This article was written by a member of Metro DC DSA. Opinions expressed here do not reflect the views or opinion of the chapter, but reflects commentary from an individual writer.
EVERY FEW YEARS, an idea pops back up in the chapter: “What if we got a bunch of socialists elected to their Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANCs)?”
With the democratic socialist electoral project once again in the national spotlight following Zohran Mamdani’s win, many comrades believe the moment has never been better to run socialists wherever we can. We must seize the initiative while the moment is right. This is not an entirely new line of thinking in our region. In 2022, Comrade Dieter L.M. published, “Flood the Zone,” making the case for MDC DSA to commit to running members for Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in the November 2022 elections.1 The piece helped spur renewed interest in ANCs and their relationship to our chapter, but the chapter’s 2022 foray into ANC organizing was not the first attempt and I fear it won’t be the last.
While the idea of running socialists for ANCs is correctly rooted in goals like developing deeper neighborhood and community connections, destigmatizing and normalizing public socialist political involvement, and building a base of future support, I don’t think running DSA members for ANCs does any of those things. This is absolutely not the fault of the chapter or particular ANC Commissioners. I think it’s because ANCs are fundamentally anti-democratic, parochial, and should be thought of by socialists like they were government-run homeowners associations.
Many socialists strongly believe in the expansion of democracy to all spheres of human life. This often manifests in a healthy distrust of elected bodies far-removed from the people that actually elect them. The thinking goes — the larger the office, the further it must be from promoting the interests of working people. Conversely, the smaller the office, the closer it is to promoting the interests of working people. With this logic, what could possibly be more democratic and grassroots than DC’s ANCs?
We all know that American political life is undemocratic and unrepresentative by design. Our founders envisioned an entire chamber of the legislature to represent states, without respect for population size or even allowing for direct elections of Senators by the people living in those states. A modern congressional representative claims to speak for more than 700,000 people. In the District, each ward council member claims to speak on behalf of a little over 50,000 people. How can only 13 members of the Council of the District of Columbia legitimately claim to represent the full political life of DC?2
By contrast, the French, bolstered by the long shadow of their rationalist revolution, have a law that sets their municipal councils to automatically increase with the size of the city. A city the size of DC would have nearly 70 councilmembers.3 Enter the ANC, where every few blocks and 2,000 people bring another ANC into existence. There are 345 seats elected every two years, the Jacobins would tremble at our revolutionary order.4
In our unique blend of American arrogance and individualism, we act as if lines drawn on land into electoral districts represent genuine shared communities of interest and that these “districts” have shared interests stronger and more unified than the diverse and competing interests that live within them. Anyone that has seen congressional district maps should know that the idea that there are coherent unified “communities” being represented. Some might see this problem and argue smaller districts solve the issue.
With this in mind, should we as socialists legitimize an ANC system that enshrines the idea that a resident of single member district 1D04 (part of Mt. Pleasant) has interests fundamentally different from a neighboring resident of 1A05 (part of Columbia Heights). A working class tenant in Ward 3 has more in common with a working class tenant in Ward 1 or 2 than a capitalist homeowner in their own ward. A working class homeowner in Ward 8 has more in common with a working class homeowner in 4, 5, 6, or 7 than they do with a Navy Yard Republican renter.
As socialists, we proudly believe workers of the world have shared interests, so why are we trying to divide them up politically by neighborhood as if that is the principle that we organize around?
These questions are as relevant generally as they are in specific analysis of ANCs. We need to ask ourselves what an ANC is and what it is attempting to represent. We should first look at its name.
An Advisory Neighborhood Commission is an advisory body, set up and elected at the neighborhood level, that meets as and conducts its business as a commission (i.e., it must speak as a group, not as individual commissioners). As a non-partisan, hyperlocal office, the ANC claims to be an elected voice or expression of neighborhoods. Its single member district design rules dictate that the Council must respect natural geography and neighborhood cohesiveness when drawing ANC boundaries.
DC’s ANCs developed out of the neighborhood governance movement of the 1970s.5 Think of them as the crossroads of Jane Jacobs-style new urbanism, mixed with Saul Alinsky community organizing and Ralph Nader citizen activism, but throw in a dash of 1970’s conservative tax revolt. The Home Rule Act of 1973 which granted us our limited democracy, also contained a provision for a referendum on whether DC residents wished to implement a neighborhood level advisory system. The rationales at the time ranged from heady justifications that ANCs were a new form of radical local self-governance to pragmatic concerns about unequal representation within the newly enfranchised city. Georgetown would never need its own spokesperson, but some neighborhoods might.
