A local city council election has sent shock waves through the political world.
Indian American Kshama Sawant campaigned openly as a member of the Socialist Alternative Party and won a seat on the Seattle City Council.
She will take office January 1 and has already been featured by such prominent international publications such as the New York Times. Sawant will become one of the few Socialists in the United States to win office.
“The take-home message for the left in general is that people are looking for alternatives,” she said. “If you ask me as a socialist what workers deserve, they deserve the value of what they produce.”
“She tapped into a growing discontent,” said James N. Gregory of the University of Washington. “But she also built off a framework of liberalism and economic liberalism that is pretty widely, strongly based in Seattle.”
One of her ideas has already won the support of Mayor-elect Ed Murray.
You can read about that in the New York Times.