latest updates: [Birze Political Report] The American Solidarity Party in suburban Chicago, Part Two ‖ [Birze Political Report] The American Solidarity Party in suburban Chicago, Part One
[Birze Political Report] The American Solidarity Party in suburban Chicago, Part Two
or, The Municipal Message of the American Solidarist
Just a few miles west of Lombard—where we last left off—is the town of Batavia, Illinois. Here the American Solidarity Party finds itself attempting to (re-)elect Dustin Pieper—one of two people they officially recognize as elected representatives for the party—as alderman for the city's 4th ward.
The situation in Batavia, Illinois
We should first examine briefly why the American Solidarity Party is even represented in Batavia, which hardly stands out as a place of religious fervor or church politics. The answer to this is almost entirely because of Pieper himself. Born and raised in Missouri and—by his own admission—someone who only moved to Batavia in 2022 for a job at Fermilab, Pieper nonetheless quickly advanced into city politics on the back of his interest in organizing zoning reform for the city. He seems to have founded, and almost-singlehandedly built, the Batavia chapter of municipal advocacy group Strong Towns. He was also extremely lucky: his ward's incumbent, Tom Connelly, had to resign just two months after the April 2023 municipal elections took place. Pieper took a leap of faith, applied to the position, and successfully won appointment to Connelly's remaining term in the seat. This has left him in the remarkable position of being an appointed member of city council, but effectively having served a full two-year term already.
In that role Pieper has by all indications served quite admirably. He seems both popular and well-regarded in Batavia as a whole, much of which seems to be the result of his competence in navigating municipal issues. Answering a recent candidate questionnaire he attributed this to a "[deep] interest in local policy, planning reform, and in simply diagnosing a lot of troubles in the modern American development pattern."
The 2025 election campaign
This fascination has also put him in a good position for re-election this year. At least in his ward, the main issues of the 2025 campaign are two issues he can speak on extensively: growth and housing affordability. Pieper's campaign accordingly resembles a YIMBY policy laundry list: housing reform, zoning reform, and development. He calls on the city to massively invest in walkable infrastructure and bike infrastructure; he hopes to make it easier for developers within Batavia itself to build housing and create jobs; and he wants to prevent urban sprawl by infilling less dense parts of the city.
On the more aspirational side of things, he wants to lower permitting costs and building review times by providing developers with a catalogue of pre-approved building plans—or perhaps even by adopting a form-based or transect zoning code in the city.1 The radicalism inherent to some of these proposed reforms have clearly not inhibited his institutional support: Pieper comfortably earned the endorsement of the Daily Herald, the major newspaper of suburban Chicago, earlier this month.
Solidarist urbanism?
As described so far, Pieper probably sounds like the antithesis of conservatism. Housing and zoning reform have for the most part been the pet issues of social liberals in recent years, and opposition to them has largely (although not exclusively) come from the conservative right. But Pieper complicates the oft-assumed notion that liberal-championed political reforms are inherently liberal because they are liberal-championed. A more thorough examination of his platform clarifies that most of it is actually a mirror of the American Solidarity platform. Is this reflective of the party being genuinely center-left on housing and zoning? Not necessarily. Cutting to the heart of this subject, however, requires us to explore the principles of Christian democracy more extensively than we have to this point. Specifically we must examine the concept of sphere sovereignty—a foundational concept that informs Christian democratic politics around the world—and its relation to the American Solidarity platform.
