Update: Ky Fireside — the Eugene-DSA endorsed candidate for HD-7 (Springfield) — launched a public petition calling on Oregon governor Tina Kotek and the Legislature to immediately impose a statewide moratorium on new data centers.

One month out from Oregon’s May Primary Election, grassroots resistance to the data center takeover in Washington County threatens to deal a critical blow to the state’s political establishment.

Pent up anger and frustration finally boiled over into political action earlier this year and has escalated into primary challenges for important legislative seats. 

At a surface level, data centers seem like the quiet capital project that built Oregon’s Silicon Forest. That may be why Oregon’s Democratic Party leadership was caught flatfooted when a rare urban-rural firestorm erupted over Governor Tina Kotek’s “economic development” efforts (land giveaways and tax breaks) to her data-center backers like Amazon and Google.

The grassroots coalition reflects the numerous costs of data center construction in Oregon, including skyrocketing utility rates, environmental degradation, and agrarian depletion.

Data centers’ key role in AI proliferation also means they contribute significantly to the AI ‘revolution’ eviscerating labor standards around the country. But the harm is not only domestic; it’s directly tied to the horrors of the United States’ wars in the Middle East. 

According to research by Portland DSA’s BDS working group, the Portland-based company Sightline Intelligence has been shipping drone technology components to Israeli military contractor Elbit Systems. Sightline’s website emphasizes the use of its technology for “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” and Al-assisted target recognition.

The Data Centrists 

Enter Janeen Sollman, Democratic State Senator for District 15 and chair of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee, who co-sponsored a bill this year — alongside dozens of other statehouse Democrats — which would have rezoned 1,700 acres in Hillsboro for data center construction. 

The bill died in committee, after facing what the Oregonian called a “buzzsaw of opposition, including from farmers and conservationists, who were worried that the proposal would bring more data centers and relatively few jobs to Hillsboro, without yielding property tax revenue for public services.”

Locally, Washington County’s established political class (almost all Democrats) is fairly united on the data center issue. In line with their Chamber of Commerce backers, they are strong supporters of data center construction, despite sharp pushback from their constituents.

These ‘Chambers’ of Commerce play a critical role in whipping political support for the data centers, and their relationships with transnational technology corporations are substantial.

Intel’s chief lobbyist Carly Riter chairs the Washington County Chamber and Amazon is the Chamber’s “Exclusive Champion” for advocacy. In Portland, firms with substantial data center interests helm the Metro Chamber’s Board of Directors, including Intel, Google, Microsoft, Northwest Natural Gas, and Portland General Electric.

Campaign finance records show large contributions from the Washington County and Metro (Portland) Chambers of Commerce to incumbents and wannabe electeds including Sollman, Oregon House District 27 (Beaverton) hopeful and current Beaverton City Councilor Ashley Hartmeir-Prigg, Beaverton Mayor Lacey Beaty, West Portland/NE WashCo State Senator Lisa Reynolds (SD-17) and a cast of Washington County Commissioner incumbents and hopefuls.

Up-ballot, Governor Kotek is more savvy. After the organizing “buzzsaw” caught her off guard, she convened an ‘advisory group’ earlier this year to direct grassroots energy into a dead end process, purportedly to give the public a voice in weighing the costs and benefits of handing over public resources to the largest companies in the world.

At the group’s first meeting, a data center industry insider was sober about the downsides for Oregonians:

Resistance at the Ballot Box

Not all candidates running for Washington County political office are captured by the data center industry. 

Portland DSA’s army of volunteers has already helped knock 14,000 doors for physician Tammy Carpenter, who is running for an open seat in OR-27 against Chamber of Commerce-backed Hartmeier‑Prigg. 

DSA endorsed Carpenter for her commitment to the chapter’s Renters’ Bill of Rights and open democratic socialist politics.

Carpenter took an early position against the data center explosion, and she’s backed a petition launched by allied Washington County area political candidates calling for a moratorium on new data centers:

Similarly, data centers are a hot topic at the doorstep across Washington County. “I’m hearing data center resistance coming up again and again from our members when they are out on the doors volunteering for Tammy Carpenter,” said Portland DSA Co-Chair Carolyn Roderique.

According to the Oregonian, Data center proponents like Sollman, the SD-15 incumbent for Hillsboro, are also getting an earful from residents on the doorstep:

“…but a data center is not going to solve our problems. We have already made too many compromises to Intel, like on air quality. I don’t believe that what Hillsboro needs is to give up great farmland.”

