A Mighty Wind
Democrats are endorsing striking teachers. That doesn’t mean the party’s abandoning its education agenda, but it does mean that the working class is making itself harder to ignore.
People rally in the streets of downtown LA in the pouring rain during a United Teachers Los Angeles strike on January 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.Barbara Davidson / Getty
When Chicago teachers struck in 2012, the entire liberal political class seemed against them, as Corey Robin noted last year. The strike was provoked by a Democratic power player, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and liberal pundits lined up to tut-tut about how a strike waged for “the schools Chicago’s children deserve” was actually hurting Chicago’s children.
In March 2016, the Chicago Teachers Union struck again, walking off the job for a day to protest budget cuts and demand the rich pony up more for public schools. Bernie Sanders voiced his support; he even held a news conference in Chicago about it. And two days later, after Emanuel endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primary, Bernie responded, “I want to thank Rahm Emanuel for not endorsing me. I don’t want the endorsement of a mayor shutting down schools and firing teachers.”
Back then, Bernie’s support for striking teachers made him an outlier on the national political stage. But now, things have changed.
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