Democratic (Party) Direction

got some threadbait

This anecdote from my Ohio reporting last week captures something I see all the time. Purity tests: Big on Twitter, less so IRL. https://t.co/4phI0m2Ue3 pic.twitter.com/Gour17aTTe

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) July 17, 2018

70 y/os so weak on irl purity tests also their canes slow them down a lil

another cool 70 yo in that article saying she wont vote for the dem because he will keep obamacare and abolish ice

My fave trump anti obamacare feature is where they have repo teams to recover canes and batterychairs from the 70 y/os. that’ll larn em.

Cuomo is shook as hell

NEWS: Christopher Kim, the Cuomo donor who gave 69 times, reported the same Long Island City address (down to the apt. #) as Cuomo aide Julia Yang.

She identifies herself on LinkedIn as Cuomo’s “creative director.”

I’ve reached out to the campaign for comment… https://t.co/YUITqWwADI

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) July 17, 2018

nice

lmao what a move

also 69/77, nice

hahahah hell yeah

very "creative" Ms Yang

love to give, and receive, 69 times

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-joe-crowley-for-working-families-1531868231

So, Crowley never even called AOC personally to congratulate her and concede defeat when it became clear he'd lost. That was sniveling of him.

He conceded and endorsed her.

God, fucking Lieberman.

I'd blissfully forgotten he exists

if you'd asked me yesterday i'd've genuinely thought he was dead.

hard to forget him when his fingerprints are all over the party

“I don’t know any Democrat who cares what Joe Lieberman thinks, to be honest with you. I really don’t,” Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) saidhttps://t.co/FZMxoRVf2u https://t.co/MfFCRkn8r1

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) July 18, 2018

hell yeah

Justice Dems endorsed Nixon.

https://mdhslibrary.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/dems_for_nixon_bag1.jpg

I'm increasingly convinced DSA should stay out of electoral politics and focus on everything else it does - it seems like there are more than enough orgs out there to help support left-of-center Dems

I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or what. Please say the former.

What should they spend time on besides getting left Dems elected everywhere they can? Being insufferable on old messageboards? Morbius has that covered. They’re not like ACLU or SPLC with a specific mission distinct from organizing and mobilization. Every left leaning group that doesn’t have such a mission, in fact, needs to be spending every minute recruiting candidates and getting them elected. It’s almost profoundly stupid to suggest there’s “enough” help for Democratic candidates running from the left end of the spectrum.

What should they spend time on besides getting left Dems elected everywhere they can?

Direct action, serve-the-people programs, education, supporting labor organizing...there's a lot!

This is probably best discussed on HOOS' thread tho

being old on insufferable messageboards

i'll see what i can do at the Central Brooklyn DSA if they ever schedule a meeting that's not opposite must-see rep cinema

I think there are pretty clear and well thought out arguments for DSA supporting some select candidates running on the dem ballot line and also pretty clear and well thought out arguments for why they shouldn't and can't just support whoever is running left of center. The most obvious reason for the latter is they simply don't have the resources to do that, but there are other good reasons as well. Agree maybe it's better to get into on the "left" thread rather than the dem party direction thread. But I think it would require a more thorough and nuanced understanding of what DSA actually is than Tom is expressing in order to understand.

separately, what do you think the odds are that Crowley's people quietly asked Lieberman to write that vs Lieberman just doing it on his own accord. Crowley's "I'm running but I'm not really running" schtick is looking more suspect by the minute.

How about 0%?

lol, based on what?

It makes absolutely no sense? Getting the one guy every Democrat hates to write an endorsement in the Wall Street Journal to achieve... what exactly?

to achieve trying to keep his candidacy alive because he wants to win and doesn't want AOC to go to congress

surprised I have to explain that to you

lol

His candidacy is dead and there is no way in hell he could revive it by running on a ticket for a party who despises him more and more.

well, yeah

I think that's plausible, but when you say "party" you mean the base in the district. This is a guy who raised $4 million for his campaign vs $300,000 for AOC, and money doesn't give up easily. I don't think the RE developers and bankers who backed him like the idea of sending a socialist to congress and seeing their boy's influence in the local party dramatically weakened. Even if Crowley didn't have anything to do with the Lieberman endorsement I wouldn't be surprised if some of his backers did. Op-eds in the WSJ don't just appear out of nowhere.

