New York State Inside Baseball: Simcha Felder and Blake Morris

I live in New York State’s District 17, and our state senator happens to be Simcha Felder. No doubt many of you in the state know Felder because he’s an almost infamous character in New York State politics, but for those of you who don’t know him, I’ll try to offer a brief explanation.

While New York State should be a reliably Democratic state, our politics are actually fairly conservative, because the Republicans essentially have control of the state government. The reason they have control of state politics has to do with a few issues. First, it has to do with the IDC, who were a group of “turncoat” Democrats who don’t caucus with the Democrats, essentially empowering the Republicans. Second, Andrew Cuomo, our Democratic Governor, quite likes having a Republican controlled state senate, because it allows him to talk a somewhat “liberal” game, but he never has to legislate in that way, because the legislature is conservative. So, he can appeal to his constituents with liberal talk, but he never runs the risk of actually having to legislate progressively, which might alienate him from his very wealthy donor base. And last, there is Simcha Felder, our state senator. Felder runs as a Democrat, but he’s essentially a Republican. But he typically runs unopposed in the Democratic primary, because no one wants to waste their time challenging him, because it’s presumed he has a lock on the district. Our district is heavily gerrymandered, creating a district with a very large Orthodox Jewish population, and Felder himself is Orthodox. But outside of this issue of identity, he’s very effective at representing the interests of the Orthodox community. So, it’s long been thought that it would be a waste of time to challenge him, because the district is his. And along with the IDC, Felder helps make the New York State Senate a Republican legislature.

That’s the backstory. And then, as happened in many places in this country, the election of Trump was an awakening. In my neighborhood, a group of people began organizing with the intention of challenging Felder by either putting pressure on him to legislate in a progressive way, or else, by running a primary challenger against him. And as many of you might also know, because this was somewhat of a big story in state politics, this local group eventually decided to run a challenger named Blake Morris, who ran as “A Real Democrat,” and whose platform was actually quite progressive. He eventually lost the primary, but he did manage to garner thousands of votes, so the hope is that in two years, building upon these successes, either Morris or a different candidate might be able to successfully challenge Felder.

My first encounter with Morris was by way of a local Facebook page that activists in our neighborhood started. I don’t have a background in activism, but after the Presidential election, I was thinking that this should change, so I welcomed all the agitation that was happening in our neighborhood. At first, the Facebook page was a way to help make connections and to strategize, and these then morphed into in-person meetings and then political actions. (Disclaimer: I never actually managed to make it out to a meeting or protest, but it was in part because of stories like the following—which is also a convenient excuse for me, no doubt). And, it was through this Facebook page that I had a long and tiring argument with Blake Morris, long before he decided to be the nominee in the primaries.

I don’t know if people remember, but a little while back there was discussion about the possibility of having a constitutional convention in New York State. Every progressive and liberal group in the state was advocating against the convention, while the real estate lobby was the notable group lobbying for it. The reason for this was that once a constitutional convention is called the constitution can be re-written in any way the attendees see fit. And this means that whoever happens to be a powerful player in New York State politics at the time of a convention can play a huge role in what our new constitution looks like. And right now, New York City real estate developers play a huge role in our local and state politics. In fact, they’re part of the reason our state is so conservative, as they dump tons of money into politics throughout the state in order to keep the legislature friendly to their plans in NYC. So, it wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination to realize that if a constitutional convention was called that real estate developers would dominate, and that the already weakened rent protections that we have would be eliminated. Consequently, real estate developers wanted the convention, and almost everyone else was opposed to it. And my argument with Blake Morris had to do with this.

As I mentioned, this happened well before he announced that he was going to run in the Democratic primary, and it happened on the Facebook page that was set up for activists in our state senate district. In the weeks leading up to the convention, Blake kept posting about how he supported the convention. At first, I thought he was just an uninformed community member voicing his opinion, so no harm no foul. But over time, he kept on posting about the same issue, while making the claim that the only progressive position was to support a constitutional convention. And given the frequency of his posts as well as his argument, I decided to get involved, because I didn’t know who was following the page, and I was worried that some people might be buying his argument. So, I responded to Blake, and we argued.

