I can’t say my affiliation with Christianity was very strong, but I did develop a positive association with the idea of moral community—the idea that we could get together, support each other, and try to do something good for one another and for the world. That seemed like an important thing for us to be doing.
When did you start thinking about the role of religion in your animal-rights activism? I ask because the organization you started, Direct Action Everywhere, feels explicitly secular.
I remember having a conversation around 2015 with Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies political movements. For the most part, he thought that DxE was a fascinating demonstration of grassroots mobilization and community-building. But he said one thing that really hit me hard, and made me think we might be on the wrong path: “You’re not really harnessing any particular identity. And movements that don’t have identities behind them just don’t succeed, because they can’t sustain themselves over the long term.”
Fundamentally, what moves people is when they believe they’re fighting for something that’s part of them. If it’s purely about ideology, not about identity, it’s just not going to create sustained mobilization. The example he gave me was the Black church. He told me to read “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” by Aldon Morris.
I already knew a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how the movement collapsed in the late sixties partly because of the loss of faith. There wasn’t the same sense of community and commitment. Doug shared this acronym with me, WUNC, coined by the sociologist Charles Tilly. It stands for “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.” When you have those four attributes, you have a successful movement.
I realized there wasn’t a sense of worthiness in our movement, partly because there wasn’t a commitment to some greater moral purpose. In the late stage of the civil-rights movement, it became nihilistic—the Weather Underground, the Vietnam War tearing at the fabric of people’s commitment to nation, to community, to church. Our movement just never had that deep sense of moral purpose that made people feel like, O.K., these people are praiseworthy people.
You don’t think “Don’t kill animals” is a worthy cause?
I think it’s a worthy cause. I don’t think people see us as worthy people. There’s a big difference. It’s not enough to have a good cause. You have to have people believe you’re good people. If anything, it’s almost the opposite—even though people think we’re a good cause, they find us annoying and pedantic.
I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates went on Ezra Klein’s show after he read “Why We’re Polarized.” He called it a “cold, atheist book.” I think, even when animal rights is at our best, people see us as a cold, hard-atheist movement. There’s sentimentality and emotion about suffering in animal-confinement facilities, but there isn’t this sense that we’re a morally meaningful, upstanding contingent of the broader human community.
I agree that the public thinks you guys are freaks or agents provocateurs trying to advance a marginal cause. How does affiliation with the church change that?
I think it’s a complete antidote to that “freak” allegation. It’s hard to say whether this is a cultural artifact of the past ten thousand years or whether there’s something inherent in humanity—the desire for divine purpose. But, regardless of whether it’s socialization or something inherent, most humans on Earth see the divine as the most morally praiseworthy thing in our communities. This is even true of the cold, hard atheists—the effective altruists. They don’t call the divine God. Their divinity is some form of very strict utilitarianism.
A shared narrative has to involve a story that doesn’t just matter to me. We all have stories about ourselves that are funny or interesting or inspiring, but a lot of times they only matter to us. And there are some stories that affect all of us—the nation-state, universities, sports teams.
The other thing that’s important is a sense of power beyond our comprehension and control. I think that might be inherent to human beings—there’s something about that we almost want to worship.
(CNN) — Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist whose focus on working-class issues and personal magnetism attracted a diverse coalition of volunteers and supporters to propel a once-underdog campaign, will win New York City’s general election race for mayor, CNN’s Decision Desk projects.
Mamdani beat former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for a second time, shattering the political scion’s hopes of a comeback after his loss to Mamdani in the June Democratic primary. Also running in the general election was Republican Curtis Sliwa, who refused to end his campaign despite pressure from Cuomo and his supporters.
Mamdani’s win marks a victory for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party at a time when national Democrats are divided over how to counter President Donald Trump. The president is himself a native New Yorker who has falsely derided Mamdani as a “communist” and suggested he’d “take over” the city if he is elected.
The results are likely to echo far beyond New York City, elevating both Mamdani’s profile and platform, including his proposals to freeze the rent for New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments, make public buses free to ride and provide universal childcare by taxing the wealthy.
Mamdani’s win completes a meteoric rise a year after the state assemblyman launched his bid for mayor, promising to make the most expensive city in the country affordable for its working class.
Who is Zohran Mamdani?
Mamdani is a three-term state assemblyman who entered the mayor’s race as one of several apparent also-rans to what appeared to be Cuomo’s race to lose.
Born in Uganda and first raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Mamdani moved to New York City when he was 7. He attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College. He is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University, and Mira Nair, an Indian filmmaker whose credits include “Mississippi Masala” and “Monsoon Wedding.”
Before becoming an assemblyman, Mamdani was a housing counselor and self-described C-list rapper who went by the name “Mr. Cardamom.” His short-lived music career was sometimes front and center in his opponent’s attack ads.
The music video for “Nani,” a rap song where Mamdani pays homage to his grandma and New York City’s South Asian culture, also shows him shirtless, donning only an apron, looking directly at the camera while he rocks side to side. The image was plastered across anti-Mamdani campaign ads to poke fun at his past music career and his lack of governmental experience.
Andrew Epstein, a campaign aide, noted that Mamdani’s rapping career helped him indirectly in his campaign.
“An incredible asset for anybody seeking to run for office is bravery in the face of embarrassment and being able to push through the natural inclination many of us have not to kind of introduce themselves to strangers or do things in a kind of silly way in front of them,” Epstein told CNN.
But Mamdani made a steady climb in the mayor’s race by producing a constant stream of social media videos, including interviews with voters who had supported Trump in 2024 due to the high cost of living. He ran a groundbreaking digital campaign in which he spoke in multiple languages and connected with supporters with a message anchored to affordability. During the campaign, Mamdani, who natively speaks Urdu, released campaign videos in Bangla, Spanish, and Arabic.
One of his most memorable viral videos tackled what the candidate referred to as “halal-flation.” He set out to interview street meat vendors about the high cost of running a street food business in New York City. With a mouthful of rice and halal meat, Mamdani detailed how an arcane permit system in the city is in part to blame for the prices of what should be cheap street food.
“This was one of the coldest nights of the year, bitterly cold,” Epstein recalled recently. “We were downtown by Zuccotti Park near Wall Street and Zohran just asking people on the street, ‘Would you rather pay $10 or $8 for halal?’ People were pushing through trying to get home, you know, it was rejection over and over and over and over again, but it never fazed him.”
Mamdani was cutting into Cuomo’s lead in public polling by the June primary. The city’s traditional power brokers, including the real estate and business sectors concerned with Mamdani’s democratic socialist identity, banded together in support of Cuomo and donated millions of dollars to anti-Mamdani super PACs. Business leaders argued Mamdani would drive wealthy New Yorkers out and discourage businesses from operating in the nation’s financial capital.
Their push ultimately helped Mamdani cast his campaign as a fight between working-class people and billionaires.
Still, his primary victory shocked much of the political world.
“I don’t think the line is so much between progressives and moderates. It’s between fighters and fakers,” said city comptroller Brad Lander, who ran against Mamdani but allied with him under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. “What Zohran is showing is that it’s worth putting up big bold ideas for change, standing up and fighting for them, and that’s pretty hopeful. Yes, he’s a democratic socialist, but he had a bold vision for the future of the city and that excited people.”
