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26/2/2014

Ten Years: A Rambling Meditation

07 March 200407 March 2004

Ten years ago today, along with all the other men of Echo Battery, 2nd Battalion, 11th Marines, I left Camp Pendleton on a deployment to Iraq. In retrospect, ten years seems like an awfully long time. Since then, I’ve left the Marine Corps, moved six times, gained two cats, gotten married, put one cat to sleep, gained two more cats, completed a degree in history, began teaching at a university, lost my dad to cancer, started graduate school, lost my stepdad to a workplace accident, bought a house, made a lifelong dream come true by taking a trip to Russia with my best friend, began a serious effort to write literary poetry, and struggled to stay above water following my wife’s most serious recent bouts (yes, plural) with Crohn’s disease. The last few weeks have been busy. I haven’t had time to reflect about this anniversary in a way that seems at all appropriate or sufficient. That, in itself, is a metaphor for the last decade.

My experience in Iraq remains a fundamental part of how I construct my identity. I try not to be over the top about being an Iraq veteran, or about having served in the Marine Corps. Under normal circumstances, those are not among the first five things I might volunteer about myself to a new acquaintance. But they’re there beneath the surface, and they color everything I come into contact with, whether I’m aware of it or not. My closest friends are all veterans themselves, or work closely with the veteran community in Madison. I chose to study US military history as a graduate student in part because I want to understand my experiences in Iraq in context with other wars. I’m particularly interested in civil-military relations because I want to understand the dynamics of how our society shapes and controls our military, and how it understands (or doesn’t understand) military service. I get very agitated sitting in traffic because I’m still waiting for the VBIED with my name on it. I have trouble running a day full of errands because I wear myself out mentally scanning people and locations for threats. I jump and shout when my wife accidentally appears behind me while I’m in the middle of doing the dishes. I cringe when the F-16s fly over our house. Iraq’s still there. I’ve carried it around for ten years, and I’ll carry it around for however many I have left.

When we left California that Thursday, one of the Marines in Echo didn’t know he had less than a month left. I didn’t know Casper very well. We were on the occasional working party together prior to and during the first month of our deployment, but we didn’t socialize much otherwise. I was attached to Echo for the deployment and still getting to know people when he was killed. In a sense, it’s strange that I’ve spent so much time thinking about Casper in the ten years since. I go to his memorial page and see messages from guys in Echo who knew him much better. There’s a message as recent as a few months ago. Oft-repeated are sentiments like:

“I still think about you. I’ll never forget. Feels like yesterday. I love you. Miss you, bro. I’m sorry.”

I wonder why the death of a guy I didn’t know very well has stuck with me so long. I feel as though I have no claim on his memory, and yet, I remember him. Mostly, because his face has grown fuzzy in my memory over the years, I remember how warm and friendly he was to the new guy on those working parties. And I think about his stolen potential. I think of him whenever I get to do something he never had the chance to do himself. Many of my students are older than Casper ever lived to be. I think about that, too. Casper was twenty when he died. I turned twenty-two on that deployment to Iraq. I hope I have many years and birthdays left. For Casper, it will always be 2004 and twenty.

The night before our deployment began, I wrote on the blog I kept at the time:

I’m not happy to be going there. I know that in my heart as well as I know my own name. But I know that I did give a promise that I cannot break. I’m not going to delude myself by saying that I am fighting for the freedom of my country, or to protect it, or anything of the like. I do know, however, that I am earning my right to speak my mind without fear of reprisal on any wars we get ourselves into in the future. And from what I understand about war now, and what those who have gone before me into war understand, is that war is a terrible thing that is incomprehensible to those who haven’t felt its grasp. I’m not going to make a moral judgment on whether a war is just or not, I am just stating that war is a very catastrophic event to those who fight it, and to those who remain behind after it is over.

My expectation was mostly correct. Speaking my mind about Iraq has only been a problem for me once. Shortly after I returned home a man at a social gathering asked me, “How many towelheads did you kill over there?” A dozen thoughts raced through my mind, but I found myself completely unable to answer, to formulate the perfect response — or any response — capable of expressing my disgust. The helplessness that I felt in that moment is still strong in my memory. How that situation was resolved is not.

