Who Sent You?

Nick Kryczka

August 26, 2025

In March of 2022, I had the odd experience of appearing at two political demonstrations on the same morning in downtown Chicago. One, staged outside City Hall, involved an assembly of progressive tenant advocates boostering on behalf of an omnibus ordinance on affordable housing. At the other, convened a few blocks away in front of the city’s Board of Education, I joined a group of frustrated parents demanding a drawdown of the school system’s prolonged COVID-19 protocols. As I ran through a gray drizzle across Chicago’s downtown to make it in time to both press conferences, I sensed that my political radar was in a state of recalibration. 

The housing crowd included well-networked nonprofit managers, leftist organizers, and public housing tenants who had risen to the rank of spokespeople for the plight of others in their strata. The parent group was ideologically miscegenated, embracing fed-up lakefront liberals, fired-up MAGA moms, and apolitical amateurs — and no one with professionalized connections to the local partisan infrastructure. Similar instincts had led me to both of these events, but I knew that the groups at each gathering might have a hard time imagining ever hanging out with each other. A lifelong Chicagoan and a historian of the city, I prided myself on a certain insider’s savvy, hip to the stakes, players, and textures of local politics. But COVID was, of course, an utter surprise — as was its capacity to force to the surface the structural and ideological oddities that characterized big-city Democratic party politics.

Serving the Community

My appearance at housing demonstrations had become something of a happy obligation over the previous five years. It began on a subzero night in 2017 when I showed up at a crowded Northwest Side community meeting to support the construction of eighty units of low-income housing that my progressive alderman was attempting to push through the zoning committee. I supported the alderman and shared his vision. I knew that housing costs were soaring. I knew about the city’s legendarily stark lines of segregation, the long waitlists for low-income tenants, and the supply-side pressures caused by exclusionary zoning. And I had been made to understand that saying yes-in-my-backyard to affordable housing was one way that people in neighborhoods like mine could help chart a more equitable landscape for the city’s future. Others in my bungalow-belt neighborhood, a white-and-Hispanic base for cop-and-fireman conservatism, strongly disagreed. The value and safety of the neighborhood that had drawn me there to raise my family, they argued, depended precisely on preventing the “criminal element” that dominated public housing from ever gaining a toehold. 

My neighbors’ political positioning tracked with nativity, education, and occupation. Those opposed to the project, including many first responders, tradesmen, and city workers, stressed their multigenerational roots in the neighborhood, defending what they described as the stability and low-density character of the community. Advocates for the new housing, whose ranks overrepresented white-collar professional transplants, made their case as forward-looking cosmopolitans, welcoming not just the deserving poor, but the walkable, transit-centered, new urbanist development that our neighborhood — crosscut by interstate highway trenches and railroad viaducts — seemed stubbornly unable to cultivate. From the YIMBYs, the NIMBYS saw an outsiders’ agenda for social and spatial engineering. From their NIMBY neighbors, YIMBYs heard only racial dog whistles.

Both sides had a point. Opponents did traffic in racial hysteria, prophesying an infestation of “ghetto rats” and their “miscreant cousins.” Proponents were trying to change the character of the neighborhood, and seemed unable to imagine that some liked it the way it was. I tried in vain to translate across the divide. These racial panics, I explained to my fellow college-bred progressives at our organizing meetings, were regrettable, but they were informed by concrete experiences that many of our older neighbors had when they evacuated the West Side in the sixties and seventies — fleeing spikes in crime and taking a bath on the investments they had made in their family home. New affordable housing, I argued to frowning old-timers on their front steps, were not the social failures of midcentury tower blocks, but in fact the only way to truly stabilize our neighborhood and address the problem that many of them admitted — that too many of their adult sons and daughters couldn’t afford to move out of the home they had grown up in. 

My efforts at polite suasion were doomed, drowned nightly, my neighbors informed me, in a stew of cultural enmity that boiled over on Facebook — which I wasn’t on. Regardless, the political fight would need to be won — and over the course of eighteen months, we waged it. Our local YIMBY group was quickly adopted by a coalition of citywide housing advocates, and I received an intensive crash course on the details of low-income housing tax credits and the more exciting game of political organizing. As my neighbors and I canvassed, phonebanked, petitioned, testified, staged actions, and recruited new allies, we were drawn into a wider circle of urban progressives whose numbers and strength had surged in the mid-2010s. The network included urban policy wonks, seasoned public interest law firms, liberal philanthropies, labor unions, neighborhood nonprofits, progressive aldermen, and millennial DSA members.

