A DSA amuse-bouche

The more I learn about DSA the less impressed I am–especially with the NPC which might actually be Russia-influenced. I hate to go all conspiracy theory but where did their desire to leave NATO come from? Why blame Ukraine for the war? I can understand wanting to revamp our foreign policy away from supporting dictators who kill their own citizens on the excuse of stopping communism and I can understand wanting to stay out of quagmires, but a wholesale capitulation to Russia? Weird.
And one of the chairs is a Marxist which means idiot. Voluntary idiot. I’m not referring to innate intellectual abilities. I am referring to the self-lobotomy necessary to join that religion–and contemporary American Marxism functions very much in the same way as American fundamentalist Christianity.

i’ll give them one thing: the DSA crowd is very sure of themselves.

I think it’s important to remember a few things in these sorts of discussions – covered in part in the podcast, but easy to forget in all of the juicy gossip stuff that brings in the podcast audience…

• most of the people – and some of the candidates – in the US who self identify as democratic socialists are not members of, or active in, the DSA.
• for all of that DSA history, the core of the party should be understood as being exactly that rump organization of American socialism that failed to gain any traction. It still is that party.
• Saying you are a democratic socialist gives a candidate a hot brand that can be used to attract supporters who like the idea of democratic socialism, but have never wanted to joint the party.
• The celeb candidate voices have given them DSA a lot of contact glamour, and they are hoping to grab hold of that sudden status to build a functional party.
• They are useful idiots for Russian propaganda in exactly the same way that Jill Stein has proven to be a useful idiot.
• The DSANC will not build a functional party.
• I’m expecting that all of the Bot BS and radical purity test urges will provoke the celeb candidates to split and rebrand.

My bet would be that the rebrand grabs hold of the Progressive Party label that briefly had a national profile, and that they present themselves more as social democrats or something along Fabian lines, rather than as anything overtly revolutionary and marxist.

I’d love to see the Democratic blogs and influencers build an on-ramp for all the people who support social democracy but who are alarmed at the idea of revolutionary socialism. I think the cross-pollination would do both sides some good.

If the socialist revolution comes to the US, it will come because the oligarchs force the issue and trigger widespread desperation on the scale of the Great Depression, not because the marxists organize it.

The DSA label is like tying an anchor to yourself before you try to go swimming.

In case you didn’t know (I kid), one of the words “NAZI” stood for was “Socialist.” I see people pointing this out as though it proves something. It’s kind of like how the Republicans were the party of abolition and the Democrats supported slavery, another factoid that people trot out to prove who the real racists are.

This is politics. Figure it out, politicians!

“I know that we are talking about the median US voter, but”

Sadly, there is no “but”.

The median US voter doesn’t have a lot of insight into the history and meaning of words like “socialism”. The bog standard usage here is that it’s “when the government takes your stuff and gives it to somebody else”.

Which, of course, is anathema.

And that’s the median.

There is no word the (usually RW media) demagogues cannot make toxic. And they have stamina. Making ‘liberal’ a dirty word took time but they knew it in advance, persevered and were successful. Replacing democratic with democrat (as an adjective) and making it a slur is another example. Politically correct, woke…
The only difference with socialist is that it came prepackaged with communist negative vibes (and commie still is the go-to to discredit anything*). The mainstream media will not tolerate the left besmirching or discrediting favorite RW buzzwords in return. And these days the Right has become so shameless that it would not work anyway (cf. the rise of slavery apologists these days).
It’s just a matter of time before an infamous pre-1933 Hitler quote** gets used by a RW candidate who will not get condemned but lauded for his candidness.

*insert quote from The Manchurian Candidate
**(paraphrased) “These gentlemen are completely correct. We ARE intolerant. I have set myself a single goal: To sweep the other political parties out of the country!”

I know I don’t have to tell anyone here this, but the main feature of socialism is putting the means of production in the hands of the workers (via state ownership usually). I’m not all that focused on the DSA, but it does appear that that is part of their stated platform, along with a major restructuring of the federal government (with a whole new constitution!).

If that’s their deal, they are socialists and I don’t know what else they should call themselves. As far as the further left wing of the Democratic party goes, I think they’re more like social democrats and it would be pretty stupid to label themselves as socialists.