Our experiment with neighborhood governance is not entirely unique. In 1999, Los Angeles created the Neighborhood Council system. New York City has had Community Boards, or their local zoning predecessors, in its charter since 1961. NYC’s Community Boards, due to their larger size and higher populations tend to be far better resourced and more consequential than their DC cousins.6
It is politically important to recognize that “community control” or “local control” in America is inextricably linked with historical veto authority over more centralized decisionmaking. This historical current had progressive and reactionary strains, summarized succinctly by our conservative opponents as “Back when the Panthers were riding high, the phrase community control had one set of connotations; in the wake of the busing battles, it had another.” To black communities ignored by downtown politicians, the neighborhood governance movement was about self-sufficiency and demanding adequate resources. To white enclaves in cities, demands for neighborhood control was a thinly veiled attempt to keep their disproportionate school funding and city services, high property values, and keep out non-white residents. But within all of these currents was the emphasis on checking the actions of a higher authority, often perceived as out of touch with particular localized concerns. It's not hard to see why ANCs or neighborhood councils elsewhere easily become bastions for Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) type politics. It's almost hardwired into their history. Our democratic socialist program demands society-changing policies, so it’s hard to see how reflexively veto-prone bodies like ANCs would play a role other than by being roadblocks to our work.
DC law states that ANCs, “may advise the Council of the District of Columbia, the Mayor and each executive agency, and all independent agencies, boards and commissions of the government of the District of Columbia with respect to all proposed matters of District government policy including, but not limited to, decisions regarding planning, streets, recreation, social services programs, education, health, safety, budget, and sanitation which affect that Commission area.” This law, however, gives us no fundamentally new rights that we did not already have. There is already a legal right enshrined in the constitution for any group to petition or advise the government.7
So, what do ANCs get for this formal advisory status? The law requires that DC’s government grant ANC’s opinions “Great Weight.” What practically constitutes great weight? The Council and Executive Agencies must wait at least a few days before sending ANCs a letter methodically rejecting their position. That is, great weight means nothing. This isn’t just cynicism built from years of my personal organizing failures, this is the actual legal opinion of DC’s Attorney General:
“Giving great weight means that the government entity making the decision must ‘articulate its decision in writing.’ It must acknowledge the ANC as the source of the recommendations and explicitly reference each of the ANC’s issues and concerns. Although the agency is not ‘obliged to follow the ANC’s recommendations or adopt its views,’ its written decision must explain ‘with particularity and precision the reasons why the Commission does or does not offer persuasive advice under the circumstances,’ accompanying that explanation with “specific findings and conclusions with respect to each issue and concern” the ANC has raised.”
ANCs are not a lower chamber of a bicameral legislature. They are institutionalized feedback to the DC government that are ignored when inconvenient and lifted up when they support the case someone is already trying to make. Further adding to their indignity, ANCs are tasked with being the local advisory formation to weigh in on zoning plan changes and alcohol licenses within their commission area. Instead of advancing policies that make material improvements on people’s lives, ANCs are forced to adjudicate between neighborhood conflicts.
“That restaurant is playing its music too loud.” “A teenager said something mean to me and his friends laughed.” “Don’t approve the zoning variance for my neighbor, because their back porch blocks the sun onto my yard.” “Bike lanes will bring in dangerous crime into my neighborhood.” “Add a stop sign, because people speed on my street.” “Take away the stop sign, because I like to speed on your street.”
There is no class struggle here. Only the confused politics of a homeowners association.
We are not the only political organization to explore the possibilities of advancing an agenda through ANCs. Greater Greater Washington (GGWash) has repeatedly run ANC trainings, sent out questionnaires, issued endorsements, and coordinated activities of ANCs once they got in office. But GGWash’s smart growth, YIMBY, zoning reform agenda is a much more natural fit for the work of an ANC than an organization like ours, which is tasked with the overhaul of the political economic order.
In 2023, GGWash even faced pushback by DC’s Director of Government Ethics who attempted to argue that the free, informational training sessions constituted a violation of the ANC ethics rules. While they later reversed their decision, it points to the broad perception of ANC’s as being non-political offices focused on “good governance” issues.
Our strategic goal as socialists is to combine struggles together from the local level, to the state level, to the national level, to the international level. At each step, we reveal that the same class forces raising the rents in your building are the same ones passing legislation in your state to pause elimination of the sub-minimum wage, and those same forces fight at the national level to cut your medicaid, and across the world fight violently against any workers that dare to fight back against their conditions. There are no local struggles, only different fronts in the same class war. Hyper local focuses distract from that.
