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I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, where the adults around me always vaguely referred to our city as having a “homelessness problem.” I’d been told that homelessness was exacerbated by heroin addiction, something I never had reason or method to verify, but which seemed accurate enough based on the long, lingering stares and slumped over silhouettes that were common to witness. One day as a high schooler in the summer of 2015, I sat across from a homeless man on Pacific Avenue, who struck up a conversation and asked me what my aspirations were. In response, I mentioned I was applying to college. 

“Good,” said the man. “As long as you don’t join the army.”

“Were you in the army?” I asked. The man nodded.

“And they’ll never tell you this,” he said, “but the war in Afghanistan was only ever about drugs.”

At the time, I nodded politely, but started to doubt the direction the conversation was taking. My head was full of AP United States History knowledge; I knew we had Reagan to blame for the war on drugs and Bush to blame for the war in Afghanistan, but as far as a connection between drugs and Afghanistan, I didn’t think there was one.

“All I ever did was guard poppy fields,” the man explained. “Heroin,” he added, noticing my confused stare. 

Since this conversation, I’ve gained a college education, witnessed record breaking data spikes in overdose deaths, and read several bombshell accounts that further emphasized the truth about drug trafficking in the United States: Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance, and Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel. Though the opioid crisis has become more universally recognized (yet not solved), the role of imperialism in the drug politics of the United States remains largely obscured to the public and easy for most people to doubt as I once did as a teenager. The Trump administration would like Americans to believe that drugs are a foreign threat crossing into our nation—it’s how they convince Americans to bolster border policy, escalate anti-immigrant attitudes, support foreign wars, and turn a blind eye toward big pharma. The myths surrounding drugs form some of the most dangerous contemporary right-wing propaganda. Our best chance at collapsing this rhetoric is to engage a meticulous, historically informed comprehension of how drugs reach the United States in the first place—not as a foreign threat, but as an imperial import. 

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT: DRUGS ALL OVER THE MAP

The precedent for drug-favoring imperialism was set in the 20th century. Perhaps the first stand-out region is the “Golden Triangle,” where the borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet. In 1972, Alfred McCoy’s book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, revealed years of CIA involvement in the regional drug trade. At the time he wrote the expose, Southeast Asia grew “about 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply” (McCoy 244). 

As U.S. troops exited the region at the end of our involvement in the Vietnam war, the local market for heroin shrank, and bulk shipments to the U.S.  increased (McCoy 245). The refineries that produced the majority of the Golden Triangle’s heroin product were located mostly in “areas totally controlled  by paramilitary groups closely identified with American military operations,” with the largest refinery operating in Laos, where the Meo region’s population was channeled into a thirty thousand person army faction that allied with the United States (McCoy 248).  Heroin production flourished in areas where the American CIA supported the armed forces in power, though this was mostly publicly overshadowed by atrocities in Vietnam. Still, “rather than sending U.S. combat troops into Laos,” for any intervention on the region’s largest heroin refinery, “four successive presidents and their foreign policy advisors worked through the CIA to build the Meo into the only effective army in Laos” (McCoy 264).  That same Meo army would collaborate with the U.S. military to add Air America landing strips throughout Laos, which were subsequently used by planes from many different nations to transport opium out of Laos and into global markets (McCoy 274-277). 

Soon, the pattern of drug-favoring imperialism continued in South America, a story that first came to public knowledge due to Gary Webb’s reporting with the San Jose Mercury News, and his subsequent 1998 book, Dark Alliance. From 1936 to 1971, the Somoza family ruled Nicaragua, doing “nearly everything that the United States asked,” from assisting in the 1954 coup in Guatemala to providing a secret base to the U.S. to prepare for the Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba (Webb 21). The United States sent “millions of dollars a year supplying weapons” to the Nicaraguan National Guard, also known as the Guardia, and instructing the officers “in the complex arts of anticommunism,” an obvious effort to maintain U.S. capitalist supremacy (Webb 22). By 1979,  Anastacio Somoza was coerced into leaving Nicaragua and exiling himself first to Florida, and then Paraguay. Human rights violations by his troops were a bad look; new U.S. president Jimmy Carter did not want to continue supporting Somoza in these, and thus he was being retired. 

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the United States “were worried about cocaine,” primarily an expensive South American drug (Webb 23). “The experts were careful to note that if cocaine became cheaper, it would be more widely available” and riskier to public health and safety (Webb 25). An inexpensive new format of the drug was to smoke it rather than snort it, which led to a different erratic effect on behavior of the user. Top U.S. public health officials wrote reports warning the government to take action via education and public health endeavors, but “congress and the Carter administration did exactly the opposite” and followed the DEA’s suggestion instead to attempt to wipe out the coca plant in South America (Webb 35). This was ineffective, and Carter soon left office in 1981. 

