Ward 8 Alderwoman Erin Conley announced she won’t seek a third term on the Springfield City Council. She’ll finish her current term and then step aside. Officially, she cited personal circumstances and the reality of juggling a full-time job with the demands of the seat.
Unofficially, it’s hard not to notice that she’s spent years surrounded by the local activist class and has apparently decided she no longer wants to waste her life being around them.
Conley is, by any normal reading of the record, a conventional liberal. She previously served on the District 186 school board (including a term as president). On the council she pushed a home-improvement grant program aimed at low-income homeowners and backed paid parental leave for city workers. She supports transgenderism, makes regular appearances at the Pride Festival, and she appeared at a rally following the Sonya Massey shooting. Conley speaks the woke language of diversity, equity, and inclusion without fail. Those are not the priorities of a secret conservative.
What has grated on the activist circles is that Conley still has a few functioning brain cells knocking around in her head and has occasionally acted like it.
Violent activist Ken Pacha posted the activist case on Facebook. While others might be “magnanimous,” Pacha wrote, he will be “grateful to see a Progressive Democrat take this spot.” He has watched her land on the “wrong side of a split vote too many times,” producing “the specter of DINO behavior.” Her votes have deadlocked ordinances and “activism led changes,” forcing the mayor to break ties. In Pacha’s telling, Conley has been “working within” a broken system while “actively preventing necessary reforms.” Her departure is therefore “overdue.”
The activist replies to Pacha were just as predictable. One Ward 8 resident called her “intellectually lazy” for failing to push back against the mayor. Another declared “good riddance,” accused her of signaling open-mindedness while voting “like fuck poor people,” and compared her to characters in children’s books. A third simply labeled her “horrible.” Still another faulted her for supporting “mass surveillance systems” and not caring “one bit about the Constitution.”
Conley’s greatest crime is that she is not extreme enough. She has, in their view, refused to treat every split vote as an opportunity for activist-led transformation, and she has occasionally sided with the mayor instead of woke activist demands. That is precisely the residual common sense the purest of the pure cannot abide.
The people most eager for Conley’s exit are not celebrating the exit of a left-wing council member. They are celebrating the removal of a left-wing council member who still sometimes voted as if the city had to keep functioning.
Woke activists prefer the Notariano model instead—someone totally aligned with the activist wishlist and less willing to notice when an idea is unworkable.
The official statement is polite. The subtext is that she is done dealing with the people who treat basic competence as a moral failing.