An awful lot has been written on whether NYC-DSA should endorse AOC. I am unfortunately adding to the pile with my own perspective as a rank-and-file member of NYC-DSA. The primary contradiction I see with AOC is not whether she is sufficiently committed to Palestinian liberation, labor or housing, it’s whether she’s sufficiently committed to DSA. The NYC-DSA electoral program is reasonably successful at getting socialists into office, that much is true. But it hasn’t been terribly successful at party building, which is the number one task facing the Left today. Regardless of what kind of electoral strategy you subscribe to—dirty break, clean break, party surrogate, etc.—we require electeds who are committed to DSA above their commitments to the bourgeois.

That is not the case for AOC: she has not committed to cross-endorsing our electoral endorsements, she has not committed to voting as a bloc with our other DSA electeds as part of a Socialists in Office caucus, and she does not believe that DSA is her political home. Why then should we endorse her? It’s tempting to take a shortcut, but deference to elected officials, even popular ones like AOC, is not how we build an effective party.

Rob R.