In the new decade, things were different: Ronald Reagan was president, and in Nicaragua, many former members of the Guardia reformed into “the Contras,” unified by the CIA, and sent to Argentina and Miami, Florida for training. “Fighting communism” was the reason, of course, for the U.S. to invest in the Contras in the first place, but a connection to drug trafficking quickly followed.  A former Somoza ally, Danilo Blandòn, purchased Contra-produced cocaine from Norwin Meneses, and sold it to South Central Los Angeles drug dealer Ricky Ross. Crack cocaine was sold in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, creating an uptick in crack cocaine addiction. The Contras’ fight against communism was thus financially supported by an expanding population of drug addicts from Los Angeles. When Blandòn was arrested in 1986, he confessed to his serious drug offenses. Though precedent should have placed him in prison for life, Blandòn was freed after 28 months and hired as a DEA informant, while Norwin Meneses was never arrested and instead,  joined the DEA from 1985 to 1991 (Webb xxi).

The most recent frontier: Afghanistan

The imperial frontier shifted yet again as the 1980s came to a violent close. In Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel, he starts by explaining a CIA campaign from the Reagan administration that drove out Russian occupiers from Afghanistan, yet again for the sake of suffocating communism, and once more, with a drug-related consequence. The effort was successful: Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. “For the next five years, the country suffered under the chaotic misrule of disputatious warlords,” whilst two members of Mujahideen (guerrilla fighters who, with the CIA’s backing,  had successfully ousted the Russians), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Nasim Akhundzada, “turned Afghanistan into a giant plantation for the cultivation of of the opium poppy plant” (Harp 43). Afghan people were thus coerced into “narco-serfdom,” pressured to grow poppy instead of food crops, in the early 1990s. When the Taliban emerged in 1994, their popularity in Afghanistan “mainly stemmed from their tough-on-crime policies,” which included a ban on poppy cultivation (Harp 44). In fact, during the summer of 2001, the Taliban “completed a country-wide eradication campaign that radically reduced the world supply of heroin” (Harp 44).

Where most Americans are familiar with entering the story, is not the CIA prequel, of course, but the events of 9/11, which happened right after aTaliban-led global heroin reduction in the summer of 2001. Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial flights in the United States, using the planes to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and attempted to attack a third target, often speculated to be the U.S. Capitol building. Osama Bin Laden, then leader of al-Qaeda, took credit for the attack, and Bush began his global war on terror, starting with the invasion of Afghanistan. Most Americans were on board; by the end of September 2001, Bush had a 90% approval rating. Within congress, the solitary vote against a military response in Afghanistan was famously that of Representative Barbara Lee.

So began the 21st century wave of prolonged conflict in the Middle East, with comorbidities of surveillance capitalism and legalized torture. In 2002, The Northern Alliance pushed the Taliban out of Kabul, and Osama Bin Laden was chased into the White Mountains to await a later fate during the Obama administration. “That one of the first official acts of the newly installed U.S.-backed Afghan government was to legalize poppy planting went all but unremarked,” by Americans, Harp points out (Harp 47). It was at this line that I felt chills on my skin, remembering the conversation I had with the homeless veteran over 10 years ago. “The war in Afghanistan was only ever about drugs,” he had told me.

Whether seeing the military as heroes that rightfully neutralize threats in far away places, or as imperialists that meddle where they shouldn’t, the default concept of our military across political leanings is still that of an outward facing institution. The strength of Harp’s book is an incessant emphasis on the domestic threat of the military, revealing the other side of the coin for an institution that we’re told only aims at our “enemies.” 

The main actors identified in The Fort Bragg Cartel were William “Billy” Lavigne, a Delta Force officer with a suspicious record of drug abuse and killing fellow soldier Mark Leshikar in so-called self-defense; Timothy Dumas, a fellow soldier and drug dealer, and Freddie Wayne Huff, a former DEA agent turned drug dealer. In February 2019, Dumas brought a thumb drive to Huff, which contained a blackmail letter. Four of Harp’s sources independently described the content of the letter as addressed to a high ranking general and including a list of service members who were transporting “commercial quantities of occupied Afghanistan’s marquee nation product into the United States” to sell to the market of American drug users (Harp 182). Dumas instructed Huff to release the letter if anything ever were to happen to him. 

