CHAPTER SEVEN

RED SCARES AND RADICAL IMAGINATION

KSHAMA SAWANT TOOK THE MICROPHONE AT HER VICTORY party on November 17, 2013, and called one of the Seattle region’s biggest employers an economic terrorist. “If Boeing executives insist on relocating the factories out of Washington,” she told a cheering crowd at the headquarters of Service Employees International Union Local 775, “the only response we can have to reject this blackmail is to tell the CEOs if you want to go, you can go. The machines are here, the workers are here, let us take this entire productive activity into democratic public ownership and retool the machines to produce mass transit.”¹

Yes, Kshama Sawant is that kind of socialist. And her speech, just after her election to the Seattle City Council, got a standing ovation. Local 775 had endorsed her opponent, incumbent Richard Conlin, but by the time the final vote count showed Sawant had won, the union was lending her its hall. She paused, grinning, to let her supporters clap. “We need to fight on behalf of the Boeing workers, we need to fight on behalf of Metro workers, we need to fight for $15 an hour, but that is not going to be enough,” she said. “We are fighting against the system of capitalism itself, and look how spectacularly it has failed in meeting even the most basic needs of human survival.”

A year and a half later, I sat in Sawant’s office in City Hall, listening to her recall the Boeing workers’ rally that had taken place the next night. The state legislature had just voted to give Boeing a package of tax breaks worth $8.7 billion, at the time the largest subsidy ever given to a single company in US history, and at the same time Boeing was demanding that its union workers give up their pensions—or else the company would move production to nonunion South Carolina, where Governor Nikki Haley had bragged about wearing high heels to kick the unions.² Haley, like Sawant, is of Indian descent, but there the similarities most definitely end. After riding the 2010 Tea Party wave into office, Haley had flaunted her hatred of worker organizations; Sawant, by contrast, argued that both Republicans and Democrats had abandoned working people. And Sawant’s election to the City Council seemed to be evidence that Americans, increasingly, were ready for answers outside of the previously accepted political consensus.³

Sawant came to socialism in 2009, after hearing a member of the group Socialist Alternative speak at a postelection event. “When he spoke it was everything that I was thinking about; it was an analysis of why we need to fight against capitalism and why we need an organization like Socialist Alternative, and for me it was like boom, it makes sense,” she said. Growing up in India, she had been “obsessed” with the problems of poverty and hunger. “It got more and more obvious as I got older that this was something systemic—it was not inevitable—meaning you could change the system and have a different kind of outcome.”

Until she encountered Socialist Alternative, she hadn’t found a political organization that made sense to her. Single-issue campaigns or nonprofits held little appeal. She moved to the United States at age twenty-two and worked as a computer programmer, but her questions about poverty and inequality led her back to school, where she earned a PhD in economics. She moved to Seattle and began teaching at Seattle Central Community College. That’s where she was when the Occupy movement broke out in Seattle in the fall of 2011. “I can hardly remember a day that I didn’t go—I would finish teaching my classes and then walk downtown to the occupation,” she said. When the city government wanted the encampment moved out of the public park it had taken over, Sawant helped negotiate space for the occupiers on the campus of Seattle Central.

When Occupy faded, Socialist Alternative began to consider new ways to get involved in politics. The 2012 election was looming, and the pressure was on for movement activists to get in line behind the Democratic Party. But what if they could demonstrate a different kind of political campaign, one that took issues seriously but was uncompromising about its anticapitalist politics and deliberately outside of the two major parties? Socialist Alternative, Sawant explained, is an activist organization, not a political party—it calls for an independent workers’ party—and so it took a serious debate for the Seattle group to decide that it wanted to run an electoral campaign. Sawant was even more surprised when her colleagues nominated her to be their candidate. “I was quite stunned,” she laughed. “Nobody can even say my name in this country. How are we going to make any impact with my name on the ballot sheet?”

David Goldstein was a writer for the Seattle alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger when Sawant ran her first campaign, which was for the state legislature. “We’re used to having what we call ‘clown socialists’ come in,” he told me, “who are there just to be angry and dour-faced and spout a little Marxist rhetoric about how corrupt the whole system is, and then that’s all they do—they don’t really run races.”

But Sawant, seeking The Stranger’s endorsement in her race against state representative Jamie Pedersen, seemed different. She had specific plans and could discuss the ins and outs of the budget. The Stranger staff felt that they had to endorse Pedersen, who had been a champion of the marriage equality measure on the ballot that year. But Goldstein suggested endorsing Sawant in another race, against the Speaker of the House, Frank Chopp, as a write-in candidate. They did, and she made it through the first round of both primaries. For the November election, Sawant chose the race against Chopp and went to court to make sure the ballot identified her as coming from Socialist Alternative. She lost the election to Chopp, but she still managed to win 29 percent of the vote with “Socialist” next to her name.

The City Council elections came up the following year and, buoyed by its success against a powerful statewide figure, Seattle Socialist Alternative decided to challenge Councilmember Richard Conlin. Meanwhile, halfway across the country in Minneapolis, another Socialist Alternative member with ties to Occupy, Ty Moore from Occupy Homes Minnesota, was running his own City Council race. “Ty at that moment, ironically, was our winnable campaign,” Sawant recalled. “This campaign was a long shot because this was a citywide campaign; that was a ward-based campaign and we were such underdogs at that time.”

