Paul Heideman discusses his recent Jacobin magazine article, “Where are the Democratic Socialists of America Going?” which examines how the group is successfully navigating the U.S. electoral system but continues to face considerable challenges in rooting itself in the U.S. working class.
SCOTT HARRIS: And right now, I am very happy to welcome to our program, Paul Heideman, author of the book, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went From the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos. And we’ve invited Paul this evening to talk about a recent Jacobin magazine article titled, “Where Are the Democratic Socialists of America Going?” And Paul, it’s great that you were able to make time for our conversation tonight, an important topic, and we’re very happy you could be here with us.
PAUL HEIDEMAN: Thanks so much for having me on.
SCOTT HARRIS: So first of all, I think most of our listeners, this is a regular menu of discussion of progressive politics and DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, has certainly been on the menu here in many discussions. But for just a sort of a starting point, tell our listeners a little bit, a brief history of Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, and what we know about their political platform and program.
PAUL HEIDEMAN: Yeah, so Democratic Socialists of America was founded in the early 1980s out of a merger of two pre-existing socialist groups in the United States. The first of those was called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and was led by a guy named Michael Harrington who had become very famous for writing a book called The Other America in the early 1960s that really exposed the extent of American poverty even at a moment like the 1960s that really thought of itself and has been thought of since as a moment of prosperity. And so Harrington had become one of the most famous socialists in the United States and had led a small group in the ’70s called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that really worked to influence the left-wing of the Democratic party and had some success in doing so, but by the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency had grown kind of disillusioned with that approach.
The other group was a group called the New American Movement, which had been founded by a lot of veterans of the new left of groups like Students for Democratic Society in the ’60s, who in the 1970s attempted to regroup and chart a course for left-wing politics that avoided the insanity of groups like the Weather Underground that had kind of spiraled out of Students for Democratic Society, while still holding true to socialist principles. And by the late ’70s, early 1980s, those two groups had discovered that they had a pretty similar outlook and so merged and formed the Democratic Socialists of America. And while there were very high hopes coming out of that merger, the organization really went into stagnation throughout the ’80s and ’90s and was never able to build a kind of large activist base of the sort that DSA has now.
And by 2014, the group had an average age in the late 60s or early 70s. Most of its members were retirees and it was really Bernie Sanders’ run in 2016 that revitalized the group. All of these kind of people who had been a part of the Sanders run, who had supported it, were looking for some place to join. And Sanders, of course, called himself a democratic socialist, and so DSA was the natural place for a lot of these people to look to. And there, the group just grew absolutely massively in size with tens of thousands of members joining over the next few years. And it really became a new group through that. At this point, the vast majority of the group’s membership have been members for less than 10 years, almost the entire leadership of the group that’s true of. So there was kind of a complete generational turnover in the group within a very short time. And it emerged as a new force on the American left in a way that before 2016, it had simply never been.
SCOTT HARRIS: Now, that’s an important place to talk about some of the things you’re noting about the current organization as well as its future. So as you mentioned, over the last few years, we’ve seen a transformation of DSA from being pretty much marginal with little visibility to today where DSA candidates have, because of primary election victories and victories outright like the very visible Zohran in New York as mayor of New York, they’ve garnered broad attention, both negative and positive. And I wonder in terms of the trajectory of socialist and left movements in the country, what’s the significance of where DSA is today?
PAUL HEIDEMAN: I think in that respect, DSA’s success can really not be overestimated. Today, DSA has 120,000 members or so, which is bigger than any socialist group in the U.S. since the old socialist party of Eugene Debs. So DSA has really risen to that level of prominence and importance in American politics. I mean, like you said, you kind of turn on the news, no matter what channel you’re watching, you’re probably going to hear DSA mentioned at some point. If you’re watching Fox News, you’ll hear it mentioned one way. If you’re watching MS Now, you’ll hear it a little bit different way, but everyone is talking about it. So it’s really succeeded in leaving a mark on the American political landscape in a way that I think no socialist group has done since the Socialist party of the early 20th century. And like you said, that’s been through this strategy of contesting Democratic party primaries and winning some very, very prominent victories in that realm that’s done so, that’s kind of forced the entire political spectrum to take notice.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Paul Heideman, author of Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went From the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos. And we’re talking about his recent article in Jacobin magazine, “Where Are the Democratic Socialists of America Going?” Paul, summarize for our audience how DSA has articulated their platform, their ideology, their policies, because I think that they present themselves, or let’s say some of the candidates present themselves as more of sort of in line with the social democratic parties of Europe that are really about regulating capitalism rather than taking over the means of production as an old sort of socialist ideal. So where are they at? I imagine there’s a lot of things going on. It’s not just one line of march that’s being articulated.
