Transitioning Movements to Politics w/ Asha Ransby-Sporn

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Cayden Mak. On this show, we are building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impact of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:25] This week on the show, I’m joined by writer and organizer, Asha Ransby-Sporn, about building durable political power in Chicago over the past five years since the 2020 uprisings. The responsibility and opportunity of the moment we’re in and what comes next. But first these headlines. It is late June, so that means it’s Supreme Court season.

[00:00:43] Yay. Unfortunately, SCOTUS was never gonna save us. And over the past couple weeks they have confirmed that analysis. There are a few big opinions that are still in the docket as we record on Friday afternoon, but this morning we got deluge with a bundle of ’em, like the one affirming South Carolina’s to effectively defund Bland Parenthood or upholding Texas’s, right to require identity verification to view porn online, which by the way has very little to do with porn, but everything to do with de anonymizing and surveilling all of our internet use all the time, which is cool.

[00:01:13] But we have to talk about this decision where the divided court basically washed their hands of oversight of the, of executive orders. This was in response to the administration’s request to narrow the scope of lower court injunctions against executive orders, limiting them to the states groups and individuals named in the suits, meaning that only the people and groups who have the time and resources to lawyer up will gain protection of the courts.

[00:01:37] Look, this is about the Trump administration’s willful reinterpretation of birthright citizenship in this country, but it’s also about ending the judicial branch’s power as a check on the tantrums of an extre, increasingly authoritarian executive branch. To be clear, Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondy did this victory lap press conference celebrating its decision as an end to those checks and balances.

[00:01:58] You might have been taught about. In middle school civics class intended to prevent our government from becoming an authoritarian dictatorship. The unitary executive theory, Federalist Society goons are laughing all the way to the bank, AKA. They are really committing to an early days Nazi vibe Now.

[00:02:15] On the night of June 21st, Donald Trump superseded congressional authority to declare war and ordered US troops to carry out three massive airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites. This followed weeks of unprovoked missile strikes on the country by Israel, which terrorized its most populated city and capital of Tehran.

[00:02:32] A striking factor in these completely unnecessary attacks is the hack job from both the White House and the mainstream media. To manufacture consent amongst Americans for war with Iran, they pulled out their dusty old playbook from 2003 to claim for just a few days that we are preventing a dangerous badman from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

[00:02:49] Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. These same mouthpieces are now clamoring to La Trump’s attacks as a groundbreaking success, which according to many sources, including the military itself, haven’t impacted anything of substance. The even bigger fail is that the general vibe amongst everyday Americans is that this foray in Iran is merely an extension of the ruling class unbreakable commitment to spending our money to prop up the violent aggression of Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal Zionist regime.

[00:03:16] Poll after poll shows that Americans are overwhelmingly no longer in support of our commitment to I Israel’s wars and genocide against their neighbors and occupied territories. In a shocking term of events, no one’s in the mood for more forever wars delivered by the president who promised no more forever wars.

[00:03:32] The administration’s inability to maintain narrative control is yet another sign of weakness, a regime that’s dedicated to projecting strength and an opportunity to organize people who took Trump at his word when he said that he would keep us out of an imperialist entanglement away from ma. And as most of our listeners most likely know by now, democratic Socialists Zoran Ani defeated disgraced former sex pest governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary Tuesday night by a massive seven points.

[00:03:59] Almost immediately, a coalition of some of the worst people you know, began scrambling to figure out how to reverse the mandate of New York voters and sabotage Manny’s general election campaign against equally disgraced and very unpopular incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. And that includes many of Manny’s fellow Democrats.

[00:04:16] Cuomo has battered around the idea of running as an independent, while some of the city’s most obnoxious billionaires are publicly plotting and AstroTurf right in campaign, that is to say there is still a long road ahead from Ani before he can secure victory and work to deliver on any of his campaign platform.

[00:04:32] And that path is gonna be littered with endless road spikes of bad faith Islamophobic attacks fueled by billionaire money. There are also a couple of big shifts that Mom Dani’s decisive primary win may indicate, and we’ll be talking more in depth about how this all happened on the show in a few weeks, but I wanted to mark a couple here.

[00:04:50] First. Mom Dani’s campaign was very clear about their message. The fact that they were able to sum up the entire platform with a single resonant word, affordability was a massive narrative win and something which broke out beyond people who self-describe. As the left second, this campaign was won on the doors mobilizing 50,000 volunteers is doing serious numbers.

[00:05:10] And the linkage of this narrative clarity with a motivated and engaged volunteer base cannot be understated. And third, it seems like Palestine is no longer the third rail that it once was. Not only was Momani very clear about his stance on Palestine, he and Coors, Brad Lander went out of their way to demonstrate solidarity across Muslim and Jewish communities in New York City.

[00:05:31] It’s almost like people who think that human rights are for people think that apply to all people. And don’t think I forgot about you. Buffalo. Congrats to Progressive Sean Ryan for shouldering Out Corporate Shill, Chris Scanlan in the Democratic primary for mayor there too.

[00:05:51] My next guest is Asha Ransby-Sporn, who’s a Chicago based organizer and writer, who’s also a co-founder of Black Youth Project 100. I’m only gonna gloss the long list of organizing and struggle that she’s been a part of for the past decade plus, from ballot initiatives for affordable housing, progressive taxation and non-police mental health programs to divestments from private prisons and helping elect Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago in 2023.

[00:06:14] Alongside all of this work is ASHA’s poignant writing, recently publishing, and in these times on the work of contesting for Power in Chicago. Since Johnson’s win and for Hammer and Hope on the need for Black Left Leadership in a moment of strident backlash against the gains in the last five years, we’ll publish links to those pieces in the show notes.

[00:06:32] Asha, welcome to Block and Build. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:06:35] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Thanks for having me, Cayden. 

