Democratic (Party) Direction

the odds are against her, but ya never know... esp if the Trump donations to Cuomo gets legs

that's a really, really good attack angle right now, I wouldn't discount its chances of getting legs

I could see some devious push polling being done on it

"If you found out that Donald Trump had donated $64,000 to a candidate for governor, how would that impact your willingness to vote for that candidate?" etc

Hadn't noticed AOC is part of a slate of candidates called Brand New Congress

https://brandnewcongress.org/policy/

no formal "abolish ICE" language in there yet that I've seen but I'd be surprised if it wasn't added in the near future

Julia Salazar is much more upfront than AOC in advocating for using the Democratic Party strictly as a vehicle for gaining socialist power:

MD
What have been the primary failures of the Democratic Party establishment to date, and whose interests does the party serve at present?

JS
Take the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in her congressional district in New York. The dominant centrist liberal wing of the Democratic Party is completely out of touch with what the majority of registered Democrats — which is to say, working-class people — actually want, and the policies that actually resonate with them. I think what we’re seeing is that the constituents of the Democratic Party have a much bigger political imagination than the party establishment, whether at the federal level or in local machine politics.

So the main problem is a lack of political imagination, approaching every dispute from a position of compromise instead of from a position of readiness to fight for the working class and marginalized.

MD
What do you think the prospects are for socialists in transforming the Democratic Party into a fighting force for working-class people? Can it be realigned, or is it merely a tool at present for building independent socialist politics?

JS
I definitely think the latter. My feeling is that Democratic Party realignment is at best a laudable secondary goal, not a primary goal. Ultimately, the two-party system de facto disenfranchises people, and I can’t see the Democratic Party ultimately being a vessel for the democratic socialist revolution, so it would be silly and shortsighted for democratic socialists to put a lot of effort and resources into that project.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/julia-salazar-interview-socialist-new-york-senate

I think she's probably right, but I think there is a certain symbiosis there, where if DSA can help candidates win, it advances the DSA, and in turn they grow as a political force. But yeah DSA hardly has the organizational capacity right now to win more than a handful of elected offices even if revamping the party was its primary goal. I'm not part of DSA, but its success right now gives me some hope -- for the first time in a while I feel like large numbers of young people are coming to understand the value of being part of an organization, of participating within that organization, of engaging in political processes within that organization, of activism that goes beyond just "direct actions" and creative one-off protests.

my pals who are skeptical of "AOC the Reformist" are excited about Salazar which says............something idk

A reformist who will side with you more often than the person she replaced is not bad. I do get the sense JS is a more committed DSA person, but AOC courted them pretty hard and has apparently been showing up for a long time.

Salazar is a lot more /twitter/

Also, you could send reanimated Karl Marx to congress and he'd still just be one vote among hundreds. Kind of silly to get overly obsessive about whether she's for full communism at this point.

But keep in mind that an army of reanimated Karl Marxes must begin with a single reanimated Karl Marx, unless they’re batch produced, which is even more difficult

iirc there need to be at least three Marxes at any given time

And I don't mean that in a trite "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" or "avoid the circular firing squad" sort of way. I more mean that if you have actual leftist political goals you need to have some kind of strategic thinking about it, and there is zero strategic benefit to writing off AOC right now and a lot of benefit to riding the train.

I mean tbh I'm just excited to see a candidate whose analysis of the Democratic party is so clear-eyed. I like AOC a lot but her "I'm a proud Democrat" stuff threw me for a loop, mostly because I couldn't tell if it was earnest or clever pandering (if the distinction matters)

Totally unrelated question: do you think these "whip the vote" campaigns to try to unify the democrats against a SCOTUS nominee are worthwhile or not? Does it make a difference if we have 49 dems or 46 voting against whatever FedSoc lizard they put up? I keep seeing people (on facebook) say stuff like "McConnell did it so we should too" and I'm like, do they just not know how to count?

my pals who are skeptical of "AOC the Reformist" are excited about Salazar which says............something idk

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, July 9, 2018 12:51 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like AOC so much it made me reconsider my dislike of DSA, so this makes me feel good :)

They do not know how to count

Xp

I mean, it might matter a lot if one of the GOP ladies holds out too

or am I missing something

if one of the GOP ladies holds out (not holding my breath) that would probably change the calculus of the centrists in the democratic party--if they were going to vote yes on a passing vote to placate their red-state base, maybe they'd vote no if they had a real shot of blocking the nod

further exacerbating matters

Sen. Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat, says he could vote either way on President Trump's Supreme Court justice pick https://t.co/L86wuVN8PU pic.twitter.com/nwJeDCOBky

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 8, 2018

he needs to make these kinds of difficult sacrifices now so he can continue to get elected in a tough state for democrats so that he can be in a position to do important things in the future, like maybe cast a crucial swing vote for a supreme court justice

omg it's almost as if he's representing a state that is not actually that liberal

anyway here's his voting record
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/doug-jones/

Honestly I would gladly trade Doug Jones's seat for a shot at a SCOTUS pick. He's going to lose it eventually anyway, they'll find someone who isn't literally Aqualung to run next time.