The general election campaign
After taking a vacation in Uganda to celebrate his wedding, Mamdani returned to a city mourning the deaths of New York police officer Didarul Islam and three others in a Midtown Manhattan shooting. He was confronted with his years of tweets criticizing the police, including references to law enforcement as racist and wicked and calling for them to be defunded.
“I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” he would tell reporters after meeting with Islam’s family, part of an overall shift away from anti-police rhetoric that culminated in recent weeks with his commitment to retain the current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
He also reached out to New York’s Jewish community, roiled by his criticisms of Israel’s government and questions about democratic socialism. Mamdani is an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, a supporter of the movement to boycott and divest from Israel and a fierce critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I hate my choices,” said Cydney Schwartz, a 33-year-old liberal Democrat who has lived in Israel and was in line to cast an early vote. She declined to say who she chose.
The last days of the campaign
In the closing days of the campaign, Mamdani referred to the race as a choice between “oligarchy and democracy.” His omnipresence on the campaign trail was on display during the last days of the race and in the lead-up to the last weekend of early voting in the city.
As more than half a million New Yorkers turned out to cast their votes early, Mamdani was everywhere: He was in church in the morning, calling into radio shows midday, stopping into ethnic supermarkets in the outer boroughs, popping up on influencer live streams, joining a Union Square freestyle rap battle and capping off his Saturday with a whirlwind tour of the city’s nightclub scene.
Paying homage to the city that never sleeps, Mamdani appeared to hardly do so either, stopping at six nightclubs in Brooklyn just to do it all over again on the last Sunday of early voting. He attended a church service with his parents, met campaign volunteers before stopping on the sidelines of the New York City Marathon, went to Queens for a meet-up with Gov. Kathy Hochul to cheer on the Buffalo Bills, and popped up in the nosebleeds of Madison Square Garden for a New York Knicks game.
Cuomo also campaigned across the city. Notably, he tried to cut into Mamdani’s core support of South Asian and Muslim voters by highlighting Mamdani’s opposition to criminal penalties for prostitution. He also laughed when a radio host suggested Mamdani would cheer another 9/11 attack, drawing allegations from Mamdani and others that he was playing to Islamophobia. Cuomo denied he was doing so.
Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams ended his independent bid and endorsed Cuomo. But Cuomo was unable to push Sliwa, the Republican nominee, out of the race, denying anti-Mamdani voters the chance to consolidate behind one opponent. Sliwa repeatedly and colorfully vowed he would die before making way for Cuomo, arguing he owed it to his supporters to keep running.
For Cuomo, Tuesday’s results are likely a coda to a long and eventful political career. He was governor of New York for nearly 11 years before resigning in 2021 after he was accused of sexual harassment, allegations he has denied, and amid criticism of how his administration handled Covid-19 cases in nursing homes. Running for mayor, Cuomo leaned into his executive experience, often pointing out Mamdani’s short career in politics and relative lack of work history.
He relaunched his mayoral bid as an independent after losing to Mamdani in June. He remained focused on public safety, promising to hire additional police officers and build more housing. Cuomo, who has a longstanding relationship with Trump, also sought to portray himself as the better candidate to fend off the president’s attacks on New York City.
A history-making mayor
Mamdani will be inaugurated on January 1, 2026. He inherits a deeply complex city home to 8.5 million people, a large bureaucracy, a municipal workforce of roughly 300,000 and a city budget of $115 billion.
Mamdani will make history as New York City’s first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian to hold the office and one of the youngest mayors elected in modern times. He recently married Rama Duwaji, an artist of Syrian descent who was born in Texas and moved to New York City to complete a master’s degree in illustration. Duwaji skipped traditional campaigning alongside her husband on the trail and while it remains unclear whether she will have any role in his administration, at 28, she will be the first member of Gen Z to serve as New York City’s first lady.
While Mamdani’s identity as both an immigrant and a South Asian New Yorker was central to his campaign, his connection to that community began to take shape long before he launched his run for City Hall. He first made national headlines in 2021 when he joined New York City cab drivers on a 15-day hunger strike seeking relief from excessive debt.
Mamdani has a strong connection to the cab driver community in New York City, which is largely made up of immigrants, including thousands of South Asians who were among his fiercest supporters. In the last days of the campaign, Mamdani made a stop at LaGuardia Airport’s taxi stand at midnight, catching cabbies at shift change.
“Without the night shift, there is no morning,” Mamdani told them.
Back during Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor of Boston, in 2021, I joined a Zoom call to help boost support for her strong climate policies. During the pandemic years, Zoom calls were politics, but I still often find myself on them, in the process meeting candidates for local offices around the country. It’s a good analgesic for the wearying cynicism that is the hallmark of the moment, since these people are often idealistic, enthusiastic, and smart. But, once in a while, you encounter true political talent—something that is as rare but as obvious as, say, great athletic prowess or a deep musical gift. That was Wu. Even with the awkwardness of Zoom—“Unmute!”—she seemed able to project both intelligence and, for lack of a better word, kindness: not an emotional Bill Clinton I-feel-your-pain response, but a sense that she was concerned with the problems presented and had the wherewithal to take them on.
I know people who insist that when they first heard Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, they knew he would one day be President, and I confess that I had the same feeling when I first heard Wu. Bostonians picked her from a crowded field in that first run, and two weeks ago she essentially won a second term eight weeks before the election, beating the Democrat Josh Kraft, the second-place challenger in the city’s nonpartisan primary, seventy-two per cent to twenty-three. Given Boston’s top-two system, Kraft, who is the son of the billionaire owner of the Patriots, could have stayed in the race until November, but he decided on a graceful exit. If there’s an election at all, Wu will be the only name on the ballot.
Much has been made recently of the plight of the congressional Democratic Party, as it struggles to find a response to President Donald Trump’s unprecedented assault on our system of government—a bumbling that has resulted in record-low approval ratings. And much has been made of Zohran Mamdani’s rapid rise in the world’s media center, as he came out of the general vicinity of nowhere to clobber Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Both are important stories, but I think they may be caught up in a larger one: it’s possible that the Democrats are assembling a new way of governing, not at the federal level but at the municipal one. Three candidates for election in major cities this fall exemplify that possibility: Wu, in Boston; Mamdani, lucky in his choice of opponents and now far ahead in the polls; and Katie Wilson, in Seattle, who came through her primary nearly ten points in front of the incumbent Democrat, Bruce Harrell, whom she will face again in November. (Seattle’s system is similar to Boston’s.) They’re all relatively young and “progressive,” and they all, crucially, seem to be avoiding many of the well-worn grooves of American political fights by figuring out ways to talk about things that actually matter to the diverse pool of voters who will inevitably make up more and more of the electorate. That is, they don’t just make affordability or crime or livability a “theme” in their campaigns and hit up millionaires to make ads about them; they take it for granted that those are the daily struggles of many of their constituents and make those issues their focus, suggesting new ways to take them on. In the process, they each appear to be short-circuiting the cynicism I described before: voters seem won over not because they’re necessarily convinced that these politicians can solve all their city’s troubles but because these candidates seem likely to at least try.
