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LESSONS FROM CHICAGO’S LEFT, TWO YEARS IN POWER  
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Alex Han, Asha Ransby-Sporn, Jeanette Taylor, Daniel Denvir
September 28, 2025
Jacobin
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_ With Zohran Mamdani on the cusp of victory in New York City, the
Left should learn from the ups and downs of embattled Chicago mayor
Brandon Johnson. _

Brandon Johnson speaks at a Labor Day rally in Chicago, Illinois on
September 1, 2025., Audrey Richardson / Getty Images

 

What is going on with Chicago? It’s a question that people on the
American left have been asking a lot since Zohran Mamdani won his
spectacular upset in New York. That’s because in 2023, Chicago
Teachers Union (CTU) leader Brandon Johnson won Chicago’s mayoral
election. It marked one of the most significant electoral victories
for the American left. In particular, it was a crowning achievement
for that city’s militant labor and social movements. Those movements
have grown powerfully over the past decade and a half as left-wing
activists took over the CTU and took their members out on strike with
widespread community support, setting off a new era of teacher union
militancy across the country.

At the same time, Chicago has been a thriving center of black
organizing against both police violence and the abandonment of poor
communities of color. The Johnson administration, however, has faced
intense opposition from the real estate industry, organized Zionists,
the Democratic Party establishment, and the charter school industry.
Johnson’s approval ratings now are much, much lower than we would
hope — something that mainstream media reports on Mamdani really
love to mention. But while the Chicago project has faced big defeats
and confronts enormous challenges, it has also won many victories and
has a vision to keep pushing it forward.

Dan Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio
[[link removed]] podcast _The
Dig_, spoke to organizer and executive director of _In These
Times_ Alex Han, Black Youth Project 100 cofounder Asha Ransby-Sporn
and Chicago alderwoman Jeanette Taylor about the hurdles the Chicago
project has faced and how a left in power next time can avoid making
some of the same mistakes.

Daniel Denvir

I want to open this interview bluntly. There’s a widespread sense on
the Left elsewhere in the country that things are not going as well as
might be hoped with the Brandon Johnson administration in Chicago.
Most people outside Chicago that I’ve talked to have no clear sense
of why, but I do know that comrades in New York City are now furiously
researching that question now that Zohran is likely headed to Gracie
Mansion. So to start out, what’s your general assessment of what’s
going on and what’s happened so far?

 

Alex Han

That’s a really big question, but it’s obviously an important
question for this moment. I kind of want to go backward a little bit
in time and put us in the context of how we started and where we are.
Part of that is a little over ten years ago — I, along with a group
of other union leaders and community organizers, started an
organization called United Working Families, which was intended to be
an independent political organization that could contest for power.

This was 2014. This was before Bernie Sanders’s first campaign.
Before the rise of a new socialist politics and an ability to really
think about power on a bigger scale at that time. For a lot of us, we
thought of the mayor’s office in Chicago as the most power that we
could imagine. We were also not political operatives. We were union
leaders who had led large-scale strikes and organized tens of
thousands of workers, community organizers who had led campaigns
against privatization, had done sit-ins and hunger strikes and
militant action.

The orientation was not toward electoral politics as a solution, it
was toward electoral politics as a tool. It’s also important to keep
in mind that with victory, these things are not linear. And a snapshot
can’t really tell the story of where we started, where we are, and
where we’re headed. And so this kind of conversation can help us
shed some light on that.

We’re a decade into this project. But I think of us as being maybe
in the beginnings of the second phase. We don’t have all of the
power we need to transform things. But because of having a movement
mayor in the mayor’s office, and because of having elected officials
like Alderwoman Taylor here and really dozens of others in city
councils, in the US Congress and state legislatures, and the Cook
County board, we have an ability to understand what power is, and that
is what is going to help move us forward.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

It’s been a hard two years. We’ve learned a lot in Chicago. I
think about how power works. I think the Left in Chicago has opened up
a new set of contradictions. And at least for me, I know I have
learned an enormous amount about how power works and how change
happens. It has opened up this whole other window into how I and the
people around me think about what we need to do and what we need to
build in order to enact the kind of transformation that we want to
see.

At the time that Alex started United Working Families, I was in
leadership at Black Youth Project 100, leading organizing work around
policing, black youth-led organizing. And, you know, we had a sense
that we needed to challenge and get rid of some of the decision-makers
in our city, like Rahm Emanuel, like Anita Alvarez, who are
participating in things like covering up police, murder, and all of
that.

But I was on this whole other kind of side of movements that have
evolved and shifted and come together in some ways. And really
thinking about organizing from this very outsider lens of being the
people who are very far away from where decisions that impacted our
lives were being made and being the people who were protesting outside
of that. I wasn’t thinking about party-building or winning
elections, I was just thinking about how we get some of these people
out of there and then see what happens and who we can make demands on.

It turns out we protested Rahm Emanuel so hard we got the person
we’d been protesting as the head of the police board as our mayor
instead, Lori Lightfoot. But we didn’t like her very much
either. And that made me reconsider like maybe we could get behind a
mayoral candidate eventually over time. So that’s a little bit of my
journey. But yeah, I think the last two years were my entry point into
committing to a left electoral project, and seeing that as a part of
the legacy of black movements and organizing that I was a part of and
feeling like, you know, we needed to align with the labor movement.

Just ’cause you changed the top, cutting off the head, the body’s
still wiggling.

We needed to align with these other forces and movements that were
coming together in Chicago in this moment. Not just to elect a mayor
but to think about how we can actually take responsibility for
changing the city in a different direction — away from the things we
had aligned ourselves as being against, like police killings and
corruption and privatization and school closures. It had been after a
decade of organizing that I saw it becoming really clear. We were all
on the same side against these things. And I think what it looks like
to be on the same side for a different vision of the city and to know
some people in positions of power who are responsible for making
change — that opens up a whole new set of questions about how you
actually do that. So it’s sharpened for me, like the question of
party, you know? And I don’t mean that in the capital-p or
ballot-line sense of, like, the Democratic Party. I mean: What is the
alliance set of forces that are working together to try to take over
the government and then use it to do something different?

And I think that’s still contested and an open question for us. I
think it has, after the electoral wins, a lot of people talking about
co-governance. And it’s like, no, some people have governing power
and governing responsibility and other people don’t. I actually find
the framework of inside/outside much more helpful. It has sharpened
things about power, about coalition, who you need in it to be powerful
and stable — like how hard or easy it is to be unified in coalition.

There’s been a lot of coalitional strain. There have been a lot of
wins — a lot of wins when you’re thinking about the scale of the
city and the number of decisions that people in power make all the
time. But sometimes our ways of identifying the campaign goals are not
enough, even when we check them all off. So I don’t know. We’ll
get into more of that.

Jeanette Taylor

Brandon is not the magical Negro that’s going to fix what’s been
wrong for 400 years, and you honestly can’t f*ck up a system
that’s been f*cked up for decades and fix it in two years either.
And so we haven’t given this black man any grace. And that includes
Alderwoman Taylor. I have not — sorry. Now, y’all knew when I came
here, I was just going to be honest. I hadn’t, ’cause there are
some things that I’m like, “you could do this,” and it just
doesn’t work like that.

It’s not enough to get somebody who is to the left or who believes
in the liberation of all people in office. We gotta support him. We
gotta get into those. And probably his biggest downfall is some of the
people who’ve been working at the city of Chicago for twenty, thirty
years — they don’t believe in people. They’re still running
while Rahm and [Richard M.] Daley are nowhere to be found. They still
run those same systems.

And so it’s going to take us a little longer to get some of that
poison out of city council and out of government for us to see the
type of city we all want to live in and be a part of.

Daniel Denvir

Alderwoman, you put it rather bluntly in 2023 when you said, “We
should not be on the fifth floor. And I’m speaking my whole heart,
we were not ready because we haven’t been in government long enough
to know how government really runs.” What have you all learned over
the past couple years about how power functions in the city? And,
Alderwoman, do you feel the same way?

Jeanette Taylor

Absolutely. I said what I said; I’m not changing what I said. You
can see it. Look at some of the decisions he made. Why? I agree with
the decisions he made. I might not always agree with how he gets to
them. And so he’s doing the right thing. But who are you doing that
with? Who are you having those conversations with? How are you
bringing in the community to understand the things that we actually do
in government. That’s the reason why we wanted a progressive mayor
or a mayor that comes from the Left.

