Socialists Must Throw Their Full Weight Behind Nixon For Senate

The Lieutenant Colonel and the Populist

The elections in Florida this past week have come and gone, and left-wing populist Angela Nixon has shocked the South, and the whole nation, with her upset victory in the Democratic primary election for Senate. 

“Upset” is, in fact, perhaps too pussyfooted of a word. Nixon's opponent, Alexander Vindman, was far and away the front-runner candidate. Vindman's background is interesting to analyze, although no one in Florida seemed to agree, so you could be forgiven for following their lead. 

Vindman was born in the USSR, but his family left for Brooklyn when he was a child. He strove hard, graduating from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, with one eye always fixed on joining the American military. He eagerly signed up for the United States’ terrorist war on Iraq before barely surviving getting blown up by a roadside bomb, for which he received a Purple Heart. 

Despite his injuries, he loyally ascended the chain of command so that one day he could direct young soldiers to get blown up in imperialist wars, for which, if they survived, they too might receive shining pieces of metal. He proved effective at slithering up the pipe, eventually finding himself appointed to the National Security Council by President Donald Trump in 2018. 

During the first failed Trump impeachment, he earned countless commendations from MSNBC for serving as the crucial whistleblower willing to testify about Trump's threatening of Zelenskyy—offering arms for Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden. After losing his job due to the botched effort, he retired to Florida, spending the next several years rounding the media circuit and drumming up support for Ukraine and Israel.

When Vindman announced his intentions to run for Marco Rubio's vacated Senate seat, the entire liberal world stepped forth with tribute in hand. He gallivanted around America's wineries, collecting $16.3 million from rich donors eager to see Trump suffer a black eye in the backyard of the Winter White House. 

Certainly Ashley Moody, the big law demon appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to serve as interim senator, felt the identity of her opponent to be predetermined. She was surely ready to fight like hell to paint her likely opponent as a Russiagate-addled, out-of-touch traitor, channeling the same vigor with which she fought to strip access to healthcare and criminalize weed during her time as Florida Attorney General.

Angela Nixon, however, had other ideas. Born and raised in Jacksonville, she is a true child of the state, graduating with a BA from the University of Florida. She spent the past twenty years dutifully serving and organizing her hometown. She founded initiatives like Melanin Market (which brought together Black-owned small businesses into a sort of farmers’ market) and Cafe Resistance (a Black Liberation bookstore and coffee shop meant to protect the local culture of radical education in the direct aftermath of DeSantis' banning of "leftist" books). 

She started a family, eventually co-authoring a children's book with her daughter Natalie called The Adventures of Moxie McGriff. The book won the One Spark prize and was widely regarded as a successful first venture into the field. 

She has a deep connection with the Service Employees International Union, currently serving as director of the affiliate Florida Public Service Union's Higher Education campaign. And in 2020, she first entered the electoral stage by knocking off incumbent do-nothing Democrat Kimberly Daniels in the Florida House of Representatives' 14th District.  

Populism as a Political Tactic

Populism is not, as many inept pundits claim, a measure of how "radical" or "illiberal" one's policy platform is, or how many white papers can be mustered to prove the benefit of those policies to the working class. It is opposed to government by “experts.” It abhors those who assert that if only the simple people could be convinced to put some cohort of righteous geniuses in charge, these technocrats would do the best for the people on their behalf, preferably with as little democratic input as possible. 

We surely have their best interests at heart, after all. 

Geese has discussed previously our view of populism as a necessary phase of the historical tasks of socialism, crucial in articulating the revolutionary proletariat that will carry out democratic revolution in America. When I discuss populism here, however, I refer to the term strictly in a more narrow scope; as an explicit political strategy of politicians and political movements to contest for state power. 

The heart of that strategy is located not in technocratic deliverism, even of the most generous and wide-reaching kind, but in the simple concern that the people do not feel they have any power over their own lives or government. That they are controlled by systems not built for them, that care nothing for how they want to live or die, managed by individuals whom they will never meet, living lives utterly strange to them, forcing conditions of immiseration and humiliation upon them—this is the content of the modern populist approach to politics. 

It has what might be called a weak ideological character. It can be paired with a nationalist message in which cultural cosmopolitans from ‘over there’ are ruling over the ‘real’ Americans—the true ‘Volk’—long forgotten and soon to be replaced by degenerate foreigners. Likewise, it can be paired with a liberal message in which soulless bureaucrats lock out the meritorious and the virtuous from their rightful place at the top of the heap. But it can also be, self-evidently, paired with a socialist message. 