People like AOC, Mamdani, Bernie identify with democratic socialism and/or are DSA members. Bernie’s a nominal independent, but is very much associated with the Democrats. AOC and Mamdani both ran as Democrats. I don’t hear them talking about the means of production.

I find it confusing as someone who (I think?) pays more attention than most people. Good luck to the general public on figuring it all out.

the problem remains that despite what young people might think they want it to mean, the term is absolutely toxic in the US.

they might as well call themselves the Puppy Stranglers party.

It’s the New Deal, redux. It’s what we had between FDR and Reagan. Except this time women and minorities get a seat at the table too.

Younger folks don’t remember any of that. Nobody born after, say, 1975 has any concrete memory of it.

It doesn’t need a special new name, it’s what we already had before the “Reagan Revolution”.

Brian Beutler on the essential issue, if not the DSA specifically. I should also say that for various reasons at the moment I am not always reading the things I am posting (thinking they are the things ObWi might be interested in) all the way through, just skimming. If anybody wants me to stop doing that, just say so in the comments:

The Case For Hard Truths Told Well
The Democratic establishment wants to avoid conflict with the people it’s trying to persuade; the insurgent left wants to beat them over the head with hard truths. We need a path between.Brian Beutler
Aug 28
 

What do we suppose was going through Hakeem Jeffries’s mind when he agreed to meet in secret with Jared Kushner?

Here’s a theory that doesn’t posit any conspiracy theories not in evidence but does draw on recent history. It also matches Democratic Party temperament to a T.

Jeffries says he and Kushner met to “discuss the affordability crisis that exists, that is not a hoax.”

I don’t get the sense that many people find this version of events terribly satisfying. But even if you think it doesn’t wash, you don’t have to assume Jeffries is lying. Things can be true, and still be mostly bullshit.

At the very least, there’s no reason to believe anyone involved contemplated a great brainstorm of ideas, or thinks Jeffries and Trump will become Washington DC’s new Tip and Ronnie.

But it’s very easy to imagine that both Jeffries and Kushner see an upside in a future where Democrats win the House and at least stage negotiations over what they’d each describe as an “affordability agenda.”

To conjure it, you only have to remember as far back as eight years ago. When it became clear Democrats would win control of the House in the 2018 midterms, they changed affect to lower expectations. One day they were promising accountability, the next day Adam Schiff was publishing a New York Times column to head off calls for Trump’s impeachment.

Then, when Democrats took power, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi didn’t kick off the new Congress by rolling out a comprehensive oversight agenda. To the contrary, Pelosi reined in her chairmen, and set up a meeting with Trump to discuss helping him pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill. They didn’t necessarily believe these negotiations would go anywhere—and of course they went nowhere. The point was to seem constructive, rather than hostile. Focused not on partisan conflict but on Working Families and their Kitchen-Table Concerns. If Trump scuttled the deal, so much the better. No legacy achievement for him, but the unflattering contrast with Democrats would speak for itself. They got exactly what they wanted, and established a political paradigm that has defined their party ever since.

Perhaps Kushner learned from that experience that Democrats can be lured off the scent of accountability with meaningless gestures that allow them to demonstrate that they’re “ready to govern.” And perhaps Jeffries’ willingness to take the meeting—and to keep it secret—suggests Democrats still think that’s a savvy approach.

Fighting means dealing with the world as it is. Let’s insist on it together.

Regular readers are well familiar with this pathology by now. With the party’s obsession with survey data, which misleads them into believing the public doesn’t care about corruption or the assault on democracy, only home economics. With the swaddling of frontline members, who have much less to worry about when Trump is unpopular, but fear the process of making him unpopular through confrontation, because they represent so many Trump voters.

These contributing factors create a predicament where leading Democrats do not believe they can respond to the emergency of hostile fascist rule with requisite vigor. Whether or not they believe the truth—that Trump, his family, and their inner circle are engaged in a conspiracy to weaken or destroy the country so they can more easily plunder it—they lack confidence that they can win an argument with the public on those terms.

A big majority of Americans disapproves of Trump, and the overwhelming majority of those Americans despise him. But the most reluctant converts—the people who’ve likely voted for him one or more times—won’t accept it. Or so Democratic leaders tell themselves. They can accept that the country faces challenges (affordability!) and that Trump hasn’t resolved them. They can accept he’s made some things worse. But they cannot accept that his reign is fundamentally aberrant—a humiliating failure; a fraud; a threat to our way of life.