What I learned that day is that I never again want to let someone make me feel powerless about my relationship with Iraq, or with war. Casper is powerless to express himself about war because he was killed in Iraq. My old squad leader G. was beaten to death by four men after being thrown out of a birthday party, apparently for talking about some of the things that troubled him about his two tours in Iraq. He was a single dad. Reading into the situation, being a dad made some of the things he encountered and did in Iraq harder to handle. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not claiming to speak for Casper or G. That wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead, I speak because they can’t, and because I can’t stand the thought that others will be made to pay a similar price by American wars in the future.

CSC ScaniaCSC Scania

I have an interview for a job this morning. As I write this it’s 2:23 am; I know I should be in bed, sleeping and letting my mind rest. I also know that isn’t a possibility until I get this post out of my system. Why interview on a day as significant as today? I didn’t choose it — I took the opening I was given. Might I have asked for another day? Perhaps. The people interviewing me seem like nice, understanding folks. Maybe saying, “You know, that’s the ten year anniversary of my deployment to Iraq. Could we try next week?” would have been okay. Then again, maybe it would have made them uncomfortable, or raised questions I don’t feel like answering in an interview. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Is civilian America at that point in 2014? I don’t know. At any rate, it’s not a request I felt comfortable making. Even though I’m open about my Marine Corps service, I’d like a prospective employer to have an opportunity to get to know me a little before Iraq enters the conversation.

Iraq will always be part of me, but only I get to be the one who lets it define me.

Iraq Iraq War Marines
5/12/2013

Nelson Mandela & Joseph de Maistre

Nelson Mandela in prison. Photo by Jürgen Schadeberg.Nelson Mandela in prison. Photo by Jürgen Schadeberg.

Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.
(Every nation gets the government it deserves.)

— Joseph de Maistre

Nelson Mandela’s death has occasioned testimonials of admiration from every society and corner of the globe. These tributes are fitting of a man who lived a life of immense significance, and who repeatedly exercised such mindful statesmanship in moments when lesser leaders would have failed in their duties.

Mandela was a fixture of the news during my childhood. His release after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, his triumph in the 1994 post-apartheid election, and the many efforts to which he dedicated himself as President of South Africa made this political prisoner from the other side of the world a figure of prominence in a living room in a tiny village on the upper Mississippi River. I can’t claim any great depth of knowledge of Mandela’s entire presidency, or of his public life, but the enormity of his achievements resonated all the way to my small corner of the world. I knew who Nelson Mandela was before I ever knew the names of my US Senators, and I even as a child I was particularly attuned to politics.

As my wife and I stood in our kitchen this evening, listening to the BBC report of Mandela’s death, I could see how moved she was by the news. I could feel my mind working through the realization, but I couldn’t feel any emotion. At one point I said, “I suppose the funeral will be next week, maybe on Monday.” Even though it wasn’t the very first thing I said, it still probably seems like such an odd thing to say while the news was still fresh, so I suppose I should explain why that thought was expressed before any emotion.

The first funeral for a head of state I can remember watching was Richard Nixon’s state funeral. Nixon, the man and the politician, has fascinated and confounded and angered me ever since I can remember first learning about Watergate. I can’t precisely remember, but I imagine I first encountered Nixon’s resignation when I began memorizing the Presidents of the United States as a young boy. Somebody gave me a copy of The Buck Stops Here, a book with beautiful illustrations and rhyming couplets about each President. Amazon’s page supplies “Teddy Roosevelt, Twenty-six / Whisper softly, wave big sticks. Buy all the land that’s way out there. Go outdoors in your underwear.” as an example. (You can read the rest of them here. I still remember the last couplet, “And now George Bush is Forty-one. Good luck to him and all to come.” Unfortunately, the luck hasn’t been so good.)

Lyndon Johnson, Thirty-six, more war, more death, more politics.
Here’s Thirty-seven! Nixon, R., California’s tarnished star.
Gerald Ford, as Thirty-eight, turned down the sound on Watergate.
Modest Carter, Thirty-nine, crossed the Mason-Dixon line.
Reagan, Forty, reached his goal, acting out his favorite role.

Because of that sequence, for an embarrassingly long time I thought Nixon, like Ronald Reagan, the leading man I admired as a small boy, was an actor before he became president. But what was Watergate? The only two copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica I had access to — the late-1950s set my step-dad bought from the small rural high school he taught at, and the mid-1960s set at my grandparents’ house — couldn’t offer anything to the inquisitive mind of an eight year old boy. I must have asked an older relative what Watergate was, or found a book about Nixon at the public library. At any rate, the fascination with Nixon was deeply ingrained by the time of his death in 1994.

