Earlier this month, I wrote an article making the case against a potential AOC Presidential endorsement. I was glad to see the discussion that it provoked, and was especially grateful for the full response published in Geese, which organized many counter-arguments in one succinct piece. Sarkozy, co-editor of Geese, makes the pro-AOC case very clearly, and I recommend that all socialists invested in this argument read it. I found that the article presents my argument faithfully before beginning to counter it, and I would even go so far as to agree with the author's assessment that supporting our most prominent politician for a Presidential campaign is simply “common sense.” However, when it comes to common sense, I agree with fellow democratic socialist Albert Einstein: it is essentially a collection of assumptions. By unpacking some of the assumptions contained in the "Just Say Yes" article, I hope to clarify the strategic frailty of an AOC Presidential campaign.

Assumption 1: Liberal Governance is Good Governance

One such assumption is that a progressive liberal "good governance" is possible for an American President elected in 2028. "The only thing that will truly turn the masses away from socialism," Sarkozy claims, "is if AOC simply fails at deliverism, at good governance." This is brought up only to dismiss it, taking it for granted that AOC's Presidency would be successful from the standpoint of most Americans, "delivering" the goods through her center-left policies. From here, he argues that we can build on the example of AOC's Presidential success to introduce more radical policies. However, what is being glossed over so easily here is the hinge point of the entire "Just Say No" argument: liberalism is not capable of good governance, at least not from the standpoint of working people.

Sarkozy is correct that the American populace will not recoil from AOC for "not being socialist enough" given that they are not socialists themselves. What will turn them away is her failure to improve their living standards, or even prevent them from dropping precipitously. The "Just Say Yes" article seems to take it for granted that at least some of AOC's "inevitable betrayals" will be pragmatic, correct choices from the standpoint of "deliverist success." One has to wonder, if moderate liberalism "delivers" for working people better than socialism can, why are we socialists at all? This is the fundamental problem with DSA politicians governing as liberals: not that we find their policies personally distasteful, but that their policies are failures.

Let us look at the example of Zohran Mamdani, the poster-boy of "good governance" socialism. When we think of his successes, we do not find betrayals; we find the fulfillment of his socialistic campaign promises. Free childcare, the rent freeze, recognizing tenant unions: none of these are examples of Mamdani making concessions; they are all concessions extracted from the capitalist state. On the other hand, when we look at the moments we could call betrayals, there is no gain for the working class whatsoever. When he sided against the "no more 24" campaign, for example, was this delivering something for workers? Again, the entire point of socialism is to improve the lives of the working class and create a better society; if we believed that capitalism worked better, then we would not be socialists at all.

It may be protested that it is unfair to separate "wins" and "losses" from each other like this, that maybe Mamdani's successes were achieved at the cost of retreat in certain areas. This very well may be true. After all, the childcare pilot program and relief of NYC's debts were both dependent upon the goodwill of Governor Hochul. Perhaps there was some kind of deal struck, in which concessions had to be made on Mamdani's side. Politics is a tightrope walk, and I would not condemn a DSA elected as a traitor just for doing some necessary bargaining. However, when we imagine trying to scale up this compromising approach to the Presidential level, an already very dangerous game becomes downright suicidal.

New York City may be part of a dying empire, but the USA is the dying empire. We do not live in ordinary times, in which American-led global capitalism is chugging along more or less smoothly, waiting for a good Samaritan to redistribute its ill-gotten gains. The only reason DSA has gotten this far in the first place is that we are in an era of imperial decline, meaning the status quo will no longer be good enough. Normal methods of governance no longer suffice, not even from the standpoint of the elite. Trump moronically jumped on a hand grenade with Iran, but that does not mean that the catastrophic decline of the USA is purely his fault; it is the result of a long historical process. Other world powers with contrary interests are rising, productive investment opportunities are drying up in favor of speculation and corruption, and the ecological foundation of life on Earth is starting to erode. All of these factors are displacing millions if not billions of people, escalating the instability even further. There is no more moderation; there is radicalism to the left and to the right, and then there is paralysis.