“Running a viable campaign as a socialist isn’t just a matter of audacity, clever tactics, and the right program (though those are all crucial),” Moore said. “You need to have built up some kind of base in advance.” He won endorsement from SEIU’s Minnesota state council, immigrants groups, and worker centers, and ultimately lost by just 229 votes.⁴

Another campaign was heating up at the same time as the Seattle City Council race. For years, workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, in the nearby suburb of SeaTac, had been trying to organize, backed by several local unions. Alex Hoopes, a twenty-five-year veteran of the airline industry, was one of those workers. He had seen his job fall from a unionized, stable position with a living wage to a gig that started at $8.72 per hour. He worked as a baggage handler and ramp agent for AirServ, a contractor that provided staff to clean the planes, load them, and provide security. He had reached out to SEIU Local 6 about organizing, but the union was having little luck getting the airlines to come to the table and negotiate with the workers. Instead, the union and its allies moved to raise wages for the many low-wage workers at the airport and its surrounding hotels, restaurants, and other businesses by putting the wage issue before the voters. Hoopes collected petition signatures to put a $15 an hour measure on the SeaTac city ballot that fall. It was the first time that voters anywhere in the United States would consider a wage that high; only a few months before, striking fast-food workers calling for “$15 and a union” had begun the drumbeat on the streets of New York.

It wasn’t long ago that calling for a $15 an hour minimum wage would have gotten you branded a dangerous communist and laughed out of the political debate. But in 2013, members of Socialist Alternative thought it was their key to mainstream success. “We felt that the $15 demand was really going to fix itself on the consciousness of a large base of the working class nationally, not just in Seattle,” Sawant said.

Heather Weiner, a longtime labor movement strategist, was working on the SeaTac campaign at the time, and remembered the first time Sawant and Socialist Alternative arrived at a hearing on the $15 an hour measure. The SeaTac City Council had the option to adopt the measure rather than sending it to the ballot, and airport workers and local residents were lined up to speak. “Kshama and her crew showed up in their red shirts from Seattle and start giving socialist rhetoric,” Weiner said. “I remember I thought, ‘What are you doing?’ But the crowd loved her, and I thought, ‘All right, I don’t need to control this, I just need to sit back and relax and watch what happens here.’” The socialists, she said, were making her campaign look like the moderates in the room.

Back in Seattle, few people thought Sawant had a chance. Despite her vocal support for $15 an hour, most of organized labor endorsed the incumbent, Conlin. Some, though, recognized that there was an opening for someone who was prepared to challenge what Robert Cruickshank, a former aide to Mayor Mike McGinn, called the “very comfortable liberalism in Seattle.” Cruickshank explained, “Voters in Seattle were ready for political change in City Hall, and I think Kshama captured that in the right way. They wanted something more progressive.”

The Fight for $15 campaign in Seattle timed its fast-food strikes and actions to line up with key points in the mayoral race in order to put pressure on the candidates. Early on, Sawant was the only one who supported it. Mike O’Brien, at the time one of the most progressive members of the City Council, shrugged off $15 an hour as a fringe demand at first. The speed with which opinions changed on the issue, he said, was incredible. “It was just a matter of months before I said, of course I’ll support this, and then it was a few more months when I said, there’s no way this doesn’t pass.” The growing movement for $15 tapped into something that was out there, he said. “Successful movements don’t go tell people what they need, they tell them what they already know.”

The country in general, and Seattle in particular, were ripe for this message. The financial crisis, Cruickshank said, had made people start to think about capitalism, creating a newly fertile ground for big ideas and washing away the remnants of the red-baiting that had so defined debate for so long. In Seattle, where tech money from companies like Amazon was flowing and rents spiking, the city was perhaps even more primed for Sawant and for $15. David Rolf, executive director of SEIU Local 775, which backed Working Washington, the group organizing fast-food workers in the area, thought that people had been ready for a left-populist economic message for decades. “It’s just that, until very recently, there has been a silent agreement between the two major political parties and their consultants and handlers and pollsters that that’s not something they’re willing to offer.”

It didn’t hurt that Socialist Alternative ran what turned out to be a very effective grassroots campaign. “We had about four hundred volunteers toward the end of the campaign,” Sawant said. “As many of the people we ran into told us, they couldn’t walk a few blocks without seeing one of us. It was incredible.” They held a “hundred-rallies” campaign in the last few days counting down to the election, studying a map of the city to decide which street corners to hit at what times. But most people in the city’s political class assumed the City Council races were all safe. “Had anybody polled that race in late September, early October, and the Establishment realized she was in striking distance,” David Goldstein said, “they would’ve put an extra $150,000 into that race and she wouldn’t have won.”

Sawant’s ultimate margin of victory was over 3,000 votes; because the City Council was elected citywide at the time, that meant that over 93,000 people in Seattle voted for a socialist. The SeaTac ballot measure won, too, by 77 votes out of 6,003. It became clear that what had been a wild, utopian demand for a livable wage was something that voters were willing to endorse, both in the person of Sawant and explicitly, in the SeaTac ballot campaign.

To Sawant, the victory showed that her message, and its appeal to the working class of a wealthy city, had resonance. “People don’t need some kind of detailed graduate-level economics lesson; they understand that the market is not working for them. The market is making them homeless. The market is making them cityless. And they’re fed up, and they’re angry.” Angry enough, it seemed, to take a leap of faith and support a candidate whose ideas had only recently been presumed to be unthinkable.

ON TWITTER, IF YOU MENTION THE WORD “SOCIALISM,” YOU GET A preprogrammed reply from an icon of long-dead senator Joseph McCarthy, the man who was so famous for his red-baiting that his name became synonymous with the entire ideology. The “RedScareBot” adds a bit of nonsense commentary, like “Leninist soda” or “Hot to Trotsky,” to each reply, a parody of the anticommunism that once pervaded every aspect of American life that underscores the ridiculousness of red-baiting in 2015. As red-baiting itself has lost its power, it can be easy to forget that it destroyed lives—some of them not that long ago.

