Rally WHO WILL WIN THE CITY? 2010–2019

The Seahawks and the Obama administration were united in underachievement. A Chicago lawyer raised by a single mother from Seattle, Obama was supposed to institutionalize a sea change in American politics—à la Franklin Delano Roosevelt—by advancing permanent progressive wins for the increasingly liberal, increasingly brown, increasingly urban electorate that voted him into office twice. Super Bowl XLVIII champs, the Seattle Seahawks were supposed to be NFL royalty, a team of labor-friendly upper-management and politically outspoken left-of-center players who showed there was a different way to win in the conservative world of pro-football. Not enough of it materialized. By 2015, Obama’s presidency appeared more a cultural achievement than a political one, with the country’s first Black president barred from appointing Supreme Court Justices by the hardball tactics of Senate Republicans. Simultaneously, the Seahawks were ignominiously stripped of their title by a team of patriots, putting an end to their football insurgency. The two unfulfilled dynasties—one in sports, the other in politics—were bonded by unmet promise.

When the Seahawks visited the White House in May 2014, three months after slaughtering the Denver Broncos to win the Super Bowl, Obama unfurled a big blue “Twelfth Man” flag for a big “blue” country. The president addressed media members while holding the official flag of Seahawks fandom with the champs. In Seattle he saw something of himself. Speaking to the White House press corps, the president highlighted quarterback Russell Wilson, recognizing in Wilson his own unlikely rise to power: “He’s the second African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl. Nobody commented on it, which tells you the progress we’ve made.”¹ A president popular among America’s youth, Obama lauded the leadership of boomer Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, who voted for him in 2008 and 2012: “Those of us in leadership positions look at folks who do things the right way. I think Coach Carroll does things the right way.” Obama even wanted to be like running back Marshawn Lynch, who skipped the White House hoopla, usually ignored media obligations, and offered absurdist catch phrases (I’m here so I won’t get fined) and one-word answers (thankful) when pressed. “I’m sorry Marshawn Lynch isn’t here, because I wanted to say how much I admire his approach to the press,” said the president. In the triumph of this faraway Seattle squad to the mainstream of American sport, Obama saw his reflection: “As a guy who was elected president named Barack Obama, I root for the underdogs. Seeing folks overcome the odds excites me. And that’s what this team is all about.”²

As America recovered from the 2008 recession with the underpaid labor of millennial tech and freelance workers, Carroll’s 2010 book Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion became popular fodder for America’s managerial class. The coach had spun his quest to build a formidable football team into a new age manifesto on workplace culture, complete with Post-it note mantras like “either you’re competing or you’re not” and “competing is better than winning because it lasts longer.”³ An NFL reporter described the environment fostered in Seattle as “refreshing and progressive.” Inspired bosses patronized a consulting firm Carroll started as an offshoot of his book. Tech mogul Paul Allen praised Carroll for going “far beyond what makes a great football coach.”⁴ Back in 1987, Coach Pete was an assistant with the Minnesota Vikings who nearly became the team’s starting quarterback when players walked off the job.⁵ Almost a strikebreaker, he was now a pathbreaker of twenty-first-century capitalism.

It’d be tempting to call Carroll the second coming of Gil Dobie, both of them football savants who galvanized the city in support of tough teams during times when some feared Seattle had gone soft. Dobie reintroduced Gilded Age grit to party-obsessed students in the Progressive Era; Carroll commanded gridiron respect for the squad from America’s biggest latte town. Though the results were the same—stacks and stacks of wins—the methods differed: Dobie led with an iron fist; Carroll, with pom-poms. At Seahawks team practices Coach Pete and his staff blared loud music and played pranks. They held three-point shooting contests, and built an overall climate of mayhem that spilled onto the field on game day.⁶ Like the SuperSonics of the 1990s before them, Seahawks games during the peak of the Pete Carroll era were chaotic and unpredictable, with Seattle overwhelming opponents with crowd noise and competitive entropy. As a measure of their veracity, the Seahawks went sixty-five games in a row, between 2011 and 2015, without losing a game by double digits—the longest-ever such streak in league history.⁷

At the very least, the Seahawks gave Seattle fans three hours a week of feeling like no American city had anything over them; at their best, they transcended sport and implied something political. Other fan bases didn’t dress up in their team’s colors the Friday before games; very few of them could pack public transit with one another to attend games at a stadium in city limits, and only one other—college fans at Texas A&M—thought to call themselves the “twelfth man” because they genuinely believed they could influence what took place on the field of play, and often did. For a city infamous for its socially awkward, nonconfrontational residents, football scratched an atavistic civic itch, resurrecting a frontier rambunctiousness that had been lost on the road to tech-addled modernity.

The original Seattle Seahawks logo emblazoned a Coast Salish Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw mask on the side of a silver helmet, making white settler usurpation of Indigenous societies the supertext of the city’s participation in big-league pigskin.⁸ In this frontier-war simulation—a game centered on securing enemy territory with strength and cunning—there was an implied sense that teams from temperate climates like Seattle weren’t as tough; San Francisco coach Bill Walsh’s “West Coast offense” of quick passes and precision execution was a deviation from the brutalist vision of Northeastern military officials who popularized football in the Gilded Age. In contrast to the pretty-boy techniques coached by Mike Holmgren when Seattle lost the 2006 Super Bowl to hard-ass Pittsburgh, Pete Carroll’s smashmouth style was truer to the spirit of the sport. In 2013, Seattle went 13–3 by running the ball, reducing opposing offenses to rubble, and only launching explosive pass plays where necessary.

