This is a great article, although I found it depressing to read.
Still, it made me think: isn't the missing middle term here Elizabeth Warren and her "personnel is policy" approach? I was definitely a Bernie guy not a Warren guy, but she seems to have organized a large group of professionals who staff influential Democratic institutions including in the Biden administration and who are meaningfully to the left of HRC or Obama or the current version of Harris. (The people who drive Yglesias nuts.)
This is a different kind of "organizing" and a much more technocratic vision of progressive politics than what you talk about in your article. But I'd guess that during the next ten years the fights within the party will be between centrists and Warren-ites, with the DSA and the Squad in a relatively marginal position. This is a shame because I think the Sanders version is both better and more electable, but there's an upside to knowing how to take over institutions, and as you say Sanders doesn't seem to have been very interested in that side of politics.
Sanders always seemed like kind of a Ron Paul of the left. A political-moral weather vane or vote of conscience. An elder statement who holds the keys to the scrolls room and advises from a place of idealism, but not very hands-on
I loved this piece, as usual (this is kind of your beat?) and appreciate the dialogue in the comments.
As an active DSA member since 2016, who also jumped in with two feet to political organizing within DSA and the Democratic Party since then, the issue to me is the same issue I've seen throughout my life, as as millennial: people are first and foremost prioritizing their their own identities and themselves. The way we live our lives, in an atomized world, on our own phone. There is a clear path for individuals to build a movement (brand) in this era. Collective groups? Not so much. The Bernie movement is millions of individuals, sharing a series of beliefs, but mostly operating as individuals.
I'll share a quick anecdote that I think exemplifies my feelings on the matter of politically-minded people getting collectively organized. I myself pitched a role within National DSA (on one of the national committees). I pitched myself by saying I believe there should be a uniform method of training people that run local meetings, so that it is a process that is mostly standardized, and no matter where you go in America, DSA meetings would mostly be run the same way (mind you, not the content of the meeting, but the manner of running the meeting itself). My rationale was that doing this, you create a baseline set of standards, and fewer people feel they need to "learn on the job" which is stressful when you join an executive committee local in DSA.
The person interviewing me responded by saying "I wouldn't want someone from national telling me how to run a meeting." As much as I love DSA, I think that interaction pretty much sums up how people are these days. If achieving Medicare for All or passing the Pro Act requires discipline mandated from someone else, people are not interested.
The Wellstone Triangle seems like common sense to me, as someone who has straddled organizing, politics, and policy. It's remarkable how rarely it is seen in practice, but when deployed seriously, it has a pretty high success rate.
Ross, nicely done, as usual, and I've appreciated your history on Wellstone. Was going to compliment you on the earlier piece. And I'll send this on to some of my old lefty friends. Which brings me to my point. Back in the day, I was an intern for the SPD in Bonn. Helmut Schmidts party. Hamburg's (maternal family home) party. That party has sunk into near complete irrelevance, and may not survive. You mention 50,000 people organized. That's a tiny number in the US context. By way of comparison, there are roughly 20,000 car dealerships, each employing something like 69 people . . .
Similarly, the ideology here is thin, and blaming "neoliberalism" isn't enough. I just don't think mid-20th century understandings of political economy underlying so called "progressive" (that's another weird story, historically speaking) politics can work. Concerns for social solidarity, in short, need to be rearticulated, which is admittedly a big ask. Political imaginations don't change all that often. So what would a contemporary effort to politically articulate solicitude for our fellows look like?
I've done a fair amount of work with what I call "social capitalism," (sometimes confusingly, I'm told) probably should do more. You might find this of interest:
I don’t have insider or in-depth knowledge of the DSA or the sort of left politics being discussed here. But I will share what it has looked like to me from the outside. Perhaps those more knowledgeable will say that’s totally wrong, which is fine and may be true. Nonetheless-
I will start with the fact that I lost all respect for the DSA when I read about them canceling (as in, canceling a literal scheduled event) with Adolph Reed on the grounds that he wasn’t sufficiently enlightening on race. And they never, as far as I know, backed down from their ideological position on that, ever.
No surprise, as it aligns well with the same part of the left’s determination to make Bernie Sanders back down on his 2016 support for controlled immigration (no open borders), class-first politics (not appropriately intersectional and not focused enough on race), etc. By 2020, the campaign seemed pretty different and more in line with such new progressive values, understandings, and commitments.
