The skills that helped fuel We Co.’s breakneck growth are piling up as potential liabilities as the company prepares to go public
Adam Neumann was flying high. Literally.
His office-rental giant WeWork was months away from being valued at $47 billion. Revenue was doubling annually. And Mr. Neumann was zipping across the Atlantic Ocean in a Gulfstream G650 private jet with friends last summer, smoking marijuana.
After the group landed in Israel and left the plane, the flight crew found a sizable chunk of the drug stuffed in a cereal box for the return flight, according to people familiar with the incident. The jet’s owner, upset and fearing repercussions of trans-border marijuana transport, recalled the plane, leaving Mr. Neumann to find his own way back to New York, these people said.
Since Mr. Neumann co-founded WeWork—recently renamed We Co.—with Miguel McKelvey nine years ago, he has led with unusual exuberance and excess. His combination of entrepreneurial vision, personal charisma and brash risk-taking helped the company surpass $2 billion in annual revenue, and made it the country’s most valuable startup.
Now many of the same qualities that helped fuel his company’s breakneck growth in the private market are piling up as potential liabilities as the company prepares to go public—helmed by a CEO who looks little like a typical public-company chief.
Mr. Neumann muses about the implausible:
becoming leader of the world,
living forever,
amassing more than $1 trillion in wealth.
Partying has long been a feature of his work life, heavy on the tequila.
Public investors are increasingly skeptical of the formula that has worked for Mr. Neumann so far: his pitch that We is far more than a real-estate company. With its rapid growth and use of technology, he argued, the company deserves rich valuations normally reserved for tech companies.
Instead, many potential investors now see a fast-growing office subleasing company with losses of more than $1.6 billion last year.
Since We filed the prospectus for its initial public offering last month, it has been besieged with criticism over its governance, business model and ability to turn a profit. It is now expecting an IPO valuation as low as a third of the $47 billion sticker price it garnered in a January funding round—a drop without recent precedent. This week, We postponed the offering until October at the earliest.
Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors have been dismayed by the number of potential conflicts of interest disclosed in the “S-1” IPO prospectus, including Mr. Neumann leasing properties he owns back to the company and borrowing heavily against his stock. Even some of We’s private investors said they were angered to learn that an entity Mr. Neumann controls sold the rights to the word “We” to the company for almost $6 million—before public pressure led him to unwind the deal.
“This is not the way everybody behaves,” said Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter Inc., who led the company through one of the larger tech IPOs of the past decade. “The degree of self-dealing in the S-1 is so egregious, and it comes at a time when you’ve got regulators and politicians and folks across the country looking out at Silicon Valley and wondering if there’s the appropriate level of self-awareness.”
Given the prominence of the IPO, he added, “that is a big problem.”
Mr. Neumann, 40, declined to comment through a spokesman, who cited rules surrounding the planned IPO. Mr. Neumann told We employees Tuesday the process had been humbling and he would learn from it, say people who heard him. We executives have previously said he is strongly devoted to the company, and many of his personal transactions were made with the company’s best interests at heart.
This account is based on interviews with current and former employees, investors and friends who interacted with Mr. Neumann as he built We.
For startup investors, the 6-foot-5 Mr. Neumann has always had the qualities they crave in Silicon Valley founders, despite being based in New York. He is intensely ambitious and a masterful storyteller with a magnetic personality who can inspire and sell.
Raised in Israel on a kibbutz, Mr. Neumann moved to the U.S. when he was 22, where he attended Baruch College and tried to start businesses. One was a collapsible heel on women’s shoes that didn’t get off the ground. Working out of his Tribeca apartment, he started Krawlers, which sought to make baby clothes with knee pads to make crawling more comfortable. The slogan, he has said: “Just because they don’t tell you, doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.” It never gained traction.
He and Mr. McKelvey started a small co-working space on the side during the recession that followed the financial crisis and were amazed by the demand.
By 2010, they had started WeWork, with essentially the same core business model that exists today: They lease an office long-term, renovate it to make it hip and inviting, and sublease smaller desks and offices short-term.
Early on, Mr. Neumann painted a picture of how WeWork was connecting entrepreneurs and others who in the past would have worked from home or in coffee shops; how the company would bring a new way of working to a changing world.
