DSA member Peter Moody looks over DSA’s electoral strategy and its current application, specifically in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign, arguing that the task of making candidates accountable to the organization is far from complete.
The Democratic Socialists of America seems poised to have two members in the next sitting of the House of Representatives- albeit elected on the Democratic Party ballot line- which would be historic for both DSA and the representation of self-described socialists in Congress generally.
This would also be notable in terms of the group’s electoral strategy, as these candidates are well-known as members of DSA, and one of the candidates in particular- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez- has been endorsed by the national organization and received material support from it; this has also been true to varying degrees for a number of candidates for state and local office.1 This represents a shift for the organization- likely brought on in part by the ‘successful loss’ of the Bernie Sanders campaign, which helped start the ball rolling in terms of membership to get DSA to its current claimed figure of 50,000.
Previous DSA interventions in elections can probably be best described as uneven. While it is best known on the left for promoting a strategy of ‘realigning’ the Democrats- working with trade union leaders, left liberals and progressive social movements to transform the party into a social democratic formation- its official stance has historically been one of agnosticism between explicit realignment and more tentative support for building some sort of independent political formation. In practice, however, DSA has given at least tacit support to the Democrats and generally looked askance at electoral efforts to the party’s left- whether in the form of non-socialist radicals like the Greens, or explicitly socialist campaigns. Nevertheless, such efforts were indeed tacit: little energy or organizational resources were spent promoting Democratic candidates. Even when DSA had elected officials previously (including former Democratic member of Congress Ron Dellums), such candidates went largely unremarked, the unspoken logic behind such a stance is that socialism was saddled with too much baggage to be electorally popular outside of some minor-edge cases, and the duty of socialists was to act as the best builders of the ‘broad, progressive’ camp in order to either promote reforms or at least keep conservatives from winning office and ‘making things worse’.
In a post-Sanders political environment, however, things have changed in DSA’s estimation. Now that some conception of socialism has entered into the wider American consciousness as a positive, the group has taken a much more proactive approach of supporting particular candidates who are DSA members. By and large, the candidates it supports are still running on the Democratic Party ballot line, but are evaluated against a document passed by DSA’s national convention last August- now the national organizations’ priority is given to supporting ‘open socialist candidates’. Furthermore, the convention document begins to flesh out a commitment to “building a mass socialist political formation in the United States” and speaks of developing candidates (and by extension, elected officials) who are “accountable to DSA’s political agenda and who can serve as the base for increasingly assertive and widespread independent socialist electoral activity in the coming years”.
The accountability question is a vital one. In an electoral strategy document adopted by DSA’s national political committee earlier this year, which fleshes out the principles adopted at the August convention, the desire to hold candidates running with DSA endorsement accountable to the politics and platform of the organization runs strongly throughout. In particular, the document correctly notes some of the weaknesses of DSA’s earlier electoral efforts. Under the old method, the resources of DSA largely existed as campaign fodder, subordinate to the candidate running; once elected, said candidate possesses not only access to elected office but also the power of incumbency and but all of the resources (staff, skills, experience, a donor list) required to run a successful campaign and stay in office. On the other hand, the organization has little leverage over the candidate and little to show for the work of its volunteers.
The piece goes on to argue- again, correctly- that this model had the practical effect of subordinating the broader organization to the elected official, rather than the other way round: in order to retain association with the elected official they had to be provided with resources and loyal support, while criticism of their actions had to be either muted or silenced completely. With such an arrangement, the elected official then had the freedom to pursue whatever agenda best suited their own political career, and DSA either needed to stop supporting said official- thereby losing the much-coveted access that they were aiming for by supporting them in the first place- or provide left cover for what may have ended up being an increasingly centrist or right-wing agenda, undermining the very politics that a socialist organization is supposedly fighting for.
Thus, from the perspective of rhetoric, DSA’s electoral strategy document represents an encouraging, if hesitant, step forward. Unfortunately, practical proposals for how candidate accountability is to be achieved are rather thin on the ground, which leads to a de facto slide towards the previous model of jockeying for candidate access, while committing greater energy and resources. This is compounded by DSA’s rather loose political and organizational nature, which purports to place local initiative and the free expression of members at the center of its practice. This is largely positive when it means the rank and file of the organization have the ability to self-manage their own activity, but can also mean that candidates and electoral work can still be treated in the same localist approach.
This slippage has already started in the case of DSA’s highest-profile candidate- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While she prominently featured her DSA support during her campaign for the Democratic nomination (and still calls herself a “democratic socialist” on her website), her Twitter profile was largely scrubbed of DSA content after the primary, and DSA endorsement now only exists on her website as one among a constellation of progressive and left-liberal groups also supporting her campaign – as opposed to the prominent place that one would hope for the organization of which she is a member and supposed representative (and to which- again hopefully- she is accountable). Moreover, Ocasio-Cortez has made public statements pitching herself as a loyal Democrat, seeking to support all party nominees regardless of their actual politics. This has led the New York City chapter of DSA to publicly criticize (if perhaps rather mildly) her position. It is positive that this unconditional Democratic Party loyalty is not going unchallenged, but is yet another sign that any process of developing candidate accountability to DSA itself has a long way to go.
A version of this article originally appeared in Issue 1228 of the Weekly Worker, the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
