Quo Vadis, Democrats?

[Norgy]

We have some Samis.

But I think Ivan is mostly concerned with white-ish people? 

[crazy canuck]

Reparations for the WHGs!

Only after the EHG's are fully compensated!

[crazy canuck]

But I think Ivan is mostly concerned with white-ish people? 

So he is pro-immigration after all

[HVC]

But I think Ivan is mostly concerned with white-ish people? 

So he is pro-immigration after all

I don't think the argument that his people pushed out the old people but the new peoples won't push him out will convince Ivan of his folly

For my part, like most Western Europeans, I'm probably like 2% Neanderthal and thus I demand reparations!

[Razgovory]

Without immigration there would be no Canada, or me. Without immigration the person who I hope will one day be the mother of my grandchildren would not be here. So I must disagree with the premise that it has been bad.

That's your argument for mass-migration? A country built on pushing away the indigenous population?
It can only be hoped that the countries in western europe don't undergo the same fate.

I wasn't aware of Indigenous populations in Western Europe. Please enlighten me who these Indigenous people are. And most importantly, what steps are you taking to restore their rights?

   This is fucking hilarious.  

[Razgovory]

The problem is that the radicalization isn't coming poor.  The DSA stalwarts aren't working class or poor.  They are mostly from the Middle Class or really upper-Middle Class.  And this is true for a lot of MAGA (though MAGA probably has more working class people in it, both as a percentage and in absolute terms.)  What these people do have in common is a fear of downward mobility.  For all the talk of solidarity about the working class, the these people don't want actually be the people waiting tables for minimum wage.

Sure but that's always been the case, no?

Not to go all Marxist and be too simplistic and programmatic but the driving force of right-populist movements historically is the downwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie. Similarly on the left it is often (though not exclusively and more in the Western world) downwardly mobile, for want of a better word, "graduate" class. Or as you often frame it PMC - though I'd handle that with a bit of care - I can't help but think there's something a little bit of the Mao in the Cultural Revolution in Musk et al.

I think the big question that we need to answer - and where the challenge to the "system" comes from - is why are so many people downwardly mobile? I mean to screw over one is unfortunate, to fuck up both is starting to look careless.

FWIW I'm not entirely convinced by inequality as we're talking about it - not least because I think the trajectory is rather different in different countries. I think the fundamental economc condition is global and it is the emergence of a new global middle class because of Asia and above all China which materially reduces the position and goods available to the traditional developed world's (a position fundamentally based on two hundred years of an injust economic order established and maintained by force) middle class and poor. Ultimately I would argue that for all the talk of neoliberalism, which is important, when the histories are written Reagan and Thatcher and Pinochet etc will be footnotes in the biography of Deng Xiaoping. Because that's the profound economic change, re-ordering, up-ending that is shaping our world and everything else are just little local difficulties.

I think there is more in the parity of esteem, respect and voice which is not just about wage and working conitions. But also I think there is something to the wider point on social media and rolling the "Bowling Together" argument forward to a signficantly more atomised and and algorithmically isolated society. That's partly why I think you cannot disentangle the social benefits and freedoms of neo-liberalism, based on liberating the individual from the market forces producing it by atomising the individual - they are two sides of the same coin.

I would say one of the major reasons for the downward mobility and the instability is elite overproduction.  There are simply too many people with college degrees and not enough high paying, high status jobs for them.

[Razgovory]

Even after a string of recent victories in congressional primaries by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, national Democrats appear slow to recognize that ideologues on the left are attempting a hostile takeover of the party. The DSA's ascent comes on the heels of a yearslong effort by socialists and progressive activists to steer one of America's two major political parties toward identity politics, isolationism, and hostility to capitalism.

Democrats looking for a way to reclaim their party can find inspiration in the career of Neil Kinnock, who in the mid-1980s rescued the British Labour Party from a determined band of sectarian zealots.

After Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives surged into power in 1979, Labour responded by moving left. Its 1983 election platform—promising centralized economic planning, unilateral nuclear disarmament, and the introduction of a price-control commission—was so extreme that critics dubbed it "the longest suicide note in history." After the party lost in a historic landslide to the Conservatives, major factions within Labour still insisted that the party wasn't left-wing enough. The Labour politician Edward "Red Ted" Knight famously declared that "there can be no compromise with the electorate."

