At a pivotal moment for Chicago’s left, North Side alderman tries to bridge socialism and pragmatism

Ald. Andre Vasquez was almost done arranging chairs inside a barren church basement in Edgewater when he stopped to listen to a woman deliver a warning.

The Rev. Beth Brown, a member of the Chicago police community commission, began tallying on her fingers the reasons Mayor Brandon Johnson should scrap his new plan to house migrants in encampments staffed by a security contractor. Too many people in tents that wouldn’t withstand winter temperatures, overseen by a controversial private company, Brown said.

Vasquez, Johnson’s hand-picked chair of the City Council immigration committee, agreed the mayor’s tent plan seemed misguided.

“They’re gaslighting us,” the 40th Ward alderman said, before peeling away to find a home for the last seat.

The tenor of the community meeting itself was quite different. The September evening event christened “Reimagining Public Safety” saw many members of the small, mostly white crowd focus on traditional crime concerns such as 911 response times and vehicle thefts. Vasquez largely kept his responses procedural.

The juxtaposition in approaches underscores the high-wire act the 44-year-old alderman has been attempting since first winning office in 2019.

A self-styled democratic socialist in his sophomore term, Vasquez knocked out a 36-year incumbent to win the seat representing the neighborhoods of Andersonville, Lincoln Square and Edgewater, an election that was as much about dissatisfaction with the status quo as it was about the former battle rapper’s candidacy. His North Side ward is marked by progressive voters but also wealthy homeowners who are upset over violence and property taxes.

Vasquez’s endeavors to straddle those two constituencies have at times put him at odds with both ends of the spectrum, with some surmising he is more politically expedient than he lets on. He has been painted as an anti-law enforcement extremist by his social media critics on the right, yet the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America renounced him in 2020 for a budget vote that maintained Police Department funding.

The alderman is no longer a member of the local DSA, but he still labels himself a socialist — just a realistic one. “When you have movements of people who rightfully, and justifiably, are angry at government, it feels like the only energy people know is angst,” he said in a recent interview.

“We’ve never been in a moment like the one we were in, where we actually had movement candidates in office,” Vasquez added. “There was no understanding of what it looks like to actually co-govern. And there still isn’t.”

Vasquez was elected with four other aldermen who labeled themselves democratic socialists — joining DSA member Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who had taken office in 2015 — in what some have dubbed a “red wave.” Though their agenda was frequently stymied under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the broader progressive movement saw themselves officially switch from rabble-rousers to ruling class with the election of Johnson in April.

Vasquez said he knows grassroots anxieties on how that transition should unfold continue to swirl around City Hall after decades of deferred hopes over seeing a progressive in the mayor’s office. But now that Johnson’s mandate to vanquish the “politics of old” is being put to the test, the 40th Ward alderman worries the political left will squander the moment by miring itself in purity tests rather than finding ways to accomplish things in an ideologically divided City Council.

At the same time, Vasquez has held onto a streak of independence even after Johnson tapped him for a committee chairmanship — a prize that traditionally comes with the expectation of by-and-large supporting the fifth floor’s agenda.

The alderman’s multiple flashpoints with the Johnson administration include its choice to keep Dorval Carter as Chicago Transit Authority board president; shutting out Mexican Independence Day revelers from downtown — to which the alderman sarcastically posted on X, “I mean, it ain’t raising bridges, but…;” and the new tentative Chicago police union contract that Vasquez cast as “even more disappointing” coming from “an administration that claims to want to reform.”

Still, Vasquez again displayed his political tightrope skills by criticizing Johnson’s proposed 2024 budget for its potential to grow future deficits, only to then cast his vote in favor of the plan.

Back at the meeting inside the Edgewater church, he was far less fiery. A local Chicago police commander spoke for much of the time, his clipped speech and crew cut serving as a foil of sorts to the alderman’s ease with slang and casual outfit. But by the 50-minute mark, a restless Vasquez couldn’t help caving to his more radical side.

“That would be me,” he piped up at a question addressed to unspecified officials who have been critical of the size of the CPD budget. Then he began his pitch on streamlining police spending, but in terms that would resonate with the 40th Ward crowd: “How many of you guys like your taxes being higher? Please put your hands up. Didn’t think so.”

“If you put money into a system, and you’re not getting the results that you want to see on the other end, you want to lift up the hood and see what’s working,” Vasquez said. “Calling for a (police) budget audit is just being fiscally responsible, right?”

Yet three years ago, the alderman fatefully threw his support behind Lightfoot’s COVID-19 budget that preserved CPD spending amid a nationwide reckoning against policing. Within minutes, the local DSA chapter called on him to resign from the organization and said his vote “preserves the white supremacist power of the Chicago Police Department,” among other charges.

