quote:

I’ve spoken to hundreds of voters in “flyover country.” Socialism is an easy sell.
Kentucky voters are ready for a bold progressive agenda.
By Richard Becker Jul 12, 2018, 12:10pm EDT
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Kentucky Public school teachers rally for a “day of action” at the Kentucky State Capitol to try to pressure legislators to override Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s recent veto of the state’s tax and budget bills on April 13, 2018, in Frankfort, Kentucky. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
First Person
Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays.

On a bitterly cold day in late January, I knocked on the door of a home in Louisville, Kentucky’s Camp Taylor neighborhood. I was running for state representative in a Democratic primary and was spreading the word about my candidacy. Camp Taylor was an interesting community politically: It was full of registered Democrats who hadn’t been turning up to vote in recent elections.

A woman in her 50s came to the door and peeked through the curtain at me. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Richard Becker and I’m running for state representative!” She turned the deadbolt and opened the door.

“I just wanted to stop by and introduce myself and find out what issues—” I was interrupted by a voice from further in the house. “I want to know if you’re gonna fight for people like me!” a woman’s voice said from the couch.

“That’s my daughter,” the woman said. “She got hurt in an accident and can’t walk very well anymore.”

“And now this governor thinks I should have to go to work to get my health care? I can’t even walk to the bathroom without help!” the younger woman cried out, referring, presumably, to Gov. Matt Bevin’s plans to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “And I don’t know what to tell you other than I will fight for you. Fighting Gov. Bevin’s Medicaid work requirements and fighting for universal—”

“What we need is single-payer health care!” the mother interrupted.

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. I stopped by that house twice more before the end of the campaign, and by Election Day, they had placed one of my signs in their yard.

I’m a union organizer who ran in Kentucky on a leftist platform and I was campaigning in the state’s 35th District. Predominantly white and working-class, the district exists in a sort of bubble within Louisville. Containing rapidly gentrifying, liberal neighborhoods like Germantown and Schnitzelburg, as well as more conservative areas like Okolona and Lynnview, the 35th District holds political lessons about the viability of a progressive platform for those willing to listen.

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It’s a district that is overwhelmingly Democratic by voter registration numbers, but like many communities across the South, the Democrats here don’t necessarily always vote with their party. The district went for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary by a margin of 53 percent to 45 percent. In the general election, Hillary Clinton won the district with just 54 percent of the vote, or 9,554 votes, out of a total of more than 18,000 Democrats. Many of the registered Democrats in this part of town voted for Donald Trump.

I knocked on hundreds of doors. While I didn’t win my race — I finished second in a three-way primary — through my conversations, I heard over and over again that Louisville voters were tired of timidity, incrementalism, and equivocation. They craved boldness and candidates who will not only fight for them but with them on issues that affect their lives: truly universal health care, free college tuition, combatting income inequality, and restoring and strengthening workers’ rights.

The popularity of the teacher strikes show that “red” states are ready for progressivism
I ran for the state legislature in the shadow of an intensely controversial legislative session that saw right-wing Gov. Bevin ram through so-called “pension reform,” gutting retirement benefits for public employees. Apparently startled by the backlash to his proposals, Bevin lobbed vitriolic insults at teachers and other public employees, calling them “selfish,” “thuggish,” and “ignorant and uninformed.”

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Bevin’s push to make cuts to public employee retirement benefits came as teacher strikes swept the country, from West Virginia to Colorado. Inspired by their fellow educators across the country and angry over Bevin’s insults, Kentucky’s teachers shut down their schools for several days earlier this year and rallied in Frankfort, the capital.

To stand, as I did, on the steps of the Kentucky State Capitol amidst a sea of red — striking teachers, marching en masse on the legislature, wore red to symbolize solidarity (“Wear Red for Ed[ucation]”) — underscored one of the values we had set out to uphold on the campaign: that an organized working class is the most powerful political force you’ll find.

Across Kentucky, the potency of the teachers’ movement persists, with record numbers of educators running for office, and one teacher, R. Travis Brenda, even defeating an incumbent, House majority leader Jonathan Shell, in a Republican primary. Brenda ran on a pro-pension, pro-public education platform. This uprising echoed in red states across the country is proof of a nationwide working-class awakening.