“Loserville, USA” was no more. Coastal liberal cities could dominate, and Seattle could be the toughest of them all. During their 2013 Super Bowl season, Seattle’s football rivalry with San Francisco pitted America’s two paradigmatic postindustrial cities against one another. In the post–World War II period, both cities parlayed federal research and defense grants to build burgeoning tech sectors. By the time a federal judge ruled that Seattle- based Microsoft had engaged in trust-busting against Silicon Valley tech firms in 2011, both the Emerald City and the Bay Area hosted corporate campuses of all the biggest tech companies in the country: Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and by 2013, Amazon, which occupied the South Lake Union lots known as the “heart of Seattle” a century earlier. For their thriving computing industries and “high average median income,” San Francisco and Seattle topped the list of Bloomberg magazine’s 2012 “Best Cities in America.”⁹

A stout defensive team with a mobile quarterback named Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers were a mirror image of Seattle. Though the Seahawks won the NFC West division in 2013, the 49ers remained close in the standings all season. The rivals met in the NFC Championship Game on January 19, 2014, with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line. When defensive back Richard Sherman tipped a Colin Kaepernick pass to teammate Malcolm Smith to end the NFC Championship Game, the rivalry was settled: Seattle was headed back to the Super Bowl, and San Francisco was headed home. Insult was added to injury when, later in the year, a transit official who once worked for the Seattle Department of Transportation colored seats on San Francisco subways in Seahawks’ blue and green.¹⁰

The Seahawks didn’t go quietly to the Super Bowl. In a postgame interview with NFL on Fox reporter Erin Andrews, Sherman chastised San Francisco for daring to throw the ball in his direction and proclaimed himself the best defensive back in the league in an explosive rant. For two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, Sherman’s boast prompted an uproar about civility in Obama-era America.¹¹ Some believed that America had become “postracial” with Obama’s election; Sherman’s cockiness showed that the path to social acceptance for Black athletes still cleaved to the politics of respectability that Obama epitomized. Sherman’s “uppity” rant provoked a racial backlash. Football fans took to social media to call him “an ignorant ape,” “a jungle monkey,” “a fucking gorilla,” “a model for today’s Taliban Youth,” and, predictably, “a n——.”¹² Of the insults hurled, “thug” seemed the most insidious because it managed to retain all the ugly racial subtext of more straightforward slurs, while remaining socially permissible.

A communications major who graduated from Stanford, Sherman pounced. “The reason it bothers me is because ‘thug’ is an accepted way of calling somebody the n-word,” he explained, his words reprinted by Time magazine, who named him one of the “100 Most Influential People” in 2014.¹³ Sherman referenced a 2012 game between the New Jersey Devils and the New York Rangers, in which the predominantly white teams fought before the game even began, highlighting racial double standards in sports coverage: “Can a guy on a football field just talking to people be a thug? There was a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey.” Sherman and the Seahawks had the last word in the discussion: on February 2, 2014, they dismantled Denver in the Super Bowl by 35 points.

The Seahawks were the champions—of the NFL and of the idea that a football team could win while standing for on-field excellence and standing for something more. On May 21, 2014, they went to see Obama.

While the Seahawks were a new kind of football team, Obama seemed a new kind of Democrat. During his 2008 campaign the senator from Illinois used social media to rally young voters, wowed crowds with his soaring rhetoric, and played basketball on the campaign trail to appeal to his urban base. Where Seattle had demonstrated a different way to win games, the president showed a different way to win elections: by energizing blocs of diverse city dwellers and reform-minded ruralities, such that wasting energy trying to convert right-wingers with watered-down policy proposals would be unnecessary. “Progressive people of color now comprise 23 percent of all voters, and progressive Whites account for 28 percent,” wrote Obama campaign operative Steve Phillips in his 2016 book Brown Is the New White. “America has a progressive multiracial majority that has the power to reshape American priorities.”¹⁴

Diverse big cities like Seattle and San Francisco powered America into a heady new progressive period. The movement was led by a president whose bohemian mother spent her young adulthood in Seattle, going to basketball games, dancing at sock hops, and discussing communism in University District coffee shops in the 1950s and 1960s. Something of the youthful JFK aura surrounded Stanley Ann Dunham’s son, who was reelected to the presidency for a second time on November 6, 2012—the same day that Washington State voters approved legalizing marijuana and same-sex marriage. Two years later, in June 2014, with the Seahawks still basking in their Super Bowl win, Seattle became the first major city in the country to adopt a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage.¹⁵ Sports, politics, and the new progressive movement met when the Seattle Seahawks visited the White House in May 2014.