In the fall of 2008, as the financial industry was shuddering from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and when Hank Paulson was trying to push a $700 billion no-strings-attached handout to banks through Congress, the most pressing concern on the campaign trail was whether Barack Obama was secretly a socialist. On October 3, George W. Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program into law. On October 12, Barack Obama had a campaign conversation with a man who became identified as Joe the Plumber, a man who became, in the media, a symbol of Obama’s supposed disconnect from white working-class voters. The future president explained his tax plan and commented that “when you spread the wealth around,” it’s a positive thing. Sarah Palin jumped on the phrasing. “Friends,” she told a crowd in New Mexico, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.”⁵

But Palin’s attacks on Obama’s commitment to an economic system that was spectacularly failing didn’t gain much traction with people who had just watched their retirement savings or their future jobs go up in smoke. Even as the red-baiting hit another level, thanks to Fox News’s Glenn Beck and his jeremiads against “socialized medicine,” and even as Tea Partiers turned up to protest at town hall meetings held by members of Congress, it seemed that the reaction to red-baiting from younger Americans was to turn a favorable eye on socialism. A spring 2009 poll found that 20 percent of Americans of all ages thought socialism would be preferable to capitalism, and 33 percent of people under age thirty thought so. Just 37 percent of people under age thirty stuck it out for capitalism, with the rest undecided. Maybe, contra Palin, it was time for some new ideas.⁶

Those polls didn’t save Van Jones’s job. In the spring of 2009, Jones, an African American activist with a background in a socialist organization, had been appointed to the White House Council on Environmental Quality as special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation. He was dubbed Obama’s “green jobs czar.” But Glenn Beck’s red-baiting drove Jones out of the administration. There were power and profits at the heart of the fight over Jones—as reporter Adele Stan and Tea Partier Debbie Dooley noted, the Koch brothers and others who backed the campaign against Jones made a lot of their money from the kind of dirty energy that Jones was brought on to fight.⁷

The attacks on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which began in earnest during the 2008 elections, also centered on political power. The group was a membership-based community organization, mostly of working-class people of color, and had for decades organized around raising the minimum wage and fighting for affordable housing. It had challenged subprime lending and other bad banking practices, and most notoriously, had registered people to vote. It was those voter-registration efforts in communities of color that led to the election-season attacks on the group, with which Obama had worked in the 1990s. John McCain, in the third presidential debate, harped on the theory that ACORN was perpetrating massive voter fraud. The “fraud” was some registration forms filled out falsely, some of them very obviously so—Mickey Mouse isn’t going to turn up to vote—by workers hired by ACORN to be part of a voter registration drive. ACORN had turned over the fraudulent forms, and no one voted using them.⁸

The election over, the attacks on ACORN continued. Glenn Beck continued to accuse the group of being part of a leftist conspiracy to impose socialism, alongside the “union thugs” at SEIU, and even of using “Alinsky-ite intimidation tactics” to pressure banks into making subprime loans. (Saul Alinsky was a groundbreaking community organizer from the 1930s through the early 1970s who published a 1972 book, entitled Rules for Radicals, that described his disruptive methods.) That Beck’s arguments were barely coherent mattered little. The end came for ACORN after a video created by activist James O’Keefe purported to show ACORN staffers helping a “pimp” evade taxes on his prostitution ring. Congress voted to cut off grant funding to the group in September 2009; ACORN declared bankruptcy in November 2010, its state affiliates having dissolved and in some cases reformed. Investigations found that the video had been heavily doctored, but none of ACORN’s allies—certainly not the president—were willing to stand up for the group.⁹

At the same time, though, something else was happening. Economist Richard D. Wolff remembered getting calls from Tea Party groups asking him to come and lecture. “I would say to them, ‘You know I’m a Marxist, right?’” he told me. “‘We don’t care,’ they’d say. ‘You’re saying that what happened is unfair, that the little guy got screwed, [and] we want to hear you.’” When he was first hired at the University of Massachusetts, Wolff said, he had asked the university for a letter acknowledging that he would teach Marxian economics, in case some legislator came after him for being a socialist. But each year after the financial crisis, he got more calls asking him to come speak, and by 2011, he was no longer getting calls just to critique capitalism. People were looking, he said, for something more, for what comes next.

Bhaskar Sunkara was in college at George Washington University when the financial crisis hit, and he decided to start a leftist magazine. He had been the editor of the blog for the Young Democratic Socialists, but Jacobin, the print magazine he launched in 2010, was designed from the start to attract a bigger audience. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, buoyed not only by the rise of the Occupy movement but also by mainstream support for its unapologetically socialist ideas. It didn’t hurt that the magazine (for which I have written) was sleek and glossy (it was designed by Rhode Island School of Design graduate Remeike Forbes), and looked about as far from the newspapers still printed by socialist organizations as it could. It even got support from conservatives: National Review writer Reihan Salam praised its “vital left-of-left-of-center” perspective in the New York Times, and Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat, in a piece entitled “How to Read in 2013,” suggested Jacobin as one of many outlets worth reading for those who wanted to be “a well-informed and responsible American citizen.”¹⁰

Despite the Obama administration’s overreactions, it was beginning to seem as though red-baiting had lost its power. “There’s been such a massive shift in the times,” Kshama Sawant told me. “Often people would ask me, especially when we were running the campaign, ‘Aren’t you worried about the S word?’ And certainly there is truth to that because of the Cold War–era propaganda and everything. But the recession and the collapse of the American dream among young people, who are going to have worse-off standards of living than their parents for the first time in American history, for them it’s not so much about the S word. It’s the C word. Capitalism is the dirty word.”

THE DECLINING EFFECTIVENESS OF “THE S WORD” AS A WEAPON FOR silencing progressive voices in recent years is significant because for so many decades it was a defining obsession of American politics. For a nation committed to its revolutionary beginnings, the United States has had a deeply fraught relationship with its radicals. It has arrested them, deported them, hounded them out of jobs, and hanged them. In the 1800s and early 1900s, the enemy was “anarchists” and radical unionists. In 1886, a bomb was thrown into a crowd during a rally for striking workers and the eight-hour workday at Chicago’s Haymarket square. The perpetrators were never identified, but that didn’t stop the city from hanging four leftist rabble-rousers, August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer, for the crime. In the absence of evidence that any of them had lobbed the bomb, the court mainly relied on their political writings. Parsons was the editor of the English-language paper The Alarm, which announced itself as “A Socialistic Weekly”; Spies was the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (German for “Worker’s Newspaper”).