Americans broadly do not understand their situation yet, so they will blame whoever is in charge for whatever goes wrong. For the past ten years, Democrats and Republicans have taken turns disgracing themselves as each one fails to escape the chaos inherent in the system. Immediately preceding Trump, the USA had a President who was very willing to break the neoliberal mold and return to more traditional 20th-century interventionist policies. Under Biden, real wages went up, jobs were added, and union membership increased with his support, yet none of this was enough to meet the current moment. The sense of failure and malaise was inescapable even with a return to this FDR-like era of liberalism, and thus that return was brief and embarrassing. One could argue that AOC would govern to the left of Biden, but the fact cannot be ignored that Biden governed significantly to the left of Obama on kitchen table issues, yet Obama is the one more favorably remembered by his base. Things are rapidly getting more desperate for workers, and the depth of change needed is growing faster than our willingness and capacity to make those changes. Zohran Mamdani and other potential DSA executives can avoid the brunt of these problems only because of their subordinate position. For the Presidency, "the buck stops here," meaning there will be no one to shield us from blame when things take their next turn downhill.

As Sarkozy mentions, I suspect Taiwan will be the next big foreign policy problem, but it really does not matter which particular issue fires off in the 2029-2033 Presidential term. There are an ever-increasing number of potential crises like this boiling away in the background, probably some that the public is not even aware of. Any one of them could activate at any time, and it will be highly discrediting for whoever has to deal with it. The President will go to war, or they will back down, and in either case American decline will accelerate. As I argued in the original article, the only possible way around this is an extremely creative, courageous, and yes, radical reversal of American policy up to this point. To be more specific, there would need to be a retreat from imperialism, paired with domestic policies which ensure that the American working class would not foot the bill for it.

Beyond that, it seems increasingly unlikely that a center-left administration could even fix existing problems, let alone solve new ones. Trump's terms have both done real damage to American society, and liberal politicians have so far been powerless to undo it. While "do nothing" neoliberal Biden is a bit of a myth, Trump 1.0 policies proved shockingly resilient. One can only speculate that there is an appetite for these policies among the ruling class, including the “progressive” donors of the Democratic Party. The new Republican regime has been even more radical, enacting legislation and creating legal precedents that saddle the government with massive debts, make regulation impossible, disenfranchise ethnic minorities, fuse the Pentagon completely with the Israeli security state, and empower a massive paramilitary to surveil and kill as they please. Undoing all of this would be the bare minimum expected of any progressive government, yet it is already so entrenched that it may not be fixable within Constitutional limits.

In summary, to meet the minimum standard of "good governance," AOC would need to go well beyond liberal progressivism and embrace a radical socialism that she has thus far avoided. If she took office intending to govern as an inoffensive progressive, she would be completely unprepared for the real situation, in which there is no room for moderation. By confining her program to liberal social democratic policies, AOC would not be a failure according to some abstract Marxist standard, but in the eyes of the masses. This brings us to the next assumption.

Assumption 2: American workers would be understanding of our shortcomings

Just as the "Just Say No" argument rests upon the understanding that social democracy too wedded to liberalism would fail and discredit socialism, the "Just Say Yes" argument relies on a belief in its general success, paving the way for more socialism. However, the idea that AOC would govern without "betrayal" strains the credulity of any informed reader, so Sarkozy asserts that this "... would make the masses more aligned with socialism, for they would desire a president who goes further than her." This is wishful thinking. As his own article correctly asserts, "democratic socialism and Marxism are poorly understood by everyone," but this is not, in fact, "advantageous." As previously argued, we cannot by any means rely on "deliverist success," and there is no reason to think that people would attribute AOC's failures to her centrism rather than to the movement most associated with her name, democratic socialism. We need to remember that most Americans are not self-identified socialists, and are not at all predisposed to think well of socialism. It shows the desperation of the current moment that so many people are willing to give socialism a try. If we crash and burn, there will not be a second or third any time soon.

We also must remember that another reason we are winning right now is that we do not abdicate responsibility like normal Democrats do. There is a major appetite for a stronger social safety net, but the thing that most consistently inspires the progressive voter base in this country is the idea that a candidate will fight hard against the evil that they see coming from Washington. Americans see what Trump is doing, and they ask why no one fighting for them will go that far. Obviously, the US political system would rebel against a socialist President in a way that it does not against a reactionary like Trump, but if we run a candidate for President, we are implying that we would be able to use that position to fix things. If we win only to turn around and whine about the limitations of our position, real though they might be, we will doom ourselves to obsolescence. Socialists are held to a higher standard, and if we fail to deliver, it will not go unnoticed by either our enemies or our erstwhile supporters.

