Chicago mayoral primary: Where are the progressives?

Comments (2) Politics

The beginning of today’s organized resistance to the machine was the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012. F Newsmagazine photo by Chris Johnson. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Is the local news media more interested in Chicago’s primary than Chicagoans? The mayoral candidates are certainly uninspiring — there is no Karen Lewis, or even Chuy Garcia. Yet local elections have a much greater direct impact on the lives of many Chicagoans, especially the poor, than national elections. The mayor and city council hit you with property taxes and regressive sales taxes and fines, high rents and lack of affordable housing, struggling schools, a racist criminal justice system, the war against immigrants … and the myriad daily offenses of inequality and racism that keep the poor poor and the middle class struggling. They may pretend it’s some previous administration or the market doing it to us, but their fingerprints are everywhere.

Where are the progressives? At long last they should be in a strong position to challenge the Chicago machine. Haven’t progressive movements have been on the rise since Rahm Emanuel became mayor? Isn’t the machine weaker and more divided than at any time since Mayor Harold Washington declared, “The machine is dead, dead, dead”?

Add it up: 1) Rahm has been forced out of the mayoral race. 2) Cook County party boss and County Assessor Joe Berrios was defeated by a reform candidate in 2018. And now, 3) the FBI probe and indictment of that other top party boss, Ed Burke, and the exposure of powerful Ald. Danny Solis’ quest for Viagra, sex and campaign booty has tainted two leading mayoral candidates, Toni Preckwinkle and Susana Mendoza. 4)  And there’s no telling who will follow, as the scandals became more farcical. Mike Royko is laughing in his grave.

And the progressives? Certainly there are enough progressive voters in Chicago to bring about transformational change … but they can’t manage that without candidates and organization. After years of gains in the street and the polls, progressive voters and activists are divided when not disengaged from the elections.

Unions, Black Lives Matter, Women’s March, community groups

A few unions are the most powerful organized progressive force in Chicago — in particular, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Service Employee International Union locals (SEIU). But they are playing an ambiguous role, supporting Toni Preckwinkle. Her platform is about as progressive as anyone’s, and she would have the power to deliver. She made the right promises to the Chicago Teachers Union and the three SEIU unions. But her history with corrupt machine boss Ald. Ed Burke is an inconvenient reminder that she is another player in machine politics. She ushered in some genuinely progressive measures in the County, but she did so entrenched in a power structure that is dead set against any serious redistribution of resources and power.

The Black Lives Matter groups kept nationwide focus on the criminal injustice system for four years now. In Chicago, their bold and unrelenting street actions were key in fixing sustained focus on the police murder of Laquan McDonald, forcing the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and defeating states attorney Anita Alvarez in their “Bye, Anita!” campaign … and they managed this without endorsing her victorious challenger, Kim Foxx. Reflecting the distrust many of the more revolutionary groups have of electoral politics on politicians, the groups seem disengaged from the elections.

We may end up with the second woman mayor in Chicago history, but the vast uprising of the Women’s March gave rise to no candidate, and the leadership of Women’s March Chicago has no apparent interest in the primary. The board organized a “March to the Polls” … but that was in October, for the midterms. When the national Women’s March and sister groups throughout the country marched on January 19, the Chicago leadership decided instead to ask “our marchers to take ownership of their activism and organize or participate in actions that help people in their communities feel safe, included, respected and represented.” Their “Operation Activation” didn’t mention the Chicago primary and instead called for “impacting current legislation and working toward progressive election outcomes in 2020.” Let’s have progressives elected in Washington later on, but not here in Chicago now?

The power of the woman voter:  She shines a light on corruption with the ballot, but in the Chicago primary she’s getting no help from Women’s March Chicago. Woman suffrage cartoon, Puck, 1914. Library of Congress.

Meanwhile, Chicago has thousands of activists, dispersed in community and non-profit groups; after the unions, their organizations are Chicago’s progressive infrastructure. These organizations have a huge stake in the primary’s outcome, but they have been disciplined to focus on narrow organizational missions and stand aside from electoral politics. The Democratic establishment (aka “the machine”)  has enormous resources to reward loyalty and punish disobedience with our tax money, zoning and building permit favors, and the wealthy donors of the non-profits can reenforce the social discipline. Our tax system’s not-for-profit status has, after all, been designed to prevent non-profits from playing an active role in supporting candidates. But maybe the time is coming for more of them to learn from the many ways the right-wing tax-exempts have figured out how to influence elections.

