split-ticket.org has done this analysis for a few cycles now, and candidates with DSA affiliation have pretty consistently performed worse than expected. I’m sure they’ll do the analysis again this year.
Ah, but you see, if the DSA underperforms it is because of *false consciousness.*
There IS a secret love of socialism that even the general voters themselves don’t know they have. They will only realize it once we’ve heightened all the contradictions and imminentized all the eschatons.
It'll either be that or because "the establishment" undermined them because they're so afraid of real change. It still seems to be a non-negotiable position on the left to deny the results of the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and insist that Bernie Sanders was actually more popular and only lost because the race was actually rigged in some way (the fact that he got far fewer votes is almost never even acknowledged).
I had to go to an all day "training/indoctrination" madness to teach everyone to be less racist (without any prior notion or evidence that the individuals had ever acted racist). Seattle, of course. Anyway, the entire class was repeating over and over that if you don't think you're racist, that just shows you're much more racist than you know. Facts, you know. Sigh. As poorly a spent day as I'll ever have, including days where teenage me was dumped.
My guess is that “we are going to give you lots of free stuff and not raise your taxes” part of the DSA would over perform polls, though be bad governance.
Why do you call El-Sayed a "DSA candidate?" He's not a member of the DSA, and when asked explicitly about this by David Remnick, he said (paraphrasing from memory) "I'm not a socialist, I'm a capitalist. I believe in free markets." He talks about the benefits of free markets, and the only diss you could make against him in this arena is that he doesn't like 'monopolies,' which puts him in the same group as other familiar commies like Theodore Roosevelt.
You do refer to him several times in your post as a "DSA candidate." My main point is that just because he's endorsed by DSA doesn't mean he agrees with them on every important issue, and even in those areas where he does agree at a gross level, his position is often more nuanced than a typical DSA talking point.
I'm not arguing that DSA doesn't have some truly stupid positions, and many of these are pretty fundamental to what the DSA is. I'm just arguing that he isn't a DSA candidate in any real sense. I think he mainly gets crap for being critical of Israeli governments that talk about a 2 state solution, and then do their best (along with many Palestinians unfortunately) to prevent that from ever happening.
Sometimes, I need to use shorthand to keep the prose from being endlessly clunky. The first time I referred to him, I purposefully said "DSA-backed" -- I gave some thought as to whether the characterization was fair. I decided it is. I also made it clear that the candidates I'm talking about are El-Sayed and Hong, and, yes, later in the article I shorthanded them as the "DSA candidates".
If El-Sayed wins, the DSA are ABSOLUTELY going to claim that as proof of their theory. I mean, they're already treating his likely primary win that way. He can't be DSA if he wins and not DSA if he loses.
Do you apply the same test to Republican candidates, a great many of whom are “backed” by neo-Nazis, right-wing militia groups, and white supremacists? Do you refer to Trump as the “Nazi-backed Donald Trump”?
Yes, I would call any candidate who did rallies with Nazis and who emphasized their endorsements from prominent Nazis in their campaign literature “Nazi-backed”.
I particularly enjoy how that was clearly supposed to be some kind of devastating "gotcha!" trap question despite there being a screamingly obvious and easy response.
I don't care if the DSA takes credit if he wins. After all, *I'm* going to take credit if he wins for my brilliant defense of his candidacy here.
Look, DSA can claim credit, but if he only gets the votes that a DSA endorsement can deliver, he's going to be toast. The DSA is just not that important, except to some columnists for the Times who are desperate for something to write about that generates clicks.
Yeah, you're right, what an unreasonable request he made, for a potential guest of a show to go where the show is recorded. Which is something all of his guests manage to do, including Trump.
That was a huge unforced error. Other than Rogan's audience etc, last time I checked, there are a lot of voters in Texas. Go on Rogan, do a rally in Austin and then in Dallas. You know, like a candidate for political office would do.
Absolutely. Rogan has an average listener audience of eleven million people, many uncommitted, but she apparently found it more compelling to get to a rally in the middle of Michigan where she'd have an audience of 2,000 people, all of whom were already going to vote for her.
Harris is a crap politician. Someone like Bill Clinton in his day would have *relished* the opportunity to try to convert people to his viewpoint.
Thing is, Bill Clinton would have been *able* to, if not convert people to his viewpoint, then at least convince them that he was less scary/alien than Trump, because he could actually connect with the squishy middle.
