“A certain schizophrenia.”

Notes on the D.S.A.

Misguided from the first. Michael Harrington in the D–Soc days, 1979. (Wikimedia Commons.)

7 AUGUST—The Democratic Socialists of America have been feeling their oats of late, what with Zohran Mamdani’s election to the mayoralty of New York last year and a succession of D.S.A. victories in primaries across the country since then. On Tuesday another Democratic Socialist won a primary, this one for a House seat in Michigan.

What right-thinking person does not wish these people well? But where is all this going? We all want to hear the plan.

You have on the one hand reports that all these oats the D.S.A. is sowing have conventional liberals and mainstream Democrats in a state of high anxiety. And then you have those who look with one or another measure of derision upon the organization, the movement or whatever we are to call what is not a political party.

In my read there is cause for both. This revival of the long-moribund D.S.A. confronts Americans with all sorts of political, economic, and social questions that are well worth posing and well beyond the fence posts of the reigning ideology. At the same time, you have to wonder whether those standing for the D.S.A. in coming elections are long on grand ideas but have a poor grasp of politics and are, in consequence, fundamentally unserious about how to make all the ideas realities.

Some notes on the D.S.A. phenomenon.

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Megan Romer, a national co-chair of the D.S.A., sat for a 4–minute, 34–second interview on Fox News Sunday on July 26. This exchange has since made the rounds for all the views Romer expressed, some with an “Absolutely!” in reply to Shannon Bream’s questions.

Megan Romer was very big on abolishing things: “Abolish the Senate” was one, and then came “abolish I.C.E.” “abolish prisons,” and “abolish borders.” A little cryptically, Romer also proposed, “Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them.” And then: “Defund the Pentagon.”

What is my word for these policy positions? Back in the 1960s we used to call this kind of talk “left-wing adventurism” or simply “ultra-leftism.” Either term will do. They derive from the vocabularies of Marxism or Leninism or, indeed, both—meaning reckless, uselessly destructive, unthought-through.

The D.S.A. stands for some very worthy principles of a general kind: All people deserve to live in dignity, “free-market” capitalism is a destructive force and must be superseded, “a free Palestine in our lifetimes.” And abolishing I.C.E. is, of course, an excellent idea.

But Megan Romer’s menu of policy plans, which is by no means uncommon within the D.S.A., cause me to do something I am rarely inclined to do. Because of Megan Romer I have to agree with an assessment the Cato Institute published Monday. “The Democratic Socialists of America are out of touch with normal Americans,” Rikki Schlott wrote on Cato’s website. Then came lots of polling statistics to back up Schlott’s case.

The Cato piece, which includes the video of the Fox News Sunday interview with Romer, is here. I do not know who qualifies as a normal American and do not think there is any credible way to quantify anyone being “out of touch.” But with ultra-leftists such as Romer at the top, the D.S.A. most certainly tilts in that direction.

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Let me get this straight. The D.S.A. proposes to accomplish the sorts of things its leadership and constituents demand—capitalism must go, major corporations must be nationalized, etc.—by way of the American electoral system? Say whaaa?

I simply do not understand obliviousness of this order. Is it purposeful self-deception? Are electoral politics merely the proscenium within which D.S.A. people such as Megan Romer indulge in a performative radicalism? Is it an unwillingness to address the very large implications, in terms of shared responsibilities, that come with concluding there is no getting anything worthwhile done by voting in a system wherein money gets all the votes that matter?

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The D.S.A. had its annual convention in Chicago last week, as you may have read (or even attended). There were convocations on topics such as “Governing as Socialists” and “Building to a General Strike” and “Organizing Fundamentals,” the last a series of training sessions.

I read in The New York Times, so it must be true, that many of those present in Chicago swelled with pride as they discussed the Megan Romer interview. A delegate from Seattle named Chanpreet Singh took the podium and said à propos Romer, “You’re going to have to constantly push and advocate for things that people don’t think, until they think it.”

Do tell, Chanpreet.

My mind goes straight to a noted remark attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru–Rollin, a French lawyer and legislator celebrated (in France, anyway) as a leader of the Revolution of 1848 and then as a radical in the cause of republicanism during the Second Empire, 1852 to1870. “I am their leader,” Ledru–Rollin once said of the republican movement. “It is necessary to follow them.” A simplified translation: “To lead I had to follow.”