In December 2020, Lavigne, and Dumas were both found shot dead in a rural wooded area near McArthur Lake, beside a truck that was stuck at an odd angle in a trail rut. An off-duty soldier stumbled upon the crime scene while deer hunting, and called 911. The responding team to the scene were military police, and they quickly constructed  a theory that Lavigne, an addict, owed someone drug money, and that Dumas, a dealer, had been hired by a higher level dealer to kill Lavigne. They theorized that Dumas brought a third person in to get the job done, and that this mystery individual betrayed Dumas after the truck got stuck, killing him too to make a fast getaway. 

Within days, Huff was under investigation as a suspect in the murder of Lavigne and Dumas, and after five months, he was arrested for drug trafficking. At this point, “the task force swept up all the electronic devices” that belonged to Huff, which according to Huff  included the thumb drive, and therefore the letter which named “the members of a drug cartel embedded in the Special Forces at Fort Bragg” (Harp 224-225). The thumb drive was logged as evidence, then locked away. 

“Huff described the blackmail letter that Dumas had written,” and revealed the thumb drive’s location while bargaining for a plea deal,  believing it would be important to their investigation into who really murdered the two soldiers. “But to his surprise, they seemed uninterested in this information” (Harp 287).  Harp, with permission from Huff, “requested that the police department turn over the thumb drive on the grounds that the case against Huff [had] been fully adjudicated” at that point, and the thumb drive was Huff’s personal property (Harp 309). The police department agreed to provide a digital copy of its contents, but within a few days of this promise, Harp was contacted with unfortunate news—the detective who went to copy the drive claims he found it empty of any files. Harp was left with no means to verify this, and the drive itself is still languishing in the Winston-Salem Police Department’s evidence room. In 2023, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against a young Black man, Kenneth Maurice Quick Jr., accusing him of both the murder of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas, and related drug trafficking charges and destruction of evidence. The indictment has not been made public and the trial is pending. 

The war on drugs

In the 21st century, it’s easy to see the Middle East as a place where the U.S. has continually mutated the same war repeatedly into new forms—the left largely sees this as the Bush family legacy. But a more historically informed view, with the precedent of McCoy and Webb’s reporting, is important to keep in mind. It’s not just wars in the Middle East that shapeshift, and the Bush presidencies are not isolated incidents. The war on drugs itself has mutated, and the global infrastructure of drug trade has easily adapted across borders and administrations. 

The term “the war on drugs” comes from Reagan himself, when he declared at a 1986 press conference that we were actively in “another war for our freedom,” against drug addiction, parallel to World War II, and thus in need of a patriotic response. In terms of the policies that Reagan came up with, the most famous are mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenders, and stop and frisk searches which are largely carried out via racial profiling. These laws criminalized drug users for consuming the very product that Reagan’s foreign policy had brought into the United States. Mandatory minimums led to incarcerations in cases that previously would not have led to imprisonment, and Black and Brown individuals were more likely to be convicted. This mass incarceration of people of color was an act of voter suppression—like Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow, the wave of felony convictions took away voting rights specifically from Black men. 

One of Reagan’s lesser known laws is the 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, which enabled the U.S. Military to cooperate with domestic and foreign law enforcement agencies. It’s this law that I think is most pertinent to keep in mind when considering how history has led us to the contemporary moment. Evolved from the traditional drug criminalization, the war on drugs now deploys ICE, a rogue paramilitary agency that defies any checks and balances or transparency, perpetuating a  moral panic about “foreign” cartels. 

According to President Trump, the United States is  fighting “narco-terrorists.” Drugs, supposedly, are the reason that Venezuela’s government has recently been targeted by the Trump administration, and the continually fabricated statement that ICE is heroically deporting cartel and gang members is cited as the justification for ex-judicial murders in our streets, and the torture of thousands in ICE detainment. Under this messaging, 38% of Americans believe that the benefits of using U.S. Military force to combat drug cartels in other countries outweigh the costs. Meanwhile, 22% believe that ICE’s violence within the United States is appropriate and 12% think ICE isn’t going far enough. It’s tempting to be soothed by percentages under 50%, but it’s a significant minority that’s responding affirmatively to ICE and military intervention in Latin America, and the murders ICE has committed are stacking up with an appalling lack of accountability, regardless of how many of us respond to a poll with a negative opinion of the agency. 

For true MAGA believers, paramilitary action from ICE is heroism against violent gang and cartel members. That ICE  and CBP receive equipment, training, and support from the military due to Reagan’s largely forgotten 1981 war on drugs policy, the Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, is something rarely cited in ongoing conversations about ICE and CBP.  I suspect if MAGA knew this, it would simply make them worship both the military and ICE even more than they already do. 