[00:06:36] Cayden Mak: It’s good to catch up. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a million years. I know. I know that you’ve written a lot about the lessons of Black Lives Matter and obviously June of this year in particular feels like timely and it makes sense that a lot of folks are taking stock of the George Floyd uprisings five years on.

[00:06:52] One thing that’s been giving me a little hope in this time is how willing so many folks have been in this moment to reflect on what happened and what we’ve learned. And that’s the kind of thing that’s gonna let us really iterate on our strategies in real time, a lot faster. Totally. And this is a big question and I think it’s in part because there’s a lot of answers, but I’m curious if we could start with what some of you see as some of those lessons. What are the big sort of top line lessons and how do you understand the impact of the uprisings in the, in a longer arc of struggle for the liberation of black people in this country?

[00:07:21] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah, totally. Yeah, thanks for the question. I appreciate the way the kind of anniversary has been used as an opportunity for the movement to reflect, which oftentimes we don’t do enough of. And I do think that it, that since the uprisings of 2020, we have seen a shift in what’s on the table politically when it comes to policing.

[00:07:47] Even if it’s way, not enough or not as much as we maybe felt was possible when we felt as powerful as we felt flooding the streets with millions and millions of people. And I think it’s measuring that like inevitable disappointment and also the wins is like how we measure our power, how much of it we need, how effectively we’re organizing and wielding it.

[00:08:12] So that kind of dissonance. There’s just like a lot of information there. And I think that’s important. In Chicago we’ve seen investments in police alternatives. And yeah, that’s because Chicago has like elected people that are willing to consider different things. Those people ran on and were able to run on the platforms that they did.

[00:08:32] Because of the way that we busted open. Even how in the like movement for Black Lives, we were talking and thinking about en mass policing, which is, away from even. Just looking at individual instances of violence or the acts of individual police officers or small scale reforms or training or new equipment.

[00:08:51] But looking at, let’s actually look at how are we, where are resources going in our society and why is so much of it going to policing when so much of it is not going to all these other places that we need it. And so maybe defund is like a. Polarizing word, but if we’re looking at, what are the proposals that people are actually considering in different places when it comes to how do we address not only policing but structural violence, structural racism and inequity in this country?

[00:09:20] We are looking at resources and where those resources are going which I think leads us to better and more structural big scale solutions Then. Where we were at before. So that’s where I see some of the impact. In Chicago we’ve got a pilot of a non-police mental health crisis response system.

[00:09:37] You can call 9 1 1 in a mental health crisis response, and if you’re in a certain part of the city, you’ll get a care team, not a police officer responding to that crisis. And that’s connected to growth in our public, our system of public mental health centers. So we’ve seen two and a half of those reopened and that, that may be like small scale just for our city, but that’s like the measure of how much power we were able to wield since the moment and the movement and it points to the power that’s left to build.

[00:10:08] Cayden Mak: Yeah, for sure. We have another like alt police alternative for like mental health crisis thing going on in Oakland also that the, I feel like the city council is constantly talking about increasing hours because people use it, right? Like it’s actually something that people want.

[00:10:22] And it’s pretty meaningful. One of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that it feels like defund became was poisoned by the right wing media system is also that like there’s a, there, there’s, there is such like a deep, and like the idea of policing and the way that policing works in this country is so like the it’s tendrils and its roots go really deep into our politics, our political imagination and our discourse.

[00:10:56] And I think that like the moment of 2020 and thinking about the eruption of. Awareness about abolitionist alternatives to police was so big. And the fact that we are still talking about defund and that we’re talking, still talking about in like divest invest Totally. When it comes to policing in the military industrial complex also seems like huge to me.

[00:11:20] Totally. That certainly is something I would never have imagined or dreamed about in 2018. Yeah. Yeah. Not a coincidence. 

[00:11:27] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah, and I’ll say a couple other things about defund here. I sometimes, yeah. I think sometimes we even on the left are like vulnerable to like mainstream status quo interpretations.

[00:11:42] Of what’s going on. And so a couple of things I’ll say in 2020, there was like a city run, city administered, not the movement, city administered budget survey that went out to that 30, 38,000, I think Chicagoans filled out. 87% of those people said in that budget survey that they would move money away from the police department and get into, other services.

[00:12:06] When you ask the question like that, then in 2023 we have lots of progressives running not just for mayor, but for city council seats all across the board. In the city of Chicago and some of those folks, there are movement people they’ve been in the protest with us. And defund was like, I don’t know how much money the, like neoliberal class spent on ma, I would love to like cumulatively add up, like how many millions of dollars they spent printing mailers that had like anti defund messages and like literally the races where they spent the most money sending out.

[00:12:41] I was getting, I as like a black voter on the south side of Chicago was getting multiple pieces of mail and like fear mongering about crime. Anti Brandon Johnson every day. It was Brandon Johnson for Mayor one, one, overwhelmingly among black voters in particular. And then two of our other leftists in the city council who faced serious opposition from the real estate industry and others, these were the folks they were sending this propaganda against and they won.

[00:13:11] So the idea that it’s like an unelectable position, and then the last thing you know now this the, defund or police budget organizing or public health and safety now is the language that we’re using to talk about it. Organizing in Chicago has continued. I first got involved in work resisting around the police budget in 2014.

[00:13:28] We’re in a totally different landscape around it than we are now. We’re looking at, right now, there’s $200 million that goes into the police department budget for vacant officer positions. They haven’t been able to increase the ranks of the police department in years. No matter how many be a cop, billboards or police training facilities, they build. They just, they can’t, it’s not something people wanna do. But at the same time, we we, our city won investment in a youth jobs peacekeeping program. They had a pilot with just like a hundred young youth peacekeepers for the summer. They had 800 people apply.

[00:14:04] They’re turning away young people that’s in that wanna do the work of public safety. And so when we talk to people about that, and we’re running, a big door knocking and organizing program this summer in black communities, in communities impacted by policing. We just got started. We’ve already had hundreds of conversations.

