Party in the DSA
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author.
Reform & Revolution, a Trotskyist caucus, has proposed that DSA jump to forming an independent ballot line, and has laid out steps to do so. In addition to the article penned by their NPC candidate, Sarah Milner, they have introduced a parallel resolution to implement their program at convention. I think the proposal is unworkable, and have listed my reasons at the end of the piece. But arguments about practicality are too often where DSA debates start and end, avoiding discussion about difficult and generative political questions.
The proposal raises important questions about what DSA is and what we want—that’s what I want to focus on in this piece. “Becoming a party in years rather than decades” would require us to rethink DSA and our electoral project in even more fundamental ways than Milner proposes, and would make every ideological tendency currently in the organization deeply uncomfortable.
Milner correctly assumes that a workers’ party would have a radically different coalition from the current Democratic Party’s base. But what she doesn't see is that creating a party of our own to capture that coalition would mean thinking differently about how we evaluate candidates and how we determine our organizational priorities. Her proposal should make us interrogate what we value, how much we value it, and how our actions might bring those values into the real world.
The Osborn Question, and What Makes a Party
Nebraska union leader Dan Osborn's independent run for Senate serves as both evidence and aspiration for Milner, and for good reason: as an independent, he ran about 13 points ahead of Harris on an unabashedly pro-union platform. His race, along with the decidedly less pro-worker campaigns of Evan MacMullin in Utah in 2022 and Greg Orman in Kansas in 2014, all suggest that independents can do better than Democrats in red states, and Osborn's performance suggests that economic populism is viable and popular. Milner’s article accordingly calls for “DSA [to] tactically run at least a few of these candidates as independents in deep blue or deep red states where there are Dan Osborn-style openings.” Though it wouldn’t bar candidates from running on the Democratic ballot line, the proposal does call on us to enter the broader electorate.
Milner is right to focus on Osborn—a socialist party able to contest for majorities in the American system would have a very different coalition from the present left-liberal coalition. Many people who vote Republican at present, and even more who have a passively conservative attitude but are infrequent voters, would have to vote for a socialist party for it to be electorally successful on a national level.
But that would be less clean than it’s normally treated. A key political assumption made by everyone who believes in DSA’s electoral work (or potential electoral work) is that there are voters who are either economically populist or “anti-system” enough that they would leap to vote for a socialist irrespective of their current voting preferences. This is true to some extent, but since 2016 we have seen its clear limits. Bernie Sanders’ overperformance in Democratic primaries in predominantly white red states encouraged people to believe that a “pure” class realignment was possible, but Progressive third parties matching economic appeals with unabashedly socially progressive platforms have foundered over the course of the 21st century.
“Historically, parties have had to tolerate a wide range of opinions in their elected officials.”
What goes unmentioned by Milner is that Osborn's platform and campaign did not involve calling himself a socialist, but instead involved saying he was “with Trump” on key issues, promising a “strong border,” and criticizing his opponent for abandoning Trump after video surfaced of Trump bragging about sexual assault in 2016. He did win over many working-class conservative voters with a populist, anti-system, pro-worker politics, but did so at the price of adopting many parts of the basic conservative worldview. It is worth asking how coherently left-wing he is in a meaningful sense.
His bid also relied on the tacit consent of the state Democrats, who withdrew their candidate. We can ignore that one for now, though it raises questions about what political independence means anyway.
I don't bring these up as a "gotcha,” or to suggest that it makes all of this a nonstarter. Milner, in fact, has a great answer for us on the ideological question: a part of launching the party is a four-year commitment to a highly delimited set of talking points, the kind that could fit on a palm card, or naturally in organizing conversations ranging from “labor to mutual aid.” The idea, tested by time, is of a coherent, delimited political program—the kind a Party would have. To read a bit into what Ms. Milner wrote, and applying some basic logic: if a candidate like Osborn, maybe validated by being a “cadre candidate” as worthy of our trust, agreed to our four points, he would be free to campaign as he needed to to win “under local conditions.” R&R has accordingly put forward a proposal for “programmatic unity.” What’s more, so has MUG.