There’s a reason Jon Ossoff’s incredibly promising campaign for reelection to the Senate stands out among all the others. It is the exception to this rule. The rule is that Democrats are poor avatars for any message that resembles tough love; that they are unqualified to prescribe strong medicine to the median voter. The rule is that telling swing voters the truth about Trump would be an affront—akin to, say, sending Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg into black communities to tell young men to hike up their pants.

I don’t mean to suggest there’s nothing to this concern. It’s not always enough that a message be correct or defensible—it often matters how it’s delivered and by whom.

Consider the case of the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who has now been condemned by approximately every Democratic officeholder in America, for—as Cory Booker put it—his “dangerous and hateful language… [s]uggesting that Jewish Americans bear responsibility for hatred or violence directed against them.”

Booker’s characterization, echoed by many other Democrats, is wrong. Not, as Piker would have it, because AIPAC and Democratic leaders conspired to smear him. But because his own mode of discourse is hostile to mutual comprehension—and politicians (particularly Democratic Party politicians) are inclined to take cover from controversy rather than embroil themselves in it. This has set off a recriminatory cycle: In misrepresenting Piker, in order to hold the center, they’ve encouraged his fans and people who agree with his point to dig in and seek more factional conflict.

But even a fair-minded characterization underscores the importance of calibrating rhetoric to be persuasive rather than inflammatory.

A transcript would unfortunately run thousands and thousands of words. You really do have to listen to a very long clip, starting around 1:53:00, to ascertain Piker’s true meaning. There are many contiguous segments across about 30 minutes in which, if you tune in late or tune out early, it sounds like he’s blaming Jews for fomenting antisemitism and even justifying antisemitic violence.

The actual argument is basically this:

Many pro-Israel organizations, politicians, right-wing Jews, far-right Republicans, and others who profess to speak for the entire Jewish community, insist support for Israel should be a high U.S. priority, and equate opposition to Israel with antisemitism. True.

Antisemites also want people to treat jewry and Judaism as synonymous with Israel. Also true.

This intentional line-blurring or line-erasing will work. It will increase the number of people who equate Israel and Judaism and, thus, increase Jew-hatred—even among people who once understood and maintained the distinctions. And that, as Piker put it, makes the intentional conflation “dangerous.” True again.

Ergo, it’s important for Jews who do not support Israel to get loud—not just in defense of their own beliefs and values, but to insulate themselves, their loved ones, and their communities from indiscriminate, antisemitic backlash. Arguable, at least.

This is not at all the same as arguing that people who adopt AIPAC’s line deserve violent backlash. Paraphrased accurately, with the incendiary language stripped out, I don’t even find it offensive. I basically agree! But it was never likely to get a fair hearing from many people who don’t already agree with Piker.

What Piker does not say is that anybody who would resort to violence—whether neo-Nazi or Islamist or Palestinian liberationist—would be doing something very wrong. The onus to discourage people from embracing antisemitism, or from resorting to political violence or hate crimes, should fall on everyone who values true pluralism, but Piker places it on anti-Israel Jews.

Most American Jews are pluralist; many if not most deplore the Netanyahu regime. But few will open their minds to this kind of advice when it comes from someone outside their community, who doesn’t clearly have their interests at heart.

For many years after 9/11, mainstream discourse in the U.S. was bloated with loose talk about peace-loving Muslims, and their supposed duty to condemn al Qaeda: If you don’t want Americans to lash out at Islam and Muslims, you better speak up!

Not everyone who said stuff like this was a bigot—and in a bloodless, strategic sense, it might even have been sage advice. But more enlightened people—most of them liberal or progressive—saw through to the problem. Who is, e.g., Bill Maher to tell anyone what their civic or political or religious obligations are?! To demand respectability politics from people outside his community? Why isn’t he demanding it of the yahoos who might assign collective guilt and attack innocent Muslims?

If you thought that rhetoric was Islamophobic 20 years ago, you should at least understand why Piker’s jeremaid struck people as antisemitic.