So I don’t back down from what I said. And so I still got a beef
with them about it, ’cause I told them it’s always the black woman
y’all want to listen to. But I digress.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

I want to hear what Alex says, but I feel like it would be useful to
hear you spell out, like, what are some of the consequences of having
nineteen progressives in a fifty-person city council, and not that
majority that you’re talking about?

Jeanette Taylor

We passed stupid sh*t like “the snap curfew.” Come on. We already
got a curfew. We already spent millions of dollars on violence
prevention. We’re putting money in schools, we’re putting the
money in communities we’ve never put money in. And so that was dumb.
And look at the vote. Look how it went. We keep doing stupid sh*t
expecting different types of outcomes and it’s just not going to
happen.

What I wanted us to do was get in those departments ’cause those are
the people who make really, really bad decisions. I meet with the
Department of Planning on a monthly basis ’cause they will f*ck up a
development. And people being able to purchase land and just — oh,
Jesus Christ — I can’t say how.

And let me say something. The new lady who is there, Commissioner
Boatright, I adore her. She’s from the hundreds, she’s from the
hood — she gets it. But she’s got so many people in that
department who don’t get it and who are dead set against making sure
we own the institutions in our community. They don’t do all that
they can to make that happen. And so, I stand by what I said. I wish
we would’ve gone out to those twenty-six seats because also you got
people who just say no, because he’s a black man. Let’s make clear
what’s happening in city council. These are the same motherf*ckers
that sold the parking meters, and we wouldn’t be in debt if they
hadn’t sold them.

So you voted yes for the parking meters, but now you got a conscience.
We can’t do bonds. We can’t ever do sh*t when it’s time for
people who make under a certain amount. We got a class problem in this
country, and we got a colorism problem in this country ’cause we
think white is right.

And that’s no disrespect to my white counterparts in here, ’cause
I know some of y’all are real allies. We think brown is all right.
But everybody is not in coalition with us, but everybody will use us
and pretend they are. So let’s call this what it is. We’re at a
space where there is no hiding place for any of us. If you ain’t
voting, if you ain’t part of the conversation, if you’re not
talking about accountability, your a** is just a problem.

Daniel Denvir

Alex, I take it you were on the opposite side of this debate from the
alderwoman at the time.

Alex Han

I will stand up for Alderwoman Taylor to say she has been saying that
for a long time. She was saying that in 2021. She was saying it in
2022. And she’s saying today. She’s not wrong. I disagree with
her, but I can hold two contradictory things in my head. One is that
we are not ready and one is that we have to take the chance when it
comes. We had decades of administrations in the city of Chicago that
were designed to prevent the people on this stage and the people who
have been working together for a long time from accomplishing the
changes that we’ve been trying to make. And I am not trying to
sugarcoat it — it has been a challenging couple of years.

I think about one city council — and I might get the specifics of
the policies that were passed in one city council meeting wrong. But
I’m thinking back to ending the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers,
to moving family leave, to moving all of these workers, you know,
childcare workers — so we’ve had all of these things move in and
of themselves under a Rahm or a Daley that would’ve required all of
the strength of all of our organizations working for nine months
together to pass one of them.

We stopped ShotSpotter. There are all of these different pieces that
have come together. Have they come together in a perfect way? No. But
I do think we’ve got to recognize the challenges that we face. We
also have to recognize the successes that have happened —
importantly and especially for a lot of us who have been organizing
for a long time. But those successes in and of themselves do not
create political transformation, so we have to continue pushing
forward and fighting as we move forward.

Daniel Denvir

In advance of Johnson taking office after his historic victory, how
did the Left prepare for taking power? And given what you’ve learned
from that experience, how should the Left in New York City and beyond
think about taking power moving forward?

Jeanette Taylor

Oh Jesus, you can ask this sh*t. So prepare for everything. We knew
that dim-witted motherf*cking dictator in DC was going to get in
office, so we sat back and waited to see what he’s going to do. And
we told everybody what he was going to do — so we should have had a
plan for our immigrant communities. We should have had a plan for what
was going to happen on every level of government, so that in schools
and park districts, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is not
be able to come in and do some of the sh*t they are doing.

It’s less to do with the CPD [Chicago Police Department] and more to
do with what our plan is. The CPD has proved this to us for years, and
let me say this, the superintendent lives in my ward. We four blocks
away from each other. We talk all the damn time. This is less to do
with him but with remembering he works for a system — a system that
was created because they wanted their free slaves. So the system that
we created to free slaves, we expect to protect us when the real slave
masters are after us.

We keep expecting a shift from people. That show us who they are and
shows us their hand every time. And so we had these great plans. The
problem was the implementation didn’t go as well ’cause I don’t
think people realize — and I didn’t realize it until getting into
government — that it’s dependent on somebody on the bottom, then
they have secretaries, those secretaries have secretaries, and so on.

There is a deputy commissioner who has a bunch of secretaries and then
above them, the commissioner. And so we don’t have the right size
government, which is the biggest problem in Chicago. Everybody who’s
working doesn’t need to be working. Some of these people have been
sitting here twenty, thirty years and ain’t done sh*t for nobody.
Why are you still here? I know some people that need this job, who
would actually do it. Well, they just don’t.

So I think the plan was there. I think the question that we didn’t
anticipate was the implementation, ’cause we didn’t know that
system, and city hall is an evil f*cking building. The devil is there.
I’m telling you. Go in that building. There is a different feel to
that marble. Like every time I go there — I used to listen to church
music but now I listen to gangster rap ’cause Jesus ain’t gonna
cut it for that f*cking building. I’m just gonna keep it real. And
they are so upset with Brandon bringing in different folks.

Remember this was Daley’s and Rahm’s — this was their game.
These are all of their people. And so just ’cause you changed the
top, cutting off the head, the body’s still wiggling. They’ve been
wiggling sh*t for thirty, forty years. It’s time to cut the legs and
arms off. It is enough sh*t. Take out the heart sh*t. Did they do
heart transplants? We have to do something different. And so I don’t
think he was right to have those transition teams. I think the part
that we failed on, and I failed on, that’s taken us a little longer
is to learn those systems, if that makes sense.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Oh yeah. There’s so much here that so many people I know who are
really smart would argue with us about. I think the thing that you
talked about, about “right-sizing government,” which is kind of
uncomfortable language because it’s also the language of like the
Musks. And I think you speak to something that I resonate with as a
campaigner who has led a lot of outside work, trying to generate
support for some of the big, bold proposals that have been on the
table in the last few years.

On some of our campaigns, the biggest pushback we get to some of our
big ideas about investing in the public good, investing in
communities, making the city work for us is people just don’t
believe that the government will deliver. And I think in this time I
have been confronted with the question of how we work together
inside-outside to actually convince people that we need public good
and resources, and also, how we have people on the inside with the
ability to make it more true — that we can build things, deliver
things, and have public goods, resources, systems, programs, clinics,
and schools that work well.

And there are some exceptions of public institutions, maybe schools
and libraries, that I think people do value in a particular type of
way. So I just wanted to say that, with the transition plan and
process, I sat on the public safety transition committee along with
some cops — that was fun. It’s called —

Jeanette Taylor

Collaboration.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Well, okay. “Big tent.” Yes, big tent. So I think there is always
tension and a balance to try to make something a reality. To govern
and have the consent of people to do it, you need a big tent of
different forces, not just your tiny leftist, major minority. We need
a set of forces that reflect a majority of people and institutions
that have to participate in making things possible. And I think
that’s an important reality to accept. And there’s constant
contestation of who belongs in that big tent, where we’re willing to
take up battles that will alienate powerful or opposition forces, and
where we’re willing to deprioritize that fight to have more
collaboration.

And you know, I have a different vision of the world than most people
who are police officers. Do I think in making a transition plan for
the mayor of the city of Chicago there should be some people who know
how the system of policing actually works? Yeah. I do think that
process could have been better. And I think it involved so many people
that wanted to feel like they had a seat at the table, that it ended
up being more about generating that feeling for some people than
developing a solid plan. Because in the three-day-long retreats, that
cop and I didn’t come to a coherent strategy for public safety. We
had a side group chat to organize, to get some things I care about in
that document, but that didn’t produce a strategy.

When you closed schools in 2015, you got rid of the other black parent
that was in these children’s lives. You killed the last stable
institution we had in our community.

