************* The Interview ************* Anthony P. Teso
David Remnick sat down with the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and asked her, in a dozen different ways, what her organization would actually do. 1 ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fn-1 ) Megan Romer answered him. She has positions, she states them on hostile ground without flinching, and she does not retreat into the fog that most of the left's spokespeople reach for when a serious interviewer starts pressing. She never produced any account of how a position binds anybody, because there is nothing there to produce. Nothing in that reflects badly on her preparation. She was giving an accurate account of the organization, and she is better placed than anyone to give one. She gets a good deal, right? Romer defines class by relation to capital: do you earn a paycheck, or do you live off other people's labor and off rent from property you own? Remnick hands her the hard case, the dentist, and she applies the criterion instead of dropping it, distinguishing the dentist who sells her labor to a corporation from the dentist who owns the practice. She volunteers that gig work is genuinely unsettled and that socialists are arguing about it, which is true and which she was free to conceal. Then Remnick reads her the definition attributed to the mayor of New York, which defines the working class as everyone earning under a million dollars a year, and gives her every opening to smooth it over. She says flatly that this is not how she would define the class. That is a materialist definition, held without apology, by the co-chair of an organization she puts at 129,000 members. It is better than what DSA's best-known elected member is reported to have said. She is also right about 2024 and right on principle rather than on arithmetic. She sat on the National Political Committee for the vote on the Harris statement and defends the outcome on grounds of independence, not on grounds of whether the endorsement would have moved votes. Pressed on whether social democratic vocabulary would sell better, she declines the trade: the goal is working-class control, not a gentler version of the present arrangement. Anyone who has watched socialists in this country talk themselves into the lesser evil while insisting they are doing something else should recognize how rare that is. The trouble starts every time Remnick asks what follows. ------------------------------ Everything routed to procedure ------------------------------ Tax the hell out of millionaires. At what rate, above what threshold, on what base? The answer is that this is democracy and that the organization would first have to work out what it needs to fund. Would the terms on offer at Camp David have satisfied DSA? She would need to look at the specifics. Who arbitrates the organization's positions? She dismisses it, saying no true arbiter exists or ever will. The closest thing is the convention, which meets every two years. Her defenders will read that last answer charitably, and they are entitled to. She is saying that no individual speaks for a democratic organization. That is true; it is not a dodge, and she goes on to name the body that does decide instead of leaving the question hanging. So grant it, and look at what she has granted along with it. The sovereign assembles once every two years. Between sessions there is a National Political Committee, and as it happens, this same interview tells us what an NPC decision is worth. ----------------------- What the sanction costs ----------------------- Remnick puts the sequence to her directly. In 2024 the NPC withdrew DSA's endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her support for a House resolution on antisemitism, and her local chapter stood by her anyway. 2 ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fn-2 ) Romer does not contest any of it. She calls the episode complicated and inter-DSA bureaucratic, which is fair enough, though "bureaucratic" is doing more work in that sentence than she wants it to. Disendorsement is the heaviest penalty DSA can impose on anyone. It did not cost the seat. It did not cost the chapter, which simply declined to go along. It did not cost the national platform. Nor did it cost her standing inside DSA as the presidential question everyone is waiting on. We know that because Romer raises the name herself later on, when Remnick turns to 2028, and calls that candidacy the big question. So the heaviest thing DSA can do to an errant officeholder is stop lending her its volunteers, which is less a punishment than a way of leaving the field. What would amount to discipline here is not mysterious. Recall by the body that nominated, available at any time and not only when renomination comes around. A salary pegged to the average wage of the workers represented, with the balance returned. A fraction that meets, decides, and binds, whose members vote the way the fraction voted or go elsewhere. 