Juliana Stratton Understands the Assignment

IL Senate candidate knows you don’t find common ground with Trump

The campaign for the Illinois Senate seat to be vacated by Dick Durbin is underway. My preferred candidate, I think, is Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton. There are a range of reasons for that, and I’ll cover a few of them. But what really cemented my enthusiasm was a moment in a debate at the end of January when moderators asked candidates to name a policy on which they agreed with Trump.

House Rep Raja Krishnamoorthi, a centrist dissembler whose campaign has been deluged with big donor cash, responded that he agrees with Trump in attacking China because, “we have to be concerned about our manufacturing workers and what’s happening to them.”

House Rep Robin Kelly, a solid progressive who has led the effort to impeach DHS secretary Kristi Noem, but whose polling is dire, said that while she disagrees with HHS secretary Robert Kennedy on most things, she likes his focus on “wellness and exercise and eating properly.”

Stratton, in contrast, refused to be pushed into the bipartisan compromiser quisling box. Rather than finding some shit Trump policy she could put a friendly spin on, she delivered a fiery denunciation. Trump, she said, was a “fascist.” And she concluded,

Donald Trump is not a normal president. In fact he’s not a normal person….There’s nothing that I’m going to say today that I can think of that I agree with Donald Trump on. And what I will tell you is that I am not going to the United States Senate to find something to agree with Donald Trump on. I’m going to the United States Senate to represent you, and to take your voices with me.”

The video on facebook is labeled, “We don’t need to find common ground with a wannabe dictator.” Which I can’t do any better than to repeat with perhaps an embellishment or two. WE DON’T NEED TO FIND FUCKING COMMON GROUND WITH THIS FUCKING FASCIST.

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Everyone wants to make nice

Kelly and Krishnamoothi’s answers are both bad on the merits. RFK’s “wellness” initiatives—his constant hectoring about diet and exercise as some sort of responsibility of citizenship—is grotesquely ableist and fatphobic, and indistinguishable from his disgusting eugenic bullshit. The fact that parts of the wellness industry are left-coded is all the more reason to reject the entire enterprise. Similarly, Trump’s attacks on China have been directly linked to violence against Chinese-Americans, and his use of xenophobia to justify tariffs and nationwide anti-immigrant pogroms have been a disaster for workers. Also, pogroms are bad.

Mainstream journalists—and not just mainstream journalists—love compromise and bipartisanship for its own sake. It is a shibboleth that partisanship distorts perspectives, and that if we could just overcome our divisions, we could find common sense solutions that transcend party. Trump, in this thinking, may be extreme and bad in many ways, but serious legislators need to work across the aisle, and should find some way to work with him on something. Isn’t that what the great deliberative Senate is all about? Cool that tea, Senators! Make sure our democracy isn’t too democracyish!

Alas, in trying to compromise with Trump at the behest of journalists, Kelly and Krishnamoothi both ended up validating fascist talking points, ideology, and policy. This is not a surprise. Trump is a fascist! If you try to find common ground with him, you’re probably going to end up compromising with fascism—as Krishnamoothi did when he cast a despicable vote to thank ICE last summer while they were terrorizing LA.

Krishnamoothi claims he made that vote because it was bundled with a condemnation of antisemitism—but of course Republicans see attacks on antisemitism and attacks on the left as the same thing, and thanking a fascist right wing paramilitary for “protecting the homeland” does not, in fact, make Jewish people safer.

Krishnamoothi was afraid fascists would smear him as antisemitic and/or as insufficiently deferential to law enforcement, and so he shucked his spine and provided bipartisan support for Trump’s brutal anti immigrant terror campaign. For decades Democrats have embraced the conventional wisdom that political ambition requires centrist appeasement and anti-left branding. That’s what donors are most comfortable with, for sure, which is why Krishnamoothi has raised three quarters of the cash in the race with a $28.5 million war chest.

Fucking fight you fucks

You could argue that this kind of wishy-washy slouch to the center used to have some traction with voters as well. If it ever did though (and analyst G. Elliott Morris is skeptical) it’s certainly not the case now. Democratic voters, in particular, are enraged that they are being targeted by a violent fascist regime and want their representatives to fucking fight. In one recent poll of Democratic voters, 75% wanted the party to be more aggressive in attacking Republicans and 69% said Democrats are “weak.”

Candidates are aware of the mood. That’s why Krishnamoothi has said he wants to “abolish Trump’s ICE”—a stance which adopts progressive rhetoric, but which is instead a weasely, intentionally deceptive way to package small bore reforms like requiring agents to stop masking and to wear identification.

Krishnamoothi has also been highlighting his actual (admirable) efforts to do oversight at ICE facilities, just as Kelly has been pointing to her efforts to impeach Noem. But Stratton is the only one in the field who seems entirely comfortable simply saying the agency needs to be abolished though, just as she’s the only one who’s comfortable saying she would not under any circumstances vote for famously invertebrate Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer to head the Senate Democratic caucus.

You could argue that Stratton is pandering perhaps; the Democratic base says they want to see fight, and so she is going to fight—by calling for the abolition of ICE, by calling for new more vertebrate Senate Democratic leadership, by refusing to pretend she agrees with Donald Trump.

But wishy-washiness is pandering too. Kelly and Krishnamoothi are hedging on abolishing ICE because they’re worried that they’ll be seen as insufficiently supportive of law and order. They are hedging on Schumer because they feel it might be politically inconvenient to defy their colleagues once they’re in the senate and are trying to give themselves room to maneuver.

The question isn’t whether politicians are pandering. The question is who are they pandering to? Who do they want on their side, who have they aligned with, and where do they see their power coming from?

Stratton is making her allegiances clear. She is speaking to, and wants to speak for, those who oppose Trump and fascism. She is speaking to, and wants to speak for, those who understand that this is not a normal administration. She doesn’t want to make deals with Trump; she wants to defeat him. She doesn’t want to fiddle with the rules governing the gestapo; she wants to get rid of it. And if her colleagues aren’t on board with that—as Schumer isn’t—she’s going to side with her constituents against them.

I have disagreements with Stratton too. She has said she would not back Sanders’ resolution to cease weapons shipments to Israel; Kelly would have signed it. If Kelly seemed to have a real shot at the nomination, that might well lead me to support her. But polls put her far behind—the most recent has Krishnamoorthi at 34%, Stratton at 23%, and Kelly a distant third with only 8%.

I think defeating Krishnamoorthi is imperative—and more than that, I think it’s imperative to have a Senator who wants to crush fascism, not appease it. If we are ever going to forge an antifascist future, we need representatives who aren’t afraid to say so. Julianna Stratton understands the assignment in a way that too few Democrats seem to. It would be a tragedy if big money donors bury another fighter before she even gets a chance to fight for us.