I think a strategy to deliver is different than producing a kind of
laundry-list document that might have contradictory things in it. I
think that time could have been used better. I think my experience in
the transition process wasn’t as sharp at being like: What are our
big things that are going to deliver for a majority of people that
we’re going to get a lot of people behind. So I don’t know.
That’s one thing for New York: How do you do that?

I think there are some real differences in the coalitions that elected
Johnson and elected Mamdani. And I think, you know, there are
strengths and weaknesses in both ways. I think the Johnson election
involved big unions, big coalitions, a massive slate of cross-endorsed
elected officials. It meant that [Brandon was] on the hook for a lot
of different people and stakeholders with a lot of different
interests. From what I have seen, the Mamdani campaign is a little
more nimble, and that has meant that the platform and agenda is
actually big and bold; it’s kind of clear and coherent. It’s going
to mean organizing a whole institutional set of actors behind it. But
it might be hard in unique ways.

Daniel Denvir

Yeah. Alex?

Alex Han

I do think the question of taking power is the real center of the
question. How do we think about something like a transition plan as a
political instrument. I think that in Chicago, there are lessons
learned from prior experiments, largely in recent years in smaller
cities, places like Jackson, Mississippi, places like St Louis and
like Pittsburgh where you’ve had progressive coalitions that have
some of the same elements. And in New York, I’m hopeful that
November goes well. I’m hopeful that we’re in a position to be
talking about transition — that there can be lessons learned from
our experience in Chicago and that we can continue to learn lessons
from, hopefully, success there.

I also do think that Asha raised an important question about what the
context is and what brought us to this point. And it is important to
recognize the differences in what that history and those coalitions
are. It doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming at the similar things,
but we are starting from different bases of power. The context of
these campaigns is very different. The structure of elections in
Chicago and New York City is very different. So all of those
differences lay something out.

I will also say — and I’ve been struggling a little bit with how
to say this — we’re also saddled with this kind of neoliberal
brain. We have all lived in this system. So many of us have existed in
nonprofit advocacy and service organizations. And our tendency,
because we have been so far away from power for so long, is to say,
“We’re gonna put out our laundry list. Here are the twenty
things.” And again, that this is going to transform the city. Those
twenty things can all be accomplished without creating any power and
transformation, right? That’s not to say that they aren’t worthy
goals — to raise wages, to create space to have new protections for
renters, all of these different things. They are important and they
help people, but they don’t inherently build power.

And so I think we have learned what the difference is between doing
the checklist — because, in part, when you’re out of power, it’s
easy to say, well, sh*t, we’re going to do this checklist. And then
the revolution comes. But what we’re finding is that you have to be,
at every step of that way, recontextualizing what that power is and
understanding that the next step is going to look very different from
the previous step.

 

Daniel Denvir

Alderwoman, you made a really good point about what we might call the
“deep state” of municipal government personnel processes, systems
that are not designed to help a left-wing popular government
accomplish its goals, but quite to the contrary. And it seems like in
Chicago, a really important case study on that is schools. One,
because this process that brings us to the Johnson administration,
that brings you into office, is really the struggle of the Chicago
Teachers Union.

That dates back seventeen years to the formation of CORE, the Caucus
of Rank-and-File Educators, which then takes over the CTU and then
leads CTU on strike. Then, parent and community organizers like
yourself working in coalition with them, Johnson coming out of the CTU
— he’s now the mayor. He then immediately meets stiff resistance
from the school board, with a superintendent — CEO of Chicago Public
Schools Pedro Martinez — fighting efforts to get a new contract for
CTU that gets rid of a neoliberal teacher evaluation system.

So if you all could talk a little bit about how those sets of
conflicts played out between the Johnson administration and the
educational deep state. And how amid all of that, the CTU navigated
the position of being in this sort of situation of co-governance after
so many years of leading the popular left-wing opposition.

Jeanette Taylor

So one of the problems with the mayoral seat is you don’t know who
to trust. I’ll just tell you I’ve known Brandon Johnson for
fifteen years. I knew him when he had a hoodie slob on his sweater and
he wore gym shoes. I knew him then. He was a person that would get on
the bus with us and go down to Springfield and demand that legislators
met with everyday parents. And what he would say to us is, they’re
no better than you. They put their pants on one leg at a time. And so
that was one of the reasons why I was like, he could do this.

But I told him to fight Pedro. Pedro didn’t do sh*t in the last
administration. He did nothing during COVID. He spent all that COVID
money. Nobody knows what it went to. Black students didn’t do any
better. We had loads of families who didn’t have laptops, who
didn’t have internet. So how are they gonna do remote learning? But
I think that he sold the mayor a bill of goods and them bills was
fake, as you see. They had their board — and I’m venting for a
little minute — and I got up there and said, “Where the hell was I
at when he was great?” ’Cause this is the same motherf*cker who
mistreated our kids for all the years that he was there. So how was he
great? This is the same person who has not been accountable to any of
us. This is the same man that refused.

Power is given and taken away from people you _think _have
decision-making power.

Now, I wasn’t the chair of the education committee in my first term.
I was on the committee and he refused to come talk to city council
about what was going on there. And so y’all trusted him. So I’m
looking at Brandon a little funny, like, you know that cousin you got
that sometimes don’t listen to what you say. But you gotta slap them
upside their head and let them see for themselves that they made a
f*cked-up decision.

That was Brandon at that time. I’m fifty years old. I get to say
what the hell I want to say. Well, I’ve been doing that, but I’m a
tourist and people understand that. But at any rate, this was him, I
guess, trying to give opportunity to someone who sold him a bill of
goods that he couldn’t make good on. And so, you can’t go from
being $70 million in the hole to a billion dollars in the hole in
twenty-two months. So stop that sh*t.

We’ve always been in trouble; we ain’t broke though. They spend
$80,000 on flowers down on Michigan Avenue. Do the math. Those flowers
pop up every year, don’t they? We got priorities for what we spend
money on. And that’s the same thing with Chicago Public Schools.
Think about this: schools that are north of Chicago Math and Science
Academy get all the resources and most of the things they need. The
schools outside them? The kids have to figure it out. When you closed
schools in 2015, you got rid of the other black parent that was in
these children’s lives. You killed the last stable institution we
had in our community. So you gotta be very careful about who we put in
these positions. He should have fired Pedro’s a** on his day off.
But there again, y’all don’t listen to the black woman.

Daniel Denvir

Alex, about this confrontation with the educational deep state and
also specifically how CTU operated in this new environment of not
being in opposition but having one of their own in on the fifth floor.
. .

Alex Han

I think that, again, this speaks to the fact that you can take
snapshots that look very different from day to day. But I do think
some of the proof is in the result. And I totally agree, Alderwoman
Taylor. I think about kind of like a metaphor of total war. And in a
lot of ways that’s the situation that the Left and progressives who
are in power find themselves in — it’s around every corner.

I don’t think we had the imagination, and maybe we didn’t listen
to Jeanette and some others enough to say, there is not going to be a
break. You don’t get to take off on Sunday. It is at every moment
that these people are going to be trying to undermine you. Every
misstep is going to be taken advantage of. They have the resources to
do this.

I think there’s a better and deeper understanding. Sometimes you
have to experience that to understand it. I do think the challenges of
what has happened in the public schools we see now that we have Pedro
Martinez out — I’m sorry for the children of Massachusetts, but he
has moved on to a new job. The CTU has won a historic contract along
with historic contracts for school support workers for SEIU Local 73,
for others. And the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union was
reelected resoundingly a few months ago. So I do think we have to look
at the whole picture of the situation. It’s very easy to look at any
particular day and say, “Oh, things are looking very bad.” But if
we look at the arc of where things are moving, we are moving in a way
that allows us to continue building power and build those structures.

Daniel Denvir

Asha?

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Oh man, you just took me back to some really hard moments. Just to
transition a little bit, in my first organizing training and now in
many that I have since led, you get taught how to power map, and
there’s a decision-maker and you focus on that decision-maker. You
tune everything else out and you just go as hard as you can on that.
And if you don’t understand all the ins and outs of every element of
government and how every different stakeholder might be influencing
this or that, or relating to one another, it’s helpful to get people
really clear on who can meet your demand, and who can deliver the
thing that your community needs and give you the concession that you
want.

I think what has become clear to me in this phase of things is
that’s a really, really, really oversimplified way for us to power
map and we actually need more nuanced ways of doing that. So even in
this scenario, right, the mayor has some decision-making power over
education. The city council has some decision-making over that.