Assessing whether either proposal would actually attract mass support if adopted as a program is beyond the scope of this article. And the R&R proposal at least would not necessarily mandate candidates adhere to that program. But this kind of logic is, in fact, the logic of a real party, where maximizing power in the state to achieve core priorities means assessing gains in power relative to their ideological cost. A candidate (or union, or constituency) that grows the party and increases our ability to wield power in the state for our core priorities is worthy of support, even if they disagree with us deeply on other matters.
“The Socialist Party was large enough and powerful enough that people with both enlightened and bigoted views had secure positions within it; that is what it means to be a party.”
Historically, parties have had to tolerate a wide range of opinions in their elected officials. America’s weak party system and entrepreneurial model of electing single-seat representatives and powerful executives have made this particularly acute here. There are contemporary examples—the Democrats, for instance, could only secure majorities over the past six years thanks to a set of four idiosyncratic independents in the Senate, each with significant differences with the party on separate issues.
Perhaps more relevantly, the most successful American third parties have been riven with deep disputes about historically significant issues. The Socialist Party and Populist Parties, for instance, had deep divisions on race—with outright racists often having powerful positions within the party. This is correctly reflected on as a historical tragedy that severely limited the ability of the populist and socialist movements to have clear answers to urgent historical questions. But while we can view it as an error, we also shouldn’t think that it was unnatural or came out of a mere failure to choose tolerance. Being a candidate of the Socialist Party meant working with the local socialist groups, appearing on the ballot line, and agreeing to a core platform: it did not mean an exhaustive investigation into the soul of the elected official in question. The Socialist Party was large enough and powerful enough that people with both enlightened and bigoted views had secure positions within it; that is what it means to be a party.
This is the function of “programmatic unity,” and why programs are necessary for political parties. Limiting the number of positions that you have to agree to to be acceptably “within the tent” is what allows the kind of wide, heterogeneous coalitions that parties need to be able to contest for majorities in elections with hundreds of millions of voters. It can also be extraordinarily ugly and discomforting on the margins. This is not how DSA currently evaluates our candidates.
The DSA Model and Activist Attachments
When I was on my local electoral committee, I was proud of my efforts to streamline our endorsement questionnaire. Across two cycles, I was able to lobby it down to a sleek, efficient fifty-three questions. Beyond the bureaucratic politics of each and every issue committee needing their pound of flesh (extracted from the fingertips of the poor campaign staffers who we made pound unnecessary keys), our questionnaire was laden with a deep, emotional neediness and anxiety. While there were fifty-three questions on topics ranging from specific legislation to a brief biography, each and every one asked the same thing: “Are you one of us? Really?” The specificity itself was an entreaty to lay out in excruciating detail each candidate’s political journey, to check that they went through the same one we did.
Needless to say, Dan Osborn wouldn’t have cut it.
The current mode of DSA candidate evaluation is not party logic. It is instead a logic of group belonging and anxious attachment. The anxiety is rational and the volume is structurally inflicted: we are potentially sending state legislators to hostile legislatures to wave the red banner as best they can, and we have no real ability to recall them, so it makes sense to plumb the depths of their political soul. We also have no clear, delimited, positive goals that they can affix themselves to. Nor do we have real ways to prioritize and deprioritize issues: at our worst, DSA is a composite of several-issue activist affinities assembled into the “Left” of a given city. Any issue is as important to a sector of them as any other. We can see the same effects at play in our national platform, extensive and diffuse, and produced through agglomeration rather than prioritization. It isn’t a program—it’s the description of an intellectual world.
“The current mode of DSA candidate evaluation is not party logic. It is instead a logic of group belonging and anxious attachment.”
Likewise, the narrative of electoral betrayal embraced by sectarian caucuses does not stem from party logic. Though it uses the language of party building, the demand for tribunes that reflect our aspirations and desires on every issue and in every conflict is a more personal desire for representation than any hard-bitten socialist party architect would recognize, even in systems where “withdrawing the whip” when a legislator breaks ranks is common. It is rather the logic of an activist group seeking representation, above and beyond the incoherent and contradictory desires of the “community,” a geographic constituency an American legislator is supposed, on paper, to represent.
Nor do mass-oriented caucuses really measure up to party logic ourselves. Our practice of aiming to recruit candidates who will maintain close organizational ties and advocate for our full platform as best they can is (in my biased opinion) a closer approximation of and a precursor to party logic. But it is still engaging in the ideological and dispositional mix-and-match of an activist group seeking to retain its influence over and above the natural pull of the constituency or the Democratic caucus.
