The DSA Repeats itself
It’s 2025 (2017), and after a disastrous election campaign in which Kamala Harris (Hilary Clinton) lost to Donald Trump, a young upstart political candidate running for Mayor of (Congressional representative of) New York City has begun their campaign, capturing the hearts of young progressives around the country. After a series of ICE raids and a spate of climate-change induced flooding in Texas, the young socialist candidate who they said could never be mayor (Congresswoman) wins the election.
Have we not seen this movie before?
AOC began her campaign in 2017 and won her seat in New York in 2018. She ran against Joe Crowley. Crowley was a celebrated senior Democrat in the Congressional Caucus who was a top fundraiser with tons of lobbyist connections – exactly the kind of person the party loves. Crowley was also raising massive amounts of cash from a group of lawyers who helped evict people in his own Congressional district from their homes. These lawyers appeared in front of judges who, as chairman of his county’s Democratic Committee, Crowley helped pick. Crowley effectively helped the Democratic party fundraise off of the eviction process for his own constituents.
Taking down grandees like Crowley was exactly the point of AOC’s campaign – running against a corrupt Democratic party machine that actively hurt its own supporters to the benefit of its rich fundraisers. However, after Cortez won her primary and won that Congressional seat, we heard not a peep about this any further from then on out. Congresswoman Cortez did not pursue the corrupt leadership of the Democratic party after she was safely ensconced in the House Chambers.
Cortez was elected to the same party that Crowley belonged to, and she had to work with the Democrats. She made concession after concession to the House Democratic Leadership, even defending Kamala Harris’s abysmal record on the Gaza genocide, but they did not return the favor with prestigious committee seats.
AOC may have taken down Crowley but she was, at the end of the day, also a Democrat. The truth hurts.
Zohran Mamdani is also a DSA member who won a primary against a Democratic establishment that didn’t want him. Why do we expect this to go any differently? Zohran promises to freeze the rent on rent-controlled apartments.
The last DSA mayor of New York City, David Dinkins, similarly promised to freeze commercial rents, i.e., the rents that small businesses pay to lease their space. Did he manage to follow through on this? He did not. His failure is vividly echoed by every ubiquitous Duane Reade, Chase Bank, and other large corporate chains that’ve shoved aside smaller previous tenants. The neighborhood deli, dry cleaner, electronics repair shop, or other small retail or service storefront is now an endangered species. This didn’t slow down after Dinkins – it accelerated.
Giuliani is portrayed as a massive sea change for a traditionally liberal city, especially when it came to policing. Not so. The big surge in policing in NYC began under Dinkins, who increased the size of the NYPD before Giuliani came in and did this at an even faster rate. The DSA mayor was arguably, in several ways, a neoliberal pioneer.
Cuomo, a consummate scumbag who helped kill thousands of old people during the Covid pandemic, and Adams, NYC’s bizarre lounge lizard mayor who doesn’t even live in the city and takes foreign bribes to facilitate shoddy construction, screech about Zohran being a dangerous far-left ideologue who cannot be allowed to run the city. Curtis Sliwa, crazy Republican cat-man and political weirdo who founded the Guardian Angels back in the 1980s, has a longer institutional memory. He knows that New York City has had socialist and even communist officials in the past and averred, publicly, that electing another one like Mamdani would not be the end of the world. The Democrats Cuomo and Adams inveigh against Mamdani’s criticism of Israel, and Kirsten Gillibrand even calls him a jihadi! Sliwa, the Republican, says that such Islamophobic attacks against Mamdani should be off the table.
The DSA’s strategy of “pushing the Democrats left” is completely bizarre in a city where so-called moderate Democrats are more right-wing than the Republican candidate. It doesn’t matter what fancy theoretical trappings are draped over this lemon – clean break, dirty break, Spencer Ackerman’s surrogate party strategy, yes we get it you went to college – it all amounts to trying to take over the Democratic party or base, and using it by pushing that pre-existing apparatus left.
Moderate is a slippery term, but let’s talk about the people we call “moderates.” The fact is that “moderate” Democrats are simply right-wing now, more right wing than some “moderate” Republicans like Sliwa. They are, like Hilary Clinton did in 2008, all for diversity, equity, and inclusion, until a person of color threatens their precious political career, and then, of course, the gloves come off and they vomit out vile racist stereotypes in prodigious quantities. The Democrats’ own house newspaper, the New York Times, (think of it as doing for mainstream Democrats what Jacobin does for DSA members) even republished a hacked school report from a Nazi – a Nazi – that showed something unflattering from Mamdani’s college applcation when he was a teenager. With Gilibrand calling him a jihdai and Cuomo refusing to even pronounce his name right, these are not strange bedfellows at all.
The hipster left of the DSA likes to crow about how corrupt and desperate the Democratic establishment and New York Times are being in the face of their movement. But here’s the thing: they want to join the Democratic party!!! Mamdani, if successful, would be elected as a Democrat, by, mostly, Democratic voters. Like Dinkins, he would face forces that would push him irrevocably rightward until he was possibly replaced, in his re-election bid, by the real thing (ie, a proto-fascist King of The Pig People like Giuliani).
If the progressive wing of the Democratic Party were so serious about their political program, they would split and form their own political party. Mamdani, if he’s serious about his socialist principles, would, on winning the race, declare that he was leaving the party that actively attacked him and forming a new workers’ party in the United States. Mamdani, if he’s serious even about defending his own self-respect, would refuse to work with the same “progressive” wine mom ghouls who called him a jihadi during his run for mayor.
That’s not going to happen. Mamdani is already meeting with Democratic members of Congress and their strategists for “advice” in winning this election. Just like AOC not talking about Crowley’s vile political machine immediately after winning the primary and from there on out, Mamdani is going to drop any mention of the Islamophobia he faced from his own party during the primary. The well was poisoned from the start in 2018, and it will be in 2025. Anyone who is still getting “disappointed” by these DSA democrats in 2025 has shown that they have the attention span of a goldfish.
The strategy of “pushing the Democrats left” the same way that the Tea Party pushed the GOP right in the early 2010s will never, ever work. The Democratic Party is a massive fly trap for progressive movements, and it serves its function well. New York elected a cop mayor immediately after the George Floyd riots of 2020. The Democratic party chose the most anti-single payer candidate as their nominee in the middle of a fucking pandemic. Need I go on?? The reaction inside the Democratic Party always exceeds, by a massive margin, the initial progressive action that set it off in the first place.
Now, with the Democrats having gotten the everloving shit kicked out of them in 2024, the party has responded to AOC and Bernie’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour with their astroturfed 50501 organization and its “No Kings” protests. Oligarchs have always disliked kings – they don’t like the competition. It was English aristocrats, not English peasants, who forced the King to sign the Magna Carta in the middle ages, limiting his own power and enumerating the various powers that Parliament should have. I’m sorry, but how the fuck is any of this leading us to socialism?
We need real revolutionary organizations to, in fact, fight oligarchy. And if we want to do this electorally, we’re going to need a new party. Not a surrogate party, not a dirty break. I’m talking real Whigs-and-Republicans shit here. The early Trump administration, the first time around, was great for DSA, for a while. But the Trump era is a decade old, now. Let’s fucking move on already.