Why America needs more communists

The nation’s two-party system has been become stuck, bloated and riddled with money. A controversy in Seattle shows up how absurd it is to continue this way

These last few weeks in Seattle have been days of high political drama. Opponents of city council member Kshama Sawant, an undiluted socialist,  have been trying to oust her by means of a recall campaign.

They allege the 48-year-old, first elected in 2013, breached the standards expected of her office most grievously by letting hundreds of racial justice protesters into the city hall in in the summer of 2020 while Seattle was under Covid restrictions. They’ve also attacked her and urged her to be impeached for delivering a speech outside the home of the mayor.

The final results of the recall have not been released. But it seems once again, Sawant has secured victory.

“It appears we have defeated the combined efforts of big business, the right wing, corporate media, the courts and the political establishment who sought to remove our socialist council office by any means necessary,” she recently told supporters.

As it is, Sawant represents Seattle’s District 3, which includes parts of Capitol Hill, and is where I live.

• Recall effort against Seattle socialist appears to fail
• Kshama Sawant: America’s top socialist lawmaker fights for her political life

As a British citizen I did not get to vote; Seattle has not yet followed the example set by New York City, which recently passed a law granting the right to vote to all people who live and work there. And I am not sure how I would might have cast my ballot; the allegations against Sawant were certainly worthy considering, and she eventually admitted to misusing city funds as part of a ballot measure.

At the same time, it was clear many of those voting to get rid of Sawant simply did not agree with her politics. She is a member of the Socialist Alternative, which describes itself as a Trotskyist political party, seeking democratic revolution to help the masses. If that was the case, given she had been reelected in 2019, the correct means to get take her on ought to have been at the next election, not by means of a recall held in the dead of winter.

Yet, in a broader sense, beyond the confines of Seattle, I am tempted to think America is in desperate need of more communists.

The nation’s two-party system has been become stuck, bloated and riddled with money from special interests and corporations, and very ripe for a shake-up. While other parties do exist — the Greens and Libertarians always run presidential candidates and have broken color or gender ceilings in their choices, long before the mainstream — they make little headway. As a result, you have the same two parties — the Republicans and the Democrats — which every four years somehow have to spread their appeal to supporters as widely and as thinly as possible.

It means an organisation such as the Democratic Party has to try and make room for the views of everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Manchin, who appear to agree on very little. Joe Biden’s pained efforts to pass key legislation, even as Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, is proof of how difficult such a job has become. They have to be all things to all people.

Voters might not like the candidate, but because they have an R or a D next to their name, people very often just hold their nose and mark the box. As AOC herself said last year: “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

To help encourage political diversity, America would need to reform some of its voting systems and make wider use of proportional representation and ranked voting, to let people know if they support a smaller party their voice will not be lost. This will not just benefit socialists such as Sawant, or India Walton, the nurse and activist who recently failed to become mayor of Buffalo. An overhaul of the two-party system would allow Donald Trump and his supporters to have their own outfit, while the never-Trump Republicans could plough their own path — perhaps by seeking to win over more voters of color, a course of action envisaged by the “post-mortem” report commissioned by Mitt Romney after his 2012 defeat to Barack Obama.

And the bitter fight between progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders, against Hillary Clinton’s centrism in 2016 — a fight replayed between Sanders and Biden in 2020 — indicates there are millions of people who prefer to vote with their hearts.

In this landscape, Sawant and her communists would be just part of the political scene, though perhaps an important one. (In 2014, Sawant helped make Seattle the first major city to pass a $15-per-hour minimum wage, something quickly picked up by other places.)

More political parties might encourage greater voter interest.

When I lived and worked in India, there were hundreds of political parties. In the last election I covered, in 2014, 37 parties won seats in the lower chamber, or Lok Sabha. Voter turnout was 66 per cent, the highest ever. That was similar to the turnout for the US presidential election in 2020, which was similarly historic. But turnout for the midterms is usually much less.

Voters often say they are fed up with politicians from the same old parties, so they might be more likely to show up and cast their ballot for a fresh face, someone with new ideas and policies, and not hamstrung by being forced into the political straitjacket of being a Democrat or a Republican.

A shake-up of the system would benefit everyone — except, perhaps, those getting rich and comfortable from decades and decades of politics as normal.