But in the context of The Fort Bragg Cartel’s revelations, and the historical precedent documented in Dark Alliance and The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, it’s profoundly ironic. Each journalist’s research is a damning indictment of a long-hidden drug trade facilitated by none other than the U.S. Military and intelligence agencies. No matter how much propaganda claims to be fighting the influx of drugs, the truth is that our government facilitates their arrival. How we could get MAGA believers to ever part with their beloved misinformation about ICE and the military, I’m not totally sure. But I believe if progressives are to counter it, we must start by contending with the underlying logos of this faulty reasoning, which is a mutation of the war on drugs. If drug trafficking is so paramount to the justifications MAGA has for ICE, CBP, and imperialism in Venezuela, then we must be armed with more accurate information on how drugs enter our country, and then ask ourselves why these facts alone don’t seem to undo MAGA beliefs. The most current and blatant example of U.S. backed drug trade  is Fort Bragg—with more overdoses than any other military base, at least 24 murders between 2020 and 2024, and several other suspicious deaths, it’s teeming with signs of drug trafficking. The reality of this many soldiers overdosing and dying at a military base in a red state might be the crack in the drug narrative that can shift someone’s confidence in the misinformation they’ve been relying on.

narrative reinforcement of hegemony

As someone with an MFA in creative writing, I find propaganda interesting because it makes use of the human brain’s desire for a compelling narrative. It’s hard to deconstruct a story, because they’re built to make sense just like a math problem. Narrative endings are clean, definitive and memorable. The assumption of factuality and inevitability, which endings so neatly provide,  is crucial for the continuance of hegemony—the ubiquitous state of acceptance across a society that the systems they live under are natural, inevitable, and preferred. Deprecatingly, it’s the ease with which states can encourage people to act like sheep. 

Conceptualized by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1929-1935 Prison Notebooks, hegemony was described as having two separate mechanisms for states to enforce their ideologies through. Firstly, ideology was maintained through coercion from armies, police, or legal systems—in the context of what you’ve just read, that’ll include the CIA, the military, and ICE. But Gramsci also rightfully identified the power of generating consent, and hegemony is the word that encapsulates the universal acceptance of unquestionable truths, which ordinary people perpetuate and use to self-placate. 

 This might seem to be an inaccurate concept, because of how much Americans disagree when it comes to politics. But hegemony exists in our paradigms—like the belief that the military is only an external facing force rather than a simultaneous internal threat, or that coordinated efforts to create drug addiction crises in specific communities are too conspiratorial to be real. You can witness hegemony’s reach in the ways we apply plausible deniability to patterns, and give credence to chance and coincidence. It’s the reason I doubted what the homeless veteran told me about Afghanistan when I was a teenager.

When considering the revelations that are brought forth in the journalism of McCoy, Webb and Harp, we can’t only consider the coercive forces that they unravel. Equally as powerful in this miasma of drugs, violence, and secrecy is that little voice in the back of a reader’s head casting doubt on the conclusion that there’s something conspiratorial afoot. Hegemony is all about rejecting alternatives—whether it’s alternative systems or explanations, we’re poised to feel unsettled when refuting narratives, tempted to return to the comfort of the standardized story.

The step we need to take then, as leftists, is to understand that we’re not just fighting misinformation when it comes to MAGA. We’re undoing the hegemony that they build their beliefs on, and even sometimes toppling our own paradigms along the way. We’re collapsing myths that our class enemies have people rely on for a sense of comfort and security, which fundamentally undermines a sense of reality. Knowing how disquieting this experience must be, we must  approach our political hopes for an anti-imperialist  socialist future with proper respect for what narratives can do, though facts remain crucial. Underestimating the emotionality of losing a paradigmatic story, and thinking factuality alone can replace it without friction, is part of how we’re failing to contend with propaganda. It’s not just the facts that we have to be armed with, but the goal of writing new endings. We need narrative comprehension to use history as the actual story that it is, to lead people  toward a new politics for the future. To replace the comfort of lies that so many are fed, we can provide comfort and hope in the third act that lies ahead of us. 

References

Ackerman, Spencer, and Jeremy Scahill. “The Long-Lasting Consequences of the War on Terror.” The Intercept, September 3, 2021. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/01/intercepted-reign-of-terror-spencer-ackerman/. 

“The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack – FPIF.” Foreign Policy In Focus, May 8, 2013. https://fpif.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/. 

Gelman, Andrew, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss. “An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 102, no. 479 (September 2007): 813–23. https://doi.org/10.1198/016214506000001040. 

“Guide to Investigating Organized Crime in the Golden Triangle.” Global Investigative Journalism Network, November 28, 2022. https://gijn.org/resource/guide-to-investigating-organized-crime-in-the-golden-triangle-introduction/. 

Harp, Seth. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. New York, NY: Viking, 2025. 