Jeanette Taylor

The city council has no say so over Chicago Public Schools. None. All
we do is give them TIF [Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing] dollars
to fix things. Daley did that where he took the power from the city
council. So no, don’t put that on us.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Power is given and taken away from people you think have
decision-making power over things, even when they have titles like
chair of an education committee. Then you have the CEO of the school
system that’s over the bureaucracy and that’s not an elected
position. And then you have the school board, which is its whole own
separate entity that previously was appointed by the mayor and now we
have elected — the community wanted it to be elected. And the
charter school people can also spend money to elect their people on
there. So you have all of these different forces that are working
together. And I think when you have your people in positions of power,
you just become so much clearer on the fact that there’s more than
two camps in any one thing.

Figuring out how to align the most forces behind the best version of
the thing is very complex. And I think the teacher contract is one
example: even when you’re getting hit in the media every single day,
and it’s like looking really bad and messy, not letting up on what
the big visionary end goal is until you actually get that and align
the set of forces that you need behind it.

Even if the process to get there is quite difficult and, frankly,
straining on a coalition that you might need to do other things. So I
don’t know.

Daniel Denvir

Asha was getting into going from a place where the Left had an outside
strategy when Rahm Emanuel was in power. There was so much work that
we were all watching all over the country that was happening here in
terms of organizing against Emanuel, demonizing him, effectively
polarizing against him.

But everything seems like it gets a lot more complicated once you need
to have, not just an outside strategy, but an inside-outside strategy.
How did you even think about beginning to adapt to that reality?

Jeanette Taylor

We just knew what we had gotten before was sh*tty. Right now I feel
like the good, the bad, the ugly — Daley was ugly. Rahm was bad.
Lori was bad. Johnson is good. Johnson needs help. We’re trying to
change systems, so it’s like, would we have been better off pushing
from the outside? No. Especially with what’s going on with DC. I’m
glad who we got in power. I do. But you know, for me, it’s like a
favorite sitcom. Everything is going right. You know, you hear the
music. You know, in the scary movie, somebody about to get killed.
That’s how I’ve been feeling in this moment. Like, it was too much
going, right? Like him getting in.

You saw generationally, you saw the Rainbow Coalition. It mirrored
what Harold Washington did. It was an amazing thing to see all of
these electeds from different levels of government, all of these
organizations that never really got to talk to each other, or worked
on different issues, get together and say, we are going to get
somebody in office like this. But you knew it was just too f*cking
good to be true.

Now we got the county, we got the city, and we got the governor all
working together, all being on the stage. And now DC is f*cked up. So
it’s like my favorite Stevie Wonder song, “Rocket of Love.” He
says, “You took me riding in your rocket. You gave me a spark. And
halfway to heaven, you dropped my a**.” So we got dropped because of
what happened at the DC level. But it’s ’cause we were organized
the wrong people and you don’t really wanto to have that
conversation with me. But I’m going to work hard every day and I
feel a lot better that we get to run the narrative ’cause we are
always on the defense.

We’re kind of on the offense now and I feel like we’re in a space
to say, this is what _really_ happens in government. We are at the
family reunion, we are at the Fourth of July, and we are on Juneteenth
talking about what government is. We talk about what’s going on in
government, but that ain’t really what happens. And so now we get to
have this clarity and social media bless this little heart. It’s a
catch-22 ’cause you can find really good information but you can
also get really good a**holes who pull people’s attention and give a
false narrative account of what’s going on.

And so I think we’re all struggling. We’ve all got some burnout
still from the election. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m still
a little burnt out. But I’m grateful that Chicago is the city it is.
And that we’re taking care of each other despite what’s going on
in DC. Like, I’m a little less worried now if there was a Rahm
’cause — say what you want to say about Republicans, you can
be _called_ Democrat but you’re really a Republican. Wow. It’s a
lot of Republicans that play Democrats ’cause they know we vote
Democrat. We just go down the line and hit “Democrat.” Don’t get
me started. But I am at the place now where I take a little breath. I
know what’s going to happen ’cause we’ve already said it.
We’ve already tried to get the story about what he was going to do
and he’s doing it. And so now we should have been planning — and
we should still be planning — how we take care of each other.

Daniel Denvir

Alex, how have you seen this learning process of going from being on
the outside to having to be simultaneously inside and outside for
labor unions and for socialist organizations like DSA [Democratic
Socialists of America]?

Alex Han

“Challenging” is too simple a way to talk about it. It’s a
constantly evolving dynamic too, and I think that we still don’t
understand effectively what coordination looks like from the outside
in a large-scale way. I do think in a moment of real national crisis,
in a moment of rising authoritarianism, we have some opportunities and
a necessity to figure that out in a way that doesn’t have to be
oppositional. I think that right now, these last couple of months,
while we should have been more prepared, there are some real
opportunities to figure out how to move forward together. I think that
this is going to be the constant tension and contradiction that we
have to manage and deal with.

We’ve gotta, hopefully, get used to managing that tension in a
long-term way and figuring out how that leads to, again, growth —
and structural growth and advancement too.

Daniel Denvir

As the Chicago left is figuring out this inside-outside situation,
your political enemies are finding themselves in the unusual situation
of just playing the outside game, but they are definitely beginning to
play that game hard.

So I wanted to ask: What does the organized opposition to Johnson and
to the Left in power more broadly look like? How are real estate,
finance, the Democratic establishment, the charter school industry,
Zionists, how are they all coming together to try to put an end to
this really incredible left-wing political project in Chicago?

Jeanette Taylor

Using our playbook against us. So think about this: we put a law in to
stop them from just closing public schools. So now state law says you
have to do all of these things before you can close the school. The
charter f*cking schools used this so they could keep their charter
contracts. I know we gotta push it in writing there — say this is
just for public schools, not for charter schools. They’re using the
things that we did well. So they’re organizing. Have y’all ever
seen a city council meeting? Have y’all seen the UniverSoul Circus?
They got a set of motherf*ckers that come down there that look like me
talking about “Go red. Go red.” Where? Not the f*ck here. Not in
this Democratic state, you not.

I feel like, and one of my mentors asked me when I first ran for
office, what’s your exit plan? I’m like, exit plan? What the f*ck
is he talking about? I ain’t even know it yet. He said justice is
not going to come fast enough. You’re going to have the answer.
People are not always going to listen. You might not get to see
yourself win what you’re fighting for. And that’s hurtful.
That’s hard. And that’s a reality. Like, Brandon got in office, we
didn’t even get to celebrate the win ’cause DC changed on us and
some of that sh*t is our fault.

Okay. Don’t answer, don’t say nothing. But some of it is on us
’cause we were organizing the wrong f*cking people. We should have
been organizing poor white people, Asian folks and Latino folks. We
were too busy organizing Latino folks and black folks who already
decided, we know what’s on the f*cking other side; we don’t want
it. And so that’s some ownership about that. We don’t take
ownership for sh*t we do wrong. They are pushing the narrative. Make
no mistake about it, Harold Washington was killed by the stress of
what he was being asked to do.

Would we have been better off pushing from the outside? No.

Brandon might not die on us, but I’m sure his a** is stressed out
because he’s been asked to ignore the people who for decades have
been ignored. And that’s not what this administration is doing. And
that’s not what happened at city hall, which is why they are
fighting so hard.

But I want y’all to pay attention to one of the things that I said
when I was knocking doors. Look at what I was doing before I wanted to
be an elected official. I spent twenty-three years on a local school
council. I went on a hunger strike. Like, if you look in my bag right
now, I got some goodies in there ’cause I’m eating all the time.
So going on a hunger strike was about showing young black people that
people in their community cared about them.

Do not let the rhetoric make you feel like this man is not doing his
job. I did it. I’m talking to black people. We’ve gotta have grace
for each other. We don’t give each other grace and we need to. And
as much as he has gotten on my nerves — only because I want him to
fix it — that’s me being transparent with you. That’s me just
pouring my heart out. Take a strong look before you decide, if he
decides to run again, to not vote that man back into office, because
he said everything that he was going to do and for the most part he
stuck to it.

See, sometimes I think we forget that politics and government are two
f*cking different things. And so what I say I’m going to do when
I’m at the door is give you and the world rainbows and sunshine.
When I get into office, I don’t realize that there are twenty-six
f*cking people who might vote against the interest of what I’m
trying to do. And so us really figuring out how to look at this
different — looking at the people we vote in and knowing that those
f*cking Congress people think about this. They’ve been elected
officials in Congress since before I was born, and I’m fifty f*cking
years old. Why the f*ck are they still there? Why do y’all keep
voting for their a**?