As a result, of course, it was also of much less interest to actual working class voters. But, oh well . . .
This points to the fact that it seems to be that the Rainbow Coalition movement was utterly different from what the DSA represents, and in many ways antithetical. I don’t think that they would have cancelled Adolph Reed.
All this also aligns the DSA with the Democrats, who were all in on “social justice ideology” (OK, wokeism) until they weren’t, as working class voters in particular hate it. And so, now we’re on to “joy” etc., but underneath the rebranding, everything’s still the same.
I think what you are noticing here is the difference between "radlib" leftists and actual socialist-leaning leftists. The DSA has factions of actual socialist leftists but in the end is dominated by its liberal wing.
Controlled immigration was a left wing, union policy until it wasn't. Class focused politics was left wing until it wasn't. Adolph Reed's approach to contemporary "anti-racism" was the standard left approach until it wasn't.
Bernie is a strange bird. He comes across as genuinely left in his speeches, his policy proposals and his voting history. And while it may have been possible to support the Democrats as a leftist a very long time ago, Sanders' capitulation to the DNC marks him as a quisling.
Stripped of its ridiculous "all race all the time" rhetoric and its increasingly insane commitment to the belief that sex is a social construct and biology is just "cisheteronormative patriarchy" pretending to be science, a class-focused left might yet appeal to diverse working class Americans.
But so long as "the left" remains wedded to the Democratic Party? Bring on the clowns.
What I wonder about, though, is what happens now that these old left positions on immigrantion, race, and class are much more well-established and accepted on the right? For awhile, I thought that perhaps Trumpism really might morph into the multiracial working class coalition that used to be the goal of the left. Watching that from the outside, too, though, I no longer have any hope it will happen there, either.
I also don't believe that wokeism has receeded on the left, I think it's just calmed down as it's now solidly institutionalized.
Really appreciate your acknowledging Paul Wellstone’s character, commitment and extreme abilities in organizing for good change. He was an amazing person, as was his wife, Sheila and his sons. I am one of the fortunate grads of the first and second Camp Wellstone in Portland and Seattle in the early 90’s. Amazing experience that continues to fuel my activism at age 78.
For those of us who were around in the 1980s, we knew already that Bernie was never going to become serious about organizing. He built a personal and very successful brand of independent politics in Vermont, and never put any real energy into helping progressives there, who have despite that managed to elect a handful of capital P Progressives to the state legislature for years. Back when I was at The Nation magazine, I can still remember attending a big convening of Vermont progressives in 1989 up near Burlington where it was taken as a given that Bernie would be of no help. And Our Revolution has just been a kind of sinecure for his loyal campaign team, not an organizing vehicle. The only thing to be said, in fairness, about the larger point your making is that no progressive Democratic presidential candidate has ever figured out how to convert their campaign army into an ongoing organizing vehicle. Not Obama, who let his lieutenants smother OFA and turn it into a thank-you-note writing machine; not Jesse Jackson, who shuttered his Rainbow Coalition state locals because he couldn't figure out how to raise the money to keep them going; not Jerry Brown in 1992; not Howard Dean in 2004, though at least he did use his time as DNC chair to try to revitalize state Democratic parties.
Stev's comments display frustrations I understand but the conclusion is wrong. DSA is a site for struggle with ultra-left and sectarian ideologues. I believe the base of DSA is far more sensible than the majority on our NPC. Our challenge is to forge links to overcome that wrong-headed ultra approach. A problem is that secartians devote constant energy to organizing and many of the rest of us dedicate time to such priorities as family, community organizing, self-care, etc. I pay attention to Paul Garver, a sensible voice for unity and both internal and external struggle. When Stev acknowledges that DSA has many members, he provides the REASON it is such an important place to recruit for a united front approach to confronting MAGA and the rest of the sordid following Trump inspires. Look at the contention over the Teamsters' failure to endorse Harris - even that important section of the labor movement is facing pro-Trump opposition. We have a historic opportunity to advocate for real-world politics.