“How Mandatory Minimums Perpetuate Mass Incarceration and What to Do about It.” The Sentencing Project, 15 Feb. 2024, www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/how-mandatory-minimums-perpetuate-mass-incarceration-and-what-to-do-about-it/. 

Loffman, Matt. “Poll: Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Say Ice Has Gone Too Far in Immigration Crackdown.” PBS, February 5, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/poll-nearly-two-thirds-of-americans-say-ice-has-gone-too-far-in-immigration-crackdown. 

Martin, James. “Antonio Gramsci.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 13, 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/#Hege. 

McCoy, Alfred W. Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Harper & Row, 1972. 

“New Report Details Ice’s Expanding and Increasingly Unaccountable Detention System.” American Immigration Council, July 16, 2026. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-expanding-detention-system/. 

Office, U.S. Government Accountability. “U.S. Gao.” Military Cooperation With Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies. Accessed August 15, 2026. https://www.gao.gov/products/122004. 

“Presidential Approval Ratings – George W. Bush.” Gallup.com, February 9, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx. 

Reagan, Ronald. Address to the Nation on the Campaign Against Drug abuse. Accessed August 15, 2026. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-campaign-against-drug-abuse. 

Roberts, Roxanne. “Barbara Lee Doesn’t Feel Vindicated for Voting against Afghan War: ‘I Almost Wish … I Had Been Wrong’ – the Washington Post.” The Washington Post, August 18, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/08/18/barbara-lee-vote-afghanistan-war/. 

Skopic, Alex. “No War with Venezuela!” Current Affairs, October 28, 2025. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/no-war-with-venezuela. 

Tyson, Alec, and Annaleise Azevedo Lohr. “Most Americans Feel the Risks of Military Action against Drug Cartels Outweigh the Benefits.” Ipsos, December 18, 2025. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/most-americans-feel-risks-military-action-against-drug-cartels-outweigh-benefits. 

Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. 

Wolf, Zachary B. “The ‘war on Drugs’ Felt over. Donald Trump Restarted It.” CNN, December 6, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/06/politics/war-on-drugs-trump-boat-strikes-venezuela. 

On Saturday, November 14th, Chicago DSA will be asked to debate and decide whether our chapter should endorse Mayor Brandon Johnson for his reelection campaign or, if we decline to endorse, whether the chapter will recommend a vote for him. Endorsing or recommending Johnson risks chaining our organization to a sinking ship at the very moment of our party’s nationwide ascendency.

During the 2023 mayoral election, Chicago DSA did not endorse Brandon Johnson in his campaign for mayor. The media tied us together anyway, thinking it would hurt him. While his term has been a mixed bag, we have found common cause and visibly worked together on priorities such as the Protecting Renters Ordinance and the Corporate Head Tax. Our endorsed city councilors have been among his staunchest allies in council. While polling shows Johnson deeply underwater, it is tempting to believe we could save him. We all want Chicago to have our “Zohran Moment”, breaking through and becoming the dominant political force in the city. 

Brandon Johnson Is Not Our Zohran

Unfortunately, for several reasons, Brandon Johnson cannot deliver such a moment nor the power that comes with it. He is not a socialist and refuses to identify as such. He is not interested in joining DSA, let alone co-governing with us. We are building a strong socialist party to transform society, not another progressive organization which endorses the lesser of two evils in every race.

Right now we can credibly present ourselves as outside insurgents against an established political class, sharing our plan to radically change our political and social systems to a public ready and willing to punish the capitalist parties. Johnson’s likelihood of spurring a highly enthusiastic campaign for his reelection is low. His path to victory lies largely in presenting himself as the only tolerable candidate where his main opponents want to hire 1,000 more cops to terrorize our streets or to roll back portions of the landmark SAFE-T Act. The fact that his opponents are terrible ghouls does not make Johnson a powerful candidate for DSA. He currently sits at an abysmal 22% approval rating in Chicago and has been widely criticized for his failure to deliver on large parts of his agenda. The frank reality is he is not likely to win reelection, nor are we likely able to save him. 

It is imperative that we have the patience to wait for the right window and the right candidate. To achieve Chicago’s Zohran moment, we need to do more than endorse a winning mayor. We need an exciting candidate who can win not just broad support but popularity across the working class of Chicago. We need our status as an outside insurgent to remain intact until we are ready to run that campaign. By endorsing Johnson now, we risk forfeiting it on a doomed campaign for a candidate who is neither a member of our party or even an open socialist. 