To do this we must necessarily simplify a bit, for sphere sovereignty has been debated and refined heavily since Abraham Kuyper first formulated it in 1880. In brief, however, sphere sovereignty asserts the following two premises: firstly, that all spheres of life are divinely ordained and ordered, and thus derive their existence and legitimacy only from God; and secondly, that each sphere of life has a delegated role in the order of creation, and answers only to a Sovereign authority within them that is granted by God. As summarized by Gordon Spykman in his essay “Sphere Sovereignty in Calvin and the Calvinist Tradition,” Kuyper's belief is essentially that “Each sphere [of life] has its own identity, its own unique task, its own God-given prerogatives. On each, God has conferred its own peculiar right of existence and reason for existence.” From this foundation, Kuyper proposes a model of society in which (1) every sphere of life is co-equal and yet simultaneously distinguished from the rest and (2) each sphere is delegated an absolute, inviolable responsibility within the specific bounds of its social domain. As an example, since this may seem unintuitive: the head of household and the covenant of marriage would be viewed as the absolute basis for the "sphere of the family." It would thus be the duty of the household—not the the duty of business, church, or state—to uphold expected familial norms and fulfill the God-given prerogatives associated with family life.
It should perhaps go without saying: Kuyper was not a liberal, either in a classical or contemporary sense.2 Both then and now, he was of the right-wing.
Thus in defining sphere sovereignty and in recognizing Kuyper as a right-wing figure, suddenly we find a transformation of the American Solidarity platform. What initially appears center-left now jumps off the page as clearly motivated by right-wing politics. In their assertion that "Society consists of various institutions and communities, like families, governments, and religious groups, whose primary authority over their own affairs should be respected and defended," the party almost wholly adopts Kuyper's vision. Likewise when the party emphasizes its support for "local production, family-owned businesses, and cooperative ownership structures," for "zoning laws which favor small businesses and conservation over large-scale corporate investment," or for "measures that allow local communities to limit the power of outside interests in managing their land," what animates these beliefs is clearly a sense of sphere sovereignty more than anything else. These policies are not *per se* advocated for because they are just, they are advocated for because they return primary authority to the expected spheres of life that Kuyper identifies in his model.
In turn, Pieper's platform and how he describes himself become more obviously solidarist, too—or at least this context make his political axioms more ambiguous. When he argues for "cultivat[ing] an incremental development community in the region," for example, can we discern whether he is motivated by an independently-arrived-at belief that this will serve Batavia well, or by an desire to municipally build sphere sovereignty? This is probably not something that can be definitively settled without a statement from him, and I will not pretend you cannot make an argument for the first position. What I will say is that there is an unusually compelling case for the second position even based on public information.
Certainly Pieper does not hide his current position on the Illinois Solidarity Party's state committee, which is the most obvious point in favor of him being avowedly solidarist. But how he describes himself sometimes is also a dead-ringer for solidarism. In a candidate questionnaire from Patch he calls himself a "strong advocate for localism and a more well-distributed economic system to help better promote small and employee-owned businesses," something you would expect of a committed ASP member and a solidarist who agrees at least in part with Kuyper. To say nothing of things that might otherwise not raise eyebrows, but do so in his case. Pieper often credits his housing and zoning opinions to the work of Strong Towns and its president Charles Marohn—an innocent enough influence, given the visibility of Strong Towns in housing and zoning spaces. But Marohn has also served in an advisory role for the American Solidarity Party since at least 2020.3 Is this influence merely a coincidence, or the reason Pieper takes after Strong Towns at all?
I want to make it plain: I do not think Pieper's politics are as right-wing as other ASP candidates; if he supports abortion abolitionism or is totally opposed to same-sex marriage and gender affirming care, he has not said so in places I can find. I also do not think he is a bad person, at least from this extensive dive into his politics. But I do think his agreement with the American Solidarity platform cannot be characterized as superficial, and hence I would categorize him as standing for a sort of solidarist urbanism. I also think he presents an interesting problem for social liberal housing activists in sounding like one himself but almost certainly not being one on closer inspection. What should the relation to solidarism be from the center-left? I am in no position to adjudicate this, and perhaps the American Solidarity Party will never be large enough to justify answering such a question. At least in Batavia though, it seems likely this relation is something liberal activists will have to mull over for the next few years. While the Kane County Democratic Party is organizing against him (and Batavia as a whole is a modestly Democratic city), nothing suggests to me that Pieper has worse than coin-flip odds of being re-elected.