PAUL HEIDEMAN: Yeah. So one of the key things to understand about DSA is that it is in practice a very decentralized group. Local DSA chapters do more or less whatever they want so that some chapters are spending 90 percent of their time working on election campaigns and democratic primaries. Other chapters are really focused on things like mutual aid and brake light repair clinics, things like that. Other chapters are really focused on demonstrating against war and things. So there’s just this huge variance in what local chapters of the group are actually doing and in what members believe. And if you ever go onto the DSA forums online, you’ll see there’s certainly no excess unanimity within the group. There’s a huge amount of dispute and disagreement over what it should be doing, what’s the proper way to advance the cause of socialism in the United States. So that’s I think the thing that everyone needs to understand is that it’s just a very decentralized group with a large spectrum of opinion that runs really from, like you said, classic social democratic positions to revolutionary communism inspired by things like the Cuban Revolution or the Chinese Revolution.
So in terms of candidates, I would say that the spectrum of opinion among at least the more prominent candidates is rather narrower, partially because if you’re running in a Democratic primary, you have to appeal to voters. And there aren’t a whole lot of voters in the United States at this point who want to vote for someone who says we should have a Chinese-style revolution in the United States. So the people who are focused on winning elections tend to hue a little bit more to that kind of more social democratic line. Although I think in fairness, it’s a quite left-wing social democratic line that is really focused on things like U.S. imperialism, also focused on winning big dramatic reforms like Medicare for all, those kind of things. People are talking about how to democratize finance, things like that. So I think there is a big ambitious policy agenda that is behind most of DSA’s candidates, even if they don’t necessarily all sound like Che Guevara.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Well, Paul, as you noted in the article, DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, have found a lot of success in running for office inside the Democratic party, and they have succeeded probably beyond some of their wildest dreams. But of course, there’s a lot of pressures within the Democratic party. There’s a right-wing establishment of the party, and you’ve had some very prominent members of that establishment like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blast DSA, and you’ve had Jamie Harrison, another Democratic party official, just attack DSA mercilessly. And then of course you have a lot of Republicans and Fox News, as you mentioned earlier, sort of daily attacking DSA whenever they discuss them. They always note, “Hey, DSA has a platform where they want to abolish the Senate. They want open borders, they want to defund the police, they want public ownership of major corporations, they want voting rights for permanent residents in the country.” There’s a lot of things there that don’t jive with the Democratic party.
How is this marriage of convenience going for DSA right now?
PAUL HEIDEMAN: Well, it’s kind of both a marriage of convenience and a UFC cage match at the same time. The strategy of running in Democratic primaries is itself embraced by DSA members as a way of contesting the leadership of the more centrist wing of the Democratic party. So the whole idea behind the strategy is to challenge those political forces and that this is actually the most effective way of doing so rather than running third party, which is much easier to dismiss. But you’re right that once these people are elected into office, they face a choice of either kind of being a permanent “no vote” on everything, which means having very little power and not being able to deliver on very much, or compromising with their colleagues in the Democratic party on certain fronts. And to be honest, I think in some ways that’s unavoidable in legislative politics more generally in that if someone were elected on a third-party ticket, they would face much the same dilemma.
Either you can work with other people and other legislators to try and pass legislation and support it — in which case people might be more open to your priorities and kind of signing onto your bills — or you can be a permanent “no vote” and just denounce everything. So in some ways, I think the dilemmas that DSA legislators face are not so much a product of being in the Democratic party, as being in office, period.
