No matter who wins, we are winning

“They’re all crooks.” That is the first political lesson I was ever given, by my father. 

The year was 1992, I think, because the memory also involves an elfin man with an impish smile who danced across our TV screen at home for a few months, briefly enchanting our little clan (and a surprising number of other Americans) by buying a shitload of airtime and using it to host infomercials warning about the national debt. 

The man was Ross Perot. He parlayed those graph-laden half-hours into a completely improbable 19% of the national vote in the 1992 presidential election, and at the time, I was an 11-year-old hayseed beginning to realize there was an entire world outside the pinetree cloister of my country home and the suburban decadence (MTV! Newport Cinemas! Bumpers Fun Center! Coke II!) of my grandparents’ house off Country Homes. 

That day at school, my 6th grade teacher Mr. Winkle had discussed the results of the election, explaining the electoral college and how it was possible that Bill Clinton could have won a landslide victory with only 43% of the popular vote. I think I had tried to ask my parents more about it that night at home. Those three words were my dad’s response.

As a conservative of the old school who had moved to North Idaho (for the wilderness, not the white supremacy) in the late ‘70s, before it was cool, my dad liked Perot’s politics, and I think he was pretty bummed the little guy lost. Dad’s words weren’t expressing bitterness that the system was rigged against his favorite insurgent candidate, though. I think he was voicing a near complete fatalism about the ability of people like us, proud but poor Chattaroy trailer-folk, to impact power in any way at all. 

They’re all crooks is, for my father, a truth claim about politicians and other powerful people. The lesson I took from it as a child was in the subtext: Those three words were all the discussion merited, because when it comes to influencing power, there’s nothing people like us can do about it.

I spent a very long time believing he was right.

Before this becomes a memoir no one wants to read, let’s jump forward. Past Ruby Ridge (which had happened the summer before the 1992 election), past Waco and past the various separatisms that fueled the development of the militia movement. Let’s zig way left past the 1999 WTO protest and zag back right past the Brooks Brothers riot of 2000. Let’s jump past 9/11 and all the times groups of veterans and allies gathered, protesting our forever-war, just south of the Monroe Street Bridge, near the Lincoln statue. Let’s leapfrog both the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street. 

Let’s jump to 2016. The year Trump would build a right-wing populist movement that shocked the liberal intelligentsia (and won him Spokane County), Bernie Sanders attracted over 10,000 people to downtown Spokane, including a group of friends and I, who showed up at what seemed like a reasonable time, and found ourselves at the back of a line that stretched halfway through Riverfront Park. We never got close to making it inside. 

Among the thousands like us who milled about for hours in the cold that March day, were plenty of organizers, activists and lefty hipsters, but I also met folks who had driven down from Newport and Bonners Ferry. I met a farmer from Stevens County and a couple who had been living in a cabin outside Kettle Falls they built in the 70s, around the time my father was beginning his own rural dream.

To that point, I had spent the first eight of my then-12-year career developing a thick, reporterly callus of skepticism that only reinforced the lessons my father taught about the futility of building power among the disempowered. Then I spent a partially overlapping eight years with my friends literally (accidentally, but literally) building power in Spokane’s perpetually struggling creative economy. 

In all that time — and I feel like an idiot admitting this — I don’t think I even considered the idea that the soft power of community and shared struggle could ever David the twin Goliaths of America’s economic and political elites. 

That day, I started to think it was possible.

Let’s jump again, to 2018. A man named Alfredo Llamedo stages a hunger strike that becomes a tent-encampment in front of city hall, protesting the city’s new sit/lie ordinance, which effectively criminalized homelessness, and the lack of reliable 24/7 shelter. It came to be called Camp Hope. The protest succeeds in stopping enforcement of the ordinance. Later that year, Llamedo was diagnosed with terminal liver failure. The community vowed to carry on his work. 

And again. It’s winter 2019, dark money floods Spokane elections for the first time in memory, leading to a narrow victory for powerful interests in our mayor's race, and a narrow defeat in the race for council president. 

It’s summer 2020. The disruption, fear and eventual mistrust of the early pandemic mixes with the brutality and impunity of the murder of George Floyd, igniting like white phosphorus and catalyzing a level of sustained unrest I had never witnessed in my life. Even in sleepy ol’ Spokane, people show up week after week en masse. Even after the furor dies down, people keep joining organizations and building informal mutual aid networks. No one is waiting for permission.

It’s winter 2021. The flashpoints of the early pandemic are over, but the flame is still growing. People keep organizing and showing up for each other. Movements overflow their silos, building solidarity. Another tent encampment forms in front of city hall to agitate for more shelter beds. Activists name it Camp Hope, drawing an explicit continuity to organizing work done years earlier. 

Summer 2022. Camp Hope is eventually pushed off City property, but organizers find an even more tactically useful place to protest, on a block of land owned by Washington State. At this location, it becomes the largest single tent encampment in the state, eventually winning $25 million to aid the transition to permanent housing for the over 600 people living on a single square block. This feels, to me, like the moment Spokane’s grassroots successfully leveraged one overwhelming power (the city) against another (the state).