What I want to drive home is that populism is not about policy, except insofar as policy serves as a signifier meant to illustrate that the individual offering the policy is on the side of the people, that the individual is like them, and that they authentically hate the right enemies. The purpose of populist politics is for politicians to present themselves as people who can serve as a vehicle by which the people might take back control of their own lives from the decadent elites who look down on people like us and lock us out of power. 

Populism is a highly emotional political register. It is not interested in convincing highbrow opinion writers of the “logical consistency” or “evidence-based” nature of a particular platform or policy. The logic of populism is simple: power to the people. The evidence to support such a prescription is even more straightforward, and grants populism its basic emotional power. There are more of us than there are of them, and yet they are the ones with control.

Angie Nixon understands this better than most. The klansmen who run the Republican Party in states like Florida have spent the past decade or more working tirelessly to unwind the legal gains of the Civil Rights Movement with the aid and comfort of the Federal Judiciary. The Black masses of the South are once again, as always, under vicious political attack. 

Black majority districts are being cut up and packed in, a terrifying historical rhyme with the "Redeemer" campaign to break the back of Reconstruction-era multiracial governance. A startling number of Black individuals have been found hanging from trees all over the country, their fates being ruled "suicides" by the same law enforcement agencies that shoot Black children without a second thought.

When the white supremacist campaign reached Florida in 2022, Angie Nixon staged a raucous sit-in campaign, serving as a tribune for a Black community whose political power, always precarious in the old Confederacy, was under imminent threat. When the Republicans pushed ahead regardless, maliciously redrawing Nixon's own district in the process, she managed to win re-election anyway. 

After the slaughter in Palestine kicked up to its current blood-soaked pace in 2023, Nixon introduced a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire. She did so on November 9th, far before most Democrats were willing to do anything other than mindlessly repeat Netanyahu's genocidal talking points. 

To give a sense of the bravery of this position (and the depravity of the establishment) in that particular political environment, the resolution was effortlessly defeated 104 to 2. When Nixon demanded to know how many more innocents must be killed by Israel, one fellow Republican proudly responded, “All of them.”

When Florida Republicans took a second bite at the redistricting apple, unhappy with only partially breaking the back of Black voting power, Angie Nixon took a megaphone into the State House and decried the corrupt and racist establishment for stripping power from the people. She was arrested while carrying out another sit-in in the office of that damned meatball, the weasel of Tallahassee, the honorable Ron DeSantis. 

If you can sense my venom, it comes from a personal place. My wife and I were both born and grew up in the Sunshine State. Despite taking on the role of fascist Mecca in the past decade, it remains a place of spectacular natural beauty and many, many brilliant and kind people forced to endure the misrule of racist buffoons and corrupt incompetents. 

The Florida Democratic Party is infamously weak and incapable; it leaves its candidates with no infrastructure with which to contest Republican domination. Florida contains no fewer than four major metropolitan areas while being as racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse as any place in America. That population has endured unending assault by DHS terrorists in their ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign. 

It is, despite its reputation, an excellent breeding ground for socialism, of which places like Tampa have a long and storied history. Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs took second place in the state in the election of 1912, almost entirely off the back of the organized workers of the city. The people who have been abandoned and forgotten by the Florida Democrats demand a champion, demand a political force through which they might liberate themselves and take back control of their lives from the ghouls who torture, belittle, and exploit them.

Alexander Vindman was an uncut mixture of jello and mayonnaise—a perfect avatar for the inept flailing of the Democratic Party in Florida. It is no wonder the people chose a champion willing to contest power rather than compromise. To advocate rather than vacillate. To speak clearly about whose side she was on and that there are enemies within our midst and we must not bend to them, work around them, or appease them. We must defeat them.

Vindman's inability to understand this was clear for all to see. He quite literally laughed, like some bad Will Ferrell character from a 2000s-era political comedy, at the idea of facing a challenge from Nixon. Nixon, meanwhile, convinced a majority of the Democratic primary electorate of the truth: that Vindman was a carpetbagging hack who had a stick so far up his ass he wasn't able to turn his neck around enough to see the demands of the people whose votes he was arrogantly expecting. She earned the last laugh.

The Primary Task of Our Movement 

Unfortunately however, there wasn't much talk among DSA leadership about Angie Nixon prior to the election (who is a DSA member, albeit a relatively recent one). Instead, most focus seemed to be on the campaign of Oliver Larkin, who fell short of his effort to displace centrist mainstay and all-around Zionist freak Jared Moskowitz in Florida's 25th U.S. House district. 

Moskowitz, for what it's worth, celebrated his moment of victory, as the entire centrist establishment seems obsessed with doing, by derangedly tweeting about Hasan Piker before giving a second thought to first thanking those who elected him or even acknowledging the support of his own family. 