One small but loud faction on Labour's left was the Militant Tendency, a highly disciplined group that took its name from the socialist newspaper around which its members gathered. Giant banners showing the faces of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky adorned its rallies. Unlike the Labour mainstream, which sought to alleviate inequality through democratic reform, Militant believed in the overthrow of British capitalism, by force if necessary. With its own manifestos, conferences, leadership structures, and funding, Militant resembled a traditional political party in every respect but one: It didn't run candidates on a ballot line of its own. In a ploy that might sound familiar to Democrats in the United States today, Militant instructed its members to join Labour, ascend its ranks, and advance the group's cause from the inside. By the time Kinnock assumed leadership of the Labour Party after the 1983 disaster, Militant had been functioning as "a party within a party" for some two decades.



At Labour's annual conference in Bournemouth, England, in 1985, Kinnock's frustration boiled over. He spoke emotionally about how he owed the Labour Party "every life chance that I have had since the time I was a child," and argued that far-left purists' "impossible promises" and commitment to theories over results imperiled Labour's ability to protect the welfare state. He denounced Militant members as "gesture generals" and likened them to privately educated schoolboys who were willing to "play politics with people's jobs and with people's services or with their homes." Militant members and their fellow travelers booed, and a former Labour chairman stormed off the stage in anger. But Kinnock had the courage to say what many in Labour were thinking. Most of the crowd roared their approval.

In a television appearance the following month, Kinnock went further, denouncing Militant as "a maggot in the body of the Labour Party." Despite fierce internal resistance, Kinnock ended up expelling hundreds of Militant members. More than four decades later, Kinnock's actions remain among the most memorable examples of a political leader confronting extremists on his own side.

Kinnock was among his generation's greatest political orators—to the point that Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, plagiarized some of his most effective lines. Although Kinnock never managed to become prime minister, he saved the Labour Party from electoral oblivion. He paved the way for a successor, Tony Blair, to steer the party back into power in 1997 and become the only Labour leader to win three successive elections.

Today, Democratic leaders find themselves in a quandary much like Kinnock's. The DSA's agenda is alien to mainstream Democrats—or at least it should be. The organization's draft platform calls for "fully abolishing the police and prison system," drafting a "new constitution," extending voting rights to noncitizens, and creating a "democratic socialist republic." The group holds the U.S. and NATO responsible for Russia's war against Ukraine, defends the Communist dictatorship in Cuba, and pledges to shut down the Department of Defense and all overseas American military bases.

To gain leverage within the Democratic Party, the DSA is employing a tactic that Trotsky dubbed "entryism"—the willful effort by a small, disciplined cadre of radicals to infiltrate a more moderate organization and subvert it from within. It's the same tactic that, throughout history, far-left organizations such as the Militant Tendency have routinely used to amass power. Unless the Democrats respond forcefully to the DSA's entryism, they risk being overrun by extremists who will poison the party's national brand and sap its capacity to compete with an already radicalized GOP.

In liberal enclaves, the DSA keeps getting stronger. Last month in Washington, D.C., a DSA candidate beat the outgoing mayor's chosen successor, and this fall in Los Angeles, a DSA city-council member could unseat the incumbent Democratic mayor. Recently, two current members and one former member of the DSA—all endorsed by the group's most prominent elected official, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—defeated establishment Democrats, including the chairman of the House Hispanic Caucus, in congressional primaries. Since his inauguration, Mamdani has shown a moderate streak. One of the insurgents, a doctoral student in sociology named Darializa Avila Chevalier, is far more emblematic of the DSA's radicalism. She has called for the abolition of borders, police, and prisons; has endorsed the seizure of private property; opposes deportations on any grounds; and took part in a DSA-supported pro-Hamas rally the day after the October 7 massacre. Recently in Colorado, a progressive 15-term Democratic member of Congress lost a primary election to a DSA candidate who refuses to condemn as anti-Semitic the firebombing of a demonstration for Israeli hostages.

These victories mark major milestones for the DSA's overall political strategy. Knowing that it doesn't have anything near the support to compete as a party in its own right, the DSA opportunistically uses the Democratic Party ballot line (which some members describe as a "tool") to get its candidates elected. The DSA declined to endorse the Democratic nominee in the past three presidential elections, and members attack the Democratic Party's leaders as neoliberal corporate shills who must be overthrown. (When images of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on television screens at the party celebrating the DSA slate's win in New York, the audience erupted into chants of "You're next!") The DSA is not shy about its ultimate designs. A recent draft platform explicitly called for the eventual formation of an "independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority"—language that was eventually scrubbed.

