Photograph by Adam Elkins
Senate candidate Greg Levy understands working class people in a way he says run-of-the-mill Democrats and Republicans don’t. He grew up in the Rust Belt town of Akron and joined the military at 18. Levy was stationed at the Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island near Seattle, where he worked on planes and learned about U.S. imperialism and how the military preys on young people like him.
Four years ago, Levy joined the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and last year they asked him to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jon Husted as Ohio’s first-ever third-party socialist candidate. This is Levy’s first time running for political office, and he’s scheduled to speak for the first time in Cincinnati during a campaign stop on May 17.
“Ohio is ready for socialism,” he says. “Are you gonna let the place be desolate and broken down, or are you gonna do something about it? I think that socialism has a unique appeal to Ohio and the entire Midwest.”
Known as “Rubber City,” Akron was home to B.F. Goodrich and Firestone Tire. Goodyear is still headquartered there, but manufacturing jobs have still been gradually leaving the city, decreasing the population. “For 35 years my dad worked at the Brook Park Ford plant,” says Levy. “Those jobs don’t exist any more. The real question is why? It’s because career politicians nowadays are accountable to billionaire donors, period. We need parties that are beholden only to workers, not to billionaires—that’s what the third-party situation is about. It’s about the need for true representation for Ohioans.”
Levy says the current two-party system does not work for Americans, with both Democrats and Republicans lacking an interest in helping the working class. “Ohioans want universal health care,” he says. “Democrats and Republicans don’t support that. Ohioans want an end to the forever wars, and Democrats and Republicans don’t support that.”
His progressive platform includes not taking money from corporations or PACs, cutting the defense budget by 90 percent, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour, implementing universal health care, abolishing ICE, ending the war on Black America, a guarantee that every worker a living wage and safe working conditions, and destruction of the kind of American fascism that the incumbent Husted represents.
“Fascism is when liberalism betrays working people,” says Levy. “We’re looking at a regime that seeks to scapegoat Black and brown people and make them the butt of the joke but doesn’t have any type of imagination or program to address the needs of the people other than just blaming Black, brown, trans, queer, and minority groups for the downfall of society. We have to stand up against it. They are an example of billionaires run amok, but so are the Democrats. They just do it in a kinder, gentler way. This isn’t a democracy. It’s an oligarchy, and we have to say all of that is unacceptable.”
With primary season in full swing, midterm elections campaigns starting, and the recent election of Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first socialist mayor, Levy sees a potential path for him and other socialist candidates to be seen and elected as viable alternatives.
“The people of Ohio have been propagated myths that nothing is possible, but that true change is not true,” he says. “But to start, we have to impose the will of the people and the interests of working people on the political system. We have to demand dignity for all of the labor that we put back into the system. In a democracy, the people rule.”
Greg Levy will speak at House of Hope, 930 Findlay St., Over-the-Rhine, at 5 p.m. May 17.
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