Voters are fed up with a political class that defends its corporate masters and spits in the faces of working-class people. An overwhelming majority of voters, 77 percent, want to see the influence of money in politics curbed, while establishment politicians of both parties continue accepting campaign checks from big business.

Democrats need to reach out to people disengaged with the political system
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning victory over establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th District primary this year set off the latest iteration of Democratic Party hand-wringing over the future of the party. Establishment Democrats across America wasted no time in admonishing the left to know its place and discounting Ocasio-Cortez’s success as an aberration and a product of her deep-blue district. This political earthquake, they assured us, was most certainly not indicative of any broader political trend.

But to see the potential of progressive politics, even in supposedly moderate states, we need only look to the success of candidates like Virginia’s Lee Carter, a 31-year old former Marine who ran for the House of Delegates in 2017 as an open socialist against an entrenched Republican incumbent — and won. Or, obviously, Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, which saw victories in Rust Belt states across the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia.

Further, polling suggests that progressive or even “socialist” policy prescriptions actually enjoy considerable support among voters, with Americans supporting a federal jobs guarantee by a margin of 52 percent to 29 percent.

With only 23 percent of voters casting a ballot in the 2018 Kentucky primaries for both parties, progressives within the party have a real opportunity to expand the voter pool by offering a message that draws people into the political process. The Democratic Party can win by attracting non-voters who are disengaged from a political system and bought and paid for by corporate America — and by embracing the next generation of political leadership, a generation that by all accounts is more progressive than their parents on almost every issue.

Although I didn’t win my bid for public office, the issues I ran on — Medicare-for-all, restoring and strengthening workers’ rights, and free college tuition — resonated overwhelmingly with the voters I spoke with. I earned the endorsements of sitting members of the Kentucky General Assembly and more than a dozen local labor unions. Not bad for someone campaigning on an openly left-wing platform in a supposedly centrist city.

The question today is: Will the party continue to circle the wagons around more corporate-friendly, “mainstream” candidates, or will it welcome and support truly progressive candidates who will fight for the working class?

How Democrats choose to answer the call of my generation will likely determine whether the party goes the way of the Whigs — drifting away into history as a failed political party — or if it can secure majority status once again. If and when the party chooses to open itself up to more progressive elements and ideas, you can bet there will be millions of us ready to help realize that vision.

Richard Becker is a union organizer, millennial, and political activist in Louisville, Kentucky. He ran for state representative in Kentucky’s 35th District in the May 2018 primary election."]

SKULL.GIF posted:

The specific text of the indictment says this:


laughing forever that her emails actually did matter

Over There posted:

Dems? in my government?

Raskolnikov38 posted:

behold the single image more powerful than american democracy

HiHo ChiRho posted:

All the succ dems are going to make noise for a few more months until Abuela, "after much agitation from the liberal base" throws her hat in for round three. The will have the clown car of dems bow out quickly after that.

mila kunis posted:

why the gently caress is that probatable?

Shear Modulus posted:

i think its clear by now that in the general election trump would eat every democrat that isnt bernie or biden or maybe gillibrand alive

Gene Hackman Fan posted:

We can still talk about tweeting pictures of guillotines to billionaires, right?

Chillgamesh posted:

I don't know much about Gillibrand at all beyond her being a "progressive" succ dem, but I think what the dude meant was that Trump's going to walk all over any opponent whose response to being mocked by Trump is to be indignant about it and say focus-tested poo poo like "When they go low, we go high" rather than just swinging back. Maybe he thinks Gillibrand is more of a scrapper like Bernie and Biden?

Shear Modulus posted:

i think that her being the only one to tell franken to gently caress off demonstrated that she was the only one among the current crop of idiots who can figure out that (as in deference towards powerful old rich white dudes) is a liability. during the election i expect her to act angrier than harris or booker or whoever will, which will help her

Barry Convex posted:

wow, imagine a president spending billions on programs you don’t like! what a nightmarish, dystopian vision

https://twitter.com/illinibizdean/status/1018318458793136128?s=21

The Muppets On PCP posted:

giilibrand suffers from the same problem harris and every other non-biden democrat faces- they're completely unknown to 95% of the general public. and i'd even put biden on that list because nobody gives two shits about the vice president

trump is going to continue sucking up every last bit of media and it'll be impossible for someone who isn't already a household name to get any publicity

and if sanders somehow winds up the nominee i'm not entirely convinced the dnc and friends won't tacitly sabotage him since they prefer having trump as a foil