During the White House press event, the president celebrated Seattle’s loud fans, its lucrative tech industry, its forward-thinking city dwellers, and the social progress their football team embodied. Within a year, however, both the Seahawks’ bid to repeat as champions and Obama’s presidential agenda would be in shambles.

Seattle stumbled to a 3–3 start to its 2014 campaign, took three games in a row against mediocre competition, then dropped to 6–4 after running back Marshawn Lynch failed to convert a short fourth down in Kansas City on November 16, 2014—one of five times that season when Lynch faltered in high-leverage short yardage situations behind Seattle’s shaky offensive line.¹⁶ The Seahawks regained championship form and made it back to the playoffs as the best team in the conference. In January 2015 they beat the Carolina Panthers to advance to the NFC Championship Game, then played one of the wildest games in NFL history: a 28–22 overtime win against the Green Bay Packers, in which Seattle rallied from a 16-point third-quarter deficit to advance to the Super Bowl. Awaiting the Seahawks in the championship game was an opponent that was everything they were not.

If the Seahawks were emblematic of Obama-era America, the New England Patriots were their conservative counterparts: buttoned-down, lacking Seattle’s sociopolitical braggadocio, completely comfortable in the Bush White House, which they had visited three times after winning Super Bowls in 2002, 2004, and 2005. Befitting of their status as the representative American sports team of the Patriot Act era, New England was caught illegally surveilling opponents in 2007.¹⁷ New England embodied the conservative tide that Obama had overcome in 2008; they were the kind of dull establishmentarian drones that Pete Carroll never wanted his team to become. To be the first repeat Super Bowl Champions since New England a decade earlier, the progressive Seahawks would have to defeat a team infamous for its repressed work atmosphere. In a rare act of self-expression permitted by Patriots management, a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap was spotted in Tom Brady’s locker in 2015.

Played February 1, 2015, at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Super Bowl XLIX was a back-and-forth affair between two proud teams, with New England taking a 7–0 lead in the first quarter, Seattle storming back to tie, the Patriots going ahead 14–7, and Seattle ending the first half with a Russell Wilson strike to tie the game. Despite losing two key defensive starters to injury, Seattle built a 10-point lead in the third quarter but failed to put the game out of reach when Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler broke up a critical third down conversion deep in New England territory. Seattle’s depleted defense gave up two fourth-quarter touchdowns. Down four, the Seahawks had two minutes to try to win the title. Russell Wilson threw Seattle onto New England’s five-yard line, zipping a crafty wheel-route reception to Marshawn Lynch and a miracle pitch to Jermaine Kearse, who gained possession of the ball after a spectacular juggling catch. Wilson handed the ball to Lynch, who would have walked into the end zone were it not for a last-ditch tackle made by a Patriots linebacker lying on the ground. With the ball on New England’s one-yard line on second down and the clock dwindling, statisticians placed Seattle’s win probability at 73.8 percent.¹⁸

In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, Patriots coach Bill Belichick praised Pete Carroll for getting his teams to “compete relentlessly as well as any organization I’ve ever observed.”¹⁹ Belichick had replaced Carroll in New England after Coach Pete was fired there in 1999. The firing prompted a period of self-reflection that resulted in the concoction of the Win Forever philosophy and the eventual assembly of the juggernaut Seahawks. Carroll was going to stick it to his old team. He would call in a pass play. If it fell incomplete, the clock would stop, saving the team a time-out. Seattle would win its second Super Bowl title after Russell Wilson dropped back to deliver a touchdown slant pass to Seattle receiver Ricardo Lockett. Except Malcolm Butler intercepted it. New England took possession and won the Super Bowl. Marshawn Lynch laughed at the Seattle coaching staff while red, white, and blue confetti fell from the sky. A competitor to his core, Pete Carroll had done battle with common sense and lost.

Once the icon of an ascendant liberal city, the Seattle Seahawks became a symbol of self-sabotage. Lynch was a local folk hero and national icon, a power runner whose vicious steamrolling of flailing defenders was legendary. In 2014, USA Today reported that while he was in his mother’s womb, Lynch fed on two placentas due to a possible twin who never developed, making him an exceptionally strong child and a terrifying running back.²⁰ Even casual football fans understood the lunacy of not seeing if the man could run three feet to win a Super Bowl. Though Wilson had given Lynch the ball on the play before the calamitous interception, luminary Seattle writers Sherman Alexie and Ijeoma Oluo speculated that Seahawks management wanted the more clean-cut Wilson—not the dreadlocked Lynch—to get credit for the win. If the Seahawks couldn’t have a white Super Bowl–winning quarterback, the line of argumentation went, they would have one who white audiences were more comfortable with.²¹ Russell Wilson was clean-cut, well-spoken, lighter-skinned; before the NFC Championship game against San Francisco, memes circulated comparing him favorably to the tattooed, corn-rowed Colin Kaepernick. Of course management wanted Wilson, and not the unapologetically Black Marshawn Lynch, to be the hero, the reasoning went. Of course.

