Yesterday, I summarized the main points of a history of American socialism provided by New York Times reporter Charles Homans in a recent episode of “The Daily” podcast.
Today let’s look at what Homans has to say in the podcast about the tensions between the Democratic Socialists of America, which isn’t a political party, and the Democratic Party:
“[The DSA] has this kind of interesting, I think, unstable relationship with the Democratic Party, where they’re really mostly operating inside of that party at this point. But the DSA is not taking out Republicans. They’re taking out other Democrats. And they’re increasingly taking out not just moderate establishment Democrats, but actually pretty progressive Democrats in some cases.
“There’s a national DSA organization, there are individual chapters all over the country, and then there are DSA candidates. The national DSA does not necessarily hold all the same views as DSA candidates. And it doesn’t necessarily hold all the same views even as individual DSA chapters. This is a very diffuse, horizontal organization.
“But they do have a national platform, which has a pretty straightforward program of what they want, which ranges from things that are fairly familiar to things that are really much further out there on the radical spectrum of what we talk about in American politics.”
Here is the DSA’s own description of its program.
Homan continues:
“DSA is a very complicated organization inside, but it’s useful to think of it as kind of a Venn diagram with two big overlapping circles. On one side, you have people who are, more or less, like the Bernie, AOC wing of DSA. They basically have a lot of those same policy priorities. And more importantly, they believe in pursuing power the way that AOC is doing it, for instance, actually contesting elections on the Democratic ballot line and winning a seat in Congress, winning a voice in politics.
“On the other side, in the other circle, you have a much more unruly, fractious array of people who, broadly, are skeptical of that approach. They don’t necessarily oppose running candidates in Democratic elections, but they are very skeptical that pursuing power in the Democratic Party is really going to produce a systemic change in the United States that they are seeking.
“There’s two chairs of the organization, two co-chairs. One of them is actively involved in an effort to draft AOC to run for president, and the other one doesn’t think that it’s a good idea and is ambiguous about whether she would support AOC if she were the candidate.
“The socialist label is still not great when it comes to the general electorate in this country. A minority of Americans have a favorable view of socialism. It’s a pretty big minority, but it is a minority. There is a pretty clear and credible sense that running as a socialist is a real ceiling in a general election.”
Here is a Pew survey on how Democrats view leaders who identify as democratic socialists.
Homan discusses how leaders of the Democratic Party are thinking about the DSA:
“You see people like Gavin Newsom, who is arguing that DSA should be welcomed into the Democratic coalition, and that the party should really be in the business of addition and not subtraction, as he put it. This is an energized constituency that has really tapped an energy, and particularly a younger energy, that the Democratic Party has really struggled to tap.
“But critics of the DSA, kind of a mix of some of the reform-minded Democrats and also a lot of people who are really just ideological moderates, they argue that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the DSA and its project, that this is not an organization that sees itself as part of that coalition, that their relationship with the Democratic Party is really not additive. It’s actually parasitic.
“The argument that is most pointedly made about them is, what exactly are you guys doing for us? You talk about revitalizing the Democratic Party, but you can’t do anything you want to do without winning congressional majorities, Senate majorities, that you have zero demonstrated ability to do.
“And in the meantime, Republicans clearly see these same ideas as a massive liability for the Democratic Party. They’ve been pointing to the DSA all summer quite happily and saying, look at all these policies they’re throwing out there.
“There’s a sense that the more out-there aspects of what DSA wants to do is going to be a real liability for not just DSA candidates, but for Democrats more broadly, if this becomes really associated with the party brand.”
Homan says that inside the DSA, the conversation right now is: “What kind of compromises are going to be required to make a democratic socialist candidate tolerable to the majority of Americans? And are they willing to make those compromises?”
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