[00:14:21] And when you talk about it in this way, like why are there public safety dollars that are going to policing? It’s essentially a slush fund. ’cause they get that money. And use it on who knows what. When we’re turning away young people that wanna do the work of public safety, when we have something like care, this non-police mental health crisis response.

[00:14:38] That’s not citywide yet. People are with us. Yeah. So that’s the world that we live in that we didn’t necessarily live in before 2020. And those are some of the things that are gonna be hard to win and expand, but we can and are on the table. And that’s not where AT before. 

[00:14:55] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about that too.

[00:14:56] ’cause we have a similar phenomenon happening in Oakland where like they, they keep saying oh, we’re gonna run two police academies this year instead of one. ’cause we’re so understaffed, but they can’t get enough officer candidates into these academies. It’s actually wild. The flip side of that of course is also that oPD is spending a ton of money, a ton of money on police overtime. Yeah. So it’s yeah, we’re in this, we’re in this like weird interstitial space where Yeah, like arguably our movements have not been able to move forward enough. And I feel like, one of the things I worry about often is the risk of backsliding because of backlash to programs that have not been fully implemented yet.

[00:15:36] Totally yeah. That like the like neoliberals and even conservative folks. In our communities, they’re gonna be able to point to those things and be like, look, it doesn’t work. 

[00:15:44] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah. Because you gave them like one staffer, 

[00:15:47] Cayden Mak: Even though traditional policing hasn’t been working for years.

[00:15:50] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah. 

[00:15:51] Cayden Mak: I also am thinking about, what happened in 2020 being also the confluence of a lot of factors, including, as you say, like the work that BYP 100 Dream defenders other organizations had been building for many years. Leading up to that punctuated moment. And I think that there’s an important lesson to draw there as well, about 2020 that like the manifestation didn’t come from nowhere.

[00:16:13] That it was, I think that there is a narrative, like a more like a non-movement focused narrative of 2020 that’s like suddenly all these people cared about this thing. But can you talk a little bit to some of the hard work of organizing that really led up to that moment and how you think movements and movement organizations were able to prepare for.

[00:16:36] The eruption of these, like mass protests. 

[00:16:38] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think about, it’s been interesting to be asked to reflect on five years since 2020. ’cause I really see 2020 as like an inflection point in a 15 year, like a 10 or 15 year arc of organizing. Totally. That that really started in 20 12, 20 13 around the time of the murder on Trayvon of Trayvon Martin, which is when Black Youth Project 100, which I was a co-founder of, a co-founder of, at a, the young age of 19.

[00:17:07] And then the dream defenders that, I’ve also supported and we work closely with over the years. And at that time like. Starting an organization that was like four black young adults felt like an intervention in and of itself. And, even I remember talking about abolition at the founding gathering of BYP 100, and it like wasn’t something most people had heard of.

[00:17:31] And that’s probably not like the vibe in a like, black activist organizer, that’s something that people are familiar with if they’re in, movement at this point. I, yeah, we. Spent the, like seven, eight years before that building, or black organizations running campaigns around policing.

[00:17:53] It was in 2014 under the leadership of Miriam Kaba in Chicago with a formation called We Charge Genocide. That a group of myself and other young people, we we went to the United Nations and took a report about policing of youth of color in Chicago and did all of this stuff that was a part of, connected to the campaign that won reparations for police torture survivors in Chicago as well.

[00:18:14] But that’s when we started talking. That’s when I first. Learned that 40% of the Chicago Police Department’s budget went to or 40% of the City of Chicago’s budget goes to the Chicago Police Department. We started popularizing it then. The movement for Black Lives started with this invest divest framework.

[00:18:33] BYP 100 had our agenda to build black futures that used this frame of stop the cops and fund black futures. So we were seeding and starting to talk about how do we use this frame of like where money is going to think about more structural solutions around policing. ’cause many of us were clear that the like big reforms that were being offered to us, like body cameras or more training.

[00:18:57] We’re actually doing the thing of shifting the balance of power to take power away from policing which is this institution that has so much power over our lives. And then get at like the structural inequities and the manifestations of structural racism, which are not just the violence of policing that happens in this like violent visualized way, but it’s also that’s happening in communities where like public funding for everything that people actually need has been taken away.

[00:19:26] There were many years of like refining, refining a frame so that when. The societal conditions and the protest moment were like ripe to hear it. That frame. And that took, form and like the slogan, defund the police and invest in our communities, which was like always meant to be a two part thing.

[00:19:46] That we had refined that and could make an intervention in that way by that time. And then I, the other thing I’ll say is so that’s some of the organizing, we’ve been many years of young, black, young adult led organizing that led up to that moment. And seeded a frame that people took and ran with.

[00:20:07] But I think the reality of COVID also put a light for people on what is the role of the state, what is the role of government and why when what we actually need is, like universal healthcare is a public health response. And like we’re seeing the government do like new things that feel new. We’re seeing direct cash assistance.

[00:20:30] We’re seeing like public health programs and like testing around common. A common virus, all throughout our communities we’re like, oh, the government can do this. And yet the like consistent thing that I’m seeing the state do is continue to murder black people and imp with impunity.

[00:20:50] Like maybe that’s not quite right and maybe something different is possible. And I think more people were. Impacted by the bizarro feeling of being in that moment of early COVID that made them open to stepping into a fight for racial justice. That was talking about not just policing, but like the priorities of where public resources are going in our society.

[00:21:13] Cayden Mak: Yeah I think that combination of things is so like interesting and informative that like the, that early, I don’t know, whenever I think back to that summer and just like how. Unsure, like when protests were first starting and like how sure, unsure everybody was. Like how certain people were about like, we need to be in the streets.

