Squad Goals

Squad Goals

The Squad was elected on a hope for political revolution—but it was missing a standing army.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib were first elected six years ago, it seemed they might herald a new direction for the Democratic Party. The “Squad” offered hope to those of us who had occupied Zuccotti Park, marched for Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and voted for Bernie Sanders—a resurgent left that lacked representation in American politics. Now the fate of the Squad is unclear. In June Jamaal Bowman lost the most expensive House primary in U.S. history to George Latimer; in August Cori Bush lost to challenger Wesley Bell. This year there are no new insurgent congressional candidates up for election. In November the Squad will shrink for the first time since its emergence in 2018.

There have been many arguments about what lessons to draw from Bowman’s defeat in June. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent over $14 million in New York’s Sixteenth Congressional District, but it never would have been able to buy the election without redistricting in 2022, which shifted Bowman’s district north, out of most of the Bronx and into Westchester. AIPAC also couldn’t have done it without a well-organized network of synagogues in the district that drafted Latimer into the race, or without Bowman’s own missteps as an official. The Sixteenth District was also richer and more passionately Zionist than the majority of the Democratic Party’s base. But after Bush’s loss in August, it became easier to generalize. Without prior experience as elected officials in local or state politics, Bowman and Bush lacked roots in their own districts; this had real implications for both fundraising and political endorsements, leaving them vulnerable to better-connected challengers. But they likely would have remained in office had October 7 not galvanized their opponents, including AIPAC.

Amid the post-mortems, a larger question has languished: what is the current horizon of the Squad as a political project? Its members made an incursion into the Democratic Party through primary elections in bright-blue congressional districts. Organizers hoped that by building a left faction in Congress, they could redefine the party’s agenda and draw the growing swaths of the electorate that wanted to tear it all down toward a vision for rebuilding the country from the ground up. But it has become hard to ignore that many voters in the Squad’s districts do not want to tear anything down, and the energies of the grassroots left are fickle.

Is the Squad still a vehicle through which the left can reshape the agenda of the Democratic Party? And if it is, what do the events of the past six years teach us about the way forward?

After the 2016 presidential race, many on the left concluded that an establishment crisis of legitimacy had reached its apotheosis: the center had been discredited to the point of becoming an electoral liability for both the Democratic and the Republican parties. Donald Trump had risen to the helm of the GOP and secured the presidency, sailing to victory despite the predictions of pollsters, in part thanks to the Tea Party’s years of organizing and agitation. If we wanted to defeat Trump, and if we wanted to see our movements’ demands translated into law, we would need a “Tea Party of the left” and a faction to represent it inside the Democratic Party.

This was the proposal set forth in a meeting of organizers in the brightly lit basement of Judson Memorial Church in New York City a month after Trump’s election. I convened the meeting with about twenty-five others from Momentum, a new group of millennials dedicated to learning and applying the lessons of popular movements that had won sweeping reforms under undemocratic conditions. The organizers devoted their time to a range of causes—ending the exploitation and deportation of undocumented immigrants, overhauling the criminal legal system, fighting for Palestinian self-determination, halting climate change—but few of them had ever worked on political campaigns. Our analysis was that winning any of those reforms would require tremendous pressure outside of government; while the dominant story about power was that it came from leaders at the top of institutions, we maintained that those leaders could not operate without the daily consent and political support of workers, citizens, the broad public. But after Trump’s election, we feared that his presence in the White House foreclosed all of our demands; we couldn’t avoid the question of electoral politics.

Several organizers worried about diverting energy from building a popular movement with a militant base toward taking over the Democratic Party—which might never represent our interests, given its elite leadership and dependence on corporate money. Hadn’t neoliberalism destroyed mass organization and narrowed the channels for collective action? Now that popular movements were back, wasn’t it time to recover the old levers of strikes, boycotts, and other forms of disruption instead of limiting ourselves to the ballot box?