Wilson, for instance, entered politics by founding Seattle’s Transit Riders Union, which won free bus rides for young people across the city. As an activist, she helped write the JumpStart tax bill, which raises taxes not on employees but on the corporations that pay the heftiest salaries. In February, Mayor Harrell, at the behest of local heavies such as Amazon and Microsoft, led the opposition to a referendum on another tax on those companies which would help pay for public, mixed-income housing in a city that desperately needs it. The law passed in a landslide, which seemed to confirm the idea that he was an old-school Dem, opening the door for Wilson’s challenge.
Wu—the first woman of color elected mayor of a city that has held a reputation for racism—has gained national attention this year for standing up to Trump on immigration. (Wearing an Ash Wednesday smudge on her forehead, she faced down with aplomb a congressional panel investigating her “sanctuary city”; it followed a few weeks after the border czar, Tom Homan, said that he would be “bringing hell” to Boston.) But she won all twenty-two of the city’s wards in this month’s primary because she has paved streets, dealt with subway crises, and turned Boston into an almost unbelievably safe city. Last year, the city saw just twenty-four homicides.
As for Mamdani, the forces of Cuomo, Trump, and Rupert Murdoch have all tried to paint him as a dangerous radical who will fuel antisemitism across the five boroughs, even as, by passing higher taxes on the wealthy, he will drive the city’s billionaires to Florida. In response, Mamdani focussed on such things as the Thirty-fourth Street busway. The manner in which he addressed it, of course, is telling—alongside his former primary opponent the city comptroller Brad Lander (the city’s highest-ranking elected Jewish progressive, whose support has helped undercut the antisemitism angle), Mamdani demonstrated that he could walk across town faster than the bus could move through traffic.
Mamdani clearly knows how to communicate ebullience, a talent that is all the more potent for its scarcity in current political life. (Where Republicans now specialize in rage, Democrats tend toward the anodyne—think Chuck Schumer and his “very strong” letters to Trump.) He also shows a deep knowledge of the city’s history—witness his recent video, about the nineteenth-century investigative reporter Nellie Bly, which he used to introduce his proposals for addressing the issue of mentally ill people on the streets. And, unlike many politicians who play up urban troubles the better to cast themselves as savior, Mamdani seems to truly love the town where he lives. Usually clad in a white shirt and skinny tie, he’s somehow reminiscent of J.F.K., who campaigned with a twinkle in his eye. Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s three-term progressive mayor, also had that gift, and so does A.O.C., who won her House seat on the strength of her bartender and “Congresswomen-dance-too!” spirit as much as on her policy positions. In an Insta age, that kind of joie de vivre is remarkably effective.
“I didn’t leave the progressive movement; the progressive movement left me,” Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx recently toldCity & State New York. He was referring to the conflict within the left over Israel. Describing himself as a Zionist for the past decade, about “half of his posts, retweets or interactions” since October 7 have been supportive of Israel, City & State reported.
Torres is not a hypocrite. If we take him at his word, he’s been a Zionist for a long time. But he’s not being entirely truthful about the progressive movement or his place within it either. The movement didn’t leave him: He left it, if indeed he was ever fully part of it, by making a series of deliberate choices. One such choice is to support Israel despite the unbelievable brutality it has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza.
Support for Israel isn’t the only reason Torres might find himself outside the progressive movement. During his time on the City Council, Torres angered progressive supporters by agreeing “to water down the Right to Know Act, which would have forced officers to provide a business card in every encounter with the public,” City & State reported. In 2017, ahead of the vote, he said, “I stand by what I have chosen to do, even if it means standing alone … even if it means I am no longer beloved in progressive circles.” He carried that attitude with him to Congress, where he discovered allies within the Democratic Party, such as Senator John Fetterman. The Pennsylvania senator also holds a stringent pro-Israel position and told comedian Bill Maher this month that progressivism “left” him after October 7. “I didn’t leave the label, it left me on that,” he said.
Mondaire Jones, who’s running to return to Congress, struck a similar note in an interview with Politico. After he endorsed the AIPAC-backed George Latimer over progressive incumbent Jamaal Bowman, he came under significant fire from the left. The political arm of the Congressional Progressive Caucus even rescinded its endorsement of him. “These people were never my actual friends,” he claimed, saying that he would do nothing differently if given the chance. “The appreciation that people have in these actual communities in the Hudson Valley is what matters to me,” he said. “That as well as my own sense of morality compelled me to intervene, given how god-awful Mr. Bowman’s conduct has been.”
Torres, Fetterman, and Jones are free to say that the progressive movement has left them behind. Perhaps they think they’re even being honest. The term “progressive” can be vague, even meaningless. Various Democrats and their supporters interpret it in wildly divergent ways. It’s possible, then, for Torres to think of himself as a progressive, though he was never as far left as some may have hoped. But that exercise is difficult to sustain now, as Israel carries out a genocidal campaign in Gaza. Torres and pro-Israel politicians like him have sided with power over the powerless.
In doing so, they’ve cast themselves out of the progressive movement. The label didn’t leave Fetterman; he merely discarded it. He was happy to call himself progressive in social-media posts, to court the left as a candidate, and to accept a Sanders endorsement during his successful run for lieutenant governor. Now, when it truly counts, Fetterman is likelier to taunt the left than he is to embrace it. The left must employ litmus tests if terms like progressive are going to mean anything at all, and Fetterman would fail. So too would Torres and Jones. If they feel uncomfortable with the progressive movement now, it’s likely a sign they never belonged in the first place. Their values were always in conflict with the left, and Gaza merely brought that reality into sharper focus.
It’s convenient, though, for pro-Israel Democrats to shift blame onto the left. Doing so gives them a chance to present themselves as brave truth tellers: See Jones, speaking of his personal sense of morality. But the left is not as powerful as I want it to be, and no courage is necessary to attack it. Critics instead exaggerate its influence in order to score points. It’s a cheap way to look principled. Jones must invent straw men — “trust fund socialists in Williamsburg,” as he put it to Politico — in order to sound somewhat reasonable, let alone courageous.
Courage is not in the eye of the beholder. It means something. (So should the word progressive.) There’s nothing brave about rejecting the left in a moment of great moral consequence. Nor is there anything particularly courageous about standing with Israel, a longtime U.S. ally, as it pummels Gaza into dust. Courage in politics looks more like Bowman, who faces a formidable challenge from AIPAC as he defends his seat in Congress. A recent poll showed Bowman trailing Latimer, who is running to his right, but Bowman has refused to compromise his beliefs. “They’ve got money, we’ve got people,” he posted on X.
The U.S. needs a viable left: a counterweight to politicians who turn their backs to ongoing mass murder. Without it, we’re doomed not to ambivalence but something worse, an embrace of brutality and vengeance and horror. Torres, Fetterman, and Jones have made their choices. Progressive may be a mostly toothless label, but if it’s still too much, the movement is better off without them in it.
A photo-illustration in a previous version of this story incorrectly included Antonio Delgado, not Ritchie Torres.
One breakthrough for environmental progress was made recently by young climate activists in deep-red, rural Montana.
