Mayor defends police, courts billionaires, and wonders why her challenger took the revolution so far

LOS ANGELES, California — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has made a political discovery after more than half a century of progressive activism: capitalism might be terrible, billionaires might be suspicious, and the police might be controversial, but none of them is as dangerous as another socialist trying to take your job.

The 73-year-old mayor, who traveled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a young, revolution-minded activist, now finds herself defending the Los Angeles Police Department, accepting support from billionaire developers and warning voters about her Democratic Socialist challenger, Nithya Raman.

In political science, this is called ideological evolution.

In Los Angeles, it’s called Tuesday.

And in Cuba, where Bass once studied alternatives to American capitalism, it would have been called an unauthorized election.

Karen Bass and Cuba: From Fidel Castro to City Hall, the Revolution Gets a Pension

Bass’s revolutionary credentials began in the early 1970s, when the 19-year-old activist joined the Venceremos Brigade, a left-wing solidarity organization that brought Americans to Cuba to experience Castro’s socialist experiment.

According to PolitiFact’s examination of Karen Bass’s Cuba history, Bass visited the island eight times during the 1970s, helping construct houses and attending political activities.

Eight trips.

Most Americans visit Disney World twice before figuring out they’ve already seen the expensive mouse.

Dr. Marlene Okafor-Hines, a lecturer in comparative politics at a Southern California university, said the number tells its own story. “Eight trips is not a hobby. Eight trips is a loyalty program,” she said. “At some point somebody should have upgraded her to a better ideology.”

Bass kept returning, apparently because the first seven visits hadn’t convinced her that government ownership was the secret to prosperity.

The young activist helped build homes during the day and joined cultural activities afterward.

There was music, dancing, rum and a lot of revolutionary enthusiasm.

It was, essentially, a socialist summer camp with fewer consumer choices and considerably more Fidel Castro.

Bass later acknowledged that Cubans did not enjoy the same freedom to protest their government that she had in America.

That arrangement had a certain symmetry: Americans could visit Cuba to protest capitalism, while Cubans couldn’t protest communism without risking a much longer trip, to prison.

The education stayed with her anyway.

Then came American politics.

And American politics had something Castro never had to worry about.

A competitive election.

Nithya Raman and the Democratic Socialists: The Revolution Goes Too Far

Bass’s opponent is Nithya Raman, a Los Angeles councilwoman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Raman received the endorsement of the Los Angeles Democratic Socialists in September.

That created a predicament so tangled that Karl Marx would have needed a second volume of Das Kapital just to explain the seating arrangements.

The former radical is defending the establishment.

The younger socialist is attacking the former radical.

The billionaires are supporting the former radical.

And the police union is backing the woman who once traveled to Castro’s Cuba.

Somewhere, a political science professor has canceled his lecture on the left-right spectrum and replaced it with an emergency drinking seminar.

Raman herself has described her philosophy as both capitalist and democratic socialist.

So that’s California now. You can be a capitalist socialist, a socialist capitalist, or a billionaire progressive, depending on which fundraiser you’re attending and whether dinner is included.

A campaign strategy memo circulated among consultants on one side of the race, and reviewed by this publication, instructs staff to “never use the word socialist and the word responsible in the same sentence without a budget attached.” A second page of the memo advises against using the word “revolution” before noon.

One can almost hear the strategy sessions:

“She’s a socialist!”

“You’re a socialist!”

“Yes, but I’m the responsible socialist!”

“What’s a responsible socialist?”

“One who has already won an election!”

LAPD Staffing and the Olympics: Karen Bass Discovers Police Officers Are Useful

The mayor’s transformation took a turn this week when she stressed her determination to expand the Los Angeles Police Department.

According to a New York Post editorial examining her latest promises, Los Angeles has approximately 8,550 police officers.

Bass wants 9,500 before the Los Angeles Olympic Games.

That’s roughly 950 additional officers.

In the old revolutionary literature, police forces were instruments of the oppressive state.

In contemporary Los Angeles, they’re apparently also handy when somebody steals your catalytic converter.

Bass has backed bigger police staffing before, but the issue has taken on special weight in her race against Raman.

The mayor also supports LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, whom Raman has pledged to replace.

Raman argues that McDonnell has failed to meet the moment in responding to federal immigration enforcement.

Bass argues that replacing him would disrupt the department.

Ordinary Angelenos, meanwhile, are left wondering whether anybody is available to answer a burglary call.

A city hall staffer, who asked not to be named because he was eating lunch at his desk, said recruitment is going about as well as anyone could expect. “We have a lot of people who want to explain how policing should work,” he said. “We have a much smaller number who want to be the ones doing it at three in the morning.”