Those advocating for building a left faction of the Democratic Party agreed that we did, indeed, need more leverage. But if we wanted material change, we couldn’t just strike, boycott, and disrupt; we needed sympathetic legislators who could translate our demands into law. Under the neoliberal consensus, the left was unpopular; now, following Occupy and Bernie’s unexpected performance in the primary, Americans were talking about socialism more than they had in a hundred years. With our movements at their backs, a bloc of socialist politicians could get elected, and our causes could win more media coverage and bigger legislative victories. Given the failure of the center to defend against the rise of right-wing parties around the world—ethnonationalists who accelerated minority rule, criminalized dissent, closed borders, and burned fossil fuels with impunity—we couldn’t afford not to try.

The meeting ended with a major strategic divergence: some groups decided to integrate elections into their work—endorsing and canvassing for candidates who could serve not only as legislators but also as spokespeople for the left—while others resolved to focus on building the infrastructure for sustained disruption. As a facilitator of the meeting, I stayed neutral, but I soon threw my lot in with those on a quest to transform the Democratic Party.

Soon after that December meeting, Trump was inaugurated. Some groups, including the Sunrise Movement and IfNotNow (a group I helped cofound), worked to build a left faction of the Democratic Party by endorsing and canvassing for insurgent candidates while running actions against establishment Democrats who were holding up change. Others found a home in the post-Bernie electoral outfit Justice Democrats. In tandem with the group Brand New Congress, they launched a public nomination process for new candidates. Weeks later Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez, who had no affiliation with Justice Democrats, nominated his sister, Alexandria, to run.

The week after she won the 2018 general election, AOC staged a sit-in with Sunrise activists at Nancy Pelosi’s office in what amounted to a generational storming of the political establishment. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley—who hadn’t been endorsed by Justice Democrats—had also just been elected, and AOC spontaneously captioned a photo of her new cohort on Instagram “Squad.” An elected insurgency inside the Democratic Party had been born, thanks in part to a young left determined to force its demands onto the party’s agenda.

To many organizers, the birth of the Squad seemed to be a sign of political realignment, a concept popularized in political science literature of the 1960s and ’70s. As Walter Dean Burnham argued, realignments “arise from emergent tensions in society which, not adequately controlled by the organization or outputs of party politics as usual, escalate to a flash point.” A realignment changed the electorate’s voting patterns in durable ways by redrawing the lines of conflict in political discourse, leading to new priorities for the party and new openings for public policy.

While the pundit class forecasts nearly every election as marking a potential realignment, it hadn’t been seriously proposed as a strategic priority by organizers since the 1960s, when Bayard Rustin pushed for a shift “From Protest to Politics” and Michael Harrington charted a course for a “New Politics” through the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A realignment did happen in that era—but not the one they’d hoped for. By the time of Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, the country was rapidly moving to the right, and it would stay there for several decades. And after the move from protest to politics, protest nearly disappeared altogether.

Those of us on the left who had turned toward electoralism in 2017 were committed to agitating forces inside and outside of the party system to catalyze a realignment. In our campaign work, we aimed to realign the voting base by economic interests—pushing for Medicare for All, free higher education, affordable housing, and taxing the rich—as well as by social and ecological interests—with support for a Green New Deal, re-envisioning “public safety” beyond policing, and ending endless war. For many young people, these were not simply issues but existential demands: that was why we chanted “Black Lives Matter” and “Water Is Life.” By moving these demands from the streets onto an electoral platform advanced by the Squad, we could turn a fight between Democrats and Republicans to one between the 99 percent that was fighting for their lives and a 1 percent bent on extraction and dispossession. Where the 99 percent still needed to be persuaded to embrace our demands, elected officials would serve as spokespeople. The goals were clear: to establish a left faction in the Democratic Party; to move the Democratic Party’s agenda left; and to defeat Republicans by making the Democratic Party popular again. At the time, these goals seemed mutually reinforcing.