Many in the left of the labor movement were immigrants—German, Jewish, Italian, and others. Antiradical “witch hunts,” then and now, have contained a xenophobic streak identifying rebellious politics with foreignness. The demands for Barack Obama’s birth certificate are part of a long history of such fearmongering. Crackdowns on labor organizers also had the effect of mitigating the demands of labor leaders; after the Haymarket bombing, the persecution of radicals caused American Federation of Labor leaders, such as Samuel Gompers, to argue for putting labor on a “business basis.” Talk of class struggle was off the table.¹¹

Fears of the communist threat grew after the 1917 Russian Revolution. The US government passed the 1917 Espionage Act and then amended it with the 1918 Sedition Act, ostensibly to protect American soldiers during World War I. The laws made it a crime to “interfere with the war effort” by criticizing it, the draft, or the US government. Labor leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was jailed under the Espionage Act. He had already run for president four times, beginning in 1900, and ran another presidential campaign from prison in 1920, receiving 919,799 votes, 3.4 percent of the total, the most ever for a Socialist.

Anarchist feminist agitator Emma Goldman was deported under the 1918 Alien Act, which was specifically set up for the deportation of foreign-born radicals, and the 1919 and 1920 “Palmer Raids,” named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, rounded up thousands of suspected “aliens” on little evidence. The prisoners were held under horrific conditions that included beatings, little or no food, and no communication with the outside; eventually, public anger forced the release of most of them. J. Edgar Hoover, future FBI head, organized the raids. Local ordinances also played a role in the Red Scare, banning “radical” literature, which sometimes included publications like The New Republic and The Nation.¹²

The Special Committee on Un-American Activities was first created in 1934 to investigate pro-Nazi sentiment in the United States. Its second incarnation, however, launched in 1938 and dedicated more robustly to chasing communists, was the one that stuck. Alongside it came a wave of antiunion legislation, including the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which among its many limits on the power of organized labor required labor leaders to file affidavits declaring that they were not members of the Communist Party or any similar organization.

Who benefited from the Red Scare? Then as now, it has been big money—finance and major corporations trying to banish any vestige of demands for a more equal share from their workers. Red-baiting was a tactic in the war on workers, and it had a lot of success. Taft-Hartley kicked off a purge within the labor movement of the radicals who were the main proponents both of militant, democratic unionism and of organizing for racial and gender equality. The National Labor Relations Board would turn over the names of anyone insufficiently vehement in their denial of communism to the Justice Department to be investigated for perjury; their tax returns were scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service, and if they were born outside the United States, the Immigration and Naturalization Service looked for ways to deport them.¹³

The Congress of Industrial Organizations expelled eleven communist-aligned unions representing around 1 million workers. “Red Harry” Bridges, of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), condemned the purge of the biggest communist-led union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, saying, “I don’t find a single charge that says that the UE has not done a good job for its members. Not a single economic charge is leveled. So now we have reached the point where a trade union is expelled because it disagrees with the CIO on political matters.”¹⁴

Bridges, who was born in Australia, successfully avoided deportation in part because no one could ever find proof, despite years of surveillance, that he’d actually been a member of the Communist Party. His West Coast longshore workers’ union remained in the CIO, while the UE survived, much diminished, on the outside, long enough to help the Republic Windows and Doors workers take over their factory in 2008, and to support striking warehouse workers in Elwood, Illinois, in 2012. The influence of Bridges and the ILWU continues to be felt in Washington State—Robert Cruickshank suggested that the survival of the ILWU’s radicalism “helped preserve that left-wing political activism through the 50s and into the 60s” in Seattle.

The foreign communist threat of the Soviet Union and the internal threat of leftist unions, David Rolf of SEIU noted, made the owners of businesses more likely to figure out who to bargain with and how to construct deals that left the free-market system intact. So while the Chamber of Commerce was publishing anticommunist materials and implying that the New Deal was a Red plot in 1946, General Motors negotiated the famed “Treaty of Detroit” with the United Auto Workers. UAW head Walter Reuther had earlier denounced the anticommunist witch hunts, but by 1952 he was assisting the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate remaining leftists within UAW’s massive Local 600. He wasn’t the only labor leader to do so. HUAC would often schedule hearings on a union to coincide with an NLRB election, particularly if the election was to choose between a communist-affiliated union and a noncommunist one.¹⁵

Red-baiting and race-baiting often went hand in hand. Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham public safety commissioner infamous for setting dogs on civil rights marchers, less famously wrote laws that banned communist organizing. Red organizers were often the ones who insisted on organizing black and white workers together, arguing that one could not fight the power of the boss without also fighting racism. Such “social equality” was frightening to many white workers at the time, and that fear helped lead the collapse of the CIO’s “Operation Dixie” campaign to organize the South.¹⁶

Outside of the labor movement, the Red Scare most famously went after Hollywood. Attacking movie stars was great publicity for HUAC, allowing it to raise its profile and intimidate many more people than it would ever be able to haul in for a hearing. The hearings were a spectacle, designed to punish those who had committed no crime, to turn friend against friend, to divide. Going after Hollywood was also a way to attack ideas. The idea that Reds would brainwash the masses into a revolution by means of musical comedy or noirish drama seems ridiculous now, but it was common at the time. That fear itself, however, was a kind of admission that there might be something appealing about socialism to the American people.