As a final observation—and though the race is nonpartisan—I think a victory here would obviously be a boon for the American Solidarity Party. This is not merely because any win at the party's current size is substantial, but also because their other elected officials—without downplaying their accomplishments—simply are not very impressive from an outsider's perspective. Peter Sonski was elected as a Republican, not as an American Solidarity Party candidate. George L. Dziuk Jr. represents a small town of barely 1,000 whose municipal races are seldom contested, while Christopher Zehnder represents an even smaller town with even fewer elections of note. Jason Negri is to this point the party's most impressive elected official, but even he has seemingly moved on to conventional Republican politics. None of this is inarguably the case with Pieper, who would unambiguously be serving the party and would be doing so in a place where you might not expect the party to succeed at all. True, one city council seat does not a base of power make. But the party is in no position to influence national politics (it registered just 46,000 known votes in the 2024 presidential election)—for the foreseeable future, all it can aspire to do is run people like Pieper and win with them. If it cannot do even this, what can it do?
Notes
1: The various forms of zoning are beyond the immediate scope of this article, but these terms may be unfamiliar and deserve a bit of expansion. Form-based zoning is mostly concerned with regulating the shape and size of development rather than the land-usage of development; to quote the Form-Based Codes Institute, form-based codes "[designate] the appropriate form and scale (and therefore, character) of development, rather than only distinctions in land-use types." Transect zoning is a specific variant of form-based zoning that essentially proposes all zoning be consolidated into several "Transects"—usually ranging from a natural zone to an urban core zone—that progressively grow in the intensity of their "natural, built, and social components."
2 He was, at least philosophically, someone who we might term an opponent of liberal democracy. He rejected popular sovereignty in all forms and characterized the French Revolution as an event which "threw out the majesty of the Lord in order to construct an artificial authority based on individual free will" and in so doing "left nothing but the monotonous, self-seeking individual asserting his own self-sufficiency." (quotes via The Problem of Poverty (1991), trans., ed. James Skillen)
3 Something he has received pushback on from more liberal YIMBYs and zoning reform advocates, incidentally. See "Strong Towns' Guide to the Election Year" for Marohn's characterization of that criticism and his broader relation to the American Solidarity Party.
[Birze Political Report] The American Solidarity Party in suburban Chicago, Part One
or, The Curious Case of the Village of Lombard Slate
this is the first in a series on my website that i'm going to call Birze Political Report. the idea here, in short, is to cover the many interesting third-party candidates that run around the country—and the circumstances in which they are running—when i find them. why? mostly because i find the American third-party political space quite fascinating, and at least right now it is a very under-covered area of politics. if that's not your thing, though, you'll be able to pick out all blogs with this subject because they'll be marked like this one is. without further ado.
This is a fairly long post, so my introduction will be brief. A few weeks ago and for reasons I cannot quite remember, I noticed that the otherwise very minor American Solidarity Party was running a slate of 6 candidates for municipal offices this year. For most people, this is not worth even a second of thought.
For me, however, this was quite intriguing—and actually the event that inspired me to begin this series in the first place. Typically only the Greens and Libertarians have the membership to run slates of this sort, or the organization to make them politically effective—but here is the American Solidarity Party finding four people for the same office, and six in the same general area! There must be a story to pursue here, if only someone were willing to do so.
That someone is me, to the extent that I can. I want to know: who are these people? Why are they running, and is there some reason for their success in recruiting in these races? If elected, what do these people actually want? What I hope to do here—both with this post but also with this series generally—is actually investigate what third parties are up to, what they stand for, and what it might mean for them to govern you if they're given the chance. Along the way, I hope to inform people of things they perhaps did not know. There is certainly a lot I did not before going down today's rabbit hole.
In any case.
What is the American Solidarity Party?