That this conspiracy theory was spun with little basis in fact wasn’t the point. The point was that the “postracial” fantasy of Obama’s presidency had deflated to such an extent that many now believed structural racism to be an indestructible force in American life—a force that would haunt the country on television and in locker rooms, on the field and in workplaces, on the one-yard line and even in progressive places like Seattle. Just as their Super Bowl victory a year earlier was hailed as progress, so too did Seattle’s excruciating loss become a postmortem on political regression.

After Obama’s 2008 win, Republicans in the House and Senate played stall and delay, blocking, filibustering, and watering-down policy advents by Democrats who had majority control of the Senate and Congress. In 2010 the so-called Tea Party flank of anti-government supporters helped Republicans take control of Congress, who then commanded the US Senate in 2014. By this time, the Obama coalition largely dissipated. Disillusioned progressives took to increasingly radical activity like the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, where activists squatted in the financial districts of major cities to protest enduring postrecession wealth inequalities. In addition, Black Lives Matter protests began as the spectacle of extrajudicial killings of Black youths was amplified on social media after the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. In 2013, Seattle voters dissatisfied with the slow pace of progressive change elected economics professor Kshama Sawant to city council: an avowed socialist who saw Democrats as an equally insidious obstacle to economic justice as Republicans. With the dreams of robust Democrat governance deflating by the day, Obama’s second term concluded with Republicans blocking him from appointing a Supreme Court nominee to replace the deceased Justice Antonin Scalia. If the Seahawks were the back-to-back champs that could have been, Obama was the FDR who never was.

With the rudderless Obama administration licensing permits for offshore drilling in May 2015, hundreds of Seattle activists in kayaks demonstrated against a Shell Oil drilling rig making its way to the Yukon through the city’s port. National media took a break from ridiculing the Seahawks to gawk. Environmental magazine Mother Jones praised Seattle as a “progressive city taking a dramatic stand.”²² Athletic triumph had returned to Seattle: the colorful sporty “kayaktivists” held a line that their president would not. Still, the city had been let down. Once champs, the Seahawks were a dynasty undelivered. A promise unfulfilled. Looking back, it’s no wonder Obama saw himself in them.

Vitriol poured in from all four corners of the internet. In May 2016 a Bay Area investor obsessed with bringing men’s professional basketball back to Seattle had attained the urban acreage needed to build a new arena. He would pay for it himself. All that was needed was a perfunctory vote from Seattle City Council to vacate a useless strip of pavement for the stadium’s construction.²³ Area unions, afraid of losing jobs near the Seattle waterfront, pressured the city’s nine-member city council to vote “no.” To the shock of even arena opponents who believed the vote would be a slam dunk, Seattle lawmakers disapproved of the street vacation. The 5–4 vote cleaved along gendered lines, with the city council’s four male members voting in approval, and its five women members voting “no.” Consequently, misogynistic hate speech rained in liberal Seattle.

Angry tweets about the city council’s five women proliferated, the messages too specific, the profile names and pictures too personal, to be the work of bots.²⁴ One post tagged the accounts of the councilmembers who disapproved of the street vacation and cursed “These 5 dumb bitches voted no on sonics.” At that time the most moderate politician in city government, Sally Bagshaw was elsewhere called a “socialist shitbag.” Another post about the vote read “and people want a woman to be president.” All that stood between Seattle, ostensibly a liberal bastion, and America’s growing conservative movement was the ninety-four-foot length of a basketball court. “Since you voted no on the Arena, I’m voting yes for Trump,” read one of the tweets.

How “progressive” was Seattle—honestly—if it incubated the family fortune of the most regressive president in recent memory? Born March 14, 1869, in the Rhineland region of what became Germany, Frederick Trump moved to Seattle in 1891 after reading that the city was a nice place to make a buck in real estate.²⁵ Seattle progressives objected to the concentration of gambling and sex work in Pioneer Square but had no issue with opportunistic speculators who treated the city as a takable piece of cheap carrion. Trump opened a brothel on Second Avenue and Washington Street, then flipped his profits into a purchase of forty acres of Seattle-area land from the Northern Pacific Railway.²⁶ He opened several more establishments on that property, amassed a small fortune, then parlayed it into stores that capitalized on miners making their way through Seattle to the Yukon after gold was discovered there in 1896. Wary of Seattle reformers who cracked down on vice in the red-light district, Trump liquidated his real estate holdings before settling in New York City at the turn of the century. He perished in the 1918 influenza pandemic. The family fortune survived Grandaddy Trump, eventually landing in the hands of his grandson, Queens real estate baron Donald J. Trump, who was elected president of the United States on November 8, 2016.