3 ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fn-3 ) None of the three exists in DSA. I am not claiming these devices manufacture virtue; the Commune's own delegates were nobody's saints, and a fraction can be captured like anything else. The claim is smaller: they make an officeholder's tenure conditional on something besides her own read of what the moment requires. --------------------------- What actually changes hands --------------------------- The most useful thing she says all hour is her account of what an endorsement is. She rejects the suggestion that it amounts to a rubber stamp and explains what it means instead: the organization turns its people out onto the doors and the phones and runs a real voter operation. She is right, and the definition only needs finishing. An endorsement transfers organized volunteer labor from the membership to the candidate. That is one direction. Nothing travels the other way that binds anyone to anything. No mandate, no recall, no wage discipline, no obligation running from the officeholder back to the body whose members knocked the doors. The Khanna exchange finishes it for her. Asked whether Ro Khanna is too wealthy for DSA, Romer allows that some members would endorse a progressive who is not a socialist, that the question would be settled democratically, and that if it were settled that way, she would knock on doors for Khanna, absolutely. There is discipline in that sentence. It just runs the wrong way. The member is bound by the convention and will canvass accordingly, on her own time, in the rain. The officeholder is bound by nothing at all. Obligation runs downward onto the volunteer and stops before it reaches the candidate, which is the exact inversion of the arrangement Draper spent his life describing a situation where the mandate constrains the representative and the organization exists in order to enforce it. -------------------------------------- A sovereign that meets every two years -------------------------------------- As a form of government, the arrangement is peculiar. The sovereign assembles biennially. Between sessions there is an NPC that can withdraw an endorsement and chapters that can decline to honor the withdrawal, which is a sovereign whose writ does not reach its own subdivisions. Resolutions carried at a convention have the standing of resolutions: they record what a majority of delegates believed in a room once. When the candidate elected on that line takes office and moderates, what the organization has available is criticism. This is why the line about infighting deserves more than a laugh. Romer says that what looks like a mess from outside is just democracy and that DSA is always happy to pick anything apart, offering a ruthless critique of all that exists, and she attributes the phrase correctly to Marx. 4 ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fn-4 ) But Marx demanded a criticism ruthless in two senses: unafraid of its own conclusions and unafraid of conflict with the powers that be. In DSA the first half thrives. Everything gets picked apart, at length, on every listserv I subscribe to. Nothing that gets picked apart is thereby altered, because criticism has no effect. The circulation of critique has taken the place of the power to compel, and members experience the substitute as participation. It feels like a great deal of politics. A party selects, mandates, and recalls. A micro-sect at least binds its members to a program, a program being the only asset a sect has. 5 ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fn-5 ) DSA does neither. It supplies electoral labor at one end and generates positions at the other, with nothing joining the ends, and we do not yet have a good name for that. -------------- Why she joined -------------- One passage will not get clipped by anybody, and it does more work than the ones that will. Romer describes herself before 2018 as a Jon Stewart liberal who read the Sunday paper and the magazines. Clinton lost, she was horrified, and she went looking for the Democratic Party. What she found was a women's club where you listened to somebody talk about a book and left having decided nothing. She says she kept wondering who was actually doing anything. A friend, a folk musician, told her a DSA chapter was starting, and she went to the meeting on the strength of the friendship, warning him in advance that she was not going to say "comrade." And she stayed, because these people had plans to do something: lobby for a bill, run a community service project, anything. She adds, without embarrassment and with a dignity the interview does not pause over, that she never went to college and that most of the great socialist theorists wrote pamphlets for factory workers. All of that is to her credit, and none of it is naive. Read against the rest of the interview; it is also an indictment that she has not noticed she is delivering. Her complaint about the liberal women's club was that it deliberated and decided nothing that was binding. Twenty minutes later she describes an organization whose highest body deliberates every two years and produces positions that bind nobody who holds office in its name, and she describes this as its great virtue. That distance is what this series has been about. She is not fooled. The thing that recruited her, an organization that does something, is entirely real at the chapter level and thins out to nothing by the time it reaches anyone holding office in its name. ------------------------------ The objections worth answering ------------------------------ Someone will say the situation is unfair to Romer, that she is a co-chair and not a monarch and told Remnick as much. Agreed, and that happens to be the argument. An honest, quick, well-prepared co-chair, pressed hard by a good interviewer, could not produce a binding answer