Process Over Progress: How The Right Uses "Good Governance' to Keep Chicago Stuck

Here are some things happening in the news that are upsetting me lately!

🔹 Gutting the federal safety net while claiming public aid creates "dependency"
🔹 Normalizing fascist rhetoric under the guise of "free speech"
🔹 Tearing up civil rights protections in broad daylight
🔹 Letting Elon Musk turn the White House lawn into a Tesla dealership (because the grift never stops)
🔹 Deregulating food & water safety while pretending they’re fighting "bureaucracy"
🔹 Forcing trans people to flee their home states—while the institutions meant to protect them stand down
🔹 Escalating tariffs, driving up unemployment, and handing even more power to corporations,

These seem like pretty bad troubling things to me, even in a country and world full of troubling things! Even if they are by design, part of the shock and awe campaign, or something that many people have predicted all along, I still find them upsetting, which is the excuse I’m using to not hyperlink to new stories about each of these (I will probably change my mind about this come morning, so let me know if you’d like these specific links).

I have spoken to many people who feel similarly lately! Wild I know! I’m even making the radical assumption that YOU are also aware of these troubling developments and that they are affecting you in some way (dissociation counts, too)!

But good news: we are wrong for this, my friends. We have been paying attention to the wrong things.

While we have been staying up late thinking about water filtration, political disappearances, or how to get a passport before it’s too late(?) we have missed out on a crucial development:

Austin Berg thinks it’s a major scandal that Chicago’s mayor gets to appoint aldermen in the event of a vacancy.

!!!!!!! I know.

Berg claims this appointment is an unprecedented, anti-democratic crisis. He waves around national comparisons (all while ignoring the actual reasons why Chicago’s system works the way it does). Emotions are high.

I talked about Berg’s work at length last week, and how what he does is the foundation of right-wing media landscape across the country.

Honestly, it feels a little one-note for me to again talk about Berg’s half-baked, corporate-libertarian talking points, written as though he is the first to ever question Chicago’s political structure.

But — if only to distract ourselves from the real crises — let’s break his latest faulty news hook down, because it still matters for Chicago.

Outrage Over Mayoral Appointments is Fake — And Really Boring If You Think About It Too Much

Here is a quick recap of Austin Berg’s newsletter argument and the politics that inspired it:

35th Ward Alder Carlos Rosa-Ramirez, appointed to be the head of the Parks Department, will no longer be Alder, because he will be the head of the Parks Department.

So someone else needs to be Alder. The way this works in Chicago right now is that the Mayor chooses that person, who will be the new Alder until the regular election. Alder Rosa and presumably his appointed replacement, are both progressives, and the 35th Ward is a major organizing powerhouse.

Austin Berg says: mayoral appointments are a uniquely authoritarian Chicago quirk, a leftover from Boss Daley’s machine days. This is bad and should be stopped right now, this instance, preferably before MBJ appoints someone progressive in the 35th Ward.

He makes a joke about this with a Kanye lyric that I personally hate, but to each their own.

There is nothing about anything happening nationally in Austin Berg’s newsletter. No used car sale at the White House, no “damn they called our Mayor in front of the feds to testify about deportations,” no “oh wow they just defunded the hell out of the Department of Education, which ostensibly I care about lot about since all I’ve posted for the last 6 months is how messed up Chicago’s Public Education system is bc of unions” — nothing. Just this procedural appointment issue.

Cool. Great.

Now we are all up to speed.

What Do Other Cities Do? Is It Better?

Every city has a system that keeps power consolidated in some way. The real question isn’t how appointments happen—it’s who benefits.

And here’s the thing: every city fills council vacancies somehow. None of these systems are perfect.

• In New York, special elections happen in the middle of the term—when only the most die-hard voters show up. That means party machines still control the process.

• In Los Angeles, the council can straight-up vote to fill a vacancy. Which, surprise, gives power to existing electeds rather than voters.

• In Chicago? The mayor appoints someone, but City Council has to approve them. Which means the people’s elected representatives still have a say.

