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.
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
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.
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.
While they’re more modestly to the left i think, the Working Families Party in NY had or have a particular set up that i can’t name or explain atm. but iirc they could put their candidates on both WFP & Dem ballot somehow, and marking WFP supported their work while not spoiling?
So i thought perhaps while not structurally, at least in spirit DSA was the same: a sort of shadow coalition party aimed at pushing the official party to the left.
The DSA started as a group to support candidates running in Democratic primaries who aligned with their values. It was tiny for a long time, then blew up when Bernie became famous. That brought a lot of people in, not all of them on board with working through the Democratic party.
Despite Bernie's losses, some DSA leaders who were deep into politics went on to work for regular Democrats. The radicals stepped in & took control of some local chapters. Their support for a river-to-the-sea Palestine drove out more people, leaving the really hardcore weirdos.
The organizational culture was always very bro-ey, but it _completely_ shit the bed after 2016.
Lots of this played out online in ways that were pretty trivial to notice at the time.
It was started by Michael Harrington, among others, with the idea that you can’t call yourself a socialist if you don’t belong to a socialist party that can work for change in an organized way.
Not exactly, but close. I remember the debates over Jesse Jackson: he’s clearly not ‘of the left’, but is he enough ‘with the left’ for us to support him?
NY has an odd quirk (I'm also not sure of the details...) that allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate, so WFP is basically the progressive base of the Dems here. Possibly the only good thing about NY politics. I think the Conservative Party does roughly the same for the right/GOP.
And also, this is all downstream of the NY State Democratic Party being abnormally fucked-up in so many ways that don't apply anywhere else in the country.
My outsider take is the party is trying to shake off the Cuomo hangover? He kept the state party from moving left for a long time & the wings are now fighting for control.
I'm not an insider either, I just like to pay attention to the party dynamics in the place where way too much of our political media is produced. Same deal with keeping up with SoCal weirdo shit; it's gonna end up in our movies, good to be conversant.
Fusion voting - it's really helpful imo because it means people can vote for the Democrat but on the Working Families line, which is a way to say "Democrat, but from the left". When there's 200,000 of those, the Democrat knows not to sidle too far right.
anyway, drastic vs incremental is a whole convo innit. the word “triage” comes to mind for This Crisis Now, but i get it’s like crying wolf for some, esp those who get tossed under the bus consistenly, to the point of they rightly or wrongly really DON’T see the difference-for THEM.