The founders planned for the “We” brand to expand beyond office space into other categories such as housing and finance. Mr. Neumann ramped up its image as a tech company as it grew.
It introduced a mobile app for network members, meant to facilitate a “physical social network.” The company emphasized its data and how it was using artificial intelligence to glean insights about buildings.
Past funders and employees tell stories of how an animated Mr. Neumann convinced them within minutes to believe in the company’s epic future.
“When I met him, after a couple of minutes, I wanted to invest,” said Joey Low, whose Star Farm Ventures put money into the company in 2013 and multiple subsequent funding rounds. “He was hungry for success—that was for sure.”
Even former executives who disliked Mr. Neumann give him credit for an extraordinary ability to motivate employees and push the company.
He forgoes many conventions of the standard, buttoned-up CEO. He pushed for rowdy parties in the early days. He often walks barefoot around the office. In an earlier office, he blared songs by pop-star Rihanna while a trainer held a punching bag for him, and then walked around afterward while still sweaty from the exertion.
Like some high-profile CEOs in tech, he hopes to live forever, according to three people who heard him say this, and has invested in life-extension startup Life Biosciences LLC.
It says its mission is “to create a future where age-related decline is not a fact of life.”
As WeWork grew, Mr. Neumann took on ever more investment, bringing in tens of millions of dollars from venture capitalists, then hundreds of millions from mutual funds T. Rowe Price and Fidelity Investments. Crucially, he secured full control of the company in 2014 when investor demand was high—getting shares with 10 times the votes of others.
Ultimately he found a kindred spirit in Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., who, like Mr. Neumann, is a risk-taker who respects giant bets. Mr. Son, a telecom veteran who raised the world’s largest tech fund in 2017, met Mr. Neumann in India in 2016 and pondered an investment.
SoftBank first committed $3.1 billion in new funding in 2017. Mr. Neumann has told others that Mr. Son appreciated how he was crazy—but thought that he needed to be crazier. A SoftBank spokeswoman declined to comment.
Many former employees said they didn’t always know how seriously to take some of Mr. Neumann’s pronouncements. Early on, he would throw out seemingly random ideas, like adding a pool in the basement of the company’s headquarters or starting an airline.
He told at least one person directly that his ambitions included becoming Israel’s prime minister. More recently, he said that if he ran for anything, it would be president of the world, according to another person who spoke with him.
“The influence and impact that we are going to have on this Earth is going to be so big,” he said last year at a “summer camp” southeast of London, where the company’s staff were all flown for a music festival-like event. One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger.
Alcohol flowed in great quantities; bartenders handed out free rosé by the bottle. Employees from around the globe posed for photos with the CEO. Some seminars had a spiritual component, including one with holistic health expert Deepak Chopra, who advocates regular meditation and yoga.
Mr. Neumann has told several people over the past two years that a personal goal is to become the world’s first trillionaire.
He relishes trips in private jets. Last year, We bought one for more than $60 million, people familiar with the sale said. Mr. Neumann has borrowed more than $740 million against his stock and has sold multiple hundred million dollars of shares, people familiar with those sales say, eliciting widespread criticism from analysts and Silicon Valley investors. These share sales weren’t disclosed in the IPO prospectus.
In a 2015 investment round, Mr. Neumann sold tens of millions of dollars of shares. Soon after, the company launched a buyback program offering to purchase employees’ shares too. But the company gave employees a different arrangement, giving them a payout per share worth substantially less than what Mr. Neumann was paid, people familiar with the sale said. Mr. Neumann’s sale wasn’t publicized within the company.
We executives have said the buyback price couldn’t be higher for tax reasons. More recent stock sales have been more equitable.
A recent change to the company’s corporate structure puts Mr. Neumann and a group of executives in a position to have a lower tax rate on some of their stock compensation than the rest of the employees in the company. We said the new structure was created in part to make it easier to expand into new businesses beyond co-working, according to IPO filings.
In private, Mr. Neumann often talks about the company’s valuation, according to people involved with the conversations. He has insisted that We’s valuation will eventually be many times what it was earlier this year, when it reached $47 billion, the people said.
