Much commentary about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) shows little sign that the commentators read the organization’s platform, “Workers Deserve More,” which was released July 14. The DSA, for its part, doesn’t make it as visible as you’d expect, relegating the platform to a drop-down menu. The document’s turgid in tone and substantively extreme, with aims such as “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” “universal rent control,” “full voting rights” for non-citizens, and “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
Contrary to claims this organization’s going to take over the Democratic Party or is a high-energy faction with few substantive differences from Democrats overall, I think the DSA’s going to collapse from its internal contradictions (to borrow a term from Marxists). Its multiple caucuses, many of them avowedly Communist, can’t paper over their differences with each other, let alone the party as a whole or even its progressive wing. In the meantime, DSA electoral victories, when they occur, will serve as grist for right-wingers whose writings about Zohran Mamdani ludicrously invoke Pol Pot, in one of whose killing fields I recently saw bones in Cambodia. A writer in India noted: “If Pol Pot had faced an unlikely snowstorm in Cambodia, he would have forced citizens to shovel the snow for free before executing them,” not hired volunteers at $30/hour as Mamdani did.
In opposing authoritarian practices of the Trump administration, I’ve emphasized that these serve as malign precedents that can be exploited by future administrations, including for left-wing purposes. Insofar as the class-warfare ethos of “Workers Deserve More” gains influence within the Democratic Party, that danger is magnified. No less worrisome, though, is the possibility that extremism by factions on the left, however unlikely to translate into policy, will provide a pretext for additional authoritarianism on the right.
Misinformation is rife. I opened X. I saw Stephen Miller say President Trump’s latest executive order on birthright citizenship derives from his authority as commander-in-chief. Nonsense; “commander-in-chief” refers to the president’s role at the top of the military chain-of-command, not some sweeping capacity to override the Constitution and the Supreme Court. I closed X. I went to Facebook, where a friend wrote the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid’s origin’s now “generally accepted,” which I pointed out isn’t true, at least regarding scientists, for which I provided a link to a study offering a meta-analysis of scientific opinion. My interlocutor was surprised, then suggested the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.
Meanwhile, outrage from the right about “socialism”—the core definition of which involves government ownership of the means of production—also raises the question of whether the commentators involved have said anything about the Trump administration’s proclivity for acquiring stakes in American companies, some 30 by a recent count.
In his final New York Times column, Ross Douthat worried he’s having trouble figuring out whose side he’s rooting for—or against—in politics now: “For many conservatives who shared my critique of the Obama-era establishment, the populist rebellion has been the vessel for their hopes. But in Donald Trump’s second term populism has displayed most of the vices that its critics anticipated. It has been corrupt and bullying and destabilizing. It has rewarded hacks and cronies. And it stumbled into a Middle Eastern war with even less preparation than its establishment predecessors.”
After denunciations of “Hasan Piker Thought and Democratic Socialists of America energy — social progressivism with socialist characteristics,” which he described as the chief alternative to right-wing populism, Douthat recriminated about Biden-era “peak woke” that “yielded civic and educational collapse.” He went on: “Then, finally, all of these political forces — the unpopular populists, the flailing establishment, the rising left — are displaying their vices in the shadow of the artificial intelligence revolution, which is creating new zones of power in which the friend-enemy distinction is almost impossible for me to parse.”
Political scientist Nicholas Grossman scorned Douthat’s qualms about the right as downplaying or shifting blame. Also, he noted, Douthat was casually “referencing Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, as if it’s unremarkable conventional wisdom, the typical basis of a political worldview.” Schmitt argued politics is reducible to a friend-enemy distinction, with enmity involved not just dislike but existential conflict, “the real possibility of physical killing.” That, plus Schmitt’s belief in “the state of exception,” a leader’s imperative to rise above the law when needed, has had a pernicious effect on the right in recent years.
I’m closer to Grossman than to Douthat in assessing current events, but I give one cheer to Douthat for having some willingness to rethink his political stances. It’s a tendency to be encouraged, however hedged or halfhearted. If I’m wrong in thinking the DSA’s not going to become a dominant force within the Democratic Party, I’ll be faster to ditch the Democrats than I was to get out of the Republican Party, from the Tea Party to Trump’s first nomination.