Ruben Gallegos' Sister Soulja moment

Sometimes the most powerful way of saying what you're for means making it clear what you're against.

Illustration: Slate

In June of 1992, then Democratic nominee for President, Bill Clinton, had a career-defining moment that shattered his party’s fever dream of cultural excesses and put him on the path to winning the Presidency, something Democrats had managed only twice since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. A younger generation of Democrats, desperate to reclaim national political relevance, formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to refocus the party on the economy and middle-class voters while curbing the cultural extremism that had turned it into an unpalatable caricature for swing and independent voters. Their rallying cry: It’s the economy, stupid.

Speaking before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, Bill Clinton repudiated the racist remarks made by rapper ‘Sister Souljah’ who, the month prior, had suggested in The Washington Post that killing white people might be justified. Bill Clinton’s willingness to forcefully call out extremism within his own party, particularly on issues of race, was so impactful that political pundits coined a term for it: A Sister Souljah Moment. As Wikipedia describes it, the phrase describes "a key moment when the candidate takes what at least appears to be a bold stand against certain extremes within their party" and is "a calculated denunciation of an extremist position or special interest group. "This act signals to centrist voters that the politician is not beholden to those positions or interest groups. Of course, such a repudiation runs the risk of alienating some of the politician's allies and the party's base voters.

Today, the Democratic Party struggles anew with the challenges of prioritizing the economy and working-class issues with the progressive cultural demands of its base. However, the country’s shifting racial and ethnic landscape has made this balancing act far more complex than it was a generation ago. Now, it is Latinos who are challenging the Democrat’s orthodoxy on race, culture, and economics - while growing increasingly detached from the party.

Polling data, electoral results, and long-term trends all suggest that Democrats are drifting further to the left on these issues than the average American (including Latinos). Yet, the left's institutional pillars remain as entrenched as they were during the party’s losing streak from the early 1970s through the early 1990s.

Bill Clinton’s moment was uniquely suited for him. Only a young white southern Governor could credibly connecting an emerging and dying America to both recognize and admit to the racial sins of the country’s past while tempering the extremes of those on his party’s left. Clinton had to call out the obvious, a too-often perilous path to take in politics. Black people can also be racist, and those extreme voices make racial justice harder, not easier, to achieve. Sometimes, the best way to define what you stand for is by standing against what you oppose.

Clinton’s deftness and courage to stand up to his own base helped to recenter the Democratic Party in the minds of voters, leading to its dominance in the popular vote – winning seven out of the eight popular votes from 1992 through 2020. Black and Brown voters were central to that winning coalition.

Enter Ruben Gallego

The current political climate requires a new Sister Souljah moment, and it just may have arrived with Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. More specifically, his moment may have arrived in an interview this weekend on the New York Times The Daily podcast (link below).

Senator Gallego, the son of Mexican and Columbian immigrants, has had a hardscrabble background. Raised by a single mother, he clawed his way to an Ivy League education before serving in Iraq. The Senator from Arizona began his career as a progressive voice in Congress but soon recognized that longevity and effectiveness required a more moderate path. He won a Senate seat in a key battleground state and was one of few Democrats that benefitted from Trump voters crossing over to vote for him rather than his opponent, Kari Lake.

Moreover, his direct cultural connection to Latino men sharply blunted their rightward shift - the fastest-growing segment of Republican voters in the country. From morning coffee and breakfast tacos at construction sites, to high-profile visits to boxing arenas, Gallego went where no politician had gone before – the everyday spaces where Latino men gather. And he didn’t just talk – he listened.

But his impact extended beyond mere optics. Those conversations challenged the narrative pushed by Washington’s Latino political establishment, which has long claimed to speak for Latino voters while misrepresenting their priorities for over a decade. These are the voices that insist immigration policy is the defining Latino issue, that environmental activism resonates deeply because of Indigenous spiritual ties to the land, and that second and third-generation Latinos suffer from cultural alienation but just aren’t “woke’ enough to realize it.

From the success of Gallegos’ Senate campaign that bucked the national tide, it appears that those early morning conversations were not the same ones lobbyists were having with him in DC. In this bold interview Gallego calls out the ‘immigration advocacy’ groups that have incorrectly, if effectively, framed undocumented immigrant issues as central to the focus of Latino voters. There is no evidence for this as Gallego accurately points out, and there never has been.

There is now white Democrat who could ever muster the political courage to say this, though they all know it to be true. In fact, there are no Latino Democrats saying it while they also know it to be true. Gallego alone is forcing Democrats out of the racial identity cul-de-sac they have driven themselves into and is forging a new path for the emergent Latino middle and working classes he is much more in step with.