Harris does not have that capability, and I think she knows that, which is why she did not appear on Joe Rogan. (There might have also been some disdain for his viewers, but the fact that it seems like she thought *Tim Walz* of all people was the guy to bring working-class men back to the Democratic party speaks of a profound disconnect with ordinary people.)
Not exactly a hugely unreasonable request though, especially for a politician already doing a lot of travel as part of a major cross-country political campaign.
Isn't this just mathematically true? If leftist candidates underperform, some centrist dems either stayed home or switched parties.
It's debatable whether a leftie dem is "entitled" to a centrist dem vote just because they got the dem nomination, but the complaint isn't too different from the post-2024 analysis that blames the Uncommitted movement for Harris losing. Dems losing often result in admonishments that people didn't "vote blue, no matter who".
I think the ratfucking claim is more about the idea that the DNC/Big Democrat/whoever deliberately and knowingly sabotages any leftish candidate in conscious service to corporate interests over policy or electoral outcomes, often as an organized conspiracy with news organizations and pundits as knowing collaborators. This is, for example, Freddie deBoer's theory of the Graham Platner case. Related to the "rotating villain" idea.
But this is very different from normie Dems just not voting (or whatever) because they're not buying what the DSA is selling. They might still be wrong (I think they usually would be), but it isn't the same thing as ratfucking.
Conservative PAC money finding its way into DSA campaign coffers in hopes of fielding unelectable candidates might fit better with the Nixonian concept of ratfucking.
It's a bit of a moving target as tactics that were once considered beyond the pale become SOP.
My point about corporate interests is that a lot of DSA types (and populists in general) take the view that more centrist/normie Democratic politicians "know" that populist/leftist policies will lead to better outcomes for the American people/the average person, and/or more electoral success...BUT that those centrists care most about ensuring that big corporations/the oligarchs/etc make as much money as possible...and the centrists care so much they will deliberately sabotage Dem-winnable elections to keep leftish Dems from sticking it to the corporations.
The accusations of ratfucking are pretty common among the Graham Platner fanbase I think.
Is there a candidate for folks who like some of the socialist policies but are repelled by others? Most people are not all in on any one candidate's platform. Pretending they are is the boosters jobs, so Klipperstein and Piker are out there, just peddling their trade. Yeah, some of us like the idea of Medicare for All, but how are you going to sell the notion of taxing people for it, and transitioning to it?
I live in Michigan. El-Sayed will win the Dem nomination. The Republican candidate is already preparing for that possibility, as is Trump, who is dropping the word "communist" around a lot already. The Republicans are practically salivating, because, no matter what else you say about them, they understand the majority of the American public much better than this iteration of Democrats do.
Agree. There's a big difference between "I like this policy" and "this policy is doable." Centrist Democrats probably would like everyone to have health insurance just like the DSA people do, but they realize it's not that simple. Unfortunately, a lot of voters do not.
Give everyone health insurance is fundamentally simple. Most countries in Europe do this via a government run health care system that works poorly. Give everyone good or better health insurance than they have? That's tough.
As a Wisconsinite my main concern isn’t so much that Hong will lose—I think it would be hard for even her to blow it in this environment—but that she’ll either cost us our shot at winning back the legislature or that we’ll win the trifecta but then we’ll waste time with pointless infighting and not accomplish anything in the narrow window we have.
Probably better to worry about the carry trade at this point. Or diesel rationing. I don't think Wisconsin elections are going to fix or help with either of those.
Their theory of victory is unfalsifiable. If they lose it’s “the establishment did everything to help the Republican” or “well, DSA candidate actually moderated too much/went MAGA on this thing,” just like how Kamala allegedly lost because she didn’t go fully anti-Israel. And if they win, even if it’s them getting dragged across the finish line, it’s “see - voters DO want socialism.”
Do closed party primary wins tell us that much about the nation or entire constituencies when they are often explained by who is able to most effectively inspire a very small group to turn out and vote for them without inspiring others to vote against them?
I'm sure this is a fool's errand, but I'm trying to parse the logic of the secret leftist majority Piker stated (and coincidentally, it's fitting that South Park was also referenced) and here's where I'm stuck: The South Park guys have said many times they hate Republicans but they really hate Democrats. But it seems DSA folks have the same formulation, which doesn't make sense to me since the Democrats at least share some of their values, maybe not as stridently, but they are closer ideological fellow travelers to Democrats than they are to Republicans.
