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DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST POST-ELECTION MUSINGS  
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Tom Gallagher
November 25, 2024
Medium
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_ Much of the post-election Democratic Party fretting has
appropriately centered on the degree to which it has lost the
presumption of being the party of the working class. One solution:
"Maybe Democrats have to embrace a Sanders-style disruption." _

, Photo: Nicole Tian/Flickr/NSPA & ACP ELECTION 2020/2024

 

Had Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic nomination and gone on to
defeat Donald Trump — as most polls suggested he had a better chance
of doing than Hillary Clinton, the actual nominee — he would be now
entering his lame duck period, and perhaps Donald Trump might not
figure in the current discussion much at all. (Alternately, had the
party poobahs not closed ranks behind Biden with lightning speed to
deny Sanders the nomination in 2020, he might have just completed his
campaign for a second term — which he clearly would have been fit to
serve.)

EIGHT YEARS ON

Sanders did not succeed in bringing democratic socialism to the White
House, of course, but he did deliver the message to quite a number of
other households during the Democratic nomination debates. As a
result, two presidential cycles on, democratic socialists have now run
and won races all the way up to the U.S. House, and democratic
socialism has now become a “thing” in American politics. Not a big
thing, really, but most definitely a thing. Between the Republicans,
right wing Democrats and the corporate newsmedia, it’s a thing that
certainly draws more negative mention than positive — but given that
its critique of American society pointedly includes Republicans, right
wing Democrats and the corporations that own the newsmedia, we could
hardly expect it to be otherwise.

During this time, self described democratic socialists have been
elected and they’ve been unelected. They’ve exerted influence
beyond their numbers; and they’ve also struggled with the hurly
burly of political life. Some have been blown away by big money; some
have contributed to their own downfall. In other words, they’ve run
the gamut of the electoral political world — if still largely at the
margins. Any thoughts of a socialist wave following the first Sanders
campaign or the election of the “Squad” soon bent to the more
grueling reality of trying to eke out a new congressional seat or two
per term — or defend those currently held, with efforts on the other
levels of government playing out in similar fashion. But at the least
we can say that the U.S. has joined the mainstream of modern world
politics to the point where the socialist viewpoint generally figures
in the mix — albeit in a modest way.

LESSER OF TWO EVILS?

The 2024 race stood out from the presidential election norm both for
the return of one president, Trump’s return being the first since
Grover Cleveland’s in 1892 — also the only other time a president
reoccupied the White House after having been previously voted out; and
for the withdrawal of another president, Joe Biden’s exit from the
campaign being the first since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. And, just
like Hubert Humphrey in 68, Vice President Kamala Harris became the
Democratic nominee — without running in any primaries. Both of them
inherited, and endorsed the policies of the administration in which
they occupied the number two office, which included support of a war
effort opposed by a significant number of otherwise generally
Democratic-leaning voters.

In Johnson’s case, the withdrawal of his candidacy had everything to
do with that opposition, and the shock of Minnesota Senator Gene
McCarthy drawing 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary
vote running as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. But when Humphrey won
the Democratic nomination and the equally hawkish Richard Nixon took
the Republican slot, the substantial number of war opponents felt
themselves facing the prospect of choosing the lesser of two evils.
The dismal choice presented in that race soured untold numbers of
voters on the left who came to consider a choice between two evils to
be the norm for presidential elections. Over time, the hostility
faded, with most coming to judge the choice offered less harshly, now
more one of picking the less inadequate of two inadequate programs —
until now. The intensity of opposition to the Biden-Harris support of
Israel’s war on Palestine has certainly not approached that shown
toward the Johnson-Humphrey conduct of the American war against
Vietnam. But for a substantial number of people who considered it
criminal to continue supplying 2000 pound bombs to Israel’s
relentless ongoing disproportionate obliteration of Gaza in
retaliation for an atrocity that occurred on a day more than a year
past, this was a “lesser of two evils” choice, to a degree
unmatched since the bad old Humphrey-Nixon days.

And yet, while we don’t know how many opted not to vote for
president at all, we do know that those who did vote almost all did
make that choice. Even with a Democratic nominee preferring the
campaign companionship of former third-ranking House Republican Liz
Cheney to that of Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, a
Palestinian democratic socialist, third party votes did not prove to
be a factor. There was no blaming Jill Stein this time.

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA

Organizationally, the greatest beneficiary of the Sanders campaigns
has been the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Ironically, while
Bernie has been the nation’s twenty-first century avatar of
socialism — generally understood to be a philosophy of collective
action — he himself is not a joiner, being a member neither of the
Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination he has twice sought;
nor DSA, an organization he has long worked with. With about 6,000
members, the pre-Sanders campaign DSA was the largest socialist
organization in an undernourished American left. In the minds of some
long time members, their maintenance of the socialist tradition bore a
certain similarity to the work of the medieval Irish monks who copied
ancient manuscripts whose true value would only be appreciated in the
future. But when the post-Sanders surge came, there DSA was —
popping up in the Google search of every newly minted or newly
energized socialist looking to meet people of like mind. Membership
mushroomed to 100,000. Organizational inflation on that order that
does not come without growing pains — the sort of problems that any
organization covets, but problems nonetheless.

