by liberal japonicus
Folks have been talking about this, so I thought I would toss in the NYT Daily on the DSA.
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
by liberal japonicus
Folks have been talking about this, so I thought I would toss in the NYT Daily on the DSA.
>That got many quite frustrated and gave rise to the call that with these guys any significant progress was essentially impossible.
what’s stopping progressive wishlist items from passing is not the leftmost flank of the caucus, it’s the rightmost flank – Dems who get elected in conservative districts/states. those are people who fight universal health care and taxes on the wealthy etc.. and those people are not going to get replaced by DSA types. they’re going to get replaced by Republicans who will be able to run their whole campaigns just standing there and saying “My opponent is a literal socialist.”
replacing anyone else accomplishes absolutely nothing. swapping a solid Dem who would happily vote for universal healthcare with a DSA person who also happily vote for universal healthcare is a net gain of zero.
I’ll say what I always say in these sorts of conversations… As a long-time union member and local leader, one of the things I consistently have to remind members of is that management will always say that what the union wants is not possible, and most of the fights you take on (through the grievance process) will be fights that you will lose. You don’t file a grievance only when you think you will win, you file it to show that you will not let management violate your rights without a fight. And sometimes that also means taking a losing fight into arbitration and spending member dues on lawyer fees just because you need management to see that you are not going to let this particular issue go no matter how hard they try to discourage you.
Too many long-term Democrats sound like management. Not enough sound like labor leaders. It makes it hard for working class Dems and independents to trust them. Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani sound like labor leaders willing to fight for their members, and willing to take on union leadership if leadership has gotten too cosy with management and forgotten the rank-and-file.
If you want to know what “too cosy” sounds like, here’s Schumer in the NYT in 2025:
Jon Stewart was absolutely right to roast Schumer for this. It makes him sound out-of-touch and entitled, and untroubled by the effects of what is happening to people while they wait to get to that magic point where the Repubs start to worry for their own political survival.
It’s shit like this that lies behind the growing number of people declaring themselves independents. They don’t feel supported or represented, and they see no sense of urgency coming from elected officials. They want to see their representatives fight even if they don’t win, and they want to hear them keep fighting even in defeat.
They want to see their representatives fight even if they don’t win, and they want to hear them keep fighting even in defeat.
No doubt, but the US is at an inflection point: if the Dems fight but don’t win American democracy may be over, and the opportunity to fight in any organised way may not come again. That is why the fight has to be waged in a strategic and concentrated way, unhampered by unnecessary drag. Obviously, local conditions mean this will vary in its specifics according to state, but it seems absolutely vital to me.
Further to which, this is from a conversation in today’s NYT, headlined Trump Voters are Finally Starting to Sour on Him (FTLTGE):
Longwell: Democratic voters want their leaders to stop acting like peacetime diplomats, recognize the Republican Party for the threat it is and mount an effective counteroffensive. They are deeply frustrated by years of their politicians saying that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, but not acting like democracy is truly at stake.
…..
They need much more aggressive communications strategies. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a movie I hated, but a communications strategy I endorse. Talk like a normal human being about issues that matter to a vast majority of voters, which are generally the issues tied to material well-being: jobs, health care, education, crime.
But this works only if you have high-level communicators going into these spaces. Charismatic leaders like Jon Ossoff, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Josh Shapiro and Pete Buttigieg are the Democrats’ strongest messengers. Notice that this has less to do with these candidates’ individual politics — some are centrists, others are progressives — and more to do with their ability to be authentic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/opinion/democrats-fighters-trump-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9FA.CQr6.Wp4c0rXqfjFc&smid=url-share
@Hartmut, the public option in ObamaCare failed because Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) wouldn’t vote to break the filibuster unless the option was removed. Both represented states where private health insurance companies were a significant part of the economy. They got their way because by then leadership had given up on getting any Republican votes.
https://www.newsweek.com/polls-democratic-socialist-positions-traction-republicans-midterms-12353898
All fights that need to be waged whether or not the Dems win, because if they do not fight these fights they won’t gain the trust and support they need to keep democracy.
Paid family leave
Raising the federal minimum wage
Higher taxes on billionaires
Medicare for all
Opposing AI data centers
these are all fights the Dems are already having and have been trying to pass for many many years. google will easily verify every single one of them. and the are all fights replacing a Dem with a DSA will do nothing to help achieve.
if i didn’t know any better, i’d say the DSA was a way to make the GOP giddy.
just like “defund” and the Floyd protests, the leftmost flank always finds a way to take a real issue and turn it into an absolute horrorshow of a caricature which the GOP will then use to smear all Dems just in time for an election.
it’s like fucking clockwork.
…which the GOP will then use to smear all Dems just in time for an election.
They will do that no matter what, even if the have to invent every last thing (or edit quotes by removing context or adding or substracting words like ‘no’. And the media are afraid to call them out on that (if they are not the spreader in the first place). They claimed that Obama was worse than Hitler and Stalin combined (OK, that failed) and that Biden was a lawless corrupt tyrant and at the same time also sleepy and unaware of what was happening around him (which worked).
Not a fan of St.John of Patmos but his “cause you are lukewarm, I’ll spit you out of my mouth” fits the professional Dems to a t.
cleek, I have never said that we should be replacing Dems with DSA candidates. What I have said is that the Dem *narrative* on these issues has been failing because they sound like management apologizing for not being able to do it because of budget constraints, rather than sounding like someone willing to break a business relationship over these issues.
The Dems should be going after these issues with every bit the passion and the fervor that the DSA insurgents are. Instead, they keep Hufflepuffing their way around the issues. If Dems stopped running scared on these, then the DSA would not have anything to go after in a primary.
And the Dems have absolutely NOT been running against the AI datacenters. That was one of the big issues that bit the Dem choices in the ass in ME and MI, and Newsom has been cuddling up to AI money all along in order to power his media machine.
We all here (save a very few) want that. But to quote that Longwell person “Democratic voters want their leaders to stop acting like peacetime diplomats, recognize the Republican Party for the threat it is and mount an effective counteroffensive.” And the salient word is effective. It’s only an effective counteroffensive if it actually succeeds in getting the social democratic party elected. Which involves avoiding unnecessarily polarising associations.
As cleek and russell both point out, all those ideas are not sole property of the socialists, and the billionaire capitalists are a target of opportunity to be used in fighting back. Expect that you will be called a socialist. Laugh. Go after the billionaires with a counterattack.
It’s getting a lot more popular to fight against the data centres now, and I would have thought the Dems are better placed than the GOP to do it. And as for the tech billionaires and masters of the universe, Meta’s $18billion may only be a setback for Zuckerberg, but it’s a straw in the wind. It’s very possible to fight for those policies without acquiescing in being called socialists. Despite what Pro Bono says, the American people are a very long way from understanding let alone going along with Blair’s definition of socialism. Trump’s administration has done a wonderful job of laying the groundwork for showing that they don’t give a damn for the living standards of working people, and they have betrayed or messed up every promise they made and statement of “principle” on which they got elected, and that their corruption is greater than world class.
The desire of the left to fight like hell is very right and understandable. But the fight needs to be clever as well as plain spoken, and to avoid the elephant traps.
Actually, clarification needed. It’s not just “socialist” which is an unnecessarily polarising description for the Dems to eschew, it’s what in our previous conversation we were agreeing to satirically call Woke One. The extreme elements of progressivism and so-called identity politics are also electorally unpopular, and unnecessary to achieve the five political aims we have been discussing. They are the sorts of things which can be debated and decided once a party is in power, and has achieved its primary aims and commitments to the electorate.