Wouldn't it make much more sense, as a long-term project, for DSA people to infiltrate the GOP and destroy that party to achieve their political aims rather than destroy the DNC? They're lying anyway when they say they just want healthcare, they should keep up the lies and take up moderate positions on campaign trails and then just vote as radicals.
I think it’s part hippie fantasy (“the people are behind us!”) and partly what they know they need to say because they know “you’re helping Trump” is a potent argument.
I don't think it's logical, but I think it's because they see democrats as rivals while republicans are more of a "far group" (to use Scott Alexander's term) that they are neutral toward emotionally. They have more contact with democrats and tend to compete with them for status and in primaries. Through this competition they have likely come to see democrats as the enemy even though it doesn't really make sense.
If they started their own party it would get little support. On some level they might realize this even though they claim most people agree with them.
Their real opposition is often democrats. They have more conflicts with their rivals in their own party than with republicans even though they have more in common with mainstream democrats.
To be clear, I'm not defending them, I don't like them either. I'm just trying to understand something that seems puzzling on the surface.
I'd say it arguably boils down to a combination of the horseshoe theory and the theory of the narcissism of small differences.
The former suggests that rather than, say, politics being a simple left-right straight line axis, the line is actually a curved gradient where the extremes, despite their differing political positions, are actually closer to each other in terms of fundamentals than they are with the middle: rigid dogmatic adherence to utopian belief systems, insistence on utter conformity and intolerance of dissent, a certain cosiness with sidestepping democratic values in pursuit of their end goals, etc. So they might take opposite sides in terms of the general ideas, but in terms of the fundamentals they're actually more similar to each other than to the people in the middle despite nominally sharing many of the same ideas. Like attracts like, and such.
And the latter is basically the idea that people within particular groups or communities are generally more likely to develop more bitter enmities with people within the same group rather than outsiders because minor differences and disagreements take on greater significance than the expected major differences with the other side. The classic example being, of course, the bitter rivalry between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, who loathe each other way more than either loathes the Romans, because the first two have slightly different ideas for how they should get rid of the Romans and what they should do when they're gone, which take on greater significance and become more irritating / offensive because "we're supposed to be on the same side! / why don't you see I'm obviously right?!". Whereas because everyone agrees that the Romans are The Bad Guys and the differences between them are so obvious, they're weirdly less objectionable, because of *course* the Romans are clearly wrong and are clearly dicks.
So in the case of the DSA: arguably a combination of the fact that they resent that more centrist Democrats are not with them and their ideas 100% (and the vice versa is likely true as well, to be totally fair) and they must therefore be 'corrected'; the fact that the Republicans obviously disagree with them and so are clearly wrong, so can be mostly ignored / dismissed; and the fact that deep down despite having different ideas and slogans they're perhaps not as different to Republicans, or at least the extreme-end Tea Party / MAGA Republicans who are currently dominant, as they might insist or prefer to think.
But if this was an example of horseshoe theory and narcissism of small differences, wouldn't there be MAGA people demanding Medicare for All and abolishing the Senate, presidency and Pentagon? There is some overlap on American support for Israel among the left and right, but I don't see any policy mirroring between DSA and MAGA (the Tea Party is not MAGA; they both vote Republican, but there is no ideology behind MAGA the way there was for the Tea Party).
I don't think this is actually a communist vs fascist thing where they are actually closer than they are, two similar tyrannical groups competing to be in charge. I think you're ascribing to DSA a more intellectual starting point, whereas they are actually mostly mentally ill / aggrieved people who have found their way into politics because the private sector is too difficult for them to navigate, since they have no skills an individual citizen would actually pay them for.
MAGA's ideology is primarily foreign policy based, it's anti Neocon (so, anti-Biden's foreign policy, where he let Dick Cheney be in charge again). This shouldn't surprise you, "less Christian" Republicans have long been the military wing (which is, more than liberals think, trending pacifist/isolationist)
The horseshoe doesn't mean that the extremes are exactly the same in policy objectives; it still allows for differences between them, it just means that they're closer when it comes to fundamentals like personality (hence the idea of a horseshoe rather than, say, a circle or an oval; there's still a gap between the extremes, but the edges are nevertheless closer in some ways to each other than the middle). Communists and fascists had significant differences in policy as well.