The argument lasted quite a long time, but the gist of it was simple. For Blake, a constitutional convention allowed “the people” to vote on constitutional issues that only emerge at such a convention. And this, for him, meant more democracy, and so it was therefore the only progressive answer to the question. I tried to be gentle, explaining how in principle I might agree that it’s more progressive to allow the people greater access to decision making, but that in this particular case, the opposite was true, as a constitutional convention would be nothing more than an opportunity for powerful interests to rewrite the constitution to their benefit. I also suggested that maybe in ten years, when the issue would be revisited again (a convention is a possibility in NYS every ten years), a convention might be a good idea. But what would make it a good idea would only be if “the people” manage to gain power in those ten years, so that when a constitutional convention was called, “the people” would be calling the shots and not the real estate developers.

But no matter how many times I tried to explain this point, no matter how many times I tried to demonstrate that a constitutional convention might mean the end of rent control and rent stabilization (which would be apocalyptic in NYC), and no matter how many times I tried to explain that we need to first work on gaining actual grassroots power before a constitutional convention should be called, Blake didn’t budge. For him, a constitutional convention was axiomatically a good thing, because it meant that the people would get a chance to decide on more things. That this was the case in theory only, and that in practice we’d get a constitution written by real estate developers, didn’t matter.

Things got so bad that I actually private messaged a page admin to ask about Blake. It’s not that I wanted him booted from the group, but we were increasingly worried that Simcha Felder staffers were watching what we were doing (which was true, I think), that it occurred to me that Blake might be a plant. But the admin rallied behind Blake, explaining that he was well known to all the admins (and the admins were the real force behind all the activism in our neighborhood). So, they clearly knew him and liked him, and I don’t think they were particularly happy that I thought he might be a plant.

This was the major reason, but there were also some other minor ones, that led me to avoid getting involved in our local group beyond following the Facebook page. Several months later Blake announced his candidacy, after helping lead a candidate search that didn’t yield any other takers, and he actually did manage to run on a platform that, on paper, was pretty progressive.

But that said, watching his candidacy unfold (and I did vote for him), I was pretty consistently disappointed by it. I didn’t think he was a compelling candidate, even if I was also grateful that he ran, especially as he likely ran only because no one else would. But watching the progressive wave in the city, with candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar, we not only got a candidate who wasn’t very strong in the charisma department, but whose campaign didn’t run the kind of unabashedly progressive message that I wanted, and which seemed to energize other districts.

For instance, while he supported universal healthcare for New York State, the message that I consistently got via his Facebook advertisements didn’t have to do with healthcare, but with speed cameras in school districts. I’m assuming that they stressed Morris’s support for speed cameras because this was a way of distinguishing him from Felder who was opposed to them, but also, I suspect, because he was trying to appeal to the more bourgeois parents in our district (which is gentrifying, as is the rest of Brooklyn). Which doesn’t mean I’m opposed to speed cameras, but if you’re running in support of universal healthcare, why not make that your signature issue instead of speed cameras? Even from the point of view of saving children’s lives, universal healthcare would undoubtedly save more young lives than speed cameras in school zones. All of which just led me to believe that while Morris’s campaign wanted a more progressive voice in our district, when it came to politics, they didn’t really know what they were doing (and they weren’t as progressive as they thought they were). And my earlier argument with Blake only reinforced this (or perhaps, it just biased me towards them).

Which brings me to the post-mortem that’s been happening on our local Facebook page. With all due credit to the activists in my district, they’re already looking forward to the next election in two years. However, from following their conversation, I’m not particularly confident.

For instance, against my better judgment, I got in another Facebook argument with people on the group. This time, I took the bait when someone suggested that the lesson from Blake’s loss is that we need to find a candidate who can reach out to the Orthodox community. I responded to this by mentioning that all the national electoral data indicates that the Orthodox community consistently votes Republican. And appealing to Republican voters doesn’t seem like a winning strategy for a Democratic candidate, and certainly not one who wants to claim (and advocate for) progressive policies.

As a result, I suggested that rather than courting Republicans, our electoral strategy has to be an unabashedly progressive platform. So, the question we should ask ourselves is whether there are enough non-Republican voters in our heavily gerrymandered district in order to swing it. If there are, then we can plough ahead. But if there aren’t, we’re facing an actual problem. Either we need to hope that our gerrymandered district is dismantled, or else, we might be wise to spend all of our energy on an actual swing district that might flip our legislature, rather than investing all our energy in a campaign that’s doomed to failure.

