June 10, 2014, was a hot, sunny day in Washington. Down in Richmond, the biggest city in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, it was even hotter—and not just in degrees. That was the day the Tea Party, an upstart group born out of the ashes of Ron Paul’s failed 2008 presidential campaign and previously known mainly for their costumed protests against President Obama’s stimulus package, the Wall Street bailout, immigration reform, and the Affordable Care Act, managed to defeat Eric Cantor, the sitting Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.
Cantor was no liberal. A favorite of corporate PACs and K Street lobbyists, he’d raised over $30 million for the National Republican Congressional Committee; his own campaign boasted a $5.5 million budget and twenty-three paid staffers, plus support from the National Rifle Association and the National Right to Life Committee—and hefty donations from the Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs. His opponent was Dave Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College and Tea Party activist. Brat ran without any assistance from the party’s national organization; he never got a single PAC donation either. Instead he raised just $200,000 from local donors—and didn’t even spend all of it. Brat’s campaign manager, Zachary Werrell, was a twenty-three-year-old Haverford graduate who slept on his boss’s couch to save money. An internal poll on the Friday before the primary showed Cantor leading by thirty-four points; a Daily Caller poll put him ahead by thirteen points. Yet when the votes were counted it was the seven-term-incumbent Cantor who came up short—the first majority leader ever to be defeated by a primary challenger.
Brat’s upset victory sent a current of fear through the Republican caucus in both houses of Congress, stiffening the party’s leaders in their policy of noncooperation with the Obama administration, and killing off a bipartisan effort on immigration reform. Those at least were the headlines. But there was another response to Brat’s unheralded triumph among activists and organizations on the left: envy. For years—in some cases decades—these groups had been stymied by a Democratic Party that seemed increasingly contemptuous of its base. Whether it was labor opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, African American and Hispanic objections to mass incarceration, or the growing influence of Wall Street bankers over what had once been seen as the party of working Americans, these activists had waged a long, sisyphean struggle against the party leadership. Now a ragtag bunch of Republicans had put the fear of the grass roots into their party.
Could the Left—both inside and outside the Democratic Party—emulate their achievement? Where might a “Tea Party” of the left come from? What would it look like? And what would be its signature issues?
For a time, the Occupy Wall Street protest that began in September 2011 seemed like it might be the Tea Party’s progressive counterpart. The two movements even shared a professed disdain for the crony capitalism epitomized by the 2008 Wall Street bailout. But while the Tea Party quickly attracted the support of right-wing celebrities like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, and institutional backing from Fox News and the Koch brothers, OWS spurned celebrities—or leaders of any kind—and deliberately refrained from articulating clear demands or even engaging with electoral politics.
That doesn’t mean it was a failure (though when I typed “Occupy Wall Street” into Google it added the word “failure” to my search). The group’s invocation of the “99 percent” changed the national conversation, putting income inequality and political corruption on the political agenda for the first time in decades. OWS provided crucial momentum—and experience—to the effort to raise the national minimum wage. It reshaped—and dramatically broadened—the environmental movement, recruiting a new generation of activists to the fights against fracking and the Keystone and Dakota pipelines. Occupy’s critique of the role of corporate money—especially finance capital—in electoral politics kick-started the movement to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United. And the millennials who thronged its encampments dragged the long-festering crisis over rising college costs and skyrocketing student debt into the media spotlight.
But if it is unfair, and inaccurate, to say that Occupy petered out with the wave of evictions from Zuccotti Park, the movement’s influence on candidates, legislation, and elections isn’t immediately obvious. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Occupy’s persistent focus not just on economic inequality but on “Wall Street” itself created the space for a counter-narrative to the anticipated coronation of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. As I traveled the country reporting on the Bernie Sanders campaign, I kept coming across articulate, passionate, dedicated activists for whom Occupy had served as a kind of political awakening.
