The New Kings Democrats (NKD) on Saturday invited progressive Democratic clubs from the city’s other boroughs for a lively political discourse on strategies for reforming the Democratic Party on the county level.
But once again the elephant in the community room at the YWCA, 30 3rd Avenue in Boerum Hill was engaging longtime community activists as part of the leadership of the progressive movement instead of co-opting them into what sometimes feels like an invasion into their neighborhoods.
The multi-borough panel included Manhattan District Leader (65th AD) Paul Newell, Tom Lagatta and Jeanne Wilke from the Downtown Independent Democrats (DID); Will Giron and Tim Wilson from the New Queens Democrats (NQD), Jon Crockett from the County Committee Sunlight Project (a project whose mission is to make the local Democratic party on the county level more transparent); and Samelys Lopez from Bronx Progressives.
Wilke recounted the struggles of DID trying to reform the New York County (Manhattan) Democratic Party in the wake of former Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver (Lower East Side) getting convicted on felony corruption charges and the sudden resignation of former State Sen. Daniel Squadron in a district that is two-thirds in Manhattan and one-third in Brooklyn.
Even though 73 percent of the Manhattan county committee voted for Newell as Squadron’s replacement, Manhattan County Democratic Party Chair Keith Wright had a meeting with Brooklyn Democratic Party Chair Frank Seddio, and they decided to back Brian Kavanagh to replace Squadron, Wilke said.
Newell said Manhattan progressives spent months going over the committee rules and the county rules committee voted in favor of about 90 percent of the changes.
Giron said reforming the Queens County Democratic Party starts with getting more people on the county committee as a lot of people are on it and don’t even know it. It’s very achievable to get more people on the committee as it only takes 15 signatures from your neighbors, he said.
Crockett said he became interested in having more local transparency on the county level after the 2016 election. Getting the county committee rules is not that difficult, all one has to do is go down to the Board of elections and request them, he said.
Lopez said she became involved politically with the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016. The Bronx is heavily dominated by machine politics and the movement wanted to use county committee as a tool to empower progressive politics, she said.
Lopez then took many of the progressives to task in that nobody was speaking about the importance of diversity and including longtime neighborhood activists in any progressive movement.
“It is important to talk about diversity. We absolutely need people who live and have a longtime stake in the community. We need to identify people who have already organized and we must be wary of political gentrification as well,” said Lopez.
Lopez, who was an early supporter of U. S. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, noted there have been people in the community that has been activists for a very long time and it’s really important to identify somebody from the marginalized community who has always been an activist.
“People in any leadership position should be the ones who were closest to the pain. They should be the ones front and center,” she said.
Giron, who like Lopez, is Hispanic/Latino, said there are a lot of progressive movements that do actively recruit folks of color from the community, and that the NQD is such an organization.
“In promoting diversity, we have to hold ourselves accountable as well,” said Gilron. “Diversity is very important for the progressive movement. We don’t want to give the impression the movement is run by gentrifiers.”