This is not the utterance of a revolutionary avant-gardiste in the Leninist mold. What did Ledru–Rollin, who’s role in the rise of French republicanism was key but also controversial, mean? To keep things simple, he thought it essential to listen to people and address them on their own terms, in their own language. This caused him eventually to oppose the more extreme of his contemporaries (and so to fall out with them).

I conclude this note with a memo to Chanpreet Singh.

You have to listen to those you wish to lead and be where they are, not where you wish them to be. Zohran Mamdani is an excellent case in point.

Have you noticed how much time Zo—I can’t resist the tabloidese—spends walking the streets where New Yorkers walk? This is an essential feature of his m.o. He does not traffic in extravagant dreams and performative radicalism. Zo is now working on dozens of regulations and deregulations to make work and life easier for shopfront merchants. Among these, the mayor of New York proposes to drop a strange old rule requiring those who sell ice cream to have a special permit.

One other thing, Chanpreet. People may not think some things you think because… because they don’t think them. To bang on with your “constant pushing” until they think what you think: It’s a bit Leninist, isn’t it?

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Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the two most prominent Democratic Socialists now holding public office, customarily cite Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries when they explain their model of how democratic socialism would look and work in the United States. This is sloppy thinking on any number of grounds. The Scandos are social democratic, not democratic socialist, and there are many differences.

Denmark and the others followed the Second International, founded in 1889, and, after various splits, committed to working within the capitalist model as against abolishing this, that, and the other. These are also small nations, as against the sprawl of an unruly nation of 340 million people.

The biggest difference, at least to my mind, has to do with politics and culture. I think of the former as at bottom an expression of the latter. The Scandos have long traditions of communitarianism, and this is deeply embedded in those extensive social-welfare systems we read about. Culture has everything to do with why social democracy has worked in the Scandinavian countries better than elsewhere.

Any dream of an immense version of Denmark working in a late-phase imperium—hyper-militarized, hyper-corporatized, addicted to global hegemony and given to a radical extreme of individualism—is culturally and politically illiterate. For good measure, the United States is now hyper–Zionized, too. Sanders, Ocasio–Cortez are, thus, selling the familiar snake oil: We can have empire broad and an authentic democracy at home.

No, we can’t.

Cases in point: Democratic Socialist Sanders votes in favor of the Pentagon’s scandalous defense budget time and again because there are companies in Vermont dependent on F–35 jet production. Democratic Socialist Ocasio–Cortez hems and haws and bobs and weaves—remember her “There is the ‘what’ and the ‘how’” nonsense?—whenever support for the Zionist terror state comes up.

The last book Chalmers Johnson published, shortly before he died, was called Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan, 2010). I do not see the D.S.A. taking on the reality Chalmers captured in his title on through his passionately written essay. What are we talking about? Democratic socialism with an imperium attached, or an imperium with a variant of Denmark at work on the home front?

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What terrible damage to a true and effective American politics did the Cold War and the pernicious anti–Communism of Cold War liberalism wreak. Then came the New Left, and things got worse. Centralized political organizations were a very major no-no. Authority, party discipline, and associated hierarchies were dismissed as antithetical to the cause. Power was suspect; everything had to be decentralized.

And so to the D.S.A.

Decentralization has been the ruling principle since the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, good old D–Soc, merged with the New American Movement in 1982 and Michael Harrington assumed leadership of the resulting D.S.A. There was never any question of forming a party: That would require centralized lines of authority and hierarchies of one or another kind. This was Harrington’s most unfortunate miscalculation. The D.S.A. was to work within the Democratic Party, riding its centralized lines of authority and hierarchies like… like a donkey. For decades prior to its recent rejuvenation, the D.S.A. was more or less beside the point, as readers of a certain age may recall.

Now you have Democratic Socialists contesting elections as if they are members of a party, but there is no party. This is not a small detail. You have, in consequence, what amounts to a party platform except that any given candidate can disavow any given plank in it if it is to his or her political disadvantage. It looks more than a little messy, to be honest.