A democratic socialist President without a lot of organizational power behind her and a lot of individual willpower would be set up for failure from the start. That failure would be very public, and a narrative would be crafted about DSA and its ideas from which it would be difficult to escape. The Cold War cloud over socialism has finally started to lift, but carelessness with its reputation might bring back the shadow of anti-communism darker than ever. This situation can have deadly consequences, which brings us to our third assumption.

Assumption 3: An AOC Presidency would avert fascism

Sarkozy mentions it in only one line, describing the dystopian future that would follow if DSA rejected AOC's Presidential campaign, but it is worth going into the prospect of "a downright fascist Republican [President]" who might take the seat left empty by AOC, making another electoral campaign extremely difficult if not impossible. This is very serious, and progressives of all factions would be right to worry about it. Rubio's threat combined with recent law enforcement actions against non-violent anarchists have made this a real fear.

If fascism is indeed imminent, DSA needs to be preparing to protect our physical survival. We should be organizing and training ourselves for armed self-defense, preparing safehouses, fostering connections to people who can hide us or smuggle us out of the country. In short, we should be acting in total opposition to direct instructions from NYC-DSA's leadership in 2025, going in a direction which I think the AOC for President boosters might find objectionable.

However, I am of the opinion that this lethal state crackdown is not likely to materialize within the next couple of years. Trump's attempts at a counter-revolutionary terror have had one or two false starts, and the Rubio memorandum will probably be another. Whether it is due to the administration's unpopularity, America's federalism, or the unworkable corruption and incompetence of everyone at the top, Trump's government seems incapable of mass repression. There will likely be voter suppression or interference in the midterms and the 2028 Presidential election, but it does not seem like elections will be canceled outright or that leftists will be arrested en masse.

I know Sarkozy has a similar perspective, or else he would not be participating in this conversation about Presidential campaigns. Therefore, since both of us are writing about the 2028 election rather than preparing to evade the authorities, this article will proceed with the understanding that we more or less agree that DSA will not be completely proscribed before the next election. When we talk about fascism as a potential reason to elect AOC, we must then be exclusively talking about preventing the next Republican Presidency.

Would President Vance or (God forbid) Trump 3.0 be so much more fascist than the current situation? That is hard to say, but if we are talking about combating fascism long term, just putting a non-fascist in the Oval Office is not a fix. Students of history may remember that Joe Biden was once elected President, and the result was not the prevention of fascism. The damage went unrepaired, the masses' resentment only got worse, and Trump was elected a second time. He has already done more damage than his first term, as the people around him had four years to stir up anger and carefully plan out how to use Trump as a vehicle for oligarchic power. In other words, fascism keeps growing in the background, preparing to take power after the liberal project is once again rejected. AOC may be more socially progressive than Biden, but there is no reason at all to believe that her policies would be so much more effective at attacking either the economic roots of fascism, nor has she promised to destroy its organizations and financial backers. The “lesser evil” or "seat warmer" strategy of anti-fascism has decisively failed, and that is essentially the argument which is being advanced here.

As for better organizing potential under AOC than a fascist or neoliberal, I do not think this should be taken for granted either. It is not at all clear what she would actually be doing that would make things easier for us to organize. If we have any specific ideas for what a democratic socialist President should do to build union power and socialist organizations, we should make those policies a condition for her endorsement. Otherwise we should assume that the Biden-era stagnation of socialism will be amplified rather than averted, while the far right again regroups in the background. Objectively, DSA's two greatest explosions of recruitment and electoral success happened under Trump's two terms. To be clear, a Republican Presidency is dangerous and should be strenuously avoided, but that fact pokes a massive hole in the theory that a less right-wing President translates directly into better organizing.

Assumption 4: Opposition to liberalism is "Purity Politics"

The last assumption is not an assumption about political conditions, but about the "Just Say No" argument itself, or perhaps arguments from DSA's left faction in general. The framing of Sarkozy's argument is very familiar: everyone involved wants progress, but the radicals are prioritizing moral purity over pragmatism. We hear this when the DSA's right flank debates its left just as we hear it when liberal Democrats debate socialists, and in both cases it obscures the real terms of the debate. In the "Just Say No" article, I deliberately avoided making any moral case against AOC. Every concern raised in this article and the one which preceded it was strategic, yet Sarkozy still insists that the left wants to sacrifice DSA's prospects at the altar of "principled moralism," or worse, a defense of the purity of Marxism as a "subculture."