–Hillsboro resident Katie Clark-Alsadder in the The Oregonian, “Can Oregon’s progressive left unseat 2 of the Legislature’s most moderate Democrats?” April 22, 2026

Contribute to Tammy Carpenter’s DSA-backed campaign for Oregon House District 27. Take it from fellow DSA-member and Oregon State Representative Farrah Chaichi:

❝We need people like Tammy Carpenter in the legislature who will ask how we can tax millionaires and billionaires instead of burdening working class Oregonians with cuts to services. I’ll be thrilled to serve alongside a fellow DSA member.❞

The post Coulee DSA ENDORSES Fran Hong for Governor! first appeared on Coulee DSA.

Eric Blanc and Chris Winston have both written articles recently investigating why there is currently no mass anti-war movement in the US and proposing actions for us to take to address that problem. I’m glad that they each put forward their analysis, because both are grappling seriously with this issue, and we do need to figure out what we can do to build a mass anti-war movement. Although I lean more towards Winston’s position, my primary objective in this piece is not to argue for why he is correct or why Blanc is wrong, but rather to dig into the underlying assumptions that lead some of us to Winston’s conclusions and others to Blanc’s.

Both authors propose various tactical interventions that they believe will help to build a mass anti-war movement. However, selection of tactics is downstream from strategy. In this case, the primary strategic question should be, “Who is our base?” Who do we seek to organize into this mass anti-war movement? Once we have the answer to that question, determining tactics is much more straightforward. With a war as unpopular as this one, it seems obvious that the potential base for the anti-war movement would be that majority of the American people who oppose the war, but when we look at the imperialist system more comprehensively, the base becomes smaller.

I propose that the potential base for the anti-imperialist movement within the US consists of the following:

1. The portion of the American ¹working class that is exploited by capitalism to a greater extent than it benefits from imperialism,
2. People in the United States, regardless of class status, who, due to ties of family or friendship, suffer net harm from imperialism when all impacts are taken into account, and
3. Individuals who, despite benefiting more from imperialism than they are exploited by capitalism, desire the end of the imperialist system because they believe it to be abhorrent and are willing to sacrifice the benefits they derive from the system in exchange for its end.

There is a potential fourth group: people who benefit more from imperialism than they are exploited by capitalism, but desire the end of the imperialist system in part because they don’t believe that they will have to endure any reduction in their standard of living when the imperialist system is dismantled. It is potentially possible that the productive forces could be developed more rapidly than the malapportionment of resources is redressed, such that the people in this group won’t actually face a reduction in their standard of living. Personally, I believe that doing so should be one of our objectives should we gain enough power to implement preferred policies, because it will be easier to carry out the changes we want to see if this group is not actively opposed to us. However, this group should not be considered part of the base. It might not be possible to develop the productive forces with sufficient speed to protect them from any decrease in their standard of living, and to pretend that we can definitely do so would be to act in bad faith. In order to presume good faith of our comrades, unless presented with evidence to the contrary I will assume that no one is including this group in their calculations of what constitutes our base.

The second and third groups of our base will be important, and are likely overrepresented among the organizers already involved in the anti-war movement, but the key factor determining the size of the base is the first group. This, I believe, is the primary point of dispute between those who agree with Blanc and those who agree with Winston. Before we get to that, though, I’d like to make explicit four points that I have been assuming so far, because I believe both sides of the debate agree with them:

1. The American working class is exploited by the capitalist system, given their position as workers.
2. The American working class benefits from imperialism, given their position as Americans.
3. At least some members of the American working class are exploited by capitalism to a greater extent than they benefit from imperialism.
4. At least some members of the American working class benefit from imperialism to a greater extent than they are exploited by capitalism.

The question is, of course, how big is the “some” in points 3 and 4? I will leave it to future articles (by me or others) to seek to quantify the degree of exploitation by capitalism and benefit from imperialism, but we now at least have the crux of the issue. If one believes that the group in point four is merely a small fraction of the American working class, then our base makes up a majority of the American public, and majoritarian ²tactics are the correct path to build a mass anti-imperialism movement. On the other hand, if one believes that the group in point four is a majority of the American working class, or even just a large minority, then our base does not make up a majority of the American public, and we should pursue minoritarian tactics instead.

