Hope in Chicago Offers a Lesson for San Diego
By Jim Miller
Last week in Chicago, Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, defeated fellow Democrat Paul Vallas, a former CEO of the Chicago schools who was endorsed by the Chicago police union and had the support of many local Republicans.
In an interesting parallel to the recent Los Angeles mayoral contest, the national media chatter leading up to the race seemed to have it preemptively pegged as an example of progressives losing because of their association with police reform. And, just as in Los Angeles, the progressive upended the corporate media narrative and won.
As the AP story on the race outlined:
Johnson’s victory in the nation’s third-largest city capped a remarkable trajectory for a candidate who was little known when he entered the race last year. He climbed to the top of the field with organizing and financial help from the politically influential Chicago Teachers Union and high-profile endorsements from progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sanders appeared at a rally for Johnson in the final days of the race . . .
Johnson argued that instead of investing more in policing and incarceration, the city should focus on mental health treatment, affordable housing for all and jobs for youth. He has proposed a plan he says will raise $800 million by taxing “ultrarich” individuals and businesses, including a per-employee “head tax” on employers and an additional tax on hotel room stays.
Thus, instead of running away from progressive positions, Johnson doubled down and overcame the reactionary anti-crime narrative by calling out his opponent as a “Republican in disguise” and insisting that the answer to crime and other social problems in our cities is best addressed by lifting up poor communities of color rather than over-policing them. As the New York Times piece on his victory noted, some Johnson supporters got behind him because he was seen as the “Bernie Democrat” who represented “an ideal.”
So, both in Chicago and in Wisconsin, where voters turned their state’s Supreme Court by electing a liberal who pledged to fight Republican extremism and support abortion rights, clear progressive principles mattered and helped win, not lose, elections.
While we see the Biden administration depressingly choosing to triangulate on climate, border policy, and more in classic Clintonite fashion, these races offer an alternative vision forward.
They are, in many ways, snapshots of better politics.
As the Guardian piece on last week’s electoral wins points out:
Several lessons can be learned from Tuesday’s results, progressive leaders say. They hope their victories send a message to Democratic party leaders about the enduring resonance of abortion access, the popularity of progressives’ message and the importance of long-term grassroots organizing. The wins also come at a vital moment for progressives, who have criticized Joe Biden’s recent move toward the political center on issues such as energy and crime.
So maybe, if the Democrats don’t want to demoralize a large slice of their base, the national party needs to rethink the recent move away from core progressive priorities.
Here in San Diego, as many in progressive and Democratic circles reel in the wake of the Fletcher scandal, the wins in Chicago and Wisconsin offer a corrective to the politics of personality and petty factionalism that far too often define local politics.
Rather than despair or recrimination, perhaps the wisest course of action is to remember that our politics should always be about people’s lives not individual politicians, movements not saviors, and, most importantly, principle not Machiavellian calculation about the next election.
And, as the case of Brandon Johnson illustrates, it might behoove those in local movements to continue to mentor grassroots activists to run from the bottom-up rather than looking for people we think will win and serve our interests even if they have never been in the trenches with us before they ran for office.
There will never be any guarantees as politicians are flawed humans (sometimes deeply so), as are most of us, but developing a bench of potential candidates informed more by an unambiguous history of adhering to social justice ideals rather than personal ambition might just help.
In sum, don’t mourn, keep organizing.