DSA’s very name reflects the troubled history of the socialist
movement. In the minds of early socialists the term “democratic
socialist” would have been one for Monty Python’s Department of
Redundancy Department. The whole point of socialism, after all, was to
create a society that was more democratic than the status quo,
extending democratic rights past the political realm into that of
economics, and the difference between socialism and communism was
pretty much a matter that only scholars concerned themselves with. But
with the devolution of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism,
“communism,” the word generally associated with the Soviet Union,
came to mean the opposite of democratic to much of the world. And in
the U.S. in particular, “socialism” too seemed tainted, to the
point where socialists felt the need to tag “democratic” onto it.

DSA was an organization, then, where people most definitely did not
call themselves communists. It was not the place to go to find people
talking about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,”“vanguard
parties,” or other phrases reminiscent of the 1920s or 30s left.
Among its members, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, while
certainly considered interesting and significant — fascinating even,
were not events to look to for guidance in contemporary American
politics.

And then the expansion. A lot of previously unaffiliated socialists,
pleasantly surprised — shocked even — to find the idea entering
the public realm, decided it was time to join up and do something
about it. The curious also came, eager to learn more of what the whole
thing was all about, maybe suffering from imposter syndrome: “Do I
really know enough to call myself a socialist?” And then there were
the already socialists who would never have thought to join DSA in the
pre-Sanders inflation era, some with politics that DSA’s name had
been chosen to distinguish the organization from. The expanded DSA was
a “big tent,” “multi-tendency” organization. Soon there was a
Communist Caucus in DSA — along with a bunch of others. Whether the
internal dissonance can be contained and managed long-run remains to
be seen, but then what is politics but a continuous series of crises?
It’s to the organization’s credit that it has held itself together
thus far, but for the moment some hoping to grapple with the questions
of twenty-first century socialism may encounter local chapter
leadership still finding their guidance in reading the leaves in the
tea room of the Russian Revolution. Initial stumbles in the
organization’s immediate response to the Hamas attack in Israel
prompted a spate of long-time member resignations — some with
accompanying open letters — but the trickle did not turn into a
torrent.

In the meantime, DSA, now slimmed down to 80-some-odd thousand
members, has also struggled with the more immediate, public, and
arguably more important question of working out a tenable relationship
with those members holding elected political office. While the
organization encourages members to seek office and benefits from their
successes, it understandably does not want to be associated with
public figures with markedly divergent politics. At the same time,
office-holding members are answerable to their electorate, not DSA. In
the light of some recent experiences on this front, Sanders’s
non-joiner stance starts to look somewhat prescient. DSA’s long-term
relevance will depend on its ability to carve out a meaningful role as
a socialist organization that is not and does not aspire to being a
political party.

2028 AND BEYOND

Much of the post-election Democratic Party fretting has quite
appropriately centered on the degree to which it has lost the
presumption of being the party of the working class. One solution to
the problem was succinctly, and improbably, formulated by the
centrist _New York Times _columnist David Brooks: “Maybe the
Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption —
something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.” By
Jove, you’ve got it, Mr. Brooks: Comfort the afflicted and afflict
the comfortable! But Brooks goes on to fret, “Can the Democratic
Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs
and the hipster urban cores do this?”

Can students, teachers, suburbanites and hipsters “embrace a Bernie
Sanders-style disruption?” Well sure, quite a few have already done
so — twice now. The roadblock clearly does not lie there. The real
problem is those uncomfortable with the idea of a Democratic Party no
longer aspiring to the impossible status of being _both _the party
of the working class and the party of billionaire financiers. For a
look into the void at the core of the Democratic Party we need only
think back to that moment in February, 2020 when it began to look like
the “Bernie Sanders-style disruption” just might pull it off and
the party closed ranks, with candidates Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar,
Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, and Tom Steyer scurrying out of
the race and endorsing Joe Biden in a matter of just six days. None of
this underscored the party’s determination not to turn its back on
the billionaires so clearly as the fact that at the time of his
withdrawal Bloomberg was in the process of spending a billion bucks of
his “own money” in pursuit of the nomination. Obama’s
fingerprints were never found on these coordinated withdrawals but
most observers draw the obvious conclusions. And we know that the
prior nominee, executive whisperer Hillary Clinton, was certainly all
in on the move. Herein lies our problem, Mr. Brooks.

But how? And who? The how is the easy question in the sense that
Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right
presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate
— even when the Democratic Party establishment pulls out all the
stops to block them; and even if succeeds in doing so. At the same
time, the difficulty in winning and holding congressional seats shows
that, while self evidently necessary in the long run, those campaigns
do not have the same galvanizing potential. Who? At the moment, the
only person whose career thus far suggests such potential is New York
Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. But then a lot can happen in
four years. And Donald Trump’s reelection portends four years of
American politics bizarre beyond anything we’ve seen before.

_Tom Gallagher has been a member of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives, chair of Boston DSA, and Democratic Presidential
Nominating Convention Delegate for both George McGovern and Bernie
Sanders._

* presidential elections
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* DSA
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* socialist strategy
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