Back in 1989, Trump had been a character in the story of urban conservatism, placing a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five Black youths who were falsely accused of brutalizing a Central Park jogger. Though Trump hailed from the largest liberal city in the country, his New York was not the New York of children frolicking by uncorked fire hydrants in public housing developments—not the New York of stickball games played on the streets of Black, Jewish, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods; nor the New York of Sue Bird’s empowerment as a young woman on the asphalt basketball courts of Queens.²⁷ Trump’s New York was the New York of racial reaction; the New York where urban planner Robert Moses built low overpasses on roads to local parks so buses couldn’t bring poor people there.²⁸ It was the New York where a mob of angry white people attacked Black children riding bikes through the recently integrated neighborhood of Rosedale in 1975; the New York of an angry NYPD riot in 1992, birthed by a racist backlash to the election of the city’s first Black mayor. The New York where Mayor Rudy Giuliani escalated Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. The New York of America’s forty-fifth president was a place where many agreed with Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker’s incendiary 1999 comments about queers and immigrants, subway riders and non-English speakers.²⁹

Five days after taking office on January 20, 2017, Trump issued an executive order threatening to terminate federal funding to all cities that refused to comply with federal immigration officials.³⁰ The list of these “sanctuary cities” included almost every major municipality in the country; Seattle was one of the first to be established after its city council declared it a “city of refuge” for immigrants in January 1986. Though reactionary Seattle voters launched a successful initiative to rescind the declaration shortly afterward, the city successfully reiterated its sanctuary status in 2003. In response to Trump’s 2017 executive order, rival liberal cities put their differences aside. Seattle and San Francisco were two of the sundry American urbanities to sue the Trump administration over its targeting of sanctuary cities.³¹ The teamwork extended from the courts to the fields.

During the 2016 presidential election, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Several Seattle Seahawks joined in support, including defensive end Michael Bennett, who later took to giving the Black Power salute during games.³² If the Seahawks couldn’t be a dynasty, they would join the insurgency. Five days after Trump’s election in November 2016, they traveled to New England for Sunday Night Football; in their first meeting since the catastrophic Super Bowl XLIX, they defeated the Patriots, whose coach had written a letter of congratulations to Trump and whose quarterback was golfing buddies with the president-elect. With The Guardian declaring Seattle “the most outspoken team in the NFL,” the Hawks were riding high on glowing press coverage; lineman Cliff Avril used postgame press conferences to further relief efforts for Hurricane Sandy, and receiver Doug Baldwin campaigned for a statewide police accountability bill in the Washington State Legislature. Rolling Stone billed the team “the Social Justice Warriors” of the league in 2017.³³ In response, the Facebook page “Vets for Trump” generated a widely circulated fake image of Michael Bennett torching the American flag while the Seahawks locker room celebrated.³⁴ Seattle’s reputation as a progressive bastion—long overblown, to be sure—was nonetheless furthered by its professional football team.

As president, Trump turned the arena of sport into a proxy battle in his larger contest with urban America, most of whose residents didn’t vote for him in the 2016 election. He called NFL players who knelt for the national anthem “sons of bitches,” demanding the league expel them. When Steph Curry expressed discomfort with visiting Trump’s White House, Trump rescinded the invitation and didn’t invite the Golden State Warriors in 2018. He did the same to the Seattle Storm when they captured the 2018 WNBA title. When the US women’s national soccer team won the World Cup in June 2019, Sue Bird’s partner—Seattleite and midfielder Megan Rapinoe—made it plain: “I’m not going to the fucking White House.”³⁵

Since Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era, most US presidents used sports to polish their public personas, manipulating the ableist expectations of American spectatorship to appear fit to lead.³⁶ While guiding the country through depression and world war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt hid that he was wheelchair-chair bound so as not to seem vulnerable. JFK brandished an image of spry exuberance while concealing lifelong health issues stemming largely from back injuries he sustained as a college football player. Later, as pundits roasted him about his weight, Bill Clinton took up jogging. Obama sank three-pointers for flashing cameras; in the 2008 presidential primary against Hillary Clinton, he benefited from the sexist perception that women didn’t have the strength to command the country. For his part, President Trump overstated his athletic triumphs, lying to whomever would listen about being scouted as a prized baseball player. He maintained a lifelong affinity for sports that superseded fandom and bordered on fixation: if he couldn’t box, bat, or play ball, he’d buy sports teams, host heavyweight fights at his hotel, and use the Rocky III anthem “Eye of the Tiger” as his walk-on music at campaign rallies in 2016. As president, it irked him that the country’s most popular athletes represented cities whose voters rejected him at the ballot box.

While in office, Trump explained his hostility to major cities by saying “they’re Democrat run, they’re stupidly run.”³⁷ As Seattle had allowed Trump’s grandfather to start the family business there, perhaps he had a point.

Mayor Jenny Durkan presided over a deeply divided city. Although she prevailed over urban planner Cary Moon in the November 7, 2017, election by twelve and a half points, precinct data showed a stark contrast in the candidates’ respective bases of support. Moon carried most of Seattle’s dense urban demographics, areas with higher concentrations of young and working-class people and almost all of left-leaning Capitol Hill and the University District.³⁸ Durkan, by contrast, won wealthier precincts with waterfront views—affluent areas that typically had higher turnout and more moderate voters. Trump’s vote share in Seattle was small, but greater concentrations of it were in areas Durkan carried, including her home neighborhood of Laurelhurst. Although Durkan and Moon were both Democrats, the political geography of the 2017 election replicated FDR-era redlining maps that separated areas of wealth and capital investment from those of comparative poverty and neglect. In an effort to paper over Seattle’s divides, Mayor Durkan pivoted to sports.