[00:21:36] And how unsure also everybody was about like, can we be together safely? Yeah. And honestly, I think one of the most beautiful things to me about that moment was that like, people were like, yeah, we are going to figure out how to be in the streets together safely too. Is this, like this combination of it is possible to do things differently collectively on a variety of different scales too, right?

[00:22:00] That we can take care of each other, the state can take care of us too. Those feel really big, especially in this moment where I feel like the sort of triumph of neoliberalism is not just about, this like massive expenditure on police in the military, but it is also a triumph culturally.

[00:22:19] About like individualism basically. And like the idea that like we have to all take care of our own selves and our own families and screw everybody else. That that alternative vision that you describe breaking through in that moment just felt so truly hopeful in a different way.

[00:22:40] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah. And that hope is important and it drives people and I think there’s an emotional feeling of feeling so hopeful and then wait, but not everything changed that I think has made a lot of people maybe dismiss what has, and like my hope is that we can. Let the information of that feelings and let the lessons still pierce through that.

[00:23:07] Yeah, a lot more was and has been broken open. We took advantage of some of what was on the table. There are some things that are still newly on the table that have like yet to be taken advantage of and it takes a lot of organized power to shift something. And it is so much more than just protest or mutual aid or whatever people were, or political education, whatever people were doing.

[00:23:33] Yeah, we need like media institutions that can compete with these, I don’t know if I can I curse on the pod? I don’t know. Oh yeah, no. These like motherfuckers who try to use, have tried to manipulate our, like movement slogans to tell a sensationalist and fearmongering story about what defund the police means are about safety. We need propaganda and media institutions. We need political power. We need to be able to say, if you won’t meet our demands, we will unseat you. And have the actual organized discipline power and majorities behind us to be able to do that. And then the relationships, the discipline, the coalition to be able to do the collaboration and dance to like land wins.

[00:24:16] And yeah, I think about the work that I’m doing now and I I look around some of the rooms with, I’m running this like Chicago black voter project. We’re knocking on. Black people’s doors and talking about the political moment all throughout the summer. And I like look around a room of people that are like leading canvassing operations in Chicago and it’s like people that came in or at least were stepped further in out of many of these like big protests and movement moments.

[00:24:42] And I just know we only capture I only was able to absorb so many of those people. And that’s true for any other organizer that, you know. And yeah, I think one of the lesson, some of the lessons too are like how in those moments of protests do we like make sure that we’re winning over the biggest percentage of the 26 million people that are in the streets to actually be a part of something.

[00:25:07] ’cause people, when they’re a part of a movement moment like that, you’re being changed. And it takes. Infrastructure strategy, training organizers to bring that into something where you can actually like, move in a way where you’re gonna be able to like wield power. And our ability to do that is only ever like a percentage of the people power that’s like on the table to be organized.

[00:25:30] So yeah, I don’t know. In 2020 we experiment. We did a, we ran a massive defund campaign. We put 3000 people through a massive political education and training program where you’re learning how to talk to your neighbors about, the police budget and you’re meeting with your city council person and all of that.

[00:25:45] But that’s only a small fraction of all the people who were, moved by the moment. And yeah I hope that the left like only gets better and better at taking advantage of what’s possible in terms of the people we can win over in those moments and develop into leaders. 

[00:26:01] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:02] I think the thing that really struck me about your peace and hammer and hope recently was this piece about leadership and how like it is not sufficient to have a breakthrough narrative moment. It is also necessary for there to be meaningful leadership and I think the expectation that a sort of breakthrough moment is going to be the thing that produces the results that we want is both it is, I think, how do I want to say this?

[00:26:31] It’s like both a necessary kind of like hope moment right? That you’re describing that’s it opens the door and also there’s a need to like harness that excitement, that energy, while also explaining to people how power works. Like it’s an opportunity to suddenly get in people’s ears about.

[00:26:53] Our power analysis. And like our sense of the landscape, because I think in a moment where you have millions of people in the street like that, it does feel like everyone’s with us and all the like weird corporate stuff that was happening where it was like suddenly everybody is like making these investments or whatever, made it seem like there was this consensus, which like in retrospect it’s like of course there wasn’t.

[00:27:14] Of course. Like our opposition was as we were in the streets, as we were doing these things scheming against us. And I don’t know, I think that there’s a way in which I think in retrospect about how it’s like you don’t wanna stand in the way of people’s excitement.

[00:27:32] At the same time, I think one of the offerings that you really bring to the table as an organizer and as a commentator is about. That aspect of helping people understand what the balance of forces actually is and what it takes to win these things. ’cause it is a long-term fight. And there are a lot of forces array against us.

[00:27:52] Yeah. I’m wondering too, in this moment where Trump’s back in the White House we are also in a mass movement moment that like by I recently, somebody shared with me a graph that showed that there’s something like three times the number of mobilizations happening right now than there were in 2017, which is quite striking.

[00:28:14] Yeah. ’cause I feel like 2017 was also a moment where it just felt like people were ready to throw down. People were showing up, up at airports to stop the Muslim ban. Like it was just like there was so much going on. But we are in a moment now where we’re seeing three times the amount, and also in a way that seems to be surprisingly sustained.

[00:28:31] Despite the fact that there’s not a ton of like centralized coordination. What do you think is the opportunity for our movements in this moment, and who do you see if anyone filling the leadership roles necessary to guide this moment towards building greater power? 

[00:28:49] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really, those are really interesting pieces of data that I’ve seen.

[00:28:55] Similar things. I think I’ve also seen that there’s just like a much greater geographic diversity, like protests in rural towns or there hasn’t been protest activity in however long. And just, just across the spectrum we’re seeing that it’s not just big cities, which is great.

[00:29:14] Is great and important and needed. And yeah, I think that the opportunity that exists. I think there is like a big tent of people that think what’s going on is wrong, that can be won over to something radically different. And I think there’s an opportunity there that will be like culturally a challenge for the left to fully hold.