What about all the people who came out for Sanders in 2016? The electoral groups which had earlier mobilized around the Sanders campaign carried their organizing into the midterms with dramatic victories nationwide, and their turnout of progressive voters swept out more machine incumbents. But they have no candidate for the top office, scattering a handful of endorsements among city council candidates. Indivisible Chicago, MoveOn.org, Our Revolution, Berniecrats, Democratic Socialists are not endorsing for mayor, though DSA has members running for City Council and North and South Democrats for America have a few endorsements.  Maybe they needed a Trump to run for mayor in order to get fired up; but we are far from having a political culture in which a Bill Daley or Paul Valles can be exposed and seen for the dire threats they truly are.

What needed to happen? Some lessons from Chicago history

There’s another way of looking at the leadership problem. To understand Chicago elections today, we still have to go back to Harold Washington’s 1983 campaign for mayor, a cataclysm in Chicago politics.

The machine was weakened and divided since the first Mayor Daley’s death. Jane Byrne had upended the establishment in an anti-machine reform campaign … and when she won, almost immediately made alliances with the machine’s sleaziest operators and tried to make the machine her own. (Which of today’s candidates are “reformers” posing as reformers?)

But after years of exclusion and insults to the black community, there was a small army of activists and community leadership intent on mounting a challenge in the 1983 mayoral primary. This leadership cohort had been shaped by the civil rights and black power movements and knew how to do grassroots organizing and build coalitions. They found their challenger in Harold Washington, then a respected congressman. The oft-repeated story is that he said he wouldn’t run unless and until supporters registered 50,000 new voters. In fact, a broad coalition of community activists already had a serious voter registration campaign going in the Black community before the 1982 midterms, and they registered well over 100,000 new voters between 1979 and 1983. These groups had already pulled together to mount a stunningly successful boycott of Mayor Byrne’s ChicagoFest, and that campaign developed alliances they needed for the primary. The movement was broad and deep, with black churches joining over 200 community groups, black intellectuals, business leaders and opinion-makers.

Harold — OK, OK, people who never met him have been on a first-name basis with him for decades — Harold was a brilliant politician, a genuine reformer, with a radical and antiracist program to destroy the machine, clean up and democratize Chicago politics. He fought his way into power with a coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and liberal whites, defying a shockingly open racist counterattack by the Democratic Party machine. They defeated Mayor Byrne and then-states attorney Richard M. Daley in the primary, Republican Bernie Epton (supported by much of the machine) in the general, and then Byrne again in 1987.

A spectre is haunting the machine …

A spectre is haunting the machine … the spectre of Black-Latin unity.

The machine recovered after Harold’s tragic death in office, with Richard M. Daley beginning his 22 years as mayor in 1989, the machine stronger and wealthier than ever and learning too well from the defeat. The two most important lessons:  1) Systematically divide blacks and Hispanics to prevent the coalition Chuy Garcia tried to rebuild in 2015, and 2) weaken Black unity by using the machine’s wealth and ability to deliver contracts, zoning and permits to buy the loyalty of influential ministers and community leaders and punish defectors.

We see the result in 2019: Neither the Black nor the Latinx community could produce a credible independent, anti-machine reform candidate, thus guaranteeing the minority vote would split between Susana Mendoza and Toni Preckwinkle, and probably ushering the champion of the financial sector, Bill Daley, into a runoff. There had been nothing like the years of broad community activism, strategizing and coalition-building that lay the foundation for the Harold Washington campaign, no leaders ready to walk in his path.

Why the City Council races matter

Without a clear progressive mayoral candidate to unite around, many progressives are looking to the city council races. I’ve asked everyone I’ve talked to in the last few days, from friends to students and taxi drivers, who their alderman is and what ward they live in. None of them could answer. It’s natural for voters to underestimate the importance of the city council, since for decades the political machine has made it a rubber stamp for the mayor. That makes it easy to forget the aldermen could vote on everything in city government. But progressive council victories could change that.

Although power is concentrated in the mayor’s office,  the city council has ultimate authority. This means that a progressive majority in the council could wrest power from the mayor and transform Chicago. Well, maybe that’s as unlikely as a progressive majority in Congress. But short of that, a significantly enlarged progressive bloc in the council could widen and exploit divisions in the machine, impose a credible threat of primary challenges, and  force through important reforms.