“Creating a recognizable brand with real reach requires accepting people who fit within it, even if we don’t like other aspects of their beliefs.”
So what would it take to adopt party logic as the way we evaluate candidates? It would take a radical de-emphasis on the personal qualities of the candidate, and the ability to prioritize what really matters in the relationship.
While I think it’s logistically impossible, and misjudges the moment, the ways in which we would need to change the organization to actually endorse Independent candidates is potentially quite healthy for the organization. But doing that would involve a lot of sacrifice, particularly (though not by any means exclusively) from caucuses that view themselves as the champions of a “revolutionary” strategy within DSA. If we were serious about a party, a recognizable brand, and successfully elected politicians, we would have to accept that not every issue is equally important, and deviations of policy or behavior on the part of electeds on non-essential issues must be acceptable. A narrowly defined program creates the responsibility to win it just as much as it creates the ability to enact it. Creating a recognizable brand with real reach requires accepting people who fit within it, even if we don’t like other aspects of their beliefs.
Meet the Electorate
Part of what’s attractive about the Osborn proposition is the way it opens up a different and broader electorate than we currently can lay claim to. But campaigning as a Party, rather than within Democratic primaries, would be a profoundly conservatizing force on DSA.
DSA operates as a (comparatively) ideologically rigorous organization that is uniformly liberal on social issues and socialist in our economics. We have not absorbed too many challenges on this front electorally because we fight elections in the most uniformly left-liberal electorate available in America: Democratic primaries. For all we complain about it, and are anxious about the way that post-Trump realignment has made this weaker, the intra-Democratic party is still the most reliable place to elect a socialist.
The American electorate as a whole is much stranger, and more right-wing. It is, after all, the one that just gave a plurality of its votes to Donald Trump.
It might be said that I’m unfairly fixating on the Osborn half of this; Milner also wants us to campaign off the ballot line in deep-blue districts. But the truth is, there aren’t more coherently left wing voters (on both social and economic axes) anywhere outside of a Democratic primary. Systems like the California top-two, for instance, show that general electorates are more conservative than those in Democratic primaries. Certainly, anecdotal experiences like those of India Walton suggest that general election environments can be perilous for the left when they face off against the center left or center right. Those that fight through to win a general election in other countries are often ideologically disappointing.
Our approach to the breadth of the American electorate might be different than those of the two current parties, but it will be courting at least some of the same people. While we might believe that “anti-system” politics will gain us a hearing, it will not be enough by itself to earn organized support.
Parties and DSA
A ballot line party is at the mercy of the electorate that it is trying to win over. Parties in a liberal democracy (which we are for now, and the nearest alternatives would still present these troubles) are incentivized to engage in tailism. While they have important roles in articulating social coalitions and often underestimate their role in changing behavior, the question running through the minds of key decision-makers is (and should be) “How do I win the next election?” This means taking the electorate as they find it, and saying whatever it takes to get a majority of them to vote for the party. On the extreme end, this results in a logic of complete capitulation, where the only path for politicians is to reduce the “salience” of issues they will “inevitably” lose on in the mind of the public. Leninist proposals for a new (electoral) party are refreshingly unencumbered by cowardice, but neglect the very real reasons parties in liberal democracies tail the public: those parties need present-day people to actually like them to survive. Turning DSA into a party, and attempting to realign politics on class lines like “near term dirty break” proposals suggest, would subject our project to these dynamics and pressure it to conform to the whims of the voters we would need to survive.
Milner is correct that building a party that both contested elections and held to a Leninist horizon would take having the courage to commit to a delimited set of issues that define a 21st Century Democratic Socialist. Ideally three. Americans like threes. But building a working class majority (or plurality, or significant representation) under those conditions will require a radically flexible approach to electoral ideology, and latitude for candidates to campaign in ways that fit their district.
