On a hot summer’s evening in August 2017, Jo Beardsmore and Adam Klug, two left-wing activists from the United Kingdom, excitedly got in their car and drove down the California coast, from the apple farm Beardsmore lives on in Mendocino to San Francisco. They were going to meet one of their idols—Becky Bond, a senior advisor on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Beardsmore and Klug had recently been involved with the U.K. general election as part of Momentum, a left-wing campaign group formed in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s successful dark-horse run for the Labour Party leadership in 2015. At the outset Corbyn had faced odds of 200 to 1, but he shocked the entire political and media establishment when he won. Momentum wanted to build a mass movement behind progressive policies and thrust them into the British political mainstream. It also ended up defending Corbyn’s leadership from critics outside, and within, the Labour Party.