I also have a hard time believing that having an open seat will boost GOP turnout that much -- the people savvy enough to vote based on SCOTUS are people who already vote every election, that's my guess.

can't say I disagree on either of those points

man alive otm

a rep's duty is to his conscience (if any) rather than his dumbfuck constituents

It’s political boilerplate to say he could vote either way when there’s no nominee yet. He ran on a pro-choice platform in Alabama.

Sen @DougJones was also invited to the WH #SCOTUS announcement, but will not attend, his Spox says.

Dems who were invited but declined:
Manchin
Heitkamp
Donnelly
Jones

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) July 9, 2018

show them what you're made of, doug jones, i've always believed in you

The theory I've seen is that the centrist Dems are waiting on Collins and Murkowski, and will probably vote whichever way they do.

No pressure!

iirc there need to be at least three Marxes at any given time

― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin)

i read "the three marxes of ypsilanti" when i was in college, it was shit

I don't know if this has been talked about on this or another thread but it's a nice snapshot of the intellectual movement:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/the-socialist-network/

so funny to consider this next to NYT's "Intellectual Dark Web" bullshit from a few months back. clearly the leading young socialists haven't figured out a lot of things yet, as most of them I'm sure would readily admit, but they are light fucking years ahead of the drooling goons on the right.

Haven't read that yet but I've already seen folks complain that it mischaracterizes some of its subjects' views.

given that this is a subset of people who spend almost their entire lives arguing about shit online, that's entirely unsurprising. I'm more interested and drawn to the idea of these folks deciding to take their socialism out of the realm of the theoretical and into real action/policy/candidacy, etc. It was interesting to see them realize pretty quickly that they were going to bump up against plenty of compromises because for better or worse that's just the way shit actually gets done, but I think this reality is far far more encouraging than just writing pie-in-the-sky tracts to each other all day long, especially to all the people in this country who don't spend their entire lives reading small socialist journals but could benefit tremendously from socialist policy.

I'm starting to think it's actually better for groups like DSA if they are misunderstood/underestimated

a subset of people who spend almost their entire lives arguing about shit online

board description

Also, you could send reanimated Karl Marx to congress and he'd still just be one vote among hundreds. Kind of silly to get overly obsessive about whether she's for full communism at this point.

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Monday, July 9, 2018 7:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya i agree with this and your other thoughts on the value of allies with hands on the levers of power, establishing full communism such as it is is never gonna be elected's job and handwringing about that is imo like being mad that your plumber is not descending into large green pipes with sound effects to defeat king koopa

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/opinion/centrist-democrats-midterms.html

Not as horrible as the headline/photo combo would suggest but still amusingly condescending

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150722124111-seventies-sexist-baby-soft-ad-exlarge-169.jpg

I take no issue with the idea that representatives are going to have to reflect their districts to win. I just think there's a lot of conflation of an imagined "center" with the agenda that would actually represent certain purple districts, just this sort of fuzzy thinking that "most people" are "in the middle," with the "middle" being basically an upper middle class moderate/technocratic agenda.

Like Staten Island is a place where you might not win on "Abolish ICE," but you could probably turn a lot of people out on an extremely pro-labor platform.

i'd like to use the sock o' manure on Bruni

how did a gay man like Bruni get by in life by appealing to moderation?

from Chapo thread:

In other news, that window keeps a movin'

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2018/07/10/cynthia-nixon-im-a-democratic-socialist-503279

― Simon H., Tuesday, July 10, 2018 10:29 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I eyerolled at this yesterday and Jacobin did an extremely embarassing Lenin tweet about it; you've got your DSA sponsored candidate forum in 8 hours and you're seeking an endorsement and you take that opportunity to tell a reporter you're a democratic socialist for the very first time? Come on.

AND YET as brother Duhalde wisely says here:

I remember when the Hillary Clinton's campaign tweeted a "socialist feminist" case for her.
I was shocked that she, of all people, might be okay with the need to appeal to "socialist voters" or whatever was the rationale behind it. Some people, instead, chose to use it as an opportunity to further remind people she was not a socialist.

Neither of us were asking the important question: what pushed her staff to do it in the first place?

As materialists, we need to remember the important question not if a politician genuinely adopts our beliefs (ultimately, only they know the sincerity) but what social forces push them to and why.
The fact that a major candidate for one of the largest state's governorship wants to identify with the democratic socialist project in itself is victory for @DemSocialists regardless of the outcome.

. . .and then on top of that I was just reminded that Nixon's new-ish policy director is actually a socialist organizer that I've known for a couple of years, and he and I have always aligned really quite well on the strategic uses of elected officials for social movements, and he posted this today:

It’s been quite fun getting to discuss democratic socialism on our campaign these past few weeks. Housing, health care, education, a livable planet, and justice for all. Cynthia is in it to win it.

. . .and I find myself feeling quite a bit less cynical about it.

I mean there's no question that at least optically it reeks of opportunism (if only due to the timing), but if it means that she's going to have policy planks that meet the DSA threshold for endorsement, great. That said, there's going to be a whole other set of trials to endure if and (inevitably) when leaders fail to match their platforms when they're in office.

But I don't think it's necessarily true that it's a success regardless of the outcome.

Idk dude I consider the opportunistic co-option by cynics of policies I support a kind of success.

It’s an iterative process of getting those with power to do the things you want, if you aren’t going to get the reins of power yourself you have to make it inevitable for those who have it to move in your direction, I sort of feel like