Why I Write About the DSA Left So Much

I think they are wackos of import

Photo by Joe Readle via Getty.

I feel guilty about writing yesterday about the activist duo who recruited Graham Platner. There are, after all, far more important things than a maddening interview with a couple that seems like an AI-generated caricature of smug leftists. My first line of defense is simply that I’m a comedian, and that guy’s Henry-Kissinger-if-he-was-a-Valley-Girl style of speaking forced my hand.

If I was a news organization and not a professional jagweed with a laptop, my editorial choices would be indefensible. It’s not just yesterday: In the past two weeks, I’ve written about Platner five times but devoted zero column inches to the Iran War,¹ the immigration enforcement bill, or several other things that objectively matter. These days, I complain about the socialist left more than the MAGA right, which might lead people to think that I’m experiencing a Heart of Darkness-style slow drift towards Trump. But I want to make it clear that it’s exactly the opposite: I write about the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow travelers because I think that’s the key battle line in the fight against MAGA.

Let me calibrate. The big topic this week for the president and other Republicans is a conspiracy theory about the LA mayoral election being rigged, even though there’s no evidence of fraud and the theory’s internal logic is idiotic. Republicans have their own ethically-compromised dimwit Senate candidate — Ken Paxton of Texas — and their main line of attack against his Democratic challenger is “He’s a homo!”² Trump is still pushing for $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to pay the January 6 rioters, and he’s nominated a clearly unqualified hack to be Director of National Intelligence now that the previous unqualified hack has resigned. That’s stuff happening today, and I could write a similar paragraph at any point in Trump’s presidency.

More broadly, Trump is failing even on his own terms. The Iran War has been neither quick nor decisive, and Trump can’t get the nuclear deal that he swore would be so easy. Inflation has ticked up as the war and tariffs have had predictable effects. DOGE was a failure that the bards will sing about for a thousand years, and the effects of letting pill-popping math twinks tear apart a government that they didn’t understand are starting to hit home. Trump’s budget management has been horrendous. His attempts to stifle speech have been shameful. He’s staffed the government with hacks and cranks and heads an administration so corrupt it makes Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing club look like Bailey Building & Loan. Simply put: This is not a government that an advanced country should have. I just don’t write about it every day because I can’t picture the reader who was fine with the first 12,647,870 Trump outrages but will get their dander up when they learn of the 12,647,871st.

I take the question of whether we need to change course as a given. I’m much more interested in how to change course, and to where. And that’s why I focus on the fight between normie Democrats and DSA Democrats: I think that’s currently the most relevant ideological rift in the country. If sane, solution-oriented Democrats win this factional fight, then I think we can turn the tide against MAGA and elect a competent government. But if we lose, then I think that will be good for MAGA and very bad for sanity, generally.

I won’t rehash the billion pieces of evidence that lead me to believe that voters generally prefer moderate views to left-wing ones; though I think that voters’ preference for moderation is as well-established as the law of gravity, I’ll concede that I can’t prove that I’m right. Maybe the Glorious Revolution is just around the corner — Marxists have been wrong about the revolution’s arrival for 65,124 consecutive days,³ but maybe it’ll happen tomorrow. I’d rather talk about how cultish and out-of-touch the DSA left is; that’s the factor that makes me think that even if I’m wrong about their electability, I’m right that their capture of our last remaining somewhat-sane political party would be a bad thing.

The leftist narrative of a working class suffering under the boot of an ever-more-powerful oligarchy is flat out wrong. In a dark bit of irony, the socialist left’s surge within the Democratic Party has coincided with a pretty damn good decade for low-wage workers. If we broaden the aperture, it’s totally obvious that the past century has been one of remarkable human progress. And now comes the sentence where I say “that’s not to say some people aren’t struggling” and “there’s certainly room for improvement” — yes, sure sure. But on the other hand: Fuck that, I’d rather say the big true thing, and that is that we know what creates broad-based prosperity — let’s stop acting like we haven’t solved this riddle. Welfare state capitalism is the system that works, which is why it’s used by every advanced country, very much including the DSA’s precious Sweden. One of the many questions we’ve solved in modern times is the basic recipe that creates wealth, and carrying a torch for socialism is like believing that HD-DVD might prove the haters wrong and miraculously emerge as the technology of the future.

And what does the DSA left believe? Their views on antitrust policy are so cultish that I won’t be surprised if neo-Brandeisians all start dressing alike. One of their leading lights just published a degrowth manifesto that has people debating which is funnier: The “academic research” behind the work or the author’s century-behind-the-times recommendations. Bernie Sanders’ twitter feed is a source of misinformation topped only by Trump. It seems that every DSA candidate has a social media feed full of absolutely insane statements, especially about Israel. They are — in a word — delusional. Or, if you prefer a paraphrase of the soul-destroying putdown from Succession: These are not serious people.

And in that way, they’re similar to MAGA. They can’t craft workable solutions because they don’t even know what the world looks like; they’re delusional idiots tilting at windmills. MAGA dominates the Republican Party, and the DSA would like to dominate the Democrats. I don’t blame the DSA for that — of course they want influence! But if they succeed, then both of this country’s major political parties will be insane.

And that’s why I devote a lot of column inches to factional Democratic politics — I think that’s the fight that matters most. I’ve never seen the party this divided; I honestly don’t know at this point which faction is bigger. And “Republican vs. Democrat” arguments seem pointless when who “the Democrats” even are is TBD. Democratic infighting is simply far more interesting to me than Trump’s wacky escapades, and the result of that infighting will determine what wacky escapades we’re forced to endure in the future.

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1. To be fair, I’ve written about the war plenty in the past, and there hasn’t been much concrete news on that front lately.

2. He’s not, but it also shouldn’t matter.

3. The Communist Manifesto was published on February 21, 1848.