“OK, boomer.” That’s a snarky phrase currently some use to mock 60- and-70-year-olds they consider to be cluelessly out of touch.
Recently, however, teenagers and 20-somethings have turned that snide sentiment into a positive challenge directed at doomsayers of all ages who claim nothing can be done to stop runaway global warming: “OK, doomer,” these young climate activists respond. It’s their shorthand way of saying to do-nothing fatalists: Give up if you want, but please step aside while we organize and mobilize for climate sanity and environmental progress.
Our globe’s fast-warming, catastrophe-creating climate is more than just another issue: It has become a generational cause for young people. Indeed, 62% of young voters support totally phasing out fossil fuels, and they’re channeling their anger about official inaction toward both political parties. Such feisty grassroots groups as Gen-Z for Change, Zero Hour, Black Girl Environmentalist and Our Children’s Trust are on the front lines — in the face of power, and on the move.
As in all progressive struggles — from civil rights to labor to environmental justice — progress comes from sticking with principle, building incrementally on local victories and persevering against moneyed reactionaries.
Already, one breakthrough by these young climate activists was made this year in deep-red, rural Montana. In a case filed by Our Children’s Trust, 16 children, ages 2-18, charged that a state law took away their right to challenge energy projects that increase global warming. Noting that Montana’s constitution establishes a right to “a clean and healthful environment,” state Judge Kathy Seeley ruled for the children… and for a clean, healthy climate future.
Progress is not made by spectators and cynics, but by activists. And those who say that activism can’t produce change should not interrupt those who’re doing it.
The Rattiest Right-Wing Congress Critter
Vangunu, one of the Solomon Islands, is home to a giant species of rodent called the vika. Astonishingly, this rare and very large rat has jaws so powerful it can bite through a coconut shell!
That made me think of Rep. Jim Jordan, the GOP’s rattiest far-right-wing Congress critter. There is no documented proof that this extremist partisan was raised on Vangunu, but he sure keeps gnawing on Joe and Hunter Biden, desperately trying to crack open a scandal that simply doesn’t exit. Vikas are powerful, but they’ve not been accused of being smart.
Jordan, the former coach of a boy’s wrestling team, now has his team of House Republicans in a choke hold, draining national media attention to his goofy obsession with impeaching Joe. Impeach him for what? Well, says Jordan, we’re looking for a reason.
He has it bass-ackwards — real impeachment proceedings start with specific charges of an official’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But Coach Jordan is perverting that constitutional requirement by first accusing Biden of high crimes, then holding hearings in hopes of finding one. But poor Jim — it turns out to be easier for him to bite through a coconut than to fabricate a Biden crime.
But Jordan keeps gnawing, wasting Congress’ time, staff and credibility (plus millions of taxpayer dollars) scuttling down trails that go nowhere. Meanwhile, as he and the GOP House prioritize their clownish political agenda, they can’t perform the basics of government, which is simply to keep essential public services funded and functioning.
Unable to govern, Republican leaders abruptly stopped working in the House in early December, saying they’ll get serious next year. But, uh-oh, the vika congressman has just announced he’ll hold more impeachment hearings next year so he can keep gnawing at the Biden coconut.
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, “Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow,” Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.
He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations and on the web.
Overcoming a major fundraising gap, accusations that he would “defund” the police and public polling that predicted his defeat, progressive Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, won a hotly contested race for mayor of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city.
Johnson, who is a Black leftist and former schoolteacher, defeated former CEO of Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, a white technocrat at the conservative edge of the contemporary Democratic coalition.
Johnson’s victory in one of the starkest ideological proxy battles in the annals of recent municipal politics is a historic achievement for the activist left that is likely to have ripple effects across the county. Its significance for intra-Democratic Party politics is rivaled perhaps only by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise ouster of then-Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.
That Johnson prevailed amid an uptick in crime and economic uncertainty that has strengthened the hand of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party in the past three years is that much more remarkable.
In remarks to supporters on Tuesday night, Johnson extended an olive branch to Vallas’ voters, promising that he would be their mayor, too. But he made it clear that he will not let that slow his efforts to make Chicago a more equitable and livable city.
“We will not allow the politics of old to turn us around,” Johnson declared.
“We are building a better, stronger, safer Chicago. We’re doing it together,” he continued. “It’s a multicultural, multi-generational movement that has literally captured the imagination of not just the city of Chicago but the rest of the world.”
Since the start of the runoff, Vallas raised about $13 million to Johnson’s $7 million. Even that level of cash would not have been possible for Johnson without the support of the Chicago Teachers Union and other labor organizations that were responsible for 90% of the money he raised over the course of the entire campaign.
Johnson’s candidacy was the culmination of a decade of organizing and political institution-building by the CTU. His win over Vallas, a charter school proponent and outspoken critic of CTU, likewise solidifies a leftward shift in education policy that has gained steam over the same period.
“CTU’s influence in politics is absolutely crucial to his victory,” said Tom Bowen, a Chicago Democratic consultant who advised Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s unsuccessful reelection campaign.
Vallas, who was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, the city’s main police union, hammered Johnson relentlessly for his sympathy for calls to “defund the police” in 2020. Johnson interpreted the slogan as a desire to reallocate funding from law enforcement to social programs that attack the root causes of crime.
As a mayoral candidate, however, Johnson promised not to cut a dime of police spending and issued dubiously worded denials that he had ever embraced “defund the police” in the first place.
But unlike Vallas, Johnson did not promise to increase police funding or fill the 1,600-person backlog that the Chicago Police Department faces relative to its 2019 staffing levels.
He instead proposed redirecting wasteful or unnecessary parts of the police budget to add 200 more detectives to the police force through internal promotion.
Johnson also ran on raising taxes on businesses and affluent households to fund a host of social programs that he billed as the surest route to lower crime in the long run. Key parts of his agenda include reopening shuttered mental health clinics, doubling the city’s summer jobs program for young people and sparing city taxpayers another property tax hike.
The son of a Christian preacher from Elgin, Illinois, Johnson employed soaring oratory to appeal to Chicagoans’ compassionate ideals. Anyone paying a moment’s notice to the race knew that Johnson planned to “invest in people.”
“If we’re going to get a better, stronger, safer Chicago, we have to do what safe American cities do, and they invest in people,” Johnson said in a televised debate against Vallas on March 8.
That message resonated, including among many older and more moderate Black voters who Vallas courted.
LaTrell Rush, a resident of the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, told HuffPost that her priorities for a mayor would be to “stop the killing” and provide better resources for people with mental illnesses.
“Paul ― I’m not connecting with his vibes,” Rush said. “With Brandon, my vibes connect.”
Arjette James-Wallace, a retired emergency medical technician from West Englewood, walked out of the room when Vallas addressed the congregation of New Beginnings Church on March 26. The church’s pastor, Rev. Corey Brooks, had endorsed Vallas, but James-Wallace backed Johnson, whom she described as the “lesser of two evils.”
James-Wallace liked Johnson’s plan to fund mental health clinics and disliked Vallas’ hysteria about crime, which she said reflected a white racial bias. “When it started affecting people not of color, then they want to put it on the news,” she said.
Other voters supporting Johnson simply did not believe that he would be able to defund the police, even if he wanted to do so.