For Mr. Neumann and the investors, the premise has always been that the market would look at We as more than real estate. The high valuation—twice that of United Airlines Holdings Inc. —has enabled the company to continue to raise money to fund new desks and offices and keep growing, even as losses persisted.
He has created a distinct culture in his mold. T-shirts and signs sport slogans such as “hustle harder” and “Thank God it’s Monday.” Employees are often big company boosters, creating a work-hard, play-hard office, with a millennial hipster vibe.
Alcohol has been a big part of the culture, particularly in We’s first half-decade. Mr. Neumann has told people he likes how it brings people together, and tequila, his favorite, flows freely. Executive retreats sport numerous cases of Don Julio 1942, with a retail price of more than $110 a bottle, and pours sometimes start in the morning.
A few weeks after Mr. Neumann fired 7% of the staff in 2016, he somberly addressed the issue at an evening all-hands meeting at headquarters, telling attendees the move was tough but necessary to cut costs, and the company would be better because of it.
Then employees carrying trays of plastic shot glasses filled with tequila came into the room, followed by toasts and drinks.
Soon after, Darryl McDaniels of hip-hop group Run-DMC entered the room, embraced Mr. Neumann and played a set for the staff. Workers danced to the 1980s hit “It’s Tricky” as the tequila trays made more rounds; some others, still focused on the firings, say they were stunned and confused.
Mr. Neumann also enjoys marijuana, his friends and former executives say. As with the Israel trip, multiple people who have been on planes with him say he often smokes while airborne.
Much of this culture has been pared back as the company has matured. The summer camp was canceled this year.
Mr. Neumann has mellowed some too, friends say. He sometimes stays away from alcohol for weeks or months at a time, and raucous parties are less frequent. His wife, Rebekah Neumann, has helped pare back the partying, former executives say.
Ms. Neumann, a first cousin of actress and wellness guru Gwyneth Paltrow, has said she and Mr. Neumann clicked when they first met, when Mr. Neumann was broke and struggling to make a business.
“It felt like time stopped,” she told a podcast interviewer last year. “I just knew he was the man that was, hopefully, going to help save the world.”
Mr. Neumann and his wife, Rebekah Neumann, in 2018.PHOTO: EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Former employees who worked with her say she pushes to infuse spiritualism in We—which has a mission statement to “elevate the world’s consciousness”—and enjoys broad autonomy at the company. She is the chief brand officer and head of WeGrow—the private company’s preschool and elementary school that costs up to $42,000 a year and is open to anyone. She is an important counsel for Mr. Neumann, and he has told staff they often make decisions together.
The two split time between some of their many homes—they have at least five—including a 60-acre Tudor-style estate north of New York City. They have told staff they started WeGrow after they were dissatisfied with schooling options for their five children.
The two have committed giving $1 billion to charity over the next decade.
Ms. Neumann had been slated to play a large role in choosing Mr. Neumann’s successor if he were ever incapacitated, but was recently removed from that position amid pushback from investors.
Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms. Neumann has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just minutes, telling staff she didn’t like their energy. She and Mr. Neumann have sent maintenance and IT staff to their homes to fix various items.
When Mr. Neumann announced in July 2018 via video call from Israel that the company was banning meat, executives in New York were caught off guard. With little explanation from Mr. Neumann, a group huddled to determine a rationale—they settled on sustainability—and the mechanics of what would be banned and how.
They determined employees couldn’t expense meals with meat, but they could eat it in company offices, so long as the company didn’t pay. Former employees say they have since seen Mr. Neumann eat meat.
He previously has instructed staff to fire 20% of employees a year, bemoaning the number of “B” players hired amid rapid growth. Managers were unable to hit the target even when they included attrition.
Still, former executives believe his outlandish targets for items such as reducing construction costs have forced better results than more realistic goals—and are a driver of the company’s continued growth.
That growth has remained remarkably consistent, roughly doubling every year for most of We’s history, and remains the main selling point to investors.
“This guy is pushing hard, but he’s all in,” said John Caddedu, managing director at early We investor DAG Ventures. Building something as big as We, he said, “requires extraordinary devotion and focus and will and a lot of the things that throw some people off.”
