The Democratic Party cannot be taken over. It is not a democratic institution. You could have 70% of elected Democrats agreeing with you and being variations on Mamdani and “party leadership” wouod still be outside your hands and they would still be working against you and there would be nothing you could do to advance your position in the party. It is a private, bourgeois institutional governed by ita donors and those donors’ supplicants.
More practically, what you could hope for is entryism and then a split. That is the basic claimed premise by DemSocs in DSA who argue for running as Dems. Unsurprisingly, this is a Trotskyist tactic and basically never works. But trying and failing in a very public way may still be a boon for radicalization and growing our ranks.
But only with discipline (or luck)! The Dems will try to coopt everything appealing about DemSocs without stepping on the toes of donors. And that cooption begins with Mamdani himself, who will be constantly pressured to soften his stances and be more lib. DSA has zero discipline whatsoever, so with someone like Mamdani one would have to depend on luck, i.e. just this one guy being principled. This is the DSA way and it is why they eat shit in 90% of their electoralism, they back candidates with no vetting and usually provide no support. But maybe they got lucky with this one guy.
It’s a truly exhausting strategy. It takes so much work and for very little payoff. And often (usually?) it just makes everyone involved mad at each other and burned out, even worse off than before.
There are ways to make “foment a split” work if your goal is to enrich a particular group and then peel them off of a dead-end org to instead do good work. To me this only makes sense if that group basically already exists but is stuck being useless.
Some commie factions in DSA are basically doing this, knowingly or not, and with unclear success. All DSA factions are basically premised on exhausting their opposing factions as much as possible by being a (often fairly insufferable) advocate for their positions. Obviously the libs are the most guilty of this, they tolerate genocide and tokenize etc etc, but this sets the battleground up: keep opposing these libs within that group and tiring them out or go to another org where you don’t have to deal with them, at least internally. If you do the former, you are a hair’s breadtg from an entryist + split position, as you are not going to convince the libs, generally speaking, but you may eventually get them to force a split on some key issue, and when your faction is large enough to either take over the org or leave and form a new one.
Entryism is basically this same thing only less authentic because you don’t even think of yourselves as truly part of the org, and instead try to join and take over as fundamentally external.
Only disagree with: “they back candidates with no vetting and usually provide no support.”
The volunteer effort around Zohran was nuts, I mean I read 50,000 volunteers around a DSA member, that’s not “no support”.
Whether you think those 50,000 people are wasting their time is another thing but I feel like this website’s hatred of DSA is so hyperbolic at times, and especially contradictory towards Zohran
Well I used a weasel word qualifier of “usually” because there are exceptions of course. There is no internal standard or political education program in DSA so it really depends on what composes a given local chapter and who their leadership currently are. It ranges from jokers that never win anything and don’t even file for candidacy in time (because they forgot, because life is hard, because Todd was supposed to do it but then he got sick) all the way up to a Mamdani who has been a force for years and has a coalition backing him, not just NY DSA, who are very electorally invested and do have competent people (but overly suffer from electoralism brain and therefore liberalism).
PS you’d hate a lot of NY DSA if you had conversations with them about basically anything regarding imperialism or unions having petty bourgeois limitations or how much to avoid criticizing Iron Dome AOC. Most of them would get themselves banned from this site for chauvinism.
The Democratic Party cannot be taken over. It is not a democratic institution. You could have 70% of elected Democrats agreeing with you and being variations on Mamdani and “party leadership” wouod still be outside your hands and they would still be working against you and there would be nothing you could do to advance your position in the party. It is a private, bourgeois institutional governed by ita donors and those donors’ supplicants.
More practically, what you could hope for is entryism and then a split. That is the basic claimed premise by DemSocs in DSA who argue for running as Dems. Unsurprisingly, this is a Trotskyist tactic and basically never works. But trying and failing in a very public way may still be a boon for radicalization and growing our ranks.
But only with discipline (or luck)! The Dems will try to coopt everything appealing about DemSocs without stepping on the toes of donors. And that cooption begins with Mamdani himself, who will be constantly pressured to soften his stances and be more lib. DSA has zero discipline whatsoever, so with someone like Mamdani one would have to depend on luck, i.e. just this one guy being principled. This is the DSA way and it is why they eat shit in 90% of their electoralism, they back candidates with no vetting and usually provide no support. But maybe they got lucky with this one guy.
Thank fuck PSL hasn’t been doing entryism
It’s a truly exhausting strategy. It takes so much work and for very little payoff. And often (usually?) it just makes everyone involved mad at each other and burned out, even worse off than before.
There are ways to make “foment a split” work if your goal is to enrich a particular group and then peel them off of a dead-end org to instead do good work. To me this only makes sense if that group basically already exists but is stuck being useless.
Some commie factions in DSA are basically doing this, knowingly or not, and with unclear success. All DSA factions are basically premised on exhausting their opposing factions as much as possible by being a (often fairly insufferable) advocate for their positions. Obviously the libs are the most guilty of this, they tolerate genocide and tokenize etc etc, but this sets the battleground up: keep opposing these libs within that group and tiring them out or go to another org where you don’t have to deal with them, at least internally. If you do the former, you are a hair’s breadtg from an entryist + split position, as you are not going to convince the libs, generally speaking, but you may eventually get them to force a split on some key issue, and when your faction is large enough to either take over the org or leave and form a new one.
Entryism is basically this same thing only less authentic because you don’t even think of yourselves as truly part of the org, and instead try to join and take over as fundamentally external.
Only disagree with: “they back candidates with no vetting and usually provide no support.”
The volunteer effort around Zohran was nuts, I mean I read 50,000 volunteers around a DSA member, that’s not “no support”.
Whether you think those 50,000 people are wasting their time is another thing but I feel like this website’s hatred of DSA is so hyperbolic at times, and especially contradictory towards Zohran
Well I used a weasel word qualifier of “usually” because there are exceptions of course. There is no internal standard or political education program in DSA so it really depends on what composes a given local chapter and who their leadership currently are. It ranges from jokers that never win anything and don’t even file for candidacy in time (because they forgot, because life is hard, because Todd was supposed to do it but then he got sick) all the way up to a Mamdani who has been a force for years and has a coalition backing him, not just NY DSA, who are very electorally invested and do have competent people (but overly suffer from electoralism brain and therefore liberalism).
PS you’d hate a lot of NY DSA if you had conversations with them about basically anything regarding imperialism or unions having petty bourgeois limitations or how much to avoid criticizing Iron Dome AOC. Most of them would get themselves banned from this site for chauvinism.
I’ve heard on this site that local DSA can be a lot better than national DSA