“I don’t think Brandon’s going to do that,” said Ahmed Hattab, an IT specialist living in northwest Chicago’s Belmont-Cragin neighborhood. “It’s not that easy to do.”
Hattab blamed what he sees as the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement for making police afraid to do their jobs. But his 17-year-old daughter, Jenin, who accompanied him to the polls, helped convince her father to support Johnson.
“He’s the kind of person who starts from the bottom,” Hattab said. “And he worked with the schools a lot.”
Johnson is due to succeed Lightfoot, the city’s first Black woman mayor and first openly gay mayor.
Paul Vallas, center, celebrates a strong showing in the first round of voting on Feb. 28 that enabled him to proceed to a runoff against Johnson on Tuesday.
Nam Y. Hu/Associated Press
Amid unrelenting criticism from the left and right and public outcry over the crime rate, Lightfoot did not survive the first round of Chicago’s instant-runoff elections on Feb. 28.
Johnson’s rise was likely made possible by a fateful miscalculation that Lightfoot made. The incumbent mayor largely ignored Johnson during the first round, focusing her resources instead on cutting down U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), who ultimately came in fourth place.
In the runoff against Vallas, Johnson consolidated his existing support among largely young and white progressive voters on the city’s North Side while adding to his coalition in the majority-Black precincts on the South and West sides where Lightfoot was dominant in February.
To achieve the latter, Johnson succeeded in framing the race as a choice between an heir of the Black civil rights movement and a reactionary Republican posing as a “lifelong Democrat.” He enlisted the support of local Black icons like Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., alongside national Black surrogates like Rev. Al Sharpton and House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.).
Vallas’ long trail of impolitic comments on conservative talk shows — from his 2009 admission that he was “more of a Republican than a Democrat” to more recent remarks disparaging former President Barack Obama — made Johnson’s job easier. And while Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) stayed out of the race, Vallas’ criticism of Pritzker’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Pritzker’s team to take a swipe at Vallas.
Johnson and Vallas are “both candidates who come from their bases, and they’re both candidates that are flawed,” Bowen said. “The winner is the one that essentially covered up those flaws best.”
As hard as the campaign was for Johnson, the challenges that await him in City Hall are perhaps even more formidable. He stands to inherit the same public safety crisis and fiscal challenges as Lightfoot and possibly face even more political opposition. The Chicago City Council, which is expected to be more moderate than Johnson, recently voted to expand its power vis-a-vis the mayor.
Bowen predicted that forces outside of Johnson’s control would force him to disappoint his base and govern more from the middle.
“An odd thing about Chicago politics is that the extreme left hates you and the extreme right hates you, which just automatically forces you to the center,” he said.
But some of Johnson’s allies have already indicated that they are aware of the limitations that Johnson will face once in office.
“People will have everyone else believe that if Brandon becomes mayor, that, magically, generations of underfunding, generations of segregation, generations of an equitable application of school funding is suddenly going to be over,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told HuffPost in an interview in late March. “That’s not going to happen.”
In that way, Johnson’s mayoralty is a “starting point” rather than an “endpoint,” she added.
The Democratic candidate’s defeat in the general election in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District was a double blow for progressives, at once helping give Republicans their razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and also denying the left a chance to show that one of their own could prevail in a marginal seat after ousting a centrist incumbent in a primary.
Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a regional emergency response coordinator and attorney, lost to Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, in the Nov. 8 election.
McLeod-Skinner had become the Democratic nominee after ousting Rep. Kurt Schrader, a business-friendly centrist, in the state’s closed primary election in May.
McLeod-Skinner’s biggest gripes against Schrader were that he was too oppositional to President Joe Biden and too cozy with corporate America.
The Democratic establishment “always says, ‘You can beat these shithead Dems like Schrader, but then you lose us the seat,’” a progressive strategist, who was active in a coalition working on McLeod-Skinner’s behalf, told HuffPost in September.
A win for McLeod-Skinner gave progressives a chance to “put a lie to that,” said the strategist, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “If we can pull it off, it’s sort of the perfect one.”
McLeod-Skinner now joins a short list of swing-district progressive candidates to prevail against establishment favorites in contentious Democratic primaries ― and then lose a general-election bid to a Republican. Other recent examples are Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Dana Balter in New York and Randy Bryce in Wisconsin.
“Regardless of why this happened, the reality is that Republicans and Democrats will leverage this against progressives,” said Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State University who analyzes Oregon politics. “Both moderate Democrats and Republicans in the Pacific Northwest looking to this race now have ammunition to argue that progressives can’t win in the way that they purport.”
Narratives aside, though, the question of why McLeod-Skinner lost to Chavez-DeRemer is complicated.
“Ultimately this comes down to who had the money to get their message out and who had the money to counterattack.”
– Leah Greenberg, Indivisible Project
Moderates, who maintain that Schrader or another centrist would have had an easier time against Chavez-DeRemer, and progressives, who note that McLeod-Skinner got limited help from Democratic super PACs, have arguments in their favor.
“While there are no guarantees that Schrader, a moderate incumbent, would have won, it seems likely that he would have,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president of the centrist group Third Way.
Bennett noted that virtually all non-incumbent progressive candidates who won their House races this year did so in “navy blue,” or heavily Democratic, districts. He cited the cases of Reps.-elect Greg Casar (Texas), Jazmine Crockett (Texas), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.) and Delia Ramirez (Ill.).
“The implications therefore are clear as a bell: If the left is interested in winning elections and creating majorities, they will not run against Democrats like Kurt Schrader, a strong supporter of President Biden, in places where they simply cannot win,” he said.
At the same time, progressives note that, among other confounding factors, McLeod-Skinner did not get the support of House Democrats’ main super PAC, the House Majority PAC. House Republicans’ super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, by contrast, spent nearly $7 million in the race, contributing to a massive spending advantage for Chavez-DeRemer.
“Ultimately this comes down to who had the money to get their message out and who had the money to counterattack,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible Project, whose political arm endorsed McLeod-Skinner in the primary. (Indivisible Action, the political group, funded a small direct-mail initiative for McLeod-Skinner in the general election.)
“We didn’t have a fair test because in a fair test, we’d actually have a candidate who was resourced to run the race through the finish line,” she added.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) lost the support of influential local Democrats for breaking with President Joe Biden on a handful of priorities.
Tom Williams/Getty Images
A Flawed Incumbent Turned Sore Loser
Seeking a seventh term in Congress in 2020, Schrader faced a typically weak Republican opponent. The GOP nominee, Amy Ryan Courser, spent slightly more than one-tenth of what he spent.
Still, Schrader received 52% of the vote, defeating Courser by less than 7 percentage points. Biden, by contrast, won 53.6% of the vote in Schrader’s district, besting then-President Donald Trump there by nearly 10 points.
Despite this discrepancy, Schrader joined other moderate Democrats in blaming progressive rhetoric and policies for the party’s lackluster performance in House elections in 2020.
“When [voters] see the far left that gets all the news media attention, they get scared,” he told The Washington Post. “They’re very afraid that this will become a super-nanny state, and their ability to do things on their own is going to be taken away.”
Schrader went on to become one of the biggest dissenters in the House Democratic Caucus, playing an oppositional role more common among Democrats in Republican-leaning districts.