Mr. Neumann had been expecting the revenue growth rate would also be well received by the public markets. Companies such as Netflix Inc. and Amazon.comInc. were growing at slower rates nearly a decade in, though they were losing far less money.
Instead, after the IPO prospectus was released in mid-August, the company became the butt of jokes in Silicon Valley and among Wall Street crowds. Analysts and competitors critiqued its lack of detail around the economics of its offices. Corporate governance proponents were aghast at the long list of potential conflicts. Some observers noted the irony of personally profiting off the trademark for the word “we.”
Years leading a private company left Mr. Neumann unprepared for the negative reaction, people familiar with the IPO discussions have said. Every time he raised money—often at in-person meetings where check-writers could see Mr. Neumann’s charm—the valuation went up, money rolled in, and the business expanded.
Some investors said when they raised concerns about Mr. Neumann’s self-dealings, he brushed the issues aside. Despite We’s growing size, its losses have been increasing at the same rate as revenue, creating a constant need for fresh investments. That is contrary to earlier projections from Mr. Neumann, who said the company wouldn’t need more money.
Meanwhile, numerous other business lines, including a residential arm, a gym and an office design and management arm, have all been scaled back or failed to deliver the high profit margins once expected, people familiar with the businesses said.
In a videoconference with the whole company Tuesday, Mr. Neumann, dressed uncharacteristically in a gray suit and a white button-down shirt, told the staff it has “played the private market game to perfection,” listeners said.
As for the public markets, he said, the company was still learning the rules of the game.
Mr. Netanyahu only confirmed an unspoken truth. And yet something has changed.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last week, ahead of the parliamentary elections in Israel this Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that if re-elected, he would annex up to one-third of the occupied West Bank.
His announcement prompted widespread international condemnation. But for most Palestinians such declarations mean nothing. We’ve heard many statements of support over the years, and nothing ever changes. Cynicism is widespread; by now, many of us would prefer straight talk. As Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, wrote recently, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s plan: “Let him turn the reality in this territory into a political reality, without hiding it any longer. The time has come for truth.”
Israel already is reaping all the benefits of annexation in the West Bank, and without having to bear any responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinians living here.
Mr. Netanyahu made this promise, on the eve of an election, only to please his right-wing supporters. Formal annexation won’t bring about any real change or extra benefits for the Israelis who live in the occupied areas. For all intents and purposes, the Israeli government already treats them as though they were living in Israel proper (extending Israeli law to them), and gives them perks (cheap mortgages and tax relief).
That’s one reason that many Palestinians I know have come to believe in a one-state solution: After all, with so many Israeli settlements in the West Bank by now, a two-state solution would be impossible to implement. That’s not to say, however, that many Palestinians welcome Mr. Netanyahu’s formal annexation plan as a step forward toward that goal.
Israel has always wanted this land — without its people. And the territory Mr. Netanyahu is promising to annex is sparsely populated with Palestinians. Most Palestinians living in the areas slated for annexation have already lost their land and they would not get it back. They would simply be condemned to remaining laborers in the service of Israeli usurpers.
But Mr. Netanyahu’s move would, at least, have the virtue of being clarifying: If implemented, it would confirm the demise of the 1993 Oslo Accords — a development that many Palestinians would welcome because they have been disappointed by the agreement. Under the accords, the permanent status of the territories in the West Bank was to be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization; outright annexation, as Mr. Netanyahu is now proposing, would be a clear violation.
For a time, the agreement was expected to bring about a negotiated peace between the two sides and freedom for the Palestinians. Instead, over the years it has enabled Israel to keep exploiting Palestinians economically, control much of their resources and exercise total dominion over their borders.
Mr. Netanyahu was an avowed opponent of the Oslo Accords when he was in the political opposition, before 1996, the year he first became prime minister. By now, after his various stints as Israel’s leader, he can claim credit among his supporters for having shrewdly managed the occupation of the West Bank until the time he could fully annex the territory. He furthered this goal with his unfettered encouragement of more and more Jewish settlements being built in the West Bank.
Palestinians have little interest in the elections in Israel this week. I’m not sure if that’s the result of their experience of living under an occupation that has morphed into ravenous colonial rule or of the economic hardships they suffer. Either way, I think few Palestinians believe that it will make much difference to them who is elected. None of the candidates is expressing a clear position on the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations; those simply are not on the campaign agenda. I wrote nearly the same thing half a year ago, before the previous election.