Born May 19, 1958, Jenny Anne Durkan had played high school basketball in nearby Bellevue and once worked as a statistician for the Notre Dame women’s basketball team. In an interview given shortly after she became Seattle’s mayor, she recalled growing up in Seattle as the SuperSonics raised the spirits of a recession-racked community, saying “professional sports teams knit together different parts of the fabric of the city.”³⁹ During her term as mayor, Durkan appeared at press conferences in Sonics T-shirts and participated in NCAA basketball tournament bracket competitions. She lambasted the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame when it didn’t approve Edgar Martinez’s candidacy in January 2018, and she hyped National Girls and Women in Sports Day a month later with a giddy Twitter video, wearing a Storm jersey. When a Seattle ownership group hoping to bring the National Hockey League filed its application to the league in February 2018, Durkan celebrated, then celebrated some more when the application was approved later in the year. An open lesbian, Durkan’s embrace of sport was a callback to the late 1940s, when LGBTQ+ Seattleites built a vibrant culture around athletics before the reinstitution of retrenched gender roles in the 1950s.⁴⁰

But as a titular Democrat, Durkan was a conservative in the urban political context. Her candidacy was backed by corporate spending from Seattle companies that opposed the fifteen-dollar minimum wage hike and resisted the implementation of a city-owned internet utility.⁴¹ Seattle’s business establishment expected a return on their investment. The mayor delivered: Durkan did her best to sabotage taxes on major Seattle corporations and repeatedly moved to shrink social services in the city. Her fiscal conservatism prompted labor-backed Teresa Mosqueda and socialist Kshama Sawant of the city council to criticize her for implementing “austerity policies.”⁴² When the Durkan administration defunded the city’s “Sports Court Restoration Program,” the Seattle Metro Pickleball Association wrote Durkan a pointed letter: “Physical activity is essential for quality of life and longevity. Why is it not receiving the attention it deserves?”⁴³

The pride of progressive Seattle had long been its playgrounds and parks, paved in the Progressive Era, updated by the Forward Thrust campaign in 1968, and praised by Sports Illustrated and Time magazines decades later. An original purpose of these playfields was to increase proximity between Seattle’s rich and poor as a way of diffusing class conflict. Increasingly in the 2010s, these playgrounds housed homeless residents who were displaced from stable shelter by rising rents.⁴⁴ The spike in homelessness overlapped with terrifying stories of random assaults occurring in Seattle greenways. In March 2017, Seattle jogger Kelly Herron was attacked in a public washroom, screaming “Not today, motherfucker!” when a man attempted to rape her, and staving him off with tactics she learned in a self-defense class. In October 2018 another woman runner near Green Lake was assaulted, prompting her to ask, of Seattle officials, “How many people are going to be attacked before you do something to handle homelessness?”⁴⁵

The Seattle Mariners addressed the problem of homelessness by making a bad situation worse. With housing advocates clamoring for more funding for shelters and social services to meet the overlapping issues of homelessness, street harassment, and mental health support, the Mariners organization in September 2018 successfully lobbied the King County Council for $135 million in repairs to Safeco Field, usurping funds that would have gone toward affordable housing.⁴⁶ By this time the team had become synonymous not just with bad baseball but also bad politics. As the “Me Too” movement against sexual harassment hit social media, mainstream press outlets, and whisper networks across the country, a 2018 investigation revealed that camera operators for the Mariners’ regional television network had filmed scantily clad fans in the Safeco Field stands, archiving the salacious finds in a shareable folder for later access.⁴⁷

If Seattle couldn’t count on the Mariners, maybe they could count on their government. A 2018 study by the McKinsey consulting firm estimated that the Seattle area would need upward of $450 million in public funds annually for a decade to end homelessness. But when Seattle activists successfully lobbied Seattle City Council to ratify a corporate tax in June 2018, Mayor Durkan broke state law by texting with councilmembers to coordinate a repeal of it.⁴⁸ Like Ole Hanson, Durkan had a knack for nabbing headlines; Time magazine elevated her when she told Trump, “My city isn’t afraid of immigrants” in October 2018.⁴⁹ The mayor neglected to mention that the city’s residents once rallied to overturn the city’s sanctuary city status.

Under Durkan’s term Seattle would introduce its own brand of xenophobia, with many claiming the city’s homeless weren’t “from” the area and only moved to the Puget Sound region to take advantage of services offered to transients. Cynics coined the term “Freeattle.”⁵⁰ A March 2017 survey revealed that nearly 70 percent of homeless residents in King County lived in the area when they became homeless and that half of all homeless residents in Seattle lived there for at least five years. More than a third of homeless Seattle-area residents had attended college, and over 40 percent were employed.⁵¹ But in the rush to wield nativist sentiments and meritocratic myths against the city’s homeless, facts were ignored. Just as Trump’s rhetoric weaponized the issue of immigration, turning it into a Trojan horse to decry welfare spending of any kind, homelessness in Seattle became a catchall conversation about who “belonged” in Seattle and who didn’t.