He likened the speedy House impeachment of Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol to a “lynching” before walking that comment back and apologizing. He was one of only two Democrats to vote against the House’s version of the American Rescue Plan Act (Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill), though he went on to approve the version sent back by the Senate.
And most significant, Schrader was one of three Democrats to vote in committee against legislation empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices for seniors.
Although the legislation was already a weaker version of what House Democrats passed in 2019, Democratic leaders had to water down the bill further to mollify Schrader, an heir to the Pfizer fortune and top recipient of pharmaceutical industry PAC money, and a handful of like-minded Democrats. Among other concessions, the compromise that became law reduced the roster of drugs subject to potential negotiation and postponed the effective date of the changes to 2026.
“He stood with Pharma against the will of voters who overwhelmingly want action, and the most effective possible action taken, to lower prescription drug prices,” David Mitchell, president of the group Patients for Affordable Drugs, told HuffPost in April.
“I was better positioned to win the general than Schrader, given his past underperformance.”
– Jamie McLeod-Skinner, Democratic candidate for Congress
To Schrader’s critics on the left, the lack of a political rationale for his decisions ― a point of contrast with, say, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s defense of the coal industry ― was especially galling. The vast majority of the public supports letting Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices for seniors, which is why it appears so frequently in vulnerable Democrats’campaign ads.
Due to redistricting, Schrader had not represented much of Oregon’s new 5th Congressional District, which went south and southeast from Portland rather than south and west along the coast.
The seat in which Schrader would have to run for reelection was less Democratic. Biden carried the new district by 8.8 points rather than the 9.8 points he’d carried the older district by.
But before Schrader would face off against any Republican, he had to contend with a restive contingent of progressives in the Portland suburbs and the greater Bend area, many of whom were unfamiliar with him.
McLeod-Skinner had a following in Deschutes County, where Bend is located, thanks to her 2018 run for Congress and 2020 run for secretary of state. She capitalized on local discontent ― and lack of familiarity ― with Schrader, picking up the support of four county Democratic parties and numerous labor unions.
Asked to explain the local upswell against Schrader, Judy Stiegler, a former Democratic state representative from Bend, told HuffPost a year ago, “It isn’t just that he is more moderate, but he has been oppositional” to key elements of Biden’s agenda.
Schrader nonetheless had every advantage imaginable against McLeod-Skinner, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s expertise and the support of Biden, who made Schrader his first endorsement of the cycle. Schrader spent more than five times what McLeod-Skinner spent and got an additional boost from super PACs that spent nearly $2 million on his behalf.
When the mid-May primary came around, Chavez-DeRemer clinched the Republican nomination before McLeod-Skinner’s race against Schrader was called.
Responding to her win, Republican TV commentator Rebecca Tweed said, “If it’s between her and Congressman Schrader, Lori Chavez-DeRemer has a better chance of taking that seat.”
McLeod-Skinner ended up defeating Schrader by nearly 10 percentage points in the primary.
Although Tweed was relatively vague when explaining why she thought McLeod-Skinner would be a more formidable opponent than Schrader, McLeod-Skinner and her allies point to, among other things, his poor showing in the primary as evidence of his weakness as a campaigner.
“I was better positioned to win the general than Schrader, given his past underperformance … and polling showed his high unfavorables, based on his record and broken relationships,” McLeod-Skinner told HuffPost in a lengthy email response to questions about the election results.
McLeod-Skinner and her allies also lament that Schrader sought to turn his claims that McLeod-Skinner would be less competitive in a general election into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Schrader never endorsed McLeod-Skinner, and he cast doubt on her electability shortly after losing the primary, predicting in a television interview that “the red wave begins in Oregon ― Oregon’s 5th District.”
Days before the general election, he told The Washington Post he was still undecided between the two candidates.
In Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, by contrast, the more progressive primary candidate, Doyle Canning, united behind Democratic nominee Val Hoyle, who is now the congresswoman-elect, McLeod-Skinner noted.
“The inability to pivot from a competitive primary to a unified general election cost Democrats the presidency in 2016 and may have cost Democrats OR-05 in 2022,” McLeod-Skinner wrote to HuffPost.
A fire burns outside the federal courthouse in Portland in August 2020. Backlash to civil unrest in the city was a political obstacle for many Oregon Democrats this election cycle.
Noah Berger/Associated Press
Left-Wing Associations
Of course, Schrader’s dissension was not the only reason that McLeod-Skinner failed to win over the most conservative elements of the Democratic coalition.
In other cases, stakeholders were simply more wary of her progressive views than they had been of Schrader’s.
Local 29, a regional branch of the Iron Workers union, was the only labor union to endorse Chavez-DeRemer. The union disapproved of McLeod-Skinner’s opposition to the Jordan Cove Energy Project, a now-shelved proposal to build a natural gas pipeline across Oregon that would be used to export natural gas to Asia.
The union, which endorsed Oregon Gov.-elect Tina Kotek and backed Schrader in the past, was also impressed with Chavez-DeRemer’s professed support for union rights as the daughter of a member of the Teamsters. She promised to support continued application of the Davis-Bacon Act, which creates a floor on wages for federal construction contracts, and even said she would vote for the PRO Act, a bill protecting organizing rights that has very little Republican support.
“We need pro-prevailing wage Republicans in office,” Lorne Bulling, Local 29’s political coordinator, told HuffPost. “And we really value the need for an open discussion [about energy] and especially having all parties at the table, not just extreme environmental groups.”
Perhaps more significant, the same public backlash to rising crime, homelessness and left-wing activism in Portland that kept the gubernatorial race so close hurt McLeod-Skinner and other candidates down-ballot as well.
“Those issues really did matter and in a district like this might have made the difference,” said Nichols, the Ohio State historian.
Portland, long a byword for left-wing culture, has experienced an uptick in violent crime similar to other U.S. cities in recent years.
But other aspects of what the city has endured are unique. Peaceful marches following the May 25, 2020, police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis gave way to more radical demonstrations, including a prolonged and often violent protest outside the federal courthouse that prompted a controversial intervention by the federal government.
Seeking to address a growing homelessness and drug addiction crisis in Portland, the state also decriminalized hard drugs without even what many supporters of the policy believed was adequate funding or planning to realize the policy’s goals.
“People are scared to go [to downtown Portland],” said Jeff Eager, a former Republican mayor of Bend. “And it’s not just a partisan thing. It’s a ‘am I going to be safe’ thing.”
“The fact that Democrats won’t admit that it’s worse hurts them.”
– Jeff Eager, former mayor of Bend, Oregon
Though Oregon’s 5th District contains only a sliver of the city of Portland, the city’s reputation looms large ― even three hours away in Bend, where some longtime residents fear the slightest hints of a Portland-like trajectory.
Portland is “just worse” than it has been in the past, Eager said. “And the fact that Democrats won’t admit that it’s worse hurts them.”
McLeod-Skinner never embraced the most politically radioactive components of the left-wing criminal justice agenda. For example, she has never been on record calling to “defund” the police.