In fact, little about the DSA's membership of more than 100,000 people suggests any natural affinity or appeal to America's multiracial, geographically dispersed working class. A 2021 survey of DSA members found that only 8 percent of respondents lived in rural areas (as opposed to 20 percent of the American public), that more than 80 percent had a college degree (twice the proportion among Americans overall), and that 85 percent were white. The Democrats' broad rainbow coalition looks much more like America than the DSA does.

The DSA claims, against all evidence, that pulling the Democratic Party to the left will expand its electoral appeal. To moderate-Democratic critics, the group's recent victories in New York City and elsewhere demonstrate little more than an ability to turn safe Democratic seats an even deeper shade of blue. "I'm not excited about candidates who can turn blue seats navy blue, cobalt blue, or midnight blue," Rahm Emanuel, the former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a possible 2028 presidential contender, told me. In 2006, Emanuel helped the party pick up 30 House seats from Republicans; neither the DSA nor the Bernie Sanders–aligned entities Our Revolution and Justice Democrats have flipped a single one.



Yet despite the faction's inability to win in purple or red districts, democratic socialists enjoy a net favorability of 17 points among Democratic voters nationwide, compared with just 4 points for Democratic members of Congress. More Democratic voters view socialism favorably than those who say the same of capitalism, 66 percent to 42. Socialism is an expansive term, applicable both to Scandinavian social democracies with strong private sectors and to authoritarian Communist regimes. The DSA includes advocates of both models, allowing hard-liners within the group to pass off their own dogmatic and illiberal ideology as merely a more assertive version of progressivism.

One of the less remarked upon adverse effects of the Trump presidency is the way in which it has radicalized the left, giving license to bad actors and bad ideas. Fearful of appearing weak in the eyes of their base, most elected Democrats have adopted a "no enemies on the left" approach to dealing with the DSA and other radical forces. If such pusillanimity continues, Democrats risk losing their party to a band of true believers no less destructive than the furthest extremes of the MAGA movement.

The DSA, founded in 1982 by the writer and activist Michael Harrington to achieve "the left wing of the possible," served mainly as a discussion club until 2016, when Sanders's first presidential campaign inspired a groundswell of interest in socialism. The starkest divide between the DSA's older generation and the newcomers concerned their attitudes toward democracy. The DSA's founders drew a bright line between the democratic and authoritarian left, not least because socialists are typically among the first to be put against the wall whenever Communists come to power. A staunch anti-communist and a Zionist, Harrington had no difficulty condemning the human-rights abuses perpetrated by left-wing regimes and Islamist terrorist groups.

To the DSA's growing ranks of young members, however, Harrington's anti-communism and Zionism were imperialist, reactionary relics of the Cold War. Maurice Isserman, a founding member of the DSA, has written that by around 2019, "'Harringtonite' was becoming a term of abuse within the organization." As the DSA's national profile has risen, the group has drawn new members for whom the democratic in democratic socialism is not a core value but an obstacle. Outside activists who abide by the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism"—in which the rank and file must unquestioningly carry out political decisions made by party elite—gained entry into the DSA. The group "became a sort of magnet for people who had a different sort of sectarian view of what the left should be," Leo Casey, another founding DSA member, told me. Before the DSA became a perpetrator of entryism, it was the victim of it.

Then came October 7. The DSA had officially repudiated its Zionist past in 2017 when it endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. But even this hostile move did not prepare the DSA's older membership for the virulent anti-Semitism that would pour forth from the group after the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. The DSA released a statement "expressing our solidarity with Palestine" with no mention of Hamas, the terrorist outfit that had perpetrated the massacre. The following day, the New York City chapter endorsed a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square—the rally that the future Democratic congressional nominee Chevalier attended. The group's embrace of terrorist violence proved too much for some members. "Sunday's hate-filled and antisemitic rally in New York City, promoted by the NYC-DSA, makes it impossible for me to continue my affiliation," Representative Shri Thanedar of Michigan, a Democrat, said in a statement. (For this heresy, Thanedar is at risk of losing his seat to a DSA-backed challenger.) In Los Angeles, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a DSA member, said the organization's statement "failed to reckon with the horrors committed by Hamas" and was "devoid of empathy." When she later accepted support from a local pro-Israel organization, the DSA's Los Angeles chapter censured her, noting that its elected officials "are expected to co-govern with the chapter," and it continues to withhold its endorsement in her challenge to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. At the DSA convention last August, the group repealed its long-standing ban on members from democratic-centralist organizations, effectively opening the door to Communists, who now form a majority on its governing body.