Reflecting on that moment this fall, Vasquez said he remains puzzled why the chapter would not let him explain why he opted to trade support for progressive concessions from Lightfoot and “mitigate damage” during a time of austerity, even as reallocating Chicago police funds remained a future goal. Moreover, the alderman said, the idea of DSA dictating who gets to be a socialist is antithetical to its roots.

“As socialists, we want to do things as a collective,” Vasquez said. “So the fact that we’re picking and choosing who we want to be in that collective is actually a lot more in line with the systems we’re trying to break down.”

Since that vote, Vasquez has also watched with curiosity as Lightfoot — and now Johnson — introduced budgets with more CPD funding that DSA aldermen nevertheless voted for without the same repercussions. Indeed, the 2021 budget that landed Vasquez in trouble actually slightly curtailed Chicago police spending amid pandemic-related cuts, though the amount was minuscule and more than restored the next year before going up every year after that.

No aldermen with the City Council’s official Democratic Socialist Caucus — Daniel La Spata, 1st, Jeanette Taylor, 20th, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, 33rd, Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, and new member Angela Clay, 46th — agreed to be interviewed for this story, and the leadership of the Chicago DSA did not respond to a request for comment.

Steve Weishampel, a member of the Chicago DSA and former co-chair, said the organization in hindsight has acknowledged several concurrent influences can drive an elected official’s budget vote, but the right model of engaging with politicians on the group’s “red lines” is hotly debated.

“It’s a microcosm of the big problem — the big question on the left … How much purity can we demand?” Weishampel said. “I would not want to elect a socialist who, just like at the end of ‘Animal Farm,’ starts to look like all the others. … They have to stay radical. They can’t become a normie.”

“Defund the police” protests skyrocketed after the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, galvanizing DSA ranks in ways not seen since Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, but the urgency subsided and the organization toned down its most militant cries. That boom-and-bust of “defund” also followed Johnson, who spoke admiringly of the cause in 2020 but would years later backtrack as his mayoral campaign gained traction.

Vasquez, who endorsed candidate Jesús “Chuy” García in the first round of voting before flipping to Johnson in the runoff, said the selective indignation the city’s political left applies when someone’s philosophy on policing is problematic and when it’s acceptable must be reconciled.

“There was a lot of heavy ‘defund’ energy going on, and a lot of work about reimagining public safety and a police budget. But because Mayor Johnson got elected, oh, we’re gonna chill on that now?” Vasquez said. “If you got that answer from Mayor Lightfoot, what would you be doing right now?”

The Democratic Socialists of America was officially formed as the nation’s largest socialist group in the 1980s, with roots stretching back to the Socialist Party of America of more than a century ago and 6,000 founding members.

Following the 2016 presidential election, membership surged with momentum from the one-two punch of Sanders’ populist campaign themes lighting a fire under a new generation of young Americans, followed by the backlash to the election of Donald Trump.

From 2015 to 2016, national ranks soared from 6,200 to 11,000, then more than doubled the next year before peaking at 95,000 in 2021, according to an internal report. But after that, membership tapered off and now lands around 78,000.

Marco Rossi, who has analyzed Chicago City Council voting patterns for the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the falloff isn’t shocking given the organization’s growing pains. As a member of DSA himself, Rossi said the organization is still reckoning with the same sort of quandaries it had the day it censured Vasquez.

“There always is a tension within an organization between candidates and activists,” Rossi said. “The organization is grappling with that tension now … of how do we manage now that we have some electoral successes? How do we manage this very unique organization?”

Sitting on a bench in the Ainslie Arts Plaza in Lincoln Square on a late summer afternoon, Vasquez recalled how the area was once a dilapidated eyesore. But his first year in office, he said he convinced owners of the McDonald’s behind him to get on board with what he billed as a “public takeover” of the land abutting North Lincoln Avenue for pedestrians.

Now he could see the fruits of his labor: a splashy, abstract mural sprawled on the ground, underneath crisscrossing strings of globe lights. A trio of girls laughed nearby as they pushed a shopping cart. Vasquez thought of his own youth as the rapper “Optimus Prime,” who would be regularly kicked out of Grant Park while performing.

Creating a new public arts space is a socialist undertaking, Vasquez said. But he also highlighted the truism that being a Chicago alderman is more about pointing to accomplishments within the ward than it is about political ideology.

“People were like, ‘OK, we know we elected this socialist guy or whatever. We hope he knows how to do the job,’” Vasquez said. “My political leaning is a little more to the left of a lot of our neighbors, but I know that … by creating that kind of fabric in your community, you’re getting those thoughts out there.”

ayin@chicagotribune.com