“I’m a Democratic Socialist, Like Martin Luther King."
Robert LeVertis Bell is a public school teacher here in Louisville (8th grade English) who is running for a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives. He is running in the newly-created District 43, which includes parts of Butchertown, Portland, Russell, Shawnee, Shelby Park and Smoketown. That area is currently represented by Pamela Stevenson, a Democrat who won the seat in 2020 after Charles Booker vacated it for his first Senate run.
Stevenson is running for reelection, so Bell and her are facing off in a primary, with the winner virtually certain to win the general election in this heavily-Democratic district.
Bell is a Democrat and one of the leaders of Louisville’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He first ran for office in 2020, narrowly losing in the Democratic primary to Jecorey Arthur in a city council race.
I’m skeptical about how much good any Democrat, particularly a Democratic Socialist, can do in state government in this GOP-dominated state. But Bell understands the task at hand and has both a bold vision and some practical ideas about how to move toward that vision. He explains how to make America more democratic in a particularly clear and compelling way.
Here are some excerpts from our recent conversation:
Perry: Being a Democratic state representative in Kentucky, why run in the first place? The Republicans have all the control. You have very little power.
Robert: That's actually a great question …. I think it’s a generational task to reclaim this state, and to do so on behalf of the state's working class …
I'm an organizer. When I feel like we’re going backwards or we don’t have the power that we once did, then I say, “Okay, well, what do we need to do to get that power?” And that’s where the work starts ….
Having that position [in the state House] allows me to talk about some ideas on a bigger platform than I've had before. And to get started on reclaiming the state and not abdicating it. You know the Democratic Party didn’t even run candidates for a lot of these seats. So it’s like they gave up on the idea that we can even do anything. That’s not how I approach things. It’s not just, “Do we win this race or not win this race?” It’s how do we rebuild the power to make things different in four, six, eight, ten years.
Perry: We’re not a state with a lot of Democratic Socialists. So when you talk to a voter here, do you say, “I’m a Democratic Socialist?” And then, what do you say that means?
Robert: I say, "I'm a Democratic Socialist like Bernie Sanders. I'm a Democratic Socialist like Martin Luther King.” …. To older people, I say, "I'm a Democratic Socialist like A. Phillip Randolph." [King was not a formal member of the Socialist Party during his lifetime. But he spoke and wrote repeatedly of his deep skepticism of capitalism and suggested democratic socialism as an alternative.]
The best way I can put it is that Democratic Socialism means trying to advance the American idea of democracy into more aspects of life. So, if democracy doesn't exist, we put it there. Where it does exist in some way, we make it stronger. So where it does exist already is at the ballot box, in the electoral sphere. We need to make it stronger. We need to make our voting rights stronger. We need to make voter registration easier. We need to stop gerrymandering. We need to decrease the barriers to voting. We need to have ranked-choice voting, that sort of thing.
Say you're in a union. I'm a JCTA member. Our unions are a place where there's democracy in our workplace, where people who are usually subjects to power can express some more power. But we have to make our unions more participatory. We have to make our unions more transparent. We have to have our unions fighting for working people in general, and not just for the particular people who that union nominally represents.
Where [democracy] it doesn't exist or where it hardly exists is in the economy. We want to make our economy more democratic, let it be managed by the people through democratic processes, as opposed to the invisible hand of the market and/or the power of those who are wealthy.
That's what being a Democratic Socialist is to me.
Perry: So, you're running against Pamela Stevenson, right?
Robert: She's a family friend. I respect her quite a bit. By the time I got redistricted to run against her, I had already raised $15,000. I was already in full swing. I have all the respect in the world for her. …. But there was no reason for me to drop out of the race at that point simply because I like her.
Perry: So I can imagine you, as a Democratic Socialist, are to the left of her on some things. But is there anything that you disagree with her about that is actually going to come for a vote in the Kentucky State House, which is going to be dominated by Republicans for a long time?
Robert: She was one of the sponsors of …. the West End TIF.
I would never have sponsored that …. That’s something that benefits big business and I think in this case is actually an extractive tool in our communities ….
They can get stuff passed, so it's not like they're not doing anything over there. When it comes to Representative Stevenson and the TIF specifically, to me, that is an illustrative thing. Right? Tax increment financing is by and large a scam.
So that's a difference between myself and Representative Stevenson that actually is a substantive, practical difference. It is related to our political-philosophical alignments, but it's not pie-in-the-sky. Like, I wish we could have Medicare For All, but we really could develop our neighborhoods in ways that are not purely extractive ….
I'm looking forward to really trying to advance the conversation in our state about wage theft, specifically. That's a huge platform in my campaign. Really making wage theft laws a lot stronger than they are, I think we might be able to get some support for that, at least to talk to people about the simple fact that it doesn't make any sense if there's a loophole that excludes retail workers, restaurant workers, hotel workers, residential care workers from having overtime. That’s not okay.
These are not, you know, pie-in-the-sky, highfalutin sort of things. These are things that affect people's day-to-day lives.
And then, aside from what I can accomplish or pass in the next two years, you know, I'm a young-enough guy. [Bell is 41.] What I can't do in two years, what we can't do in four years, we can think eight years, ten years from now about bringing more people throughout our commonwealth to share our vision …
The Democratic Party in the state has completely abandoned and abdicated any sort of responsibility to working-class people outside of Louisville and really within it. So, I'm invested in starting now but working for the future.
Perry: So it's easy for me to imagine the entire Louisville political establishment, perhaps even Governor Beshear, endorses Stevenson. After all, she is the incumbent and one of the few black women in the state legislature. That seems not even just possible, but I would argue likely. You agree?
Robert: Yeah, I agree.