To win an endorsement from the New York City DSA, prospective candidates must pass through a rigorous vetting process. Hopefuls must appear before multiple committees to ensure that they're sufficiently simpatico with DSA diktats. Those who receive the DSA's red rose of approval are subject to draconian ideological monitoring. In 2024, the group's national political committee revoked its endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then its most famous member, over her support for the Iron Dome missile-defense system in Israel and sponsorship of an event with a Jewish organization focused on combatting anti-Semitism. An article in the group's official publication complained that she was "committed to the Democratic Party, not the DSA," and a faction demanded that she be censured for her "tacit support of Zionism," her endorsement of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and—in a Stalinist flourish—her "inadequate political discipline."

"The trouble with socialism," according to an old joke often misattributed to Oscar Wilde, "is that it takes up too many evenings." The DSA's supporters and critics both agree that its members devote enormous time and energy to on-the-ground organizing. Representative Tom Suozzi, a moderate Democrat from Long Island, lamented to me that "people who oppose the DSA are at cocktail parties wringing their hands while they're out there organizing." For this reason, among others, some Democrats see DSA members as potential allies. "DSA members are doing the one thing Democrats can barely do anymore, especially at the local level, which is organize," Steven McCarty, a District of Columbia Democratic Party committee member and Democratic Municipal Officials board member, told me. In this view, the DSA is a resource that should be integrated into the Democratic Party, with all of the ideological compromises such a merger would necessitate. Many senior Democrats are thinking along the same lines. Jeffries has refrained from criticizing the new DSA congressional nominees despite their conspicuous refusal to endorse him for the speakership. Axios recently reported that Harris, eyeing another run for the presidency, had called Mamdani "to talk about the party's future."

Other Democrats see more clearly what's wrong with accommodating the DSA. Emanuel told me that although the Democrats are a coalition, "the coalition doesn't include room for people who believe America is a country wrong at every level." Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a prominent moderate Democrat and vocal DSA critic, likened his party's situation to that of the GOP more than a decade ago. "I see this as our Tea Party / Freedom Caucus moment," he told me, with the Democratic Party staring down a movement "interested in bomb throwing, not problem solving; sowing chaos, not finding solutions." Last month, Suozzi and Representative Adam Gray of California released an open letter that proclaims, "We are capitalist, not socialist," "We want safety, not lawlessness," and "We are proud, not ashamed of America." As of this writing, only eight other members of Congress have signed the pledge.

Democrats can look across the aisle to see what a vigorous contest for the soul of a major political party looks like. Given how slavishly the GOP has fallen into line behind Trump, it's hard to remember the ferocity of the ideological battles that took place within the conservative movement while he was attempting a hostile takeover of that party in 2015 and 2016. The conservative-activist-and-intellectual space was galvanized by debates over Trump and what he represented, and a whopping 16 other candidates competed against Trump for the party's nomination. One of those contenders, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, called Trump's campaign a "cancer on conservatism," and another, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, told delegates to "vote your conscience" at the Republican convention. Senator Lindsey Graham called Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" who should "go to hell."

Thus far, the American left is not having any significant debate on the disturbing rise of the DSA. To save their party, and American liberalism, Democrats will need to reach back into their own history, to the early years of the Cold War, when liberal titans such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sought to purge the Democratic Party of Communist influence. They will need to understand that the DSA is not, as some Democrats once affectionately described Communists, a collection of well-intentioned if naive "liberals in a hurry," but an illiberal vanguard. Establishment figures such as Jeffries and the party's 2028 presidential candidates will need to grasp that the relationship between the DSA and the Democratic Party is not one of occasionally bickering siblings, but of parasite and host.



Democrats have spent the Trump era telling the American people that they're the only political force capable of defending the country from authoritarianism. That argument will be impossible to maintain if they countenance an organization that honors the legacy of the convicted cop killer Assata Shakur and calls for "solidarity" with North Korea. But criticizing the DSA will only go so far. When David Duke was the Republican candidate for governor in Louisiana in 1991, prominent Republicans, including President George H. W. Bush, condemned the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Some explicitly backed his Democratic opponent, the legendarily corrupt Edwin Edwards. Although the GOP certainly had a moral obligation to distance itself from a hate-monger, doing so was also in the party's self-interest. Democrats, whose brand is viewed as too left-wing in five out of six Senate-battleground states, should be similarly wary of fanatics trying to infiltrate their ranks.

Open letters aren't enough. If the Democrats want to root out the party within their party, they will need to stop indulging the DSA's constant, passive-aggressive attempts to undermine them. This would require prohibiting DSA members from joining their party and throwing out the DSA members already honeycombed within it. Four decades ago, Labour's Neil Kinnock expelled the extremist faction burrowing within his beloved party. If Democrats want to rescue their party, they may need to do the same.