Our task is to show workers that they can change the world. How can we do that when our ANC doesn’t approve a non-binding resolution asking for the Mayor to do something? Does this strengthen us? Does this show our strength? Does this show to members or non-members that their time invested in organizing is worth it? Does anyone materially benefit from our political victory in an ANC?
How do you do mass political organizing when you’re bogged down in liquor license approval battles, zoning fights, and advising with “Great Weight" a mayoral agency that plans to put your advice into a shredder?
If we take the socialist ANC strategy as seriously as we should, where we effectively use ANCs to legitimize and promote our politics, we would need to target majorities on a substantial fraction of the 46 commissions. Let’s say we want half of the ANCs in DC to pass our resolution, we would need to elect or build majority coalitions of 4 to 6 commissioners on 23 different commissions. And then what? The Mayor, the agency head, or the Council can still ignore the resolution if they don’t like it. That’s the difference between advisory power and legislative or executive power. One asks, the other just does.
It isn't that legislative or executive positions are not subjected to similar political distractions as ANCs, but their ability to wield state power to actually improve worker’s lives and reframe issues around material politics make the time investment worth it. Behind DSA socialist electoral work, from 2016 to the present, is the gamble that with some election and legislative victories, we will demonstrate to workers that a better world is possible through struggle. It’s a gamble, but we must hope the odds are in our favor. But if we try to achieve any change through ANC offices, there’s no chance we can win.
Some may argue that ANC strategies shouldn’t be about moving resolutions. Some may share my skepticism of “great weight” and whether a hostile mayor or council would really ever be moved by resolutions. But even after taking that into consideration they’ll argue, “ANCs are the minor leagues and many DC politicians get their start there.” Mayor Bowser repped ANC 4B09. Phil Mendelson repped ANC 3C. Brianne Nadeau repped 1B05. Matt Frumin repped 3E. Wendell Felder repped ANC 7D. Jack Evans repped 2B. It is a pretty common place to get your political career started. But is it the right place for socialists to build their base? For every ANC commissioner to councilmember, there’s a Charles Allen (former Chairman of DC for Democracy and political staffer to Tommy Wells) and Christine Henderson (political staffer to David Grosso). Our member’s time is not infinite. Should we spend our time building our benches in the trenches of ANCs or in mass organizations like unions, tenant associations, and political clubs?
One of the more interesting counterarguments I’ve heard is that socialists should be active in their ANCs to push back against right-wing hegemony around neighborhood issues. Imagine a community meeting where the same three or four busybodies complain about “crime” (read: kids on dirtbikes). It wouldn’t take that many people to completely change the tenor of these meetings. But unfortunately, I think we are still falling for the trap set by the DC government for political gadflies of all stripes. Anyone going to an ANC meeting to talk about crime is unlikely to be convinced, so we may just be arguing with people who can never be convinced otherwise or recruiting already like-minded people. None of this is objectionable, but it just doesn’t seem like a basis for political power.
We should double down on a socialist electoral project that believes in the simple formula:
This requires running serious class struggle campaigns where our cadre candidates are forced to build a coalition of working people that confronts our opposition. Once in office, we need to build a working political majority that can win legislative victories that improve the lives of our supporters. We need to use that office and the bully pulpit to organize our working class coalition and recognize their real interests. I don’t believe any of this is compatible with running socialists for ANCs. There are winnable seats for socialists in DC wards. With Mamdani’s win, we might even be able to dream districtwide.
After re-reading Dieter’s piece, I reached out to a former chapter member John G., who has since moved away and was deeply involved in the chapter’s 2018 ANC campaign. I present his frank assessment of the 2018 campaign and encourage members to assess whether ANCs are a useful democratic socialist form of governance at all.
The 2018 ANC Campaign grew out of the DC ReInvest campaign to get the DC government to divest from its banker (Wells Fargo) and instead set up a public bank. The campaign sought to engage District ANCs as secondary targets who could pressure the primary targets (the DC Council, the Mayor, and the CFO) by passing ANC resolutions calling on them to do these things. After an initial burst of activity with sample resolutions passed by perhaps 10-12 ANCs, the progress slowed. We did get to know some ANC commissioners who were sympathetic to the ReInvest campaign and also to DSA goals in general who suggested we could get more traction for DSA projects if we flipped more ANC commissioner seats.
We also saw ANCs as more realistic targets for entering DC politics since at that time MDC had only had success in suburban electoral campaigns. Both the win number and the more organized Green Team and other machines in DC Council races were deemed too difficult to attack [directly]. ANCs, with their substantially lower win number (sometimes simply unopposed) were seen as more attainable and also as a stepping stone to larger races (having ANC experience had been a precursor to several successful Council runs in the past).