Perry: How do you overcome that?
Robert: When you get them in a room and you talk to them privately, they will say the reason is the S-word. They don't like it.
Perry: Socialist?
Robert: Yes, I use it, and they will not. And I'm not saying that people aren't fond of Representative Stevenson, I'm sure they are. But if pocketbooks open up in a way for Representative Stevenson that they never have before …. from people who have never cared about the West Louisville variety of neighborhoods ….we'll know that it's probably not because they're super-fond of Representative Stevenson, even though, like I said, she's quite a lovely woman.
But I’ve got money too. I definitely have enough money or will have enough money to run as strong a race as I can. What I have that she doesn't is 50 people just already on my list who are going to volunteer. With my volunteer base, I can knock on every single door in the district multiple times.
Perry: Talk to me about last Monday and Tuesday a little. John Yarmuth endorses Morgan McGarvey and then several city council members endorse Craig Greenberg the next day. It seems like an establishment consolidation. What do you make of that?
Robert: I see some people are very upset. But you know, nothing was surprising. And it’s not like anything untoward happened.
It's power consolidating. I don't generally buy the argument that they picked Morgan over Attica because they are afraid of Black women.
It's a political decision. He is someone who they feel like is safe. She is someone who they think is not safe.
Would I prefer Attica to Senator McGarvey? Yeah, I would. That's not a knock on either one of them. Her commitment to action on climate change is one of the things that she is extra strong on, stronger than even Representative Yarmuth. [Scott, unlike Yarmuth, has embraced the Green New Deal.] I felt like Representative Yarmuth was a fantastic representative, for what we can have in Louisville ….
But power consolidates behind who they feel like is going to be the safest and the best for their interests. And they have every right to be political actors in that way.
Like if you think that Morgan McGarvey is a stronger candidate than Attica, then go ahead and say so. I think it's good for them to say so. I feel like more people should talk about the why for their endorsement. I wish they would have said exactly what their problem with Attica was.
Perry: They definitely won't say that in public, even though in private, if you call them, they will give you a long list of things …”she didn’t come to this meeting, she was mean to me once,” etc.
Robert: She hasn't garnered a lot of love from the Democratic establishment here. And I don't know if it's personal or political stuff, whatever. But ….so much of the way that things operate is a matter of powerful people trying to pick the futures for all of us, you know, before, before anybody casts a vote, before anybody hears a forum, anything.
I can't speak to Councilman James … if his health were so bad that he couldn't run, that's his decision to make. But that decision had to have been affected to some degree by the fact that the money wasn't behind him.
You know, the Teamsters were behind him. The cops were behind him. That's not enough to win against a dude who can print money.
Perry: How should our policing policies change in your view?
Robert: I was talking about defunding the police before it was cool. Before Breonna Taylor ….that was a part of my platform.
One thing I do resent is when people completely discount crime as something that people are concerned about. When I talk to people in the community, and they talk about things that affect them on a day-to-day basis, many of them talk about the fact that they don't feel safe in their neighborhoods, before they talk about the possibility that they don't feel safe with the police.
That's just true. I don't think those people are wrong or stupid or blame them at all for feeling that way. They think that crime actually is an issue.
How do we address that? We address that by treating crime like the public health issue that it is, rather than treating it with these carceral models that we know actually don't work to make people safer or prevent crime ….
How do we stop people from being in the position where they are going to commit these crimes? We do that by helping people to live something close to the good life, free of the constraints of general economic scarcity.
If your concern is actual people's health and feeling comfortable in their communities, there are any number of solutions that we know will work a lot better than simply throwing more money at the police ….
The role that cops play in our society is not precisely to make us safer. That's part of it. There's an ideological component to policing …
So changing the narrative regarding those practices and police budgets, is a long-term, generational task. I hope that some of that has been accomplished to some degree from the protests, if they accomplished anything.
Perry: The narrative here in Louisville is, "JCPS is bad." When you hear that, what do you think? And then what do you want to do on education policy?
Robert: Our public schools in general have a massive task in front of them that other institutions in our society simply don't bear the burden of …
I'm a JCPS teacher. I'm a JCPS alum. I feel like I got a very quality education …
If we give our students, all of them, a high-quality education where we are actually trying to support our teachers and make sure that they are retained, make sure their work conditions are strong, if we were really trying to actually teach students to learn, as opposed to teaching new, arbitrary, corporate-funded, standardized-test benchmarks, we might find that our schools have the potential to be very, very strong …
We actually haven't tested that in a very long time around here because our schools are chronically underfunded. Our teachers are chronically under-supported, people who want to harm public education have been successful in doing so. So beating them back is the task that we have to undertake.
Perry: Stereotyping broadly, I think maybe the 2016 Bernie campaign and socialists in general tend to think liberals/progressives/mainstream Democrats talk about race in a flawed way. Socialists I think have a critique of “identity politics,” even if it’s a different critique than what comes from the right. As a black person who's also a DSA member, I'm just curious what you think about that.
Robert: So I can't speak for the Bernie campaign or socialism in general. DSA has about 100,000 members and we have 100,000 thoughts on race ….I could tell you what I think …
People will talk about race these days as if it's an original sin. As if, you know, race and slavery are things that existed ever outside of a material reality. As if white people enslaved black people because they wanted to be racist, because they wanted to establish a racial hegemony, as opposed to the reason why they actually did it, which is to make money ….
So racism and white supremacy will never to me exist outside of a framework …used to suppress the value of people's labor and to elevate the financial wealth of others …
A. Phillip Randolph, Martin Luther King, these are people who understood that the solutions to overcoming this country's history of white supremacy were in Social Democratic policies that would benefit the lives of the many and not the few.