Beyond the voters our politicians would need to court, a sudden jump to party status would also have profound effects on our internal composition. In a national environment, building a working-class party that truly aims to realign American politics along class lines will necessarily involve a broad-minded approach to who is welcome and who isn’t. Even as a national vanguard, as a pure mathematical necessity, our organization would need the affective loyalties of current independents and even registered Republicans. Would we be able to maintain a consistent, humanitarian, and liberty-upholding political position on those grounds? Osborn could not. Could we build an anti-system majority and maintain a strong, correct position on vaccines and public health? Answer hazy, ask again later.
“I don’t know that anyone in DSA supports what it would really take for us to be a viable party in the American electoral system in less than ten years. I don’t think I do.”
Mapping these requirements onto the internal debates of DSA from the 2017 era on, there has been one side of the debate that has pressed for a more forgiving attitude towards Socialists in Office that share our core values, towards a relatively circumspect set of focuses and priorities, and for adopting a logic that prioritizes victory and coalition building over ideological frontloading. If R&R (or MUG) wants to defect to the Mass Wing of DSA and have a serious discussion about what a party would take, I for one would welcome them with open arms. To emphasize that I take this seriously despite my cautions, let me make my own bid for programmatic unity: Medicare for All, card check union recognition, and seven new federal holidays.
That discussion is important. It makes us think about what’s most important to us. It helps us figure out how we can actually take power. I don’t know that the second-order effects of Milner’s proposal are what she had in mind, but they’re worth considering. And it might be worth pursuing by someone, even if DSA as an organization is unwilling to. If nothing else, making Republicans spend millions of dollars to defend the Nebraska Senate seat undoubtedly saved several Democrats in closer Senate elections this cycle. Building a “Red State Pro Act” caucus in Congress would help actually pass it.
But I don’t know that anyone in DSA supports what it would really take for us to be a viable party in the American electoral system in less than ten years. I don’t think I do. Some of the commitments that would make us most unpopular in the broad electorate—our resolute commitment to equal human rights, our belief that America should be a welcoming home to all regardless of race, color, creed, or country of origin, our commitments to trans rights and bodily autonomy—are some of those under most vigorous attack by the right at present. Giving them up for the mere purpose of winning elections, or quieting down about them, or accepting within our big tent people with unacceptable views on them, would be vacating one of the most vital fields of struggle in America at present.
It makes much more sense to me to fight to make a left coalition worthy of the name, to stay with the pool of voters most like us (the Democratic rank and file) and to give them worthy leaders. And if in aiming at the enemy we just so happen to hit a party structure that stands in our way, so be it.
Two options for worthy leaders. (Credit: Bryan Giardinelli)
Postscript: Earthly Matters
With all that said, I have a number of more prosaic objections that I think are important to get “on the board.” R&R has put this forward as a resolution, after all, and I oppose it. No matter what you think of the rest of this article, I think you should vote against that resolution and support SMC’s effort to fight for socialism at the ballot box instead.
Milner suggests that to remain on the ballot line is to tie ourselves to the failures of American liberalism, as personified in leaders like Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. While I sympathize, the truth is that socialists running for office are tied to them by forces larger than a brand or ballot line, and we would be even under a red banner. It is deeply worrying that the political liberties on which we and millions of our fellow Americans rely rest in the dubiously capable hands of leaders of the Democratic Party. But that is where we are.
On a practical level, I do not think the proposal is possible to carry off successfully. Congressional primary campaigns are already resource intensive. To move into the general election is to move beyond DSA’s means by an order of magnitude. General election campaigns in places where DSA is strong would be prohibitively expensive even if there were large mobilizations behind them, and many key races would be in places where we hardly have members to mobilize at all.
Lastly, the proposal contains a lengthy analysis of a "de-facto realignment” strategy in DSA that I don't believe exists. Milner argues that DSA’s relatively comfortable perch on the Democratic ballot line means that we are straightforwardly seeking to change what the party thinks without creating a true rupture with the American status quo. But what we’re up to in building our little party-surrogate is too riven with tension and internal incoherence to be called a strategy, and the long-term effects are too contingent and fuzzy to be seen now. In my opinion that situation suits us just fine. While there is a debate to be had, it’s outside the scope of this piece.
In the end, though I wonder whether those who want a ballot line party are really ready for what that would entail politically, the truth is that we are simply not well positioned to do it practically. The analysis that suggests that we need to try misperceives our true position, and American politics more generally.
But it’s certainly worth thinking about.