The Hollywood blacklist was only the most visible front of the Cold War at home. There were many means of cracking down on radicals, from HUAC and the NLRB to the Internal Security Act of 1950, which authorized concentration camps for interning communists; there were private agencies that specialized in blacklisting, as well as security programs within some companies to root out communists among employees. The FBI would also pass information about suspected Reds to the employers of those who had come under suspicion and leak the information to the press. Suspected radicals were evicted from their homes, denied passports, and occasionally denied unemployment or Social Security payments.¹⁷

Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the most public face of the Red hunts, was a skilled populist orator who aimed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations squarely at suspected communists within the federal government itself. McCarthy managed to flip the class politics of communism, making his campaign against those who wanted workers to rule into a battle against “the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth.” For years, people were afraid to challenge him, both for fear he would turn on them and because he appeared to have broad popular support.¹⁸

The Red Scare was about narrowing the scope of what was politically acceptable, and it did its job admirably. Although the most famous Red-hunters might have been Republicans, Democrats, including Hubert Humphrey, joined in the fun. Liberals fought bitterly over whether the best thing to do was to support the Red Scare’s targets, and open themselves up to accusations of being part of the “Un-American” conspiracy, or to attempt to clear themselves—to present their clean hands to the country and free their preferred political programs of any socialist taint.

After the 1950s, the most intense part of the Red Scare was over. The Supreme Court ruled that many of its weapons violated the Constitution, including the anticommunist portion of Taft-Hartley. Yet longtime labor organizer Stephen Lerner remembered being required, as late as the 1970s, to sign his own undated resignation letter that would allow a union to fire him if he was discovered to be a Red. McCarthy was disgraced, dying in 1957 after having been censured by Congress. But Hoover was still in charge at the FBI, and Bull Connor in Birmingham, and the anticommunist tactics rolled over into fighting the civil rights movement. The FBI infiltrated and harassed a number of civil rights and “New Left” groups, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Black Panthers to Students for a Democratic Society, through COINTELPRO (for Counter Intelligence Program), which began as a red-hunting program. In the final years of the Cold War, under Ronald Reagan, there was an attempt to ramp the red-baiting back up, with the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism attacking organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild and the investigative magazine Mother Jones. As journalist JoAnn Wypijewski remembered, liberals once again joined in the posturing. It was still a fight, she wrote, “to preserve space for the insurrectionary thought.”¹⁹

The legacy of the purges left us with the myth of classless America, a distrustful place where everyone was out for herself, where solidarity had been largely forgotten, and where big, radical ideas were suspect. Talk of inequality, of any deep-rooted problems within the US economy, was simply taboo. We cannot understand why it took so long to notice the inequality that was creeping up on us without understanding the intense campaign, enveloping both the public and private sectors, that was undertaken to beat the idea out of us.

BY 2012, IN THE WAKE OF WISCONSIN AND OCCUPY, SPACE HAD ONCE again been carved out to talk about inequality without the fears that had hovered around such talk throughout the Cold War and post–Cold War years. Many groups were looking for a way to use the rekindled radical imagination to create concrete changes. New York Communities for Change (NYCC), the group that arose from the ashes of ACORN in New York, had been organizing workers at local grocery stores and car washes across the city. These workers, mostly immigrants, were often the victims of wage theft, and labored under the fear of deportation, yet they had been able to win several victories and even a few union contracts through a partnership with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and the community organization Make the Road New York. Rather than going store by store, the campaigns attacked the business model of the whole sector head-on, noting that the problems were often endemic to an entire industry. If one car wash raised its prices to raise wages, that might just run it out of business and destroy any gains made for its employees.

The energy of Occupy had added vigor to these and other labor campaigns in the city; Occupy’s labor working group had created a collective called 99 Pickets, which would turn out to support workers both on picket lines and through direct action across the city. Once again, there was a vision of a labor movement that could make big demands. In this environment, the partnership between NYCC and SEIU was born that would result in the Fight for $15.

The idea of organizing fast-food workers had been bouncing around SEIU and within NYCC for a while, backed by Jon Kest, NYCC’s leader since the ACORN days, who died shortly after the first strikers walked out on November 29, 2012. The day before the strike, I spoke to Jesska Harris and Saavedra Jantuah, who both made less than $8 per hour. “The managers are telling us that we don’t have power. In reality we do have power; they’re trying to suppress our power,” Jantuah told me. “They want to keep us down so they can be up and I think that’s not fair.”

Like the car wash and grocery store campaigns, what was then called Fast Food Forward targeted an entire sector: workers from McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Domino’s Pizza, and Taco Bell joined in. Like the Walmart strikes earlier that fall, the first actions taken by the new campaign were one-day strikes, supported by raucous rallies with community members, clergy, and elected officials. Dancing on Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall outside of Burger King, fuchsia-haired Pamela Flood told a crowd that she wanted to make enough money to take her two sons on vacation, like her bosses did.

From the beginning, the movement called for $15 an hour and a union. At first, it seemed like an impossible demand, even in expensive New York City. But it was a big enough demand to be exciting, to make workers like Flood think about what they could do if they were paid a living wage. It was enough of a demand to dream about.

The next city to go on strike was Chicago, where community group Action Now also partnered with SEIU and took workers out on a one-day strike in April 2013. The movement there built on momentum from the 2012 teachers’ strike and embraced that city’s radical history, traveling to Forest Home Cemetery to visit the memorial to the men who had been executed for the Haymarket bombing, and learning about the Latina background of Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, the widow of Albert Parsons and a lifelong radical organizer. Striker Trish Kahle wrote of her decision to organize when her college degree didn’t get her a “good” job and her Whole Foods job didn’t pay the bills. “In my store, when I faced disciplinary action for violating the attendance policy we had been organizing against, I demanded union representation in my disciplinary meeting and my co-workers prepared to take action if they decided to try and fire me. Management backed off. The disciplinary meeting never even took place.”²⁰

In Missouri, the third state to go out, the campaign named itself Show Me $15, taken from the state’s nickname, the Show Me State. There, leaders like Rasheen Aldridge would hone skills that would be deployed a year later in the protests over the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson police. In different cities, SEIU partnered with different organizations, but the pattern remained: organizing fast-food workers across the sector, and bringing them out on a single strike day that culminated in a massive rally that drew support from the community, from existing labor organizations, and from sympathetic elected officials.