Nixon died on 22 April 1994, four days after suffering a stroke that put him into a deep coma. He was 81. His funeral was held in California on 27 April, a Wednesday. For some reason, I was home from school and watched Nixon’s funeral on television. I can remember being fascinated by the living former and current Presidents attending the funeral of a man so widely reviled. (This was Ronald Reagan’s last significant public appearance, though Reagan didn’t announce his Alzheimer’s diagnosis until August of 1994.)

Something about that experience stuck with me. I was in Iraq when Ronald Reagan died. At the time, my unit was assigned to provide counter-battery fire to Al-Asad Airbase, but in addition to that mission, we had been tasked with some interior guard duties, including “protecting” the chow hall. I had gotten to know some of the Indian cooks at the chow hall, and was extended the generosity of eating Indian food with them in the empty chow hall around midnight, when my guard shift typically ended. I had already heard of Reagan’s death, and had worked out that his funeral would correspond with the time I was eating mid-rats with the Indian cooks. Sure enough, I watched Reagan’s funeral on the TV in the fluorescent glow of the chow hall, eating delicious hot curry and talking about Reagan with the Indian chow hall supervisor. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. At the time I still admired Reagan and thought of myself as a traditional conservative. I can only wonder what I might have said to my dinner companion, or what he might have thought about this young American Marine and his political views.

Other state funerals followed. I watched Pope John Paul II’s funeral in the Las Pulgas barracks in April 2005, and Gerald Ford’s funeral in my girlfriend’s Chicago apartment in January 2007, just before I moved to Madison to re-start my undergraduate studies. My fascination with state funerals continues. I love history. I love listening to the tributes (sincere and insincere), the recollections, the remembrances. They bring back memories of events of listening to the CBS Evening News as I played with Hot Wheels on the floor of the living room, appearing to my dad like I was playing, but absorbing the stories Dan Rather reported through our tiny black-and-white set. (Years later, my dad told me he finally realized how much attention I paid to the news when I told him that the people inside the Fisher-Price jet I was playing with in my grandparents’ living room were “afraid of the hostages.” My grandmother gave Dad a pretty hard look when she overheard that.)

Richard Nixon’s funeral was on 27 April 1994. That same day, Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa. Though I don’t have a specific memory of hearing about Mandela’s election as I watched coverage of Nixon’s funeral or the news that evening, I must have internalized that date. Somehow, my subconscious was triggered this evening, and I connected Mandela’s death and Nixon’s funeral. It’s pretty safe to say I’ll stay up, or get up, to watch Mandela’s funeral on television.

Getting back to the testimonials that surround the death of figures of great prominence, I’m struck by the sincerity of the statements about people like Mandela. When other prominent people, particularly politicians, die, one can often tell when pro-forma remarks are given to observe the occasion, but which obfuscate the ambivalence or old animosity and disagreements behind a veneer of polite official reflections.

Occasionally, we lose a person of truly tremendous importance, a singular leader, or thinker, or discoverer, or healer. When we lose that kind of person, we’re reminded of how insignificant and, frankly, petty most of our elected leaders are in comparison. We’re given opportunity to reflect on what a leader we truly deserve actually looks like. A person like Martin Luther King, Jr. A person like Andrei Sakharov. A person like Kim Dae-jung. A person like Wangari Maathai. A person like Václav Havel.

A person like Nelson Mandela.

But given our own human inclinations to pettiness, hatred, and violence, perhaps someone like Nelson Mandela is actually a leader we don’t deserve. We live in a world where we too often choose to be led by the cheap arch-divisionists who nourish and capitalize on our sectarian, ideological hate of our neighbors and their dissimilar politics, the too-numerous incompetent creatures of the political establishment, and, perhaps most dispiriting, those who appeal to our better nature, then do secret evils in the dark, trusting that no one will speak or turn against them. We allow our leaders to manipulate our fears and animosities, and to fatten our hopes with hokum, then sell us at market to the highest bidder. We allow our leaders to speak to the worst demons of our nature, and then we listen.

