In between playing defense and scheming to win back Seattle’s voters over the next few election cycles, we should carve out some time for self-reflection. It’s tempting to think of the present moment as a backlash against progress, a temporary deviation in the arc of the moral universe—or perhaps, for the pessimist, to doubt the notion of progress altogether. But was this reaction really inevitable? by Katie Wilson It’s a trying time for Seattle’s left. The city’s new council members are rounding the curve on their first year in office, and I don’t know about you, but I’m wishing it was time to pass the baton. It’s depressing enough that City Hall is no longer a laboratory for progressive policy innovation. But it’s the Bad Idea Whac-A-Mole that’s truly exhausting: rolling back minimum wages and renter protections; defunding community-driven development; reinstating so-called SOAP and SODA zones; turning our big business tax into a slush fund. The left is having to fight like hell just to defend the achievements of the past decade. In between playing defense and scheming to win back Seattle’s voters over the next few election cycles, we should carve out some time for self-reflection. It’s tempting to think of the present moment as a backlash against progress, a temporary deviation in the arc of the moral universe—or perhaps, for the pessimist, to doubt the notion of progress altogether. But was this reaction really inevitable? Can we draw any lessons from it? What should the left do differently in the future to regain influence and maintain it? Critics of progressive-left political culture, as it’s developed over the past dozen or so years, often emphasize its supposed impotence: its penchant for loudness on social media, insistence on ideological purity, and zeal for “canceling” individuals instead of changing systems. Its adherents operate mainly in the symbolic realm and can’t break out of their echo chamber long enough to affect the real world. Whatever the merits of this kind of critique, it doesn’t fully capture what’s happened in Seattle. Precisely what characterizes our city (and just a handful of others) is that the progressive left has been effective, relatively speaking, at winning real things. But our success is not due to some special organizing prowess or because we’ve avoided the pitfalls of the wider culture. It has more to do with our city’s demographic peculiarities. Over the past several decades, progressive politics have come to correlate ever more strongly with educational attainment, while “dealigning” from markers of working class status. The gradual replacement of old Seattle’s blue collar workforce, displaced by rising housing costs and the dwindling of maritime and industrial jobs, with the younger, more affluent tech worker set hasn’t made Seattle any less blue; perhaps the opposite. Add to that some political self-selection among new arrivals, and the average normie non-activist voter just happens to be a flaming lib. On top of all that, union density in Washington state is among the highest in the country, and when Seattle’s labor unions decide to throw their weight around in local elections, left-leaning candidates tend to get a leg up. With these advantages, Seattle’s left hasn’t had to be extraordinarily smart or strategic to win a modicum of political power. And a movement with power faces different problems than a movement in opposition. From the outside, it’s easy to lambaste the status quo and its obvious failings. But actually governing is more complicated. It means passing policies, implementing them, defending their results. It also means being vulnerable to blame for whatever’s going wrong in the city, whether or not it’s your fault or within your power to fix. Of course, even at its strongest, Seattle’s progressive left held only partial power—through a city council majority that was often undermined by more centrist mayors. In such circumstances, governing also means having to decide when to remain oppositional, and when to compromise and win what you can. Either way, you have to tell a good story, explaining what you’ve done and why you couldn’t do more, to avoid being seen as ineffective. All this means that the progressive predisposition of Seattle’s electorate is a trap, as well as an advantage. If it were harder to get lefties into office, that might force us to be more strategic about what they should do when they get there—and to build the kind of movement that can support them when the going gets rough. Winning power is one thing, holding it is another. Over the last two election cycles, the left lost it. The backlash began in 2021 with the victories of Mayor Bruce Harrell, Councilmember Sara Nelson, and City Attorney Ann Davison. Last fall finished the job, ushering in the most conservative city council Seattle has seen in a long time. In my new column for The Stranger, I plan to look both backward and forward. I’ll dig through the past ten-plus years in search of lessons that can help Seattle’s left into the future. I write as someone who’s been involved in many—though by no means all—of the progressive policy battles of this period, primarily through my work with the Transit Riders Union. But I’m speaking for myself, not for any organization, and I don’t expect that all my opinions will be popular. There is too much groupthink on the left; so let’s disagree! The backlash elections of 2021 and 2023 centered most obviously around the issues of homelessness, policing, and public safety. I will start the journey there, looking critically at the question of what our goals should be and how we frame and explain these goals. These are themes we share with other progressive big cities, but our politics have a unique side, too. No look back at the past decade of Seattle’s left can bypass an assessment of Kshama Sawant’s tenure on the council, and the influence of her former organization, Socialist Alternative. And these discussions will raise larger questions about progressive-left organizing. Who is “the left,” anyway, and does “progressive” mean anything anymore, if it ever did? Whom are we trying to organize and how? Toward what ends? The left is not a monolith. In practice, Seattle’s left today is an uneasy alliance of labor unions, community organizations from the long-established to the ad-hoc, issue-based advocacy groups, service-focused nonprofits, parties and other overtly political formations, and freelance activists, coalescing imperfectly and temporarily around specific campaigns or policy goals. Between and also within these entities there exists a multiplicity of worldviews, theories of social change, and visions of a future, better social order. When someone on the left (like me) talks about what “we” should be doing, only in the most abstract sense are they speaking to and about this whole constellation of actors. But throughout these institutions and broader left milieu there are individuals who, to a greater or lesser extent, can choose to do things differently, or to do something new. There is a gleam of light on the horizon. In next Tuesday’s special election for citywide council position 8, the left looks poised to claw back a seat. Next year will bring a larger opportunity, with the mayor and city attorney up for re-election as well as the two citywide council positions. But progressives won’t have a chance at a reliable governing majority until 2027. So let’s make sure that when we win that majority, we’re prepared to hold onto it. It’s easy to bemoan the hypocrisy of Seattle liberals, the reactionary and ungenerous impulses too often hiding behind those “in this house we believe” yard signs. I’ve done that myself. But if the left can’t maintain the edge in a city where your average voter is at pains to prove his progressive bona fides, what chance do we have at power anywhere?