How Socialism Captured the West Coast
New York socialists may eye Albany as their ultimate target, but the real prize is California.
New York’s far Left may think that it is the vanguard of an envisioned American socialist commonwealth, but the real action this fall will be on the West Coast, where socialist candidates have won the mayor’s office in Seattle, seem on track to take control of the Portland City Council, achieved a critical congressional victory in Denver, and, most importantly, could even triumph in the mayor’s race in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city.
The West Coast has long had a radical tradition, dating back to the Wobblies, who shut down Seattle with a general strike in 1919, and Upton Sinclair’s Depression-era End Poverty in California (EPIC) socialist campaign in 1934. Postmaster James Farley remarked two years later: “There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”
In the recent past, West Coast Democrats had generally embraced mild redistribution as well as civil and gay rights but rarely waved the red flag. After all, they represented areas that appeared to be the prime winners in the emerging tech-driven economy. Today, however, Seattle, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, and San Jose suffer some of the nation’s highest office vacancy rates, sometimes higher than 30 percent. Seattle’s downtown is largely populated by “zombie buildings“ deserted by employers, while Portland’s once widely celebrated central core has become ever more dystopian.
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