(If you’re reading this in one of those cities — genuinely hit me up if it’s different from how I’m portraying it here!)

Berg laments mayoral appointments but doesn’t actually propose a better alternative. Why? Because he’s not interested in solutions. He’s interested in pretending every Chicago political process is broken by design, a reflection of MBJ as The New Daley so that conservative, anti-government types can justify gutting the city’s ability to function at all.

He’s Objecting to Power, Not Process.

Progressives actually have power now. The moment a left-aligned mayor gets to make a basic government decision, suddenly Berg remembers that “too much executive power” is bad, especially in 35th Ward.

By the way, the history of the 35th Ward is long and will get me way off base rambling about zoning and the power vacuum of a Council trying to function in a post-Daley Chicago, so I’m not going to go there in this email.

But you should know that Berg would love to see progressives waste time and money having to mess around with procedural and PR attacks in one of the most block-by-block organized wards in the city.

Berg doesn’t care about democratic process. If he did, he’d be just as loud about the billionaire-funded dark money groups quietly reshaping local media towards their agenda.

Or he could talk about the national issues of which we have many! You know, the ones giving you low grade (or high grade) insomnia — the erosion of the federal safety net, a collapsing democracy, terrifying attacks on free speech, many many once-protected groups, the end of the rule of law, and so on.

But Berg won’t do that, because that would mean criticizing the people who fund his job.

Why Austin Berg Still (Unfortunately) Matters

In a world where fascists are selling used cars out of the White House, why should we waste energy on Austin Berg and what he cares about re: Mayoral appointments?

Because Berg is paid to normalize destruction—to take disinvestment, wrap it in “good governance” language with charts and data, and make sure that as public institutions crumble, you blame the people who tried to hold them together, not the ones who sabotaged them.

Again, this is all part of the playbook I laid out last week, and he continues to follow it, including Crains’ Editorial Board republishing his newsletter in their own content to make sure they reach the right boardrooms, policymakers, and casual readers who don’t realize they’re being sold a right-wing agenda disguised as civic concern.

Chicago Has Other Things To Do

As everything falls apart, Chicago should be the counterweight.

The cartoonish people with power know this: otherwise, they wouldn’t be here.

They wouldn’t be funding Berg, demanding Johnson make an appearance in DC, or sending Homan to terrorize our communities.

They are grinding away at Chicago to make sure that when the real authoritarian crisis hits, there’s no one left to fight it.

Chicago should be leading the fight for working-class power — but these relatively easy plays from people like Berg leave us stuck in endless process fights while real material suffering grows.

So, as national politics descend into outright fascism, we can’t let people like Berg shape the news cycle by insisting the real crisis is the mayor filling an aldermanic vacancy.

📢 The Ask: Subscribe & Share

I write this newsletter because I want us to win. I want Chicago to be a city that actually functions for the people who live here—not for the billionaires, the developers, or the think tanks working overtime to convince us that everything is broken beyond repair.

But we’re up against a well-funded, well-organized opposition that wants you to think the problem is progressives in office, rather than the rigged systems they built to hoard wealth and power.

They already have power nationally. They’re coming for the rest.

The right understands narrative power. They use it every day to justify:
⚡ The destruction of public goods
⚡ The reframing of democracy as “corruption”
⚡ The privatization of everything that isn’t nailed down

And if we don’t fight back with unrelenting truth? They will win.

If you care about what happens next—if you want a Chicago that actually serves the people who live here— it would mean a lot if you subscribed. 

Or shared with a friend. Or send this to your favorite group chat, ideally the one that’s the meanest but most supportive of each other based on vulnerability and candor. If the group chat is a big lift right now, maybe send this to someone you know has been stuck doom-scrolling. But that’s just an idea.

📩 Subscribe here.

Thanks for reading—whether you’re here to fight, learn, or just gather enough ammo to make someone on X really regret bringing this up, I appreciate you.

Good luck out there.

+ H