Last month, Indianapolis city councilor Jesse Brown was expelled from his local Democratic party caucus. Ella Teevan sat down with Jesse to talk about what happened and how he — and his constituents — are fighting back. This interview has been edited for brevity. Listen to the full conversation over at The Call Radio.
Tell us about your role on the Indianapolis City Council. What are you responsible for? How are the parties represented?
I am a city/county councilor for the City of Indianapolis-County of Marion combined government. We have something called Unigov, which combined our city and county governments as a way to disenfranchise Black people in the 1970s. I represent about 36,000 families in Indianapolis. On paper, we have the power to write the city budgets and pass local ordinances. Historically, councilors have not actually exercised much of that power.
It’s a strong mayor system. There are 25 councilors in the legislature. We pass ordinances and determine funding levels for city programs. This most recent year, it was a $1.6 billion budget. Through public-private partnerships known as municipal corporations, we oversee IndyGo (our bus company), the Indianapolis International Airport, and the Health and Hospital Corporation, which controls most of the nursing homes in the State of Indiana. There are a lot of influential developments and tax incentives that have to get approved by the City Council.
We have had a Democratic mayor who is now in his third term. We have 19 out of 25 seats on the City Council controlled by Democrats. On the State level, we have been under a Republican supermajority in both houses of the legislature for over 20 years and haven’t had a Democratic governor in that time. We’re a blue speck in the middle of a deep red sea. Frankly, I get the impression that a lot of the leaders of Marion County have made peace with that and aren’t trying to change that anymore.
What has your relationship been to your Democratic peers since you’ve been in office?
I ran as an open socialist and won by the widest margin of any contested election in the city. All 25 councilors and the mayor all go up for election at the same time. The Democrats in charge of the city refused an independent citizen-led redistricting and instead used party insiders to protect a couple of key districts, including the one I ran in. I ran against the sitting Vice President of the Council in a district that was designed to be a Democratic stronghold. What they didn’t realize is that most of those true-blue voters preferred a socialist to an institutionalist who was defending the mayor and what he was up to.
Before my inauguration, multiple Democrats argued that I should not be able to caucus with them or be considered part of the Democratic party because I proudly use the word “socialist” to describe my politics. I brought up the fact that I’ve always voted Democrat. I’ve never skipped a primary. I’ve never voted for a Republican. I was a teenage anarchist with dreadlocks who still voted for John Kerry because I hated the Iraq war so much. I held my nose and was pretty loud about how much I hated some of the candidates, but I still voted for them as a harm reduction strategy. I’d also previously been elected as a precinct committee person in the Democratic party, so I knew my neighbors actually supported me. They had no leg to stand on in claiming that I wasn’t a Democrat, and yet at least one of my caucus mates boycotted the first caucus meeting I was invited to because he felt so strongly I shouldn’t be allowed in.
On the Council, it has been an uphill battle from the beginning. Even the “progressives” among my Democratic peers tried to let me in on the secret of how things run in Indianapolis — they are terrified of conducting any sort of real policy work. We have a very far right Republican party that’s in control of our State. Some of the fringe right wing conspiracy theorists in the State House subscribe to a legal theory that Indianapolis doesn’t have a right to govern itself because it is not explicitly mentioned in the State Constitution and, if the Republicans wanted to, they could dissolve our local government and rule by fiat. Apparently, it’s not just fringe right wing people who believe this. Most of my peers on the Council do too. My contention is that if they’re going to hold this card in their hand and we don’t even try to fight back lest we make the Republicans angry, then they basically get all the benefits of having played it without any of the negative publicity.
This tension first came to a head within the first couple months on the Council when a far right Republican State Senator tried to kill a Bus Rapid Transit project in my district that had already been awarded $150 million in federal funding. He was trying to kill it because he’s a toady for the car industry. My peers on the Council basically said, “This sucks. But there’s nothing we can do about it.” I raised over $5,000 from small-dollar donors and got 120 volunteers to commit to running someone to run against him. This infuriated the Democrats on the Indianapolis Council. To them, this is as good as we can get. We all wish that the Republicans had less power, but they don’t and they never will. We have to do what they say, or else they’ll make things even worse for us. To me, the question is: Why do you have a job? Why are you in office if you don’t think that you can meaningfully help your constituents, or you can only do so if the Republicans say it’s okay?
How did you get kicked out of the Democratic caucus?