As a Sanders volunteer in 2016, I disagree with this. Bernie's campaign wasn't the most organized, but it did put me to work purposefully, and we made a significant dent in Iowa. Bernie recruited a lot of people who had never participated in the Iowa Caucuses before, and he lost some delegates because of confusion about those rules. But that's not because he didn't organize effectively. He was up against an establishment colossus.
I did not support Bernie in 2020, because I had come to feel that he had a different weakness, which was that he was not prepared to actually govern. He is good at the gadfly role (here, I think we agree), but he would not have been good at negotiating deals or working with Congress. I agree with nearly all that he stands for, but I wanted a chance at winning, so I backed Amy Klobuchar. What I saw in that campaign was not a lack of organizational strategy on Bernie's part. It was that the establishment was so scared of his path to victory that all of the other major contenders dropped out to line up behind Biden. If they had not, the foundation that Bernie had built in 2016 might well have won him the nomination in 2020. Was that really a lack of organization or was it just another illustration of how difficult it is for an outsider to take on the Democratic establishment?
DSA still has a lot of members but it's basically dead at this point, killed by widespread sectarian impulses. It's unfortunate that Sanders didn't turn Our Revolution into much of anything, but DSA is not really relevant to this discussion. Today AOC is in the news for denouncing that pager attack, unlike Warnock and so many others. She is possibly relevant to the future of the left, which I don't think can be said about DSA.
Not dead at all. Its caucus in Albany just expanded and it's net growing its elected officials nationwide. The sectarian battles are on the national level which don't impact the locals much.
The sectarian battles ensure that they won't cohere as a national force worth paying attention to and their elected, many of whom are quite impressive, will over the years go their own way, for better or worse. Even though DSA circa 2018 was the most impressive left organization of my lifetime, I feel like we've seen this film so many times before... When do we have a left that us actually rooted in various communities, rather than a massification/radicalization of the student activist set? Not anytime soon, and not through DSA. I've often thought --a good standard is would a non radical historian be wrong to just ignore the left? Occupy, Bernie campaigns, DSA circa 2018 could not be ignored. DSA as a national organization for the last several years is eminently ignorable unless you really care about sectariana. Some of the electeds you mention could maybe form their own organizing initiative a little outside DSA, but to come back to your original point, it would just be bizarre for Sanders to try to fuel the actually existing organization.
The DSA bylaws contain a means of dealing with factionalism, for the simple reason those in charge know its introduction is how the establishment undermines successful antiestablishment organizations. There seems to be a taste of sour grapes in this insistence it's irrelevant when it continues to get people elected and build the solid voter foundation required to develop a true political party. Being human, DSA is just as susceptible to being triggered by propaganda as any other organization, meaning I don't agree with some of its choices. However, it's the only group I see that appears to have studied how one gets around the establishment blockade and developed a strategy.
Pretty close to what used to be my position on DSA. Some of the politicians mentioned in the OP included Paul Wellstone, Tim Walz, and Bernie Sanders. Can you imagine any of DSA's current electeds becoming a Senator or Governor, of a solid blue state like New York, or a Blue-ish state like Minnesota, or a weird state like Vermont? I can't, unless they took steps that would be regarded as a betrayal of principles by DSA itself. I note that while Ross often writes about New York City politics and mayoral prospects, and the future of the Democrats in New York state, he rarely mentions DSA in these contexts, because I think he understands that they don't really have a strategy to fight for power at those levels and it simply isn't emerging. It would require coalition building of a sort that the organization seems to be opposed to or at least never gets around to.
Well written and interesting! But 1) Tammany Hall, as far as political spaces anywhere go, was not actually that corrupt, the phrase references a multigenerational space that many different sorts operated through and it did far, far more good than harm. And 2) a local DSA almost cant have a Tammany Hall today because we’ve so acutely centralized both economically and governmentally that local governments cant do much of anything in most of the major policy spheres, this has greatly diminished local political organizing and local community politics in-general
This is a great article, although I found it depressing to read.
Still, it made me think: isn't the missing middle term here Elizabeth Warren and her "personnel is policy" approach? I was definitely a Bernie guy not a Warren guy, but she seems to have organized a large group of professionals who staff influential Democratic institutions including in the Biden administration and who are meaningfully to the left of HRC or Obama or the current version of Harris. (The people who drive Yglesias nuts.)