At a “Bernie Fest” in St. Petersburg I met Amos Miers, a graphic designer who’d been involved in Occupy Tampa. Meirs went to his first Sanders meet-up “not prepared to jump in. We were in Occupy. We were against the two-party system. A lot of us were against electoral politics. But I still voted. I realized we had to be involved in politics.” In Nevada, Tazo Schafer and other veterans of Occupy Las Vegas fought the state’s powerful Democratic machine to a draw in the caucuses. In Brooklyn, OWS tech activists Charles Lenchner and Winnie Wong founded People for Bernie, whose slogan “Feel the Bern” became a meme for the Vermont senator’s insurgent candidacy. And in Philadelphia, I met Waleed Shahid, a talented young organizer who’d also been inspired by Occupy.
“When I think about who needs a political revolution in this country, I think of my dad.” It was April 2016, a few weeks before the Pennsylvania primary, at the opening of the Sanders campaign’s South Philadelphia field office. A mostly young, mostly white crowd was packed into a former clothing store listening to a thin young man with brown skin and a neat beard. “He came to this country as an immigrant from Pakistan. Worked as a parking attendant. Eventually promoted to manager.”
Describing his father’s pursuit of the American dream, Shahid said his parents had put all of their savings into a house—“because that’s what everybody told them you should do.” They lost it all in the crash of 2008. “Since then, he’s had his hours and wages cut—by the same company he’s worked for since 1974!”
At the time, Shahid was the political director of Pennsylvania’s Working Families Party. Founded in New York in 1998 to take advantage of that state’s “fusion” laws—allowing candidates to run on more than one ballot line—to push the Democratic Party to the left, the WFP has long campaigned on issues of economic justice and labor rights, reflecting the interests of the unions who provided the bulk of the party’s financial support. But the relationship had never been stress-free. In 2014, the New York WFP recruited Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor, to challenge Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, only to end up endorsing Cuomo under pressure from its union backers—and out of fear that Teachout wouldn’t draw the fifty thousand votes required to keep the party’s guaranteed line on the ballot. (Running without the WFP endorsement Teachout got 192,000 votes, a record showing against an incumbent governor.)
Perhaps in penance, the party polled its membership before endorsing Bernie Sanders for president in December 2015—a move that lost it the support of a number of major unions, who’d already committed to Clinton, but reflected the overwhelming preference of the group’s members. Having spread beyond its New York roots to fourteen states and the District of Columbia, the WFP’s early endorsement did more than just raise Sanders’s profile. Everywhere I went in Pennsylvania that spring, I came across WFP activists staffing the local Sanders office—in Reading, Lancaster, even Bethlehem, where the shell of the former Bethlehem Steel plant—once the second-largest mill in the country—now houses a hotel and casino complex owned by Republican donor Sheldon Adelson. The same level of WFP engagement was true in Florida, Connecticut, and other states with a WFP presence.
Spending a day with Shahid’s team canvassing the streets of West Philadelphia, I heard him remind the volunteers to “tell our story.” Politics, he told me afterward, is partly a “war of narratives. We’ve had all these movements on the left: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, Climate Justice. And now we have this candidate, Bernie Sanders. We need to tell people that these candidates are part of these movements. People don’t understand that this is all part of the transformation of the Democratic Party. That’s something folks on the right do understand about their people.”
I asked Shahid about his own story. He talked again about his father, “who just wanted to be middle class. My father has been a citizen since the 1980s. Never voted—until 2008, when Barack Obama inspired him by telling a hopeful story. But he didn’t see his life improving. Now he tells me ‘I like Bernie because he’s angry. I like the way he talks.’ Bernie seemed willing to talk about the way things were messed up.”
His mother worked in the public school system. “On September 11, 2001, I was in fifth grade. That day is still pretty vivid in my mind, because I lived in Arlington, which is where the Pentagon is, and my mom picked me, my brother, and my sister up from school early.
“The police had blocked off our street because it was an access road heading toward Washington, DC, and my mom and this police officer got into an argument. The officer got really angry at my mom. He said she wasn’t listening to him and he wound up pulling his gun and pointing it at her head. I was in the front seat. I remember my little brother and sister screaming in the car. When we got home my mom told me to go put on a movie and take care of them. When I went back, my mom was in the kitchen and she was crying.