(Though that said, IIRC when you poll people on things like healthcare, a lot of bipartisan support tends to show up for things like public options -- it's when it's specifically labeled something like Medicare For All that the divides happen, suggesting that a lot of the differences are down to partisan labelling rather than fundamental disagreements. MAGA also tends to be biggest in communities that benefit most from social welfare; they claim to be opposed to foreign interventions; and one could argue that their authoritarianism is a form of 'abolishing' the other pillars of government. Or, in other words: there actually IS some policy mirroring, it's just obscured by kneejerk rejection of any suggestion the other side makes and is expressed in different ways.)
And not for nothing, but "mentally ill / aggrieved people who have found their way into politics" is not exactly an entirely ill-fitting description of the worst extremes of MAGA either. That's what I'm getting at; personality- and fundamentals-wise many of these people are actually not so different, it's just one side dresses their grievances up in leftist dogma and the other in, well, whatever Trump says he wants. I just suspect that if we actually ended up getting a Pure MAGA government or a Pure DSA, the two might not end up looking as different as you'd perhaps expect from the rhetoric.
That said: no theory is perfect when it meets the real world, granted.
The DSA has already swept under the rug a full-blown genocide *filmed on GoPros and broadcast on social media*, so El-Sayed could lose while every normie Democrat wins by 10 points and they’d still say it was a “conspiracy”
You know the way the MAGA movement is going, the DSA might as well switch sides and take over the Republican party instead. I mean, seriously, they agree on trade, and they would likely agree on immigration if they thought about it. Both of these policies are aimed at driving up working class wages, and inflating away the wealth of the upper middle class. They are slightly schizoid on AI, but with the anti-vaxxers firmly in MAGA it won't be long before the anti-data-center movement lands there too. Plus Trump is taking equity stakes in US companies, which would be a perfect prelude to nationalizing them. Just grow the anti-tech anti-elitism of the Republican party and unify it with "eat-the-rish" socialism. They have a lot in common. And then the Democratic party will be free to just be the libertarian-neoliberal free market party that we need.
Someone just needs to whisper in their ear "all this red tribe blue tribe stuff is how the ruling class control syou, you need to unify along class lines and right now the Republicans are the working class party. You can do it!"
Yeah, Iran is really cracking the MAGA movement. and Maga itself proves that 1990s centrist democrats can take over the Republican party, if they're "Big Man" enough and show up to wrestlemania.
I'm old enough to remember McGovern clearly and just old enough to sort of remember Goldwater. Generally, extreme candidates do poorly. The only exceptions seem to be Reagan and Trump. But that observation doesn't bode well for socialist candidates (however you define that) or even solidly progressive ones.
Good piece. The DSA types would benefit from disagregating the positions of establishment Dems and DSA. It's not that all moderate Dem positions are more popular than all DSA positions.
Nathan Robinson also made the point here that (my paraphrase) candidate quality is a separate axis from ideology.
split-ticket.org has done this analysis for a few cycles now, and candidates with DSA affiliation have pretty consistently performed worse than expected. I’m sure they’ll do the analysis again this year.
Yes, this is a clear pattern, and it's why I think Piker's theory is obviously wrong.
Saying “pikers theory is obviously wrong” is like saying “125 degrees is obviously hot”.
Also, "theory" probably isn't the correct label here. :)
Sure. But there’s definitional usage and common usage.
Ah, but you see, if the DSA underperforms it is because of *false consciousness.*
There IS a secret love of socialism that even the general voters themselves don’t know they have. They will only realize it once we’ve heightened all the contradictions and imminentized all the eschatons.
It'll either be that or because "the establishment" undermined them because they're so afraid of real change. It still seems to be a non-negotiable position on the left to deny the results of the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and insist that Bernie Sanders was actually more popular and only lost because the race was actually rigged in some way (the fact that he got far fewer votes is almost never even acknowledged).
It’s always those damnable running dogs of capitalism in the DNC!
Bernie WAS more popular. I hear this from pollsters and politicos who are currently cutting ads for MAGA.
It’s amazing! The revolutionary ideology can’t have flaws. It can’t fail. It can only be failed!
I had to go to an all day "training/indoctrination" madness to teach everyone to be less racist (without any prior notion or evidence that the individuals had ever acted racist). Seattle, of course. Anyway, the entire class was repeating over and over that if you don't think you're racist, that just shows you're much more racist than you know. Facts, you know. Sigh. As poorly a spent day as I'll ever have, including days where teenage me was dumped.
