Counterpoint | Socialists lead. Moderates like Frey claim credit.

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At 7:30 a.m. on a Wednesday in November 2016, I attended “Wake Up with Jacob,” an event hosted by then-Minneapolis City Council Member Jacob Frey. Low-wage workers in the city were organizing to demand living wages as part of the national Fight for $15 movement, but Frey’s headline topic was self-driving cars. During the Q&A, my neighbors asked Frey to publicly support a $15 minimum wage for all Minneapolis workers. He refused.

This was one of many moments in the yearslong Fight for $15 in Minneapolis led by socialists and workers. The movement had to pressure the City Council for more than three years to raise the minimum wage. Of the 13 council members, 12 were Democrats.

That’s why Jacob Hill’s recent counterpoint “Democratic socialism is not like New Deal progressivism” made me laugh out loud. After patently misrepresenting the democratic socialist political agenda, Hill claims that policies including the $15 minimum wage “have been broadly supported by both so-called ‘moderates’ and leftists, often led by a coalition of members from both camps. These are not points of division. They’re points of consensus.”

This revisionist history is the moderate playbook: Resist and delay change every step of the way, then claim credit for it.

The Fight for $15 in Minneapolis started when independent socialist Ty Moore ran for City Council in 2013 on a platform of a $15 minimum wage, a groundbreaking proposal in Minneapolis politics. After narrowly losing, Moore, alongside socialist and worker organizations, launched 15 Now, a grassroots coalition for $15. In contrast, Democratic City Council members elected in 2013 obstructed progress for more than three years under intense pressure by the Downtown Council, the Chamber of Commerce and the Restaurant Association to oppose a $15 minimum wage. These council members were not leaders of the movement — they were the targets.

Personally, I think I’d be humiliated to claim credit for raising the minimum wage after making workers earning poverty wages beg me for years. But I don’t know what that feels like, because since 2013 I’ve chosen to work with socialists: the political leaders who are brave enough to fight for what’s right before it’s popular.

Seven years after “Wake Up with Jacob,” I watched Mayor Frey veto a $15 minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers. I wasn’t surprised: As a veteran of the Fight for $15, I expect Frey and other Democrats to oppose popular demands every step of the way.

But as a socialist, I also know that political leadership means advancing ideas that many Democrats call radical and impossible — until they start calling them common sense.

So it is with Jacob Hill, former campaign manager for Frey, claiming that Minneapolis Democrats supported $15 all along.

So it’s been for decades: In the early 1900s, socialists were political leaders in the labor movement, championing ideas like weekends and trade unions. Socialists were leaders in the civil rights movement and subsequent struggles for integration and racial justice. The New Deal, which Hill is so eager to differentiate from socialism, is well-known to be a limited implementation of signature socialist policies and programs like government-backed jobs, public investment in art and large-scale public works. More recently, democratic socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders championed single-payer health care and taxing the rich — proposals that are still being discredited by many moderates, but have documented popularity throughout the working class.

It is socialists, not moderate Democrats, who will continue to demonstrate political leadership in Minneapolis. Socialists are putting bold and needed ideas on the table, like social housing, municipal grocery stores and taxing the rich. Predictably, many Democrats are lambasting these ideas and the people who champion them. But I believe that, 10 years from now, these proposals will be like a $15 minimum wage — ideas that moderates called impossible and fought like hell against, until socialists and working-class people changed what was possible.

Ten years from now, I believe we will have a more socialist city, where the rich pay their fair share, where all people have affordable and stable housing, where groceries are affordable and so much more. That’s a future worth fighting for, no matter who claims credit.