Ananya Kumar-Banerjee, BK ’21, takes a closer look at Justice Democrats, a progressive political grassroots organization, and its impact on Democratic and American institutions. She is currently a research volunteer for Justice Democrats and was a campaign volunteer for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) last summer.

Growing up in New York City, I was taught that the city’s votes didn’t matter. If you were born in a different state, you remained registered there. After all, your taxes would be lower and your vote could actually make a difference. Not in the City, where everything was solidly blue and stable. Here, people were elected for lifetimes. We lived in a city that silently championed incumbents. That was the case, at least, until June 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) defeated Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District with a progressive slate.

With the rise of AOC, Democrats across the country began to push for progressive change in the party. One group is trying to encourage similar challengers in the coming years: Justice Democrats.

Justice Democrats (JD) is a grassroots Democratic organization challenging the status quo in solidly blue districts — and perhaps in some moderately red districts — by redefining what it means to be a Democrat. It supports candidates who support an end to the “pay for play” system of Congress.I’d like to think that their forceful idealism is why someone as centrist as Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) would proudly proclaim on her website that she “refuses to accept donations from corporate PACs!”

JD’s populist progressive vision is about more than one candidate, one primary, or even one election cycle. It’s about transforming the structure of the larger institution of politics, locally and nationally. But lately, I’ve been finding myself wondering: does JD actually change the deeper infrastructural problems of democracy? Can anything besides revolution really bring about the change we desire? Does JD, a group that claims to bring about change, not just affirm that there is something that can be done to “fix” our nation, assuming nation-states are the best way for things to be organized?

Frankly, I’m not sure. I realize I’m a college student who is more embedded in critical theory than in the problems I confronted over the summer working for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign. I realize that there are people who are suffering on a daily basis due to the problems continually ignored by current representatives. I understand that having accountable representatives could ameliorate some of these problems. But this does not fix the underlying issues in a representative government when the representatives themselves rarely reflect the population — until recently, political office wasn’t even considered an option for working-class people — and especially when the core act of voting is a fraught, exclusionary process. More than that though, I’ve come to understand that, not unlike all the individual mechanisms that comprise it, the electoral process was made by and for the ruling class.

JD purveys a series of policies, which their representatives consistently support. But the question remains: Does requiring candidates to accept policies — including the rejection of corporate donations — prevent them from doing “bad” things? Even if we were to ask a representative to adopt stances on hundreds of issues, JD has no way to enforce its requests. It feels like an impossible mission. We might hope that media, social or traditional, would provide means of holding representatives accountable. But I’m not sure it does. Our culture has always had blind spots. Previously, these blind spots have been so broad so as to allow for the suppression, erasure, and violence against whole groups of people.

The truth is that JD cannot solve the deepest structural problems. It can’t fix the fact that giving individual people the power to decide larger groups’ futures is a fundamental power imbalance. But by pushing people to the left, we might bring more radicals into government. By pushing to the left, we might bring about some accountability, some change. It won’t be the radical uprooting of institutions we need for complete change, but it’s a start.

I’m not by any means satisfied with the agenda of JD. At the very least, though, I am thankful. A year ago, I was troubled by our political system. I no longer trusted electoral politics; I planned my summer around specifically not working for a campaign. But I couldn’t explain why I felt this way. That summer, I went to go work at a public interest litigation firm because I thought it might help orient me in the world of social justice, and in my own life. When I stumbled upon Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, it was because I was trying to understand who I was; the campaign was in the district my mother’s family moved to when they came to this country. It was the district that housed the largest Bengali population in New York. It was the district my father and I went to for groceries on Sundays growing up. Then, what started off as a side project has become something many people know me for. It’s become a part of my image, in a way that I don’t dislike. I’m proud, I think, of having my ideology challenged so much in the last year. I’m proud of having grown politically. I’m proud of having changed, and doing so in the company of wonderful, passionate organizers from around New York City. They’re the people who stopped Amazon. They’re the people who organized around the recent Brooklyn prison that lacked access to heat. They work on the smaller issues too, the ones that don’t go viral on Twitter. They stand up for people. They fight back. And I’d like to believe they’re my friends.

This is why I work for Justice Democrats. No, I don’t agree with everything they do. But what I love more than anything is the people, the possibility, and even more the promise. I’m thinking of something that AOC said to us many times last summer: “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.” The statement does not suggest that the pain goes away. But there’s a force behind it, an idealism, a passion. It’s the same passion I found in the little office by the subway over the summer, the steamy room where my friend Patrick told my father we weren’t sure how the primary election was going to go, but that we were fighting either way. There’s a sense on our weekly calls that there is something we can do, that there is something to fight for, even if the fighting does not seem to bring the change that my friends and I talk about. At least, not yet.

Justice for Whom? was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.