There is something deeply Californian about political leaders arguing over whether the police should exist in greater numbers while residents check whether their cars still exist at all.

The city will soon host the Olympic Games.

Perhaps Los Angeles should add a new event: the 100-meter dash from a parking garage before somebody removes your wheels.

Rick Caruso Endorses Bass: The Billionaire Who Spent $100 Million Against Her

The comedy climbed higher when billionaire developer Rick Caruso announced that he would vote for Bass.

Caruso spent more than $100 million of his own money unsuccessfully campaigning against her in the last mayoral race.

Four years later, he has decided she’s his preferred choice over Raman.

According to the Los Angeles Times reporting on Caruso’s decision, the billionaire praised Bass’s cooperation on rebuilding after the Palisades Fire.

He stopped short of a formal campaign endorsement, but his voting preference was clear.

A billionaire spent $100 million trying to keep Karen Bass from becoming mayor.

Now he’s voting to keep her.

That’s not political reconciliation.

That’s the world’s most expensive customer satisfaction survey.

Caruso’s conversion also raises some philosophical questions.

If a socialist receives support from a billionaire, does the billionaire become a socialist?

Or does the socialist become a capitalist?

The answer, under the unofficial rules of Los Angeles politics, depends on who signs the campaign checks.

Marx believed capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

It also, apparently, contains the seeds of a very convenient campaign coalition.

Inside Safe and LA Homelessness: Apartments Need More Than Keys

Bass’s homelessness programs offer another collision between political theory and municipal reality.

Her administration’s Inside Safe initiative has moved more than 6,200 people into temporary accommodations.

That is a real achievement in a city struggling with an enormously complicated humanitarian crisis.

Unfortunately, the Los Angeles Times investigation of Inside Safe reported that approximately 43% of participants had returned to homelessness by the end of June.

Some neighborhoods required repeated outreach operations.

One stretch near the 110 Freeway received 25 visits over three years.

Twenty-five.

Most people would have changed their phone number by the seventh.

Bass now argues that housing alone cannot solve serious addiction and mental-health problems without appropriate services.

That’s a reasonable policy concern.

It’s also a startling discovery for a government that has spent years wrestling with exactly those problems.

California’s political class has apparently come across the radical proposition that a person with untreated psychiatric illness might need actual psychiatric treatment.

Next, somebody may figure out that providing food requires someone to grow it.

Bass also wants Los Angeles to have greater authority over its homelessness programs.

The current setup splits responsibility among city, county and regional agencies.

Everyone is responsible, nobody has complete authority, and the paperwork has tenure.

If Marx had designed it, even he might have asked for a private management company.

Karen Bass Vanity Fair Profile: Her Younger Self Would Probably Protest Her Administration

In a Vanity Fair profile examining Bass’s political evolution, the mayor recalled believing that entering electoral politics meant selling out.

She later founded Community Coalition to confront addiction, violence and poverty in South Los Angeles.

That work required cooperation with government institutions, including accepting federal funding.

Bass described the evolution of her thinking as pragmatic.

And there lies the central comedy.

The young Karen Bass wanted dramatic political change.

The older Karen Bass wants government agencies to answer the telephone.

The young activist questioned the legitimacy of established institutions.

The mayor now runs one of them.

The young revolutionary believed capitalism deserved a hard, critical look.

The older mayor has learned that capitalism occasionally sends a billionaire to help you win an election.

Political maturity can be a wonderful thing.

It can also be awkward when your opponent has saved copies of your earlier speeches.

Bass vs. Raman Poll: Dead Heat in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Race

The June primary gave Bass approximately 34% of the vote, with Raman taking around 29% and reality television personality Spencer Pratt finishing third.

A September poll showed Raman ahead by 11 percentage points.

But the latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and Los Angeles Times poll, conducted in late October among 2,197 likely voters, found the candidates tied at 40% each, with 19% undecided.

The margin of error was approximately three percentage points.

This is where the revolution starts to look like a homeowners association election.

One candidate promises change.

The other promises experience.

Both promise to fix the neighborhood.

And everybody wants to know why the monthly fees keep rising.

The late polling shift was substantially associated with voters who supported Pratt in the primary.

So a former Cuba enthusiast is gaining ground with voters whose first choice was a conservative-leaning reality television personality.

The American political system remains the only place where the road from Castro to conservatism can run through a television star and end at a campaign fundraiser.

