[ The new director of the Working Families Party in New York wants
to unite the left against Governor Andrew Cuomo and his austerity
politics. ] [[link removed]]

SOCHIE NNAEMEKA (AND THE WORKING FAMILIES PARTY) WANTS TO TAKE ON
CORPORATE DEMOCRATS   [[link removed]]

 

Karina Piser
February 21, 2020
The Nation
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_ The new director of the Working Families Party in New York wants to
unite the left against Governor Andrew Cuomo and his austerity
politics. _

Sochie Nnaemeka became the director of the Working Families Party in
New York in December., Courtesy of Sochie Nnaemeka // The Nation

 

When Sochie Nnaemeka met me at Commons Café in Downtown Brooklyn, she
was apologetic. She was barely five minutes late, but our noon meeting
was clearly one of many she’d lined up for the day. “I almost went
to this completely other place, Brooklyn Commons. It’s nowhere near
here,” she said, smoothing out her blue dress. It would have messed
up her busy schedule. The barista, intrigued by our request for
“somewhere quiet”—someone had started playing piano, loudly, in
the back room—led us to a sunny conference room one floor up. “You
can talk about your important things here,” he said.

In December, Nnaemeka became the director of the Working Families
Party (WFP) in New York, making her the new face of a group with a
crucial role in the state’s progressive movement, backing policy
reforms and left-wing candidates. Now, she’s tasked with maintaining
that momentum—but she doesn’t seem fazed. She’s spent her career
building up to this opportunity.

It started at Yale, where Nnaemeka was radicalized. She arrived as a
starry-eyed freshman in 2007, but was immediately disillusioned. “It
wasn’t the space to engage with real questions of how to make the
country a more expansive, inclusive, secure place for immigrants and
people of color,” Nnaemeka, who is the daughter of Nigerian
immigrants, told me over cold-brewed coffee on an unseasonably warm
winter afternoon.

She said she had questions: “What does it mean for the university to
be the largest employer in a deeply segregated, divided city?” How
could Yale defend “values of the Enlightenment and possibility, when
the university basically ran on keeping an almost entirely black
workforce at bay?”

So she started organizing with dining hall workers. They were mostly
black women, and active members of their labor union. Nnaemeka
attended their meetings and joined when they knocked on doors in
low-income neighborhoods. “I thought, OK, I may not have a great
sense of where my geographic home is, but I feel most at home when
I’m with people who are engaged in a solidarity-based struggle,”
she said, an excited lilt in her voice. That’s “when the
organizing bug” bit her, she added.

Nnaemeka, now 31, has been organizing for a decade. She came to the
WFP from the Center for Popular Democracy, where she worked with
grassroots groups across the country, including Black Leaders
Organizing for Communities in Milwaukee and Detroit Action in
Michigan. In that role, she cultivated new political leaders and
empowered young women of color. Nnaemeka took the reins of the WFP in
New York at a delicate time for the small-but-mighty group. In New
York, the WFP helped fuel a progressive wave, working to flip the
state Senate to Democratic control and backing cash-bail reform,
tighter rent regulations, and driver’s licenses for undocumented
immigrants. It was a major force in propelling Tiffany Cabàn’s bid
for Queens district attorney. She lost by just 55 votes, but her
candidacy pushed the conversation on criminal justice reform to the
left. “There’s renewed interest and excitement on the left in
electoral politics,” Nnaemeka told me. “People are really
searching for a political home and a true left party, and I remain
convinced that the WFP is the vehicle for that strategy and that
movement.”

Yet the WFP—in New York and nationally—has sometimes struggled to
find its place, often straddling the line between the progressive
movement and establishment politics. After it endorsed Elizabeth
Warren in September, the party faced online harassment, often
punctuated by racist and sexist threats. _Jacobin_ declared
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the group had “written itself out of history,” framing Bernie
Sanders as “the national manifestation” of the WFP’s politics.
“The fact that the WFP doesn’t recognize that,” the magazine’s
founder, Bhaskar Sunkara, wrote, “reflects how much it has
strayed.” When I read those quotes to Nnaemeka—she had surely
heard them many times before—she laughed, but didn’t tackle them
directly. “We have a theory of change that we need to organize to
win the world that we want,” she said, her tone steady and
deliberate. “That not does not mean pushing people out at moments of
tactical rift, it means having real open and clear conversation, and
fighting for people’s votes.”