Same thing for them crooked-a** judges. Come on, don’t play eeny,
meeny, miny, moe for who looks black or has a familiar name. No, think
about this. That last election, who got some mailers from a judge?
They usually have these conversations in the community where they
bring you out to tell you what they are doing. They did none of that
on the South Side. The f*cking judges disrespect us and take advantage
of our vote and we let them. Y’all keep electing these
motherf*ckers. And so we gotta get back to teaching people about
government.

Daniel Denvir

Asha, who are the enemies of this political project and how are they
organizing to destroy it?

Asha Ransby-Sporn

So I think just to connect this back to the last piece around how our
organizing in this current political terrain looks different, we come
into this political moment after so many years of using whoever was
mayor as shorthand for describing everything about the system that was
wrong. And it is really different when you now have one of your own
people in there and sometimes it feels kind of the same ’cause if
people are using that same playbook you’re pointing at, well, he’s
the mayor now. He’s on the hook for everything.

And I think it’s super, super important that we peel back the
curtain to say, yeah, we may have replaced who’s in the mayor’s
office, but we haven’t gotten rid of all of the money to interests
and harmful industries that spend money to shape the way that things
are for people in the city making it harder, more expensive for most
of us in order for them to profit. So we all know Rahm Emanuel’s
name — the man who closed schools and public clinics, the man who
covered up police murders. But who knows who Michael Sacks is?
That’s the billionaire who’s ideologically committed to the
project of neoliberalism, aka stealing public resources for himself
and his friends and the industries he’s accountable to.

But Michael Sacks is just one example of billionaires that have, for a
long, long time, spent money to shape our political system, to shape
the candidates that are elected to office, that shape what their
policy agendas are about, and that convene other people from other
sectors that have an aligned set of interests around how they want our
city, our state, and our country to function for their own profit and
gain.

So if we think about that opposition coalition, and I think right now
they are very aligned because it’s much easier, as we have all
experienced, to be aligned and in coalition when you are out of power
than it is when you are inside or feel like you have a little bit of
power. But it’s the real estate industry that spent money to defeat
our Bring Chicago Home proposal that doesn’t want affordable
housing, that doesn’t want rent control, that wants it to be too
expensive to live so they can profit from that. It’s the real estate
industry players, the finance industry, the Democratic Party
establishment types that are ideologically committed to a status quo
— along with the media institutions that they are all tied up with,
the charter school industry, and the Walmart-funded entities that push
that policy agenda. And then the new kids on the block in that
political coalition locally are the pro-Israel, Zionist forces that
we’re starting to see spend money.

They are sending mailers, they are sending text messages, everything
newsworthy that’s happening in city council. They’re sending
negative messages about every single city council person that is in
the progressive caucus to voters in all of their wards. Fearmongering,
spreading misinformation, literally lying. You talk about civic
education, it’s like civic miseducation of voters just to drive
misinformation, to drive down favorability. And every single one,
it’s like this progressive alderperson and the mayor. They’re
making you less safe in this way and people are being berated with
this information every single time something moves through city
council with text messages, mailers, and other types of ads. And
that’s not even to speak about how they’re tied up with and able
to influence media in that type of way.

 

Alex Han

I want to add one anecdotal thing because I think the media question
is really important. During the Chicago Teachers Union’s recent
leadership election, the opposition to the core slate, their
presidential candidate, got a prime-time interview on Fox 32 News in
Chicago. I was a union officer for over a decade. I have paid as much
attention to this as anybody in this country over the last twenty
years. I have never seen a candidate for internal union office be
interviewed on prime-time local news.

These kind of things happen on a weekly basis here in Chicago. Whether
it’s from the corporate media, whether it’s from other people who
are able to drive that message. So, just like we talk about the media
normalizing Trump, normalizing the far right, the media in Chicago has
played a huge role in normalizing all of the opposition, even to the
point of asking leading questions because their presidential candidate
was not able to really answer them. It was a really remarkable moment
that I just wanted to point out.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

And I just want to highlight one thing that Alderwoman Taylor said in
case it wasn’t clear for people outside of Chicago about what
we’re seeing in city council meetings in the city of Chicago. The
chambers of our city council meetings are full of black Trump
supporters.

Daniel Denvir

Wait, really?

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Yes. So that’s what she was talking about. That is not to say that
black people in the city of Chicago are going for Trump. Some people
are. I’ve knocked on their doors. I’ve had those debates. My
neighbor, who I love, their voter profile is a person who is
disaffected, who will talk sh*t with me in my kitchen about the
Democratic Party. And I’m like, yeah, that’s the whole thing. And
I think we need better people at every level, not just at the alderman
level to be able to deliver an alternative. But the black Trump
supporters that we’re seeing in city council, that’s not
necessarily the profile I’m talking about there. It is to say,
though, that there are resources going into painting a picture of who
the opposition to our leftist movement is and who our movement does
and doesn’t represent. I think there is enormous manipulation of
elevating black people in that way. But there are some really bizarre
things going on in terms of what our opposition looks like and how
it’s trying to play up certain dynamics. So I just didn’t want
that detail to get missed.

Daniel Denvir

One case I’d like to explore in some depth is one that you just
mentioned a few minutes back, which was the Bring Chicago Home ballot
referendum in March 2024. It would’ve helped house tens of thousands
of homeless people in the city by dedicating a small transfer tax on
property sales over $1 million.

Real estate interests poured a ton of money into this fearmongering
campaign, warning of rent hikes, and the referendum, sadly, was
defeated. Why did it fail and what were the consequences of that
failure for the new administration and the larger project?

Asha Ransby-Sporn

That was a really hard loss and a really hard campaign. I led the
field and organizing components of the Bring Chicago Home referendum,
which was a proposal coming from community organizations and people
with lived experience of homelessness to create a permanent revenue
stream for affordable housing and wraparound services, specifically
for Chicago’s homeless population. And the solution to create that
revenue stream was to restructure what’s called the real estate
transfer tax.

So basically anytime a property is sold, there is an existing tax and
this would’ve made that tax structure progressive. It would’ve
increased that tax for any property sold for over a million dollars
and decreased it for anyone else. So it’s a little tiny tax cut for
the regular home seller and an increase on commercial property sales
and multimillion-dollar property sales. This was one of the first big,
consolidated efforts of that opposition coalition that I was talking
about really, really trying to prove their strength against us.

Not only did the real estate industry — which at the same time we
were running this campaign was being sued for price fixing — not
want to pay their fair share, but it was seen by a broader set of
actors as a way to stick it to the progressive coalition to be like,
you can’t deliver on your promises.

So there was a ton of misinformation. There were ads run making people
think it would make their property taxes go up. This is a totally
different tax. There was a lot of misinformation, particularly that
played up anti-migrant sentiment, saying that this was a new tax that
was going to go toward sheltering migrants, really playing up
black-brown tensions. It was a multimillion-dollar media campaign.

I believe the real estate industry would’ve spent whatever they had
to in order to defeat our proposal, despite a really massive
organizing push. This was just one year after we knocked half a
million doors and ran this beautiful massive field program for Brandon
Johnson. And somehow, they convinced me, after a year, that we have to
do it one more time. We knocked almost that many doors. We contacted
more than a million people via phone and text and had a coalition of
more than a hundred organizations doing the organizing work.

But the headwind of misinformation and media was just too strong. And
I think to that point of the strength of being out of power, our
opposition in that context had the strength of everyone’s built up,
mistrust in government to deliver anything — mistrust to spend
money, any historic promise that someone in the mayor’s seat has
made before and not delivered on.

Alex Han

I want to say that it was a learning moment, and I do think that there
was one year after the election where Alderwoman Taylor and a lot of
leftists and progressives were reelected after the mayor was elected,
and we had an opportunity to kind of count our forces in a challenging
environment. We saw where we were with Chicago voters, and that in and
of itself has real value. I do think we’ve got to learn the lesson
of actually saying in the clearest language and creating policy
proposals that are in the clearest language of what we want to
accomplish. I also want to say that around that same time was when the
city council passed a billion-dollar bond issuance that is largely
going to development and is going to be in a position to create a
gigantic amount of affordable housing.

Daniel Denvir

Green social housing.

