Sorry if this has already been discussed or if I've already told you these stories before.
I didn't radicalize until 2017 or so and was a lib until then. I was in high school in the '00s and there was only one guy there who was an out communist. He was more than an acquaintance but not a close friend. He once went through the trouble of downloading a bootleg copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for me, which would have taken like all day with the internet speeds of the time, and then he burned it onto a CD, for which I will be forever grateful. We never talked about his political beliefs together—I was a lib but always against the Iraq War (wish I could say the same for the Afghanistan War). My lib friends and I discussed his beliefs once behind his back, saying it was funny that he thought capitalism would expand across the world and then destroy itself, ha ha, how could that possibly ever happen?
When I was radicalizing in 2017 I reconnected with him and he gave me a Trotskyist book, Socialism Seriously, which I liked a great deal, even though it trash-talks the USSR within the first two or three pages. He moved to a state with more jobs and became a [member of a rare decent powerful union with good pay and benefits] and seems to be more or less a lib now, although I haven't been on FB for quite some time so I'm not sure.
Anyway, being a radical today is hard, even though to be honest it seems like it's even harder to be a liberal or a fascist ("Why is everyone around me sick, dying, or miserable all the time? They just need to work harder and smarter!"). Most of us were radicalized, if I'm correct, post-OWS or post-Bernie, so I'm curious if any of you were radicalized earlier and how things were different at the time—for instance, as terrible as the internet is, I can't recall anything resembling a communist community existing anywhere in the '00s. Leftwing websites were merely progressive at best.
When the Soviet Union still existed, no matter its faults, leftists worldwide still looked at it as symbol of hope. At least the USSR is still there, at least they show how capital isn't invincible.
After 1991, there was still a general hope in the air, mainly because that's simply how it felt being in a western country. Technology got better at a breakneck pace, climate activists started making victories too, like banning certain aerosols and regulating car exhaust. The 90s were a hopeful time in general, the future didn't seem to be erased yet. Doing things still felt meaningful and like history could still move forward.
Also there was a kind of sigh after the cold war. The American consciousness briefly forgot it was supposed to suppress leftists. "Communism" became more of a silly word to most people rather than conjuring instant hatred, so in weird way it actually became easier to talk about leftism.
I was a kid at the time, so for me the ‘90s was hightop sneakers, Clinton did something with Monica Lewinsky, Oklahoma City, OJ Simpson, bombing Yugoslavia, TNG reruns, Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights, and pictures of naked ladies taking half an hour to load on our Windows 3.1 PC.