When Sunrise punctuated the Squad’s election with direct action calling for a Green New Deal, its ranks surged, quelling for the time being my worries about elections detracting from building militant mass organizations. If grassroots organizing had produced electoral success, electoral success was now producing grassroots organizing. In Momentum trainings, we often cited Tony Schiavone’s exclamation about an underdog winning a professional wrestling championship: “That’ll put a lot of butts in the seats!” Of course, the newcomers did not neatly map onto the districts where Squad members had just won, but the realignment we hoped for was indeed taking place. If groups like Sunrise and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—the legatees of Harrington’s realignment project—continued to grow at this rate, who knew what would be possible? Even those skeptical about the possibility of waging a “political revolution” through the Democratic Party permitted themselves a measure of excitement.

Millennials built new institutions to flank the left faction of the party, including Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm, and, later, the Climate and Community Project, a think tank that turned movement demands like a Green New Deal into detailed policy proposals. The Squad had nowhere near the funding that right-wing donors had provided to the Trump campaign and the burgeoning far-right Freedom Caucus in the House, but Justice Democrats successfully courted a handful of progressive donors to resource the project. They also launched Movement School, a project dedicated to training a new crop of working-class campaign managers. All this infrastructure was intended to do two things: first, demonstrate that a left agenda was popular; and second, make that agenda politically viable. With Bernie in the Senate and the Squad in the House, there was no time to lose. Each election seemed like a new opportunity to build the grassroots left and its faction in the Democratic Party.

The year 2020 complicated this rosy vision. The left sustained major losses on the electoral front. But for every step back, there was also a step forward. Bernie lost the Democratic primary, but the Biden–Sanders unity task force brought Sunrise leaders into the process of defining the Democrats’ agenda. The fiscal policy of the COVID-19 era seemed to expand the horizon for climate policy, and commentators started speaking of Biden’s ambitions for a “Rooseveltian presidency”—a sign that our agenda was being taken seriously. That summer, the primary victories of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were seen as electoral reverberations of the uprisings for George Floyd. With the Squad expanding to six, the Democratic establishment could not dismiss the project as a fluke of 2018.

By November, our optimism had dimmed. The national media was covering Trump’s refusal to accept the election results instead of the insurgent victories of our new Squad members. The pandemic had diminished the ranks of grassroots organizations, and everyone was exhausted. The virtuous cycle between electoral victory and organizational growth had stalled. It didn’t occur to me at the time what the implications of our shrinking base might be for the districts where we had Squad members to defend and still more to elect. The agenda they were charged with advancing was still popular well beyond our organizations.

Biden had won the presidency, and Democrats the House and Senate. Under this Democratic trifecta, the Squad was no longer the leading voice of opposition under Trump but instead a junior partner in a governing coalition with the establishment Democrats whom they had, until that point, roundly criticized. For some on the left, the Squad’s shift from opposition to governance was undesirable because it exposed them to compromises with the center that would sully their program. For the realignment strategists, however, this was the goal all along: by becoming a junior partner, the Squad would co-govern with the center and set in motion a “policy feedback loop,” in which progressive policy would beget support for progressive politicians and, in turn, lead to more progressive policy. In the process, some centrists would become more progressive, and those who didn’t would be challenged in future primary elections. Becoming a junior partner was a step on the path to becoming, one day, the senior partner.

This vision was challenged in September 2021, when the House voted on $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, supplemental to the annual $3.3 billion that the U.S. government provides to Israel. Against the recommendations of Justice Democrats staffers, AOC and Bowman deviated from the rest of the Squad: AOC voted “present,” effectively abstaining, and Bowman voted for the funding. Many on the left—especially those who saw the Squad as their representatives in Congress—were bewildered: what was a left faction of the Democratic Party without commitments to the Palestinian cause? When questioned about the vote, Bowman explained, “It’s important for me to make sure I represent everyone within my district—not just some people within my district.” Bowman was torn between being a spokesperson for a national leftist movement and an elected representative of a decidedly non-leftist district. Was it the Squad’s job to shift public opinion and persuade voters to support Palestinian freedom—and the left’s broader agenda—or ours?