Advocates of endorsing Johnson might make the argument that it would be a class-struggle election, that we can polarize the working class due to his strong labor connections and progressive politics. The key goal of a class-struggle election is building lasting working class organization and solidarity. Four years ago, this did not happen. United Working Families served as a firm tent pole for aligning organized labor around the campaign. That organization has only gotten weaker, with two of its main labor backers, the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU, now actively feuding with each other. Endorsing Johnson would not build working class independence in a socialist party, but would result in Chicago DSA becoming just another member in the mayor’s fractured political coalition and tie us to the unpopular administration even while DSA itself is more popular than ever. Our essential tasks are to build our class base and independent power for our party. To do that through a mayoral run, we would need to follow the model of NYC and Metro DC in running an open socialist willing to help drive the energy of their campaign into the party. 

A Recommendation Is A Distinction Without A Difference

Similarly, we must vote against any proposal to “recommend” Brandon Johnson in place of endorsing him. The distinction between a recommendation and an endorsement is a purely internal distinction that is generally only understood by DSA members involved in debating the issue. It is almost completely indistinguishable to the broader public. When California DSA issued a recommendation in favor of billionaire Tom Steyer for governor, social media accounts and journalists reported that DSA had endorsed the candidate. Because of this lack of clear distinction, a recommendation amounts to an endorsement in the public eye. It would commit us to nothing to support the campaign or to increase its viability while visibly tying us to it. We should reject “recommendations” generally as little more than a means to circumvent our high threshold for endorsement.

What Is To Be Done?

Thankfully, declining to endorse does not preclude us from visibly stepping into the municipal elections. First, we have already committed to delivering two new socialists to city council this cycle, Kalen Luciano and Raheem Uqdah. Both candidates have made it to the February ballot thanks to our hard work, and these candidates pose real threats to two of the corporate alders who have obstructed the mayor’s agenda.

Second, this school board cycle has served as a proof of concept for a means of intervention in races with no socialist contender: an issue-based DSA Voter Guide. Voter guides are a commonly used tool for working class people navigating ballots with dozens of candidates over many races and little media coverage. There is an appetite among DSA members and the public for these guides, but in Chicago there are few good ones. The most popular on the broader Chicago left is “Girl, I Guess.” The author is not a socialist and often issues recommendations that are difficult to explain beyond merely being the personal preferences of the author. DSA’s Marxist approach positions us to analyze the elections more objectively and better inform voters about where candidates stand on key issues while putting a spotlight on those candidates who have earned our endorsement. This approach has already seen some success with our recent School Board voting guide and could be further developed and iterated on to stake out and elevate our analysis and party without forcing us to endorse candidates who sometimes align with us but do not help build the mass, socialist party.  

Brandon Johnson is the leftmost candidate in this race and clearly better than his opponents. I encourage everyone reading this article to vote for him in the February election. That does not mean we should compromise our principles of party building to endorse or recommend him. We have very little to gain in doing so and quite a lot to lose. We should continue to collaborate with his office when our legislative and organizing agendas align. We should continue to build the ties with West Side organizing which brought us to New Mount Pilgrim Church for the Fireside Chat. Declining to endorse the mayor does not and should not mean burning bridges with him or his allies.

The facism of the Trump administration and the Democratic party’s limp response has put a lot of pressure on leftist organizations to endorse and support anyone willing to provide even token resistance. We cannot cave to that pressure. We must remember that we are building something bigger than a progressive NGO. Building a socialist party capable of transforming society requires us to stick to our principles and to be wary of opportunism. We will have our chance to run a socialist mayor, perhaps as soon as 2031. When we have the opportunity to put forward a committed socialist and proud DSA member for mayor, we will be glad for our patience.

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Why I think endorsing Brandon Johnson for re-election is an opportunity we should not pass up

When I got to New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church for the “Fireside Chat” with Mayor Johnson, I had a funny realization. I shared with Rev. Dr. Marshall Elijah Hatch, Sr. that my grandma lives about 40 blocks north of him, on the same street as his Church. That street they share, Kildare Avenue, is one she’s lived on for 58 years. There, both in and beyond their local parish of St. Viator’s, was where her and my late grandpa did their community organizing. They trained as organizers with a man quite familiar to Rev. Dr. Hitch, under Ed Chambers, the long-time Executive Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation after Saul Alinsky died. Their toughest campaign was defeating the Crosstown Expressway, a proposed route that, had it been built, would have torn through both their communities and beyond. The struggle to defeat the Crosstown Expressway reminded me of what the stakes are for our movement, and how we should approach coalitions and endorsements to achieve our medium term goals. 

To defeat Mayor Daley’s preferred megaproject, the anti-Crosstown coalition had to win successive gubernatorial elections as well as municipal seats. While stopping a highway takes a lot of time and organizing, most of the goals which we seek to achieve — whether they be in the Workers Deserve More! program or from our own local platform — will take multiple terms and legislative wins at multiple levels of government. For this reason, we should look at the possible endorsement of Mayor Johnson as an opportunity to deepen our relationships with communities that are less represented in our general membership and to broaden our influence across the city. 