My guess is that “we are going to give you lots of free stuff and not raise your taxes” part of the DSA would over perform polls, though be bad governance.
Their culture war stances are toxic.
"Give you lots of free stuff and not raise your taxes" - nailed it - That's the Republican / Trump promise to the Billionaire class in a nutshell!
Hey, why should billionaires get all the freebies and nobody else? The poor and the middle-class should get everything for free, too!
Why do you call El-Sayed a "DSA candidate?" He's not a member of the DSA, and when asked explicitly about this by David Remnick, he said (paraphrasing from memory) "I'm not a socialist, I'm a capitalist. I believe in free markets." He talks about the benefits of free markets, and the only diss you could make against him in this arena is that he doesn't like 'monopolies,' which puts him in the same group as other familiar commies like Theodore Roosevelt.
I called him “DSA-backed”, which he is — they endorsed him, and prominent DSA members including Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Hasan Piker endorsed him.
You do refer to him several times in your post as a "DSA candidate." My main point is that just because he's endorsed by DSA doesn't mean he agrees with them on every important issue, and even in those areas where he does agree at a gross level, his position is often more nuanced than a typical DSA talking point.
I'm not arguing that DSA doesn't have some truly stupid positions, and many of these are pretty fundamental to what the DSA is. I'm just arguing that he isn't a DSA candidate in any real sense. I think he mainly gets crap for being critical of Israeli governments that talk about a 2 state solution, and then do their best (along with many Palestinians unfortunately) to prevent that from ever happening.
Sometimes, I need to use shorthand to keep the prose from being endlessly clunky. The first time I referred to him, I purposefully said "DSA-backed" -- I gave some thought as to whether the characterization was fair. I decided it is. I also made it clear that the candidates I'm talking about are El-Sayed and Hong, and, yes, later in the article I shorthanded them as the "DSA candidates".
If El-Sayed wins, the DSA are ABSOLUTELY going to claim that as proof of their theory. I mean, they're already treating his likely primary win that way. He can't be DSA if he wins and not DSA if he loses.
"He can't be DSA if he wins and not DSA if he loses."
Its kind of you to portray the DSA folks as logically consistent.
Do you apply the same test to Republican candidates, a great many of whom are “backed” by neo-Nazis, right-wing militia groups, and white supremacists? Do you refer to Trump as the “Nazi-backed Donald Trump”?
Yes, I would call any candidate who did rallies with Nazis and who emphasized their endorsements from prominent Nazis in their campaign literature “Nazi-backed”.
I particularly enjoy how that was clearly supposed to be some kind of devastating "gotcha!" trap question despite there being a screamingly obvious and easy response.
Oh cool. Show me all the times you’ve referred to Trump as “Nazi-backed Donald Trump.” Should be easy.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-supporters-neo-nazis-white-nationalists-kkk-militias-racism-hate/
I've written about Trump's authoritarianism plenty (one example of many: https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/what-word-should-i-use-for-a-president?utm_source=publication-search) but Trump doesn't do rallies with the people in that Mother Jones article or feature them in his campaign materials. El-Sayed has done multiple events with Hasan Piker and then promotes them on all his socials.
You really don’t think the DSA will be taking credit if he wins?
I don't care if the DSA takes credit if he wins. After all, *I'm* going to take credit if he wins for my brilliant defense of his candidacy here.
Look, DSA can claim credit, but if he only gets the votes that a DSA endorsement can deliver, he's going to be toast. The DSA is just not that important, except to some columnists for the Times who are desperate for something to write about that generates clicks.
He's also claimed to be a practicing physician but that is not true. And he's attended and spoken at DSA events.
Speaking in front of an audience doesn't imply agreeing with everything that group endorses. If Kamala understood that, she might be President today.
Her refusing to go on Rogan was one of the biggest unforced errors in all of politics.
She didn’t refuse to go on Joe Rogan. He refused to have her on unless she flew down to Austin.
Yeah, you're right, what an unreasonable request he made, for a potential guest of a show to go where the show is recorded. Which is something all of his guests manage to do, including Trump.
That was a huge unforced error. Other than Rogan's audience etc, last time I checked, there are a lot of voters in Texas. Go on Rogan, do a rally in Austin and then in Dallas. You know, like a candidate for political office would do.