[00:29:45] And it’s a very segregated country built on racism. Like it’s tough to have a whole bunch of people who’ve been really effectively taught to hate each other in, a working class coalition. And it’s by being taught to hate each other that we have been kept apart and because it’s strategic to make all the people that could be in the strategic coalition to undercut the billionaire class, hate each other, or even hate each other. Or not get each other or be so segregated that there is like a cultural divide or whatever. So that is like one thing that I’ll say yeah, lots of Trump supporters are gonna be materially economically hurt by his policies.

[00:30:31] Whether that makes them defect from his agenda or not is a totally different question. People’s political leanings is about their interpretation of reality. It’s not like we have some like political scientists inside of us with a 

[00:30:46] Cayden Mak: only, 

[00:30:47] Asha Ransby-Sporn: They’re subjective. They’re subjective too. But that was, yeah. And even not just talking about like maybe the most difficult examples, there’s just lots of people who are gonna be impacted. If we think about Medicaid, one in three black people in this country rely on some form of Medicaid funding for healthcare. He’s like the, he’s talking about cuts that mean like rural ho hospitals in rural areas getting shut down.

[00:31:14] He’s talking about, kids not being able to go to the doctor. The cuts to food assistance programs, like we’re talking about families not being able to eat. And those are people that the left should be organizing. And organizing into a alternative vision for, what government can and should do.

[00:31:35] Now, the project of actually being truthful and trustworthy. People who can say that we are gonna be able to build enough power and then be like effective enough at transforming how government works to deliver it is a massive challenge. But yeah, I think that we need to be thinking about building powerful big tent coalitions built on, a radical economic agenda that talks about race, that talks about gender and that talks about a multiplicity of needs and really polarizing against the billionaire class and keeping that at the center of all of our messaging.

[00:32:15] I think that the focus on Trump is important. I think the focus on corporations is important. And yeah, just making clear that this is about tax cuts for billionaires. That are gonna leave families hungry. Yeah. And which side of that do you wanna be on and.

[00:32:33] We actually do want most people to be on the right side of that. We don’t like, I think it is a moment to say, Hey, a left agenda is the thing that can win. Like Zoran. Momani, free buses, free childcare, publicly funded, affordable housing and food systems for everybody. That’s a bold enough agenda that can compete with whatever lies these other people are spewing because right now a story.

[00:33:01] Like whatever the status quo of the Democratic party wants to sell, which is like some lukewarm version of protecting American normalcy. That’s not cutting it, that can’t compete with anything politically. We need something bold and different and we need leadership from the left. That’s willing to take on the challenge of actually figuring out how can we deliver that and how can we deliver majorities behind that and not just be like gotcha people that, that would rather be small and pure than effective and powerful enough to deliver anything.

[00:33:33] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I’m also curious in digging in a little bit on this question of the idea that we have a cultural challenge also as part of our organizing. Like how would you characterize that cultural challenge? And I think that like you implied that a little bit about the like staying small and pure and this sort of like story of the righteous feud that like, honestly like a lot of us certainly have felt that way.

[00:33:55] Yeah. And have had to like. Separate ourselves from that and be like, no, like we’re not, it’s not that we’re not right, but we’re not special in the sense that like we are actually the majority.

[00:34:07] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah. I think this just comes back to the question of power and how part of it is like most of us have had so few experiences having any, or being close enough to power to have a super good understanding of how it works.

[00:34:23] Or we’ve been taught like magical realism versions of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks sat down on a bus one day and then like we had desegregation. Like no, people were knocking on thousands of people’s doors. They were en engaged in mass organizing. Both like civil disobedience protest, both like.

[00:34:45] Doing that work when it was extremely dangerous to life-threatening work. And being willing enough to say we actually do need political power and we do need to be able to elect the people who represent us if we’re gonna get the, boots of racist software next. So yeah, I think we’ve been taught some like magical stories about how change has happened in the past.

[00:35:08] We’ve been distant from being able to see how power actually works. So that’s one on one hand, like too few. Experiences being able to actually understand how power works to have a great culture of understanding how we might wield it or build enough to change things. And then two, I think then I think there’s a lot of people who come into movement and it’s really not rooted in a belief that things can change.

[00:35:35] And that’s, that’s true about movement, but like the data, the data also says, I’ve been specifically focused on black adults attitudes in black voter attitudes. But I think some of these things are more universal too. 83% of black adults in the US want our economic system to be overhauled.

[00:35:54] We’re like more than 50% pro socialism, but it’s like. Tiny percentage of people that believe those changes are ever gonna occur. And, that to me is the role of organizing and movement is that we’ve gotta be winning people over, not just to agree with us, but to believe that we can make a change and then be willing to be a part of the activities, the organization, the power building work that can get us closer.

[00:36:20] And I think too often yeah, people agree with us. Yes. Yeah. If you’re in movement or if you’re an activist and it’s just rooted in wanting things to be different, but not believing that they can be, or being willing to do things that might get us closer. And take the risk of working with somebody who’s problematic.

[00:36:41] Like I would rather take the risk of dealing with people who have a ways to go and like. Have fought my fricking hardest to change things in the world that we live in than, to have just talked about it or just wanted it to be different. And so I don’t, I, maybe I’m speaking a little excessively critically, I’m not trying to be hard on people, but I think that’s like a gr a useful frame of your politics is not what you say.

[00:37:12] It’s not what you read. It’s not who you associate yourself with. It’s about what you do. And if what you’re doing is politics is like dealing in power, right? So what we do should be building power toward the like. Socialist, anti-racist, everybody, jobs guarantee, free childcare, free food, housing for all a universal healthcare future that we wanna live in.

[00:37:40] And that requires us to do things like bring people in who don’t agree with us, or who maybe are a little problematic and need to be won over to some stuff. It requires that we pick our battles sometimes around. Which things are we gonna try to convince people of first and which things are we gonna let go for now?