Of course, my peers’ first complaint was, “You’re a socialist. We think that’s bad for the Democratic Party. We don’t want to be associated with you.” It seems like the electorate disagrees, because they voted me in and seem happy with what I’m doing. Then, they weren’t happy with how I engaged on social media. I agreed to abide by any social media guidelines that the caucus democratically decided on. They weren’t interested in writing down new rules. It’s a similar structure to a union contract: If the boss is the one who determines what behavior is acceptable and what behavior isn’t, it turns out, by a sheer coincidence, that the people who threaten the boss are the ones who get written up for violating the rules. The same thing was happening here. My Democratic peers didn’t like transparency. They didn’t like me talking openly to the electorate on social media, in town halls, or over coffee or a beer. They had a very broad view of caucus confidentiality, saying that anything that they say to me as a fellow politician should be considered confidential. I strongly disagreed, but I still tried to distill the general message of what I heard in the caucus without ever naming anyone or putting them on blast. I was trying to play by the rules as much as possible without compromising my values.
The reward for playing by the rules was to be totally sidelined the whole time I’ve been on the Council. I’ve only been assigned three committees while every single Republican on the Council has at least six committees. They chose to give me fewer committees for a couple of reasons: one, they thought I would embarrass them and, two, a significant portion of our pay is based on per diems that you only get on your committee days. They were literally trying to starve me out and make politics less attractive for me.
I have been dealing with being sidelined throughout my term. Last year, everyone was too afraid to stand up to the mayor and pass a budget as we’re empowered to do under State code. He could veto. We could override the veto. Instead, we wait for the mayor to propose a budget and we react to it. We finally had enough of a majority who wanted to rebel against the mayor’s budget. We have skyrocketing homelessness, and only $500,000 of our $1.6 billion budget was going to go towards affordable housing. A lot of us wanted to try to change it. I wrote a 10 page draft of revisions to the budget and encouraged my colleagues to use whatever parts of it they liked. I didn’t ask for credit. Only one of my fellow councilors even opened the Google Doc. They kept telling me, “Do things quietly, try to work behind the scenes,” and then they would laugh in my face when I tried to do just that.
Over time, I stopped trying to persuade the unpersuadable councilors and devoted more and more of my energy to talking directly to the people. This came to a head earlier this year, when several Democrats stood arm-in-arm with Republicans at a press conference to pressure our local public schools to give away more resources to charter schools to avoid the risk of an outright takeover by the State House. They threatened one of the core tenets that every person who’s not far right-MAGA believes: public education is an important thing in this state. It’s an issue that I think 90 percent of Hoosiers agree with. At first, I tried to organize against this quietly. My peers, the three Democrats, escalated by sending text messages to constituents in my district. They texted Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) parents that basically said, “Stand with these three Democrats calling for IPS to avoid the state takeover. The only way to do that is to pay more for charter schools.”
I asked my colleagues to explain themselves and got a bunch of carefully worded non-answers. When I pointed out that they weren’t denying that they had anything to do with it, they asked to talk to me on the phone. If any politician wants to talk to you on the phone, that’s because they are lying. Or perhaps they refuse to be tied down to a position which is the same as lying. I wanted something in writing. I made a Facebook post sharing a comment from one of my constituents who was upset about the text messages and said that I suspected that the three Democrats named in the text message had something to do with it. They hadn’t denied it when I asked them about it privately. So here I was, asking them publicly. In response, I was sent a screenshot of my post. I didn’t receive any other communications until the caucus meeting the following Monday. The first order of business, which was not on the agenda we had agreed on, was a vote to kick me out of the caucus.
The vote ended up being thirteen in favor, six against. No one alleged that I had violated any rules. Three people made comments. The first person who made a comment was the same person who had threatened me when I went against the Republicans. He said that what made the case for him was that I had encouraged people to come to the City Council meeting and give public comment in favor of a ceasefire resolution for Palestine. He thought that was beyond the pale. One person mentioned I was too harsh on social media. The third person basically made up a narrative that accused me of going straight to calling out my peers for the charter school text messages instead of giving them enough time to explain themselves. Those were the only three people who said a word. Everybody else voted to expel me without explaining their vote.
My peers thought I would go away quietly or resign from politics. But they had been telegraphing their moves for over a year. I decided that it’s the same as when dealing with Trump or any other dictator: don’t obey in advance, and don’t obey any rules you don’t have to obey, so don’t let ICE into your workplace if they don’t have a warrant, don’t let the Democrats on the City Council force you to leave the room. Maggie Lewis, the caucus leader, said, “Okay, we’ve taken the vote. You’re excused.” I leaned back in my chair a little bit more and said, “Sorry you feel that way. I don’t think you have the legal right to expel a duly elected Democrat, especially since you didn’t even allege any rules violations.” They called the sheriff’s deputies to intimidate me. I waved and said, “Hi, guys, how’s it going? Oh, did I get this wrong? Is this not a public room in a public building? Let me know if I read that wrong.” The situation ended with everybody else in the caucus getting up, leaving the room, and looking for another room to meet in. If they want to fight me, they’re going to get a fight back. They went off to have their caucus meeting and I wrote an email to my constituents letting them know what had happened.