Every Commission is different, with its own cast of characters and balance of forces. We had the absurd situation of DSA-endorsed commissioners fighting on the opposite sides of DSA campaigns. For example, in the Comprehensive Plan fight, some DSAers fought against developer-friendly YIMBYs to advance tenant protections while other DSAers fought with those YIMBYs against reactionary homeowner NIMBYs.
Advocates of ANC organizing point to how city Departments sometimes listen to the advice of ANCs, but it’s basically a ratchet effect for conservative forces. If an ANC takes a left or populist stance opposed to something the mayor’s administration or staff wants, that advice is easily and often ignored. If, however, an ANC takes a conservative stance to oppose a populist measure, the Mayor and Council are happy to lift up their voices.
Taking the ANC job seriously means Commissioners must engage in 10+ hours of unpaid volunteer labor each week. This work is often pointless from a material standpoint (doing constituent services for petty neighborhood tyrants, resolutionary scheming against conservative Commissioners, etc.) and is a huge opportunity cost to other, more useful organizing within DSA or on behalf of DSA priorities. Becoming a Commissioner essentially takes a skilled organizer/cadre/leader off the board for DSA, something that would be a huge disaster for an organization suffering an acute shortage of cadre and an already existing problem of burning cadre out via bullshit administrative work and petty infighting.
Endorsing a full slate of ANC candidates creates a contradiction between the huge amount of burden placed on chapter leadership and the membership vs the tiny return on that investment. The number of possible seats is so many (almost 300 SMDs) that doing a full and thorough endorsement process along the lines of other MDC electoral endorsements would be precipitous.
Even we at the time recognized that the role is so minor that it simply isn’t worth the effort of either candidates or DSA membership to go through a proper, rigorous endorsement process the way DC Council or state legislature candidates are required to undergo. At the same time, DSA does not want to endorse candidates at a whim or end up having endorsed problematic or unsuitable candidates. Do we want to put randos up in front of the body sight-unseen and just trust that they will follow DSA’s lines and not embarrass us?
We never properly resolved this contradiction. Instead, we erred on the side of very little vetting in a process that was probably not bylaws compliant even back then, when endorsement-related bylaws were much less rigorous than they are now. We had a seven-question questionnaire filled out by each candidate and then put the whole slate up for a single chapter vote.
Though the win number of any particular ANC campaign, running enough ANC candidates to get to the kind of critical mass desired would entail needing to win a large number of votes and contact a large number of voters.
We were not able to get many DSA members interested in ANC campaigning, because we could not articulate a clear material case for doing the work. So most of the work was each candidate somewhat on their own, with a few core volunteers canvassing for a couple of the priority candidates.
As a candidate, I was able to enlist the help of a couple non-socialist volunteers mostly for their own reasons (a cell of Cleveland Park YIMBYs called Cleveland Park Smart Growth, and one individual who had some personal beef with the incumbent I was challenging).
I was not able to tie socialism or even socialist-adjacent demands into my canvassing because there was really nothing I could credibly promise I could do within the office of the ANC that would materially benefit anyone, much less the working class. I also lived in an area of Ward 3 that was quite affluent and so populist messages weren’t that resonant with many of the voters.
I honestly did not do all that much campaigning for myself, in part because I did not believe in the mission enough to see it worth a lot of even my own effort. I didn’t canvass much at all in my own apartment building for fear of getting in trouble with management and for having awkward conversations with my neighbors.
As democratic socialists, we should ask what or who we are actually trying to represent here? Where in our democratic system is our representation by political belief, the thing we actually claim to be voting for? Where is our representation based on class? Where is our representation based on the job sector or trade? All of these shared communities of interest are far more likely than land to produce better reflections in office.
The 2018 DSA ANC campaign lost every competitive race except for the one race where two DSA-endorsed candidates ran against each other. Of those DSA-endorsed candidates who got into or stayed in office after the campaign, none of them had a critical mass of DSA-friendly fellow Commissioners on their Commissions. Most ceased to be in any regular contact with DSA or to push DSA priorities within their ANCs. They simply became enmeshed in the petty squabbles within their particular Commissions.
It drew attention and volunteers from DSA’s campaign for Emily Gasoi for DC Board of Education, an election that was happening at the exact same time and for an office that has at least some power vested in it. We didn’t really establish any durable connections to new Commissioners, local activists, or anyone else. We did not gain any new members that I am aware of that are directly-tied to the ANC campaign. Given the failure of both the DC ReInvest and ANC campaigns to achieve their aims, ANC-focused organizing went dormant in MDC as more viable and useful opportunities for DC Council campaigns emerged.