So I think those are kind of structural issues. I mean, that said, certainly being in the same party as Chuck Schumer presents its own set of challenges and someone like Abdul El-Sayed, who’s not a DSA member, but is representative of the kind of politics that have elected a lot of DSA members, if he makes it to the Senate, he’s going to have to work with Chuck Schumer in some way and that’s going to be both awkward but hopefully productive. And just on the broadest sense, I actually think it’s kind of positive for DSA to be attacked by people like Chuck Schumer or Jamie Harrison, just because I don’t think that they have very much legitimacy at all with the kind of younger, more left-wing voting population, and that’s who DSA wants to draw in. So the more that those people I think talk about how bad DSA, how radical DSA is, how they want to change all of this, I think that’s kind of good for DSA, honestly, when someone like Chuck Schumer says he doesn’t like it.
I think he doesn’t have a whole lot of popularity or credibility with a lot of Democratic voters at this point.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, that’s true. We look at some of the polling about the Democratic party and people like Chuck Schumer being the face of the Democratic party, they’ve failed utterly. That’s true. Well, we have time just for one other discussion or question here, Paul, and that is you make the important point in your article that there’s a disconnect between the Democratic Socialists of America and the working class, i.e. labor unions in the country and working families and communities all over the U.S. Just explain a little bit about that disconnect and why you feel it’s so important that that’s addressed within DSA sooner rather than later.
PAUL HEIDEMAN: One way to understand this is to think about the kind of socialist and communist political culture that existed in the United States basically before World War II, which is that on the lower east side of New York, which was an overwhelmingly working class neighborhood at the time, it was a neighborhood of sweatshops and factory workers, there were entire buildings, entire blocks where every family had a member in the Socialist party, where people’s entire lives were kind of spent around organizations of the socialist movement. Someone might meet their husband or wife at a dance sponsored by a socialist organization and send their kids to a school that would teach them English that was linked to the socialist movement. So socialist politics at that time were deeply embedded in the lives of working class Americans. And McCarthyism and the anti-communist purge after World War II really shattered that link.
And by driving people underground, making people burn their old socialist newspapers, hide it all to try and avoid the repression, it really broke that link. And since then, American socialism has struggled to root itself in the American working class to the same extent that it obtained before World War II. And one of the reasons that’s so important is that a basic kind of socialist premise is that people’s politics in some sense follow from their material interests, what they need to do in order to reproduce their position in society. And DSA has been very, very successful in recruiting layers of the lower spectrum of the professions, people like teachers and nurses, people who often have—or tech workers, people who have often a decent salary, make a decent living, but are not getting rich by any means—who you might think of as somewhat of the lower end of the middle class in the United States.
And there’s a tension that comes from that. First of all, people are often loathe to support tax increases on themselves. And if we want the kind of welfare state, if Americans want the kind of welfare state that Europe has, it’s going to have to be financed in part with taxes on the middle class. And if a group is only based in the middle class, it’s probably not going to fight for that in the same way as if it has a broad base among the working class. And so DSA has had a lot of trouble in recruiting manual workers, retail workers, the really big layers of the American working class that are also some of the people who work in some of the most exploitative jobs in our society. DSA has not succeeded so far in expanding into those layers. And I mean, partially those layers are just a big part of the population.
It’s quite a large part of the population that works in jobs that don’t require a college degree. And so until DSA is able to kind of expand into that area, I think there are going to be limits to what it can achieve, even as it already has reshaped American politics in some ways.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said. And that’s certainly a great place to leave off and I hope we can pick up on that point when we talk again, and I’d certainly like to stay in touch and have you back. Paul, appreciate you being here and leave our listeners with any of the websites that you’d recommend on this topic. I know they can find your article, the title of which is “Where Are the Democratic Socialists of America Going?”at jacobin.com and any others you’d recommend?
PAUL HEIDEMAN: I think Dissent is a great magazine. Also has a great online presence, In These Times. I think all of those are really good things to read to try and keep up with what’s happening in the socialist movement in the U.S., also, The Nation.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yes, of course, The Nation. Well, Paul, appreciate it. Well, like I said, stay in touch and thanks for making time for this discussion tonight. Appreciate it.
PAUL HEIDEMAN: Hey, great talking to you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thanks. Bye-bye.
PAUL HEIDEMAN: Bye-bye.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Paul Heideman, author of Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went From the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos.
