Chronicle of a Decline Foretold

Within my first few days as a freshman at Brown, I joined two political clubs: the Brown Democrats and the Young Communist League. The latter was primarily tongue in cheek—I wasn’t a Marxist, and mainly just wanted to be able to say that I was literally a card-carrying commie. But I had a good friend from high school who was an outspoken communist, and even though I didn’t quite consider myself a socialist, I’d been raised as a European-style social democrat and tended to think of fiery leftists as good passionate people generally pointed in the right direction.