“What was crazy was that my mom felt really bad for the police officers, because they’d been out there all morning, so she went to McDonald’s and brought them food. She organized a candlelight vigil on our front lawn, even though she was still upset. People had all these tiny American flags, and everyone was singing the national anthem. I didn’t even know my mom knew the national anthem until that day. I think the reason she did the stuff with the police officers and organized this whole patriotic thing was that she wanted to show that she was scared too, and that she was an American, too.”
Corbin Trent never needed to show anyone he was an American. His grandfather, Col. B. Corbin Trent, was the head chaplain of the US Air Force Pacific Command. I first set eyes on the young Tennessee native on a steamy summer night in Nashville, during the lull between the end of the Democratic primary season and the nominating convention. But I’d been hearing about him for months, chasing his trail from Florida northward through all the late primary states as Sanders kept on racking up victories and his campaign refused to die.
Like a guerrilla operating in hostile countryside, Trent kept a low profile, sleeping on supporters’ couches, eating and drinking with volunteers in each state, the long drives through strip-mall America and the hollowed-out towns that marked the death march of domestic manufacturing enlivened only by his own abundant store of anecdotes—and an endless capacity to listen to other people’s stories. A product of the same southern soil that had produced Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr.—two Tennessee populists who managed to make their mark on national politics despite being at odds with their state, and their times—Trent’s easygoing frat-boy charm belied his fierce radical convictions.
Then there was Zack Exley. With the national Sanders campaign focused on the four “early states”—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina—the rest of the country was left to the volunteers to organize. Wherever I found Sanders volunteers phone banking, canvassing, or holding house parties to recruit their neighbors, when I asked how they managed to do so much with so little direction from headquarters in Burlington, the answer was always the same: “This guy Zack Exley came down for a couple of days . . .”
I caught up with Exley in Nashville, too. A tall, lean man with spiky silver hair and geeky glasses that made him look more like a film director than a veteran political operator, he’d worked on Howard Dean’s pioneering campaign and then for MoveOn.org. He’d been chief revenue officer for the Wikimedia Foundation before joining the Sanders campaign—Wiki’s success in raising money from small donors proved that relying on corporate funding is a choice, not a necessity. Exley and Claire Sandberg, the campaign’s director of digital organizing, were given a free hand to conjure up a campaign in forty-six states while the rest of the national staff focused on making Sanders credible with an early win (which they got in New Hampshire, and came very close to getting in Iowa and Nevada. If Sanders had won either of those as well, he might have picked up enough momentum to defeat Hillary Clinton). Soon they, too, were hearing about this guy, Corbin Trent, who’d organized Tennessee for Bernie seemingly single-handedly, and was getting a massive response from East Tennessee—a deep-red region in a deep-red state.
“I’d never really found electoral politics to be that inspiring,” Trent told me. So what drew him to Sanders? Partly the memory of working in the family’s furniture factory with his father. “My dad was a Vietnam War deserter. He went up to Canada and started an alternative newspaper—the Toronto New Paper.” Mark Trent also founded an organization that found housing and work for American GIs in Canada. Eventually he came back to Bean Station, Tennessee, and took over the furniture business, where he soon discovered that thanks to cheap imports “if we wanted to survive, we basically had to become a distribution center for stuff we didn’t make.”
Instead Trent lit out for New York—and cooking school. “I graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, but when I came back home I soon realized there was no way to make money cooking in East Tennessee. So I made Crazy Good Burgers instead. Local beef. Fresh. Everything to order. I had a group of food trucks.” He was doing well enough, but when Sanders declared his candidacy, Trent answered the call for volunteers.
“At first I just started driving around, talking to people doing Facebook groups. Seeing who was ready to work. There was a lot of activity. But also a resistance to being organized. People were afraid we were going to come in and take over”—a common experience of many volunteers in the Dean and Obama campaigns. Trent’s response was to let people who were already doing effective work get on with it—but to integrate the groups into a coherent network, giving them the technological means to connect to each other, and share their discoveries about what worked and what didn’t. He saw his own role as a kind of circuit rider, spreading encouragement and, where needed, giving advice and instruction. When Exley and Sandberg hired him, they asked him to do the same thing on a national scale.
