KS

It highlights a lot of what is going on. I think there’s a legitimate debate going on among the base of the Democratic Party: what is going to be the successful strategy? Shouldn’t we have what some people call, in quotes, “visionary pragmatism” — that we can only go this far, that we can’t challenge the entrenched norms of society because that can’t be done? “You can’t mobilize mass numbers of people, it can’t be done, so let’s go for something realistic.”

That’s a legitimate question. Two things are critical to recognize: first, no, actually, at this moment, the very thing that millions of young people are looking for is a real fight back. It’s the opposite of the approach that has worked for the last twenty years.

Look at the labor movement, of which I’m a member. Even among genuine well-meaning labor leaders, the habits that have formed around the consciousness of the past have the inertia of the past. Even among well-meaning people, we don’t have confidence that things can change.

The labor movement has taken an absolutely horrendous beating from the capitalist class, and the downfall of the living standards of people of color has been part and parcel of that — it didn’t happen separately. It was part of the process.

That inertia can prevent us from understanding that there are whole new generations that did not grow up in that period of demoralization. You will end up alienating them if you do not offer them a strategy that will allow them to really fight back.

The second thing, in some ways, I think, is more important to understand: the peddlers of these ideas of “visionary pragmatism” are not ordinary people! The peddlers of these ideas are members of the ruling class. They are people who have an interest in keeping the ruling class together, but who are smarter about it than the more out-of-touch and more conservative elements of the ruling class.

They understand that there is a hunger for change at the bottom, and they understand that they ignore that at their own peril. They want to co-opt it in some form or another.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that for establishment media and for the establishment Democratic politicians in Seattle — and Seattle has been for decades ruled by the Democratic establishment — every aspect of the city is dominated by the Democratic establishment.

For the establishment — it’s not just in my case, this is true in general — for an establishment that is trying to preserve a system that is now being roundly rejected by vast numbers of people, who are by their own volition rejecting what’s on offer to them, the ruling class has to find various ways of discrediting those ideas to keep people from thinking about how we could have a different kind of society.

The establishment, especially at this moment, when people are so alive to the realities of capitalism, the bitter realities of capitalism, the establishment cannot succeed in that goal by saying “you are wrong to want to end police violence, you are wrong to want racial equality.” They cannot win that battle that way. They want to find passive-aggressive ways of discrediting those ideas.

[My being] a straight white male would have made it easier for them to attack me. What is astounding is that they still tried it. In the reelection campaign, they poured in a lot of money to try and defeat us. Proportionately, we had to raise a lot of money. It was the most expensive race in Seattle city council history.

But who do you think the establishment ran against me? They ran an African-American woman who said exactly those things: I’m from the neighborhood, she’s not from here, and she wouldn’t know.

She said that at the exact same time that her campaign coffers were replete with money from every corporation you could think of that fought against fifteen dollars an hour. The CEO of Alaska Airlines donated the maximum amount to her — Alaska Airlines has been notorious for fighting and flouting the minimum wage law at Sea-Tac.

It was not only the corporate money that flowed into her campaign from donations, it was the PACs. The result of the election, after all of that? They had combined Democratic and Republican donations, and we still won.

That’s not to say it was easy. I don’t think we should be raising our glasses. We’re not going to win every battle on the left. But it was an example of how powerful it can be when you present an agenda that speaks to the needs of every community.