I return to my initial point. Stalinist excess and the Cold War liberals’ cowardly participation in the anti–Communist pile-on of the Cold War decades have been a disaster for left politics in the United States. Centralized organization, the disciplines that come of principled lines of authority: If history is any guide there is no achieving enduring outcomes in the messy universe of politics without these.

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The adage attributed to Gandhi, correctly or otherwise, seemed to me precisely right after Abdul El–Sayed won the Democratic primary Tuesday and will now compete for a Michigan Senate seat in November. “First they ignore you,” the Mahatma is reputed to have said at some point along the line, “then they laugh at you, then they attack you, and then you win.” If the spate of D.S.A. victories these past months had mainstream Democrats anxious, El–Sayed’s triumph over Haley Stevens, a pathetic puppet of the Zionist lobbies, has stirred them to the attack phase. The 41–year-old epidemiologist isn’t even a Democratic Socialist, but never mind that: To the D.S.A.’s enemies, he is sufficiently like them to count as one.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming. It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.” That is Jonathan Cowan speaking to The New York Times after the Michigan result came out. Radical, far-left candidates? This guy sounds like the Trumpster sent him.

Cowan is president of Third Way, the advocacy group that calls itself, variously, “centrist” and “center-left, a “champion of moderate policy and political ideas.” The center of what, you have to ask. Left of what? What is a moderate political idea in this bunch’s view? As Cowan made his declaration of war to a Times reporter, he revealed a $15 million fund centrists have raised—this is The Times’s phrase—“to discredit democratic socialism.”

I hope the D.S.A. people are less worried about this kind of thing—and wait until the Zionists and the Republicans get going, but that is another story—than they are reflective. Given that even the party with which they plan to ally is dead against them, how much does the D.S.A. expect its candidates to get done once some of them are elected to office? Is there some suggestion that there are no limits to change in America—replace the presidency, abolish the Senate, etc.—as long as the D.S.A. has a place at the table? Don’t they know the well-known political truth in these matters: The Democratic Party is the graveyard of all worthy left causes? It gets to be somewhere between risible and unbearable.

America is the most right-wing nation in the West, and one of the most right-wing in the world, and even its “moderates” are dedicated to keeping it this way. It is an imperium, not a republic. There are times in history when resort to the street is the only way things get done. The D.S.A., The Nation, all those of this stripe, seem willing to do anything, anything, anything to avoid this obvious conclusion. What is it? A fear of responsibility? Of inconvenience?

In this same line, the D.S.A. had better brace itself, if it has not already done so, for the usual treatment from corporate media. They will join the attack not bluntly and obviously, like the Third Way, but insidiously, always assuming the pose of objectivity. It will be Yahoos and Houyhnhnms all at once.

I did not need to be reminded of this but I was when I read a piece in The Times, which is as “moderate” and “centrist” (quotation marks) and imperial and Zionist (none needed) as the rest of the power structure, during the D.S.A.’s Chicago convention. Said convention was “like a summer camp social for 20–somethings,” wrote the punk who put this piece in the paper. D.S.A. candidates “bewilderingly found themselves beating democratic mainstays.” And—my fav in this line—Zohran Mamdani “finagled the keys to New York’s City Hall.”

This is how it will be these coming months. Is there a hole for me to get sick in?

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A certain schizophrenia is now evident in the D.S.A., all its good people notwithstanding, and I do not hear anyone talking about it. Michael Harrington’s legacy, in keeping with a long tradition of left-liberal movements and causes, was a movement that served as the reformist conscience of the Democratic Party. This turned out to be cheap thrills, or none at all. And in its revived state, there is no way under the sun the D.S.A. will get the Democrats—not even the most “progressive” of its elected officials and certainly not the odiously corrupt Democratic National Committee—to accept its more honorable positions.

A theory, indeed: The worthier a given D.S.A. policy plank, the less chance there is of mainstream Democrats endorsing and waging political war in its cause. Let us say “Yes!” to advancing beyond capitalism, and again to bringing grossly powerful corporations under control in the interest of the American majority, O.K., but the Democratic Party is assertively capitalist and the willing, dependent servant of said corporations.

Listening to Americans is half of the task before the D.S.A. now. The other half is listening to itself.

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Revised and expanded from an earlier version in Consortium News.

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