The result was the Bernie Barnstorm—a two- or three-day-long concentrated training session that turned green volunteers into the disciplined organizers who went on to build the biggest grassroots electoral movement this country has ever seen. Combined with the software developed by programmer Saikat Chakrabarti that allowed volunteers across the country to connect with any of the sixty thousand events posted on map.berniesanders.com—from phone banking or sign holding to organizing and planning local groups— the campaign’s “distributed organizing” model was a powerful tool for taking politics out of the hands of consultants. Especially after Becky Bond joined the team, applying the expertise she’d gained as political director at CREDO, the alternative mobile phone company, to scaling up the model across the country.*
By the time we crossed paths in Nashville, Trent and Exley had left the Sanders campaign and were taking their barnstorming double act on the road, recruiting organizers and volunteers for a new group, Brand New Congress. Their pitch was simple: whoever won the nomination—at that point almost no one took seriously the possibility that Trump might actually become president—would still end up thwarted by a dysfunctional Congress in thrall to corporate interests. So why not harness the energy, enthusiasm, national organization, and fundraising muscle of the Sanders volunteers to elect a whole new Congress—all at once, in 2018 or 2020—committed to the same platform of greater economic equality, climate justice, civil rights, criminal-justice reform, and fair trade? Why not elect a Congress that not only looks like us—more women, more people of color—but will actually work for us instead of for lobbyists and special interests?
For decades, pundits have lamented the decline in voter participation, especially in midterm elections. Brand New Congress looked at those figures the way the Barrow Gang looked at backcountry banks—as opportunities. “Turnout in midterm primaries is typically between eight and thirteen percent,” says Exley. In most districts, you only need thirty thousand votes to win the primary.
And if the idea of a small, ideologically cohesive force challenging the party establishment sounded familiar, that wasn’t an accident. Like the Tea Party, BNC was the product of frustration with a status quo that paralyzes government’s machinery while allowing insiders to prosper. Except while the Tea Party (aided, funded, and ultimately directed by donors like the Koch brothers) worked to pull the center of debate to the right, targeting only wayward Republicans, the BNC wanted not to take over the Democratic Party, but to do an end run around both parties, returning government to the people.
“It sounds like a crazy idea,” Exley admitted. But when we met in Nashville, he was still hopeful the group would recruit “a couple of hundred seats”—and seriously contest at least forty to fifty seats. Trent was a little more grounded, playing the inside man to Exley’s blue-sky visionary. Younger and more solidly built, with the stubbornness common to southern radicals who remain in the South, he’d be an asset in a bar fight. Sticking his neck out was in his blood—besides his father’s example, “my granddaddy opened an integrated school” on Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; he’d also preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church at the invitation of Martin Luther King Jr.112 And though Trent was willing to believe Exley’s claim that the country had a secret supply of Republicans “who really believe that ‘love thy neighbor’ stuff in the Bible,” he didn’t think they’d be easy to find.
That turned out to be a considerable understatement. When I checked in with Trent a few months later, he admitted “we’re having some trouble with recruitment.” The plan was for people to nominate their neighbors and colleagues. “We want people with a deep history of service. People who had the chance to sell out—but didn’t.” It was the BNC’s version of “leader identification”—a standard item in any organizer’s toolkit. Only without the institutional structure of a workplace or a church group or a union, they kept getting self-nominated activists. “I finally had to say, ‘Look, if you can’t find one other person to nominate you, you probably shouldn’t be running for office.’ Also, while I still believe there are plenty of good-hearted Republicans out there, their focus is on direct service, not electoral politics.”
The group’s commitment to recruiting Republicans in red districts was based on two assumptions: that “among Republican, Democratic, and independent voters, there is an invisible majority waiting to be united around radical and practical solutions.”113 And that American politics was in a “post-partisan” phase that would allow this majority to be assembled, from scratch, by relative novices working outside the party structure. Bill Lipton, the WFP’s New York state director, was always skeptical. “We’ve been working on this for almost twenty years,” he told me. “You need a party—rooted in ideology, with an organic connection to a social base, and with a desire over the long term to systematically recruit people to run for office to contest state power.” Even when the BNC found suitable Republicans, Act Blue, the online fund-raising platform, refused to accept contributions for them.