Mayor Johnson’s remarks at New Mount Pilgrim talked  about the need to have more “old-fashioned” organizing. We need to be back in Garfield Park. He needs to hold more “fireside chats” with organizers and constituents to make connections. We need to rebuild a multiracial, working-class coalition to tax the rich and deliver for the public good. I think we should endorse Brandon Johnson’s re-election campaign whether he wins or loses. We should use the endorsement as an opportunity to cultivate relationships and expand our membership to more of Chicago.

Our Short and Medium-Term Goals

The primary political tasks of Chicago DSA and its members are1. to fight the bosses, 2. make more socialists, 3. be socialists everywhere, and 4. build a class party. To these ends, we have prioritized the work of our chapter towards contesting for state power, supporting labor organizing, and building the party. Our labor organizing work has developed significantly by expanding on a national partnership with United Electric to create the Chicago branch of the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (CHIWOC). Chicago continues to lead on DSA’s national priority to organize Amazon, in partnership with the Teamsters. Our members have deepened ties with other unions through strike solidarity work, and new initiatives authored by the National Labor Commission will provide fertile opportunities in the coming years. Our ability to fight the boss grows by the day; now, our task lies in both contesting for state power and building the party. An endorsement of Brandon Johnson would increase our opportunities and resources to advance both of these priorities.

Looking at our local platform, we would need to achieve several legislative victories at multiple levels of government. Some policies would only require individual ordinances at the city council level, which could feasibly be achieved in the short term. Expanding Treatment not Trauma and establishing Fair Elections in Chicago are already active campaigns within our chapter and among our coalition partners. While existing opposition to these changes means they may not be accomplished in the remainder of Brandon Johnson’s current term, it would not be difficult to imagine winning these policies in the near future if he is re-elected. Some of our other platform planks reside squarely within the purview of the city government but would be quite difficult to win even within the next few election cycles. Ending aldermanic prerogative, for instance, has long been a white whale of progressive organizations. Many parts of our platform cannot be enacted by the City Council alone. 

The distributed leadership and responsibilities born from the creation of the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) means that some of our transportation aims will require winning elections and pressuring politicians at different levels and in different municipalities. For example, changing the property tax regime to target land valuation would require winning at the County level. In another example, the State’s Attorney’s office is the proximate impediment right now to prosecuting DHS agents. We’ll have to elect a progressive prosecutor if we have any hope of getting it done. To achieve many of our medium term goals, we will need to go to Springfield so we can tax the rich. Even something like achieving universal health care coverage, which is in both our local and national platform, will require exerting pressure on representatives and senators to ensure the passage of federal legislation. On all of these fronts, and more, we will need to massively expand our reach as an organization. Whether this is accomplished by pressuring sitting politicians or electing new ones, we will need to make more socialists across our city.

What it Will Take to Win These Goals

To truly contest for state power in the city of Chicago, in Cook County, and in Illinois, we will need to build our party. Brandon, as Mayor, can obviously wield some state power, and influence other office holders through the informal parts of his role. Even combined with our endorsed alders, this is still not enough to pass legislation by ourselves. If Chicago DSA remains an insular and geographically confined but highly mobilized cadre, we will not be able to to achieve our aims. Building a mass party for the working class requires us to do a few things. To quote one of our previous passed resolutions from earlier this year, “party-building” is: 

“…outward facing actions and activities that grow Chicago DSA’s membership and supporter-base; expand our reach into working class communities, especially predominantly BIPOC neighborhoods where we currently lack high member density; educate members and the wider public on socialist and Marxist politics; and that develop our party’s ability to participate effectively and constructively in labor, electoral, social movement, and other struggles.”

While party-building also includes cultivating joy and combating loneliness through socials, it should be evident that party-building is equally about constructing and strengthening the core of our organization so that we might better fight the boss and contest for state power. 

In order to contest for state power at the various levels of government and over the many cycles needed to accomplish our platform, we will need to dramatically expand our reach into more working class communities. We will need to build high member density beyond the North Side Blue and Red Line branches. We will need to meet people where they’re at, which means drawing in people unfamiliar with socialist and Marxist politics and educating them so that they can effectively organize in their neighborhoods and their workplaces. To do all of this, we will need to work with a large and diverse set of coalition partners and create long-lasting relationships with institutional and organic leaders. I believe that an effective way to begin this expansion into previously unreached communities is by endorsing Mayor Johnson. 