Absolutely. Rogan has an average listener audience of eleven million people, many uncommitted, but she apparently found it more compelling to get to a rally in the middle of Michigan where she'd have an audience of 2,000 people, all of whom were already going to vote for her.
Harris is a crap politician. Someone like Bill Clinton in his day would have *relished* the opportunity to try to convert people to his viewpoint.
Thing is, Bill Clinton would have been *able* to, if not convert people to his viewpoint, then at least convince them that he was less scary/alien than Trump, because he could actually connect with the squishy middle.
Harris does not have that capability, and I think she knows that, which is why she did not appear on Joe Rogan. (There might have also been some disdain for his viewers, but the fact that it seems like she thought *Tim Walz* of all people was the guy to bring working-class men back to the Democratic party speaks of a profound disconnect with ordinary people.)
Wow. Everyone pointed out you were wrong before me. 😩 now I have nothing to add. 😔
Not exactly a hugely unreasonable request though, especially for a politician already doing a lot of travel as part of a major cross-country political campaign.
Is that like RFK Jr telling Dana Bash she can't have an opinion because she's not a scientist? While not being a scientist?
Also supports national rent control...
If they lose or underperform or a scandal comes out, it will still be because cOrPoRaTe DeMs ratfucked them.
Isn't this just mathematically true? If leftist candidates underperform, some centrist dems either stayed home or switched parties.
It's debatable whether a leftie dem is "entitled" to a centrist dem vote just because they got the dem nomination, but the complaint isn't too different from the post-2024 analysis that blames the Uncommitted movement for Harris losing. Dems losing often result in admonishments that people didn't "vote blue, no matter who".
I think the ratfucking claim is more about the idea that the DNC/Big Democrat/whoever deliberately and knowingly sabotages any leftish candidate in conscious service to corporate interests over policy or electoral outcomes, often as an organized conspiracy with news organizations and pundits as knowing collaborators. This is, for example, Freddie deBoer's theory of the Graham Platner case. Related to the "rotating villain" idea.
But this is very different from normie Dems just not voting (or whatever) because they're not buying what the DSA is selling. They might still be wrong (I think they usually would be), but it isn't the same thing as ratfucking.
Conservative PAC money finding its way into DSA campaign coffers in hopes of fielding unelectable candidates might fit better with the Nixonian concept of ratfucking.
It's a bit of a moving target as tactics that were once considered beyond the pale become SOP.
How could someone put corporate interests over policy or electoral outcomes? Corporate interests are policy/electoral outcomes.
Anyways, I haven't seen any accusations of ratfucking (as in covert sabotage rather than open arguments). I guess we'll see.
My point about corporate interests is that a lot of DSA types (and populists in general) take the view that more centrist/normie Democratic politicians "know" that populist/leftist policies will lead to better outcomes for the American people/the average person, and/or more electoral success...BUT that those centrists care most about ensuring that big corporations/the oligarchs/etc make as much money as possible...and the centrists care so much they will deliberately sabotage Dem-winnable elections to keep leftish Dems from sticking it to the corporations.
The accusations of ratfucking are pretty common among the Graham Platner fanbase I think.
Is there a candidate for folks who like some of the socialist policies but are repelled by others? Most people are not all in on any one candidate's platform. Pretending they are is the boosters jobs, so Klipperstein and Piker are out there, just peddling their trade. Yeah, some of us like the idea of Medicare for All, but how are you going to sell the notion of taxing people for it, and transitioning to it?
I live in Michigan. El-Sayed will win the Dem nomination. The Republican candidate is already preparing for that possibility, as is Trump, who is dropping the word "communist" around a lot already. The Republicans are practically salivating, because, no matter what else you say about them, they understand the majority of the American public much better than this iteration of Democrats do.
Agree. There's a big difference between "I like this policy" and "this policy is doable." Centrist Democrats probably would like everyone to have health insurance just like the DSA people do, but they realize it's not that simple. Unfortunately, a lot of voters do not.
Give everyone health insurance is fundamentally simple. Most countries in Europe do this via a government run health care system that works poorly. Give everyone good or better health insurance than they have? That's tough.
As a Wisconsinite my main concern isn’t so much that Hong will lose—I think it would be hard for even her to blow it in this environment—but that she’ll either cost us our shot at winning back the legislature or that we’ll win the trifecta but then we’ll waste time with pointless infighting and not accomplish anything in the narrow window we have.