While in the House, Gallego publicly chided the use of the term ‘LatinX’ and prohibited its use in his Congressional office. He joined the Democratic House Border Security Conference and was a co-author of “The Laken Riley Act,” positioning himself as a champion of blue-collar Latinos.

And he’s right.

He is standing defiantly against the extreme voices in his party that lay claim to the views of Latinos with no evidence to back it up. None.

These voices helped drive Latino voters away from Hilary Clinton in 2016.

Were the reason why Joe Biden lost Latino support in 2020.

And Kamala Harris in 2024.

The only Latino Democrat standing up against these “Latino” voices is Ruben Gallego.

A Sister Souljah moment. Put this interview on The Daily podcast at the top of your Sunday listening and reflect on how impactful this new direction is.

To be fully transparent, I have been a longtime fan of Congressman Gallego and have said so publicly. We’ve sparred pretty aggressively on social media about the rightward shift of Latinos—he remains skeptical about a major shift in 2022, while I argue that it’s a decade-long trend. Our disagreements have been spirited but small, reflecting two people genuinely trying to understand and explain America’s changing political landscape.

I have never met Ruben Gallego in person and I have never talked to him. But I grew up with men like him. I went to school and worked with men like him. I know what it’s like to be poor and struggling like him. I grew up with tios and primos like him. I know what it’s like to sacrifice, struggle, work and borrow my way into one of the nation’s top universities, only to feel out of place on an affluent white campus while also being dismissed by other Latinos back home who didn’t go to college for getting an education and “selling out”. But mostly, I know what it’s like to stand up and tell your party they’re wrong about your community and be mercilessly attacked for it.

I also wrote about Senator Gallego extensively in my book The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming America because he is clearly the emergent voice for the future working class in America – and the future of the working class is Latino. Not from the Rust Belt, but from the Sun Belt.

Gallego is evolving as a public servant who came of age during a highly racially polarized era in a border state. His formative political years were during a period defined by Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio and SB 1070 “Show Me Your Papers” legislation targeting multi-generational Mexicans. He is emerging as a national voice for the fastest-growing segment of the population and the electorate. His experiences shape his leadership, and as his stature grows, so does his ability to drive real change.

This is extraordinarily difficult for any politician, but even more so for a politician of color. Where Bill Clinton’s Southern whiteness afforded him a certain credibility to tackle issues of race from a safe and credible perch. Gallego doesn’t have that luxury. He is forcing America to have a conversation about what it means to be a country with fewer white people, while also challenging Latinos to define their American identity beyond the outdated perpetual stereotype of us all being immigrants.

Don’t see the double standard? Let me help you out. If Ruben Gallego were a white guy and performed as well as he did last November he would be championed and paraded around Washington DC as the future of the Democratic Party and floated as a potential presidential contender. Instead, his success is met with a shrug – of course, he did well with Latino men. Isn’t he one of them? Have you heard Pete Buttigieg is running for Senate?

Want more proof? Listen to The Daily podcast, where The New York Times interviewer expresses shock at Gallego’s support for sending violent illegal gang members to Guantánamo Bay if their countries refuse to take them back. Violent. Gang. Members. Gasp! How dare he not stand up for them!

Somewhere along the way Democrats were pressured to believe that any border security policy was inherently racist. The far left made ‘Border security’ for Latinos what the ‘Defund the police’ message was for Blacks - an out of the mainstream sentiment by political activists with no real life support in actual communities. The son of two Latino immigrants who has spent his career fighting for immigrants is now attacked for being anti-immigrant because he’s choosing to squarely represent the sentiment of Latino voters - many of them immigrants. That, in a nutshell, is how you lose elections. That is how the public comes to view your party as crazier than the crazy man they elected.

Gallego’s rise underscores a broader shift: the defining characteristics of Latino identity for the next generation will be working-class culture – not the immigrant experience. Ruben went to Harvard but he grew up sleeping on a couch because his Mom and sisters shared the bed in a one-room apartment. Guess which experience was most formative for him?

And he has been attacked for this bold necessary move into the American middle by progressive and Latino political voices alike. Not surprisingly, the most pronounced attacks have come from his left flank. Specifically from the ‘immigration advocates’ that have built an industry in Washington DC and, by all objective criteria have made the plight of the undocumented worse, not better. They created a massive space by pushing Democrats so far left on the border issue that Donald Trump could step into the void and get Latino votes from them. They demand ideological purity, refuse common-sense compromises, and claim to represent Latinos without evidence.

Sound familiar? It’s not much different than Black rappers in the 1990s declaring that all white people were bad, except of course those who agreed with them.

Ruben Gallego is having a Sister Souljah moment. And his party owes him a debt of gratitude for saving them from themselves.