Towards a Multiracial Working Class Movement

In the “Fireside Chat,” Mayor Johnson talked about building a relationship with Chicago DSA. He talked about having more meetings between him and community stakeholders as well as between us and residents on the west side. It’s no secret that our organization does not demographically look like our city – especially its working class; we can only address this fact with explanations and promises to do better for so long. To create a socialist movement here, we need to organize in, and from within, Black neighborhoods. Endorsing Brandon Johnson’s re-election campaign should be seen as an opportunity to take our party-building to the next step. We should take that first step. 

For one, we should ask Brandon Johnson to introduce us to his allies. Our organization already organizes alongside community-based organizations on ordinances like the PRO. While it’s good to unite around these shared struggles, we could do more to develop our relationships during times when city council legislation is not being considered. Introductions to institutional and organic leaders would also open the door for more tabling opportunities and recruitment. It is not enough to just be in coalition with other organizations, siloed by our distinct membership. We need to grow in numbers to exert greater influence and to shape the direction of movements for social justice. 

While we could expand into the South and West side without endorsing Mayor Johnson, it would be more difficult to do so. Unlike 2023, Mayor Johnson is the only viable candidate running on the left for Mayor. The vast majority of left and progressive organizations in our city will be getting behind Johnson, and a choice to not endorse would be conspicuous. While I, and likely you (the reader), do not believe that our organization is anti-Black, contrary to the claims of erstwhile endorsed candidates and others, that doesn’t mean unacquainted Black Chicagoans will arrive at the same conclusion as us. If we choose to not endorse Brandon Johnson, it will be something that every member has to explain in conversations with potential new members, especially those in the Black community.  I think it would be difficult to explicate the ‘capacity issues’ and the unique implications of our endorsement process to someone who just wants to know which side we’re on.  In order to organize in the varied neighborhoods of our city, we need to have the trust of the diverse residents of those neighborhoods.

Some may caution against endorsing Mayor Johnson because of his less than stellar chances of getting re-elected. It’s true that he faces a difficult path ahead. Our endorsement may not make the difference in February, or in April. I believe it is wrong, though, to condition our endorsement on the prospect of winning an election, and should look more broadly to how endorsements can help us build a movement. If it turns out that Brandon only wants to get another check-mark graphic to add to his campaign website and some extra unpaid labor, then I would be against endorsing him. I, however, do not believe this is the case. Maybe he doesn’t yet have loyalty to our group, but I think his career shows a commitment to the same vision which guides our members: that the working class should be the author of its own destiny, in this city and across the world. 

Conclusion

Chicago’s problems have existed since before Lori or Rahm. The scourge of neoliberalism began decades prior, and periodic red scares have arisen over the past century. It would be foolhardy to think (and doubtful many in this organization do) that problems decades in the making will take one or two election cycles to fix. It took my grandparents multiple election cycles to beat an expressway. Surely, then, the struggle for a better world will be a lifelong struggle. 

In some ways it is terrifying to think that we must commit ourselves to this fight for the rest of our lives. In other ways I think it can be quite freeing. Our defeats will be temporary because our victories will eventually come. Hope is a passion for the possible. By this same logic, a failure to endorse here is just a momentary setback in the long conflict. However I urge you to see endorsing Brandon Johnson as a chance to take our organizing goals to another level, and to bring our organization to places it has scarcely yet known. Win or lose, an endorsement for Brandon Johnson means a commitment to building the party we need so that we can fight the boss, wrest state power from our class enemies, and get the world that workers deserve. 

The post Endorsing in an Election; Committing to a Coalition appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Join DSA Ventura County’s Labor Working Group on zoom to discuss recent labor struggles in our communities, from Starbucks Workers United’s indefinite strike, to the new contract our County employees won by threatening to strike, to the movement for an arms embargo by Labor for Palestine, and the calls for a general strike by May Day 2028. Please, bring other ideas, campaigns, and your own workplace experiences. An agenda will be posted on slack soon. You will receive the zoom link shortly after completing RSVP.

Sunday – November 22 at 2 PM PDT

Join the DSA Ventura County book club for discussions about selected readings. If you love history, the written word, or the world around you, then you belong here!

This will be a friendly, inclusive event open to all, regardless of prior experiences or familiarity with the topic.

A post-election victory call showcased newly elected DSA endorsees from all over the country. They agreed on one thing: The work is just getting started. 

The post “Socialist Surge” Powers “Bluenami” appeared first on Democratic Left.

The post Metro DC DSA Condemns Councilmember Christina Henderson’s Attempted Power Grab and Disregard for DC Home Rule appeared first on Metro DC DSA.

Date: Thursday, November 12 at 5:30 pm

Monthly Steering Committee Meetings are open to members to observe but, generally, only Steering Committee members may vote and participate.