Happy seeing other liberals notice their abhorrent position on Ukraine. I have written about it in detail, and if we skip the details its really just Russian propaganda. With more and more instances of authoritarian countries utilizing sharp power, I wouldn't be surprised if their ties to Russia become public in a few years.
I am never quite sure just how many of the politicians who are DSA members, or who are not DSA members but are chummy with the DSA and accept its support, are actually closely aligned with the full DSA platform. Some might be playing a game of bait and switch with voters, selling them social democracy while secretly hoping to appropriate the means of production, which wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps others are just opportunists using the DSA's resources, but never really intending to try to carry out socialist policies?
Btw, when the DSA says they just want to nationalize a few major industries, I would recommend that you do not believe they would just stop there. Their antipathy to private enterprise is manifest in various other statements of theirs about capitalism, one of which you cite.
I am going out on a limb here but I am thinking most of DSA's supporters (not the ideological leadership) and even some DSA-adjacent politicians are pretty uneducated about the philosophical and economic foundations of socialism. They are attracted to the quasi-revolutionary rhetoric and the aggressive stand that seems to exact vengeance on "The Man" represented in their caricature of capitalism as the source of all evils. It's almost a retro fad that many of us olds lived through in the 1960s.
If you really push most of them they will eventually admit that they are really social democrats that have been part of the political mainstream since the mid-19th century. But parading as Democratic socialists feels bigger and more powerful.
Social Democrats are and have been a part of the Democratic Party and they would do all of us a favor by just identifying as such.
Has Bernie Sanders voiced support for the entire DSA platform -- specifically the more egregiously illiberal samples cited in this piece? How about AOC?
Has anyone held these folks' feet to the fire in an effort to discern whether they're full-fledged socialists or merely social democrats? That's a long-standing distinction on the left -- an antagonism with deep historical roots.
In politics, the crucial question is -- when push comes to shove, who's using whom, and (beyond sheer opportunism and self aggrandizement) to what end?
Nonetheless, Bernie has done a masterful job of straddling the distinction between full-blown "socialist" and (New Deal / Scandinavian-style) social democrat.
A traditional scale used to measure people's politics places social and economic ideology puts social liberal/conservative on the X axis and economic liberal/conservative on the Y. Of course, there are many more than two dimensions. I think a better scale befitting our time places liberal at the top and illiberal at the bottom, like this: https://x.com/DPiepgrass/status/2103679726611226704
Since you're interested in alternatives to the Political Compass, David, as in this exploratory multi-dimensional scale you've created, wanted to share these others with you, as well:
That coupled-decoupled thrive-survive chart notably doesn't explain me at all: I suppose I believe in decoupled legal norms and coupled social norms, so in a way I span the whole axis. Lately, I've been more focused on survive than thrive, but historically it has been the reverse. It has always been my view that good systems that would allow us to thrive also help us to survive; so in a way I span that entire axis too.
Whereas my location on that diagram I made is clear: high up and mostly left, where very few others are.
I took the "6 minute" primal beliefs test. What seemed odd to me: the concept of primal beliefs was framed as if it were like personality traits fixed at birth, but the actual questions can and should be answered in an evidence-based way. Granted I didn't look up anything to answer the questions, so availability/salience would have affected my answers, But I've always treated evidence as fundamentally important, so I think my answers are well-based in reality. At the same time, some of my answers would have been different at earlier stages of my life, because important evidence that changed my mind in major ways arrived to me rather late in life. The meanings of some questions were also notably ambiguous. My scores:
The world is safe (vs dangerous): 2.5/5 (USA average 2.7)
The world is enticing (vs dull): 3.0/5 (USA average 3.6)
The world is "alive" (vs mechanistic): 0.6/5 (USA average 3.0)
Overall good world belief score: 2.53/5 (USA average 3.2)
Maybe I don't have my finger on the pulse of the electorate, but I come to the exact opposite conclusion of this article. I think Democrats gain far more than they lose by their current strategy (or lack of strategy). I just can't envision these masses of moderates who are maybe becoming a little skeptical of Trumpism but are so horrified by the DSA platform that they keep voting Republican or stay home. And I certainly can't envision this group outnumbering the people who are energized by the most prominent DSA or DSA adjacent candidates. I don't think you give enough credit to the charisma of Mamdani, AOC, or Sanders in terms of the shielding effect they give to disturbing underlying platform.
