About
The SoCalist is a publication of essays and notes on democratic socialism, Los Angeles, and the gap between the city we imagine and the metropolis we actually live in.
California is the country’s progressive bastion in the imagination of people who do not live here, and in the carefully maintained self-image of the people who do. The reality is something else. This is the state that produced Reagan, the tax revolt, the carceral expansion of the 1980s, and a state constitution that to this day requires a public vote before low-rent housing can be built in any community. Los Angeles is where the gap between the imagined California and the actual one is widest. More billionaires live here than in almost any city on earth, and tens of thousands of people sleep on its sidewalks, and the political class treats this as weather rather than policy. The SoCalist is writing toward a different city, and a different state, by taking seriously what the liberal frame cannot see.
I am Chad Shields. I write under my own name. I have spent the last several years working on policy in Los Angeles, alongside coalition partners at LA Forward and DSA-LA, on questions of police accountability, structural democratic reform, and what it would mean to build a city that actually answers to the people who live in it. I have sat through hundreds of hours of hearings. I have read the documents. I am not an academic and I am not a journalist. I am a writer trying to think the city through.
The publication has two sections.
Essays are long-form pieces that work something out structurally: the political economy of housing, the LAPD as an institution, what democratic socialism could mean in a sprawl city, the structural reading of a current political fight. They appear when they are ready, and not before, because the form requires it. They are written for readers who care about these questions and can tolerate footnotes.
Marginalia is the workshop. Shorter notes on what I am reading, what hearing I sat through, what someone said at a meeting that snagged on something I had been thinking about, what the next essay is starting to look like before it is an essay. The essays are the main text; this is what runs in the margins.
Everything is free. There is a paid tier for readers who want to underwrite independent civic writing from Los Angeles, and the pitch is exactly what it sounds like. Nothing sits behind a paywall, because the politics of paywalling civic analysis cuts against everything I would want this publication to mean. If you can support the work, please do. If you cannot, read freely and share what is useful.
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Come think with me.