Instead of the post-partisan future Exley had predicted, Donald Trump’s victory ushered in an era of hyper-partisanship, with Republicans turning a blind eye to the president’s repeated disregard for the norms of civilized behavior—and contempt for the party’s professed concern with the deficit—while Democrats seemed to view any criticism of their own party’s leadership as tantamount to treason. By the end of 2017 Brand New Congress was little more than a website—listing just twenty-eight candidates, of whom only two were Republicans. Exley took time out for a fellowship at Harvard, and to work on policy ideas. Meanwhile Trent and most of the staff of BNC migrated to a new group, Justice Democrats, devoted to challenging and replacing corporate Democrats.
The paradox of the Sanders campaign was that in revealing the unexpectedly large constituency for genuinely radical measures—universal health care, free tuition at public colleges and universities, a livable minimum wage, an end to the school-to-prison pipeline for minority youth, paid family leave—it also revealed the weakness of progressive organizations that in some cases had been advocating for such policies for years. “Bernie sparked this politics in a way that left organizing had never been able to do on its own,” said Waleed Shahid. The question was how to harness that explosion of radical energy and enthusiasm outside the context of a presidential campaign.
“The political revolution needs to go local,” George Goehl told me. As co-director of People’s Action, a grassroots organization created out of the merger of community groups in twenty-nine states, Goehl’s call for “ongoing issue and electoral activity” was echoed across the left. Our Revolution, the most direct inheritor of the Sanders mantle—and, crucially, the only group given access to the millions of donors to the senator’s campaign—has endorsed candidates at every level, from school boards in California to the Somerville, Massachusetts, city council, to governors and senators.
Indivisible, a group founded by four former congressional staffers to resist the Trump administration by teaching people how to more effectively lobby their elected officials, has also grown rapidly, with more than 3,800 groups spread across the country.
But the risks of an electorally led strategy were summarized by Dan Cantor, co-founder of the Working Families Party, when he observed that “if you try to occupy the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party will end up occupying you.” The party leadership might give way on specific issues—abandoning a trade pact, or opening the door to a public option on health care—but when it came to weaning itself from corporate influence, big donors, and the consultant culture they pay for, #The Resistance, as the lowest-common-denominator Democratic opposition to Trump called itself, seemed more slogan than strategy. Months before the election, when a Clinton victory still seemed inevitable, the scholar and activist Frances Fox Piven warned that “electoral politics can also smother movements.”
The truth is that a lot of issue-oriented groups were geared up to push a Clinton administration in a progressive direction. Trump’s surprise victory left them struggling to find their footing. The day before the election I’d spoken on the phone with Dan Cantor, who’d outlined an ambitious agenda—on trade, infrastructure spending, immigration, voting rights, health care—already gathering support among influential Democratic legislators. Two years later Democrats couldn’t even force the administration into a deal to protect the DACA Dreamers. And while the Women’s March on Washington did draw nearly half a million protestors onto the streets of the capital the day after Trump’s inaugural—joined by an estimated four million more in other parts of the country—there was little coordinated follow-up. Even as a manifestation of feminist anger, the women’s march was overshadowed by the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment—which doubtless derived a considerable portion of its cultural force and political resonance from outrage over the harasser in chief in the White House.
Yet the focus on Trump himself could be a trap, too.114 The president’s longstanding bromance with Vladimir Putin, and the possibility that the Russian leader might have used so-called active measures to assist his American admirer served as an excuse for avoiding a more painful examination of the party’s own failings, and the Clinton campaign’s many disastrous errors in judgment. And the personal attacks on Trump let the system that created him off the hook.