because the office does not contain one. Put any other NPC member in the chair, and the transcript reads the same. The better objection is that no organization can bind officeholders inside a two-party system while running candidates on a capitalist party's ballot line. This is serious, and it is half right. But the missing piece is the fraction, not the ballot line. Fractions have bound legislators inside far more hostile parliaments than ours, and the mechanism has never required independent ballot status. What it requires is that the organization be willing to lose the officeholder, and that is the condition DSA has not met. Romer explains why without meaning to when she accounts for the growth: up after Mamdani and up again after the congressional primaries. An organization that recruits through association with its officeholders will not discipline them. The membership figures do the disciplining, and they push the other way. Then there is the objection I take most seriously: that the positions are good, the direction is right, and the mechanisms can wait. Perhaps. But a position without an instrument is a preference, and preferences drift toward whatever their holders find convenient. The refusal to endorse Harris and the promise to canvass for Khanna are from the same organization less than two years apart. The form allowed the second to follow the first, and it will allow whatever follows next. -------------------- What would settle it -------------------- I have been told in the course of this series that I am describing a problem with no remedy and that I treat every accommodation as confirmation of a thesis I fixed in advance. Fair enough, so here is what would falsify it. Recall by the nominating body. Salary discipline at the average wage of those represented. A fraction whose decisions bind its members in office. Adopt those three and the argument collapses, and I will write the piece saying so under my own name. Until then, all of this is a sequence of impersonal failures requiring no personal explanations. AOC taking counsel from Pelosi; Mamdani keeping the commissioner; the co-chair pre-committing her canvassing to a congressman she does not claim is a socialist and whose wealth she does not dispute—these are not lapses of character in otherwise sound individuals. This is what this form of organization reliably produces, regardless of who happens to occupy it. The lines from this interview that will circulate are the ones about October 7, or open borders, or the police. 6 ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fn-6 ) The line that matters is the flat administrative statement that the closest thing DSA has to an arbiter is a body that convenes every two years. Offered as a description of internal democracy, it is accurate and creditable. Read as an inventory of instruments, it says that in the two years between conventions the organization can criticize its officeholders and can withhold its labor from them, and that beyond that it can do nothing at all. Romer was not conceding anything when she said it. She was describing her organization to a national audience, accurately, and expecting to be understood as describing a strength. --------- Footnotes --------- * David Remnick, interview with Megan Romer, [program and date to be supplied], transcript. All quotations and paraphrases of Romer are drawn from this transcript. ↩ ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fnref-1 ) * The account of the withdrawal and of the chapter's response is Remnick's, put to Romer in the interview. She accepts it but does not independently confirm it, and the argument here should not rest on her silence. A citation is to be supplied for the date of the NPC decision, the text of the House resolution at issue, and the chapter's stated position. ↩ ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fnref-2 ) * On recall and on the payment of public servants at workmen's wages, see Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), in Marx and Engels: Selected Works. On the socialist officeholder as an agent of an organization rather than an independent tribune, see Hal Draper, "Toward a New Beginning: On Another Road" (1971) and "Anatomy of the Micro-Sect" (1973). ↩ ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fnref-3 ) * Marx to Arnold Ruge, written September 1843, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844): the demand for a ruthless criticism of all existing conditions, ruthless in the sense that it fears neither its own results nor conflict with the powers that be. Romer's usage keeps the first clause and drops the second. ↩ ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fnref-4 ) * Draper, "Anatomy of the Micro-Sect." The typology and its application to DSA are developed in earlier installments of this series, particularly "The Apparatus and Its Discipline" and "The Invitation and Its Chair." ↩ ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fnref-5 ) * The interview's campist material on Cuba, on Ukraine and NATO expansion, and on the substitution of diplomacy for any account of the class character of the states involved is a separate problem with the same formal root and is treated elsewhere. ↩ ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_3351431748851477963_user-content-fnref-6 ) -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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