The past decade of US political life has been defined by Bernie Sanders’ two presidential runs. By 2016, Sanders had spent almost forty years developing a political infrastructure independent of the Democratic Party. The patient organization of Sanders and his circle paid off: his insurgent campaign was capable of opening an enormous rift within the Democratic Party’s electoral base and allowed for the rapid emergence of a left opposition. Sanders’ self-identification as a “democratic socialist” returned the socialist idea to the mainstream of US political life for the first time in decades. The “democratic socialist” label led to a resurgence of interest in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which saw massive membership growth, becoming the largest socialist organization the United States had seen in half a century. It was DSA that became the primary vehicle of the left opposition that formed in the wake of Sanders’ historic political revolt and the organization went on to win a series of landmark electoral victories with openly socialist candidates.
In a Left long dominated by small, bureaucratic, and ineffective groups, the open, democratic culture of the DSA was able to sustain a socialist political life with a dynamism not seen in over a generation. DSA’s structural capacity to facilitate open debate over strategy, tactics, and program was key to its ability to take advantage of the insurgency and quickly outgrow its contemporaries in size, scale, and influence. However, the political moment opened by Sanders in 2016 is coming to an end, prompting the question of what has been accomplished over the past eight years, and what has yet to be done.
The main accomplishment of the “democratic socialist” movement has clearly been its successful unification of large swaths of the US Left under the umbrella of a single organization, the DSA. This is no small feat considering the Left has for decades been dominated by dozens of fragmented groups, only ever brought together within unwieldy movement coalitions. A second accomplishment, already mentioned above, has been its small, but rapid and significant, incursion into US electoral politics, sending half a dozen members to Congress and far more to state houses across the nation.
However, DSA has largely failed to move past these initial successes, which would have necessitated accomplishing two, interrelated goals: formalizing their initial electoral wins into a permanent left oppositional legislative bloc and building formal connections with sympathetic parts of the labor movement, the former being a prerequisite of the latter. In other words, to move beyond its first victories, DSA needed to formalize its electoral wins into actually existing, “democratic socialist” caucuses and begin to pursue relationships with trade unions based upon the promise of being the labor movement’s most aggressive representatives within state and federal legislatures. Genuine attempts to pursue objectives in line with these goals, such as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) with United Electricians (UE) and NYC-DSA’s Socialists In Office (SIO), have emerged, but only sporadically and far too late, occurring years after the initial insurgency began. They were also never articulated as constitutive parts of an overall strategic objective. The Squad, an informal group of congressional legislators that emerged out of the insurgency, remained just that: informal. There is no evidence that this was a part of a larger strategy of independent caucus formation, and, according to the representatives themselves, the idea of the Squad was more a creation of the mainstream media than the initiative of its members.1
The movement now finds itself in an incredibly precarious position. Having failed to formalize its electoral wins into a left oppositional bloc and rudderless without the figure of Sanders as a cohering force in presidential politics, the continuing existence of “democratic socialism” as a nominally independent force has largely been based on a single fact: the particular weaknesses of Joe Biden’s Democratic presidential administration. However, with Biden now successfully ousted from power by Democratic congressional leadership and heir apparent Kamala Harris quickly being shuffled into his place, pressure on the activist core of DSA to abandon the pursuit of Left independence and return to the strategy of “realignment” has increased exponentially.2 The Harris campaign immediately made a concerted effort to triangulate the left opposition in order to reincorporate the rank-and-file activist capacity lost to the Party by Sanders’ rebellion. And although the Harris campaign quickly tacked to the right in the weeks leading up to the first Harris-Trump debate, the pressure to return to the Party’s mainstream fold remains. Indeed, the failure to formalize an opposition at the level of the state and pull sympathetic parts of the labor movement into our orbit is what has left DSA so vulnerable to triangulation, as many of its activists can no longer envision a meaningful future as a part of an independent left within the Party now that Sanders has retreated and many of DSA’s legislative representatives are facing electoral defeat.
Rather than “realignment,” however, the current moment demands a clarification and formalization of the “dirty break,” which remains the most viable strategy for the US socialist Left today. Building a structurally independent left opposition within the Democratic Party continues to be the most practicable, immediate way forward towards the construction of a revolutionary socialist party in the US. But this necessitates an unbreakable commitment to structural independence and a total prohibition on the endorsement of capitalist politicians, which will always come with the threat of liquidating our movement. DSA must renew our struggle for a left opposition through study and experimentation, analyzing historic and contemporary examples of intra-Party insurgency and factional politics in order to better understand how to engage in building independent, ideologically socialist caucuses in state and federal legislatures with meaningful ties to the trade unions.3
To build a party, we must move forward towards independence. Any turn towards the old, discredited strategy of “realignment,” any endorsement of capitalist politicians attempting to triangulate our movement, is a step backwards.
-Christopher Carp
- Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim, “Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim On The Squad,” Deconstructed Podcast, December 1 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/12/01/deconstructed-podcast-the-squad-aoc-book/.
- “Realignment” refers to the previous strategic orientation of DSA, which saw as its main objective the transformation of the Democratic Party into something akin to a “reform” or “labor” party. In an article sympathetic to this position, Alexander Hernández correctly points out that DSA’s failure to produce a formal legislative bloc has led to a situation in which “realignment” remains the de facto strategy of the organization, despite it having rhetorically fallen out of favor. Unfortunately, Hernández highlights this truth in order to make a weak case for “realignment” as the only viable strategic vision for DSA, rather than as a basis for clarifying how to push forward with the “dirty break.” See: Alexander Hernánedez, “The Case for Realignment,” Socialist Forum (Fall 2022), https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2022/the-case-for-realignment/.
- Eric Blanc’s well-known 2017 Jacobin article on the “dirty break” contains an interesting, though underdeveloped, analysis of one such case, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. It should be pointed out, however, that, despite this article’s influence, DSA has done very little to emulate the FLP besides running candidates on another party’s ballot line. Although there have been a few sporadic experiments, mentioned above, there has not been a coordinated attempt to move beyond this first step. See: Eric Blanc, “The Ballot and the Break,” Jacobin, December 4 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/12/democratic-party-minnesota-farmer-labor-floyd-olson.