https://portside.org/2017-02-22/will-keith-ellison-move-democrats-left

"Here’s the interesting thing about Islam,” Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman currently running for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, said. It was a sunny, gelid afternoon just after Christmas. “The Prophet Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him—his father dies before he’s ever born. His mother dies before he’s six. He’s handed over to a foster mom who’s so poor, the stories say, her breasts are not full enough to feed him. So he grows up as this quintessential orphan, and only later, at the age of forty, does he start to get this revelation. And the revelation is to stand up against the constituted powers that are enslaving people—that are, you know, cheating people, trying to trick people into believing that they should give over their money to appease a god that’s just an inanimate object. And those authorities came down hard on him! And his first converts were people who were enslaved, children, women—a few of them were wealthy business folks, but the earliest companions of the Prophet Muhammad were people who needed justice. I found that story to be inspiring, and important to my own thinking and development.”

Ellison, fifty-three, is stocky, with a wide, square head, pinkish-brown skin, and wavy, close-cropped hair. We were sitting at the back of a dimly lit restaurant in St. Paul, and he was wearing a red-and-black checked flannel shirt and faded bluejeans. He had spent most of the day calling members of the D.N.C., and would do more of the same after the meal. The D.N.C. consists of four hundred and forty-seven unelected Party functionaries—state Party chairs, obscure assemblypersons, former big shots—each possessed of his or her own local concerns. The vote for the chairmanship will take place on February 25th, in Atlanta, and so Ellison is usually on the phone, agreeing, promising, making moans of understanding. If he wins the race, he will resign his seat in the House, and continue to spend much of his time this way.

Ellison is the first Muslim to be elected to the U.S. Congress, and I had asked about his religion, and its bearing on his conception of politics, because I couldn’t quite figure out how someone with his background—he came to politics through the roar of student activism: protests, marches, rallies—would be happy in the role he was so strenuously seeking. Like many a Christian politician before him, Ellison had found a way to apply the particulars of his faith to certain timeless American themes—justice, equality, the ability to transcend the circumstances of one’s birth. But he had also managed to sketch the sometimes pious self-image of the party he hopes to lead: sure, a few wealthy donors here or there, but largely a coalition of the vulnerable and the cast aside, arrayed against the powers that be.

The Democrats’ calamitous defeat in last year’s elections—not only losing the Presidency but remaining in a rut in both chambers of Congress and ceding further ground to Republicans in state houses, governors’ mansions, and mayors’ offices around the country—deepened a well of intra-Party bitterness that had become evident long before Election Day. In December, 2015, Bernie Sanders and the former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who were both running for President, accused the D.N.C. and its chair, the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, of favoring Hillary Clinton. During the primaries, the D.N.C. established a joint fund-raising vehicle with the Clinton campaign, an arrangement that is usually delayed until a presumptive nominee has emerged. And it was later revealed, in e-mails allegedly stolen by Russian hackers and disseminated by WikiLeaks, that Donna Brazile, who now serves as the D.N.C.’s acting chair, had shared with the Clinton campaign questions from an upcoming debate on CNN—Brazile’s employer at the time.

Ellison is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the putative left-wing answer to the brinksmen of the Freedom Caucus on the right, and he was an early and fervent supporter of Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Like Sanders, he consistently opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal sought by the Obama White House in its final two years which was attacked by populists in both parties. (President Donald Trump recently withdrew the U.S. from the T.P.P.) Ellison announced his candidacy for the D.N.C. chairmanship six days after the Presidential election. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, predictably endorsed him—but so did establishment figures, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and his predecessor, Harry Reid. One of the early objectives of Schumer’s leadership has been to placate the increasingly powerful Sanders, whom he made a member of his leadership team, and Schumer has said that he endorsed Ellison because Sanders recommended him. This may have been a canny bit of political maneuvering, but it also indicated to Sanders’s supporters that the populist wing of the Democratic Party was poised to lead the opposition against Trump.