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison. — Mandela

Nelson Mandela rejected the political power of hatred, knowing that hatred incarcerates the heart and shackles the mind. Even as our leaders speak truths about Nelson Mandela’s greatness and disregard the truths of Mandela’s greatness with their actions, we ought to contemplate why we haven’t learned this great man’s lesson.

politics in memoriam
28/11/2013

Thanks for the Memories

My first Thanksgiving in the Marines came shortly after I joined my unit on Camp Pendleton in 2003. I was the new guy in my platoon, and apart from my buddy Stan and one guy from my platoon in boot camp, I didn’t know a soul in the entire regiment. Thankfully, Thomas Prettyman was one of my NCOs. The pastor of Pretty’s church invited us to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t remember much about the meal, or the pastor and his family, other than it took place in a warm, inviting house out in Fallbrook, and that the family was kind and very generous with their invitation to any Marines who would otherwise have spent the holiday eating awful Sodexo food in the chow hall.

I don’t remember where I spent Thanksgiving 2004. I was just back from Iraq, but it seems to me that I would have already completed post-deployment leave. In the last year or so, I’ve become conscious of the fading of memories from different periods of my life, even those of the last decade. (This unnerves me more than I care to think about, as if I’m losing pieces of the life I’m yet living.) It’s entirely possible I did spend that Thanksgiving in the barracks, eating a crappy meal from the chow hall. I just don’t remember.

Thanksgiving 2005 was a delight. My friend, former roommate, and colleague-turned-boss Squibes had returned from his own deployment to Iraq. He and his wife, Kat, invited a couple of us from the platoon to their place out in Vista. I wound up making the gravy at Squibes’ and Kat’s request. We had a fantastic meal, and followed it up with a friendly Mario Kart tournament on their GameCube. As long as this memory lasts, I will think very fondly of our time together that Thursday afternoon.

I was on terminal leave by the time Thanksgiving 2006 rolled around. I might be able to look back at my photos and figure out where I was for the holiday. By then I was dating a pretty Greek girl from Chicago, so I may have spent that Thanksgiving with her family. Or, it’s possible we spent it with my families in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Again, my memory is blank. Again, I worry.

The same is true for Thanksgiving 2007. I have no idea where we spent the holiday without looking at whatever photos we might have taken. 

I married that pretty Greek girl in October 2008. We spent our first Thanksgiving as newlyweds together in our flat near Lake Monona. I made too much food — a turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, an incredible sourdough stuffing, rutabagas, and two pies (pumpkin and pecan) — in our tiny galley kitchen, but it was delicious. The flat was filled with wonderful smells, and we had to crack a couple windows to cut the heat coming from the steam radiators and the kitchen. The few photos we have of that day, of us and our two cats, will support that memory, but I would be devastated if I forgot the first holiday we spent together as a married couple.

We have fallen into a pattern in the years since, though I’m not entirely certain when it began. We spend our Thanksgiving with my in-laws in Chicagoland. It’s a much smaller family gathering than I’m used to — my family is much, much larger than my wife’s — but I love my wife’s mom, and my wife’s aunts (who live with my mother-in-law), and her Cuban grandfather. Because we live far enough away to keep us from seeing one another regularly (and because we’re in very different stages of our lives), I’m still building relationships with my brother-in-law.  But we get along just fine. Same with my wife’s cousins, who call my mother-in-law’s house their home, too, because their mom, suffering from severe MS far too young, had to move before the girls were in high school. Today, both of them are first year graduate students.

The day after Thanksgiving, my wife and I will help my mother-in-law put up garland and lights outside her house, and in the evening we’ll head over to St. Charles for The Annual, a yearly get-together with friends for tacos and board games. I met most of these folks at a Memorial Day cookout in 2006, when I was visiting my wife (then my girlfriend) on leave. Seven years have passed, and these new friends have gradually become old friends. Memories have been made over seven years of Memorial Day cookouts, backyard Oktoberfests, weddings, and (this year) an Evoloterra celebration in our backyard in Madison. Some of these memories have already been lost, forgotten as others compact them into a sediment of a life lived. What remains is the warmth of friendship, and the anticipation of making more memories together.