Marx Never Had to Fix a Los Angeles Pothole

The philosophical problem confronting Bass is that revolutionary politics gets considerably harder once somebody hands you the municipal budget.

Marx wrote about ownership of the means of production.

Los Angeles residents would settle for ownership of a functioning traffic signal.

Revolutionaries debate the distribution of wealth.

Homeowners debate whether their insurance company will renew their policy.

Academic socialists discuss the contradictions of capitalism.

Drivers in Los Angeles discuss the contradiction of paying enormous taxes and then wrecking their tires in a pothole.

Those are two different kinds of dialectical materialism.

One involves nineteenth-century German philosophy.

The other involves a $1,400 suspension repair.

Bass’s journey illustrates an old gap between describing utopia and administering a city.

A manifesto can promise affordable housing for everyone.

A mayor has to find land, financing, permits, contractors, infrastructure and someone willing to sit through fourteen zoning meetings without threatening to move to Arizona.

A manifesto can criticize the police.

A mayor has to decide how many officers will answer when the emergency line rings.

And a manifesto can demand that wealth be redistributed.

A mayor eventually learns that the wealthy have accountants, attorneys and moving companies.

Los Angeles Mayoral Election: The Revolution Must Now Apply for Reelection

Neither candidate fits perfectly into the ideological costume her opponents have assigned her.

Bass’s revolutionary history does not establish that she was a Communist Party member or that she currently supports Marxism-Leninism.

Raman’s democratic socialism is not identical to Castro’s one-party communist system. She has also disagreed with the Democratic Socialists over policing, housing policy and other issues.

The differences inside their own political movement supply enough material for several more revolutions, each with its own committee, fundraising deadline and newsletter.

Still, the reversal is hard to ignore.

Bass once explored alternatives to American capitalism.

Now she is cooperating with a billionaire, defending a police chief, emphasizing treatment alongside housing, and presenting herself as the experienced alternative to a younger progressive.

She has come a long way.

From revolutionary solidarity in Havana to municipal bureaucracy in Los Angeles.

From questioning established political institutions to defending her administration’s record.

From helping construct homes in Cuba to explaining why putting people into homes in California is a lot more complicated.

And from admiring a political system without competitive national elections to facing the terrifying possibility that voters might elect somebody else.

The revolution, it turns out, is much easier when nobody can vote you out.

The final lesson is simple: Karl Marx never had to run for mayor of Los Angeles.

Had he done so, he might have added a chapter:

Workers of the world, unite. But please keep the police department adequately staffed until after the Olympics.

15 Humorous Observations Behind the Story

1. Karen Bass went to Cuba to study socialism. Fifty-three years later she’s finding out that the biggest threat to an American socialist is another socialist with better polling numbers.
2. Bass once admired a revolution that abolished political competition. Now she’d probably settle for abolishing one political opponent.
3. The young revolutionary wanted to overthrow the establishment. The older revolutionary became the establishment, with a police chief, billionaire supporters and a budget deficit.
4. Bass went to Cuba to help build houses. Back in Los Angeles, building affordable housing takes 19 permits, three environmental studies and permission from somebody who hasn’t answered the phone since the pandemic.
5. Billionaire Rick Caruso spent more than $100 million trying to beat Bass. Now he’s voting for her. Apparently capitalism has a return policy.
6. Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Los Angeles added a third category: municipal government.
7. Bass wants 9,500 police officers before the Olympics. Ambitious, in a city where even parking enforcement feels like an Olympic event.
8. Democratic socialist Nithya Raman is challenging Bass from the left. So Los Angeles voters have to decide which progressive is the genuine revolution, using ballots printed by the capitalist establishment.
9. Bass once considered running for office a betrayal of revolutionary principles. Then she found out elected office comes with a salary, a residence and three cell phones.
10. The LAPD has about 8,550 officers. Los Angeles has way more people with expert opinions about policing than people willing to become police officers.
11. Bass now talks about addiction and mental-health treatment alongside housing. California finally figured out that handing somebody an apartment key doesn’t come with a psychiatrist, a job or recovery.
12. Bass says she became a pragmatist. In American politics, that means finding out the people fixing the sewer don’t care who won the Russian Revolution.
13. The Democratic Socialists endorsed Raman, even though parts of the organization think she’s not socialist enough. It’s a revolution with a customer complaints department.
14. Bass got about 34% in the June primary. That’s the problem with elections: unlike Castro’s Cuba, the voters can send the incumbent home.
15. The big irony is that Bass’s career started with an interest in revolutionary change and now depends on convincing voters that Los Angeles can’t afford another revolution.