My series of questions has to begin with examining the American Solidarity Party itself. From one perspective, defining what the party stands for and how they distinguish themselves ideologically is a pretty simple thing to do: the party is Christian democratic. If you have seen, say, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany campaign before, you can perhaps infer from them alone what much of the American Solidarity platform is. Certainly, the ASP does not hide the origins of its party ideology. It writes of its own founding in 2011 that "a small group, inspired by examples in Europe and Latin America, came together to start a party inspired by the principles of Christian democracy."
But this is not very satisfactory for answering what it practically means to be a Christian democrat in an American context. This is the other perspective, and in attempting to flesh it out it becomes much less clear what actually separates the ASP from other parties.
On the one hand, the ASP effectively inherits a blank canvas for itself. The Christian democratic tendency in the United States is barely 15 years old. There is a lengthy history of fusion between Christian religion and politics in the United States, but no Christian democratic movement of size seems to have existed before the American Solidarity Party. Moreover, the party is quite out of place from the contemporary synthesis of religion and politics in the United States. The predominant religious political movement is a firmly-established evangelical Protestantism—and in many cases outright Christian nationalism—that disagrees with fundamental principles of Christian democracy. Where Christian democrats (perhaps begrudgingly) recognize the need for civil liberties, many American evangelical Protestants explicitly oppose all forms of pluralism and demand the church subordinate the state. The ASP itself seems quite conscious of this dynamic, noting its disagreement with some conservative Christians and their "negative attitudes toward women, racial minorities, immigrants or non-Christians" in a recent blog post.
And yet—in spite of these seemingly incompatible political and theological differences—the actual platform of the ASP seems almost completely amenable to the priorities of evangelical Protestantism. This is the other and more sinister hand of the ASP. To be sure, the party does explicitly name pluralism and social justice as things it supports; its support for labor unions and defense of civil liberties, including "the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, a fair justice system, and equal protection under the law" are also noteworthy areas of divergence from usual theocratic faire. But simultaneously, much of the American Solidarity platform outflanks even the far-right of the Republican Party. It demands that life begin at conception and explicitly opposes in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments; it calls surgical or hormonal treatments that "circumvent the natural, healthy development and function of the body" malpractice; it calls marriage the "exclusive union of one man and one woman for life;" and it vigorously defends private schooling and homeschooling among other things. These are the political issues that evangelical Protestants and Christian nationalists actually tend to care about when running for office (one such illustration can be found in the efforts of the Remnant Alliance of Texas), and the ASP sounds exactly like them. Perhaps it is no surprise then that the ASP seems hesitant to completely distance itself from Christian nationalism. In the same blog post where it acknowledges disagreements with some conservative Christians, the party nevertheless downplays Christian nationalist ideology by arguing the term is, more than anything, "being used as a label to attack all opponents of abortion and child gender transition, as well as those who express concern about the devaluation of the traditional family." Taken as a whole this suggests the party and its membership is distinctly on the right, or even far-right, of American politics.
There are likely party members who would contest this characterization (indeed, the party has previously argued against the left-right dichotomy on its blog and sometimes identifies itself as a syncretic party). But it is noteworthy how consistently the party emphasizes its absolutist position on abortion or its total opposition to gender-affirming care, particularly in light of how unpopular these positions are. Objectively less polarizing and more agreeable policies in their platform—their support for organized labor or their advocacy for cooperative economics to name just two—simply do not get the same billing. This would also seem rather at odds with their tagline of "common good, common ground and common sense" policymaking.
The slate for Village of Lombard Library Board
This brings us to the local slate of 4 candidates the party is running for the Helen Plum Public Library District's Board of Trustees (also known as the Village of Lombard Library Board). This slate consists of four party members: Dustin Himmerich, Dan Hollenbach, Sam Kuhlman, and Daniel O'Connell.