On Saturday, we’ll return to St. Charles to go to the Electric Parade with our friends Greg and Kelly. My wife and I look up to Greg & Kelly as our example of a marriage well-lived, and we love them as the older brother and sister we never had. We’ve been doing the Electric Parade together for a couple years now, in the indifferent weather of late November northern Illinois. One year it rained during the parade, and we were soaked. One year we had a dusting of snow on the ground, and temperatures appropriate with the season. This year, it looks like we won’t have any snow, and the temperature will be in the forties. Even though I’ve lived outside of Minnesota for over a decade, these odd variations of weather this late in the year are a bit jarring, rubbing against the grain of sedimented, composite memories of Thanksgivings and late Novembers in Minnesota that surely weren’t always dusted with the first snowfalls of encroaching winter. I struggle to remember individual Thanksgivings from my childhood.

What remain are memories of the first time I ate a turkey heart or rutabagas, both at the insistence of my paternal grandmother, to whom I’ll be forever thankful for those flavorful introductions. I remember my mom and stepdad opening their home to friends of the family transplanted far away from their homes, the house warmed by kindness, spirited conversation, activity in the kitchen, and good alcohol. I remember driving from an afternoon meal at my paternal grandparents’ house in Minnesota back to our house across the river in Wisconsin, then walking across the yard to eat again with my stepmom’s family.

Over the years, I’ve lost many of the people central to those now-indistinct memories: my step-grandfather, my paternal grandmother, my cousin Teddy, my dad, and my stepdad. I keep up with only a couple guys from my Marine Corps days, and then see them only once a year or couple of years. Some nights I lie awake, worrying about who I will lose next, who will cease to be a living presence in my life, and who I will gradually lose as my memory continues to fade and my loved ones’ vitality flickers, dimming into a background of light, too soft to provide definition to all but a few specific details. I miss them, and I know more of the people I love will join them in the years to come. It’s an unavoidable part of life, but that doesn’t make it any less distressing or bittersweet.

So, this year I’m thankful for memory, and memories, those made and cherished, those sadly forgotten,  those I hope to yet make, and — because this, too, is a certainty of life — those I have yet to forget.

And I’m thankful to you for reading these ramblings. May you have many more years of making memories. May your memories keep better than mine have.

Happy Thanksgiving. 

memory
10/11/2013

One Final Act of Remembrance

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Monique. Used in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines.Photo courtesy of Flickr user Monique. Used in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines.

On the eve of the last Remembrance Day before the WWI centenary begins, The Guardian has published a fantastic, honest, provocative piece by one of the UK’s dwindling WWII generation:

Still, this year I shall wear the poppy as I have done for many years. I wear it because I am from that last generation who remember a war that encompassed the entire world. I wear the poppy because I can recall when Britain was actually threatened with a real invasion and how its citizens stood at the ready to defend her shores. But most importantly, I wear the poppy to commemorate those of my childhood friends and comrades who did not survive the second world war and those who came home physically and emotionally wounded from horrific battles that no poet or journalist could describe. 

However, I am afraid it will be the last time that I will bear witness to those soldiers, airmen and sailors who are no more, at my local cenotaph. From now on, I will lament their passing in private because my despair is for those who live in this present world. I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.

Come 2014 when the government marks the beginning of the first world war with quotes from Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling and other great jingoists from our past empire, I will declare myself a conscientious objector.

The sentiment is as relevant to American readers as it is to those in the Commonwealth. Do read the whole thing. 

war memory public memory war memorials
6/11/2013

Wisconsin’s Urban Farm Movement

One of the greenhouses of Growing Power, a Milwaukee urban farm run by MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Will Allen. Photo courtesy Flickr user crfsproject. Used in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines.One of the greenhouses of Growing Power, a Milwaukee urban farm run by MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Will Allen. Photo courtesy Flickr user crfsproject. Used in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines.

Encouraging news in this Fast.Co report on the success of urban farming in Milwaukee: 

Through the [Home Gr/own] program, some of Milwaukee’s 2,700 vacant lots and 1,300 foreclosed homes are now being repurposed for local food production, processing, and distribution, rather than mothballed and sold during the next boom.  …  Home Gr/own is pulling together 10 to 20 disparate food and farming related programs in the city such as Growing Power, Walnut Way, and Central Greens. The city-led effort is aimed at transforming multiple problems–unemployment, foreclosures, urban decay–into fertile ground for a new food economy. The city will supply new grower training, small stipends, business development assistance, tools, and water access, and encourage local food producers to sell their harvest directly through farm stands, restaurants, and stores. Foreclosed properties will serve as the new home for some of these endeavors.