This is a different kind of "organizing" and a much more technocratic vision of progressive politics than what you talk about in your article. But I'd guess that during the next ten years the fights within the party will be between centrists and Warren-ites, with the DSA and the Squad in a relatively marginal position. This is a shame because I think the Sanders version is both better and more electable, but there's an upside to knowing how to take over institutions, and as you say Sanders doesn't seem to have been very interested in that side of politics.
And of course a close Warren protege is the mayor of Boston
Sanders always seemed like kind of a Ron Paul of the left. A political-moral weather vane or vote of conscience. An elder statement who holds the keys to the scrolls room and advises from a place of idealism, but not very hands-on
I loved this piece, as usual (this is kind of your beat?) and appreciate the dialogue in the comments.
As an active DSA member since 2016, who also jumped in with two feet to political organizing within DSA and the Democratic Party since then, the issue to me is the same issue I've seen throughout my life, as as millennial: people are first and foremost prioritizing their their own identities and themselves. The way we live our lives, in an atomized world, on our own phone. There is a clear path for individuals to build a movement (brand) in this era. Collective groups? Not so much. The Bernie movement is millions of individuals, sharing a series of beliefs, but mostly operating as individuals.
I'll share a quick anecdote that I think exemplifies my feelings on the matter of politically-minded people getting collectively organized. I myself pitched a role within National DSA (on one of the national committees). I pitched myself by saying I believe there should be a uniform method of training people that run local meetings, so that it is a process that is mostly standardized, and no matter where you go in America, DSA meetings would mostly be run the same way (mind you, not the content of the meeting, but the manner of running the meeting itself). My rationale was that doing this, you create a baseline set of standards, and fewer people feel they need to "learn on the job" which is stressful when you join an executive committee local in DSA.
The person interviewing me responded by saying "I wouldn't want someone from national telling me how to run a meeting." As much as I love DSA, I think that interaction pretty much sums up how people are these days. If achieving Medicare for All or passing the Pro Act requires discipline mandated from someone else, people are not interested.
The Wellstone Triangle seems like common sense to me, as someone who has straddled organizing, politics, and policy. It's remarkable how rarely it is seen in practice, but when deployed seriously, it has a pretty high success rate.
Ross, nicely done, as usual, and I've appreciated your history on Wellstone. Was going to compliment you on the earlier piece. And I'll send this on to some of my old lefty friends. Which brings me to my point. Back in the day, I was an intern for the SPD in Bonn. Helmut Schmidts party. Hamburg's (maternal family home) party. That party has sunk into near complete irrelevance, and may not survive. You mention 50,000 people organized. That's a tiny number in the US context. By way of comparison, there are roughly 20,000 car dealerships, each employing something like 69 people . . .
Similarly, the ideology here is thin, and blaming "neoliberalism" isn't enough. I just don't think mid-20th century understandings of political economy underlying so called "progressive" (that's another weird story, historically speaking) politics can work. Concerns for social solidarity, in short, need to be rearticulated, which is admittedly a big ask. Political imaginations don't change all that often. So what would a contemporary effort to politically articulate solicitude for our fellows look like?
I've done a fair amount of work with what I call "social capitalism," (sometimes confusingly, I'm told) probably should do more. You might find this of interest:
https://telospress.libsyn.com/episode-30-david-a-westbrook-on-social-capitalism (audio)
As always, keep up the great work.
A long time ago, I was a student in Prof. Welstone's class.
I don’t have insider or in-depth knowledge of the DSA or the sort of left politics being discussed here. But I will share what it has looked like to me from the outside. Perhaps those more knowledgeable will say that’s totally wrong, which is fine and may be true. Nonetheless-
I will start with the fact that I lost all respect for the DSA when I read about them canceling (as in, canceling a literal scheduled event) with Adolph Reed on the grounds that he wasn’t sufficiently enlightening on race. And they never, as far as I know, backed down from their ideological position on that, ever.
No surprise, as it aligns well with the same part of the left’s determination to make Bernie Sanders back down on his 2016 support for controlled immigration (no open borders), class-first politics (not appropriately intersectional and not focused enough on race), etc. By 2020, the campaign seemed pretty different and more in line with such new progressive values, understandings, and commitments.