As Becky Bond put it, “they only want to talk about Trump’s racism. They don’t want to talk about why so many people support him. Why so many people are hurting.”115 In the summer of 2016, with the excitement of the Sanders campaign still in the air—and Trump merely a toxic cloud on the horizon—the actor and activist Rosario Dawson declared, “Once you know something you can’t un-know it. Now we know how powerful we are.” A year later, the writer and activist Naomi Klein summed up some bitter lessons. Our movement, she said, was still “too white.” For too long, issues of “race, gender, sexuality felt like add-ons” rather than central concerns. Yet Klein, too, was unable to unlearn the hope she’d felt watching America feel the Bern. Speaking at the People’s Summit, she reminded the Sanders supporters, “Now that we know we can win, we have a moral obligation to win. Because our losses are measured in lives.”
Nobody I’d met knew that better—or felt that obligation more keenly—than Waleed Shahid. Aware from the first of Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability—“when you have a candidate who is so clearly part of the establishment, it allows the Tea Party to claim to represent the people”—he had a young person’s eagerness for the future to begin right now. “The Bernie movement has planted hundreds of seeds into the American soil. People will experiment and learn things,” he told me several months before the election.
Arrested in September 2016 outside Paul Ryan’s office after calling on the House speaker to denounce Trump’s racism, Shahid led a group of young people who got arrested the week after the election—this time for protesting outside Chuck Schumer’s office. “The party of Clinton and Schumer is also the party of Wall Street,” he told reporters. “And now the party of Trump is the party of the KKK. So where is our party?”116 He’d left the Working Families Party to start a new group, #AllOfUs. Founded by and for millennials, #AllOfUs was supposed to serve as a model for a new generation of left organization, more reliant on social media than a membership base, determined to bridge the political narrative between “Obama’s compelling story about who ‘we’ are and Bernie’s much better version of who ‘they’ are.”
Like Brand New Congress, #AllOfUs offered a beguiling vision of political possibility. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, millennials had contributed a significant portion of every movement’s ground troops. Shahid himself had been going on demonstrations since his days as a student at Washington-Lee High School, when Wisconsin congressman James Sensenbrenner had proposed “a bill that would have made it a felony to aid and abet an undocumented immigrant.” He’d long felt that no one was speaking directly to or for his generation. #AllOfUs wanted to fill that gap—and to furnish the many protest campaigns based on racial justice or economic justice or migrant rights with a unifying narrative. “#AllOfUs comes from a direct action background,” Shahid said. “We’re good at that. We know how to organize protests. But if you just keep protesting, eventually you burn out.”
“We wanted to avoid foundation money,” which had them chasing the same small-dollar donor base the other ex-Sanders people were after. Shahid discovered that while young people were always welcomed to help make up the numbers, “when we started out talking about ourselves as millennials and a new generation, progressive allies, donors, the press, didn’t take us seriously.” Starting from scratch without funding or an institutional sponsor turned out to be harder than he’d expected. And then his mother had a stroke.
Returning to political work in the fall of 2017 Shahid and his friends wound up #AllOfUs. “We thought we could push the anti-Trump energy into reforming the Democratic Party. We did help create a change in the political weather. But the Women’s March and Indivisible—they out-organized us. Only they never gave their base a theory of political change.
“In an age of hard partisanship, with one the party of white resentment, the other the party of cosmopolitanism,” Shahid scaled back his ambition. “For now I just want the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to have more power in Congress. It’s not that I think elections are the only form of politics, but it is a terrain of struggle. A new generation, inspired by Bernie Sanders, is making ideas like tuition-free college, paid family leave, national health care . . . mainstream. That will only happen when we express our numbers and our power in the number of seats.”
The 2018 midterms saw Shahid joining forces with Trent and Saikat Chakrabarti at Justice Democrats.† Partly a tactical turn away from the BNC approach of searching for acceptable Republicans, the new group had a much simpler focus. Justice Democrats’ platform included a twenty-two-item progressive wish list supporting single-payer health care, a green New Deal, and net neutrality, and opposing bad trade deals, warrantless surveillance, and discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or immigration status. But the emphasis was on recruiting and funding primary challengers to corporate Democrats, including Democratic incumbents.
“We’re working on building up the Left’s fear-making capacity,” said Trent. With over fifty candidates—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the group’s leaders, a South Bronx native running against Rep. Joe Crowley, a ten-term incumbent who’s never had a primary opponent—the group easily surpassed BNC’s recruitment efforts. “We’re trying to drag the party back to its New Deal roots, fighting for working people.”
