David Brewster, a founding member of Post Alley, has a long career in publishing, having founded Seattle Weekly, Sasquatch Books, and Crosscut.com. His civic ventures have been Town Hall Seattle and FolioSeattle.
It's worrisome that the only channels for change that seem to be unclogged, locally as well as nationally, are channels that short-circuit deliberation and deny the chance to assemble a durable majority.
It may be that Seattle voters are ready to "leave Afghanistan," and that the voters and the mobilized beneficiaries of the charter amendment will pressure the council and the new mayor to grab this peace treaty, warts and all.
Wait til after the 2022 election. You need more Democratic votes to stand a chance to succeed, and you need the prospect of a good long run of Democratic dominance in D.C. to make it worth while.
Will the election be the start of a pendulum swing back to pragmatic moderation, or the consolidation of the city as a leftist bastion? Voters, unions, and independent expenditures hold the keys.
In the past, Boeing would set a high bar for corporate participation, with other companies finding their proper levels below. Microsoft now orchestrates such efforts.
Portland had been transformed into a distinctively Europeanized city, but now it is afflicted by a chronic anarchism that the politicians seem unable to stop.
"In the final days of the $3 million Black Brilliance Research Project, the wheels came off the wagon. King County Equity Now, the organization that fought for and spearheaded the project, found itself on the outside looking in,"
Mostly, the heady moment of alternative/urbanist/radical culture which gave birth to city weeklies in almost all large cities, couldn't survive economic downturns, social media, and the fading of the 1960s.