At different times, the WFP’s endorsements have alienated those to
its left and right. The group gave Governor Andrew Cuomo its party
line in 2014, sowing internal division and angering progressive groups
and candidates. In 2018, it threw its support behind Cynthia Nixon
against Cuomo, enraging union members closely aligned with the
governor, and its relationship with labor has remained tenuous. In the
state Democratic primary that year, the WFP backed Joe Crowley, a
long-serving centrist who supported the invasion of Iraq, rather than
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Although Nnaemeka wasn’t around during those endorsements, she’ll
need to manage their lingering effects. “We have to make hard
choices,” she said. “When it came to Cuomo, there was a political
calculation, and at that moment, that was a strategically sound
decision.” It’s clear that Nnaemeka often faces questions about
the WFP’s past, and she doesn’t want to get bogged down. For her,
the hostile response to this year’s endorsement—and the split
between the Warren and Sanders camps more broadly—undermines the
progressive movement’s long-term objectives. “We have two
structural change candidates who are vying for the highest office in
the land, talking about eliminating student debt and access to health
care, and we’re really fucking excited about that.”

Against that backdrop, Nnaemeka wants to trudge ahead—and to the
left. The WFP may have endorsed Cuomo in the past, but in 2020 she is
positioning the party in opposition to his policies and style—even
if it will further alienate the powerful unions that were once central
to its survival. That means strengthening ties with the Democratic
Socialists of America and jumping on board with staunch progressives
whose politics an earlier iteration of the WFP might have shied away
from. “We might not align on everything, but we have to find places
of deep alignment,” she said, and “getting rid of the corporate
wing of the Democratic Party is one of those places.” The WFP’s
mindset “is figuring out where we’re trying to go, and who is in
our way. So the corporate wing of the Democratic Party was making it
harder for regular people to live good lives in New York.”

Her first fight is Cuomo’s budget. “We’re falling into this
right-wing frame of austerity politics. We don’t have what we need,
and we’re balancing our budget on the backs of the most
vulnerable,” she said, referring to the governor’s proposed $2.5
billion cuts to New York Medicaid. “There’s more than enough for
what we need, but we don’t have a leader with the progressive will
and creativity to make that possible.” She listed potential sources
of revenue that could fill the state’s $6.1 billion budget hole:
taxes on luxury real estate and cars or on “second yachts,” she
explained, adding, sardonically, “the amount of wealth in our state
is, you know, quite large.” Nnaemeka called the state budget a
“moral document”; Cuomo’s “fiscal sustainability,” as the
governor calls his economic paradigm, has created a “moral crisis”
in the state. “People go hungry, schools are underfunded and
overcrowded, and what we’re actually focused on is whether
mega-millionaires feel comfortable in their day-to-day.”

The WFP’s embrace of a democratic socialist vision enhances its
ideological clarity and could solidify its role as the “political
home” Nnaemeka said so many on the left are searching for. But it
also puts the party on precarious ground. Last summer, the WFP filed a
lawsuit against Cuomo, whom they accused of creating a commission
specifically to tweak election laws in order to stifle third parties.
In November, the commission voted that in order to secure a line on
the state ballot, parties must draw either 2 percent of the vote or
130,000 votes—up from 50,000, a relatively low threshold that has
allowed parties like the WFP to remain on the ballot, giving New
Yorkers the option to “vote their values.”

The new threshold could threaten the WFP’s existence—but Nnaemeka
doesn’t seem worried. “We approach this as organizers, and turn
lemons into lemonade. For us, the higher threshold is an organizing
goal, an opportunity to talk to thousands of new voters.”

Nnaemeka sees Cuomo’s antics as a sign that the WFP is in the right.
“The backlash is real, and that’s what happens when people are
afraid of a new balance of power,” she said. “For the first time,
the left has a real possibility to govern—not just to protest, but
to govern, and so people are figuring out how to cut that at the
knees.” I asked how her disillusioned 18-year-old self would feel
about the current climate. She smiled. “Progressive movements
aren’t fringe anymore,” she replied. “This is the moment that I
wanted.”

_[Karina Piser is a freelance writer.]_

_Copyright c 2020The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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