The New York Times has this fairly lengthy story about Kshama Sawant, who was elected to the Seattle city council last month and who ran as a member of Socialist Alternative. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
Excerpt from that story:
Leftist critiques of capitalism have a long past in the Northwest, historians said, from the Wobblies in lumber camps in the early 20th century, as the Industrial Workers of the World were called, to Seattle’s general strike of 1919 and the anarchist movement that still stirs occasionally now. A socialist was elected mayor of Seattle as recently as 1922.
“She tapped into a growing discontent,” James N. Gregory, a professor of history at the University of Washington, said of Ms. Sawant. “But she also built off a framework of liberalism and economic liberalism that is pretty widely, strongly based in Seattle.”
The spotlight on Ms. Sawant, as one of only a handful of self-avowed socialists to be elected to a city council in a major American city in decades, experts say, could be intense. Her party has supported Ralph Nader for president, but its website also links to the writings of the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. It put up municipal candidates in Boston and Minneapolis this year, though none won. The Socialist Party USA, an older group, regularly fields candidates in state and federal races. Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont calls himself a socialist, though he was elected as an independent.
“If she remains only an activist, she’ll be a one-shot wonder,” said the Rev. Rich Lang, the pastor of University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle and a Sawant supporter. But if she moves too far toward the center, “she’ll be shot down from the left as a compromiser,” he said. “There’s tremendous pressure on her.”