As a result, of course, it was also of much less interest to actual working class voters. But, oh well . . .
This points to the fact that it seems to be that the Rainbow Coalition movement was utterly different from what the DSA represents, and in many ways antithetical. I don’t think that they would have cancelled Adolph Reed.
All this also aligns the DSA with the Democrats, who were all in on “social justice ideology” (OK, wokeism) until they weren’t, as working class voters in particular hate it. And so, now we’re on to “joy” etc., but underneath the rebranding, everything’s still the same.
I think what you are noticing here is the difference between "radlib" leftists and actual socialist-leaning leftists. The DSA has factions of actual socialist leftists but in the end is dominated by its liberal wing.
Controlled immigration was a left wing, union policy until it wasn't. Class focused politics was left wing until it wasn't. Adolph Reed's approach to contemporary "anti-racism" was the standard left approach until it wasn't.
Bernie is a strange bird. He comes across as genuinely left in his speeches, his policy proposals and his voting history. And while it may have been possible to support the Democrats as a leftist a very long time ago, Sanders' capitulation to the DNC marks him as a quisling.
Stripped of its ridiculous "all race all the time" rhetoric and its increasingly insane commitment to the belief that sex is a social construct and biology is just "cisheteronormative patriarchy" pretending to be science, a class-focused left might yet appeal to diverse working class Americans.
But so long as "the left" remains wedded to the Democratic Party? Bring on the clowns.
That makes sense.
What I wonder about, though, is what happens now that these old left positions on immigrantion, race, and class are much more well-established and accepted on the right? For awhile, I thought that perhaps Trumpism really might morph into the multiracial working class coalition that used to be the goal of the left. Watching that from the outside, too, though, I no longer have any hope it will happen there, either.
I also don't believe that wokeism has receeded on the left, I think it's just calmed down as it's now solidly institutionalized.
Really appreciate your acknowledging Paul Wellstone’s character, commitment and extreme abilities in organizing for good change. He was an amazing person, as was his wife, Sheila and his sons. I am one of the fortunate grads of the first and second Camp Wellstone in Portland and Seattle in the early 90’s. Amazing experience that continues to fuel my activism at age 78.
For those of us who were around in the 1980s, we knew already that Bernie was never going to become serious about organizing. He built a personal and very successful brand of independent politics in Vermont, and never put any real energy into helping progressives there, who have despite that managed to elect a handful of capital P Progressives to the state legislature for years. Back when I was at The Nation magazine, I can still remember attending a big convening of Vermont progressives in 1989 up near Burlington where it was taken as a given that Bernie would be of no help. And Our Revolution has just been a kind of sinecure for his loyal campaign team, not an organizing vehicle. The only thing to be said, in fairness, about the larger point your making is that no progressive Democratic presidential candidate has ever figured out how to convert their campaign army into an ongoing organizing vehicle. Not Obama, who let his lieutenants smother OFA and turn it into a thank-you-note writing machine; not Jesse Jackson, who shuttered his Rainbow Coalition state locals because he couldn't figure out how to raise the money to keep them going; not Jerry Brown in 1992; not Howard Dean in 2004, though at least he did use his time as DNC chair to try to revitalize state Democratic parties.
There is a Leftist candidate in this election. Look up Jill Stein!
https://www.jillstein2024.com/
Sanders sheepdogs for dems. Controlled opposition. Kshama Sawant and Chris Hedges have covered who he really is.
Stev's comments display frustrations I understand but the conclusion is wrong. DSA is a site for struggle with ultra-left and sectarian ideologues. I believe the base of DSA is far more sensible than the majority on our NPC. Our challenge is to forge links to overcome that wrong-headed ultra approach. A problem is that secartians devote constant energy to organizing and many of the rest of us dedicate time to such priorities as family, community organizing, self-care, etc. I pay attention to Paul Garver, a sensible voice for unity and both internal and external struggle. When Stev acknowledges that DSA has many members, he provides the REASON it is such an important place to recruit for a united front approach to confronting MAGA and the rest of the sordid following Trump inspires. Look at the contention over the Teamsters' failure to endorse Harris - even that important section of the labor movement is facing pro-Trump opposition. We have a historic opportunity to advocate for real-world politics.