If the Iron Dome vote surfaced confusion about what the left should do when the Squad strayed from our agenda, the trajectory of the Build Back Better bill—a significant part of the compromise brokered between Bernie’s and Biden’s bases in 2020—revealed confusion about what to do when the Squad advocated for it. In late 2021, the bill died in the Senate when Joe Manchin refused to vote for it. In contrast to the roughly forty members of the Freedom Caucus in the Republican Party, the Squad had only six; in actuality, a former Justice Democrats staffer lamented, it was less a junior partner in a governing coalition than a sub-group of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. When the CPC folded on blocking the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill—the major point of leverage progressives had to push Manchin to support Build Back Better—only the Squad voted against it. The political benefits of this maneuver were limited, but the costs would prove to be immense.

Data for Progress showed that the majority of voters supported the proposal to invest $1.75 trillion over the coming decade to fund care for seniors and people with disabilities, expand Medicare coverage, and extend the child tax credit—but just because voters liked it didn’t mean they would spontaneously protest to defend it. The Squad didn’t try to organize anyone on the outside to fight for Build Back Better, but Sunrise summoned all the energy it could, launching a hunger strike to demand executive action from Biden: “We will continue to sit starving outside the White House everyday until you use your power as elected president of the United States to deliver your mandate for bold, and transformative climate action with justice and for jobs,” the strikers wrote in an open letter. It was a valiant effort, but not enough to make an impact. Once it became clear that Manchin would not strike a deal on Build Back Better—and that Biden would not try to move him through rousing public speeches or bargains behind closed doors—the strikers went home.

At the moment when we needed mass organizing to create a popular groundswell for the most ambitious governing agenda of our lifetimes, hardly anyone was in the streets. The base’s energy was a limited if renewable resource, surging in movement moments and crashing in their wake. The Squad had been elected on a hope for political revolution, but it was missing a standing army.

When Build Back Better resurfaced in diminished form as the Inflation Reduction Act and ultimately passed in 2022, even those on the left who acknowledged it as the largest investment in renewable energy in U.S. history were more relieved than celebratory. The Squad and its supporters had moved Biden to the left, but the Democrats still lacked the governing majority needed to pass a truly transformative agenda. The movement had helped to create the political will for industrial policy inside the Democratic Party and shifted the common sense about the role of government in mitigating the effects of climate change, exactly as Sunrise had intended. But the industrial policy that was ultimately signed into law saw the role of government as one of subsidizing profits for green technology in the private sector and preparing domestic supply chains for conflict with China—not replacing fossil fuels or ensuring public ownership of clean energy. The passage of the IRA showed that we had moved the Democratic Party’s agenda in ways that were unimaginable five years earlier, but the paradigm of private investment, the primacy of geopolitical concerns over ecological ones, and the influence of fossil-fuel capital remained wholly intact.

Like the previous legislative session, the midterms that fall were cause for relief more than celebration. Summer Lee won her race in Pennsylvania; the other members of the Squad held onto their seats. The Squad was growing, and certainly punching above its weight, but it was not in a position to take over the Democratic Party anytime soon.

As our vision of a full-scale realignment foundered, many of us turned to When Movements Anchor Parties, a book by the political scientist Daniel Schlozman that had been on our bookshelves since 2016 but found new salience under the current constraints. In his account, mass movements and mass parties emerged together at the dawn of modern democracy as a means of influencing the state. Social movements are formations that offer “public philosophies that reframe basic questions asked since the founding” and “disrupt the terms of debate and expand ideological horizons.” But a movement will not provide material answers to those questions unless it finds footing in a political party. In a winner-take-all system, parties reflexively tack toward the median voter with the aim of cobbling together the majority needed to win an election. In Schlozman’s account, movements are always to the left or right of the median voter; therefore, to shift the agenda of a political party, a movement needs to offer the party votes (or networks and money that can increase vote share) that the party cannot get on its own. A movement’s influence in the party system comes from playing a mediating role between the party and the base, its leverage determined by its ability to brandish both carrot and stick. If a movement does this in a sustained fashion—as the labor movement did in the Democratic Party and evangelical Christians did in the Republican Party—it could durably shape the party’s agenda. If a movement doesn’t, Schlozman argued, it would find itself in the streets without political representation or policies that reflect its goals.

