What the left needs is not just the victories of candidates with a commitment to something like democratic socialism--though we do need that. We need a mass movement that is necessarily linked to policy changes and candidates (or to which they are linked) but ultimately defined only by the desire for a better society, a different possible form of America. 

We also need to challenge the dominant ethos. Our society has become increasingly authoritarian and is deeply marked by carceral moralisms, wielded to solve every problem. It is also increasingly aided by seemingly liberal but anti-political therapeutic spiritual ideologies and psychological tactics of management. 

We also need a "long march through the institutions," as the German student activist leader in 1968, Rudi Dutschke, put it. There are moments in the history of a society when it seems like everything must change, and everything can. And there is sometimes a sense in which that is true.