Taintrunner posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkXeMoBPSDk

oh my loving god

Main Paineframe posted:

Hillary probably will run, because she hasn't shown even a single sign that she's learned her lesson or realized that her political career is over

she won't get any meaningful support from the establishment, because almost everyone else has realized that she has no chance (even if they're still flailing to figure out why), but I dount she's ready to give up

of course, 2020 is still over two years off, so it's possible that she'll change her mind. no one expected Daou to suddenly abandon abuela, after all

theCalamity posted:

gently caress all of those people wagging their fingers at Bernie for doing this town hall. This is the poo poo every single Democrat should be doing right now. Obama should be out pushing for these policies.

FactsAreUseless posted:

lmao he'll get destroyed by his own party again

The Nastier Nate posted:

If dems are gonna talk about the Russia investigation, it should be pointed out that the pot of gold at the end of the Mueller rainbow isn't going to be some nebulous "collusion" charge (which is true, but who cares? and as said, we've meddled in more countries internal politics then anyone) but the decades of financial crimes that Trump and the GOP have committed, defrauding anyone and everyone they could.

Even when we do catch these rich fuckers red-handed we're lucky to get a slap on the wrist. We don't even have to go far for an example, as the $25 million Trump university settlement, which scammed thousands of American's who thought Trump was a financial genius ended up costing him not even 1% of his net worth.

Jailing these fuckers on the billions of dollars they've laundered, defrauded and stolen from the American people would be a good start to letting the rest of them know they're not above the law. I don't have any faith that's what is actually gonna happen but it sounds nice.

loquacius posted:

The funny thing about this is it's exactly the same tactic pro-gun people use to justify not passing any gun reforms after a mass shooting

cheese posted:

Untying schools from property taxes is staggeringly simple. You just need to make the shared funding pot bigger. Instead of having funding based on city/district/county, you make it by state.

Jose posted:

i tried to find a gbs post by zegermans to 6er him for to show mod abuse powers to stop him posting but i couldn't find one

GalacticAcid posted:

nobody cares

Yinlock posted:

avatars don't have an expiration date man

changing your avatar just means nobody recognizes you anymore

Agean90 posted:

lol at anyone who still thinks Hillary won't run in 2020

Jazerus posted:

the rise of things you have to pay for have made a free thing irrelevant

well gee thanks mr. banker

Feldegast42 posted:

The Chosen who has a sniper rifle and acts like a real badass but can't hit your squaddies even if he has a clean flanked shot

WampaLord posted:

I've said this before and I'll say it again, I can't loving believe they went with "I'm With Her" instead of "She's With Us"

WampaLord posted:

Lying?

In politics?



You think someone can do that, just get into politics and tell lies?

Agean90 posted:

remember when a millionaire reality TV star convinced millions of Americans that he was a savvy businessman who was on their side dispite going bankrupt 5 times and being notorious for not paying his contractors and is now the president

Lmao

GalacticAcid posted:

A meme I’ve seen floating around lately is “little kids have to pay thousands of dollars for [inhaler, surgery, x, y, z], yet addicts can get Narcan for free over and over again???”

Ruzihm posted:

Tbh they probably meant access to purchasing broadband for all.

Gio posted:

im asking why abdul, AOC, (lee) carter, bernie etc. barely talk about expanding unionization. bernie is the only one who has, but he rarely talks about it.

galenanorth posted:

if the union leadership is democratically elected, it seems like this'd happen with the leader of the democratically owned worker co-op

GalacticAcid posted:

Potemkin Cum Towns...

The Muppets On PCP posted:

hard to believe workplace shootings aren't more commonplace

Lastgirl posted:

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

libs have lost their minds about him. our very own zegermans has built an elaborate alex jones-worthy mind castle that half the trump thread believes lol

WampaLord posted:

"I was welcomed by everyone, with open arms" says white guy when discussing his visit to a Sundown Town

Al! posted:

yep it's actively doing harm gently caress every access journalist

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

very strange how she knows the race of the unidentified person who smashed the star

anime was right posted:

that vandal has created more jobs than that hillary staffer