The movement seemed as much about changing politics, the minimum-wage law in particular, as it was about organizing workplace by workplace. Since most fast-food chains operate on a franchise model, the immediate boss in most workplaces is operating on a thin profit margin, kicking back a required payment to the corporation at the top, and wringing profits out of the workers by keeping them at minimum wage or just above. By targeting the sector, and particularly the biggest names in it (McDonald’s, Burger King), the campaign was saying that the extremely profitable brand-name corporations and their exceedingly wealthy executives were in fact responsible for the conditions in their franchises. The National Labor Relations Board backed that claim up, ruling that the fast-food giants could indeed be considered “joint employers” of the workers making burgers and fries on the front lines.²¹

One hot week in the middle of the grueling summer of 2013, the air conditioning at two fast-food restaurants in Chicago and New York went down. Workers at those stores walked off the job and refused to return until the air was fixed. Regardless of whether the NLRB recognized them as such, the workers were beginning to act like a union.

Crystal Thompson, who worked at a Seattle Domino’s Pizza, attended the first Fight for $15 conference in Detroit and met other workers there. She kept in touch with them, sharing strategy and support, but was still too nervous to go out on the first strike in Seattle. The organizers continued to include her in the planning, she said, remembering how they would use the term “go bowling” as a code for going on strike. The first strikes in Seattle were dramatic, and they drew more workers in. “My directive was to create chaos,” said Sejal Parikh, director of Working Washington, the organization that backed the Seattle Fight for $15. Workers struck, shut down their stores, and demanded the city’s attention. What was at that point a national campaign still differed greatly from city to city, and in the Seattle area, where the effort to gain a $15 wage was already in motion, the city fizzed with energy.

There was national momentum around $15, a number that was high but not so high that it seemed impossible, and the fact that Sawant was bringing it to the campaign trail helped make it the center of debate. In turn, because of the strikers’ demands, Seattleites began to see Sawant not as the bogeyman of Glenn Beck’s fears, but as a candidate who might have something to offer. “The fact of a well-resourced, very media-intense campaign happening within our media market at the SeaTac airport, at the same time that we had the launch of the fast-food fight for $15 in Seattle, at the same time that we had the municipal elections, created a compression zone around $15 and around wages and work and inequality,” said David Rolf.

As election day drew nearer, tiny SeaTac, with just 12,000 registered voters, drew more and more attention. The BBC even arrived on election day to do a live feed, despite the fact that Washington State votes by mail. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime campaign. It seemed as if the general public outside of SeaTac understood the issue, understood about the economic inequality,” Heather Weiner said. “If the people can do it in a small suburb like SeaTac, they can do it anywhere.”

The results on Election Day were close enough that neither the $15 campaigners nor Sawant knew they’d won that night. Rolf met Sawant properly for the first time days after the election, as they both waited for a final count. They both realized, he said, that at least one of the two had to have a victory in order to be able to win $15 in the city of Seattle; eventually, they both did.

Martina Phelps, the daughter of a welfare rights activist, had joined the Fight for $15 in Seattle just before the election. The first action she took part in was a march from SeaTac to Seattle, an eight-mile hike in the November cold. Marchers carried lit-up signs to symbolize $15 moving from the suburb to the city. “I can’t even explain how that was,” Phelps laughed. “The walk was horrible, but I spoke at the end. That was my first time ever speaking in front of a crowd like that.”

It was the efforts of people like Phelps and Crystal Thompson and Malcolm Cooper-Suggs that changed the story in Seattle. Without workers in motion, the process would have been entirely different. “Voters have changed their opinions on whether they support higher minimum wages,” said Sejal Parikh, “and this was done not through traditional knocking on doors or phone-banking; this was done through workers rising up and gaining the attention of people in their communities.”

The workers’ pressure eventually brought around the mayoral candidates, too, beginning with the eventual winner, Ed Murray, who used the issue to differentiate himself from the incumbent. After the campaign, Phelps, Thompson, and Cooper-Suggs made trips to City Hall to meet with council members and share their stories; they also kept up the strikes and actions, enough to convince business owners to come to the table and hammer out a compromise bill that would gradually get to $15 over seven years. Through the process, Sawant and Socialist Alternative continued to threaten to take $15 to the ballot in Seattle if the City Council didn’t act. On the day of the final vote, Sawant offered amendments that would speed up the process of getting to $15, which were rejected by the other council members. The audience jeered and booed each rejection, and many assumed Sawant would vote against the bill. But the final vote was 9–0 in favor of $15. “It was an incredible victory,” David Goldstein said. “It was also important that it was passed by ordinance. Because it showed that this wasn’t some fringe thing that a bunch of angry voters did. 9–0. This is a mainstream idea. You can get to $15.”

Sawant stressed that the narrative should not be that the political establishment—“a few people at the top”—sat down and worked out the details. “If this fairy tale is what people are fed then two things happen. One, it eliminates the reality under capitalism, which is that there is a fundamental conflict between the interests of big business and the interests of the working class. The other part is, it’s such a disempowering message. So you have to wait for some mythical do-gooder at the top who’s going to do something for you?” The message, instead, that she wants to stress is that this was an “organized collective struggle” by people who may all disagree on politics, but who agree that income inequality as it exists “is absolutely unacceptable.”

When you talk to the workers who made the $15 wage a reality in Seattle, you can hear the power that they feel. Being part of the campaign changed Crystal Thompson’s life. She didn’t vote before she got involved in the Fight for $15; now she can rattle off policy priorities like a seasoned wonk, from mental-health services to the exact number of homeless sleeping on Seattle’s streets. “Now I’m actually a part of something bigger—it’s pretty empowering,” she said. “To have my kid watch me and say, ‘My mom helped do this,’ he’s proud of me. It’s pretty cool.”