While Trump’s agenda was disseminated with cable news propaganda on Fox News and right-wing media like Breitbart, stigmas about the homeless in Seattle were driven by conservative blogs like Safe Seattle; the editorial slant of the Seattle Times argued against the use of progressive taxation to end homelessness.⁵² The pro-Trump company Sinclair took over one of the city’s local news stations in 2018, broadcasting garish propaganda that made homeless Seattleites seem necessarily prone to criminal activity. The 2019 Seattle City Council candidate Christopher Rufo made criminalizing the homeless a core part of his platform, then worked with the Trump administration to ban federal agencies from partaking in diversity training.⁵³ Conservatism took its place alongside computing and coffee as Seattle’s most visible exports.

Early in his term, President Trump launched an unprecedented attack on America’s national parks, reducing protections for approximately thirty-five million acres of public land. The president’s privatization of communal reserves had a parallel in sweeps the Durkan administration conducted of homeless encampments in Seattle parks.⁵⁴ Durkan spent $10 million annually to rid city greenways of Seattleites who had no place else to go; in so doing, her office replicated a strategy that had been a proven failure since the 1930s, and blew many millions of dollars that could have been spent on actual housing.⁵⁵

Liberal Seattle could have been a refuge from hostile political winds. But a city in competition with itself could scarcely give anyone else shelter.

The arrival of the National Hockey League (NHL) in Seattle kick-started a chain of events that led me to enter the foray of local politics. After the NHL’s Board of Governors approved a local ownership group’s application for a Seattle NHL franchise, Rob Johnson of Seattle City Council District 4 vacated his seat in November 2018 to take a job with the team. The councilmember’s trade of politics for sport popped the cork on Seattle’s 2019 election cycle, with city council races shaping up as a clash between Mayor Durkan’s Chamber of Commerce and candidates who objected to the direction Seattle’s business establishment was taking the city in. I was one of fifty-six candidates who vied to represent one of Seattle’s seven city council districts, announcing my run for the seat vacated by Johnson in the alt-weekly tabloid The Stranger on November 23, 2018. My district included the northeast Seattle neighborhoods of Wedgwood, the University District, and Sand Point, where Seattle police had killed a pregnant Black mother named Charleena Lyles in June 2017.

Politics are the arena where conflicting group interests are settled. Recalling a book I read as a history student at the University of Washington—Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 “Right to the City,” a manifesto about reclaiming cities from the grips of finance capital—I made our campaign’s slogan “FIGHTING FOR YOUR RIGHT TO THE CITY.”⁵⁶ And the fight was real. District 4 had some of the wealthiest, most racially homogenous neighborhoods in Seattle, areas that might have hesitated to vote for a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a Black one at that. Late in the campaign a yard sign with my image on it was defaced with the n-word.⁵⁷

During the primary my campaign was endorsed against by nearly every sitting federal, state, and city elected official in Seattle, with many believing I was too much of a radical to advance to a general election and in any case not capable of running a serious campaign. To win, we would have to seize any advantage we could. As the August primary approached and the hot sun of another summer beset by climate change beat down on Seattle, my campaign doubled down on door knocking. We routinely turned out dozens and dozens of volunteers in city parks who believed that Seattle could be the progressive city it said it was. Playgrounds planted during the age of reform were a staging point for our ground attack. Thanks to the efforts of these volunteers and our campaign staff—the first in Seattle electoral history to unionize—we advanced past the August 6, 2019, primary and into the general election.

Ultimately, I came up a few points short in November. Because of my campaign stance on paying for public housing by taxing large corporations, our campaign was outspent one hundred to one in corporate independent expenditures—some of them by the ownership group of the Seattle Mariners.⁵⁸ On election night, Tuesday, November 5, 2019, our campaign trailed by sixteen points; late ballots narrowed the final margin of defeat to four. Though we narrowly lost the election, our campaign rallied areas with renters and students to pay closer attention to local politics; not an easy task when rising rents and stagnating wages make it difficult on many to spend time on civic engagement. In addition, I was proud of how we competed in areas typically thought of as moderate, if not conservative. On a platform devoted to building affordable housing by repealing Seattle’s restrictive zoning laws, we won twenty-nine of thirty-one precincts in Wallingford, a once-segregated neighborhood long believed to be categorically resistant to the construction of affordable housing.⁵⁹

After the campaign Christopher Rufo took to the New York Post to clutch his pearls: “Socialist city council candidate Shaun Scott argued that the city must ‘disinvest from the police state’ and ‘build towards a world where nobody is criminalized for being poor.’ At a debate hosted by the Seattle Police Union, Scott blasted officers for their ‘entrenched ties to institutional racism.’ One might dismiss such proclamations as part of a fringe movement, but advocates of these views are gaining political momentum.”⁶⁰

Rufo was right about one thing: momentum was growing for the idea of reimagining public safety. Variations on the idea of using police funding to bolster human services have appeared throughout history, reiterated by policymakers and political figures who didn’t believe more police necessarily meant safer communities. In 1924, Seattle mayor Bertha Landes told the city’s police chief “the police department has lost the confidence of the people. Taxpayers should not pay the salaries of men who should be removed from the force.”⁶¹ In 1958 urban planner Jane Jacobs asserted that “no quantity of policemen can enforce civilization where informal community self-policing falls to pieces.”⁶² In 2005, former Seattle Police chief Norm Stamper argued for “using the money now being squandered on cops to finance new public policies and educate and rehabilitate.”⁶³ Before long, reactionaries like Rufo would see exactly how much “political momentum” police accountability via police divestment really had in urban America. In the meantime, I poured over precinct data, searching for clues about how and why I had come up short.

