The revolution has been podcasted, and a lot of alders don’t like what they’re hearing.
Mayor Brandon Johnson just appointed one of his left-wing buddies to serve as his liaison to the city council, putting her in charge of selling his budget to the alders at a time when the city has a $222 million deficit. Before she joined the Johnson administration last spring, Kennedy Bartley was executive director of United Working Families, the political arm of the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson’s former employer and current political patron.
After Bartley was appointed, reporters dug up a 2021 podcast on which she called police “f—ing pigs” and “slave catchers.” Two days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, she wrote this on X: “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free. Amen!”
But that’s too much leftism for some alders to bear. One suggested she resign and have all her work items placed in a box on the sidewalk outside City Hall. The Council’s only Jewish alderperson called her comments anti-semitic.
“I don’t want someone so left-wing that we can’t work together to move things forward for our community,”Alderperson David Moore said of Bartley.
There’s a Red Scare at City Hall. Bartley’s ascent is a sign of Johnson’s deep commitment to his deeply progressive agenda — for some alders, an agenda that’s too progressive
Johnson, the most left-wing mayor in the city’s history, has taken his administration as far left as it can possibly go. And now, a City Council that is starting to see him as Chicago’s Fidel Castro is trying to force him back toward the center. For months, Johnson tried to install socialist firebrand Alderperson Byron Sigcho-Lopez as chair of the powerful Zoning Committee. But he couldn’t corral the votes, and was forced to offer the position to Alderperson Walter Burnett, a protégé of Jesse White’s organization from the Near West Side.
Just how far left is Johnson? He doesn’t call himself a socialist — he prefers the term “progressive” — but some of his best friends are socialists. Take Alderperson Carlos Ramirez Rosa, who was Johnson’s floor leader until he was forced from that position for trying to block Alderperson Emma Mitts from attending a meeting on Chicago’s sanctuary city status. Some of Johnson’s ideas are socialist, too: He’s promoted city-owned grocery stores in food deserts. It’s an example of the government stepping in because the free market won’t provide fresh fruits and vegetables to a poor neighborhood.
Is Bartley a socialist? She has called herself “anti-capitalist,” and she told In These Times, a socialist magazine based here in Chicago, that she hopes the Johnson administration will build “a system where co-governing with folks who are led by teachers, working-class communities, young people is normalized.” The entire city knew Johnson was a labor organizer — a socialist-adjacent profession — yet 52 percent voted for him over Paul Vallas, who carried the banner of conservatism.
Now, Vallas charges that Johnson’s “agenda is amplified by the Council’s Socialist leaders” and that he “is guided by a far-left ideology he’s blindly embraced.” (Vallas may still be sore that he was such a terrible candidate he lost to a socialist.)
More damning than a sore loser complaining about his former opponent was a Tribune Op-ed from Southwest Side Alderperson Silvana Tabares, who charged that Johnson has “insulated himself with his well-funded extremist allies” and “remains in the echo chamber of slogan-based demands from ‘advocates’ whose suburban upbringing has apparently gifted them the wisdom to know what’s best for Chicago’s Black and brown residents.”
On Wednesday, the same day the Op-ed was published, the City Council voted 33-14 to prohibit Johnson from ending the city’s contract with ShotSpotter — one of his campaign promises. Afterward, Alderperson Raymond Lopez said, “Clearly, the mayor does not have a mandate that allows him to work that far to the extremes. He only won by 4 percent. That should not be lost on anyone.”
Not everyone who voted for Johnson wanted socialism, but everyone who wanted socialism voted for Johnson. Whatever he calls himself, he’s been governing as a socialist. With the failure to appoint Sigcho-Lopez to Zoning, the embarrassment of the Bartley saga, and the ShotSpotter defeat — not to mention the budget hole he has to fill — he may have to shift toward vanilla liberalism, particularly as the City Council pushes back against him.
However, Ramirez Rosa defended Johnson’s mandate to govern from the left.
“Brandon Johnson was elected to lead the city,” he said. “I don’t think the majority of conservative voters and FOP supporters in Silvana Tabares’s district reflects the city. There’s a clear progressive and liberal majority” in Chicago.
To be sure, Bartley didn’t just get her new job as the result of a socialist plot to turn Chicago into Havana on the Lake. She got her job the same way every other political hack inside City Hall has gotten a job for the last hundred years: patronage. United Working Families got out the vote for Johnson. Its cadres of door knockers — what used to be called “precinct captains” during the days of the Machine — were the reason he beat Vallas, despite being outspent 2-1. UWF also tried to help Johnson pass the Bring Chicago Home ordinance, which would have raised taxes on expensive home sales to fund homeless services. (At this, it failed.) United Working Families is Johnson’s Machine, and like any Machine, it expects a place inside the administration.
The fact is, all government is socialism: It takes money from private individuals and uses that money for public purposes. Politics is about deciding how much socialism we want from our government. For some of Mayor Johnson’s opponents, the answer right now is “too much.”