[00:37:58] And it also be means being willing to try to take over the systems that exist and manage public resources and being honest about what’s gonna be effective and not getting us there while not compromising what the kind of like end goal and vision is. Even if it’s far away. 

[00:38:18] Cayden Mak: It also strikes me that like this thing about like, how do we get there and what is the road is a question of imagination.

[00:38:25] It’s just not a question of imagining the future that we want to build. It’s a question of imagining that we have the power to build it. That that is actually where our imagination is often divisioned.

[00:38:35] And there’s work to be done there in terms of telling a credible story of what it might be like to govern or what it is like to govern in the places where we are. Yeah. That, that’s like something that, I don’t know I think a lot about also as like a movement media maker that like what is 

[00:38:50] the thing that we’re up against is a lot of the folks who agree with us being pre influenced to think that government doesn’t do anything.

[00:38:57] Because what has it done for us lately? There’s a real question there. Yeah. Totally. And I think a lot about this too with regards to the sort of like national narrative about Chicago and like how aggressively stacked against the Johnson administration.

[00:39:14] A lot of the national press has already been like even before he took office. That in a lot of ways it feels like those narratives are designed to repress an imagination about what we could do together and what it would mean to govern. Yeah. So I’m and especially with Zoran MA’s win in on Tuesday’s primary.

[00:39:33] I’ve been thinking a lot about, I went, actually went back on Wednesday to your piece from last month. And in these times, talking to a lot of folks organizing in Chicago about how things have changed over the last two years in Chicago and like what it, what the balance of power looks like now and what.

[00:39:53] You all were able to do with that balance of power? Yeah, I just think it, we don’t have a strong grasp about what it truly takes to govern. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about like how you’ve seen that shift take place and like what you have yet to do in Chicago to build that kind of governing power.

[00:40:11] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I think there’s some really important, useful things to say here that are relevant to everyone. And I think just to start, I think putting the Chicago Left political project or Chicago movement in a tiny bit more context, that’s yes, we won a union backed mayor that came out of the Chicago Teachers Union and out of United Working Families.

[00:40:39] That includes a number of other forces for mayor two years ago. But that happened in the context of. A militant labor movement that includes the Chicago Teachers Union, that includes SEIU Healthcare which has a super interesting, organizing history of coming out of a union built by Illinois acorn.

[00:41:01] And others that includes the, movement that I was a part of with BYP 100 that protested police killings and really in, struggle and partnership drew that comparison between the closure of schools, the closure of mental health c clinics, and yet this reality of over-policing in black communities and a convergence of other movements.

[00:41:24] So those are, that’s like the movement context. And like we came up against the limit of what in a city. With massive movement activity with militant labor unions willing to go on strike with serious organi. It’s also the birthplace of alinsky style org. We got 1,000,001 community groups right to do good organizing.

[00:41:47] And there is a point at which and this really became clear under Rah Emanuel, like we need to. Be able to show that we have power politically. And that led to a number of interventions. And notably in 2019 we there a city elected a number of social, a handful of socialists to our 50 person city council.

[00:42:10] They’re still a small minority, but like my Alder woman Jeanette Taylor, she was a Kenwood mom who got involved in her local community organization and then. Went on hunger strike to get one of the schools that rah Emanuel shut down in that neighborhood, reopened. And then ultimately ran for office.

[00:42:30] Ana Rodriguez Sanchez, who’s a, badass Puerto Rican socialist who has really been a partner in leading the charge on us winning treatment, not trauma, winning that non-police mental health crisis response. So those two and a handful of others were elected in 2019. And then the wins in 2023 included electing the mayor Brandon Johnson, but also 19 progressives to our city council, which is a lot.

[00:42:55] But in a 50 person city council, it’s not a majority. Still 

[00:42:58] Cayden Mak: not a majority. Yeah. 

[00:42:59] Asha Ransby-Sporn: It’s a little ways to 26 votes. And then we have an elected school board, and I’ve been a part of helping elect community leaders to that. And there is this like bigger context that I think is important.

[00:43:10] And yeah, there has, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of, I’ll just say directly like a lot of Brandon Johnson critique and a lot of reduction of that political project to just Brandon Johnson and just his actions. And I think that’s a mistake in terms of the lessons that we draw for two reasons.

[00:43:33] One, because the political project, as I’ve described, is so much bigger than one person’s leadership, and it’s so much bigger than just winning executive office. And the power structures that exist. Like this doesn’t change the relations of power between the finance sector and the powerful real estate industry and a public sector union.

[00:43:56] Like those forces still have the economic power that they have and are still in struggle. And now that is shifted in some way. The same forces that were backing up rah emanuel’s political decisions to privatize massive elements of the public sector for their own profit and gain at the expense of black communities are then the same forces that are spending tons and tons of money to make you think that everybody hates the Brandon Johnson agenda.

[00:44:30] And so like when you think about it in that way you can have a clearer picture of what’s going on. And yeah, so those forces are at play. I wrote a, I read a little bit about the opposition that we faced from like the real estate industry, from the finance sector and others in the, in these times piece for anyone that’s interested.

[00:44:49] And then you have the reality of the difficulty of inheriting government or stepping into government with a gutted public sector and an unequal place. You’re responsible for this massive police department. You don’t have enough people working for the departments you might wanna grow. Yeah.

[00:45:10] And government is like bureaucratic and slow and ineffective in some ways that certainly need to be reformed. And those are things that, there are just constraints on how much you can change and. Yeah, that’s a challenging situation to be in, to say I wanna promise these things and I wanna deliver them.

[00:45:31] And the actual work of getting your hands dirty to say, alright, this is what is, and we’re gonna take it from here. To go from there is harder than imagining how you would like it to be. Especially when you have attacks from all those local forces that I mentioned. Especially when you have, like Texas Governor Abbott saying that I’m gonna use pe the li like the lives of newly arrived migrants as political ponds to bust them to blue cities to, make the life harder of a progressive executive.