Schlozman’s book provided a map for “anchoring” ourselves in the Democratic Party even if we were not poised to take it over. His case studies reflected what we’d already learned: sometimes our movements’ demands are not yet popular with the majority, and sometimes our movements’ demands are popular with the majority but still repelled by opposing anchors in the party. In any case, the path forward was the same: build a base of voters that the Democratic Party needed to win—a bloc of votes they couldn’t get without us.

That task became more pressing after October 7, 2023, when the Democratic Party split over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. When Cori Bush put forth a resolution calling for a ceasefire on October 16 and Bowman cosponsored it with the rest of the Squad, they were in step with the majority of their constituents as well as the majority of Americans, but way out ahead of nearly every other politician in Congress. Bowman was also out ahead of a small but influential portion of his district. Twenty-six local synagogue leaders, already angling to oust Bowman, described his call for a ceasefire as “a position of appeasement toward Hamas’s terror regime” in an open letter imploring George Latimer, the county executive of Westchester, to primary Bowman. AIPAC, which had recently donated to every single member of Democratic and Republican congressional leadership, was already looking for a way to prove that criticism of Israel could be politically fatal. When Latimer stepped up to run, backed by an organized pro-Israel constituency in the district, AIPAC had what it needed to make an example of Bowman. Nearly $15 million went toward ads that flickered across the televisions and phones of New York’s Sixteenth District.

Those ads didn’t mention Israel at all but instead focused on Bowman’s vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill, cast with other Squad members in an attempt to salvage what they could of Biden’s own Build Back Better agenda. AIPAC spun the vote into an act of insubordination, and then they did the same with Cori Bush. For an audience of Democratic primary voters who supported a ceasefire but were concerned with party unity and defeating Trump above all else, it was enough to swing votes. An opposing anchor in the party had poured millions into ousting the Squad members with the weakest ties in their districts, and they had done it with an appeal to the very partisan loyalties that the project of realignment was supposed to supersede.

The first six years of the Squad revealed the contradictions in the way we’d imagined their role: they were spokespeople for a national political revolution and officials elected to represent non-revolutionary constituents; they were outspoken critics of the elite Democratic establishment and aspiring junior partners in a governing coalition with it. So long as a Squad member, or candidate, stood on a platform that unified the Democratic Party’s existing base—taxing the rich, ensuring access to abortion, canceling student debt—those contradictions receded into the background. But whenever the Squad took a position that either divided the base of the Democratic Party or roused an opposing anchor in the party, those contradictions surged to the fore, often rupturing the left’s relationship with the Squad as well as relationships within the left itself.

In 2018 our goals of building a left faction of the Democratic Party, pushing the party’s agenda to the left, and defeating Republicans seemed mutually reinforcing. In retrospect, that was only the case in a political context (from 2016 until 2020) where the center had been delegitimized by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. The party wants to win elections, and to do so it needs electoral majorities, which Clinton could not deliver. A former strategist for the Working Families Party pointed out to me that this created an opening for the left; we found ourselves energized not only by Bernie’s popularity but also, perhaps more decisively, by Clinton’s failure. Once Biden reasserted the electoral viability of the center, our status within the party plummeted. The young left was depressed after November 2020 not only because of the pandemic, Bernie’s loss, and the tumult of the Trump years, but also because our influence over the political terrain diminished at precisely the moment that a Democratic trifecta came to power.

