Do Conservative Seattle Politicians Exist?
Yes, and City Council President Sara Nelson Happens to be One of Them
Recently, I seem to have upset some folks when using the word “conservative” for some Seattle politicians like City Council President Sara Nelson.
In fact, over the years, pretty much every time I’ve written about city politics and used the word “conservative” for anyone wielding power in Seattle, I am greeted by derisive statements in the comments section about how stupid I must be. It’s the same on social media. Even the commenters who forgo the virtual spittle seem to think such a thing is impossible.
Yes, Seattle has Conservative Politicians
First, let’s just address the issue head on. Of course we have conservatives in Seattle politics. For starters, we have a Republican City Attorney who has given us good evidence she is also a MAGA Republican.
Ann Davison, who is in charge of prosecution in our city, became a Republican during the Trump administration–when thoughtful, moderate and otherwise non-MAGA types were fleeing the party in droves.
She filmed a promotional video that openly invited people to join the Republican party less than six months after the January 6th insurrection. The filmmaker she worked with was himself a January 6th insurrectionist, and was later prosecuted by the Justice Department and convicted for his activities at the capitol.
That doesn’t mean that people who voted for Davison are conservatives, or MAGA, or Republicans. But Ann Davison is undoubtedly all the above.
Conservative ≠ MAGA
I have also found that many people seem to think that when I use the word “conservative” for Sara Nelson, I’m suggesting she is a MAGA Republican. Democrats who are fond of Nelson find this quite insulting, for obvious reasons.
But to be clear, I’m not implying anything of that sort. She’s a conservative Democrat.
What about Nelson is Conservative?
Her perspective and rhetoric on government spending and who should pay taxes is more conservative than every Democratic President, many of whom have been moderates, since at least Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is similar for unions–she’s a direct opponent of the majority of the organized labor agenda. This despite the fact that unions are favored by 67% of all Americans. A significant percentage of Republicans are now to her left on labor.
Nelson’s stances and rhetoric regarding taxes and government sound more like Reagan, or even Herbert Hoover, than they do Barack Obama or Joe Biden. You would never hear her kind of rhetoric or support for her policies from actual moderates like Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker.
Since at least the invention of the automobile, the closest that the Democratic mainstream has come to Nelson’s tax and spending conservatism was Bill Clinton after Gingrich took over the House. And many of Clinton’s moves were understood to be political triangulation, not ideology.
But even then, at the apex of low-tax-love among Democrats, federal taxes as a percentage of GDP increased by almost 1/5th. When Clinton wasn’t fighting with Gingrich, he made income taxes more progressive, and much more so than they are now. When he was backed into a corner by Gingrich on tax cuts for the rich, he wrangled progressive offsets like child tax credits and benefits for small businesses.
Even taking into account Clinton’s welfare reform, Nelson’s agenda sits to the right of Bill Clinton’s 30 years ago, while the Regan revolution was still raging. She is far to the right of (still moderate) Hillary Clinton’s 2016 platform.
The National Democratic Party Agenda
It is tough to imagine Nelson sharing moderate Senator Amy Klobuchar’s enthusiasm for regulating tech companies. Undoubtedly Nelson’s rhetoric suggests she would oppose the Biden Administration's historically unprecedented climate bill. But that very bill was signed even by Joe Manchin, a conservative, gun-loving, coal-coddling Democrat, and Kristen Synema, who was so far to the right of the Democratic party that she left it less than four months thereafter.
Meanwhile, Nelson said that voting yes to expand Seattle’s Parks levy was the hardest decision she has made on council.
Can you imagine this same “we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem” politician voting for the Biden Administration’s massive Infrastructure Act, which got “yes” votes from Republicans including Mitt Romney and Susan Collins to Thom Tillis and Mitch McConnell?
I don’t say this to suggest she is more conservative than they are, and certainly she sits to their left on plenty of other issues–but as Democrats go, she’s about as conservative as they come.
JumpStart
For instance, In Seattle, we have one modest progressive tax (JumpStart). JumpStart was passed to fund affordable housing, childcare, and some climate investments.
Nelson has adamantly opposed it from the start. And it isn’t like we are taking our progressive taxes a step too far. Until recently Washington was the most regressively taxed state in the country, and now it is only the second worst. And Seattle’s spending as a percentage of GDP is down from ten years ago, contrary to Nelson “government spending is the problem” claims.
She opposes this tiny tax on top incomes despite the overwhelming economic evidence that cutting taxes doesn’t grow the economy, it just increases inequality, doesn’t affect whether millionaires migrate, and doesn’t impact startup creation.
This leaves Nelson with virtually no mainstream Democrats to her right to point to. Michael Bloomberg is probably the most conservative mainstream-ish Democrat in the last decade, and he raised taxes repeatedly in NYC, including progressive taxes, to address budget shortfalls. He stopped doing this once the NYC economy was booming again–but this is after taxes were much, much more progressive than they are in Seattle. Nelson makes billionaire Bloomberg look pretty progressive.