What does stand out is the ever-growing discrepancy in power between Israel and the Palestinians. When Mr. Netanyahu declares that he will annex about one-third of the West Bank, everyone knows he has the power to do so. When Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, declares that he will cancel the divisions of the West Bank created by the Oslo Accords — into so-called Areas A, B and C — which gave Israel power over more than 60 percent of the area, everyone knows he is powerless to implement that announcement.
Israeli flags in front of an Israeli settlement on the southern outskirts of the West Bank city of Bethlehem.CreditThomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Worse, it is possible that Mr. Netanyahu is shrewd enough to carry out his promise of annexation and then manage to weather all the criticism and the consequences. He would probably justify the measure as being necessary for the defense of his country: He recently said to his voters in a Facebook post that Arabs “want to annihilate us all — women, children and men.” (Facebook then temporarily suspended some features of the account, as a penalty for violating the company’s hate-speech policy.) This hardly augurs well for the prospect of peace between our two nations if Mr. Netanyahu is re-elected.
Then again, it’s not like his main opponent, Benny Gantz, a former military chief, is better disposed toward us Palestinians. Short of being a Saudi billionaire, Mr. Gantz said last week, “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel” — as though Palestinians in Israel were treated like Israelis’ equals. “And the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.” As though Palestinians — or anyone — could be happy living under foreign occupation for half a century. How deep can denial go?
Mr. Netanyahu is shameless. Mr. Gantz is blind. Palestinians see no prospect in this election. How could they?
Barring Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib shows weakness and intolerance, not strength.
It is difficult to stomach the notion that an American president would put pressure on Israel to deny entry to two members of the United States Congress.
There are not many traditions of decorum that President Trump has not trampled on since entering the White House. But to put at risk, so cynically, America’s special relationship with Israel solely to titillate the bigots in his base, to lean so crassly on a foreign leader to punish his own political adversaries, to demonstrate so foul a lack of respect for the most elemental democratic principles, is new territory even for him.
Though facing a difficult election next month for which he sorely needs the support of his fractured right-wing base, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was said to be leaning toward allowing Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to travel through Israel “out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America,” as his ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, wisely said last month. But, on Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu cravenly bowed before the pressure from Mr. Trump.
“It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Thursday morning. “They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”
Sad, to borrow one of Mr. Trump’s favorite words. How sad that two leaders — each desperate to look tough to his own base — are risking a bipartisan relationship built between these two nations over generations. Only weak leaders would risk so much for a reward so negligible. To what end?
To win a few political points against two of the newest members of Congress?
To capture a few news cycles?
To dial up the outrage machine just one more notch?
Confident leaders would never have risked so much for so little.
Though many American presidents have sought to influence Israeli decisions throughout the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, they usually did so diplomatically — and to advance America’s interests. Mr. Trump, by contrast, leaned on Mr. Netanyahu as he would on one of his own appointees, in broad view, and in direct violation of what the president of the United States should be doing when democratically elected lawmakers are threatened with a blockade by an allied leader.
There can be, and has been, considerable debate over what the two congresswomen, the first two Muslim women elected to Congress and both sharp critics of the Israeli government, have said and done. They have supported the controversial Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement aimed at pressuring Israel into ending its occupation of the West Bank, a movement that some Jews have deemed to be anti-Semitic.
Yet, from the outset, Mr. Trump has pounced on the religion and background of the two congresswomen to fan racial divisions. Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were two of the four congresswomen of color, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who Mr. Trump said should “go back” to the countries they came from, giving rise to chants of “send her back” at a subsequent Trump political rally.
The visit Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were contemplating was not to Israel proper, but to the West Bank, where they were to visit Hebron, Ramallah and Bethlehem, as well as Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, on a trip co-sponsored by a Palestinian organization, Miftah, that promotes “global awareness and knowledge of Palestinian realities.” A visit was planned to the Al Aqsa Mosque, on what Israelis call the Temple Mount, an especially volatile site in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is little question that their visit would have focused on Palestinian grievances over the Israeli occupation.