Also, what are the mechanisms for the Democratic party to deny access to the ballot for would be primary candidates, and is it actually advisable to use this power if it exists? When you're talking about not welcoming DSA into the party, what specific actions are you expecting to be taken, and by whom? It seems that when people get concerned about an emerging faction, they demand that the Democratic National Committee act as some kind of centralized, coherent, ideologically driven mothership that imposes the correct platform and candidates from above. When the party is perceived as actually putting their thumbs on the scales for their preferred candidate, they typically lose the election and are excoriated for their fundamentally anti-democratic behavior. In a first-past-the-post system in a country as diverse as the US, the parties are not ideologically driven machines. They exist to win. To win, the parties must become bizarre, sometimes incoherent coalitions that vary by locality. Winning via restricting primary ballot access to energize the moderates does not strike me as a good strategy.
If you can't envision it, then you must not be one of the moderates. I would fall into a absolute pit of despair if I had to choose between MAGA and DSA, and probably stay home if my district's DSA member actually stood behind this terrible platform document.
Reasonable enough. I don’t know how I’d label myself. Your response reads almost exactly like an irritated text response I sent to an unsolicited Sanders campaign text in 2020. Since then, I don’t think my policy preferences have moved much, but the danger level I perceive from the hard left versus hard right has changed dramatically. The threat level is based not just on how bad their ideas are but whether they have the actual intention, plan, resources and infrastructure to remove the constraints that would prevent them from implementing the worst aspects of their platform, and permanently remove themselves from democratic accountability. It does feel strange that people can assess the threats as roughly equivalent.
Right, it's true that the DSA probably would be unable to implement their worst ideas, whereas Trump implemented Project 2025 systematically with EOs, and 2028 frontrunner JD Vance is supporting lots of ugly Trumpian policies to pick up the hard right vote, while most sitting Republicans have been unwilling to speak out against all this because MAGAism is too powerful...
Still. I'd hate to trade one wrecking ball for another, and I expect plenty of moderates would just see two evils and stay home, and that the ones who vote anyway would be somewhat split between DSA and MAGA.
This Substack seems to be a front for Clinton style ‘centrism’ which really means GOP lite corporate Democrats whose neoliberal economic policies inflicted massive social and economic damage on large segments of the U.S. population through support for Tax cuts for corporations and the billionaire class and disastrous ‘free trade’ deals like NAFTA which encouraged outsourcing and destruction of our manufacturing base, weakening of labor unions, mass immigration, both legal and illegal, and a host of other destructive social and economic policies to the current crisis we find the country in at present.
Contemporary "really existing populist regimes" both left and right have so far shown deep procedural isomorphisms and an authoritarian "systemic equifinality"
This is untrue: "You can’t draft a new constitution without shredding the old one."
The Constitution includes a process for amending the Constitution. One of those amendments could be replacing the current Constitution with a new one. There is nothing illiberal about this idea.
So glad other liberals are waking up to the rot undermining the Democratic Party. The DSA offers us nothing but the further destruction of our appeal with independents
So, you got me curious. I read their program. Weirdly I found no talk of Castro or NATO or support for any other dictatorship. I didn’t find anything about not being able to own personal property. It did talk about the right to housing and certain companies being publicly held. That makes sense if you consider food, medicine, housing, and utilities essential for our survival. I did find anti-capitalist language, which when you understand how capitalism has enslaved us and created nearly every bad circumstance in our country, from the housing crisis to people dying from lack of healthcare—pollution, poverty, inflation, crime, sickness, starvation. Not only in our country, but we export our capitalist horrors in the form of wars, genocides, sanctions, and colonization.
As for the three branches of government. Trump has shown us that there’s no such thing. Especially when they’re all just piggies slurping from those billionaires' troughs, doing their bidding.
Meanwhile, they have us at each other’s throats, ginning up bigotry to keep us distracted. Think about it, they even have white folks claiming that Mexicans are taking white fruit-picking jobs! Of course, after the AI layoffs, those may be the only jobs left for humans.