Raúl Grijalva, Arizona’s maverick congressman, has joined Justice Democrats, as have California congressman Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, and Pramila Jayapal, the Seattle congresswoman who has been leading the opposition to the Trump administration’s policy of separating undocumented immigrants from their children. And in late June 2018 the Left finally got its “Eric Cantor moment” when Ocasio-Cortez, running on a platform of economic justice, Medicare for All, and the abolition of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), easily defeated Crowley, who in addition to heading the powerful Queens Democratic machine had been widely touted as a possible successor to House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Although press coverage of the resulting political earthquake made much of twenty-eight-year-old Ocasio-Cortez’s youth, Puerto Rican heritage, and relative inexperience—including the fact that she’d recently been working as a bartender—and her endorsement by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), few accounts noticed that the young Puerto Rican activist had actually been one of Brand New Congress’s first recruits. Or that her brilliant guerrilla campaign included a media coordinator with an East Tennessee exchange on his mobile phone: Corbin Trent.
“The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democratic Caucus] is scared stiff that after 2018 there will be a huge wave of progressive Democrats taking over the party that won’t be accountable to their corporate interests,” Chakrabarti, Justice Democrats’ executive director, told a reporter for Mic digital news.117 By demanding that its candidates agree to back the party’s eventual nominee, regardless of their position on the issues, and by stipulating DCCC candidates spend most of their resources on paid advertising—providing income for paid consultants, but ignoring the potential for the kind of peer-to-peer networks Chakrabarti built for the Sanders campaign—the DCCC’s criteria seem designed to exclude the insurgents recruited by Justice Democrats. And with its poster boy Crowley defeated by a candidate who refused a single corporate donation, it appears the DCCC has plenty to worry about.
Still, as Waleed Shahid learned the hard way, building a Tea Party of the Left poses a different set of challenges than its namesake. “The actual Tea Party attracted big money donors committed to traditional conservative values. Even if there were left-wing versions of the Koch brothers, our values mean we have to avoid becoming part of the nonprofit industrial complex.” Also, unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is a multiracial coalition, which complicates any anti-incumbency movement by the Left, since many of the most senior Democratic incumbents are black or Hispanic.
If you look at the history, says Shahid, “the Tea Party operated most effectively in deep-red districts [where they could show the incumbent had abandoned the base—and where any Republican nominee would probably win]. Because of redistricting and racial gerrymandering, a lot of the deepest blue districts are represented by pillars of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. These incumbents are very popular—and they do represent their communities, at least in terms of identity.” Even when some of their members support policies that serve corporate interests and directly injure their constituents, Shahid says, these veteran legislators “are a lot less vulnerable to challenge from the left, and particularly by white leftists. We also have real urban political machines in a way the Republicans don’t.” Corrupt but effective, that kind of entrenched power has proven remarkably resistant to movement pressure.
Shahid and Trent still envy the Tea Party’s influence—and the successes of Momentum, the left-wing caucus of Jeremy Corbyn supporters inside Britain’s Labour Party. “Where were all the people on the left before us who should have built this stuff?” Shahid asks.
And they’re both still devoted to the task of trying to articulate a progressive populism to counter the authoritarian vision offered by Trump—and the neoliberalism still endemic among the Democratic elite. Which for the moment means trying to win elections. “For people like my parents, voting is the only political activity they engage in,” says Shahid.
The goal, he says, remains the same. “Racial justice. Economic justice. Bringing them together is the future of left-wing politics.”
*In November 2016 Bond and Exley published Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything, distilling the lessons they’d learned during the Sanders campaign, and offering a how-to guide to distributed organizing.
†In May 2018 Shahid, another young man in a hurry, became the director of policy for Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s reelection campaign. With over $30 million of campaign funds in the bank, Cuomo remained a heavy favorite for a third term. Yet his eight years of cozying up to the state’s Republican Party—likely in preparation for launching his own presidential bid in 2020—offered Shahid and the Working Families Party, who endorsed Nixon, an irresistible target for their critique of the Democratic Party’s subservience to Wall Street.