It was within this wider network of clout, and against the national backdrop of Trump’s first term that our housing fight gained traction as a local cause celebre. The address of the proposed site, “5150,” became shorthand in progressive social media circles. Reporters at citywide dailies and public radio adopted our framing and our talking points, seemingly eager to amplify stories that showcased both the intransigence of old bigotries and the energy of the new progressivism. I remember one housing organizer exclaiming his disbelief at “how hard we’re winning on all media!”

Winning the media finally won us the zoning and financing fight, but it may have cost our progressive alderman his job. In the election of 2019 — the same cycle that brought seven DSA-backed aldermanic candidates to office in the city’s more up-and-coming creative corridors — my alderman lost his seat to a conservative firefighter. Contingent voter-turnout bungles may have been just as decisive as the affordable housing fight, but both floated atop a stubborn sociological reality: in my swath of the Northwest Side, the transition that sustained the new urban Left — a replacement of older ethnics with younger college grads — had not taken place at scale.

The rise of a coherent Left faction in Chicago’s political scene depended on more than the demographics of gentrification. Perhaps more than any other American city, Chicago’s Left was built off of a dense nonprofit infrastructure of “neighborhood-based organizations,” and anchored by an undisputed center of gravity: the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU), led by the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE). By the time I was becoming active in local organizing, my own bread was already well buttered by the CTU. I had worked previously as a Chicago public school teacher for ten years, and my wife was entering her second decade in the system. Our middle-class lifestyle had been underwritten by our membership in the union, and I had supported the CORE caucus when I was a voting member. At the time, however, I was only vaguely aware of the shape and scope of CTU’s expanding political ambit. Across the 2010s, CORE’s brand of social-movement unionism became an inspiration to disgruntled teachers across the country and an influencer for a Jacobin-era American Left. Locally, its role was more concrete and consequential: a kingmaker for self-styled progressives in the Illinois Democratic Party and a benefactor and incubator for the expanding network of leftist activists, organizers, journalists, and politicos.

By early 2020, I had given over substantial time and energy to Chicago’s new Left flank. In addition to keeping active with my local YIMBY group and my former alderman’s political organization, I volunteered for multiple local progressive candidates and referenda, repped our housing group in a statewide coalition for rent control, run and won a seat on my Local School Council, canvassed for Bernie Sanders, and started paying dues to the DSA. For as grateful as I was for the political education, stubborn facts nagged at me. The new progressives seemed only capable of thriving where the creative classes were already remaking neighborhoods in their own image. Meanwhile, they appeared incapable of pitching political programs without draping them in moralistic and racialistic costumes. For the older liberals who managed and donated to legacy nonprofits, housing policy was part of the “unfinished struggle for racial justice.” Among younger activists, no political project was deemed satisfactory unless it could be synchronized with the Black-identitarian strains favored by Chicago’s local anti-police violence coalition, which had surged in prowess and clout following the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014.

As technically proficient as many on the broad Left had become at organizing for urban power and urban policy, I was consistently struck (and irritated) by the sentimentalist excesses that increasingly characterized local activism. As a Chicago native, I resented the sudden embrace of placeless intersectional lingo (“communities of color” “marginalized voices”) that flattened the contours of urban social life and decades of ethnic clientelism into templates that fresh-faced activists could recognize from their campus orientation workshops. Whether they called themselves progressives or socialists or liberals, the people who made up Chicago’s Left shared a strong desire to morally upbraid their neighbors. At times, my liberal neighbors’ class animus toward their conservative counterparts rivaled my conservative neighbors’ racial animus toward the black underclass. The people at citywide coalition tables who called themselves socialists were usually worse — lobbing accusations of insufficient racial sensitivity at anyone or anything they disagreed with. Veteran issue-based organizers were typically better behaved, their passions tamed and targeted toward the timelines and tactics needed to win discrete campaigns.

Wherever I sensed that more serious and more strategic initiatives might be afoot, I sought them out. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I trained with an insurgent citywide tenant organizing collaborative, which seized on the COVID terrain (closed courts, eviction moratoria, and landlords facing both vacancy risk and low turnover) as an opportunity to leverage renter power at the building level and build renter consciousness at a citywide scale. Cobbled together over zoom and Google docs by an ambitious cadre of activists, the effort ultimately included a hotline, tactical support, and a network of volunteer tenant organizers, of which I was one. The larger movement’s steering committee zoom meetings and slack channels hosted some of the most obnoxious counterculturalist and “abolitionist” performances that I had yet been exposed to. But the actual organizing campaigns were deadly serious, and thankfully most of the tenants I worked with never had to log on and meet an actual Leftist. The multi-month, multilingual campaigns I led were exhilarating, taxing, and only occasionally successful. One building achieved a wall-to-wall union and secured guaranteed lease renewals without rent raises. At another, a notorious slumlord succeeded in dividing and intimidating his tenants from their collective efforts, leaving longstanding utility cutoffs and maintenance issues unremedied.