They’ve made us OK with slavery in the form of a prison system, with the incarceration of over 2 million mostly black men. Now they have us OK with the legal government hunting, brutalizing, and now often shooting brown people.
It seems to me that our form of capitalism has gone down the same dark roads as the worst examples of socialism and communism. A cruel authoritarian, surveillance state that silences opposition. Maybe these atrocities are what we should expect. Maybe it’s what we deserve. We vote for it don’t we? Or maybe we can consider a different approach. Not all democratic socialist countries turn into authoritarian states.
There is a movement of neoliberalism within the center-left personified by scoundrels like Tony Blair, The Clintons, Obama, Biden, which this Substack seems to be a mouthpiece for. It would be interesting to research the money trail funding this movement with unsurprising ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Oh please, yourself. NAFTA, GATT, WTO, MAI, and other destructive job and industry destroying trade agreements occurred under slick Willy’s administration. incan throw in his horrible foreign and immigration policies.
Alas, that is not a list of behaviors. Too vague to tell what you actually object to. But if there's a theme, I guess it's that you reject the concept of mutually beneficial trade. And perhaps you habitually judge people post-facto: if a policy they implemented doesn't work the way they intended, it doesn't interest you what the policy was, just that the person pushing for it must be bad because it didn't work.
Curiously though, "Slick Willy" is a 1990s term and you named only Democrats (and UK Labour) as your enemies even though free trade has often been a Republican priority. This likely means that you are a lifelong Republican-now-MAGA who opposes free trade because it's out of vogue right now, but you were supportive back when Republicans supported it. Or maybe... a big fan of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh?
‘Mutually beneficial trade’ for parasites on Wall Street. Clinton was an absolute scumbag, sexual predator, and outright traitor as was the shrew he married. I’m not a Republican and both parties must be destroyed. I am a big Buchanan fan in spite of his flaws. Never liked Rush nor am I a conservative.
Happy seeing other liberals notice their abhorrent position on Ukraine. I have written about it in detail, and if we skip the details its really just Russian propaganda. With more and more instances of authoritarian countries utilizing sharp power, I wouldn't be surprised if their ties to Russia become public in a few years.
I am never quite sure just how many of the politicians who are DSA members, or who are not DSA members but are chummy with the DSA and accept its support, are actually closely aligned with the full DSA platform. Some might be playing a game of bait and switch with voters, selling them social democracy while secretly hoping to appropriate the means of production, which wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps others are just opportunists using the DSA's resources, but never really intending to try to carry out socialist policies?
Btw, when the DSA says they just want to nationalize a few major industries, I would recommend that you do not believe they would just stop there. Their antipathy to private enterprise is manifest in various other statements of theirs about capitalism, one of which you cite.
I am going out on a limb here but I am thinking most of DSA's supporters (not the ideological leadership) and even some DSA-adjacent politicians are pretty uneducated about the philosophical and economic foundations of socialism. They are attracted to the quasi-revolutionary rhetoric and the aggressive stand that seems to exact vengeance on "The Man" represented in their caricature of capitalism as the source of all evils. It's almost a retro fad that many of us olds lived through in the 1960s.
If you really push most of them they will eventually admit that they are really social democrats that have been part of the political mainstream since the mid-19th century. But parading as Democratic socialists feels bigger and more powerful.
Social Democrats are and have been a part of the Democratic Party and they would do all of us a favor by just identifying as such.
QUESTION FOR THE AUTHOR:
Has Bernie Sanders voiced support for the entire DSA platform -- specifically the more egregiously illiberal samples cited in this piece? How about AOC?
Has anyone held these folks' feet to the fire in an effort to discern whether they're full-fledged socialists or merely social democrats? That's a long-standing distinction on the left -- an antagonism with deep historical roots.
In politics, the crucial question is -- when push comes to shove, who's using whom, and (beyond sheer opportunism and self aggrandizement) to what end?
Sanders has never been a DSA member in his entire political career.
Interesting background! Thanks!
Nonetheless, Bernie has done a masterful job of straddling the distinction between full-blown "socialist" and (New Deal / Scandinavian-style) social democrat.