All that was clearly troublesome for Mr. Netanyahu, especially the support of the congresswomen for the B.D.S. movement. A relatively recent law allows the Israeli government to deny entry to supporters of the movement; it was this law that the government used to deny entry to the representatives.
In April the United States barred Omar Barghouti, one of the co-founders of the B.D.S. movement, from entering the country when he was scheduled to deliver a series of talks and attend his daughter’s wedding. Other American public figures have been detained by Israeli authorities, ostensibly because of their political views, including the
IfNotNow founder, Simone Zimmerman, who was held at the border; a B.D.S. advocate,
Ariel Gold, who was denied entry to the country; and the
journalist Peter Beinart, who was held at the airport. Mr. Netanyahu later called Mr. Beinart’s detention a “mistake.”
Yet contrary to Mr. Trump’s tweet, it is blocking entry by two American legislators who are critics of Israel that shows great weakness, especially after Israel hosted visits by delegations of 31 Republican and 41 Democratic lawmakers this month.
It has long been Israel’s mantra that critics of its policies should come see for themselves, and the country is certainly strong enough to handle any criticism from two members of Congress. Mr. Trump has done Israel no favor.
Representative Ayanna Pressley broke with traditional diversity politics last month when she said at a conference in Philadelphia, “we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” Instead, “we need you to represent that voice.”
The members of the so-called squad who were also on the panel nodded in agreement. They are the defiant and unapologetic voices of the communities that produced them. Since being elected last fall, these four progressive Democratic congresswomen have pushed the limits of what most liberals mean by the contested term “diversity. ”
Some of their colleagues may have preferred that they simply come in and add color to the room — but in every other way behave as their long-established white predecessors have.
But they have a different agenda. They have a transformative notion of diversity that comes with a different set of expectations and metrics. They insist on bringing the concerns of historically marginalized communities into the rooms where decisions are made, even when that is seen as impolite or inappropriate.
This is evident through their politics, priorities and style — not only their presence. Consider Rashida Tlaib’s “Lift + Act” bill, which comes as close as any to advancing the radical economic principle of universal guaranteed income that Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently advocated some 50 years ago.
They’re exposing the false belief that American foreign policy is infallible. This is exemplified by their critique of Washington’s unconditional support for Israel. And recall the memorable hearing in February when Ilhan Omar challenged Elliott Abrams, a Trump administration official, over his role in supporting Central American death squads in the 1980s.
All of them, along with some other Democrats, have called for the outright abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement because of its widely publicized mistreatment of migrant families and children.
The squad understands that “diversity” is meaningless if the measure of success is “sameness.” The congresswomen are choosing to do politics a different way because they recognize that Congress has never worked for their communities.
From the start, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was urged to stay in her place when she insisted upon committee appointments deemed out of reach for a freshman representative. It was those committees that would have the most impact on the values she was elected to advance, and so she persisted, violating protocol in the process.
She was doing something unprecedented when, as a political neophyte, she introduced the Green New Deal resolution without support from the party leadership. Similarly, Ms. Tlaib and Ms. Omar have called for President Trump’s impeachment and passionately advocated the rights of Palestinians, breaking with the more tactically conservative approach of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on both matters. However, as the scholar-activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in Jacobin, they don’t just represent different personalities vis-à-vis Ms. Pelosibut different worldviews.
Over the past nine months, the squad’s members have made good on their promises to be agents of change, not just fresh faces. Radical inclusivity means that people from different communities, backgrounds and ideological traditions will do their jobs differently and will bring new sensibilities, commitments and understanding with them when they sit at the tables of power. If they are doing their jobs, they will be accountable to people who sent them there, not maintaining the status quo. Anything less is merely cosmetic.
One outcome of exclusion and white privilegeis that people of color don’t see ourselves reflected in positions of power often enough. That is the least of it. A more consequential outcome is that our communities are underserved, our children racially profiled by the police, unfairly pushed out of schools or locked up in disproportionate numbers. “We expect elected officials to fight hard for a progressive agenda, and we are not cutting anyone slack simply because they look like us,” argues Chinyere Tutashinda, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 black-led organizations across the country.