[00:46:03] And then there’s only fucked up decisions that you can make in that, in the context when you have tens of thousands of people arriving in your city with. Who need access, who need immediate access to healthcare, who might have just the clothes on their body who’ve gone through who knows what trauma.

[00:46:24] There’s absolutely no adequate way to receive that challenge. And that is just one of many. Yeah. And so that’s real. Yeah. And that’s not to say the takeaway I want people to have from that is not to say oh, then we shouldn’t like, put our money in behind politicians. It’s no. It’s to say we need so much more power and we need so many more leftists taking over government and taking, which is taking responsibility for how public resources that come from all that belong to all of us get used to operate our society. And right now, if you think it’s fucked, if you think all politicians are fucked up. That means like our pa that’s ’cause our power is so little of it. That means the people that you agree with don’t have the power to shape how society is. And so I have appreciated and I’ve never worked in government.

[00:47:16] So the question of actually how do you govern is like one that yeah, I’ve seen in a closer way than many people from being a part of political projects that have elected community members, elected organizers, elected leftists to office. But you know how you actually get in there and done it.

[00:47:35] I haven’t done that either. And, but I do know that it’s hard and complex and seeing it has exposed a whole new set of contradictions and realities about how power works. And part of the reason why I think it’s so important for movements to be engaged in elections, to be engaged in politics and why it has been important for me too, is because it’s not to say oh, just there’s a limit of what we can do here and therefore we turn away.

[00:48:03] It’s a mirror to say, no, this is an accurate reflection of how little power we have. And it’s a window into how might we better understand how we need to build power, how we need to wield it and how it works so that we can actually take steps to deliver and come closer to the world we wanna see. And as like hard and imperfect as it has been, there have been massive things.

[00:48:28] I have seen that. Don’t change the overall society in as big of ways as I would like, but do really radically matter and change people’s lives. We’ve got thousands more youth jobs. There’s like mental health clinics that were open before that, that weren’t, we won like big investment in affordable childcare in the city.

[00:48:51] We abolished the sub minimum wage for tipped workers. And those are things, and that’s just at the city level, similar like inside, outside coalition that included electing organizers to office. That meant that we ended money bail in this state of Illinois. And so it’s not surprising that we face the backlash that we have, and I think it’s important for movement folks on the left to be clear that what we have faced is enormous backlash.

[00:49:18] Is the real estate industry. Billionaires who are Zionists and the finance sector and more in the third largest city in the country, banding together and using all the tricks that they’ve got and they’ve had more experience in politics than we have to undercut our ability to tax the rich, undercut our ability to deliver affordable housing, to divide our communities against each other.

[00:49:50] And, there’s a lot of lessons about how we’re vulnerable to those attacks, about how we might combat them. And, I don’t know, send some love to Chicago. We’re like inside of the hard contradictions of how you Yeah. How you how we change things. And I think it’s important that we share and learn from those lessons.

[00:50:09] Cayden Mak: I’m also struck too by the story that you’re telling and the analysis that you have is also about what happens when we are willing to struggle together. 

[00:50:18] That it’s not a thing that is we solve this through running a candidate, having that candidate win, but also that like our movements need to be willing to both push those candidates once they’re in office towards the policies that we want them to pass.

[00:50:32] Because we know that we know that our opposition is doing that right. By giving them money and like giving them presence and like sidling up to them and making them feel real cool, but also being willing to hang with each other and be like. How do we make sure that this decision, that this person like that, that it’s possible for this person to make this political decision.

[00:50:53] That feels like a big aspect of it. And talking about the city council, not just Brandon Johnson, like opening that vista on city politics one, I’m like, it strikes me that at the top of the show is talking about unitary executive theory and how like the far right has been pushing that since the seventies, right?

[00:51:14] That that is like the way they want us to think about politics. 

[00:51:17] But that there’s so much more at work that makes it possible for somebody with a vision, for a movement, with a vision to be doing that work.

[00:51:24] Yeah. And it I’m curious if there are like stories of that from especially the past couple years in Chicago that you wanna lift up about, like movement accompanying electeds to pass those policies.

[00:51:35] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. I think you mentioned the city council, right? Yeah, we don’t just elect people and then they magically like wave wand and deliver their whole agenda. And we still have to organize we, and we have to organize in the same conditions that they have to govern in.

[00:51:50] And if we talk about 19 progressives in a 50 person city council, if if we wanna pass a, progressive policy, we have to be able to then pressure. Enough people to help the mayor get to 26 votes on ev any given issue. And we have to create the conditions in which our demands and policies are like popular in a majoritarian way.

[00:52:14] And sometimes that mean, that means like organizing public pressure protests, lobbying elected officials at varying levels of government. Sometimes it also means convincing and working with like bureaucrats and CI or city staffers who will have to implement certain policies. Like those are all of the things that, that go into creating the conditions to make something possible.

[00:52:37] And those are the types of activities on something like, going after the, like police vacancies that I talked about. That’s not necessarily message-wise and an easy thing to do, if. If Brandon Johnson says yes to that, he will take some hits for it. And so what are we doing to make it so he can do that?

[00:52:56] And then still have the like, political capital that he needs to do the next thing. And how are we convincing enough people in the city council so when he introduces it if that’s how it goes, that it will pass, and yeah, that’s just like one example. And that we’re doing the, like the door knocking and the canvassing and the delivering voters to say yeah, if you do these things, it’s gonna be the things that, people actually want.

[00:53:22] Cayden Mak: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that and sorry. Yeah, go for it. No, go for it. 

[00:53:27] Asha Ransby-Sporn: And then on the flip side, like we don’t just have to be we can’t just be focused on, I think the other thing I like about politics and elections is like. A lot of us are trained to organize, like you cut an issue and then you narrowly focus on this one solution to this massive societal problem.

