Individual DSA chapters are better or worse, but there's nothing useful to be done through it that you can't do better either on your own or directly supporting a Democrat, IMO.
Chicago DSA is a victim of their own success to an extent. My progressive alder won with their backing in 2019, as did others. Now that the people actually interested in governing have power as Democrats, only the ragey radicals stuck with the DSA.
It’s possible to get a group of people who would really like drastic change together to work for incremental change but they’re not going to *enjoy* working with the system, unless they turn out to really be people who enjoy working with the system, in which case they will probably change orgs
DSA groups that aren’t spoilers are groups that, as you say, back Dems in most situations, which means that what you really get from being part of (non-dysfunctional) DSA is the sense that your literal comrades agree with you more on how things theoretically should be
And that isnt worth that much
But at some point people are gonna divide into “it’s better to make real change” and “I like my fantasies more then reality” and therefore “reasonable” DemSocs do in fact notch-filter out to basically just a meeting point where tankies and institutional libs intersect and learn to hate one another
I think what most sticks in my mind in an annoying “this is very juvenile to still bothered about” way from the 2016 primary where a former friend, in terminating the friendship because I was going to vote Dem even if it wasn’t Bernie, said I “used to be cool”
Because that’s wrong, I was never that kind of cool
I at no point *really* was ever going to make a serious political decision based on my vague sense that everything needs to be fair somehow so theoretically I support communism,over the thing that could actually make things better
Ppl just assume
And that’s the thing. The supposed reasonable left really does to me seem like a thing for young people who haven’t figured out that basically you decide at some point if you’re ever going to set reasonable expectations or if you’re just never going to do that
The hidden variable here is race, because your median white leftist is often a covert racist and open sexist anyway, and then follows that down a rabbithole of positions that only someone with no skin in the game can take.
(But Mr. Cat, are you not a glows-blue-under-fluorescent-light white fellow yourself?
Yes, but I listen attentively to people who are not, because I care more about outcomes than my vanity *and* because it has been of direct material benefit to do so.)
Ellie! You used to be cool! You gave all that up for Biden? 🤣
Did you have some rare punk 7”s or a sweet collection of Criterion DVDs you had to turn over or do they let you keep that kinda thing so long as you don’t display it publicly, which could mislead people about your lack of coolness?
I mean I absolutely am an obnoxious film buff of the “I tend to like things from A23 or that end up on Criterion releases” person and wanted to be a “geurilla filmmaker” or whatever as a teenager, so, kinda
I was still a lib then though, I’m just a lib who thinks camera angles are interesting
It takes very little to cross over from 'cool media collection' to 'insufferable dork media collection' but it's always an improvement.
(I need to rebuild my physical media collection. I got rid of most of it a couple moves ago.)
Yeah, I wish I’d been buying DVDs up the last decade or so
But now I’m wondering where I fall on that cool/insufferable line?
Have I showed any of you my sweet collection of Brazilian lps from the early 70s? My Brian Eno vinyl box set? Huh? Huh?
🤣
Lots of them slept through the Civil War module in history and thus are trying to retrofit the wrong historical analogies to problems because those analogies make them feel cool and sexy, like whatisisname who went to LARP Homage to Catalonia in Kurdistan.
The ideology might change but the Kremlin's motivation doesn't really change. Had the two absolute worst people not involved themselves in the Spanish Civil War, imagine how different it would have been.
Eh, I think the Spanish anarchists would probably still have tried to sabotage the Republic, but it's possible things would have been less bad.
The real answer, I think, is that a lot of people need to _see_ things get bad before they believe it. That's not tenable with nuclear weapons.
This country never had a labor-liberal split, so it's pretty irrelevant, and we should be reflexively suspicious of the people who think we need one for aesthetic reasons.
Also just generally, the whole cosplay-Communist complex seems to be transparently about replacing Girl Words like 'empathy' with Man Words like 'solidarity' much more than it's about real differences of policy, and I know where that shit leads.
Well and, now based on that Chicago DSA post about actively trying to disrupt the DNC and torpedo Biden’s campaign: quite, quite literally too dumb to live.
