Nate Emery
Template:TOCnestleft Nate Emery is active in Salt Lake Democratic Socialists of America.
Salt Lake DSA
The Salt Lake Democratic Socialists of America saw a bump in membership after President Donald Trump was elected in 2016. But organizers agree that the momentum they’ve seen in the past two months — swelling now to more than 270 members — coincides with the candidacy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is herself a member of the national chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“I’ve been a socialist for a while, and I was always kind of on the fence about actually joining,” said Nate Emery, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Utah who recently joined the Salt Lake chapter. “And then with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that’s kind of when I decided yeah, I want to be part of this. This organization is the real deal.”
“Our generation has witnessed what capitalism has done and we don’t like it,” said Matt Kirkegaard, the co-membership coordinator for the Salt Lake Democratic Socialists. “To millennials, it means debt and a climate in crisis. The world is burning around us — we’re watching capital profit off of that.”
But the question of what, if anything, the fledgling organization will do with the momentum around its movement is still up for debate.
“We’ve had this problem in this organization where we have an idea, it’s a really good idea, there’s one or maybe two people that thought of it and then it kind of dies,” Nancy Barrickman, co-chair of the Salt Lake Democratic Socialists, said at the meeting.
That’s why the group is working to revise its bylaws and change its organizational structure, she said, in the hopes that they can get to the work of executing real change in the community.
Barrickman and Kirkegaard, both joined the socialist group in the months immediately after Trump’s inauguration.[1]