I suspected that their next step would be to strip me of my committee assignments to try to pressure me to resign from office. In fact, they had given the prerequisite 48 hours’ notice of a Committee on Committees meeting, which is where committee assignments are formally determined. I brought this up in my email to my constituents and said, “This is an attempt to disenfranchise your district. I think I’m representing you very well. If you disagree, definitely let me know. But if you want me to be able to keep fighting for you, I need to be able to serve, not just on the three committees I’ve been on, but on six.” I urged my constituents to pack the room and make sure that my peers understood I’m not alone, I’m fighting on behalf of my constituents. Sixty people showed up to a meeting in a room designed to seat seven. They had chosen this small room to act as though it wasn’t a public meeting. A president of a local union was in the room. There were people from a number of different communities, a lot of my constituents, but also well-respected people from the community who weren’t in my district, and some pretty upset activists who were quite vocal — all of them stuffed in that room. The councilors decided not to remove me from any committees.
It’s been kind of a whirlwind since then, but my constituents are on the warpath at this point. They organized a march on City Hall that they’re planning for the next caucus meeting and the next full Council meeting, demanding that I be given at least six full committees and hopefully be seated with the Democrats again. I have my doubts about whether that second part will ever happen, but as a duly elected Democrat, I still think I have the right. This experience has rallied a ton of people who weren’t super involved in politics, gotten them a lot more interested and active. We’ve had dozens of people join DSA in the last month. They see DSA actually willing to fight back regardless of party line and that’s where they want to be, which has been amazing to see.
Is it politically useful that you got kicked out of the Democratic caucus? How do you see this in relation to a “dirty break” strategy for building independent working class political power?
The way I’ve chosen to pursue this has been to earnestly participate in Democratic politics and to push issues that I know are popular with their base, but not with their donors. Force them to stand on one side of the line or the other.
For example, some of my peers think that I brought a ceasefire resolution about Gaza to the Council to embarrass them. I absolutely did not. I brought it because hundreds of my constituents asked me to. When they first brought it to me, I said, “Look, I totally agree. I’ll sponsor it, but it will have to be a movement that pushes it, not me.” My constituents got hundreds of signatures and dozens of people packed the City County Council meetings month after month. In the end, Democrats sided with Republicans to remove the ceasefire resolution from the agenda so they would never even have to take a vote on it. Not voting looks even worse than voting no. People see that you don’t even have enough respect for them to look them in the eye and vote one way or the other. They disagreed.
My objective has never been to cause division. The division is there. My role has been to expose it. If Democrats truly are the party of unions, the party of the working class, the party of public education, the party of peace and not imperialism, then let’s act like it. Let’s not only do what big donors are asking us to do. I’m not letting people say I’m no longer a Democrat, because 5,479 people voted for me in the general election as a Democrat. Thirteen people don’t get the right to override the will of the constituents. I continue to try to expose those contradictions and force Democrats to choose which side that they’re on.
It has become a principled stance of mine that I’ve never taken a dime from any organization at all. It’s only been small-dollar individual donors. One of the only groups that ever tried to give me money was my local DSA chapter, but I gave it back insisting that the money should be spent on building DSA. People are huge fans of a politician who refuses to be bought. I think it’s a really good strategy that everybody should be following.
What is the task of socialists in this political moment? Can running for municipal office actually make a difference?
What I found is that when you engage and activate people, when you do sincere organizing on the local level, those people are speaking with other people, developing class consciousness and figuring out how to fight bigger fights as well. Running for office, as long as you are not afraid to make enemies of the powerful, can be a great organizing tool. It forces the conversation right out in the open. The fact that I was able to not take donations and not bow to pressure from donors shows that there’s no kill switch in the brain of every Democrat. They all could do this if they wanted to. They’re choosing not to. That framing is helping constituents expect more from Democrats and Republicans alike.
It’s important to embody the ethos of “Not me, Us” and make sure that it’s about the movement and that you’re always redirecting the energy away from yourself. This is about my district. This is about my constituents. This is about what the people want. It’s not the Jesse Brown show. I ask in all my constituent emails, “What do you want to see more of? Where should I be focusing my energy?” My constituents responded that they wanted to know where local politicians were getting their money and who their biggest donors were. I said, “I don’t know. Anybody want to help me find out? Come to the DSA office. I’ll bring pizza and donuts. We can spend a couple hours researching campaign finance together.”
Sixty people have signed up to do just that, three quarters of whom were not previously DSA members. They can see the results of organized people starting to have this power and changing the public narrative. It’s addictive. There’s so much despair, fear, alienation, and lack of agency. This is something where it feels like your efforts matter, you’re not alone — and together you are making a difference. This is the path forward.
