In response to last year’s historic Black Lives Matter uprising, with 20 million taking to the streets, the ruling class and right wing responded with 81 bills criminalizing peaceful protest in front of 34 state legislatures and over 250 voter suppression laws in 43 states, both offensives initiated by the Republicans but with no effective resistance from the Democrats. Now, both voter suppression and the attack on the right to protest have arrived squarely in liberal Seattle in the form of the right-wing Recall campaign against my socialist council office.

The Recall campaign is using massive voter suppression via a low-turnout winter special election, and the unelected state supreme court’s stamp of approval on the ballot itself, in an attempt to construct the most undemocratic election possible.

If the Recall succeeds, it will set a new and deeply dangerous precedent: when the ruling class fails to unseat left elected representatives through “normal” means like flooding races with corporate cash, or neutralize them through cooptation, they can resort to extraordinary measures like this recall. We see the same phenomenon at play in Buffalo, New York, where the City Council equivalent is threatening to abolish the position of mayor just one month after democratic socialist India Walton won the Democratic mayoral primary.