Evan Barker isn’t surprised.
“The democratic socialist surge of the past several weeks has stunned the nation,” this former Democratic operative wrote last week. “From left to right and everywhere in between, people are asking: How did we get here? What does it mean? And will the Democratic Party survive it? The prevailing reaction has been shock.”
She’s not shocked, though, because for half a decade she had worked for “a slew of progressive candidates” teaching “DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network.”
But after the big loss for Kamala “Salad Slinger” Harris and Tim “Cringe” Walz, Barker left the party. And wrote a book, Nothing Left, regaling us with how she became disillusioned with “a leadership class” that had drifted “further and further from the working-class Americans they purportedly represented.”
Barker’s not alone. Others in the rah-rah crowd for an older Democratic Party have also expressed their chagrin. On the First of July, well-known “liberal” journalist Jonathan Chait published in The Atlantic “There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists.”
Noting that the Democratic Socialists of America despise the Democratic Party, with many of DSA’s stalwarts veering off into communist advocacy without much nudging, the question becomes why Democrats with some sense don’t come to their alleged senses.
Chait observes that Michael Harrington, the socialist founder of DSA, placed into its bylaws “the expulsion of members who were ‘under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,’ a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.”
Yet, the Democratic Party isn’t as moderate as Harrington!
Truth is, “DSA supporters see internal division not as a risk but as a historic opportunity to seize power.”
And the “means of production.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One reply on “Socialists to Seize Power?”
Under the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party reëmbraced “progressivism” and a programme that was implicitly totalitarian in that it had no stopping principle (except for the exhaustion of possibilities) when it came to intervention by the state into life. Note that the Bernie Broes imagined a Sanders Administration as a continuation and furtherance of Obama’s legacy, and fantasized about Sanders’ appointing Obama to the US Supreme Court. Still, under Obama, Democratic totalitarianism was eventual rather than immediate.
Then a crisis came in 2016. The corporate left made a number of major miscalculations and not only lost the Presidency with three-to-five seats on the US Supreme Court at stake, but found a much more threatening President-Elect than they’d ever faced in living memory. So the corporate left pulled-out a great many of the stops, in an attempt to cripple his Presidency as much as possible. And part of that process was to embrace left-wing activists willing to go much further than previously, those activists who self-identified as socialists.
But, once those people are given entry and power, they hold onto it. And they won’t moderate “for the sake of the Party”.
Trump has the US and thus America embroiled in a war for which his Administration has not offered a reasonable case — indeed, the Administration has offered mutually contrary rationales — and even those citizens who are indifferent to the deaths of Iranian citizens and of American soldiers are bearing discernible costs in material well-being. Normally, this situation would mean that the Democrats would recapture both Chambers of Congress. But the Democratic Party has become the party of Platner, of Mamdani, of Walz, and of Omar; and Spanberger has shown that these folk will sometimes cross-dress as moderates to get elected. Majorities of voters may decide that even war is better than the warmth of totalitarianism.