But McLeod-Skinner, who lives with her wife on a plot of farmland in central Oregon, also had a history of saying things that, though uncontroversial in progressive circles, nonetheless made it easier for Republicans to tie her to the most radical forces in Portland. For example, in August 2020, she tweeted that the rioting that erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake reflected “righteous anger.”
The opposition dossier that national Republicans assembled on McLeod-Skinner for use by Chavez-DeRemer and GOP super PACs also noted that the Working Families Party and Indivisible, early supporters of McLeod-Skinner, have endorsed calls to “defund the police.” They also highlighted McLeod-Skinner’s December 2021 interview with HuffPost in which she refused to say whether she supported reducing police funding in order to free up money for other public safety programs.
A barrage of TV ads by Chavez-DeRemer fused all of those elements ― as well as McLeod-Skinner’s stint as a city council member in Santa Clara, California ― to depict McLeod-Skinner as a far-left extremist from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chavez-DeRemer’s second TV ad placed the phrases “defund the police” and “Green New Deal” alongside a photo of McLeod-Skinner as a narrator branded her “an out-of-touch San Francisco area politician pretending to be Oregonian.”
In one of eight ads that the Congressional Leadership Fund aired in the district, the GOP super PAC made it sound like McLeod-Skinner’s description of the situation in Kenosha was about Portland.
“When the mob raged, Jamie McLeod-Skinner sided with them,” the narrator says as an arrow on screen points to rioters and looters marauding city streets at night. “She called it ‘righteous anger.’”
The ad also misrepresented McLeod-Skinner’s praise for Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s work ousting federal law enforcement officials from Portland.
“McLeod-Skinner even praised Kate Brown’s disastrous riot response, saying, ‘Good job, Governor,’” the narrator says. “Really, Jamie?”
Rep.-elect Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.) succeeded in tagging her Democratic opponent as an extremist while evading similar branding for her opposition to full abortion rights.
Steve Dipaola/Associated Press
A Cash Disadvantage
It took McLeod-Skinner a few weeks to air a TV ad countering the narrative that she was an anti-police extremist. She rolled out a 30-second rebuttal spot with the former police chief of Bend on Oct. 7, at least a month after the first CLF ad tying her to the “defund the police” movement.
Both campaigns say that the polling in the race shifted in Chavez-DeRemer’s favor after the first few weeks of attack ads against McLeod-Skinner.
McLeod-Skinner’s rebuttal ad “took too long to air and did not have sufficient funds pushing it out,” McLeod-Skinner admitted to HuffPost, saying that the campaign had to wait for the former police chief to become available to film the spot.
Nicholas Trainer, a veteran Republican consultant who advised Chavez-DeRemer, offered a similar assessment, pointing to internal polling showing that Chavez-DeRemer had succeeded in defining McLeod-Skinner as a cop hater by the time the rebuttal ad aired.
But he also maintained that there was only so much McLeod-Skinner could do to moderate her image after years of running for public office as a staunch progressive.
“There was always the lingering activist sensibility about her,” Trainer said.
Trainer said that Schrader would have been “a lot harder” to beat. “We were able to occupy a ton of the middle in this campaign that we would have been fighting over with Kurt Schrader,” he said.
Campaigning for moderate voters meant characterizing Chavez-DeRemer as a suburban mom, small-business owner and trailblazer in Latino politics. Chavez-DeRemer and Rep.-elect Andrea Salinas (D) will be the first two Latina members of Congress for Oregon.
“We spent a lot of time talking about generational poverty and how we get more people of color to get more generational wealth,” said George Carrillo, a former Oregon state health official and Democratic candidate for governor who endorsed Chavez-DeRemer. “With those conversations I had, there was no way I couldn’t support her.”
Carrillo, who lives just outside the district, told HuffPost that his attempts to reach McLeod-Skinner for a similar conversation were not successful.
When it comes to the actual policy, Chavez-DeRemer is likely more conservative than the median voter in the district in key respects. During the GOP primary, she touted the legitimate concerns of “millions of Americans that doubt the integrity of the 2020 election” and suggested that those concerns were to blame for the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the general election, she refused to say whether Biden won the race fairly, conceding only that “Biden is the president of the United States.”
Likewise, Chavez-DeRemer supports restricting abortion rights. In May, she said she would support “heartbeat” legislation, which generally means prohibiting an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
“I don’t think the lesson is that a progressive can’t win.”
– Christopher McKnight Nichols, Ohio State history professor
But Chavez-DeRemer succeeded in avoiding Democrats’ efforts to paint her as an anti-abortion extremist. She claimed that she opposes federal abortion restrictions and wants the decision left up to the states.
The lack of an imminent threat to Oregon’s permissive abortion laws may have reduced the salience of her stances on the issue.
“If we were in a state that had a trigger law or had a Republican legislature that was moving toward doing something, that would have been an issue for us,” Trainer said.
The Republican spending advantage also made it harder to define Chavez-DeRemer one way or another on the airwaves.
“I don’t think the lesson is that a progressive can’t win,” said Nichols, who previously worked at Oregon State University. “I think the lesson is that it was a tight race. They should have invested a lot more resources in it.”
McLeod-Skinner did not suffer from the anemic fundraising of a fairy-tale progressive upstart by any stretch.
As of late October, McLeod-Skinner had raised about $1 million more than Chavez-DeRemer. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), often criticized by progressives for being inadequately supportive of left-leaning candidates, spent $2 million on McLeod-Skinner’s behalf, including more than $1.8 million on TV ads.
In a statement about its involvement in the race, DCCC spokesperson Johanna Warshaw called Chavez-DeRemer an “anti-choice extremist” whose “career in Congress will be short-lived.”
But Republican super PACs heavily outspent Democratic super PACs in the district and, critically, began advertising weeks before their Democratic counterparts.
Not only did the Congressional Leadership Fund spend $7 million, its virtually bottomless coffers enabled it to get on air in early September without any concern that it would run out of money.
In the meantime, progressives are fuming at House Majority PAC, CLF’s Democratic analogue, for failing to spend in the race. “National Democratic PACs walked away and left Jamie to twist in the wind,” Joe Dinkin, national campaigns director for the Working Families Party, said in a statement. (Dinkin led a last-minute super PAC effort that spent about $600,000 on McLeod-Skinner’s behalf.)
The House Majority PAC’s internal polling never showed McLeod-Skinner leading, however. And it was forced to put out fires in neighboring Oregon seats with fewer resources than it would have liked for what turned out to be a far more favorable cycle than it had anticipated.
“Given what was believed by many to be a very challenging political environment … House Majority PAC had to make strategic resource allocation decisions, with many of our investments making a significant impact in races across the country,” HMP spokesperson C.J. Warnke said in a statement.
Logan Bolinger is a lawyer and the author of a free weekly newsletter about the intersection of Bitcoin, macroeconomics, geopolitics and law.
As Bitcoin continues to infiltrate U.S. politics and policy, debates about which political party is more naturally aligned with the orange ethos have proliferated and intensified. The increasing number of self-described Progressives entering the space has catalyzed some heated discussions about how Bitcoin fits into the ideology of the political left. Is Bitcoin Progressive? Is it fundamentally not Progressive? Is it something else? To understand why these may not even be the right questions and why many (though not all) Progressives seem to struggle with Bitcoin, we should refine some of the partisan language and identifiers that tend to constrain our thinking. To the point, it’s high time we disentangle capital “P” Progressivism from lowercase “p” progressivism.