More council members have faced serious challenge since the 2015 primaries. Then, the charismatic CTU president, Karen Lewis, announced she would run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. When she was forced to withdraw after a cancer diagnosis, she and the CTU drafted Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who began his progressive activism even before his important role in the Harold Washington’s 1983 campaign. In the biggest blow to the machine since its defeat by Harold Washington, Emanuel and 19 aldermen were forced into runoffs. Emanuel won, but voters brought new voices into the council’s progressive caucus. More important, voters showed that the machine could be beaten in ward races.  And then the machine suffered another blow in the midterms, with even more progressive challengers backed by activist groups.  Two key party bosses in particular suffered major defeats — Ed Burke’s brother lost to a CTU-backed candidate and Cook County boss Joe Berrios lost the Assessor’s race, both defeated by relatively unknown outsiders backed by the movement upsurge. And this time Ed Burke himself is under attack by the feds and has been targeted by progressives.

Again in this election, the CTU has put together a slate of candidates, endorsing 13 for city council, some of them union members.  SEIU locals endorsed a dozen. Their endorsement for mayor may have disappointed many progressives, but their city council candidates are for the most part an anti-machine slate of activists.   Some of the progressive organizations have smaller slates of candidates, and some locally iconic progressives have put their names behind some candidates.

Will activists go into the streets for them? Progressives have one big task now: to oppose the neoliberal avatar of the machine remade by Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel and fight back against its program of delivering the city to the financial sector.  We’ve seen enough under Daley II and Rahm to know what to expect from them: more privatizations like the scandalous parking meter giveaway; more monster tax-funded developments like Lincoln Yards; more bleeding the middle class and the poor with fines and taxes; more starving the schools and community service organizations; more gentrifying black and brown neighborhoods and driving out working families; more poverty and desperation fueling an endless stream of gun violence and homicides in the Black community; and more powering up the police and jails for the violent social control required by all of this misery.

—Paul Elitzik

Notes:

The Chicago primary election for mayor, city treasurer, city clerk and 50 city council seats will take place on February 26; early voting has begun. Find your ward and alderman here, and consult Ballotpedia to see who is running against them.

There’s a good discussion here between Amisha Patel of Grassroots Collaborative, Ben Joravsky and Fred Klonsky on the role of progressives in Chicago elections — in particular, why they were not prepared to advance a candidate in the mayoral election.

To learn more about the Harold Washington campaign, read Gary Rivlin’s in-depth account in “Fire on the Prairie: Chicago’s Harold Washington and the politics of race.” (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992).

My comments on the Harold Washington campaign’s meaning in Chicago racial politics owe a lot to John M. Hagedorn, “The Insane Chicago Way: The daring plan by Chicago gangs to create a Spanish Mafia” (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2015). More than a story about gangs in the 1990s, it’s a penetrating history of racism, power, politics, corruption, homicide and police violence in Chicago. The continuing role of gangs in the history of the Chicago machine and the police is a little-known story important for understanding the bigger picture, very relevant today when police violence and reform measures is one of the most important issues in the primary. More at Hagedorn’s website, gangresearch.net.

I’m learning how many of my friends don’t know who their alderman is or what the issues are. So I’m going to follow up with another post, highlighting some of the issues and races, with notes on some of the candidates and who is supporting them. If you’d like research on any candidate or issue, send me an email and I’ll try to oblige.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 Responses to Chicago mayoral primary: Where are the progressives?

  1. I’m really surprised you don’t have anything about Amara Eniya here. My students (who are active, grassroots members of groups that regularly organize in the city around #BlackLivesMatter and anti-gun legislation) are working on her campaign. I don’t usually vote for an underdog, but their passion around her stances is so inspiring that I have to champion her progressive ideas. And Chance the Rapper is behind her, too. Why isn’t she in this article? Is it just because she hasn’t been polling super-well?

    Thanks for this thoughtful piece, Paul. I really enjoy reading your thoughts on these issues.

    • Paul says:

      Thanks for your note, Sophie. It’s important to pay attention to grassroots activists, it’s interesting that your students are working for her. I’m looking forward to learning more and will pay close attention.

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