Probably better to worry about the carry trade at this point. Or diesel rationing. I don't think Wisconsin elections are going to fix or help with either of those.
Their theory of victory is unfalsifiable. If they lose it’s “the establishment did everything to help the Republican” or “well, DSA candidate actually moderated too much/went MAGA on this thing,” just like how Kamala allegedly lost because she didn’t go fully anti-Israel. And if they win, even if it’s them getting dragged across the finish line, it’s “see - voters DO want socialism.”
You asked for it. You got it. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/democratic-socialists-america-democratic-party.html?unlocked_article_code=1.21A.RIfz.sL8AFZo8j3zY&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Do closed party primary wins tell us that much about the nation or entire constituencies when they are often explained by who is able to most effectively inspire a very small group to turn out and vote for them without inspiring others to vote against them?
I'm sure this is a fool's errand, but I'm trying to parse the logic of the secret leftist majority Piker stated (and coincidentally, it's fitting that South Park was also referenced) and here's where I'm stuck: The South Park guys have said many times they hate Republicans but they really hate Democrats. But it seems DSA folks have the same formulation, which doesn't make sense to me since the Democrats at least share some of their values, maybe not as stridently, but they are closer ideological fellow travelers to Democrats than they are to Republicans.
Wouldn't it make much more sense, as a long-term project, for DSA people to infiltrate the GOP and destroy that party to achieve their political aims rather than destroy the DNC? They're lying anyway when they say they just want healthcare, they should keep up the lies and take up moderate positions on campaign trails and then just vote as radicals.
I think it’s part hippie fantasy (“the people are behind us!”) and partly what they know they need to say because they know “you’re helping Trump” is a potent argument.
If the people don’t vote for them, it’s obviously because they’re brainwashed bigots voting against their own interests
I don't think it's logical, but I think it's because they see democrats as rivals while republicans are more of a "far group" (to use Scott Alexander's term) that they are neutral toward emotionally. They have more contact with democrats and tend to compete with them for status and in primaries. Through this competition they have likely come to see democrats as the enemy even though it doesn't really make sense.
They're too lazy to start their own party and too stupid to identify their real opposition.
If they started their own party it would get little support. On some level they might realize this even though they claim most people agree with them.
Their real opposition is often democrats. They have more conflicts with their rivals in their own party than with republicans even though they have more in common with mainstream democrats.
To be clear, I'm not defending them, I don't like them either. I'm just trying to understand something that seems puzzling on the surface.
I'd say it arguably boils down to a combination of the horseshoe theory and the theory of the narcissism of small differences.
The former suggests that rather than, say, politics being a simple left-right straight line axis, the line is actually a curved gradient where the extremes, despite their differing political positions, are actually closer to each other in terms of fundamentals than they are with the middle: rigid dogmatic adherence to utopian belief systems, insistence on utter conformity and intolerance of dissent, a certain cosiness with sidestepping democratic values in pursuit of their end goals, etc. So they might take opposite sides in terms of the general ideas, but in terms of the fundamentals they're actually more similar to each other than to the people in the middle despite nominally sharing many of the same ideas. Like attracts like, and such.
And the latter is basically the idea that people within particular groups or communities are generally more likely to develop more bitter enmities with people within the same group rather than outsiders because minor differences and disagreements take on greater significance than the expected major differences with the other side. The classic example being, of course, the bitter rivalry between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, who loathe each other way more than either loathes the Romans, because the first two have slightly different ideas for how they should get rid of the Romans and what they should do when they're gone, which take on greater significance and become more irritating / offensive because "we're supposed to be on the same side! / why don't you see I'm obviously right?!". Whereas because everyone agrees that the Romans are The Bad Guys and the differences between them are so obvious, they're weirdly less objectionable, because of *course* the Romans are clearly wrong and are clearly dicks.
So in the case of the DSA: arguably a combination of the fact that they resent that more centrist Democrats are not with them and their ideas 100% (and the vice versa is likely true as well, to be totally fair) and they must therefore be 'corrected'; the fact that the Republicans obviously disagree with them and so are clearly wrong, so can be mostly ignored / dismissed; and the fact that deep down despite having different ideas and slogans they're perhaps not as different to Republicans, or at least the extreme-end Tea Party / MAGA Republicans who are currently dominant, as they might insist or prefer to think.