A traditional scale used to measure people's politics places social and economic ideology puts social liberal/conservative on the X axis and economic liberal/conservative on the Y. Of course, there are many more than two dimensions. I think a better scale befitting our time places liberal at the top and illiberal at the bottom, like this: https://x.com/DPiepgrass/status/2103679726611226704
Since you're interested in alternatives to the Political Compass, David, as in this exploratory multi-dimensional scale you've created, wanted to share these others with you, as well:
https://incentivesmatter.substack.com/p/warning-labels/comment/13563281
That coupled-decoupled thrive-survive chart notably doesn't explain me at all: I suppose I believe in decoupled legal norms and coupled social norms, so in a way I span the whole axis. Lately, I've been more focused on survive than thrive, but historically it has been the reverse. It has always been my view that good systems that would allow us to thrive also help us to survive; so in a way I span that entire axis too.
Whereas my location on that diagram I made is clear: high up and mostly left, where very few others are.
I took the "6 minute" primal beliefs test. What seemed odd to me: the concept of primal beliefs was framed as if it were like personality traits fixed at birth, but the actual questions can and should be answered in an evidence-based way. Granted I didn't look up anything to answer the questions, so availability/salience would have affected my answers, But I've always treated evidence as fundamentally important, so I think my answers are well-based in reality. At the same time, some of my answers would have been different at earlier stages of my life, because important evidence that changed my mind in major ways arrived to me rather late in life. The meanings of some questions were also notably ambiguous. My scores:
The world is safe (vs dangerous): 2.5/5 (USA average 2.7)
The world is enticing (vs dull): 3.0/5 (USA average 3.6)
The world is "alive" (vs mechanistic): 0.6/5 (USA average 3.0)
Overall good world belief score: 2.53/5 (USA average 3.2)
Maybe I don't have my finger on the pulse of the electorate, but I come to the exact opposite conclusion of this article. I think Democrats gain far more than they lose by their current strategy (or lack of strategy). I just can't envision these masses of moderates who are maybe becoming a little skeptical of Trumpism but are so horrified by the DSA platform that they keep voting Republican or stay home. And I certainly can't envision this group outnumbering the people who are energized by the most prominent DSA or DSA adjacent candidates. I don't think you give enough credit to the charisma of Mamdani, AOC, or Sanders in terms of the shielding effect they give to disturbing underlying platform.
Also, what are the mechanisms for the Democratic party to deny access to the ballot for would be primary candidates, and is it actually advisable to use this power if it exists? When you're talking about not welcoming DSA into the party, what specific actions are you expecting to be taken, and by whom? It seems that when people get concerned about an emerging faction, they demand that the Democratic National Committee act as some kind of centralized, coherent, ideologically driven mothership that imposes the correct platform and candidates from above. When the party is perceived as actually putting their thumbs on the scales for their preferred candidate, they typically lose the election and are excoriated for their fundamentally anti-democratic behavior. In a first-past-the-post system in a country as diverse as the US, the parties are not ideologically driven machines. They exist to win. To win, the parties must become bizarre, sometimes incoherent coalitions that vary by locality. Winning via restricting primary ballot access to energize the moderates does not strike me as a good strategy.
If you can't envision it, then you must not be one of the moderates. I would fall into a absolute pit of despair if I had to choose between MAGA and DSA, and probably stay home if my district's DSA member actually stood behind this terrible platform document.
Reasonable enough. I don’t know how I’d label myself. Your response reads almost exactly like an irritated text response I sent to an unsolicited Sanders campaign text in 2020. Since then, I don’t think my policy preferences have moved much, but the danger level I perceive from the hard left versus hard right has changed dramatically. The threat level is based not just on how bad their ideas are but whether they have the actual intention, plan, resources and infrastructure to remove the constraints that would prevent them from implementing the worst aspects of their platform, and permanently remove themselves from democratic accountability. It does feel strange that people can assess the threats as roughly equivalent.
Right, it's true that the DSA probably would be unable to implement their worst ideas, whereas Trump implemented Project 2025 systematically with EOs, and 2028 frontrunner JD Vance is supporting lots of ugly Trumpian policies to pick up the hard right vote, while most sitting Republicans have been unwilling to speak out against all this because MAGAism is too powerful...
Still. I'd hate to trade one wrecking ball for another, and I expect plenty of moderates would just see two evils and stay home, and that the ones who vote anyway would be somewhat split between DSA and MAGA.