The positions of the national party, not to mince words, do not cast a favorable light on these candidates. But we should be careful not to jump to conclusions even when they seem quite obvious. Just because the party seems distinctly right-wing or even far-right at the national level does not mean this necessarily follows at the local level. Parties are not politically homogeneous, for one. For another, American political parties are uniquely weak in their ability to select or deselect candidates. Michael Kinnuckan argues compellingly in my view that, in an American context, political parties are little more than "a vague and nebulous constellation of wealthy donors, prominent politicians and political brand identifications whose power consists in their ability to coordinate to influence primary voters." This dynamic is particularly common in local races, where parties are less likely to recruit candidates proactively and frequently have no control over who runs at all. Is there any reason to believe the American Solidarity slate is a case of this, or dissents significantly from the national party in priorities?
In this case, no. Even being charitable, the party still leads with its most conservative policies at the local level, and is largely indistinguishable in tone from evangelical Protestants and Christian nationalists.
The 2023 Lombard campaign
One of the reasons this can be asserted so confidently is the 2023 "slate" the party ran for Helen Plum Public Library District—that year, Daniel O'Connell ran for the Board of Trustees alongside fellow party member Angel Diaz. Their primary reason for running is not ambiguous: opposition to the supposed "political agenda" of the board in allowing LGBTQ+ and "pornographic" materials in the library, and offense toward the Board of Trustees for voting to affirm the American Library Association Library Bill of Rights and Freedom to Read statements. O'Connell seems to have been the more explicit of the two in running on these; he is quoted in the Dupage Policy Journal as saying "Libraries should be a place to that provide an opportunity for people to become educated and informed, not a place that imposes a political agenda especially on kids." In line with the philosophy of the ASP, O'Connell also asserted that parents have and should have absolute authority to dictate what books are appropriate for their children. Diaz, in a candidate questionnaire for The Lombardian, took a slightly different line which opposed supposedly obscene or pornographic materials in the library for their lack of "value". He added that, in his view, "Having pornographic and obscene images within reach of children is contrary to the library’s vision."
(For the record: the "obscene" and "pornographic" materials seem to have been, among a few others, the books Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; Flamer by Mike Curato; and All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson. In other words, books that are only obscene and pornographic if you think LGBTQ+ people existing are those things.)
Neither O'Connell nor Diaz ultimately won a place on the Board of Trustees—with three seats available, they came a somewhat distant 4th and 6th out of 7 candidates—but both registered respectably enough to win singular precincts. O'Connell's performance in particular allows for some estimation of what the American Solidarity Party constituency might look like. As you might expect that constituency seems pretty similar to the Republican base and evangelical politics as a whole. It skews overwhelmingly white—to the order of 80% white, where Lombard is only 69% white—and appreciably more conservative, to the order of 10 percentage points. It also has substantially worse educational attainment than Lombard as a whole (55.4% attaining only some college or no college, versus 43.5% for Lombard as a whole). In areas of the city with greater racial diversity or higher educational attainment, vote share cratered for both O'Connell and Diaz. If the intent of running on "common good, common ground and common sense" is to win over both Democrats and Republicans, then it seems these candidacies were failures—overwhelmingly, their voters look to be associated with the political right, not the center or left.
The 2025 Lombard campaign
Evidently, though, O'Connell and Diaz performed well enough for the party to take another shot at things this year—this time with a full slate of four candidates for the four seats, and with unambiguous American Solidarity Party branding. As the party writes on a since-removed donation page, their candidates "affirm and support the mission and principles of the American Solidarity Party."
What this page also makes clear is how right-wing that mission and those principles seem to be. Compared against the 2023 run of O'Connell and Diaz, this page is much more explicitly steeped in the language of spiritual warfare and Christian nationalism. "The only way to correct the regrettable course that our current culture is taking," the party writes, "is by turning back to the foundations upon which western society is built." It adds that the party's four candidates believe in "properly ordering their home and family" and hope that through "local involvement in the public process they can bring positive change to their community and the broader culture." A reaffirmation of this can be found on O'Connell's candidate page this year, where he asserts that "the foundation of a good society is well structured families" and says he seeks to demonstrate solidarist principles on the Board of Trustees. Sam Kuhlman concurs on the second point, saying he would like to see Lombard "grow in justice through the principles of the ASP." Dustin Himmerich is less explicit in confirming his agreement with this donation page; he instead opts for rhetoric that mirrors O'Connell and Diaz from 2023. According to his candidate page, he wants to "ensure [the Helen Plum Public Library District] remains a family-friendly center for learning, growth, and the pursuit of truth"—certainly a hard to disagree with statement, if not for the context it was said in.