A city is a competition. Who will win it? During the city council campaign, land-use activists brought it to my attention that private golf courses in Seattle enjoyed huge tax subsidies and that public golf courses had bigger budgets than critical city bureaucracies.⁶⁴ As of 2019, if the Sand Point Country Club in northeast Seattle paid the same land taxes that area homeowners do on their property there, its annual tax bill would grow from $36,507 to $2.85 million. Similar figures exist for all private Seattle golf clubs; the Broadmoor Country Club in Madison Park gets an annual tax subsidy of $6.8 million. That’s lost revenue that could be used on civilianized 911 response, earthquake retrofitting, housing, and more. In addition, the four public golf courses operated by the City of Seattle totaled 528 acres of city-owned land; many housing advocates and environmentalists wondered whether these expansive courses could be converted into sustainable affordable housing developments with plush parks and trees for low- and middle-income residents.⁶⁵

Seattleites don’t have to look too far for a better way to use the hundreds of acres of city land currently being usurped by golf. In 1947 the University of Washington recast a nine-hole golf course to build the UW School of Medicine. “They could’ve preserved some of the course, but that’s progress,” recalled a medical student who hit the fairway when he wasn’t hitting the books.⁶⁶ If the area south of Lake Union is the heart of Seattle and Pioneer Square is its gut, the University District is the mind—a place where big ideas radiate outward and collegiate optimism pushes the city to be better than before. The “U-District” was established in the Progressive Era as a release from the downtown business blocks; its original name was “Brooklyn.” The University District is a city within a city, connected to the rest of Seattle by subways, by bike lanes, by brain waves.

Conceptually the college districts of major cities are among the most coveted urban designs in the United States. They’re dense ecosystems where residential units collide with commercial storefronts, street clatter with spaces of quiet contemplation. This kind of cityscape has become increasingly trendy as the fiscal and moral costs of automobile-centric lifestyles in US suburbs have escalated. Tech and industrial science corporations often brand their workspaces as “campuses,” presenting them as futuristic fairgrounds free from history. In reality, they mimic college contours that have existed for centuries. As it turns out, corporate America has little to offer in the way of improving upon what Marxist-urbanist Mike Davis has called “the quasi-socialist paradises of university campuses.”⁶⁷ Fitting for a hub of research in the sciences and humanities, the University District is a laboratory for the urban experiment, showing what cities value by what they decide to cheer.

As Gil Dobie began his run of excellence in autumn 1908, the University of Washington’s Washington Alumnus publication wrote that “the Northwest [has] just woken up to the fact that championship teams advertised the college in a unique and effective way.” A century later, in 2013, the school completed a $280 million renovation of Husky Stadium, followed by the opening of two U-District subway stations that were the result of a transit measure King County voters approved in 2008.⁶⁸ The weekly parade of foot traffic to and from Husky football games in autumn—to and from blooming on-campus cherry blossoms in spring—increased on newly paved walkways and pedestrian bridges. Sports and outdoor spaces advertised UW beautifully, broadcasting it as an oasis apart from the rest of the neoliberal city. In his 2021 book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, historian Davarian L. Baldwin writes that “the university has shifted from being one noble part of the city to serving as a model for the city itself.”⁶⁹

If Baldwin is right, then the “model city” in America is one where free labor builds and pays for everything. College football was a lucrative game worth more to UW than its players would ever see. In 2019 the university reported $133.8 million in total revenue from its Athletics Department; most of it ($84 million) came from media rights and tickets sales generated by Husky football, which—in addition to underpaid academic employees who struck for higher wages in 2019—directly subsidized research worth $1.3 billion to the American economy.⁷⁰ As pathways to prosperity were few and far between for economically marginalized populations under neoliberalism, sports were a way out of poverty, creating a biopolitical regime where athletes from disproportionately poor backgrounds sacrificed their bodies to the altar of college sports. In the same way that privileged Americans with blood disorders benefit from the sold plasma of the destitute to stay alive, college athletics programs are similarly vampiric, sucking life and health from football players pursuing the distant dream of sports stardom.⁷¹

Seeing the tremendous value generated by uncompensated college athletes, a Republican in the Washington State Legislature introduced a bill in 2019 to allow college athletes to be paid: “Everybody is getting extremely wealthy off of this system, except for the college athletes themselves,” said Drew Stokesbary, a GOP politician representing the Seattle suburb of Auburn.⁷² Stokesbary faced opposition from a Democrat and self-professed progressive whose district included Seattle neighborhoods near Husky Stadium. The rep argued that if a student executed research that brought in money for the university, that student would not be paid—hence, student athletes who provide revenue for the university shouldn’t either.⁷³

In Washington State’s Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, the argument that labor exploitation in one place excused it in another proved compelling. The bill to abolish student athlete serfdom was defeated.

With progressives like these, did American cities need conservatives?