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Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now more than a year into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators and educators not only about how to resist but also about how to build a better world. Today’s interview is the 118th in the series. Click here for the most recent interview before this one.
Today we bring you a conversation with Joe Dinkin, the campaigns and communications director at the Working Families Party (WFP). Dinkin discusses how Paul Ryan’s exit is indicative of the trouble the Republican Party is in and how WFP plans to organize people around the 2018 midterms.
Sarah Jaffe: I want to start out with some of the good news. Tell us about what your reaction was to hearing that Paul Ryan was no longer going to run for his seat?
Joe Dinkin: There had been rumors swirling for a while that Paul Ryan might get out of the race as Randy Bryce’s campaign picked up steam…. It turned out that the rumors were true and Paul Ryan quit before he could be fired, because Randy Bryce, the union ironworker and Working Families Party activist … was going to give Paul Ryan the run of his life; it turned out we were right.
Randy Bryce, from the beginning said he wanted to “repeal and replace” Paul Ryan. We’ve gotten the first half of that done. We’ve repealed Paul Ryan; he’ll be out of Congress. It’s pretty satisfying to say that. This is a guy who has talked about dreaming of slashing Medicaid and the social safety back … dreaming about making poor people suffer is just so infuriating that I couldn’t be happier to see him exit public life.
Unfortunately, he’ll probably end up with a lucrative lobbying contract of some kind, but he won’t be in the same capacity — able to inflict the kind of direct…