TO DAVID GOLDSTEIN, SEATTLE’S LEADERSHIP ON THE MINIMUM-WAGE issue, and the push for economic justice more broadly, are part of an obligation Seattle has to the rest of the country. The tech wealth that suffuses the city comes from companies like Amazon, which might be a high-wage employer within the city—it didn’t oppose the $15 minimum wage—but around the country mostly creates low-wage warehouse jobs similar to those at Walmart distribution centers. “We’re like Rome,” Goldstein said. “We have this moral obligation, because we’re benefiting tremendously.”

After the vote for $15, Seattle workers found themselves answering questions from others around the country. It was hard, Martina Phelps said, for some of the workers in New York and Chicago, who had been in motion for months before Seattle’s first strike, “for us to just pop up and get it within a year—no one really knows what they’re doing wrong.” Malcolm Cooper-Suggs noted that the political situation was different in Seattle than elsewhere—in New York City, for example, where the city was unable to raise its own minimum wage without state approval. Political pressure had to build across the state, finally escalating to a point where Governor Andrew Cuomo, who had formerly opposed raising the wage, empaneled a wage board in 2015 that formally approved a $15 an hour wage for the fast-food industry by 2021.

In Seattle, a socialist candidate taking up the demand helped move it to reality; in New York, the circling corruption investigations of major politicians in the legislature helped to bring Cuomo to the table. Looking for friends, the unpopular governor took up the demand of the still-growing movement, which had added child care, home care, and other low-wage workers to its ranks, and bragged about New York’s “leadership”—though San Francisco had already followed Seattle to $15 through a ballot initiative by the time Cuomo changed his mind, and Los Angeles became the largest city to vote for $15 an hour in July 2015.

In most places, the measures implemented did not immediately raise the wage, but phased it in over a period of years. Phelps and Cooper-Suggs were wary, too, of attempts to cut their hours alongside the raise, and talked of the need to stay active in their stores. “We have power; these stores don’t run themselves, we make these stores run,” Cooper-Suggs said. “I tell people to organize within their stores—stay strong; if you guys have a common issue, raise the issue, stand strong together on that issue, that’s how you get things done.”

The second part of the “$15 and a union” demand was harder to come by, Sejal Parikh noted. Winning a legislative fight was a big deal, but immediately after the wins in SeaTac and Seattle, there were attacks on the measures, including attempts to block or repeal them. Those attempts were partially successful in SeaTac, where a court at first excluded workers at the airport itself from the benefits of the raise. (In August 2015, the state supreme court ruled that airport employees would indeed get their wage hike.) “Without a sustainable organization, how do workers join together and fight back, and make sure that they defend their wins, and do more proactive policy stuff within the city, county, state?” she asked.²²

Cooper-Suggs and Phelps were lukewarm on the idea of a union, but they did want such an organization, and they valued the power they had built with their coworkers in their workplaces. In the aftermath of the win in Seattle, Working Washington spun off into an independent organization and began to consider what a workers’ organization for the twenty-first-century workplace might look like. The questions they were dealing with, Parikh said, were how to be findable by workers, to those who use social media comfortably as well as those who don’t have Internet access; how to help workers develop their demands and connect to one another; and how to be flexible enough to adapt and to be able to create new strategies as quickly as their well-funded opponents could. “We need to be quick and nimble and experimental and militant because those are the things that work,” she said.

Relying on elected officials for victory, even friendly ones, only goes so far, and particularly for the labor movement, playing an inside game has been a strategy that has gotten it burned many times before. Without some actual power in the shop and in the street, campaign trail promises can often fizzle into nothing. But the combination of disruptive movements and political candidates willing to stake out a seemingly radical position has often been how change is made.

The anger that I heard over and over while reporting this book—directed at both political parties—would seem to provide an opening for more outsider candidates to ride movement energy into office. The Working Families Party, for years mostly dependent on “fusion” voting laws in states like New York that allow multiple parties to endorse the same candidate, elected its first state legislators as Working Families Party–only candidates in 2015. The first WFP-only elected official, Letitia James, became a member of the New York City Council in 2003, and in 2014 she became public advocate, the city’s second-highest elected office.

The Working Families Party came close to sending a challenger, Zephyr Teachout, against Andrew Cuomo in the New York governor’s race in 2014; the party’s decision to endorse Cuomo earned it a good bit of criticism. Teachout challenged Cuomo in the Democratic primary, and in the general election, longtime socialist activist and teacher Brian Jones joined perennial Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins’s campaign and drew a record number of votes. “Promoting a genuine independent third party may have the paradoxical effect of getting more out of the major parties and genuinely shifting the debate,” Jones said. “The bottom line is that it’s becoming clearer to people that it’s getting hard to imagine a way that capitalism can actually solve our problems.” It was the year after that challenge that Cuomo decided to take executive action on the $15 wage.

To Cruickshank, Sawant was a “canary in the coal mine” for something new, a different kind of political party or coalition outside the mainstream and defiantly disconnected from the patronage of the billionaires who pump so much cash into the electoral system.

A $15 an hour minimum wage is hardly socialism, of course. It’s a decent increase in the floor for workers, but still barely enough to live on in major cities like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. That it took a socialist to be the first to make it a campaign platform was a sign of how far away from workers’ demands the political debate in the United States had moved. But it became the central demand in a time of renewed protest and attention to income inequality. Different politicians have been able to have more or less success with a worker-focused agenda, but, as David Rolf noted, “what unites them is the fact that it was in an atmosphere of real, legitimate anger about the looting of our country and leaders actually being willing to talk about it.”