That opening will reappear again eventually, because neither the center nor the right will chart a pathway out of the crises that are sure to arise. The classic conditions for a realignment, as outlined by political scientist David R. Mayhew, are all still there: the “tension buildup” resulting from a party system that fails to respond to the demands of the populace; a “ripening” of the electorate marked by young people disengaging from an established party system; the “societal trauma” of wars, economic recession, and police violence; turmoil in presidential nominating conventions; and third parties emerging that may attract the flagging party identification of young voters and entice one of the major parties to shift its agenda in the process.

The Squad is unlikely to be the vehicle for a realignment, but it is already part of a growing left faction—in Congress and beyond it. The CPC, whose platform is often indistinguishable from that of the Squad, has grown dramatically since 2018. There are genuinely socialist state legislators and local officials around the country who are in the process of building roots in their districts that Bowman and Bush lacked. The left is more popular than it has been for a century. We have shifted the Democratic Party’s agenda and—like every generation of leftists before us—come up against the entrenched interests of capital, which the party system has traditionally relied upon and served. Millennials and Gen Z will become a majority of the electorate this decade, and their political views show no significant signs of moderating with age. As their political influence increases, those entrenched interests will spend more and more money to control the party system. AIPAC may one day seem like a minor player compared with fossil-fuel capital and the military-industrial complex.

The only counter to those influences will be organization. The contradictions that bore down on the Squad the last six years will continue to bear down just as heavily on leftist organizations. Schlozman refracts the contradiction into two roles: “movement radicals,” the principled militants who refuse to compromise with power, and “movement moderates,” the brokers who push a movement’s demands into the party system by converting them into resolutions, laws, and talking points that sympathetic politicians can adopt. The groups occupying these two roles are generally antagonistic toward each other—as they were in the debate among Momentum organizers in 2016—but a movement lacking either will only amount to cycles of protest that educate the public without building its power or electing milquetoast politicians to pass incrementalist legislation.

What is the ideal version of these roles in the years ahead? Movement moderates will build a base aligned on the project of confronting the party system; they will train that base in the necessity of electoral majorities and build coalitions to that end; they will have a principled strategy for navigating that coalition with red lines that cannot be crossed; and they will cultivate the infrastructure to run a field operation that can deliver votes and a media operation that can tell the movement’s version of the story. When the center’s popularity is waning, movement moderates will portray centrists as an electoral liability; when centrists are in power, movement moderates will underscore that they can’t win without the left. The base will understand that opportunities wax and wane, and that the party establishment does not listen to words but to votes.

Movement radicals, freed of the burden of winning electoral majorities each cycle, will more readily embrace their minoritarian status. As a longtime member of the labor movement put it, movements achieve their aims not simply because they are popular but because the elites who oppose the movement’s reforms decide to sue for a truce. Congress, for this part of the movement, is the treaty organization, not the terrain of struggle. Movement radicals wage rebellions not for legislative influence but rather to make so much trouble through strikes, boycotts, and disruptive actions that capital decides it’s cheaper to broker a deal. The base of these organizations put up their own spokespeople instead of relying on politicians, and they understand that capital doesn’t listen to words but to a loss of profit.

If a realignment is happening, it likely won’t happen in a single important election or even a few, but rather unfold in a multi-decade process, like the realignment that took place from the 1930s until the 1960s and brought labor and Black voters into the Democratic Party. In the years that followed, our political parents watched radical movements fracture under the weight of the Cold War, COINTELPRO, stagflation, and infighting. They watched their peers enter the political parties with the style but none of the substance of the movements that defined their coming-of-age, and they turned to the spadework of community and labor organizing while anti-labor forces gathered strength and the American public shifted right. The task of offering a public philosophy that reframed foundational questions of American society was deferred until that society wanted to hear it. Today, the society we live in can hear the left. We have gone from protest to politics and were met with enduring obstacles. Given the inevitability of crisis, we will go back to protest again. It’s too soon to say whether that will lead to a new politics this time.

Lissy Romanow is the former executive director of Momentum, a cofounder of IfNotNow, and was previously a lead organizer with Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts. She is currently writing a book on the evolution of organizing methods in the United States.