The race for the chair has often echoed the acrimony and confusion of the Presidential primaries. Ten candidates are competing for the job, though few have a national profile. Ellison’s chief rival, Thomas E. Perez, was formerly Barack Obama’s Labor Secretary. Perez has consolidated support from much of the Democratic establishment, and increasingly appears to have seized the role of front-runner. Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has positioned himself as a compromise candidate, saying, of the 2016 Democratic primary race, “I don’t know why we’d want to live through it a second time.” All the candidates agree that the D.N.C. is a shambles. Raymond Buckley, the Party’s chair in New Hampshire, and another hopeful, declared, at a Party forum in Baltimore, “For the last eight years, I’ve been a vice-chair, and I don’t know what the hell is going on in this party any more than any of you.”

Meanwhile, the turmoil of Trump’s first month as President has alternately panicked and emboldened the Democratic base. The activist surge on the left, most spectacularly demonstrated at the Women’s March, in Washington, D.C., and in other major cities, and during protests at nearly a dozen airports after the executive order to temporarily ban people from seven majority-Muslim countries, has stoked a conviction that the Party must be more forceful in combatting Trump. Democrats in the Senate have been conspicuously more strident in their opposition to his Cabinet nominees in the days since the airport protests. The rhetoric of the marches has seeped into the D.N.C. race as well, though to less certain effect. There seems to be a mismatch in expectations between the lofty hopes of the marchers and the more mundane work that awaits on South Capitol Street, where the D.N.C. is headquartered. Even with the Trump Presidency in disarray, there is no guarantee that the Democrats will make a strong comeback in the midterm elections of 2018 and the Presidential race in 2020—the real, albeit less glamorous, job of the D.N.C. in the years to come.

Ellison gained an advantage in the race by announcing his candidacy early, in November, but he has faced several obstacles in the months since: recurring questions about his more radical past; a palpable if rarely articulated uneasiness about his faith; and, perhaps most perplexing, the shadow of Bernie Sanders, whose support accounts for both the initial strength of Ellison’s run and the intensity of the opposition that has gathered against him.

Ellison was born in Detroit, one of five boys in a middle-class family. His father, Leonard, was a psychiatrist, and his mother, Clida, a social worker. When he enrolled at Wayne State University, in 1981, campus activists were protesting apartheid. Ellison had read the novel “Cry, the Beloved Country” in high school; soon he was a leading campus petitioner on behalf of divestment from the South African government. He studied economics and wrote for the college newspaper. At the time, Warith Deen Mohammed was a prominent political figure. He had taken over the Nation of Islam after the death of his father, Elijah Muhammad, and had steered its membership away from racial separatism and toward mainstream Sunni Islam, changing the organization’s name to the American Society of Muslims. Under his influence, Ellison, who had been a mostly non-observant Catholic, converted, at the age of nineteen.

In 1987, Ellison married Kim Dore, whom he’d met in high school—they divorced in 2012—and enrolled at the University of Minnesota’s law school, where, along with other students of color, he protested against the lack of diversity in the school’s faculty and staff. On a walk around campus, he and Kim noticed a scrawl of racist graffiti on a pedestrian bridge. Ellison contacted the law school’s black students and the university’s Progressive Students Association and organized an effort to paint over the graffiti. One student was arrested on painting day, and Ellison called the local newspapers to let them know what had happened. In 1989, following an incident in Minneapolis, Ellison organized protests against police brutality. After graduation, he took a job at a law firm, then became the executive director of the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis.

In the summer of 1993, Ellison met Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota senator who died in a plane crash in 2002. Wellstone is a key figure in Minnesota’s long liberal tradition; while I was there, everyone I spoke to invoked him. “He really changed my idea of what a politician could be,” Ellison said, his face brightening. “ ’Cause he was a very unpolitical politician, right? I mean, this guy would come down to community events, he was present—he really kind of set the template for what most Minnesota politicians want to be.” Wellstone believed that political change depended on good policy, grass-roots organizing, and electoral victories. “You need all three,” Ellison said. “At the end of the day, if all we ever had was Bloody Sunday, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but we weren’t talking about the Voting Rights Act, people’s lives would not have changed much.”

