It’s the best time to be a socialist in the United States since the 1970s. The bad news is that it’s still not a very good time to be a socialist in the United States.

But things are certainly better than when Jacobin launched six years ago. Back then, I knew next to nothing about editing and publishing. Not surprisingly, the initial rollout was a failure: a few hundred visitors to an ugly website the first day, mostly people already on the Left or friends and family.

The turn to print shortly after was an act of desperation — maybe people would notice us if we were competing with a smaller pool of publications. We got a hundred or so subscribers, enough to help finance the first print run. We needed a couple hundred more between its release and the second issue to keep things going. Things were looking so bleak that the third Jacobin volume, just as thin as the first two, was billed as a double issue.