This Substack seems to be a front for Clinton style ‘centrism’ which really means GOP lite corporate Democrats whose neoliberal economic policies inflicted massive social and economic damage on large segments of the U.S. population through support for Tax cuts for corporations and the billionaire class and disastrous ‘free trade’ deals like NAFTA which encouraged outsourcing and destruction of our manufacturing base, weakening of labor unions, mass immigration, both legal and illegal, and a host of other destructive social and economic policies to the current crisis we find the country in at present.
Contemporary "really existing populist regimes" both left and right have so far shown deep procedural isomorphisms and an authoritarian "systemic equifinality"
Surely you jest. 😊
This is untrue: "You can’t draft a new constitution without shredding the old one."
The Constitution includes a process for amending the Constitution. One of those amendments could be replacing the current Constitution with a new one. There is nothing illiberal about this idea.
It's so sad to see the same old bad ideas come back. If we're going to try out some bad ideas, can they at least be new?
So glad other liberals are waking up to the rot undermining the Democratic Party. The DSA offers us nothing but the further destruction of our appeal with independents
So, you got me curious. I read their program. Weirdly I found no talk of Castro or NATO or support for any other dictatorship. I didn’t find anything about not being able to own personal property. It did talk about the right to housing and certain companies being publicly held. That makes sense if you consider food, medicine, housing, and utilities essential for our survival. I did find anti-capitalist language, which when you understand how capitalism has enslaved us and created nearly every bad circumstance in our country, from the housing crisis to people dying from lack of healthcare—pollution, poverty, inflation, crime, sickness, starvation. Not only in our country, but we export our capitalist horrors in the form of wars, genocides, sanctions, and colonization.
As for the three branches of government. Trump has shown us that there’s no such thing. Especially when they’re all just piggies slurping from those billionaires' troughs, doing their bidding.
Meanwhile, they have us at each other’s throats, ginning up bigotry to keep us distracted. Think about it, they even have white folks claiming that Mexicans are taking white fruit-picking jobs! Of course, after the AI layoffs, those may be the only jobs left for humans.
They’ve made us OK with slavery in the form of a prison system, with the incarceration of over 2 million mostly black men. Now they have us OK with the legal government hunting, brutalizing, and now often shooting brown people.
It seems to me that our form of capitalism has gone down the same dark roads as the worst examples of socialism and communism. A cruel authoritarian, surveillance state that silences opposition. Maybe these atrocities are what we should expect. Maybe it’s what we deserve. We vote for it don’t we? Or maybe we can consider a different approach. Not all democratic socialist countries turn into authoritarian states.
“Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases.”
“End economic warfare against countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.”
Why do you lie?
There is a movement of neoliberalism within the center-left personified by scoundrels like Tony Blair, The Clintons, Obama, Biden, which this Substack seems to be a mouthpiece for. It would be interesting to research the money trail funding this movement with unsurprising ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Oh please, you think this is about money? How absurd.
But I am curious what sort of "neoliberal behaviors" do you consider so objectionable from The Clintons and Obama?
Oh please, yourself. NAFTA, GATT, WTO, MAI, and other destructive job and industry destroying trade agreements occurred under slick Willy’s administration. incan throw in his horrible foreign and immigration policies.
Alas, that is not a list of behaviors. Too vague to tell what you actually object to. But if there's a theme, I guess it's that you reject the concept of mutually beneficial trade. And perhaps you habitually judge people post-facto: if a policy they implemented doesn't work the way they intended, it doesn't interest you what the policy was, just that the person pushing for it must be bad because it didn't work.
Curiously though, "Slick Willy" is a 1990s term and you named only Democrats (and UK Labour) as your enemies even though free trade has often been a Republican priority. This likely means that you are a lifelong Republican-now-MAGA who opposes free trade because it's out of vogue right now, but you were supportive back when Republicans supported it. Or maybe... a big fan of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh?
‘Mutually beneficial trade’ for parasites on Wall Street. Clinton was an absolute scumbag, sexual predator, and outright traitor as was the shrew he married. I’m not a Republican and both parties must be destroyed. I am a big Buchanan fan in spite of his flaws. Never liked Rush nor am I a conservative.