What do India’s “Cockroach” activists have in common with Democratic Socialists in New York and Colorado?
They are both manifestations of Gen Z disillusion with old-school politics, and motivation to shake up the system.
I first heard about India’s “Cockroach Party” in this NYT headline:
Abhijeet Dipke’s “Cockroach Janta Party” has emerged as the unexpected voice of young people feeling let down by the government and struggling to find jobs.
I’ll refrain from extolling—again—the virtues of reading My Beloved Print Edition™ of the New York Times, but good writing is still good writing, even when you’re speed-reading it on your phone1. Here’s how that story begins:
Until a couple of weeks ago, Abhijeet Dipke was one of thousands of Indian students in the United States with a fresh graduate degree in hand, seeking a job. Then, a cockroach changed his life.
It started with a question that Mr. Dipke, a 30-year-old graduate of the public relations program at Boston University, posted on X on May 16: “What if all cockroaches came together?” He was responding to comments a day earlier from India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, who referred to young and unemployed Indians as cockroaches who, failing to secure jobs, end up complaining on social media or becoming activists and criticizing the system.
As someone who co-founded a political movement for the right of corporations to run for Congress, which some called satire, I was particularly interested in the next paragraph:
Encouraged by thousands of replies endorsing his call to action, Mr. Dipke started the “Cockroach Janta Party” — janta means “the public” in Hindi — as a joke, with its own website, built in two hours with help from A.I. and friends. The goal was to create a movement for young people “who keep getting called lazy, chronically online, and — most recently — cockroaches,” the mission statement read. “The rest is satire.”
Read that full NYT story (it’s a gift!) and see how the movement quickly was joined by tens of millions of young people, with the CJP signing up one million registered members as of May.
A day after police forcibly broke up demonstrations, thousands returned to the protest site in New Delhi to keep pushing for action over the country’s failings in education.
They flocked to New Delhi by the thousands. Young Indians demanding accountability from their government for a flawed education system, hoping for a promise or a signal from those in power that would reassure them about their futures.
Instead, the throng of protesters who tried to march to Parliament on Monday were confronted by security forces, batons in hand, tear gas canisters ready. As the crowd swelled, the police cracked down, striking people’s shins, calves and backs, swinging their staves overhead. Protesters hurled flip flops and water bottles back. Many rushed to escape through back alleys and side roads. Plumes of tear gas left people choking.
Here’s that link again to the full story, with vivid photos that yes, look better on your phone than they do in print2.
What they’re saying in the streets of India echos what we’re hearing here.
Many who gathered were parents worried about the future their children stand to inherit. Mina Ganesh, 51, was at the protest site on Tuesday with her son Miher, 17.
“Finally someone in the country is willing to speak up,” Ms. Ganesh said. “It took us long enough. Now that we have begun to speak up, there’s no stopping us.”
Democratic socialists feel that way too.
In a low-slung house in Queens, Cooper Smith and his roommates live at the epicenter of a political shift.
Mr. Smith is a 26-year-old copywriter who recently voted for Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist who won a House primary last month. He said he cannot think of a single one of his friends who identifies as a political moderate.
In his voting precinct, not far from the Brooklyn border, Ms. Valdez received 84 percent of the vote. Three-quarters of the people who cast ballots in this year’s primary there are under 40.
This is important. Turning out more young people to vote is the theme of much of this Substack3. I read with interest these details:
In two neighboring parts of Ridgewood where at least 80 percent of voters are under 40, Ms. Valdez won at least 80 percent of the vote. Overall, she got 76 percent of the vote in precincts with an average age under 40, and just 39 percent in precincts with an average age of 50 or more
But there was also this:
Grace Jackson, 24, lives in Ridgewood and decided to support Ms. Valdez after learning she was in the D.S.A. and had been endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fellow D.S.A. member.
“That was enough for me,” Ms. Jackson said. “I thought it would be cool if I had my own A.O.C.,” referring to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is closely associated with the D.S.A.
Yes, but politics isn’t always cool, and not all candidates are going to look like AOC.
This is not a liberal country. Bernie Sanders was never going to be elected President.
Zohran Mamdani can get elected Mayor of New York, and longtime incumbents can lose primaries to socialist-leaning challengers backed by Gen Z enthusiasm and the affordability crisis.
But districts where DSA can be a voting bloc are few and far between.
All eyes are now on Michigan, where the “establishment” candidate, Rep, Haley Stevens, is picking up support against progressive challenger Abdul El-Sayed in the August 4 primary.
Back to that theme often repeated here:
Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote.
The actual turnout was 23%, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
And in 2024, 42 percent of Gen Z voted, but voters over 50 were still in the driver’s seat—63.1 percent in 2022, and 52 percent in 2024.
It’s wonderful that Gen Z is turning out in liberal districts in big cities and university towns, but what about everywhere else? Here’s the map of the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” targets for 2026. You’ll notice it includes states like Iowa, North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio.
India’s “Cockroach” movement consists of young people willing to get tear-gassed and beaten in the streets—see those pictures here—while Gen Z voters in Brooklyn are…4
I’ll be following the news from India, wondering if this is the beginning of a new Arab Spring, a Tehran crackdown, or something else.
The question remains, how to attract young people to vote for candidates who aren’t “cool” but can win in close races against Republicans? I’ve previously quoted Cyrus Beschloss, Generation Lab’s founder and CEO, making a similar point:
“Young people are voting at just obscenely low rates.”
I’ve also written about the prominent pollster who said on a zoom briefing I attended that Democrats should make voting something “extra” they talk to young people about, on top of social media, creating videos and following influencers.
They say in advertising to “sell the sizzle, not the steak,” but in this case, what’s being sold is voting, and the sizzle long ago lost its’ sizzle.
We talk a lot about “voters,” but of course, we never know until Election Day exactly who those people are. The reliability of polling depends on their being a set population from which a random sample can produce a representative snapshot.
But we can’t know what makes up that population of who voted until all the polls have closed—and as Donald Trump proved twice, it’s possible to engineer a new electorate that doesn’t show up in polling.
All the outrage over Trump’s attacks on democracy, civil liberties, institutions and world peace may not be landing with those who aren’t convinced that voting is a way to do anything meaningful. For them, change happens on their phones.
What are we going to do about that?
See this:
And this:
Slow down! Turn the pages!
Along with tastefully curated musical selections that, alas, mostly go undiscovered
Imagine snarky reference hinting at privilege and performance here
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