A Socialist Wins in Seattle

By John Nichols, The Nation

01 December 13

Kshama Sawant’s City Council victory reflects broad trends: polls show voters are increasingly immune to redbaiting.

hen Machinists union members rallied in Seattle in mid-November to protest Boeing’s demand for wage and pension cuts, the newest municipal official roused the crowd. “We salute the Machinists for having the courage to reject this blatant highway robbery from the executives of Boeing in pursuit of their endless, endless thirst for private profit.” Kshama Sawant, an economics professor and Occupy Seattle activist who had just won a citywide City Council seat, said threats to shift production out of state could be met with an eminent domain move allowing workers to “take over the factories.”

Condemning private profit and talking up worker control of factories? That sounds kinda socialist. And socialists don’t win elections in the United States, right? Wrong. Sawant is the most recent in a long line of “out” socialists elected to city councils, mayoralties and even seats in Congress over the past century. Yet her win drew headlines as far away as her native India.

What made Sawant’s victory historic was the context. Since 2008, Republican politicians and their media echo chambers have built a cottage industry around the comic claim that Barack Obama is a socialist. The man who took single-payer healthcare off the table and refused to break up “too big to fail” banks wouldn’t qualify as a mild social democrat, let alone the raging “Marxist” of Rush Limbaugh’s hallucinations.

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