It’s Fall 2023. With mayor and council president back on the ballot, dark money once again floods Spokane elections, in even greater volume. As we wrote at the time, “The city hosts less than 3% of the state population, but has been subject to over 43% of [independent expenditures] made in races for elected offices in all of Washington.” Unlike 2019, though, all five candidates supported by private wealth lose their races, despite outspending their people-powered opponents dramatically. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. 

The idea for RANGE began incubating outside that Bernie rally in 2016, the beginning of this populist moment. Trump and Bernie went from being the butt of Beltway jokes to the leaders of (very, very) different movements that year, and have changed our politics fundamentally in the process. That moment fundamentally shaped RANGE, too. We were publishing by April 2020, but it wasn’t until the people’s uprisings in June that it became clear what we needed to be writing about.

We’ve been taking the lead of our community ever since. 

It was Valerie Osier (aspirational extrovert) who brought the idea of inviting our readers out for a coffee or a beer in 2022. It was the community who set the agenda for those meetings. We always get a few story pitches when we do Office Hours, but mostly readers show up wanting to understand how power moves in the city, the county and beyond.

It was Erin Sellers (recent college graduate) who pitched the idea of doing a bar crawl through our city council districts in 2024. It was our readers who showed up to Politicrawl with policy ideas ready to pitch the people they had elected. Those leaders, understanding who had elected them, passed legislation suggested at each of our first two Politicrawls, and after our most recent event, a hat trick seems likely. 

It was also Erin Sellers (noted theater kid) who had the idea of a candidate town hall that felt less like debate club and more like a roast during ren faire. We produced the first Spokane’s Spiciest last year, but it was our readers who made it a rowdy, substantive (and surprisingly cordial) referendum on the policies — not the personalities — onstage. I’ve never seen so many people get booed, then thank their hosts for the opportunity. 

This year’s Spiciest was even bigger, and better attended. We wondered if candidates would stay away this time, having learned their lesson. Instead we had hopefuls from across the political spectrum begging to be included.

They weren’t trying to make their case to a handful of journalists. They were making it to the heart and soul of this city. 

This makes us stronger as a community. 

I have no idea if Michael Baumgartner will ever RSVP yes to one of these events (we asked! And we’re gonna keep asking!). If he does, that won’t be because of anyone at RANGE, either. It will be because he has realized, definitively, that the people of Spokane have built for themselves a popular power that doesn’t just rival, but usually eclipses all the dark money in either Washington. He will show up and smile through it, because he will have realized that, in Spokane anyhow, to quote Thatcher, there is no alternative.

Let’s jump back, briefly, to 2016. One evening that summer, my mother walked me to my car after a family supper and, before sending me on my way, asked the kind of question she had never asked before and hasn’t asked since. “What do you think of that Bernie Sanders?” 

I had no idea how to respond at first. She and I have almost never talked politics, largely, I think, because of the understanding that, y’know, they’re all crooks. 

Neither they nor I have any stomach for pretending the gamesmanship of campaigning means anything real for people like us. (I loathe horse race journalism.) We have, though, found ways to somewhat frequently talk about the effect of the system on people, through a moral, not political lens. Not which politicians are good or bad people. What policies are good for normal people, and which aren’t. We disagree a lot, but we agree so much more often than I would have expected growing up in that pine cloister.

I don’t think my dad has changed his stance on politicians or the futility of politics, but he and my mom have both seen how my brother and sister-in-law, each active union members, have had an easier road than many because of the power of collective bargaining. I’m not sure they have connected that to the ballot box, but they’ve certainly connected it to their grandkids’ bellies. 

We never invoke party, I think because we know neither party holds much sway with any of us. None of us can stand the sclerosis, venality, sycophancy and overall cowardice of both major parties, their utter disregard for the common person or their limp, changeable morals. 

(I think all of us want leaders who draw their vision for America from a righteous and robust personal morality and sense of the Good, not yesterday’s opinion poll. We disagree a bit on implementation.)

She had walked me all the way to my car before she squared me up. We were standing pretty close as she asked, and I noticed the corner of her mouth twitch this particular way it does when she’s anxious. I felt so much love for her right then. I still don’t think I’ve figured out what to say. I got through that night by feeling it out. 

“That’s a hard one for me to answer, Mom,” I said. “I think the things he says he wants to do would have really helped you and dad a lot when we were struggling in Chattaroy.”

Her eyes welled up a little, she gave me a hug and held me there. “I think so, too,” she said. 

I wrote above that the day I spent shivering alongside thousands had finally persuaded me that building power for people was possible. 

That summer evening, as a mother who has probably voted party-line Republican her whole life held a son who sits far enough to the left that he often has to plug his nose to vote Democrat, I realized there was nothing else I wanted to do than help people like she and I find the common ground and shared struggle to build the world we all deserve.