A Power Broker In The City Of Roses

Emma Buckley sits down with Jesse Dryer to discuss how Portland DSA has used street mobilizations to back up its DSA public electeds

Emma-

You’ve been electoral co-chair of Portland DSA chapter and you have worked on multiple events from rallies, to getting DSA members to mobilize, to city council events. Can I ask just generally, what is the underlying theory behind the urgency of organizing three events within two weeks?

Jesse-

Well, many of these events have been rather rapidly planned. So, as a result of four DSA members being on Portland City Council, the primary rallies that we’re talking about were two rallies for the Portland City budget to be just. We also held a rally in mobilization to the Beaverton school board to defend a DSA member on that school board named Tammy Carpenter, who was targeted by fellow members over her vigorous support for Palestinian Liberation on her personal social media.

For the budget, the rallies were meant to display the political power amassed by Portland DSA through the last election. I believe it was Willamette Week that designated us as the second biggest power broker at the city level in a kind of “power rankings list,” which is certainly flattering. But that means we have to meet the moment regularly in order to maintain that perspective being correct.

For the school board rally, it was important for us to move quickly, because there’s been a lull in the Palestinian Liberation protest movement in the US, and we’re seeing a broad national rejection by the establishment of elected officials who support Palestinian Liberation or an end to the genocide. We felt it was important to make our stance known that Tammy was not being antisemitic. Tammy was being cool. Tammy was being authentically herself as a medical practitioner, who does not like seeing hospitals blown up, does not like seeing the intentional starvation of a people. We don’t think that those views are anti semitic.There are many in the mainstream Zionist community in the Portland metro area who do:it’s important for us to demonstrate that there are Jews like myself who reject that framing. 

But also to keep this stuff alive. You know, it’s not good for anti-genocidal protesting to be in a lull, right? It’s something that needs to be at the fore more regularly, more often, raising the stakes and heightening the contradictions. So those are the two reasons why it was important for us to mobilize these three events in the last two weeks. Tammy’s event did take about 90 hours of organizing, just kind of straight through. So that was literally planned in like two and a half days from the first message to completion of the rally. It was 90 hours.

Emma

That’s a lot of work. How are these events and rallies being used in conjunction with the Socialist In Office Committee (SIOC) as a means for creating an ongoing relationship with our electeds?

Jesse

Portland DSA maintains a body called the Socialist In Office Committee. It is a multi-tendency and variation body. There are three at-large seats: two seats are held by external organizing co-chairs of the steering committee and two seats are held by the Electoral Working Group co- chairs, which essentially allows for a broad sense of capacity going into our organizing. 

We know what’s going on at the steering committee, at the electoral level, and more broadly, amongst the chapter, because of the at-large members. Most of this work has been coordinated between the chapter’s steering committee, the Socialists In Office Committee, and the electoral working group. The Socialists In Office Committee has been working to expand our relationships with the people that we have endorsed and elected, as well as people that we have not endorsed, but who are members of the chapter. 

That is a bit controversial: some say that it’s better to keep our relationships primarily geared to those we have endorsed. But it’s not necessarily reasonable to do that when you have a willing political block interacting with one another like we have on city council. We have definitely deepened our relationships between our electeds and our organization’s members by mobilizing heavily. It’s good for them to see us at the fore, on the battlefield with them. So it has definitely increased our legitimacy in the eyes of the electeds, who are regularly agitated against for their socialist perspectives. There was a wonderful clip of a centrist on City Council, Dan Ryan, at the close of the city budget cycle asking the Progressive Caucus – which is more than just our members on the council – if ‘Portland is the testing site for the elimination of capitalism and the experimentation of socialism at the city level?’

We say that is very flattering, Dan: but you know, there’s much to do before we can get to our real goals. The Socialists In Office Committee has definitely expanded the bounds of what our relationships are with these councilors and electeds.

Emma

How do you view these mass mobilizations bringing people in? Because, usually, electoral organizing gets done during the electoral cycle; but it seems like Portland DSA is attempting to continue this sort of mass mobilization – not just of canvassing, but also of rallies and stuff like that. 

So why is DSA different from other organizations within the electoral sphere, and how do you see this as being sort of a different way of doing politics?

Jesse

Your typical NGO process or 501c4, process, nonprofit process will be to endorse widely and then take credit for piecemeal pet legislation.

It’s really difficult to encapsulate in a singular sentence “What is the priority of Portland DSA”? Perhaps we could say it is for the advancement of the socialist movement to transform the world, but that’s not necessarily going to look great on a policy platform.

So working with our electeds between the elections is important. We want to hold them accountable. That means that we need to be looking over their shoulder and checking their work. But it’s not simply a one way street of us dictating to the electeds what we would like to see done.They also have ideas. They are members of the organization, and members of the organization come forward with ideas to the general membership regularly. Now we shouldn’t necessarily heighten the democratic rights of electeds in our organization: they are still just members, you know, no better than anyone else putting forward their ideas. But they have a larger platform from which to put forward those ideas at the council level.

One of the more interesting things that happened during this budget cycle was Mitch Green, from District Four, putting forward a measure to force the Portland economic development agency, known as Prosper Portland, to self fund its activities through its strategic investment fund, rather than taking more line items out of the general budget. Forcing them to self fund this kind of crony economic development firm at the city level – which has a private board, mind you not a public one that is elected – and forcing them to make the case against taking the line item out of the budget when we’re in a big budget crisis. 

We did not have the votes to raise revenue through a ‘tax the rich’ scheme. We did put forward taxing the rich as our approach to raising revenues broadly through these rallies. You know, Tax the Rich Portland has a long, storied history in the chapter in terms of finding manners to collect revenue in that way. But the PROSPER Portland one was interesting because it highly polarized the council people who are in the, quote, ‘progressive block,’ and in the centrists. That vote lost 5 to 7. So, you know, it was pretty much our people holding the line.

Emma

Can this sort of application towards electoral politics serve as a model for other chapters? Can this be implemented in places other than Portland? And could this even be implemented at the national level, potentially? 

Jesse

I mean, certainly, there have been phases to DSA’s electoral project. The way you framed it earlier, of like, we’re only focused on the campaign, and then they can do whatever they want in office has been a historic part of DSA’s electoral work. That has shifted in the last couple of years, following what members see as the capitulation of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to the Democratic leadership in Congress. It’s also been seen through Jamal Bowman being endorsed as a New York City federal representative to Congress, and then taking trips to Israel and voting for Iron Dome funding. This has made DSA members more keenly aware of their endorsed elected’s activities between elections.

Now we’re in a new phase where these bodies are popping up all across the country, these Socialists In Office Committees, which are meant to be the connective tissue between the chapter and the representative in a hostile body. This is something that certainly could be brought forward nationally. I believe that there are elements of this in the National Electoral committee’s consensus resolution and perhaps some amendments to it. 

But I think that the best way to learn in DSA is to have conversations with people in other chapters about how their work is going and what struggles they face. Because the fact is, DSA has endorsed well over 100 office holders across the country over the past, like, six years. So the amount of information and experience the chapters have working with electeds now that are representing them is so much more than it was when DSA was in a nascent revitalization, in that 2017-2018 period when AOC was elected, Rashida Tlaib was elected. You know, there’s just a lot of: ‘let’s endorse this person and this person, that person,’ yada yada yada. And now people, I think, are becoming more selective, more protective of DSA in the way that they endorse people.

I think that this kind of process that we’re doing in Portland, having it mediated by several different elected bodies – the steering committee, electoral working group leadership, and at large – is potentially helpful to get a wide berth of chapter perspective when discussing, you know, the issues that we have with electives. So I think it is possible to adapt this nationally.