As a Sanders volunteer in 2016, I disagree with this. Bernie's campaign wasn't the most organized, but it did put me to work purposefully, and we made a significant dent in Iowa. Bernie recruited a lot of people who had never participated in the Iowa Caucuses before, and he lost some delegates because of confusion about those rules. But that's not because he didn't organize effectively. He was up against an establishment colossus.
I did not support Bernie in 2020, because I had come to feel that he had a different weakness, which was that he was not prepared to actually govern. He is good at the gadfly role (here, I think we agree), but he would not have been good at negotiating deals or working with Congress. I agree with nearly all that he stands for, but I wanted a chance at winning, so I backed Amy Klobuchar. What I saw in that campaign was not a lack of organizational strategy on Bernie's part. It was that the establishment was so scared of his path to victory that all of the other major contenders dropped out to line up behind Biden. If they had not, the foundation that Bernie had built in 2016 might well have won him the nomination in 2020. Was that really a lack of organization or was it just another illustration of how difficult it is for an outsider to take on the Democratic establishment?
DSA still has a lot of members but it's basically dead at this point, killed by widespread sectarian impulses. It's unfortunate that Sanders didn't turn Our Revolution into much of anything, but DSA is not really relevant to this discussion. Today AOC is in the news for denouncing that pager attack, unlike Warnock and so many others. She is possibly relevant to the future of the left, which I don't think can be said about DSA.
Not dead at all. Its caucus in Albany just expanded and it's net growing its elected officials nationwide. The sectarian battles are on the national level which don't impact the locals much.
The sectarian battles ensure that they won't cohere as a national force worth paying attention to and their elected, many of whom are quite impressive, will over the years go their own way, for better or worse. Even though DSA circa 2018 was the most impressive left organization of my lifetime, I feel like we've seen this film so many times before... When do we have a left that us actually rooted in various communities, rather than a massification/radicalization of the student activist set? Not anytime soon, and not through DSA. I've often thought --a good standard is would a non radical historian be wrong to just ignore the left? Occupy, Bernie campaigns, DSA circa 2018 could not be ignored. DSA as a national organization for the last several years is eminently ignorable unless you really care about sectariana. Some of the electeds you mention could maybe form their own organizing initiative a little outside DSA, but to come back to your original point, it would just be bizarre for Sanders to try to fuel the actually existing organization.
The DSA bylaws contain a means of dealing with factionalism, for the simple reason those in charge know its introduction is how the establishment undermines successful antiestablishment organizations. There seems to be a taste of sour grapes in this insistence it's irrelevant when it continues to get people elected and build the solid voter foundation required to develop a true political party. Being human, DSA is just as susceptible to being triggered by propaganda as any other organization, meaning I don't agree with some of its choices. However, it's the only group I see that appears to have studied how one gets around the establishment blockade and developed a strategy.
Pretty close to what used to be my position on DSA. Some of the politicians mentioned in the OP included Paul Wellstone, Tim Walz, and Bernie Sanders. Can you imagine any of DSA's current electeds becoming a Senator or Governor, of a solid blue state like New York, or a Blue-ish state like Minnesota, or a weird state like Vermont? I can't, unless they took steps that would be regarded as a betrayal of principles by DSA itself. I note that while Ross often writes about New York City politics and mayoral prospects, and the future of the Democrats in New York state, he rarely mentions DSA in these contexts, because I think he understands that they don't really have a strategy to fight for power at those levels and it simply isn't emerging. It would require coalition building of a sort that the organization seems to be opposed to or at least never gets around to.
I do think DSA could have a NYC mayor someday. Gov is tougher because of the money required and the suburban constituencies
Wellstone was great. His brand of liberal / progressive made sense, and, like Kucinich and Ron Paul, seemed like he could never be bought.
Well written and interesting! But 1) Tammany Hall, as far as political spaces anywhere go, was not actually that corrupt, the phrase references a multigenerational space that many different sorts operated through and it did far, far more good than harm. And 2) a local DSA almost cant have a Tammany Hall today because we’ve so acutely centralized both economically and governmentally that local governments cant do much of anything in most of the major policy spheres, this has greatly diminished local political organizing and local community politics in-general
Solid points. Can you recommend a good book on Wellstone, Ross?
I haven't read any! I'm sure there are some decent ones