What does it mean to pursue either majoritarian or minoritarian tactics? Well, here are some examples. In electoral work, majoritarian tactics would involve seeking to either win enough elections to pass our preferred policies, or to demonstrate the counter-majoritarian nature of the electoral system. Minoritarian tactics would mean seeking to win races in certain areas where the electorate is friendlier to us, running other races that we don’t expect to win, and having those elected officials and candidates use their higher profiles to encourage people to participate in the movement. In labor organizing, majoritarian tactics would involve strengthening our relationships with whatever unions we can and supporting any worker organizing. Minoritarian tactics would be specifically building relationships with unions that represent large portions of our base (and organizing unions in unorganized workplaces where members of our base are overrepresented), whether that is workers who are exploited more by capitalism, workers who have personal ties to the imperial periphery, or workers who are more likely to be willing to suffer reductions in their standard of living as the cost of ending imperialism. In direct action, majoritarian tactics means mobilizing as many people as possible to events such as the No Kings rallies, while minoritarian tactics requires researching specific pain points where a smaller number of people can put effective pressure on the imperial system.

Blanc’s preference for majoritarian tactics is most explicit in section 6, “Sectarianism Has Helped Marginalize Anti-War Activity.” He presents building “the broadest and deepest possible opposition to US military aid and interventions abroad” as the preferred option, and laments that the movement has tied “widely supported demands against war to unjustified and unhelpful romanticization of any and all anti-imperialist forces.” This is a long-running dispute within the left, where anyone who expresses support for the people who are putting their lives on the line to resist imperialism will be lambasted as romanticizing “any and all anti-imperialist forces”. Because such forces are universally condemned in American media, any support for them whatsoever (justified or not) tends to be incompatible with cohering majority support, at least in the short term. Blanc also explicitly criticizes the encampments on college campuses for lacking, “concerted efforts to win over and mobilize majorities on campuses,” but he does not explain why winning over majorities would have been preferable to other strategic objectives that could conflict with an effort to win over majorities. Blanc’s bias towards majoritarian tactics is so strong that he never bothers to argue for why such tactics should be preferred; it is self-evident to him that majoritarian tactics are necessary.

On the other hand, Winston’s preference for minoritarian tactics does not come out in any overt rejection of majoritarian tactics, but rather a belief that there are some things more important than staking out a majoritarian position, and those things are sometimes incompatible with such a position. In response to Blanc’s assertion that Americans are overwhelmed by all the terrible things Trump is doing, and thus don’t have time to build an anti-war movement, Winston asserts, “We have plenty of time to meddle in their [Palestinian and Iranian] affairs, and allow DSA politicians such as Zohran and AOC to manufacture consent for these wars, yet none, it seems, to build a competent, powerful movement to actually be of service.” In this section, Winston counterposes the need to build a movement that can materially impact the situation with public criticism of anti-imperialist forces, and crucially, presenting it from the perspective of our comrades in other countries: why would they have any respect for our critiques of their social systems if we aren’t actually inhibiting the mass slaughter our government is subjecting them to? Thus, building a powerful anti-imperialist movement must precede any critiques of their societies. This line of reasoning does not allow for any exceptions in the event that public criticism of anti-imperialist forces may be necessary to build a majoritarian movement in the US, so if such a necessity exists, then we have to rely on minoritarian tactics. However, the gaze of anti-imperialist forces is not the only reason to refrain from public criticism of them. For Winston, “What distinguishes us, however, is that we also hold AOC and Sanders and Zohran to account for their role in normalizing, from the left, the American narrative regarding Iran.” Public criticism of anti-imperialist forces, even when paired with rhetorical opposition to the war, strengthens the narrative that is employed to justify the war. As a result, any potential gain from a broader base being willing to support us if we concede the flaws of the enemy du jour is more than offset by the harm done by reifying imperialist narratives.

I do not expect us to all agree on whether or not our potential base makes up a majority of the American public. Even if someone effectively quantifies the relative degrees of exploitation and benefit I allude to above, there will be many who dispute the results of their calculation. However, I hope that this piece will help us to all understand the reasons for or against the various tactics that we propose.

by Eric Herde

1. While I am not fond of using the word “American” as a demonym for the United States, the English language does not have a workable analogue to Spanish’s “estadounidense”. “UnitedStatesian” just feels to clunky for formal writing. In the context of this piece, “American” is used as a demonym for the United States, not for the Americas as a whole. ︎
2. The term ‘majoritarian’ is not meant to imply that anyone thinks we can organize a majority of the population into DSA, or get a majority of the population to actively participate in any particular campaign. The majoritarian/minoritarian distinction refers specifically to the size of the base; the people whom we could reasonably expect to passively support or at least not oppose our actions ︎