DSA's focus on Larkin is understandable. He is a pure "cadre candidate." He was going after an open and stated enemy of DSA. He was doing well in the attention economy—going everywhere and talking to everyone. He was rewarded with virality numerous times for his uncompromising (albeit still not aggressive enough) interview style. To take one example, he fearlessly went on Fox News to unapologetically label the President exactly what he is: a pedophile. 

But his district was always going to be a hard one to win, and again, he was nowhere near a perfect communicator. This does not mean he shouldn't have run (he absolutely should have) or that the results were still not impressive (he did far better than would have been imaginable even five years ago, especially for his wealthy and elderly district). 

I simply mean to ask: why did I hear more about Angie Nixon and her campaign, which actually won statewide, from my relatively apolitical wife, as compared to DSA advocates, organizers, and leaders? Why were there no demands made by prominent DSA voices for the National Political Committee to endorse Nixon, like there were for Larkin? Why, instead, was the narrative so squarely focused on "everyone's favorite white boy"? 

Months ago, Geese published that there is no socialism without Black socialists. Ain't that the truth. Angela Nixon displayed what Chris Rabb, Darializa Avila-Chevalier, and Summer Lee have long made clear: winning the white ideological left is not enough to win a Democratic primary. Without buy-in from the Black masses, our movement is dead in the water. 

To really lay out the magnitude of her breakthrough, a more granular look at the voter data is required. Nixon shattered the narrative of the traditional strength of socialist candidates relying purely on their domination with college-educated voters. In fact, Nixon precisely inverted this, doing better with voters the less they were educated. Her worst group was college graduates. 

Vindman really only held strength among the very old; every other age group broke for Nixon. She rang up massive numbers in her hometown, Duval County. She won all of the poorest counties in the state, and most crucially, she—an open member of the Democratic Socialists of America in Florida—won Black voters. Not by a little, but by 30 points. 

This is the only kind of coalition that can win a Democratic presidential primary. 

Some socialists in the state might hesitate to throw their full weight behind Nixon in the aftermath of recent statements calling herself a “capitalist who believes we need some strong regulation.” To be clear, neither Geese nor I endorse this statement. We are Communists, plain and simple. 

But at this particular historical juncture, as painful as such an admission may be, what does such a statement matter? Nixon remains a clear, unabashed representative of the left insurgency that is currently forging a political pole that will make such differences legible to the masses. So that soon they might understand that “capitalism with heavy regulation” is scarier and more dangerous than socialism could ever be, at least to the interests of the millions, if not the oligarchs. 

We rise on Nixon's victory, and we fall on her defeat. It should be noted that she decided to join the Democratic Socialists of America during the campaign. She took on electoral risk in a state with more registered Republicans than Democrats by throwing her lot in with the most radical mass political organization in the country. She fixed her name to ours. Should we not do the same? 

Oliver Larkin has come out and offered a full-throated endorsement of Nixon, requesting his army of volunteers' labor to secure her yet another upset victory. He did not hesitate to do so. For those saying Larkin was worth following to hell and back, is he not worth listening to now? 

Upon her victory, Angie Nixon displayed exactly the charismatic confidence that won her the nomination while all the political wizards dismissed her as a sure failure. When Nixon triumphed, her GOP opponent, Ashley Moody, descended into a babbling, frothing rage, ranting incoherently about the Islamo-Communist-Black Radicals coming to steal white babies and drink their blood. Nixon thundered back: "She can call me whatever she likes, come November she will call me Senator." 

It will be a tough battle, but DSA must fight to make her prediction come true. The left would do well to listen to her. Her political instincts and understanding of populism have culminated in a breakthrough for socialist politics that most would have dismissed as impossible before the fact of her victory. She did so while being outspent 16 to 1. She has spent the past twenty years fighting for her town, for Black liberation, and for the left. What does it say about us if we cannot repay that in kind? Should we be surprised when the Black masses feel alienated from us in their struggle against white supremacy? 

The ball is in our court now. Socialism in Florida is a tall order, but the remarkable spirit of passionate camaraderie and the laudable efforts of the tens of thousands who door-knocked and phone-banked for Ollie Larkin must now be redeployed in favor of Angie Nixon. Those working the ground game made no error, and their efforts bore beautiful fruit. The next battle is clear, and we must take our place on the front line. The people demand someone step forward and help them seize power for themselves. If we don't offer them anyone, their demands will not evaporate into thin air. They will simply be met by someone less amiable to our movement than Angie Nixon.