The interesting exception is Hollenbach. I think it is reasonable to conclude he also supports the party platform, but unlike the other candidates this cannot be definitively concluded from public material. He is, presumably because he filed after the other three, not named on the party donation page for the ASP slate. His page on the American Solidarity Party website also focuses on his life and work as an HVAC construction worker first and is content to relegate his campaign to a single sentence. In short there is nothing else to go in ters of his ideology. There is also some basis to assume he is, in some way, a replacement for Angel Diaz. In April 2024, Diaz appeared with O'Connell, Himmerich, and Kuhlman at an event for congressional candidate Mike Vick; that event also identifies him as the fourth ASP slate member for Board of Trustees, something he obviously no longer is. What happened here? Only locals and party members probably know; there is nothing hinting at a public-facing answer from what I could see.
As for the actual campaign itself? It is hard to parse from a distance, but the ASP slate is clearly on the defensive rather than the offensive. Their campaign was an uphill battle to begin with—Lombard is a city Kamala Harris won by 17 points in 2024 and Biden by 22 in 2020—and it seems that local groups are actively mobilizing to keep the ASP out of office. Both the Addison Township and York Township branches of the Democratic Party have called on Democrats to not vote for any of the four—a particular development in the former's case, as they seemingly did not weigh in on the 2023 slate at all. A guide being circulated by self-described "library workers and library advocates" calls the ASP "closely aligned with Christian nationalist values" and recommends voting against all four as well. Anecdotally, residents of Lombard seem largely unimpressed by the ASP, and the slate's Facebook page seems to have gone private in the time between its candidates announcing their run and today.
The party also seems particularly concerned that its opponents have effectively characterized it as the party of book banning and Christian nationalism. In an extremely defensive post, it decries this "false narrative" and argues that it simply wants to implement "responsiveness to community requests to protect children." It also attempts to inject other positions the slate is running on into the conversation, specifically their desire to "create and foster relationships with community organizations," "increase community engagement by taking library services out into public spaces," and "include more services aimed specifically to helping the poor and traditionally underserved by libraries."
Is this a winning message—and are those issues, surely secondary despite what the party insists, a winning platform? Almost certainly no, for reasons previously mentioned. But it will be interesting to see how far the party can take its branding with priorities on social issues that are nearly indistinguishable from those of evangelical Protestants and Christian nationalists.
But this is only one part of the slate. Tomorrow, we’ll cover the other major candidate of the American Solidarity Party in suburban Chicago: Dustin Pieper of Batavia, Illinois.
A brief note about Richard Petraitis
I would have liked to add something substantial about the sixth candidate the American Solidarity Party is running, a mister Richard Petraitis for the Woodridge Library Board. Unfortunately there is nothing to talk about with him. He is a very basic candidate, the ASP page for him gets the seat he’s running for wrong for some reason, and there is no real local coverage to flesh out an understanding here. The extent of what I can tell you is what appears to be correct from the ASP page, which is as follows:
Richard and his wife have been residents of the Village of Woodridge, IL since 1996, almost spanning the length of their twenty-nine (29) year marriage. They are proud to have raised two beautiful kids, a son, and a daughter..
He is proud to be a member of his local The Knights of Columbus Council. Richard is also a big believer in localism and looks forward to seeing the continuation of programs that are family / community centered at our local public library.
I believe you can apply everything I have already written about the Lombard slate to him, in any case. Not surprisingly he has drawn the opposition of the Downers Grove Township Democratic Organization, who recommends voting for literally everyone else on the ballot but him. I don’t think he’ll win, given that Democrats seem to routinely draw 60% or greater of the vote in Woodridge.