It's interesting that DSA now advocates "a grassroots, organized
Left."[*] It seems a bit late for the DSA to change its focus -- if in
fact it is doing so. Just like DSOC, the DSA has never been
"grassroots" in orientation. Instead, the focus was and is on
electoral politics, specifically the Democratic Party. DSOC arose when
Michael Harrington's "realignment caucus" left the SP-USA pushing his
idea of "realignment" of the two hegemonic political parties. The idea
was that the DSOC/DSA could push or steer the DP to become a social
democratic party, especially if it could get rid of those darned
Dixiecrats.
To be charitable, Harrington was prescient: realignment has occurred.
The GOP took the Dixiecrats from the DP and has become an
ideologically-consistent machine. The DP has also become more
ideologically consistent and has leaned in the "social-democratic"
direction.
The problem is that it wasn't Michael Harrington and DSOC/DSA which
caused realignment. To a much much greater extent, it was Richard
Nixon, using his "Southern strategy." This made the GOP much more
powerful while shifting much further to "the right," e.g., by
rejecting abortion rights and other causes that the extinct species of
"moderate Republicans" such as Nelson Rockefeller favored. The
clarification and increasing rigidity of Party Lines -- the dreaded
political polarization that pundits condemn -- also resulted from the
creation (by incumbents) of more and more incumbent-friendly
districts. This has meant that the party primaries, not the general
elections, have tended to decide who's in office, which encourages
obedience to the Line. (The GOP is currently almost a
"Marxist-Leninist" party, with a Party Line ("talking points") that
get passed down to the rank-and-file members from an informal central
committee while politicians who disagree with the Line are punished.
The DP is much more chaotic internally, allowing caucuses such as the
DSA to exist until they get in the way of politicians' ambitions.)
That polarization may be nice in some ways, but it's not exactly
democratic. In fact, many would say that it "endangers" democracy. The
flow of big money into US politics has likely helped with this process
of realignment, with different factions of the capitalist class
backing different major parties.
Worse, there's an entire dimension that the DSOC/DSA realignment focus
ignored. The DSOC ignored grass roots (something that Harrington left
to the spurned Students for a Democratic Society and similar
organizations to deal with). The focus was on "the left wing of the
possible" (Harrington), i.e., trying to make the best possible
compromise for the left given the current balance of political and
economic power within one of the two duopoly parties. But the
globalization of US capitalism and the neoliberal policy revolution of
1979 and after pushed that balance far to the right. Perhaps it
couldn't have been done, but the DSA never even tried to prevent that
change. In fact, it supported folks like Jimmy Carter, who started the
neoliberal ball rolling.
The changing political economy meant that for purely economic issues
such as protecting working-class living standards, the DP's political
backbone went away. US organized labor has been totally decimated
outside of the crisis-ridden and shrinking government sector. Without
this kind of basis, the DP could hardly be social democratic in the
traditional sense of the phrase. Instead, the DP leans toward being
technocratic and pro-big business (like Obama) while emphasizing those
social issues where there is still a base of sorts. (The GOP, on the
other hand, is less technocratic and more likely to appoint
incompetents (such as George W. Bush) and is pro-small business, while
emphasizing right-wing causes (anti-abortion rights, etc.) )
The left wing of the UAW's officialdom -- and later people like the
Machinists' William Winpisinger -- was in some ways the political
backbone of the DSA, at least as far its connection with the working
class is concerned. With the fading of such unions -- and the rise of
the more corporate-style unionism of the SEIU's Andy Stern -- means
that the DSA is likely nothing but a caucus within the DP these days.
It may be progressive about the concerns of communities of color,
feminists, the LGBTQ community, environmentalists and peace
activists, but their analysis -- emphasizing the far-Right threat to
democracy -- is missing a lot, i.e., the way that both the GOP and DP
have empowered the Right and how the world has changed, due to
globalization. It would be interesting to see how serious DSA's
commitment is to grass-roots politics.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 10:38 AM, c b <[email protected]> wrote:
> “Democracy Endangered:
> DSA’s Strategy for the 2012
> Elections and Beyond”
> The National Political Committee
> of Democratic Socialists of America
>
> I. The Threat of Right-Wing Hegemony
> The 2012 election poses an extreme challenge to the
> future prospects for democracy in the United States.
> This threat demands the focused attention of the broad
> Left – the labor movement, communities of color, feminists,
> the LGBTQ community, environmentalists and
> peace activists. The task for the U.S. Left is two-fold.
> First, we must defeat the far-Right threat to democracy.
> Second, we need to build a grassroots, organized Left
> capable of fighting the corporate interests which dominate
> the leadership of both major political parties.
>
> The Left confronts a Republican Party thoroughly controlled
> by Right-wing forces that are determined to cement
> long-term control of the federal government and of
> the majority of states.....
[*] disclosure: In the early 1970s, I belonged to DSOC, the
predecessor organization to DSA, which itself had come out of the
Socialist Party-USA (which I also belonged to). I was never a member
of the DSA. I was also a member of the New American Movement until the
DSOC absorbed it and it became part of the DSA. During my years in SP
& DSOC, I was more sympathetic to the "Debs caucus" of Wisconsin
socialists (which differed from the later Debs caucus) because that
caucus was more strongly anti-War.
--
Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at
least you should know the nature of that evil.
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