Alex Han

Yeah. Including green social housing. So once we’re in those
positions where we don’t have the power to just make things happen,
we can still make a relative balance of what is there. I’m
forty-five years old and have been doing this work for twenty-five
years, and I have lost way more than I have won over my lifetime. And
so I want us to understand that there are steps forward and backward,
but I don’t want us to relearn these lessons of tactics and strategy
when we have to be learning lessons of creating a vision that people
can come to. And I think that’s true in a lot of different ways.

For example, if there hadn’t been such a sharp division created
around migrants, in part created because of the mayor and leaders and
city council’s insistence that they would not go back on the
commitment that was made to ensure that there was housing and services
for every single person, a commitment that most large cities in the US
went back on. There’s a lot of different things that we could say
would’ve changed the specific votes in this referendum. But I want
to take the lesson of charting something forward that allows us to
think again about the power we have and the power we need.

Daniel Denvir

Alderwoman?

Jeanette Taylor

The question failed because we refused to solicit a community that
said put the sanctuary city question on the ballot. That’s why I
failed. Let’s be honest. And we were on opposite sides of this
’cause when you think of referendums, there is nothing legally there
to hold you to that referendum question. But what I explained to the
organizers was what we should have been doing at the same time we were
talking about the tax was talk about what it means to be a sanctuary
city. We did not have that conversation and black Chicago felt
ignored.

Now, I’m one of these people, and I’m gonna say it ’cause
who’s gonna whoop my a**? Latino people ain’t done sh*t to me.
White supremacy has, that’s what’s f*cking up my life. That’s
what’s getting on my nerves. That’s what’s making my insurance
go up. That’s what’s f*cking me over. Not Latino people. And we
still don’t remember America f*cked over their countries. That’s
why they’re here in the first place.

See, we will have the sidebar conversations and pretend and want it to
look all pretty. Nothing about none of this sh*t is pretty. So the
referendum failed because a lot of folks wanted that question to be on
the ballot. And it wasn’t. So they said, f*ck y’all’s question,
that’s what happened. If you look at the numbers, you look at how it
was voted on in certain communities, the same people who said they
wanted it felt ignored. And so they ignored the question or said no.

That’s how we lost and that’s a lesson for us: listen to each
other. And make sure that we’re listening to black Chicago ’cause
too often we don’t. And while black people have our own sh*t that we
can talk about later on in the back, you still need us to vote for
y’all. Y’all still need us to come out and be part of those
conversations. I tell the people all the time, the Black Caucus has
twenty votes in the city of Chicago. Say what the f*ck you wanna say
about it but y’all gotta come to us and have that conversation. This
was the exact same thing. And while it hurt to have to tell people in
coalition, I told you so. I told y’all this was going to happen. I
said this. Did we not have this conversation?

We should have been talking about what it means to actually be a
sanctuary city because I don’t think people understand what it
ultimately means. So black folks felt disrespected and they voted no.

Daniel Denvir

I want to get deeper into this and set a little context for the
listeners at home. The arrival of a huge number of migrants to
Chicago, including many sent by far-right Texas governor Greg Abbott,
posed a major challenge for the Left project here and for the Johnson
administration. It generated anxieties and anger among black
Chicagoans, who felt that the newer arrivals were being taken care of
while their neighborhoods had been neglected for decades.

How did the politics of mass migration play out in Chicago, and in
particular, how did it reflect or surface tensions between black and
Latino communities?

Jeanette Taylor

I represent a ward where it’s about 15 percent Latino. So I have a
percentage of Latino folks in my community, where I door knock, who
actually vote for me. So the problem with my community was we didn’t
have a say over the shelters. That’s number one. Y’all keep
blaming everything on Brandon — no, the f*ck it wasn’t. Lori
Lightfoot told Governor Abbott of Texas to kiss her a**. Does anybody
remember that? And he was like, kiss these migrants — let me bust
them up here. And Brandon paid for it. She did not.

Brandon did not start this fight, but he had to finish it. I wanna
know for y’all who call yourselves Christians and say y’all love
the Lord, but you say you would throw a man in the street. You would
see a woman with a baby sleeping in a police station, breastfeeding
her baby. You would see people hungry and in the streets but will
still say that y’all Christians. Amen. Amen. Bullsh*t. You have
never seen God. So the God you claim you love, who you pray to, “Oh,
Father God.” But you mistreat people who are walking in and out of
the streets every day. Go to hell. Go straight to hell.

The real estate industry would’ve spent whatever they had to in
order to defeat our proposal.

I was conflicted. And I wasn’t conflicted because I didn’t want
these people to be taken care of. I was conflicted because I know how
hard I’ve been fighting to make sure that people in my community get
there.

The median income in my community is $25,000. And they are now selling
a home that’s two homes, $964,000. Who the f*ck is that for? I’m
going to say something that I heard an economist say: when we all
stand together and realize who the real enemy is, the game is over.
The game is over ’cause if they can’t say to me, “Asha ain’t
good for you, ’cause her hair’s straight and I got locks. No. Asha
is good for me ’cause she got a good heart. She’s going to do what
she’s supposed to do. She’s going to fight with me and hold my
hand.”

Latinos have been made the face of immigration. They are not the only
people that have migrated or immigrated. And we imports are coming
from an import ’cause you motherf*ckers brought us here without
asking. And I don’t know if this is the place I really wanna be. It
just looks cosmetically better. But it ain’t no better. We’ve made
Latinos the face of immigration, not realizing a lot of folks that
they actually put in shelters, they identify as Afro-Latino. They were
folks from Africa, they were Haitians. I have a large population, a
nice population, of Nigerians and Ghanaians that live in my ward. We
made a lot of mistakes in this.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Thank you, Alderwoman. There are some of the moments you were talking
about — we had these conversations, like literally on the phone late
at night, and I think that’s really beautiful and I’m so happy to
be represented by you. I live in that community that you’re talking
about. I live one block from that first migrant shelter — literally
my block, my neighbors. That was our community where that first
shelter was opened up in a former school. And that
happened _before_ Brandon was elected.

Now, I do think that it escalated once he was in office, and it
escalated Republican Texas governor Abbott’s political stunt of
sending new arrivals to the city of Chicago because we had elected a
progressive mayor. It was an attempt to divide constituencies that had
supported him and create a genuine political challenge.

There is no acceptable way to receive tens of thousands of people
coming with medical needs and injuries and with literal wet clothes as
the only things on their backs. Having gone through who knows what to
get into this country, being sent to a place that they don’t know,
there is no adequate way to actually receive people who’ve been
through that. Nothing, nothing, nothing is enough. And you know, if
you’re saying, hey, we’re gonna take responsibility for sheltering
people, the companies that can staff a refugee camp in a city in the
Midwest are horrible companies that have only done horrible things.

That’s not to excuse the sh*ttiness of all of it, but it is just to
say that it was intentional and that it was a political move that was
made. F*cking with people’s lives — that was intentional. And you
know, the mayor’s first city council meeting was at the very same
time. But it was every neighborhood I drive through, you have people
literally sleeping on the floor of and outside of every police station
in the city of Chicago, thousands of people getting off a bus every
day. Children and babies sleeping in police stations. Who’s ever
slept in a police station? It’s not a good situation.

So it was very much a crisis and that’s what was going on in his
very first city council meeting. And one of the first big decisions
that he made was to pass $52 million in emergency spending to shelter
people because it was an emergency. And the opposition really played
it up to send a message to black Chicagoans in particular that said,
hey, this coalition isn’t actually for you. They’re only concerned
with this other set of people that quote-unquote just got here. And,
you know, that did play up real tensions for communities that have
been disinvested in for years and for whom our movement was running on
a promise for.

That is a real structural tension that they intentionally fanned the
flames of. And just on a governance level, it meant that all of our
people that we sent inside went into government in a state of
emergency. Just think about you in your life and how you manage things
in an emergency.

Daniel Denvir

Alex?

Alex Han

I don’t have a ton to add. I do think that it’s important to
remember that we don’t give the Biden administration a pass. There
were thousands of Ukrainian refugees who were brought to the United
States in an organized way, brought to the Chicago area, given
resources. And I know that the mayor and everybody was going to the
federal government for resources and not getting enough for what was
happening. That’s true. It was a political act. It was Governor
Abbott on the far right using some of the people who had really been
through hell as political pawns. At the same time, I don’t want to
give the Democrats in power in the federal government a pass for not
actually doing what they should have done, which is adequately fund
the city’s response.