Ms. Tlaib cares deeply about accountability. She often tells her audiences that she proudly represents Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, one of the poorest in the country, with one of the largest black populations of any district. She is committed to serving its interests and speaking with its voice. When, soon after she was sworn into office in January, she proclaimed that “we are going to impeach” the president, that is the constituency she was speaking for: a population that feels assaulted by Republican policies and abandoned by mainstream Democrats.
The squad has tilled new ground in reanimating a fighting spirit within the Democratic Party and revived its left flank. A more timid approach would have been to go to Washington and blend in. The women’s approach is admirably and courageously to stand out.
This is threatening and offensive to many of their conservative and, dare I say, racist colleagues. In his typical meanspirited manner, the president has hurled numerous insults at them; others have piled on too. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was all but foaming at the mouth on Fox News in July. They are “a bunch of communists,” he said, “who hate our own country.” And “they stand for all the things most Americans disagree with.”
Really? A new poll by The Economist and YouGov indicates that each of the four women has a higher approval rating than Mr. Trump himself. And among independent voters, Mr. Trump still loses by more than 6 percentage points to each squad member. Speaker Pelosi, for her part, has alternated among a mild-mannered defense of her junior colleagues, dismissive comments and an outright reprimand in one instance.
A similar dynamic is playing out in politics around the country, as the noted political strategist Jessica Byrd told me. Her electoral firm, Three Point Strategies, has been helping black activists win elections over the last five years. “Without fail, these women are discounted until the voices of the people they represent become too loud to ignore,” she said. “These elections are an incredible symbol that movement can win and is winning. They are a symbol that accountability is possible.”
Many young activists feel protective of the congresswomen, seeing their vulnerabilities as linked. Thenjiwe McHarris was one of 100 black women who hosted a rally in April to protest the attacks and threats against Ms. Omar. “What’s happening to the squad is deeply connected to what’s happening to our communities and our progressive movements,” she told me.
But the squad, and so many other women of color in politics, are not the sit-down-and-shut-up types. And that has earned them widespread adoration. Thousands have signed petitions in their support. The congresswomen collectively enjoy millions of followers on Twitter. And they earn high praise from the millennial activists who have played a monumental but largely unknown role in pushing the party left.
Maurice Mitchell, who now runs the Working Families Party, sees them as central to a seismic shift in electoral politics post-2016. “This moment has radicalized liberals and electoralized radicals,” he told me. Meaning there are new political actors with new agendas and expectations.
I am reminded of another “diversity” moment when the establishment felt threatened. It was when Sonia Sotomayor was being considered for the Supreme Court in 2009. Her opponents had dredged up a speech from eight years earlier in which she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
She opined that theexperience of racial and gender oppression, learnedsurvival strategies and cultural practices could and should be brought to bear when representatives of marginalized communities assume decision-making roles. This caused quite a stir.
But what she rightly seemed to suggest was that, if who we are doesn’t matter, we are aiming for tokenism more than transformation of elite institutions. She was also intimating that, if I come in, my family, my community, my elders, my people, will in some form, come with me.
These women — Justice Sotomayor and the squad — have all insisted upon bringing their whole selves into these insider spaces where women and people of color have been historically told to either “go back” to where they came from, or “listen and learn” in terms of how things are done if they want to succeed. The former message comes from the right, the latter from liberal insiders.
A key demand of this new generation of activists of color has been accountability. They have seen historic numbers of women and black and brown people elected to office, including the nation’s first black president. That alone is insufficient, they have decided. They have seen the limits of representational politics. They want leaders who are immersed in communities who remember where they came from when they attain positions of power. Or better yet, politicians who never leave in all the ways that matter.
Well, the squad members, all with varying activist backgrounds, are a part of that generation. They are products of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Occupy Wall Street and an increasingly militant immigrant rights movement — bold, game-changing social movements that are not afraid to speak truth to power and upset business as usual.
If the millennial social movements are not “your grandmother’s” social movements, then the squad members are certainly not your typical “minority” politicians. They are wisely acting as if they represent the demographic majority that their generation will become. It is significant that a majority of millennials polled by Harvard researchers in 2016 rejected capitalism and leaned toward the left politics that these four congresswomen represent. They are the future of the Democratic Party. So are their ideals. And we need more politicians like them.