[00:53:44] And I think the thing about working for candidates is like you get to talk about the bigger vision that has a mo multiplicity of things that we wanna deliver. And everything is all in con conversation with one another when you know, you’re in that context of politics. So I, I like and find that important.

[00:54:04] And I think it’s important that as leftists, we don’t, I think in Chicago we went in and it was like, these are the community organizing campaigns that people have been working on forever. And they were designed in context. When we were trying to find places to get concessions from people that were structurally moving the city in a different direction than we wanted.

[00:54:25] And that is what community organizing is built for us to do. It’s like totally, how do you narrowly when you are not the people who are driving the direction of things, get some concessions from decision makers. You have no power over who they aren’t. And so if we wanna graduate from that a little bit, but if you stay in that lane, you only ever shrink what’s on the table if you only ever stay.

[00:54:46] And so if we wanna think a little bigger I do think we have to think about play playing on a, like diversity of issues. We have to think about making moves when things come up, when new opportunities arise to win and deliver things. Be flexible enough to take advantage of them even if they weren’t the thing that we like.

[00:55:08] Democratically won our whole membership. And I believe in member democracy and organizations and all that stuff, but we have to be nimble and willing to move on a variety of issues. And one example is in Chicago, there’s been this whole debate around a youth curfew.

[00:55:22] ’cause there are these like, I don’t know, teen trends, teen, lots of young people, they get together, they go downtown, whatever. And the older people in the like rich downtown wards that have a lot of tourist activity don’t like when a bunch of black teenagers from the south and west sides are like hanging out in Millennium Park.

[00:55:41] And now there have been instances of violence at, some of these as there are in neighborhoods across the city all the time. And so my point is not to dismiss. The reality and problem of community violence it’s something that, I have been impacted by. It concerns me too.

[00:55:57] And putting, implementing a curfew on young people, which is like literally just a political way to empower police to do something they already actually have the power to do. 

[00:56:08] And it would be like a snap curfew so they could implement it at any time with 30 minutes notice and then send police out.

[00:56:15] It’s like what kind of messages that tell young people about what they’re worth. What they deserve? Yeah. How they should be dealt with. If the problem is violence, like why are young people not okay that they’re fighting or bringing a gun to a hangout? Like, why, and how do we actually get at the root of that?

[00:56:31] Sorry, I’m going off on the curfews because it makes me so mad. It’s incredible. 

[00:56:35] Cayden Mak: And also like giving people 30 minutes notice, it’s this is a joke y’all nobody can comply with. It’s a joke. It’s a 

[00:56:40] Asha Ransby-Sporn: trap. It’s in, it’s trapping young people so that you can police them and in what way is that gonna make someone supporting the development of young people?

[00:56:51] I don’t know. But, so this is a debate in city council. It passed. The mayor is gonna, the mayor vetoed it, which is like the first time a Chicago mayor has used their veto power in 20 years. And then who, but the billionaire funded charter school industry Pac that spent tons of money against him in the mayoral race that spent tons of money against the like pro-public education community members that ran for our school board.

[00:57:19] They’re sending out text messages to voters in every single ward where a progressive voted against the youth curfew like Brandon Johnson and his progressive friends and city council are making you less safe. That’s the type of thing that’s creating the conditions for how people are feeling politically in Chicago.

[00:57:36] And I’m like, they shouldn’t be the only ones. Interpreting for people what every single thing means. Like our opposition aren’t narrowly thinking about any and those forces, it’s the charter school industry. They don’t, or it’s the the real estate. They might not even care about the specific issue at hand, but they’re taking advantage of a political opportunity to win people over to their side.

[00:58:02] And they’re doing that for nefarious reasons. But there is something to learn from. How do we think about taking responsibility for interpreting what’s in the news for people? And in terms of what it means for our lived reality and what it means for who is fighting for us and not. 

[00:58:19] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. No, that seems quite right.

[00:58:21] And like the opportunity to make a world that it increasingly makes very little sense, makes sense to people is like actually like huge, I think. That is also the opportunity of having our folks elected because they have a greater platform to make sense of those things to people. 

[00:58:44] Asha Ransby-Sporn: Totally. 

[00:58:46] Cayden Mak: This has been great and it is always a delight to hear from you.

[00:58:48] I don’t know, I’m, I seriously do send some love to Chicago ’cause like y’all are fighting the good fight out there. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m also excited to be in Chicago next weekend for socialism, awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else you wanna leave our listeners with anything we didn’t get to?

[00:59:06] Asha Ransby-Sporn: I just, I think that the, what the Trump administration and the billionaire are doing in this moment are enormous. I it’s horrible and it’s like an enormous ID in my opinion, ideological and organizing opportunity to win people over to a left. Socialist agenda. Like they’re visualizing what does government do?

[00:59:34] What does public resourcing do? And creating space, frankly, for a conversation of how can those things be different and better. And I just think yeah, we should step into this moment in a way that is thinking about it as a generational opportunity. Opportunity, like feels fucked up ’cause it’s fucked up.

[00:59:52] But really take responsibility for winning people over to a left economic agenda. That includes an analysis of race and all these other things and not that, not let that get lost in how mad we are at the personalities. And that’s what I am wanna be a part of and I’m focused on and think that we should all should be.

[01:00:14] Cayden Mak: Yeah. No, that’s what I wanna be a part of too. Let’s go. Yeah. My thanks again to Asha Ransby-Sporn for joining me today. You can find other ways to connect with ASHA’s work in the show notes. We’ll link to the articles that we discussed as well, so you can read them. They are great. This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for Radical Insights.

[01:00:34] I’m Cayden Mak, and our producer is Josh Stro Kimie. David designed our cover art and Logan Gross is our intern. If you have something to say, please do drop me a line. You can send me an email that will consider running on an upcoming mailbag episode at Con [email protected]. I hope this helps.