Photograph Source: Cory Doctorow – CC BY-SA 2.0
The continued electoral success of the Democratic Socialists of America–whose candidates run for Democratic Party nominations rather than as independents–has a lot of people very angry. Most of these candidates when judged by their policies are more FDR’s New Deal than worker-controlled factories–a return to the party’s greatness rather than importing radical politics into a centrist machine. But in the US that practically makes you a Naxalite.
For mainstream Democrats this is a crisis. Challengers running on single-payer health care, universal childcare and rent control are beating corporate Democratic incumbents in party elections fair and square, and polling shows that socialist ideas are indeed increasingly popular in an unaffordable world. The party has evolved for decades away from the New Deal and civil rights in pursuit of this moderate center accepted by socially liberally rich donors who can live with gay marriage and abortion but need their workplaces union-free. Now Bernie Sanders’ ideological grandkids are all grown up, winning races and serving in office with the big D by their names, co-opting this coveted brand status.
Some pundits have likened this to the Tea Party candidates of 2010–right-wing populist insurgents who ousted old guard Republicans who were seen as too entrenched in the sinecures and out-of-touch with the conservative base. In other words, rather than start a new party in the November elections, DSA, like the Tea Party, focused on the spring primaries–which are often the real election in places where one major party dominates politics. This isn’t just expediency–in both cases, DSA and Tea Party popularity have been fueled by anti-incumbent angst.
Conservatives see this as a communist threat in the making. Once a critical mass of DSA candidates get elected then socialists will have the ability to steer one of the nation’s two major parties.
The DSA’s socialist critics see this choice to run inside the Democratic Party as supreme disappointment. The entryist strategy means that elected DSA members will have work within the confines of the Democrats, who are avowed supporters of capitalism and American imperialism. Real socialists would run independently, thus signalling to the working class that they are not going to compromise with the class enemies who make up the Democratic Party donor base and instead build a wholly separate and prefigurative structure.
All of these viewpoints about the DSA strategy to run candidates within the Democratic Party misunderstand its contemporary nature. Once the organ of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, the Democrats’ weakness isn’t just that theirs is a capitalist and imperialist party. The real problem: it’s not a party at all.
Major European political parties–for example, the British Labour Party, have rules governing not just its candidates but its member base and a policy manifesto that binds everyone together. Left critics of DSA’s electoral strategy often say the moment one registers as a Democrat they have signed their socialism away. But this action is simply checking a box on a card to vote in a primary election–you don’t pay dues, answer to a local official or abide by any code of conduct.
As the scholar Aziz Rana has pointed out, the Democrats aren’t a party in any real sense, but rather a network of operatives and consultants that candidates can use as a fundraising vehicle for their own individual campaigns. And so if a random businessman can do that to run a neoliberal campaign on the Democratic line, why shouldn’t a socialist use the same tools?
These DSA electoral victories within the Democrats speak to the hollowness of the current party–Democratic elders dismiss winners who offer universal programs on grounds that they’re out of touch with the average voter, but the scoreboard says otherwise. For the DSA’s left critics, the group has latched on to the machinery of capitalist governance. But this would also be true of other forms of radical organizing. Socialist third parties still have to run in accordance with the ruling class election codes, often with piddling results. Trotskyist rank-and-file trade unionists, while workerist in their outlook, still must work within established unions who submit themselves to a Byzantine and often restrictive legal regime. Unless you’re practicing guerrilla tactics in the jungle, all socialist organizing under capitalism operates within the so-called system.
Socialists outside DSA don’t have much to fear, because DSA electoral success doesn’t hinder the organizing work of other socialist groups. Nothing about these victories impede worker and tenant organizing and the growing street resistance to deportations. The DSA won’t turn the Democrats into Bolsheviks like conservative fear, but their success may pull the nation’s center away from the right.
The centrist Democrats are correctly worried that their post-Clinton neoliberalism is crumbling. But judging by their current hysteria at DSA wins they don’t understand that their years of standing for almost nothing other than “we’re not Republicans” has made them weak enough for socialist advancement at the grassroots level.