I’m happy to see this going on in my state, and I wish the folks who are working to develop urban agriculture in Milwaukee much success.  Will Allen’s Growing Power and Sweet Water Organics could use some more company.

local food urban agriculture Wisconsin
6/11/2013

On Eugene V. Debs’ birthday, no less.

Eugene V. Debs, 1921. Image in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.Eugene V. Debs, 1921. Image in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In Minneapolis’ city council election last night, an interesting thing happened: a Socialist candidate came close to defeating a conventional Democrat. Only 131 votes separated Ty Moore, a Socialist and former bus driver, from Alondra Cano in Minneapolis’ Ward 9. No victor has been declared because the election is a ranked-choice system and neither candidate has yet received a sufficient margin to call the election.

Moore remarked in a recent interview that he would like to see “an independent, working-class, Left political party that is viable in this country,” and if he wins a seat in Minneapolis, a wealthy city owned for generations by Democrats, it would be an upset worthy of notice.  Moore received endorsements from the Green Party, SEIU, the Democratic Socialists of America Twin Cities, and Socialist Action, but did not receive support from several major unions, including Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation AFL-CIO, AFSCME Council 5, a local IBEW chapter, the International Union of Operating Engineers, and the Laborers District Council of MN & ND, all which endorsed his Democratic opponent. Nonetheless, Moore out-raised his opponent $46,074 to $29,470.

Regardless of whether Moore wins his bid to become the first Socialist elected to the Minneapolis City Council in modern history, his viable candidacy suggests that, at least in Minneapolis’ struggling Ward 9, voters are beginning to act on a the gap they perceive between Democratic rhetoric and the actual governance of Democrats when they hold political power. While the Republican party, at all levels, has been susceptible to pressure from its furthest right blocs for decades, over the last generation or two the national Democratic party has been relatively impervious to challenges from the Left. (This regardless of the popular narrative surrounding the outcome of the vote in Florida and the Green Party’s Ralph Nader “stealing” the 2000 election from then-Vice President Al Gore.)

The diminishing influence of the political Left over the national Democratic party can be traced from Eugene McCarthy’s challenge to his party’s (quasi-liberal) sitting President in 1968, to George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, to Jimmy Carter’s outsider candidacy in 1976 and the unsuccessful presidency that followed, to Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge to his party’s sitting President in 1980, and finally to the emergence of the New (centrist) Democrats in the wake of Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in 1984. Democrats who lived through the difficult years of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s might be justified in saying that policy matters little when one doesn’t hold the offices necessary to turn policy into governance, but the records of Clinton and Obama-era Democrats suggest a party which runs on liberal policy but governs as centrist establishmentarians or, at best, incrementalists. This multi-generational trend likely has hundreds of variations at state and local levels, and it may not represent the state of relations between the Democratic party and its left-most potential constituents in every case. However, serious questions remain: Why has the Democratic party been so free from pressure on its left? Can this situation endure? If so, under what conditions can Democrats continue to fend off challenges from the Left?

One wonders where the next viable challenge to Democratic politicians’ claims to progressive, or even liberal, principles will originate. Will Hillary Clinton face serious challenge from her left in 2016, or will the Democratic Party re-embrace Clintonism as it attempts to retain control over the White House? Will the most liberal and progressive constituents of the Democratic Party remain loyal after Barack Obama, a quasi-progressive ideologue turned moderate conservative president, leaves office? Where will progressive and liberal voters wind up in states where the Democratic Party has conceded significant ground to the latest iteration of far-right Republican governors and state legislators? How long will those voters tolerate Democratic candidates who sprint to the center, hoping to capture enough votes from the middle to eke out a general election victory and regain control?

Up until now, questions like these might seem foolish or at best politically naive, but a Socialist candidate just gave a well-supported Democrat a serious electoral challenge in one of the bluest cities in the United States. It would be foolish to look for a tidal change at the national level in the next three years, but perhaps some serious erosion is finally occurring at the local level. Ty Moore just might be the beginning of something, rather than simply a flash in the pan. Time, as it always does, will tell.

Minnesota politics socialism