I firmly believe that Bitcoin, though harmonious with purportedly Progressive ideas, ultimately transcends the ossified, two-party paradigm we have in U.S. politics. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that skepticism from the politically left-leaning cohort, specifically Progressives, remains acute and intractable. So what’s the problem here? Why do folks who identify politically as Progressives vilify Bitcoin, a technology that credibly addresses many of their professed concerns and priorities? It’s a vexing question and it has been examined by a number of Bitcoiners who have come to the space from the left (myself included). There is certainly an element of over-trusting the machinery — and overestimating the competence — of the state and misunderstanding how money works, but I think there are some other things going on that are discussed less. I want to put some of those thoughts on the table.
First, I think it’s useful to articulate some definitions, since “Progressive” connotes different ideas to different people. Let’s begin by distinguishing between progressivism and Progressivism. While it probably seems like these two concepts are synonymous, their real-time divergence is an obvious issue with the latter as a politically formalized advancement and advocacy of the former.
Let’s start with lowercase “p” progressive. What does this mean? I would argue that it ultimately refers to prioritizing the improvement of aggregate quality of life and a willingness to modify or transcend existing systems to do so. This is to say the ideas and the ideals drive the bus, and whichever tools are most useful are the ones most readily utilized. I’m aware that this definition is a bit loose, but I think that’s part of the point. Personally, I would argue that quality of life requires and demands the preservation and maintenance of a certain degree of sovereignty. I would also argue that quality of life doesn’t have to be a zero-sum, closed system in which the only way to increase it for one cohort is to transfer it from another.
Capital “P” Progressivism, as it refers to the more politically formalized subset of Democrats, is wholly different. Like all political affiliations in America, I think this has evolved into an identity, and one that defines itself mostly by contrast to what it is not. In the same way that Republicans have drifted from conservatism and Democrats have drifted from liberalism, Progressives have drifted from progressivism.
Whereas no one expects Republicans or Democrats to necessarily operate with an uncorrupted philosophical coherence and/or moral consistency, I think there are many who do sort of expect Progressives to act in that manner. However, like both Republicans and Democrats more broadly, I would argue Progressives have drifted from some of the first principles that putatively underpin their ideology. This type of drift seems inescapable in our politics and is an argument for trying to break through and move beyond our old partisan paradigms.
In sum, progressive does not equal Progressive. Sometimes it does, but it is certainly not true that Progressives are inherently or invariably exemplars of progressive ideas.
If we think about all of the innovative, ingenious and yes, progressive ways in which Bitcoin can be used as a tool to address issues like the climate, wealth inequality, equal financial access and general human freedom, we might wonder why Progressives aren’t heartily endorsing its growth and use. One way of accounting for this seeming dissonance is simply that Progressives are not always the paragons of progressive ideas.
In fact, contrary to common belief, Progressives do not have an authoritative, epistemic monopoly on what is or is not progressive. Capital “P” Progressivism is a politically committed identity; lowercase “p” progressivism is political in the sense that everything is political and has political implications, but it’s not an identity. You do not have to label yourself as a Progressive to believe in and advocate for progressive ideas. Lowercase “p” progressive ideas do not require an identity, nor do they bestow one. It’s the difference between something closer to a meritocratic marketplace of ideas and a top-down, dictated meritocracy sustained by purity testing.
Moreover, I think it’s worth questioning how much of the Progressives’ economic program is lowercase “p” progressive, in the sense of seeking to transcend or transmute current entrenched systems, and how much of it is just iteration on an FDR-style framework, utilizing the same set of tools that created the problems in the first place. In some ways, I think Progressives are forever seeking the perfect apotheosis of Rooseveltian policy, tinkering more and more extensively until class conditions are calibrated perfectly. I could argue that Republicans similarly attempt to resuscitate Reaganism, though the coherence, applicability and meaning of both of these frameworks get emptied out and distorted over time, like a generational game of policy telephone.
I think it’s telling that the intellectual bogeyman of the right is still Karl Marx. I think it’s telling that most salient influences and forefathers of the figureheads of the left — whether more traditional, e.g., Joe Biden, or more Progressive, e.g., Bernie Sanders — are relics of the earlier 20th century.
Progressives, like Republicans and more traditional Democrats, are seemingly shackled to old frameworks, mining them eternally for new solutions.
Years ago, when I was in law school, my constitutional law professor began his course by asking us if we wanted the blue pill or the red pill of constitutional jurisprudence. Those of us who got the reference enthusiastically opted for the proverbial red pill, which he was going to administer to us anyway.
The red pill — the truth behind the artifice, per our professor — was that the U.S. Constitution is an old, increasingly inapplicable document that was never meant to remain comparatively unchanged and religiously adhered to for centuries. Which isn’t to say it’s not useful, historically momentous and foundationally solid. Most other countries have modified founding documents at various points, as lived experience dramatically changes over the course of centuries and compels more relevant guidance and renewed compacts, while our Constitution has remained relatively fixed, particularly after the initial flurry of amendments.
I think being progressive means being willing to think beyond the increasingly dusty set of frameworks we’ve been living with and allowing our ingenuity to lead us down new paths. In this context I am constantly thinking of Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson’s admonition that “there is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
Similarly, with respect to old frameworks and to partisan identities that are effectively shortcuts to thinking, doctrinairism is almost always an inhibition to progress.
So I care what Elizabeth Warren and her ilk say about Bitcoin only insofar as political perceptions matter in the short term for the type of regulatory environment we choose to create. But Warren and other Progressives do not get to dictate what is progressive by decree.
There is nothing more progressive, for example, than the work being done by folks like Troy Cross, Shaun Connell, Daniel Batten, Margot Paez, Nathaniel Harmon and so many others who are using Bitcoin as a tool for addressing climate change. Approval or endorsement (or the lack thereof) from Progressives does not change this.
To conclude, I think when we ask why Progressives don’t seem to take to Bitcoin — a technology that is inarguably pretty lowercase “p” progressive — we are presupposing that Progressives will always endorse progressive ideas. And I think this is simply not true, which is why I want to continue to press on what I think is a growing distinction between Progressivism and progressivism, particularly as it relates to economics and Bitcoin.
Though it may not be Progressive, Bitcoin is progressive. This is why, despite a warmer embrace from Republicans, Bitcoin does not belong to them. Classically Republican, Reagan/Bush-style family-values paternalism is, after all, still paternalism — just a different flavor than that of their political counterparts.
Ultimately, I think the stagnating two-party paradigm in America is precluding us from coalescing around promising tools — like Bitcoin — to address our most pressing issues. I think trying to claim Bitcoin for either side of the partisan divide is one of Naval Ravikant’s proverbial stupid games that yield only stupid prizes.
In my opinion, it is more useful to pursue lowercase “p” progressive values, meaning that which advances the highest aggregate quality of life and is not constrained by current systemic norms. This pursuit foregrounds ideas regardless of which partisan identity group feels more affinity for them.
This is a guest post by Logan Bolinger. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