So I say 20% chance Crowley had something to do with it, 40% chance his backers did.

To clarify my lack of nuanced understanding: the most important thing for a left/liberal organization to be doing between now and 2032 or so is getting involved in grassroots electoral politics and getting the vote out for candidates who support our causes. There is no better way to have a lasting impact on this country's trajectory. The end.

So the theory is Crowley is actually still running but just doing so secretly and if he wins somehow he’s going to be like “aww shucks, honestly folks I never intended this but you know what? The voters demanded it. Back to congress I go”? That would certainly be “one for the books” as they say.

Well but the tweet said so

hurting & simon otm imo; GOTV for strategically important candidates is among the most important things to be doing, i agree, and i want to maximize active participation on that front. I also think, more and more, that outside of key places where it makes a lot of sense (like an AOC, or Salazar, or Lee Carter in VA), that the kind of work we're talking about is best done by the likes of Our Revolution, Indivisible, Swing Left, and the overflowing portfolio of local orgs also doing such work. As a friend put it to me the other day, channeling the energy of the Bernie & Bernie-adjacent left into important races with spiritually compatible candidates is literally what Our Rev is for. DSA's comparatively limited resources aren't, in all cases, best suited to that work--in lots of places things like tenant organizing & other housing work, the brake light clinics, organized labor support, are likely the most strategic use of limited local chapter resources.

All that, plus I would love to see DSA to eventually (like, at least a decade down the line probably) form the basis of a viable workers' party and electoral work isn't much help with that. :)

I do think it's important to differentiate between a party in the electoral sense and a party in the mass sense of the term--I'd like to see the latter and Refoundation Caucus has that in mind (I'm applying to join), but under our current conditions I don't think an electoral left third party is an especially viable or desirable proposition. But again that's for the other thread.

Mass (Party) Direction

I’m v. annoyed I got tricked into arguing with a third party fantasist

under our current conditions I don't think an electoral left third party is an especially viable or desirable proposition

def not

it's extremely important to begin to build functioning leftist services and infrastructure in advance of leftist electoral victory. aside from saving lives immediately one reason to do this is that it gets out the vote. but in doing so it makes grassroots candidates dependent on and emergent from a preexisting and independent worker power base, rather than simply promising still-atomized workers that sudden power lies on the other side of an election or two provided they are loyal to a celebrity. candidates become delegates promising representation instead of messiahs promising agency.

dingaling

tom, I'm not in DSA but I know a lot of really smart people who are and who have very developed positions and arguments on all of the things you are talking about. And they don't all agree with each other, but there is a pretty strong contingent in NYC DSAs pushing for the use of the democratic ballot line for socialist candidates, while also not just backing anyone who is left of center.

The recent episode of The Dig with Dan Denvir features Seth Ackerman discussing just this issue and I recommend giving it a listen. The same ep also has an interview with someone from Our Revolution, which is an org more along the lines of what you're talking about, i.e. backing as many left-leaning dems as it feasibly can with the resources it has.

There's really too much to say in one post, but I think it's important to understand that DSA is organized and functions very differently from a standard liberal/left policy org or electoral org. It's not a professionalized fundraising/media model, it's a membership organization that self-organizes in a democratic way. The point of it is really to organize people, not back messages or campaigns, but contrary to what you said above many chapters DO canvass on issue-based campaigns, such as abolishing ICE, medicare for all, postal banking, etc. That organization and ability to mobilize volunteers paid off in the AOC campaign, but they really don't have the capacity to back every or even half of the left-of-center democrats running, not to mention that doing so would kind of water the org down and make it redundant to groups like Justice Democrats and Our Revolution.

Also, I would add that many members of DSA *are* also doing other things outside of DSA to support left-of-center democratic candidates, and there's a difference between arguing that people should be doing as much as we can to elect democrats and that DSA as an organization should be doing so.