This accusation has little to do with the actual argument being made and quite a lot to do with the desire to avoid a debate on strategic terms. By casting only one side as pragmatic, the other as moralistic, the former can win the strategic argument by default. However, as we saw with the Clinton campaign, the Biden Presidency, and the Harris campaign, the “pragmatists” often fail to get results. Meanwhile, the longshot Mamdani campaign, initially decried by many progressives as ultra-left (I remember distinctly hearing that Brad Lander was clearly the only sensible choice), served as the tip of the spear for the current DSA primary blitz.

Because we are both making strategic arguments, readers should compare them on those terms. DSA's grand strategy is to win sufficient electoral power with which to carry out a socialist transformation of American society. Both Sarkozy and I have agreed that the Presidency alone will not be sufficient to do this, so the 2028 Presidential election can only be a means to that end. Sarkozy believes that AOC's Presidency would be a great success, imperfect but generally very progressive, and the American electorate would be so pleased with us that they would let us have another turn in the White House as soon as possible with an even larger mandate. My argument, as laid out in both of the two relevant articles, is that a President AOC with DSA’s endorsement but no accountability to its program will not be willing or able to do what it takes to have a "successful" socialist Presidency, thus fatally discrediting the movement when she flounders. Hopefully the evidence already provided makes it clear which of the two futures is more likely.

This is not a case for abstinence from electoral politics, or even from contesting the Presidency. On the contrary, in a Presidential system like the USA’s there is no democratic road to socialism that does not run through the White House. However, we should have no illusions about what we would be getting ourselves into. When an anti-slavery candidate took the American Presidency in 1860, the slave owners immediately started a preemptive counter-revolution. More recently, when a socialist President was elected in Chile in 1973, he was murdered in a right-wing coup. This is no game, and we would need to carefully prepare for the resistance which we would face.

What would it take to have a successful socialist Presidency, then? At a minimum, it would require a decisive legislative majority to push through her decisions. To have a majority that we can actually rely upon, we need some level of accountability. Or, to phrase it another way, we need a measure of party discipline over our elected officials. Once again, this is not political puritanism; this is a general necessity in politics. There is a reason why the "Just Say No" article uses the Democratic Party as an example of discipline and not the Bolsheviks.

Contrary to Sarkozy's assumption of my true motivations, I do not believe DSA can or should be any kind of Leninist vanguard in the foreseeable future (unless we are calling Chuck Schumer a Leninist). DSA's strength is its pluralism, and any attempt to enforce the rigidity of an underground vanguard organization will reduce it to the level of a sect. However, there are forms of political organization other than communist vanguard sects and Democrat-aligned activist groups. There are also electorally viable American political parties, and this is what DSA must become in order to win.

When we get a candidate elected, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, they are subjected to pressure from their actual party, the Democrats. The power the Democratic establishment wields over its politicians is considerable, and they use it with precision to block progressive legislation while protecting their reputation. As argued in “Just Say No,” even an ideologically committed delegate benefits from some countervailing pressure, let alone a fairly untrustworthy one like AOC. The pressure coming from our own organization needs to be greater than that of the DNC, or else we are just electing Democrats at the end of the day.

If the DSA elects AOC President without any way to exert its influence afterward we stand to reap none of the benefits but inherit all of the costs. The last thing we need is a public figure representing us on the global stage carrying out establishment policies which are unpopular across the board and totally ill-suited to the current moment. To avoid this, we first need to create mechanisms for holding DSA electeds accountable to the organization (I was sincerely glad to see that Sarkozy agreed on this point), and we need to use them. Politicians need to know that if they break their obligations to DSA, they cannot rely upon DSA's considerable organizing network or media influence in their next election. Then, frankly, we need a Presidential candidate who is personally more loyal to democratic socialism than to the Democratic Party. This would have to be a "cadre candidate," like Mamdani. If we cannot do any of this yet, we need to be thinking and discussing how to get there. Rushing ahead with a force unequal to the task simply because we can rather than because it advances our plans is not common sense strategy; it is the absence of strategy.