CHICAGO AND U OF C - BOTH IN THE PITS
I am a third year economics major at the University of Chicago…
I recently left the [Democratic] Party (though I will still vote Democrat until Trumpism is defeated) because political culture on the left has become increasingly toxic. I cannot consider myself in the same political tribe with people who think that all white people are racist, Israel is a white colonial state, speech is violence, the definition of good policy is throwing enormous sums of money at a problem, and the meritocracy is racist.
Of course, not all Democrats believe these things, but many of my peers do—peers who have the power to cancel me for my centrist views at any time they chose. The final straw for me was during the conflict in Israel a few months ago when many of my Leftist current and former classmates were sharing Instagram posts with rhetoric that could have come straight from a neo-Nazi. As a Jew, I was so horrified by what my supposed political allies were saying that I felt no choice but to disassociate from them and from the Democratic Party as a whole because of its refusal to condemn such rhetoric.
The reason I am writing today is the uptick in violence that we have seen this past year. UChicago is (was) in a somewhat safe neighborhood, Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. However, we have had three UChicago community members murdered in the past year. Three. One grad student, one undergrad, and one recent graduate. This gives UChicago a murder rate of 15 per 100,000, three times the national average. On top of this, there was an assassination attempt of a congressional candidate (we do not know if he was specifically targeted or not) on my walking route back to my apartment. Had this shooting happened half an hour later, I would have been there too. This is not to mention the almost daily armed muggings in the neighborhood. I am terrified to leave my apartment and when I do, I cannot bring anything that I am not willing to have stolen from me. That means I won't bring my computer to class, even though this is essentially a necessity in the modern classroom....
The worst part is that when we students expressed our fears and demanded more policing of the neighborhood to keep us safe, left wing student activists called us racists and demanded, once again, that the campus police department be defunded. Similarly, Democrats in office refuse to believe that there is a crime problem and won't advocate for any policies that would make us safer because this opposes the interests of the Democratic base. UChicago’s President says that he will “work with the mayor” to reduce crime in the neighborhood, but for once I agree with Reagan: the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the Chicago mayor’s office, and I’m here to help.”
To summarize where I think we are: our democracy is under threat from the Right and our freedom of speech is under threat from the Left. The Right is advocating for political violence and the Left is advocating for policies to increase crime that threatens my life and the lives of my peers at UChicago.
The Right houses anti-Semites like the “good people on both sides” at Charlottesville and Marjorie Taylor Greene, while the Left houses anti-Semites who attack Israel’s right to exist and promote deranged conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi tropes. The Right ignores policy problems that are important like climate change, while the Left promotes policy solutions where the only metric of success is the price tag. The skit from SNL from two weeks, “Republican or Not,” sums it up pretty well. My question to you and the Bulwark team is, how am I supposed to vote for someone (like Mayor Lightfoot) whose policies make me too scared to leave my apartment? How am I supposed to vote for someone (like Ilhan Omar) who votes against foreign aid to Israel and promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that could potentially endanger my life when I go to Shabbat? I hate Trump and Trumpism as much as you do. I hate this current Republican Party as much as you do. I miss 2015 before I even knew who Trump was and took joy in learning about politics and supporting Democratic causes.
In today’s world, there has to be another option. I will continue to vote Democrat as long as the Republicans pose a threat to the Republic, but I should not have to vote for people who I believe are dangerous to myself, my friends, and our country. I think the answer is structuring a non-partisan, pro-democracy coalition that endorses good, moderate candidates from both sides of the aisle while opposing the dangerous ones. Admittedly, they would be supporting basically a handful of Republicans and most of the Democrats, but this might be a force that independents and centrists could attach to, ultimately bringing the parties closer to the center to gain this endorsement.
This email is much longer than I intended, so I will just conclude by saying once again how grateful I am to you and the team for the excellent work. You are making a difference both to me personally and to the rest of us who no longer have an ideological home.
Best,
Ian Bamford