Daniel Denvir

I want to get into to cops and crime, and then close with a question
about looking forward and where things may be heading. The Chicago
left in so many ways has built its power over the years through the
struggle against police brutality, including the movement that
exploded in the wake of the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald.

Mayor Johnson, since taking office, has had conflicts in all sorts of
directions around questions of policing, there have been conflicts
with some local black politicians over his opposition to the
ShotSpotter gunshot identification system. And also over his recent
mayoral veto of an ordinance that would’ve allowed police to declare
emergency youth curfews at locations of their choosing.

Meanwhile, Johnson anchored some on the Left by signing a new contract
with the police that included major raises without major reforms.
Crime is way down and yet it seems as though Johnson has been unable
to capitalize on that politically. So there’s a lot going on here.
Asha, let’s start with you. How would you assess this balancing act
that the mayor is confronted with on crime and policing?

 

Asha Ransby-Sporn

I spent a lot of the last two years thinking about this question. A
lot of my organizing life has been on public safety. How do we invest
in public safety beyond policing? How do we think about what makes us
safe beyond just like how we respond to instances of violence? How do
we make sure people have the things that they need so that those
instances of violence and harm or whatever it is are fewer?

And yeah, that was my issue. That was the basis on which I was going
to support Mayor Johnson in the first place and bring my community
with him. We had put a question on the ballot around whether people in
the ward I live in, which Alderwoman Taylor represents, asking people
if they wanted the city to invest in a non-police mental health crisis
response: Would you rather have a mental health professional respond
to mental health crises instead of cops? Do you want the city to
invest in public mental health centers?

We knocked on a ton of doors in this majority-black ward. Ninety-plus
percent of people said yes. We did that because we wanted it to be a
major issue in the mayoral race. We had just won that when Brandon
Johnson had announced his mayoral run. Like, as we were in the midst
of that door knocking, I hosted a house party with all the people that
had knocked doors, and we had Brandon Johnson in my living room. It
was really, really packed and he ended up sitting on like a stool. It
was really awkward. Anyway, we were asking him questions about the
police budget and it was a room full of young people and older people
who had been a part of this black movement around policing.

We asked him what he would do about the police budget. We asked him to
pledge to make Treatment Not Trauma — which was the name of the
mental health proposal — a top issue in his campaign. He said yes.
And, you know, there were people who had spent every month in police
board meetings with Lori Lightfoot snatching the microphone from
people who were telling their stories of losing loved ones to police
violence and had spent time protesting Rahm Emanuel after emails
getting leaked showing that he intentionally covered up the murder of
a black teenager who’d been shot sixteen times in the back — to
have somebody who’s in my living room talking to us about defunding
police and how we’re going to build a non-police mental health
crisis response system, that was the basis on which I got involved and
backed Mayor Johnson.

And there are people in this room who are a part of different fights.
We’ve gotten two clinics reopened. There’s a pilot for a
non-police mental health crisis response system called CARE. We are
fighting in this budget to see if we can make that citywide so that
there is a clinic that serves people in every ward in the city of
Chicago for free — a publicly run mental health clinic. Forty
percent of 9-1-1 calls in the city of Chicago are for mental health
crises. I don’t think cops should be responding to those and a lot
of cops don’t think they should be responding to them either.

So that is one really important issue where we have seen movement. We
also need to see more youth jobs and in particular investment in a
youth job summer program called the Peace Book. We’ve seen
investment in that but we need to see more. I felt proud of our mayor
with the curfew veto. It’s the first time a mayor has used their
veto power in twenty years. It was a proposal for a snap curfew, where
the cops could say, with thirty minutes’ notice, there’s a curfew.
If you’re concerned with violence, maybe let’s think about why
young people are not okay. That is my question. If we’re thinking
about the problem of violence, what is the thing that leads to that in
the first place?

I disagreed on the Fraternal Order of Police contract — I wouldn’t
have given them a historic raise without negotiating some reforms in
the process and locked us into spending millions and millions more
dollars on the police. Hundreds of millions of dollars go toward
vacant police officer positions every year. They have not increased
the ranks of the police department despite having the largest budget
for recruitment of any city department in seven years. They cannot get
people to become cops. That’s not what people want to do. At the
same time, good kids who are running this incredible peer peacekeeping
youth violence prevention program, they’re turning hundreds of young
people away because they only have funding for a pilot. So why are we
giving the cops this slush fund for jobs they can’t fill when young
people are knocking on the door of a community organization saying, we
want to do violence prevention work? Let’s invest in that.

So that is one proposal that’s on the table now that folks are
organizing around and that we know we need to continue to push for.
That’s another example of what it looks like to continue to push.
And yeah, I think that the fearmongering and the amount of money that
has gone into anti-defund messaging has gotten to people in our
coalition. We’ve argued around it and I just want t remind folks
they spend a lot of money on that in races that we still won. I’ve
knocked on a lot of doors talking about this and I believe this is a
very commonsense solution. Let’s invest in what works. Let’s
invest in what actually helps people have the things that they need to
be all right so that we’re not having a conversation about how we
respond to violence at all.

Daniel Denvir

Thank you. Alderwoman?

Jeanette Taylor

Cities kind of tell you, through their budgets, what they believe and
what they stand for. And I hate to say it, but over 40 percent of the
city’s budget goes to policing. And I don’t know about y’all,
but I don’t feel safe. If something is happening to me, my first
thought is to not call 9-1-1 — especially if it has something to do
with mental health.

Because literally my first month in office, they killed a young man
whose family was calling to say he was having a mental breakdown and
he locked himself in the house. And [the police’s] only response
after being there, what ten or fifteen minutes, was to go in and kill
him. And the family was devastated. I struggle with the whole system
of policing because I know what it does in my community. If I call the
police or one of my white counterparts calls the police, we know whose
word they’re gonna take.

That makes it dangerous for people who look like me. And I’m an
older woman. So we gotta start with a conversation about what safety
looks like in different communities, because it’s different. What
works in Woodlawn does not work in New City. What works in Washington
Park doesn’t work in back of the Yards. We gotta start having
conversations about what safety looks like and what actually makes us
safe. Nobody’s ever said that.

Think about this: I have a ward that’s adjacent to the Obama
Presidential Center. I don’t have a Chuck E. Cheese, I don’t have
a bowling alley, I don’t have a skating ring. I have nothing for
young people to do. So they run downtown because they have that. And
let me say this: this curfew is not about safety. It’s about
protecting the interests of downtown. People who are f*cking visitors,
go visit somewhere else. If you’re worried about what young people
are doing downtown, don’t come here. Bye. That tourism ain’t
really bringing us that motherf*cking money anyway, so go. Bye. See
you. This is about them protecting what they love and it’s the
beautiful downtown.

You notice after the riots, nobody’s crying. You ain’t heard a
peep, have you? Because the insurance checks came and they decided
whether they wanted to make a little more money or if they’re gonna
leave. And so let’s talk about what this really is about. It ain’t
about keeping anybody safe.

Let me tell you about my father. Let me just be honest, he wanted a
son. So he would have my mother and my sister dress up in these little
dresses and he would take us downtown to get a muffin and to see the
Sox or the Cubs play because he loved Andre Dawson. That was his
thing. And so downtown always made me uncomfortable because I didn’t
see enough people that looked like me, and it was a reminder of what I
didn’t have. It was not a place where I wanted to be.

If you went down 43rd, 63rd, 79th, 55th, all those institutions served
us. And we had loads of things to do in our own community. The park
district was more welcoming. You could be a young person jump roping
— when was the last time you saw a kid outside playing jump rope or
Hula-Hooping or playing hopscotch? You don’t because we’ve
forgotten those lessons of what it’s about to be a young person. I
should be able to sit on my porch, do whatever it is I wanna do, sing,
do whatever without being a target. And that’s just not the type of
system that we have.

So this thing around ShotSpotters, my problem with it? It is the worst
data ever. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do. And so just
imagine every time a truck backfires, here comes the police. And
it’s like you wasted all of this police money to come for a backfire
on expressway. It just didn’t work. And so crime is down because
we’re investing in those young people and their families.

