Brandon Wins: Thoughts from Sept 2022 Before Endorsement
I originally wrote this back on 9/12/22 to help me think through how I felt about 33rd Ward Working Families (33WF) and United Working Families (UWF) endorsing Brandon Johnson. Honestly, my initial reaction was that it was a bad idea. But after patiently talking it over with comrades, especially my partner and super-organizer (Caitlin B), I sat with different perspectives.
Meditating on the idea, I arrived at the conclusion that we needed to endorse him. But it was the conversations, meditation, and writing it out that helped me figure it out. With that in mind, I wanted to share my thoughts here which I was too cowardly to share with people at the time: partially as a record of what happened, but also as an example of the process one person took to arrive at their conclusion. I did voice a compressed version of this at both 33WF and UWF endorsement meetings.
I’m of two minds about endorsing Brandon, I’ll share my pros and cons for endorsement, starting with the cons.
Against
Politics in Chicago has been absolutely chaotic since 2019. They have been so unpredictable that I’ll bet Brandon could win. At face value, some folks might think that is a positive. “A good person in the seat of mayor could do good things.”
But in practice, I think the situation would be more complicated. For a leftwing politician to hold down an executive office like president, governor, or mayor: they need to have a social base that is organized enough to defend them while also pushing them forward. The reality is that at this moment, Chicago has a vibrant and impressive organized base. But in my opinion, we’re still too small to meaningfully provide a counter-weight to the pressures someone in an executive office would face from the capitalists, the police, the media, and the right-wing.
If we can’t provide a counter-weight, then whoever sits in the executive seat is faced with two choices: either stick to your principles and become a lame duck that might face economic and political unrest, or begin down the path of compromising principles away in order to try and avoid the unrest that the capitalists would use as ransom. In other words, a situation where we win an executive office before we’re ready to defend it (much less figure out how we would co-govern) sounds like a losing game.
While we’ve been in the City Council positions, we’ve been able to fight for concrete gains while also agitating. Because we’re not in the executive seat, we’ve been positioned to punch up at the mayor while the responsibility of being the boss of the city has remained on the mayor’s shoulders. But if we win, now our candidate is the boss. Now the responsibility is on our person. Now we might have to protest and denounce our own member, or risk moving backward in our commitment to our platform and our mission to build an alternative to the Democratic Party.
For
Politics isn’t just about winning or losing. Sometimes it’s about reading the moment, reading the excitement, and figuring out how to ride the wave without wiping out. I’m thinking of the Bernie campaign of 2016. If we followed the logic I outlined above, I would have tried to convince Bernie not to run. But in hindsight, we know that his campaign unleashed an excitement way beyond what anyone could have predicted, regardless of the consequences if he had won.
The reality is that, after several generations of awful Chicago mayors, Chicagoans would probably be extremely excited to see someone on the left to rally around. In particular, organizers would likely be inspired to participate in such a campaign. In other words, Brandon’s campaign could become an electoral center of gravity over the next 5.5 months. Many people new to politics might get pulled in and it will be essential that those of us with longer-term vision and radical politics are there to meet these new people and pull them into the long game.
Otherwise, they might just pop-in for the mayoral campaign and then go home when it’s over, potentially demoralized if we lose and potentially worse if we win and then we don’t live up to the promises. But if we can keep them in organizing spaces, inoculate them about these two possibilities, and win them to the politics of longer-term radical struggle, then we can grow our core of cadre.
Staying out of the mayoral race would be confusing to political outsiders and potentially lose us, or fence us away from, volunteers precisely when we could be seizing the moment and growing.
We would still face the same dangers if we actually win, but at least we would be larger and better positioned to face those dangers than if we stay out of the mayoral race. But for this to be effective, we would need to find tactful yet honest ways of communicating both the danger and the hope in this race.
Conclusion
Looking at this dialectically, it makes sense to endorse Brandon while holding firm to our independence and being prepared to challenge him, if he makes us, while hopefully developing a relationship of co-governance to avoid full-blown conflict between the movement and the mayor. Our ward has been the hotspot of pro-cop agitation and we need all of our allies and comrades to be united in defending Rossana, defending TNT, defending Defund, and resisting any attempt to roll back the political gains of the uprising.
If our comrades, including Brandon, backslide on this then they risk helping create a political opening for people to organize against us and steal our seat in the long term. Worse, backsliding risks the entire political project of building UWF as an independent political party. But by riding this wave carefully and honestly, we can come out stronger than ever because UWF and our IPOs walk away bigger and bolder.