Fighting for Family

At the same time as I was helping tenants build courage and leverage against the abuses of their landlords, I was oddly accepting of the public policy abuses that were growing around me and being inflicted on my family. In sync with the rest of the planet, Chicago’s public schools shut down and went fully remote in March of 2020, as did the university where I was teaching. Even as I mustered the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit necessary to adapt to the new education zoomscape, the sense of degradation to my children’s social lives and their educational progress was immediate and overwhelming. The parenting energy I had spent keeping my kids away from screens was overruled in an instant as we now dutifully sat them in front of chromebooks for multiple hours a day. Everyone in my household hated everything about it, but we deferred to the experts who assured us that it was all necessary.

Only once other aspects of Chicago’s public health restrictions began a poorly choreographed dance of drawdown and backtrack, did I sense that pandemic protocols were far less scientific than advertised — and that the policies that affected children were the most senseless and punitive of all. In June 2020, Chicagoans could partake in the bizarre pleasures of socially distanced indoor dining but my kids couldn’t swim at the beach. By February of 2021, bars and restaurants had been opened, closed, and reopened twice over, but the city’s public schools were operating on their tenth month as a fully online affair. Even when schoolhouse doors opened for the first time in March (just a week shy of the one-year anniversary of the initial shutdown), our kids were only allowed in their classrooms two days a week so that district leaders could stage theatrics of hygiene and distancing. Meanwhile, children in Chicago’s own Catholic school system, and roughly a third of the state’s other public districts, had been in-person and on-site since the start of the school year.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which Chicago’s school system sat at the vanguard of COVID-maximalist policy. Even when an allegedly full five-day schedule resumed in fall of 2021, children of all ages remained under a mask mandate for another eight months. Most punitive and disruptive of all was an elaborate rolling quarantine mandate for “close contacts,” a protocol by which parents received evening emails informing them that their child had been “exposed” to “someone who tested positive for COVID-19” and was thereby excluded from attending school for the next fourteen days. (Exclusions were later reduced to ten days and then five, but with longer sentences handed out to unvaccinated children). On any given day during the 2021-2022 school year, the Chicago Public Schools kept anywhere between 4,000 and 14,000 students out of school — without any of them having tested positive or expressed symptoms. My household was hit with eleven such alerts. (The last one, issued in the diminished form of a ten-day masking order, landed in my inbox in March of 2023 — three years after the dawn of the pandemic era).

With my frustrations mounting in fall of 2021, I naturally turned to my network of leftist activists and organizers to help me push back on the unchecked power of a malevolent public authority. As I should have anticipated, no one on Chicago’s organized Left would countenance even the slightest signal that the school system’s pandemic theater needed to be drawn down. (The sole exception was the Chicago chapter of Class Unity, a safe harbor and catch basin for dissidents and materialists — and the only leftist group happily socializing on an indoor, in-person, and maskless basis). The dominant appetite on the Left was for more: more surveillance; more mandates; more shutdowns. As many have suggested, the left-progressive overcommitment to COVID-19 protocols likely blended a range of impulses: a college-bred deference to expertise; wishcasting for crisis-based solidarity; hysterical polarization against whatever Trump and Trumpists wanted next. In Chicago, all of these surely applied, but it was my brothers and sisters at the helm of the Chicago Teachers’ Union who repeatedly reinforced and expanded the COVID policy arena in successive reopening negotiations with the city’s Board of Education. And it was CTU’s power to discipline every tendril of Illinois’ progressive infrastructure that ensured that my efforts to organize would be rebuffed at every turn.

In the local Independent Political Organization (IPO) that I helped found with the leftover pieces of my former alderman’s org, my tepid proposal to replace quarantines with a test-to-stay protocol was voted down in favor of a carbon copy of CTU’s vision of maximal pandemic restrictions. (I later resigned from the organization). During an excruciating five-day showdown between the union and the Board in early 2022, progressive and leftist groups swung into unison with CTU, reviving calls for remote instruction and a fresh pandemic panic for the Omicron variant. Lacking parent support, CTU blinked; the president at least had the dignity to resign after the loss. When I raised the issue of quarantines directly with old friends in union leadership, they admitted that members had thousands of different views on the pandemic. But they stood stubbornly on “racial equity” talking points, insinuating that if I organized with more “Black and Latinx families,” I would see the wisdom of the more coercive policies that CTU had gotten behind. I found myself on unfamiliar terrain. Unlike the moment when I struck with my colleagues in 2012, teacher unionists were no longer fighting alongside parents to defend pillars of public life against managerial austerity; they now attacked parents and egged on managers’ controlled demolition of the public trust.