I will say this, and I’ll end with this: when I first got into
office, for the first few Fourth of July’s, I would always get a
call that somebody got killed. And so every time somebody gets killed
in your ward, you get a call from the police. No matter how it
happens, no matter where it happens, you get a call. That has dwindled
down. But that has dwindled down because you have communities who are
now working with and talking to the police — but also thinking about
ways to hold each other accountable outside of calling the police. So
seeing young people argue, I get right in there and I’ll be like,
“I’ll whoop everybody’s a** out here. Go the f*ck home and find
something safe to do. And this ain’t it.” And I know we are scared
of these kids but that’s a whole other segment. We’ve forgotten
they could use an a** whooping. That’s what I said. We should just
go downtown with some bells and just start whooping a**. Everybody
will go home and ain’t nobody will be dead and everybody will be
okay. They’ll live to see another day. I said it.

Alex Han

There is something that I kind of appreciate in a mayor’s office
that is not able to capitalize on less children dying year to year.
You know, we’ve increased youth jobs, we’ve increased these
investments, we’ve made these small changes. It’s not enough.
Nobody says it’s enough. But I do think, as you said, it is a
balancing act that has to be engaged with in a clear way.

People forget that we had the Democratic National Convention in the
city of Chicago a little over a year after Brandon came into office
and everybody said, “This is going to be a disaster. This is going
to be a disaster.” Now, did the police over-police some of those
protests? Absolutely. Have they been doing that? Some of the story is
that, no, not nearly as much happened as would’ve happened under
almost any other leadership. So part of it is that the _absence_ of
things is much harder to talk about than the _presence_ of things.
That’s not to give anybody a pass on anything, but it’s to say,
we’ve gotta just look at the whole picture and understand what that
balancing act is and understand how we can actually move that in a
clearer way forward.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Just one addition here because a part of your question was about the
mayor clashing with some moderate and conservative black older people.
And that’s not speaking to the few black aldermen who are both in
the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus because it’s not as much
overlap as I would like to see. We have elected a lot of progressives
in white and Latino parts of the city to our city council and we have
a smaller bench representing the south and west sides who come from
progressive movements. And we have less organization even in other
black parts of the city. That’s something that I’m deeply
committed to building.

When we think about a broader progressive coalition, being able to say
that we have elected black leftists from our movement, and that we
have a really organized base in the communities hardest hit by
disinvestment is one way to put it. We’ve got to have a base in
those places if we’re going to be successful on our issues or else
our coalitions are just too weak. So I do think that’s something
important to be said and there’s a lot of that work being done by
myself and others in this room.

Daniel Denvir

Recently Mayor Johnson has been very outspoken, pushing back against
the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda, and that seems to
have resonated broadly across the city. Is that something that he and
the broader left project in the city can build upon to win back the
majority coalition that put him into office in the first place?

Alex Han

I think Alderwoman Taylor said this really well early on in this
conversation, and I’m going to just paraphrase it and put it
differently. But we are in a different position. We are two years in,
things are being learned and things are shifting in a different
direction. Obviously the threat — and not just the threat of Trump,
but the reality of Trump — is something that we have to grapple
with. I remember saying to some friends of mine who were big critics
of the mayor, who would you rather have as mayor right now on January
21, 2025? Is there another mayor in the United States that you would
rather have? They couldn’t answer. They couldn’t give me an answer
to that question.

So I think it’s not a question of taking advantage of that. It’s
about figuring out in a deeper way what needs to be done to move
governance in the city at the same time as being crystal clear about
the dangers that we’re facing and what the city needs to do, not
just to protect our people — because there is a lot that the mayor
and the city cannot do, we have already seen that — but to put us in
a position to build power through this really difficult time with
Trump as that foil in DC.

Daniel Denvir

Alderwoman?

Jeanette Taylor

He could turn it around if we did a lot more collaboration. For me,
there is an expectation that we would bring in people who normally
never get to sit at the table. He’s done some of that. I want to see
more of that and I want to see us agree to disagree as well. I’ve
gotten to the place where I can disagree with something he’s doing
or saying and I don’t always have to call him on it. He knows my
face says everything, my mouth say a whole lot. But I also, as you all
know getting into government, it’s not enough to get good people in
politics. You got to get behind them.

I think people do amazing work and this is what I, Alderwoman Taylor,
have seen. People are around me, they’re with me and my team. When
we are running knocking doors trying to get in the office, I get in
and y’all just drop my a**. I don’t have that anymore. And so
sometimes I’m human. I’m conflicted. I’m a person. I think
people forget I’m an everyday person with kids that get on my
nerves. I got a grand turtle and a grand dog and some fish. I’m a
nana. Like, I am a normal everyday person. I still DoorDash sh*t. My
sh*t’s like everybody else.

There is something that I kind of appreciate in a mayor’s office
that is _not_ able to capitalize on less children dying year to
year.

And so being able to have support and in our ears when we’re making
that — and also just ’cause we got that seat, y’all stop being
in the other people’s a**. Y’all have been silent on these
motherf*ckers who vote against your interests. Why? Because y’all
think Brandon is going to be there forever. He says twenty years. I
give him, sh*t, two more terms. Hell, I know I’m leaving at the next
term. Let me make that sh*t clear. I’m out because this is
stressful. Listen, I have to wake up one morning and remind myself
“you are somebody.” Like, there’s so much sh*t I can’t even
have a normal relationship. I can’t be soft. I have men that say to
me: “You are dictating.” No, my father and mother were together
and my mother was the breadwinner. But you never knew that at my house
because what my daddy said went. So I can’t be soft.

But that also comes with paying the cost of standing up and saying
what other people won’t say. There are a lot of people who won’t
support me. There are a lot of people who drag me on social media.
That’s when y’all need to be like, no, that ain’t how it goes.
That’s not what she said. That’s not what we are doing here. And
so we need you all. We get into office, we can’t do this without
you. We need y’all at city council with us.

And I told my community that when I ran, I’m taking you to city hall
with me. So it’s not Alderwoman Taylor coming outta her a** making a
decision. I’m on the phone. Look, I got two rules. “Good
morning” is after ten o’clock and unless you dead on fire, don’t
call me at 10 pm — that’s ’cause people will talk me to death
and talk all day long. But I need that humbling ’cause this job
ain’t f*cking humble. There are spaces I could walk in and they will
give the world and I didn’t even ask for it. That’s what elected
officials go through. And I want y’all to hear this. That
conversation we have about passing envelopes, that sh*t happens and we
all got a price. I ain’t special. My price comes with buying out my
whole community — all fifty thousand of us. And if you ain’t gonna
do that, get the f*ck out.

Brandon didn’t get here with just us and our small coalition people
had. I tell people all the time, it does not matter how much money and
mailing you sit out. If those people don’t get off their a** and go
to that voting booth and vote, none of that matters. And so we cannot
make a country that we are proud of. When I go out of town now, they
be like “you from America.” I’m hesitating ’cause people hate
us so much because of what our government does. And so please
understand that your silence is violence.

Asha Ransby-Sporn

You know, without getting into field math, I saw a video of Brad
Lander repeating a quote that was from Greg Casar initially, like the
struggle within the Democratic Party right now is not between the
center and the Left, it’s between fighters and folders, and I
disagree — I do think that it is a fight between the center and the
Left. It is easy for the center to sound like, we’re the reasonable
compromise people, and not, we’re the people who are gonna sell you
out. And so, I really resonated with the second half of that framework
and I think Brandon Johnson and any political leader’s success in
this moment is going to be rooted in their clarity in how they’re
going to show up when so much of what so many of our communities rely
on is at stake.

I think that that means fighting and being willing to speak out even
when it means personal risk. For political leaders, I think it means
fighting in terms of figuring out how we’re going to deliver, how
we’re going to create revenue, how we’re going to protect the
things that are at stake in real ways to use whatever power the
government has to actually deliver to take care of people.

And then it means even when sh*t does get bad and people do feel the
impact of this big billionaire bill, that we have political leaders
who are on their side willing to stand up. And so I think Brandon
Johnson and any political leader’s success in this moment is going
to be reliant on showing people that they’re willing to fight for
them.

_ALEX HAN is the executive director of In These Times magazine and a
longtime labor, community, and political organizer._

_ASHA RANSBY-SPORN is a Chicago-based community organizer and writer
committed to black, left social movements. She is a cofounder of Black
Youth Project 100._

_JEANETTE TAYLOR is the alderwoman of Chicago's 20th Ward._

_DANIEL DENVIR is the author of All-American Nativism
[[link removed]] and the
host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

_Subscribe to Jacobin [[link removed]] today, get four
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