But if this was an example of horseshoe theory and narcissism of small differences, wouldn't there be MAGA people demanding Medicare for All and abolishing the Senate, presidency and Pentagon? There is some overlap on American support for Israel among the left and right, but I don't see any policy mirroring between DSA and MAGA (the Tea Party is not MAGA; they both vote Republican, but there is no ideology behind MAGA the way there was for the Tea Party).
I don't think this is actually a communist vs fascist thing where they are actually closer than they are, two similar tyrannical groups competing to be in charge. I think you're ascribing to DSA a more intellectual starting point, whereas they are actually mostly mentally ill / aggrieved people who have found their way into politics because the private sector is too difficult for them to navigate, since they have no skills an individual citizen would actually pay them for.
MAGA's ideology is primarily foreign policy based, it's anti Neocon (so, anti-Biden's foreign policy, where he let Dick Cheney be in charge again). This shouldn't surprise you, "less Christian" Republicans have long been the military wing (which is, more than liberals think, trending pacifist/isolationist)
The horseshoe doesn't mean that the extremes are exactly the same in policy objectives; it still allows for differences between them, it just means that they're closer when it comes to fundamentals like personality (hence the idea of a horseshoe rather than, say, a circle or an oval; there's still a gap between the extremes, but the edges are nevertheless closer in some ways to each other than the middle). Communists and fascists had significant differences in policy as well.
(Though that said, IIRC when you poll people on things like healthcare, a lot of bipartisan support tends to show up for things like public options -- it's when it's specifically labeled something like Medicare For All that the divides happen, suggesting that a lot of the differences are down to partisan labelling rather than fundamental disagreements. MAGA also tends to be biggest in communities that benefit most from social welfare; they claim to be opposed to foreign interventions; and one could argue that their authoritarianism is a form of 'abolishing' the other pillars of government. Or, in other words: there actually IS some policy mirroring, it's just obscured by kneejerk rejection of any suggestion the other side makes and is expressed in different ways.)
And not for nothing, but "mentally ill / aggrieved people who have found their way into politics" is not exactly an entirely ill-fitting description of the worst extremes of MAGA either. That's what I'm getting at; personality- and fundamentals-wise many of these people are actually not so different, it's just one side dresses their grievances up in leftist dogma and the other in, well, whatever Trump says he wants. I just suspect that if we actually ended up getting a Pure MAGA government or a Pure DSA, the two might not end up looking as different as you'd perhaps expect from the rhetoric.
That said: no theory is perfect when it meets the real world, granted.
Ugh, reality bites. At least this post had two funny clips.....
The DSA has already swept under the rug a full-blown genocide *filmed on GoPros and broadcast on social media*, so El-Sayed could lose while every normie Democrat wins by 10 points and they’d still say it was a “conspiracy”
You know the way the MAGA movement is going, the DSA might as well switch sides and take over the Republican party instead. I mean, seriously, they agree on trade, and they would likely agree on immigration if they thought about it. Both of these policies are aimed at driving up working class wages, and inflating away the wealth of the upper middle class. They are slightly schizoid on AI, but with the anti-vaxxers firmly in MAGA it won't be long before the anti-data-center movement lands there too. Plus Trump is taking equity stakes in US companies, which would be a perfect prelude to nationalizing them. Just grow the anti-tech anti-elitism of the Republican party and unify it with "eat-the-rish" socialism. They have a lot in common. And then the Democratic party will be free to just be the libertarian-neoliberal free market party that we need.
Someone just needs to whisper in their ear "all this red tribe blue tribe stuff is how the ruling class control syou, you need to unify along class lines and right now the Republicans are the working class party. You can do it!"
Yeah, Iran is really cracking the MAGA movement. and Maga itself proves that 1990s centrist democrats can take over the Republican party, if they're "Big Man" enough and show up to wrestlemania.
I'm old enough to remember McGovern clearly and just old enough to sort of remember Goldwater. Generally, extreme candidates do poorly. The only exceptions seem to be Reagan and Trump. But that observation doesn't bode well for socialist candidates (however you define that) or even solidly progressive ones.
Good piece. The DSA types would benefit from disagregating the positions of establishment Dems and DSA. It's not that all moderate Dem positions are more popular than all DSA positions.
Nathan Robinson also made the point here that (my paraphrase) candidate quality is a separate axis from ideology.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/were-thinking-about-electability-all-wrong