How Chicago ended up governed by people unfit to govern anything
Chicago’s governance failures are usually described as ideological in nature. We are told the city is run by people with unsound ideas — progressive excess, hostility to policing, disdain for markets, and a fondness for socialist abstractions. That diagnosis is not wrong. It is merely incomplete.
Ideology does not arise spontaneously. The more revealing question is how a city repeatedly elevates people who hold such demonstrably false views of the world—and why those views are held with such confidence even as reality refutes them.
The uncomfortable answer is that Chicago is increasingly governed by people who are not merely ideologically misguided, but intellectually inconsequential. They lack the analytical capacity, real-world experience, and critical reasoning skills required to test ideas against evidence. Ideology, for them, is not a hypothesis to be examined but a catechism to be memorized.
This is no accident. It is the predictable output of an educational and professional pipeline dominated by activist pedagogy, grievance politics, and Marxist mental models — institutions that reward conformity over competence and moral signaling over empirical rigor. These systems do not teach students how to think; they teach them what to think. Those least equipped to interrogate ideology are the most likely to absorb it uncritically — and then to seek political power.
Unable to deconstruct the contradictions embedded in that worldview — economic, historical, or mathematical — these officials adopt it wholesale. Markets are dismissed as exploitation. Incentives are ignored. Tradeoffs are treated as moral failure. Arithmetic itself becomes suspect. When policies fail, reality — not theory — is blamed.
The result is not simply bad policy, but governance by abstraction.
A recent protest outside the Daley Center illustrates the problem precisely.
Appearing together on video, Andre Vasquez and Robert Peters denounced the Trump administration’s removal of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. In a rambling statement, they declared the action an “illegal war,” claimed it lacked congressional authorization, labeled it impeachable, compared it to the Iraq War, blamed U.S. policy for Latin American poverty, and argued defense spending should instead be redirected to healthcare, housing, and retirement benefits.
Every element of this argument is wrong.
Jurisdiction without limits
Neither Vasquez nor Peters has any authority over U.S. foreign policy or presidential power. One is a municipal legislator; the other is a state legislator. Their responsibility is to govern Chicago and Illinois — jurisdictions facing rising crime, fiscal instability, and administrative decay. Their decision to posture as foreign-policy experts is not moral seriousness; it is abdication.
Law, history, and arithmetic
The claim the president lacked authority to act without congressional approval is false. The president’s Article II authority to conduct limited military actions and targeted operations is well established. The Bush administration’s removal of Manuel Noriega from Panama in 1989 provides a clear precedent.
In addition, they overlook the inconvenient truth that the Biden administration placed a $15 million bounty on the criminal Maduro’s head.
The comparison to Iraq is more damning. Congress explicitly authorized the use of military force against Iraq in October 2002. To cite that episode as evidence of unauthorized executive action is historical ignorance.
So too is the assertion that this action is “one of a thousand impeachable offenses.” Impeachment requires votes. Conviction requires more votes. Neither exists. This is not ideology; it is arithmetic. And arithmetic, in modern Chicago governance, appears optional, as evidenced by the Mayor’s repeated Kamikazi-esque charges into unanimous City Council rejections, a feat made more remarkable by the fact that 100% of aldermen are on the same political team.
Economics without causation
The economic analysis fares no better. Vasquez and Peters attribute poverty and instability in Latin America to U.S. intervention while ignoring the central cause: decades of left-wing economic policy.
Venezuela’s collapse under Hugo Chávez, despite possessing the world’s largest proven oil reserves, was driven by expropriation, price controls, and corruption. The Maduro regime merely completed the destruction. Similar patterns have played out across the region. These failures are not imposed by Washington; they are endogenous to socialism.
Budgets and category errors
Finally, the speech advances a false choice between defense spending and domestic welfare. Defense accounts for under five percent of GDP; healthcare alone approaches 20 percent. Eliminating the entire defense budget would not “solve” healthcare or housing.
More fundamentally, Chicago does not have a defense budget. It cannot redirect Pentagon spending to trauma centers. The suggestion that it can reflects a governing class that does not understand scale, structure, or causation.
Which brings us to the real question.
How did we end up here?
Policy failure is rarely accidental. It is biographical.
Chicago’s current leadership shares a defining trait: the absence of demonstrated competence outside protected political, union, or nonprofit ecosystems. These are not people who tested ideas against reality and refined them. Politics became a refuge, not a vocation. Sic semper Marxists.
Consider the roster:
Brandon Johnson
Brandon Johnson began as a public school teacher before abandoning classroom instruction for full-time union activism with the Chicago Teachers Union. He did not distinguish himself as an educator. Like many before him, he found permanent employment in grievance politics rather than performance-based work. He has never run a business, managed a complex organization outside union politics, or been accountable for results.
Toni Preckwinkle
President, Cook County Board
Toni Preckwinkle also began her career as a school teacher before transitioning into politics. When teaching did not lead to distinction, political office offered a parallel track insulated from competitive pressure. Her tenure has produced a county government that is larger, more expensive, and less effective — consistent with a career formed entirely within public-sector institutions.
Stacey Davis Gates
President, Chicago Teachers Union
Stacey Davis Gates spent a brief period in the classroom before abandoning teaching for union leadership. She now wields enormous power over Chicago’s education system without having demonstrated success as an educator or administrator. Her authority rests on ideology and mobilization, not outcomes.
Andre Vazquez
Alderman, 40th Ward
Andre Vasquez’s pre-political career consisted largely of non-profit work and a failed attempt at a “music” career. Unable to achieve distinction outside politics, he gravitated toward office, where rhetoric substitutes for results. He has never managed a business, balanced a constrained budget, or been accountable to markets.
Robert Peters
Illinois State Senator; candidate for U.S. Congress
Robert Peters comes from an activist background, not law enforcement, economics, or administration. His signature achievement, the SAFE-T Act, reflects de-carceration theory rather than empirical crime control and has imposed real costs on law-abiding citizens. Rather than reckon with those outcomes, Peters seeks promotion to Congress.
Byron Sigcho-Lopez
Alderman, 25th Ward
Byron Sigcho-Lopez built his “career” in nonprofit housing activism rather than in real estate development, construction, finance, or large-scale project management. This obnoxious partisan has never been responsible for delivering housing at scale under budgetary constraint. His advocacy for rent control reflects the NGO worldview: moral certainty unencumbered by economic consequence.
Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez
Alderman, 33rd Ward
Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez comes from activism and nonprofit political work, with no experience in private enterprise or large-scale administration. Her policy positions mirror Democratic Socialists of America orthodoxy rather than practical governance.
Anthony Quezada
Alderman, 35th Ward
Anthony Quezada entered the City Council from a background as a political staffer and Cook County commissioner. He was appointed by Brandon Johnson, which tells you everything you need to know, about this professional agitator. Critics argue this path emphasizes aid and advocacy over executive leadership. His agenda centers on democratic socialist priorities — particularly rent control and expanded housing regulation — policies opponents contend risk constricting supply and worsening affordability.
Quezada’s tenure has also been marked by controversy, including criticism over a resurfaced high school social media post containing a racial slur and concerns surrounding his appointment to the City Council by Mayor Johnson rather than through a special election. In mid-2025, he was involved in a physical confrontation with federal ICE agents during a protest — an episode supporters framed as activism, but critics viewed as emblematic of a confrontational posture ill-suited to elected office.
Opposition as identity
What unites these figures is not diversity of experience, but its absence. None has built an enterprise. None has managed capital under risk. None has been accountable to customers, markets, or balance sheets.
Their political identity is defined almost entirely by opposition to Donald Trump. Opposition substitutes for substance. Marxist frameworks — long discredited in practice — are recycled as virtue. The same policies that impoverished Venezuela are now proposed for Chicago: defund the police, constrain markets, regulate capital, and moralize failure.
Chicago is governed by people who do not know what they are doing, and who have never demonstrated that they do. However, they cannot be forgiven. They must be forgotten, relegated to the ash bin of history along with their Marxist antecedents.
That is the predicament. Until voters recognize competence is not oppression, arithmetic is not colonialism, and economics is not a social construct, the decline will continue — predictably, relentlessly, and entirely of our own making.
