Once again, the election. It is always an election year, for some. Most recently, members of the DSA have been battling over the exact form that a presidential endorsement could take. It is all shadowboxing around an AOC run, again. Even though, as Rob R. pointed out months ago, none of the conditions for a candidate have been met. But some are enthused to breathe new life into the failures of the Bernie era, reborn.
That is no challenge to the determined. Revisionist articles by Geese magazine and Groundwork NPC members have attempted to paint a picture of a repentant AOC, who simply does not exist. They have imagined, through flights of fancy, an organization that has never weighed-in on a presidential run will be able to dictate the terms of her campaign from day one. These are contortions for the desperate. By this argument, Nielsen ratings determined the best television show and, as any prudent socialist knows, disciplined democratic centralists reform their politics to conform to the latest Gallup poll.
There is something else these maneuvers reveal about DSA’s reformist right—they are happy to manipulate capitalist public media to influence their own party, chiefly through threats of a split. NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo has provided fodder for Fox News articles through veiled public threats on X to withdraw his chapter’s funding from the national organization. With an attitude typical of the cultural capital of the Empire State, Gordillo finds it difficult to accept that his chapter is a significant, if minority, component of a larger project. It is short-sighted to imagine that an isolated New York chapter could survive long alone.
If the DSA claims to be serious about contending for power in the current US state formation, then long-term design is needed. The horizon is not 2028 but 2058. The organization has produced no prior method for intervening in the presidential process, aside from a raw straw poll. Now is the time to build this method, but it will not be fit for purpose by 2028. Those who now try to drag the organization screaming into the fray would be better served by a quiet lamentation over their own lack of foresight. It would be more dignified and more effective.
Every ill-planned foray into the empty halls of the federal enclave will break like water upon the rock of Gibraltar.
The Crocus
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