How much the debate had changed—and how much fear there still was that it was possible to be too radical—was visible in the 2016 presidential race, when longtime independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a proud democratic socialist, entered the Democratic primary calling for a “political revolution.” On his first day as a declared candidate, Sanders brought in $1.5 million; he continued to smash fundraising records, raking in $8 million from small donations the day after he defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. Supporters of Sanders flooded the Internet with calls to “#FeelTheBern” and organized marches in their cities and towns; in New York City, former Occupy organizers held a phone-banking session in Zuccotti Park. Sanders was especially popular with young voters; by mid-March 2016, more voters under the age of thirty had chosen Sanders than both Clinton and Republican front-runner Donald Trump combined.²³

When Brett Banditelli helped kick off People for Bernie, he said, “We wanted to inspire people not to support Bernie Sanders, but to use his platform as a way to support themselves. It had less to do with electoral politics and more to do with community organizing.” The effort kicked off months before the official Sanders campaign launch, building grassroots groups around the country that would last beyond a Sanders campaign. “Would winning an election be nice? Sure. But what’s more important is winning our issues and creating a new world from the bottom up,” said Banditelli, who had been involved in the Wisconsin protests and Occupy. “There’s a real sense of it being about us. That’s the most beautiful thing. The movement can run without me. The movement can run without you. But the movement can’t run without us.”

Especially exciting, he noted, was the involvement of very young people—in some cases, too young even to vote in the 2016 election. There was so much talk about so-called millennials, he noted, but the actual change might come about because of the generation coming after them. “They can’t remember the financial crisis, but they can see the effects. They realize capitalism has failed and see socialism as the answer. That’s going to be the long-term lasting effects,” he said.

Sanders’ declaration that he would run in the Democratic primary had disappointed some who had wanted a truly outsider campaign from the well-known, well-liked senator. Kshama Sawant was one of those. “We have to think about any of these campaigns not as an end in itself but what it could do to serve to show the way forward,” she said. “Victory in 2016 would be for somebody of the stature, name recognition and the confidence that people have in Sanders, somebody on those credentials running an absolutely bold independent working-class challenge to the big business candidates, and serving as an electrifying pole of attraction to especially the young people on the left, and using that campaign as a launch pad for building a party for the working class.”

Still, Sawant saw the value in Sanders’s campaign even as a candidate within the Democratic Party, and she appreciated the issues that he brought into the race. He spoke of breaking up the Wall Street banks, universal health care under the banner “Medicare for all,” worker cooperatives, and a $15 minimum wage in a campaign season otherwise dominated by corporate-friendly candidates. But many major labor unions, despite Sanders’s position on the $15 wage, continued to endorse Hillary Clinton—even SEIU, which had spent so much time, energy, and money to make $15 the center of the debate, went with the candidate who insisted that $12 an hour was a reasonable wage. For much of labor, perhaps, the ghost of the Red Scare was still too close, and it was too hard to believe that a self-proclaimed socialist could win.²⁴

In the first Democratic debate, Sanders was asked if he was a capitalist. “Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little? By which Wall Street greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don’t,” he said, to resounding cheers. Clinton jumped in with a defense of capitalism: “I don’t think we should confuse what we have to do every so often in America, which is save capitalism from itself.” Even in defense of the system, it seemed, one had to admit that capitalism unchecked would self-destruct.²⁵

From New Hampshire to Washington, as Sanders’s poll numbers brought him neck and neck with Clinton, it seemed that plenty of people were tired of saving capitalism from itself. In Seattle, Sawant was popular enough not only to get elected in 2013, but to get reelected in 2015, this time with the support of the unions that had opposed her before. She had won over quite a few of the city’s Democrats despite her adamant opposition to the two major parties. “There are a lot of Seattle Democrats who chafe under the neoliberal moderate Democratic Party in the state and in this country and really want something to the left, and they see her as what they would love to have,” Robert Cruickshank said. They might not all have been ready to discard the party and join Socialist Alternative, but they supported Sawant: the two Democratic Party groups whose districts overlap with her council district chose to not endorse a candidate for the 2015 election, a tacit endorsement of Sawant, who could not receive their direct endorsement because she’s not a party member.

The most common criticism of her was that she was divisive and polarizing, that she was ineffective because she only wanted to stake out a far-left position. While she had been willing to take a stand and fail in order to make a point, she was often much more effective than her critics would admit. David Rolf noted that “the issues she picks to organize around and to raise rarely get settled 100 percent the way she would have crafted the policy, but always to the left of where they would have ended up without that kind of voice.”

“We’ve accomplished a lot as a city since she’s been on the council in just over a year,” agreed council member O’Brien when I spoke with him. “To pretend that somehow we can still do that and just play nice, that’s what we’ve been doing for decades. There’s something about her keeping us unsettled that forces us to do a better job.”

Denechia Powell, a former organizer with Occupy Our Homes Atlanta who moved to Seattle after Sawant’s election and worked with the Tenants Union of Washington State, said that having Sawant in power opened up more political possibilities; it was a reversal of the Red Scare’s ability to limit political possibilities for so many years. “For so long it was like capitalism is the way, it is the light, the only way of living, and so seeing that someone in a city like Seattle can win as a socialist is big,” said Powell. “I remember being in Atlanta following her campaign and just being like ‘YES!’ It changes narratives. It allows us to imagine more, imagine a world that is actually just and equitable and with a solidarity economy.”

Sawant credited Occupy with kicking off the change that Fight for $15 consolidated and that people like her have been able to ride to electoral success. “Anytime you look at historical periods in the past, you cannot see the value of movements by looking at them in an isolated fashion,” she said. “They’re a continuum.” Sanders supporters, too, pointed to the wave of movements behind them, crediting them with propelling the unlikely candidate to victory in state after state. At the time this book went to press, Sanders had won 22 states, representing a total of nearly 12 million voters, and had raised $230 million.²⁶

For decades, it had been the right that successfully took fringe ideas and moved them into the mainstream of American politics. The Tea Party has been correctly credited with pushing Republicans into office who were more conservative, and more willing to stand on principle, than the mainstream party. That now ideas are moving from the left, from workers’ movements and Occupy protesters, into the public sphere, becoming policy in major cities and propelling an insurgent presidential campaign, is a sign of a shift, a sign that all of the years of the Red Scare couldn’t, in fact, completely kill the radical idea that a fair distribution of wealth is possible. Seattle’s organized business lobby, Goldstein noted, didn’t even fund a ballot initiative opposing the $15 an hour wage in Seattle. “They would’ve lost.”