Ellison ran for the state legislature in 1998, and lost, but in 2002 he ran again and won, just weeks after Wellstone’s death. In 2006, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In that election, his district, which is nearly two-thirds white, had the lowest turnout in the state; in Ellison’s recent reëlection, it had the highest. The work of organizing, Ellison told me, “isn’t just about winning elections. It’s about building community. It’s a way for neighbors to talk about stuff, when neighbors don’t usually talk.” Ellison is not a policy wonk; he talks about such imperatives as “raising the minimum wage, putting money into the schools, staving off environmental disaster” in long, rolling clusters, and often ends by declaiming the point of the whole thing: “Just improving the quality of people’s lives!”

He frequently uses the word “solidarity,” attempting to eschew the debates over identity politics that have proliferated since the Presidential election. In a widely read Times Op-Ed, the liberal political theorist Mark Lilla wrote that Hillary Clinton tended, especially when discussing domestic affairs, to “slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop.” By presenting the image of America as a collection of categories, Lilla argued, Democrats had encouraged working-class whites to do the same, and to vote as a bloc for Trump. Former Vice-President Joe Biden made a similar point both during and after the campaign, saying that the Democrats had not shown white working-class voters “enough respect.” Conversely, Sally Boynton Brown, one of the candidates for the chairmanship, who is white, made headlines when she said, at a Party forum, that the D.N.C. needs to teach volunteers “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white.”

Ellison offers an idealistic synthesis, drawing on Wellstone’s approach—which bears some resemblance to Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Beloved Community, a semi-utopian vision that insisted on the inextricability of economic justice, civil rights, and antiwar sentiment. Ellison’s advantage in promulgating this sixties-descended, peace-and-love brand of liberalism is, perhaps, the matter of his own identity: no one is likely to accuse a black Muslim who fought his first political battles over apartheid and police brutality of shunting the concerns of minorities to the margins.

“You and me are black,” Ellison said to me. “You may or may not agree with me on this, but I think that when black people get in a closed room together we kind of think that we’ve probably got it harder than anybody else. We think, maybe Native Americans got it hard, maybe Latinos got it hard, but we figure white folks all got it made in the shade, you know. But, as it happens, that ain’t true. It happens that everybody’s got problems. They’re not that different, and what we really need is human solidarity.”

Shortly after Ellison announced his candidacy, in mid-November, Fox News published an article on its Web site with the headline “Who Is Keith Ellison? Left-Wing Congressman with Past Ties to Nation of Islam Wants DNC Job.” Other conservative outlets ran pieces with similar insinuations, and, on December 1st, CNN published a detailed report on writings, mainly from Ellison’s law-school years, in which he defended the demagogic Louis Farrakhan, who broke with Warith Deen Muhammad’s reform movement in the late seventies and reclaimed the “Nation of Islam” designation for his own newly separatist group. Ellison never joined the Nation of Islam, but he was known in Minnesota, even during his early state-legislative campaigns, for his friendly relationship with it. He adopted the sorts of monikers that people associate with the Nation: Keith X. Ellison, Keith Ellison-Muhammad. “Minister Farrakhan is a role model for black youth,” he wrote in an op-ed for Insight News. “He is not an anti-Semite.” When Nils Hasselmo, the president of the University of Minnesota at the time, criticized a student group’s decision to invite Stokely Carmichael to campus, citing Carmichael’s bizarre assertion that Zionists had aided Nazism during the Second World War, Ellison wrote that Hasselmo had taken offense at the assertion “without offering any factual refutation of it.”

Youthful zeal doesn’t quite suffice as an explanation—Ellison was in his late twenties when many of the writings in question were published. It’s true that, in the early nineties, the Nation of Islam was near the center of black activist politics; Ellison often reminds reporters that Barack Obama attended Farrakhan’s Million Man March. And Ellison’s friendliness toward the Nation might have been as pragmatic as it was heartfelt; for all his idealism, he is clearly ambitious, and, even today, many black activists tend to leaven their criticisms of Farrakhan with nods to his efforts on behalf of black equality.

In 2006, when opponents of Ellison’s congressional campaign called attention to his writings, he distanced himself from the Nation and renounced Farrakhan as an anti-Semite and a bigot. He told me that he’d thought it was a settled matter, and seemed perhaps naïvely surprised that it had become an issue for him again. Hours after the CNN story ran, the Anti-Defamation League released a statement saying that the old writings were “disqualifying” in the D.N.C. race, and the Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban called Ellison “an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual.”