Conservative on Many Fronts
In fact, in 2022 Nelson donated $350 to unhinged King County Prosecutor Candidate Jim Farrell, whose campaign was kicked out of the Democratic Party for having direct ties with Republican campaign professionals and activists, and embracing their positions. He was so far to the right that many of Seattle’s “moderate” precincts voted against him by a ratio of 2 to 1 or more.
You can make a similar case regarding her rhetoric and behavior around a host of issues, including policing, public health and drugs. Her anti-science shtick regarding whether jail helps people recover from drugs— “I have a personal story and this somehow cancels out the conclusions of a vast field of scientific research” is the same kind of expertise-rejecting populism on the right that is used to claim we should take ivermectin for Covid. She even opposes moving elections to even years which we know would drastically increase voter turnout, and so on.
In other words, Sara Nelson is a conservative.
Afterward
Median ≠ Moderate.
It’s worth noting that some people will reject my position because they might think “moderate” is just someone splitting the difference between the positions held by the Democratic and Republican parties of the moment. That is an ahistorical category error, albeit one constantly reinforced by lazy journalists.
The median voter and whether someone adheres to leftist or rightist political thought are different things. Many countries have been overrun with bonkers ideologies that took hold of most of the populace. In places where median voters embraced murderous ideologies–the fact that they were in the middle of the population didn’t make them moderates.
Conservative ≠ MAGA
The MAGA Republican movement is, on balance, conservative. But that does not mean that all conservatives are MAGA or Republican. As mentioned above, much of MAGA is substantially less conservative than Sara Nelson on some topics, like unions and public finances, and that’s part of what they rebelled against party leaders like recent Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
This can be true even while they are comfortably to Nelson’s right on cultural issues.
You can also be quite conservative and a non-MAGA Republican, like former Republican presidential candidate and current Senator Mitt Romney.
In other words MAGA Republican and conservative are different things, even if they largely overlap in the United States.
Conservative ≠ Republican
Or you can be a very conservative person and be neither a Republican nor MAGA. These include Ronald Reagan debate prep buddy and political commentator-in-a-bow-tie George Will, or Bill Kristol, founder of The Weekly Standard and former Chief of Staff for Dan Quale. Both are diehard conservatives who left the Republican Party and voted for Biden because they think democracy is more important than taxes.
Democrats are certainly capable of being conservatives as well. Just a few decades ago the Democratic party was dominated by the racist anti-voting-rights Southern faction that now runs the Republican party. Given the party’s embrace of civil rights, it may no longer be common to be a conservative Democratic politician now, but it is certainly still possible.
For example, some Democrats are still sometimes quite conservative on abortion rights, taxes, guns and climate. Just ask Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.
On Defining “Conservative.”
Nelson is more or less a textbook conservative, but the problem of defining something like conservative using a dictionary quite thorny, so I’ve saved that for this afterword. As someone who rejects essentialism, I find a fixed, crisp, coherent, contextually appropriate and adequately capacious definition of a concept like “conservative” to be more or less a fantasy.
This is why I built my case above around various wayfinders for what generally counts as a conservative. For you philosophy nerds, I think the later Wittgenstein might like this.
If I were trying to do something like define the oeuvre of conservative and its counterparts, it would probably be something like this:
Progressives want to change the status quo in ways that are straightforwardly egalitarian. They are ready and willing to buck the opinion of the status quo power holders who have something to lose. Moderates might share some of these progressive goals, but they are more suspicious of bold steps, and they tend to be more sensitive to existing power structures. A conservative pushes for policies that prevent moving in that progressive egalitarian direction, or resents such moves, and fights to move the other direction. Most of us, of course, are some mix of all three depending on the specifics. Holding some mix does not make one a moderate.
Instead, the appropriate political identity captures the balance of our convictions. And modifiers add a great deal of clarity. That’s why calling Sara Nelson a conservative Democrat is the most accurate way to address her politics.
On “liberal”
Note - none of this is addressing liberalism. While there is this odd-but waning tradition of using this word to mean “progressive” in the US, the rise of illiberalism seems to be pushing it back toward its rightful place. The use of “neo-liberal” to refer to a particular kind of Reaganite economic agenda (much like Sara Nelson’s actually), also confuses this topic. Ditto for the rise of very-online young libertarian men calling themselves “classical liberals.”
I think it is most helpful as a concept for the liberal v illiberal sense, because it helps us differentiate different kinds of progressives and conservatives. Illiberal folks find the rule of law, or at least current legal structures, insufficient for achieving their aims and are readily willing to overthrow the basic legal order for the sake of their political aims. Liberals reject this to differing degrees.
Progressives and conservatives can be liberal, like Elizabeth Warren or Mitt Romney, or illiberal, like Kshama Sawant or Senator Josh Hawley.
Most US progressives are liberals and, prior to Trump, most Republicans held liberal positions too.