Saikat Chakrabarti: JUSTICE DEMOCRATS THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU ALEXANDRA OCASIO CORTEZ

Saikat Chakrabarti

Chief of staff for Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)

Two years ago, after working for the Bernie Sanders presidential
campaign, Saikat Chakrabarti co-founded an organization called Brand
New Congress with a lofty goal: Launch hundreds of progressive
candidates into congressional races.

Hundreds didn’t exactly pan out. But one major star emerged from that
process: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who shocked the political world this
summer with a primary upset over rising party leader Joe Crowley (N.Y.).

Now Ocasio-Cortez is headed to Congress, with Chakrabarti as chief of
staff.Though they’ve been in Washington for only a few weeks, they’re
already making a splash — clashing with incoming committee chairmen,
joining a protest in Nancy Pelosi’s office and agitating for newly empowered
Democrats to stake out ambitious goals on climate change. Chakrabarti
turned heads by saying on a call, “We gotta primary folks.”

It’s all part of a broader strategy to deploy inside-out organizing,
Chakrabarti said. Staying connected to the progressive movement
— and the public eye — through attention-grabbing demonstrations and
social media is part of gaining policy leverage.

In other words: Don’t expect them to back down.

“When you shoot for big stuff, you stay true to the movement, you
fight unapologetically on the inside, that is a very, very powerful way
to pass the radical solutions that are necessary to face the radical
problems that you have,” he said.

Chakrabarti isn’t naive about the prospect of passing major liberal
legislation with a Republican Senate and Donald Trump in the
White House. And he wants to seek bipartisan achievements, citing
the Senate effort to end support for the Yemen war as an example.

But he also has his eye on the long game, name-checking everything
from the abolitionist movement to the country’s economic mobilization
during World War II.

He has big policy dreams, like a “Green New Deal,” which would
tackle everything from mitigating climate change to transforming
the American economy, and criminal justice reform. He wants to
lay the groundwork now to make them realities.

“Another thing to really do over the next two years is to basically
show the American people what will be possible if the Democrats
win the House, the Senate and the presidency in 2020, and that
means putting our best foot forward,” Chakrabarti said. “It means
putting the most ambitious, the boldest, the biggest things we can,
and then just build a movement around that.”

That approach doesn’t surprise Alexandra Rojas, executive director
of Justice Democrats, the successor to Brand New Congress. She first
met Chakrabarti on the Sanders campaign, where they regularly pulled
15-hour days.

“We’re in a very do-or-die moment, and I think he embodies the integrity
of fighting for a better world,” she said. “He’s a progressive force.”

Though Chakrabarti is shifting from outside activist to inside player,
he’s no stranger to career transitions. The 32-year-old Fort Worth
native came to the Sanders campaign after growing disillusioned with
the tech world. He co-founded Mockingbird, a web design tool, and
then built up the product team at the payment processor Stripe.
That followed a brief stint on Wall Street right out of Harvard.

Those earlier moves were propelled by a collegiate desire to start his
own company, and the belief that technology was his generation’s
way to change the world. Now he has his sights set squarely on the
halls of power.

“You have to decide to create the society you want to create,” he said,
“and that’s done through politics.” — Eli Okun

Photos by M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO.