COWBOY COMMUNISM
The People’s Republic of Laramie (PRL)
Making a socialist utopia in Wyoming.
HEAR ME OUT: The nascent left-wing insurgency in the United States should colonize Wyoming by establishing an electoral supermajority in Laramie. At best, this project will require years of hard work; a plausible timetable would span decades.
But the payoff would be immeasurable: A far-left paradise in Wyoming would be so much more than a novelty getaway for progressive Millennials. It would be an irreversible step forward in the international fight for justice.
If we start ASAP, we can transform The Equality State into a Marxist wet dream that delivers invaluable results for the Movement.
The People’s Republic of Laramie (PRL) can be Ground Zero in a larger effort to capture the levers of power at the local, state, federal, and international levels.
It’s just going to take time, commitment, strategic organizing, and a lot of babies.
2021 💲
First, we’ll need funding. This is always a hitch for large-scale socialist projects, but it’s been a particularly debilitating snag for the past 30 years.
In the old days, the Soviet Union accepted grant applications for lefty startups. Special consideration was given to ventures that would embarrass Uncle Sam.
Needless to say, the old days are long gone.
If we still want to go through government appropriations, there’s always Vietnam, Cuba, and — of course — China: the largest economy outside of the NATO sphere (by a good country mile). But as long as “China does not export revolution,” it’s probably not wise to bet long on state funding from abroad. Other possible avenues include sugar daddies like George Soros, left-wing orgs like DSA and CPUSA, and shaking down small donors the world over.
But it’s going to be a tough sell no matter what. It’s just not easy to persuade people to invest in living arrangements for strangers.
If you’ll suspend your disbelief for just a moment, a lot of doors open after we clear this first hurdle. Assuming that PRL can accrue any kind of nest egg — less than a million dollars — then the wind is already at our backs.
2022 🏘️
Next, we’ll need a headquarters. A quick Zillow search reveals that large, multifamily houses are available in Albany County for less than $600,000.
This property would serve as a home for the premiere revolutionary pilgrims in Laramie.
Rounding up half a dozen socialists to move into a rural clubhouse would be the easy part.
The hard part is getting hundreds of left-wing ideologues to take up residence in Albany County, register as Democrats, and commit to some level of civic engagement.
Coaxing leftists out of their enclaves in New York City and San Francisco will be a challenge. Comedian Demetri Martin and others have articulated the pervasive view that the easier it is to draw a state, “the harder it is to live in.”
Under this metric, the great rectangular regions of the Midwest fair poorly.
But as the socialist presence in Albany County grows, we’ll win seats on the Laramie City Council, in the Wyoming House of Representatives, and in the Wyoming Senate. With a few hundred settlers, we’d amass enough voting power to contest Wyoming Senate Democratic primary elections — contests which, even in presidential years, typically turn out fewer than 1,000 voters.
2023 ✈️
With a few small state and local victories under our belt (hopefully…), it would be crucial to attract larger and larger numbers of socialists to The Cowboy State — and to win the affections of any Wyomingites (e.g., University of Wyoming students) who are amenable to our egalitarian vision.
For any of this to work, we will need at least enough comrades in Wyoming to win statewide primary elections.
Fortunately for us, Democratic candidates in Wyoming — even at the statewide level — typically run unopposed.
10,000 settlers by December would be ideal. With an electoral base that broad, we would be unstoppable.
I know it seems impossible to orchestrate voluntary resettlement on that scale, but that’s a small fraction of dues-paying DSA members.
Think of it this way: that’s less than 0.1% of the votes Bernie Sanders got in the 2016 Democratic contests.
If 1 in 1,000 Berniecrats picked up and moved to Wyoming, then we’d be looking at 13,000 reliable votes — more than enough to control the Democratic primaries for Governor, for U.S. Senate, and Wyoming’s At-Large seat in the U.S. House (currently held by Dick Cheney’s daughter).
2024 🗳️
If a nationwide left-wing effort to absorb the Wyoming polity accomplishes one thing in the next four years, I hope it will be this: replacing Senator John Barrasso with a socialist.
Barrasso will be 72 years old the next time he faces reëlection, and he will be as vulnerable as ever to a challenge from the left.
This is a guy who has spent his career blocking background checks for gun buyers, preventing the EPA from limiting carbon dioxide emissions, and denying the human species’ role in the climate crisis altogether.
It’s clear that Barrasso needs to go, but can we really end his Senate career?
Barrasso probably inspires the least voter enthusiasm of any official elected statewide in Wyoming.
Barrasso won two-thirds of the vote in the last general election, which is nothing to sneeze at.
But it’s also a poor showing for a Republican in Wyoming. His 75,000-vote lead was the smallest of any Republican elected statewide in 2018; Rep. Liz Cheney and Gov. Mark Gordon both performed significantly better. No Republican has come so close to losing a statewide election to a Democrat since 1996, when Republican Mike Enzi won by roughly 25,000 votes.
But who says we have to put up a Democrat?
We could just as easily run a far-left candidate in the Republican primary.
It’s as easy as finding one left-wing partisan in the entire state whose name sounds innocuously conservative enough — something gender-neutral and ethnically ambiguous, like “Taylor Johnson” or “Alex Smith.”
A Trojan Horse bid to unseat a member of the GOP Senate leadership is a long shot, but crazier things have happened in recent U.S. elections.
The Years Beyond 👶
As with any effort to “settle” a land that is already inhabited by human beings — from the American frontier to the Israeli occupation of Palestine — our success would depend largely on how rapidly we reproduce.
A couple of years ago, I heard Palestinian-American comedian Amer Zahr discuss the understated role of demographic warfare in the Palestinian resistance to Zionist expansion: “The Israelis are scared of Palestinian kids, and they should be,” he often says. “They drop bombs, we drop babies. They have tanks and helicopters, but we have the strongest weapon in the world.”
In the end, this will be our path to establishing Socialism In One State: birthing a legion of red diaper babies who will carry our movement forward in the 2040s and beyond.
We can design private schools to teach them Marxist theory, labor history, political organizing, and anything else they might need to succeed as leaders of a budding revolutionary cult in Wyoming. At the University of Wyoming (conveniently located in the Laramie metropolitan area), our children will can pursue degrees in political science, government, and law.
As we further consolidate control of the Wyoming state government, we can legislate changes to the public school curriculum, the paid family leave policy (if there even is one), and the availability of affordable housing — all with the aim of drawing more comrades into the home state of the Cheney family.
The point is that Wyoming is the least populous U.S. state. With barely 250,000 voters, The Equality State is more vulnerable than any other to socialist infiltration. If we converge on Laramie, Cheyenne, and Casper, then we can transform at least Wyoming’s governorship and congressional delegation into avenues for radical change.
The politicians we elect could become national or even international advocates for Bill of Rights Socialism, and the policies we implement on the state level could serve as a model for national overhauls.
The process would be slow, frustrating, and unlikely to reach its full potential.
But such is the work of revolutionary change.
I’m sure some of you aren’t persuaded that Wyoming is the best site for this kind of project, nor that raising large families on Midwestern farms is the most effective way to yank American politics to the left.
More than anything, I just want to encourage a little more ambition in our Movement. In less than 100 days, Donald Trump will probably lose his bid for a second term, and young activists (like me) will have to learn for the first time how to organize in favor of good policies rather than against bad ones.