It was clear that I would need to organize outside of the political environment that I knew, so I took the tacklebox of maneuvers that I learned from my housing activism and tenant organizing and went fishing for angry parents. I began with a few close friends and neighbors, got used to using Facebook, and started collecting contacts by way of an online petition. Soon, we were convening weekly meetings as the “Stay-in-School Coalition,” defining shared principles and talking points, assigning each other to take meetings with elected officials, and signing up to testify at upcoming Board of Education meetings. From what I knew, there was a range of political leanings in our original group, but no one spoke in those terms; our shared politics came directly from our stake as public school parents (and a couple of teachers) whose kids were being actively hurt by current policy.

Across the broader Left that I had been involved in, this sense of commonly held material interest was always talked about. But in the actual conduct of many campaigns orchestrated by professional-class nonprofit leaders, there was an assumed (and sometimes anxiously overexamined) distinction of interests between the organizers and the stakeholders. Organizers were credentialed technical assistants or big-hearted volunteers working on behalf of “vulnerable” or “marginalized” or “directly impacted” stakeholders, whose development and self-empowerment as “leaders” foundation grantmakers needed to see “centered” in every action. As a parent group, we had no need for the bureaucratized anxieties of noblesse oblige. We were fighting for ourselves and our kids.

At our first in-person testimony at the Board of Education, I met several other anti-quarantine moms who had come downtown independent of our group. As I quickly learned, there was a rich and varied political landscape outside of the CTU orbit. There were liberal critics of CPS-CTU COVID policy who had launched their own formidable organization a year earlier, earning polite coverage from respected news outlets. There was a loose coalition of cop moms, cops’ wives, and Hispanic evangelicals (or the nexus of the three) who were anti-mask, anti-vax, and pro-Trump. There were CPS teachers who had joined a class action lawsuit against the Board of Ed when they refused to be vaccinated or tested for COVID. Over the next eight months, we combined forces, looped our testimony together, and continued to strategize and mobilize on our two principal goals: an end to quarantine orders and an end to mask mandates.

It was clear that our conservative comrades had forged their activism in a distinctive ideological ecosystem. While my arguments stressed the irrational and unscientific nature of COVID protocols, as well as the need to restore the public trust in common institutions, conservative moms stressed the role of the US Constitution as a guarantor of personal autonomy and Christian conscience against the encroachments of an unelected bureaucracy. Some of their ancillary interests seemed eccentric to me. A few urged that we mobilize next on the sex ed and anti-grooming crusades that were gaining steam on the cultural right. Others shared a regular diet of silver-bullet legal gimmicks with questionable track records, apparently pitched by lawyers active on conservative social media. But on the fundamental questions at issue, their instincts were sharper than mine. Tutored by liberals and progressives, I underestimated the degree to which school administrators, board members, public health officials, union leaders, and local reporters constituted a unified block of unreflective opposition to our perspectives and objectives. My conservative counterparts were earlier to recognize the affront to dignity and common sense that swept our school system, more willing to disobey rules and file lawsuits, and less concerned with how we might sound on the local NPR station. 

Indeed, NPR’s local education reporter did not care for us. The Sun Times dismissed us. Left-wing reporters replied to our press releases by insulting us and wishing us ill. The Tribune dignified us with a few quotes. We caught blips on CBS, NBC, and WGN, and our best coverage came on Univisión where most of our press conference made the air. We certainly weren’t “winning the media,” but the newscasts were rosy in comparison to how members of the Board of Education received us. At the February 2022 Board meeting, with the entirety of the rest of the state of Illinois operating without mask mandates or quarantines, Board members expressed open disdain toward our simple demand that Chicago do likewise. Two board members accused us of being insufficiently solidaristic and insensitive to the “disproportionate” impact of the pandemic on “Black and brown communities.” The Board, they explained in a remarkable act of doublespeak, needed to promote “collective well-being” rather than “individual concerns.”

The malapropisms were telling. From the view of Blue-city managers, individual rights claims were suspect — incompatible with their vision of a polity in which various “communities” could only be made to speak through a well-vetted web of nonprofit “voices.” If your city government refers to you as “marginalized” or “vulnerable,” you need help speaking; they don’t expect you to speak for yourself. Or as an older turn of phrase in Chicagoese put it: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”