And this is where things got truly nutty. Rather than engaging my primary point, which had to do with determining if a progressive platform can win in our district, several group members (including admins) decided to attack me for being insufficiently progressive, borderline anti-Semitic (which they never explicitly stated, but which was implied), and just plain dumb.

Let me explain: when I suggested that our district might be un-gerrymandered, several group members totally flipped. And the reason they flipped is because they saw this suggestion as an attack on the civil rights of the Jewish community. As they explained to me, the gerrymandering of our district creates an Orthodox Jewish voting bloc (which it does). Therefore, the call for our district boundaries to be redrawn would mean an assault on the civil rights of the Orthodox community. As I was asked, “doesn’t the Jewish community deserve representation too?”

I was therefore accused of being against civil rights, I was told that any attempt to un-gerrymander the district would mean that we would receive a challenge based on the Voting Rights Act, I was accused of having opinions that were “frankly gross,” and when I didn’t just accept failure, I was accused of being ignorant of politics and the law.

Let me be clear, none of this bothered me personally. When confronted with this, I had to systematically explain to people how they were wrong, and there’s a kind of satisfaction in demonstrating that confident and condescending idiots are wrong. I explained how the Voting Rights Act applied to race and not religion, how even in the case of majority-minority racial districts they are a response to a demonstrated history of discrimination and not merely granted on minority identity status, how the Orthodox community isn’t even a religion but a sect of a religion (of which I am a part), how likely the First Amendment would prevent gerrymandering based on religion anyways, and how our gerrymandered district which they claimed advanced the civil rights of the Orthodox community also created a district in which the rights of poorer people and people of color are systematically ignored. But none of this registered. Instead, the comment thread was closed, and I should be lucky, I suppose, that I wasn’t banned from the group. No big loss, but I’d prefer to be a part of it.

Why do I mention any of this? Well, for a few reasons.

First, for those of you in New York State, I thought maybe that some of this insider information about the state of activism in our district might be of interest. We’re an important district in the state, and one that gets a lot of press because of Simcha Felder, so this is a story about potential challenges to his rule.

Second, I thought this might say something about the state of activism beyond our district, but I’m not sure. Ranging all the way from our candidate for state senate to the activists who first began the resistance to Felder, there’s a pervasive ignorance about the basics of politics. They didn’t understand civil rights, the Voting Rights Act, constitutional conventions, and so forth, which isn’t a problem in itself, because there is a cure for ignorance, but they were very confident that their ignorant positions were true. So, even though I tried to calmly explains some of the basics, because what I was saying conflicted with what they believed, they saw me as the enemy.

And lastly, and perhaps most tellingly, much of what drove this conflict was the question of identity politics. And let me be clear, I’m not at all an opponent of politics based on things like race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other identity. In fact, I’m extremely supportive of all of them. And I’m not trying to revive the divisive arguments about whether identity politics and class politics can be resolved. I think we’re at a point where we generally agree about the importance of both identity-based and class-based politics. But all of this said, the reason I was attacked had everything to do with a particular conception of identity politics. What got everyone up in arms was my suggestion that our district could be un-gerrymandered, so that the Republican-voting Orthodox community didn’t dominate politics in our district. I never suggested this as a policy we should actually pursue, but the mere suggestion that the Orthodox community wouldn’t dominate politics in our district was like touching the third rail. In other words, slightly diminishing the power of an identity group (who already has an outsized share of power in New York state politics) in order to advance a progressive platform was a contradiction that they couldn’t resolve. Like Blake Morris’s insistence that a constitutional convention was always and necessarily a good thing, giving more power to a minority group was also a necessarily good thing, so that it was impossible to understand how diminishing the power of an identity group could actually be the progressive choice. And that strikes me as a problem greater than just one of ignorance.

Perhaps these stories are idiosyncrasies of my district, but I suspect not. At worst, hopefully you get a sense of how messed up activist politics are in central Brooklyn, and at best, maybe this says something about American politics more broadly. Or maybe this is just a story about some random argument on Facebook, and the real message is that I should really just go outside!