To the extent progressives want more American Jews to condemn Israel, or oppose U.S. aid to Israel, choosing avatars who refer to CNN as ZNN, and CBS as ZBS, is a mistake. Whatever’s in Piker’s heart, he should know that’s the idiom of people who want to make common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other bigots who rant about the ZOG. It’s not how anyone sincere would seek to appeal to pluralist Jews.

To the extent those same progressives want to salvage Piker’s argument, they need to find better messengers. Because it is a challenging message.

But the mere fact that a worthy message might prove challenging to a potentially receptive audience doesn’t mean it should be shelved.

Consider these two poles.

Speaking on the stump about his Republican opponent, Iowa Dem gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand frequently admonishes his own supporters: “The most important thing that you need to remember about my opponent [Zach Lahn] is he’s a human being. And he’s got people that he loves, and there are people in the world that love him too. And we can have a conversation about who’s better, and we can have sharp disagreements without getting worked up.”

Up in Michigan, by contrast, Abdul El-Sayed says things like, “[Mike Rogers] has the charisma of a doorknob.”

Now these are different states and different races, and if Trump’s electoral track record teaches us anything it’s that ad hominem politics aren’t fatal in the upper midwest. But surely there is a way to campaign that appeals to persuadable voters without either putting them off or evading hard truths about the nature of the modern GOP. Would it really be fatal to Sand’s (very promising) campaign to tell Iowans who’ve voted for Trump one or more times that he’s enraged on their behalf? Because Trump violated their trust? Because he lied to them and continues to lie? And that Zach Lahn knows it and goes along with it anyhow?

Would it be fatal to say, we, collectively, as Americans must do a better job sniffing out con artists and demagogues? When someone tells us people who are different, or people who are weak, are responsible for the problems in our lives, we shouldn’t give in to the temptation to assign blame. Rather, our spidey senses should tingle. We should suspect our pocket is being picked. We should recognize it as the hallmark of a bad person.

We have tried the alternate approach for a decade now. We have tiptoed around Trump, and antivaxers, and various other false prophets, for fear of offending the sensibilities of their followers. And in all that time, their malign influence on society has only deepened.

The Jeffries controversy makes me fear we’re going to try for an eleventh year. The Piker controversy makes me fear too many of the country’s rising leftists would miss the sweet spot of persuasion. But there is a middle way.

cleek — Mamdani and AOC are both young, attractive and charismatic. none of that comes from being any kind of ‘socialist’.

That is an error that seemingly never grows old: take the victory of a particular candidate, or small group of candidates, across a few non- typical races and extrapolate to a pre-preferred ideological transformation in the broad electorate. On a few occasions, that turns out to be correct. In the vast majority of cases it isn’t. In those cases, it routinely results in a party reinventing itself as something the general public isn’t interested in buying.

In the specific case before us, we have a few attractive and successful politicians who accept the “socialist” label (whether or not they embrace the general socialist vision). Does that mean the electorate, even just the folks who voted for them, favor the socialist vision? If you believe that, I’ve got this bridge some wonderful meme-coins….

these conversations are not just prompted by the success of several charismatic “socialists” over party backed Democrats in majority Democratic districts.

we can do the same analysis on the right, where sane Republicans are getting replaced by bug-eyed racist freaks. what conclusions should we draw there? it’s not a sign that socialism is ascendant – quite the opposite.

but i think if you look at the whole picture, what it really says is that people are bored with current politicians and want to replace them with people who are radical, disruptive, populist and entertaining. they want people who “fight” and who promise to do impossible things like eliminate the Senate or ban Islam or make it illegal to be socialist/conservative, who will ‘take the fight to the enemy’ and radically reshape the country, tomorrow if not sooner.

Trumpism is the alternative on the right, something calling itself ‘socialism’ is trying to market itself as the alternative on the left.

thing is, a lot of what people in the US think is great about socialism (health care, greater equality, less corporate influence, etc.) they could absolutely get from pretty mainstream Dems. if they would just elect more of them. because every Dems run on those things and most of them actually mean it. and every time a Dems Pres tries to do anything about them, they run into the same wall: 60 votes in the Senate, Court says No, etc..

electing people even-more-left than Dems into safe Dem districts is absolutely not going to get any of those policies enacted any faster because democratic-socialist Senators still only get one vote in the Senate.

but sure, just abolish the Senate. reach for the stars!