[crazy canuck]

That's an interesting historical take.  The Democrats should emulate someone who lost, was it three or four consecutive elections?

[Razgovory]

I can think of a more popular position to take in American politics than abolishing prisons.  The problem most people had with Jeffery Epstein was that he wasn't free.

[Sheilbh]

Will come back to some other points here but that speech by Kinnock (weirdly there's basically no good version in a lot of the archives - loads of issues with audio mixing so this one's been stitched together a bit - it's slightly mad for a politically hugely consequential moment but a bit like huge amounts of the BBC's archives not existing because they used to record over tape ):

The famous section is about 2 minutes in (my parents - who lived in Liverpool, which was run by Militant Tendency remeber cheering with relief in that moment when they saw it on the TV) and the great peroration on "every life chance I've had" is abou 4.15 ending on the need to "deliver the British people from evil".

Kinnock was the last great orator in British politics - oratory's always had a slightly mixed reception here and has particular roots (his reputation at the time was for often speaking a bit too much and getting lost in his own rhetoric - a "Welsh windbag"). But also the actual drama of the speech is really important and also the last time that really happened. Early on you'll see Eric Heffer, hard-left MP from Liverpool (not part of Militant, but a "no enemies to the left" type) who was on the National Executive Committee walking off the stage and out the hall. There are Militant members (including Dereck Hatton who ran the council) heckling Kinnock. It's also, I think, probably the last speech in British politics aimed at and for the audience in the room - it was a real platform speech. It was not really aimed at the audience a home or the TV cameras which is I think what gives the charged atmosphere producing that drama. After this we enter more an age of message discipline and spin and far more professionalised media-focused comms.

Edit: And just to note at about the 6th minute you see two of my heroes - and very strong figures of the Labour left, Barbara Castle () and Michael Foot applauding strongly as it was confronting an alien faction. Militant were - and are (they still exist) - Trotskyist entryists (one of the four groupuscules of British Trotskyism each, somehow, more unappealing than the last).

[Norgy]

So, the DSA is a "hostile takeover". From whom, exactly? The "let's check what our focus groups say" crowd?

Mamdani showed that you can win on a from an American viewpoint, radical platform.

I would say the United States are ahead of Europe there, as we are collectively going for retrograde nationalism with ordo-liberalism without a conscience.

[Norgy]

How many steps to the right have the labour movement involuntarily or through poor leadership taken since Kinnock, Sheilbh?

Yes, it is not an honest question. The situation today is more like 1890 than 1986.

[crazy canuck]

Will come back to some other points here but that speech by Kinnock (weirdly there's basically no good version in a lot of the archives - loads of issues with audio mixing so this one's been stitched together a bit - it's slightly mad for a politically hugely consequential moment but a bit like huge amounts of the BBC's archives not existing because they used to record over tape ):

The famous section is about 2 minutes in (my parents - who lived in Liverpool, which was run by Militant Tendency remeber cheering with relief in that moment when they saw it on the TV) and the great peroration on "every life chance I've had" is abou 4.15 ending on the need to "deliver the British people from evil".

Kinnock was the last great orator in British politics - oratory's always had a slightly mixed reception here and has particular roots (his reputation at the time was for often speaking a bit too much and getting lost in his own rhetoric - a "Welsh windbag"). But also the actual drama of the speech is really important and also the last time that really happened. Early on you'll see Eric Heffer, hard-left MP from Liverpool (not part of Militant, but a "no enemies to the left" type) who was on the National Executive Committee walking off the stage and out the hall. There are Militant members (including Dereck Hatton who ran the council) heckling Kinnock. It's also, I think, probably the last speech in British politics aimed at and for the audience in the room - it was a real platform speech. It was not really aimed at the audience a home or the TV cameras which is I think what gives the charged atmosphere producing that drama. After this we enter more an age of message discipline and spin and far more professionalised media-focused comms.

Edit: And just to note at about the 6th minute you see two of my heroes - and very strong figures of the Labour left, Barbara Castle () and Michael Foot applauding strongly as it was confronting an alien faction. Militant were - and are (they still exist) - Trotskyist entryists (one of the four groupuscules of British Trotskyism each, somehow, more unappealing than the last).

And was it three or actually four elections that he lost?

A great hero of the left, indeed

[Norgy]

Kinnock lost to John Mayor.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, and if memory serves, that was the election, it was supposed to win.

Four election losses would bring us to about the end of president Vance's second term.  Counting midterms as an election.