By now, you’ve seen the news: a “political earthquake” hit Los Angeles and flipped the script on the decades-long reign of corporate Democrats. The people elected some real progressive fighters like Nithya Raman, Holly Mitchell, and George Gascón to local offices.
Our city swung left, thanks to the organizers who guided our anger into action. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the grassroots teams whose years-long work paid off in November. Groups like Koreatown For All, GroundGame LA, Community Coalition Action Fund, labor unions, and the Sunrise Movement hit the pavement and the phones, and went all-in to propel their candidates to victory. Black Lives Matter LA, which protested Jackie Lacey, DA-elect George Gascon’s predecessor, on the steps of City Hall every Wednesday afternoon for the past three years, delivered an especially powerful pressure campaign with sophisticated and comprehensive policy proposals on police reform.
Wealthy lobbyists used to corner the market on brokering power behind the scenes of LA elections. Move over: grassroots organizers are the new kingmakers of Los Angeles.
Their army is a highly organized, well-oiled machine of activists. And they’re not leaving town — they intend to hold the leaders they endorsed to account. Already, George Gascón has met with BLM LA, who warned him that their full trust must be earned.
LA politicians are wising up to the will of the people. Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas is pushing for Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s resignation, a signal to Angelenos that he is prepared to feed their hunger for criminal justice reform when he takes his seat on the City Council.
If the rest of our local leaders are smart, they too will take cues from recent progressive victories and get on board — or get out of the way.
As a super-majority Democratic city in a super-majority Democratic state, Los Angeles should be a model for the nation, leading on smart, cutting-edge, transformative policymaking. There is no Republican threat here to get in the way of a bold agenda. Our leaders have nothing to lose by going big, and, as the local election proved, everything to gain.
California is supposedly the liberal beacon of the nation, but with our continued commitment to fracking, the second largest prison population in the country, and the ongoing criminalization of homelessness and poverty, we’re not acting on our own values.
It’s time to change that.
We can transform LA into a laboratory of good government; putting progressive policy to the test and proving to the Democratic Party that answering the will of the people is not only good governance, it’s good politics.
With our new trio of innovative leaders, a freshly passed Measure J (which, by the way, defunds the police), and a growing movement of organizers and engaged Angelenos, we have an opportunity to demonstrate the credibility of the progressive platform that traditional Democratic leadership has been so hesitant to embrace. And maybe, once establishment Democrats see how popular progressivism has become, they might, like Supervisor Ridley-Thomas, start shifting to the left.
Either way, the progressive wave is here to stay in LA. Local leaders can choose to ride it with Holly, Nithya, and George, and set an example for the state and the nation, or they can belly flop straight into the undertow of stale, old-school politics and get left behind.
After all, our new kingmakers are only growing stronger.
Ignore us at your own risk.