Three years before Bernie Sanders entered the national stage with his 2016 bid for the Democratic primary, Kshama Sawant brought socialism back to the American vocabulary by becoming the first open socialist in nearly a century to win a citywide election in Seattle, Washington.

The issues Sawant championed in Seattle have become central demands of the now-resurgent left: a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, raising taxes on the wealthy, and rent control in quickly gentrifying cities. Despite charges that she was “too ideological,” voters returned her to the city council in 2015, showing not only that the Left could win office, but keep it.

Crucially, Sawant has also been outspoken on racial and gender oppression, imperialism, and US support for Israel. This has served to undermine one of the Democrats’ central rationalizations for refusing to take on Sanders’s social-democratic policies: that you can’t talk about social and economic justice at the same time. Sawant’s tenure has shown that not only can the Left take on both economic and racial and gender justice, but that it should.