Centrist Democrat's feckless war with the DSA

Back in the 1980s, the UK Labour Party was in crisis. It was getting whalloped by Margaret Thatcher in an era where neoliberal economic policies were ascendant. The obvious move was to swing to the political center and abandon the socialist economics that, in the 1970s, had become associated with malaise (somewhat unfairly, as the malaise was caused by the oil market and wasn’t limited to the UK, but I digress). Yet on its left flank was Militant, an organization of Trotskyist Communists whose strategy of “entryism” led them to insert themselves into the Labour Party. As the Labour Party was the established party of the working class (at least in theory), and as the UK had devolved into a quasi-two-party state (though never to the same degree as the US), this made sense as a strategy. Become the dominant force within the socialist party, because you’re socialists anyways, then direct it to take more revolutionary economic positions. Militant did dominate some of the UK’s more leftwing municipalities like Liverpool, so it wasn’t just some group of outside invaders, but it was fundamentally at odds with the more moderate wing of the party. In the end, Militant would get purged from Labour and the party would complete its movement to the center (a movement which ended with the ascendancy of Tony Blair). It never purged all its leftists and capital-S Socialists, but it did decide that an organization like Militant was dangerous to the party.

The Democrats in the USA face a similar crisis of sorts with the apparent ascendant Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) defeating establishment candidates (though I would heavily caveat how ascendant it is, at least right now). Former-socialist-turned-establishment-stooge Van Jones has been hyperventilating about Michigan candidate Abdul Sayed, while James Carvile rails against DSA-adjacent podcaster Hasan Piker. National figures like Schumer, Pelosi, and others have put their hand on the scale in favor of establishment candidates just as the DNC did against Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Hakeem Jefferies and Katie Hochul have what could best be described as a complex relationship with Mamdani. The corporations that throw money at the Democrats are perhaps most worried of all, less that the DSA will send them to the gulag but that it will undermine their influence in one of America’s two main parties. For centrist Democrats, the DSA poses a whole host of immediate hazards for their hold over the party.

Of course, the similarities are skin-deep. Where Militant was a doctrinaire Trotskyist party that traced its theoretical approach back to Lenin and Marx, the DSA is an entirely heterogeneous grouping. There are moderate social democrats, radical liberals, “progressives”, more radical social democrats, socialists, Trotskyists (yes, they’re still around, though most of their organizations have imploded), Maoists, various other types of Communists, and even a few anarchists. This heterogeneity is simultaneously a strength and a weakness, as it gives the multitude of far-left voices a vehicle to unite their energy behind a common project while also means its constantly beset by internal disputes between its “right,” “center,” and “left.” It has a wider body of radical theory to call from than any of the narrow leftwing sects like the PSL, RCP, or (shudder) the ACP, but it also struggles to lay out a coherent vision and strategy for success.

Also, where the UK has at least some opportunity for third parties, the US is institutionally a two-party duopoly. The system is almost set up intentionally to prevent third parties from ever seeing success. In most states, the two major parties are guaranteed ballot lines while everyone else has to jump through hoops to get on the ballot (and are often kicked off due to legal technicalities). The media won’t even include them in debates, and of course the two major parties have near limitless finances compared to their minor competitors. Ross Perot’s Reform Party came close because he was a billionaire able to throw money into his campaign, and Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party saw some success, but both efforts were fleeting in the face of the two dominant parties. This is why we’re stuck with two parties that emerged in the mid-19th century, the Democrats (which went from being racist populists in the 1800s to anti-racist populists by the mid 1900s) and the Republicans (which oddly goes by the term “Grand Old Party” despite being the younger of the two). While Labour and the Conservatives do dominate UK politics, they always have to watch their back lest new parties like the Liberal Democrats (descendants of the older Liberal party), Reform (Nigel Farage’s racist rabble), and the Greens (a left populist party that has grown considerably with Labour purging its left again in the 2020s). This makes the call from some like James Carvile for the DSA to start their own party particularly ridiculous.

Lastly, where Militant spoke for a modest but still marginal population of socialist workers in traditionally leftwing cities in a context where neoliberalism was ascendant, the DSA is emerging as a force in a country where moderates in both parties are increasingly discredited. People tire of the economic orthodoxies of the 1980s and 1990s and now see that the moderates who hold to these orthodoxies have no answer to their problems. In practice, DSA policies under Mamdani haven’t moved that far from those orthodoxies, at least not yet (and there are institutional constraints that prevent him from doing so), though in theory the DSA does have a far more radical vision for the future.

It is true that the DSA, like Militant, is not trying to function as its own political party. Legally, it is a non-profit meaning it cannot run candidates directly so they must run as Republicans, Democrats, as members of some other party, or as independents. Yet this is a rational response to a strategic reality built by Democrats and Republicans to preserve their duopoly. Building a third party is not viable, or even if it was, would take generations of work to get it at the same level as the duopoly.

The more important factor making the Democratic backlash absurd is the state of the country. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for this torrid state, and neither offers any clear solution to it. Ironically, much of this can be summed up by Democratic centrist James Carville’s famous quip, “its the economy, stupid!”

The reality is that the US is an empire in inexorable decline. This is for a variety of reasons that are legitimately difficult to fix, and it is unlikely that the DSA in its current state can do so. Yet it is clear that the mainstream Democrats and Republicans have even fewer solutions.

(1) Military overspending

The US is a country cursed by its own hegemony. Alongside China, it has by far the world’s largest armed forces, with Russia and India trailing a bit behind the two behemoths. In a sense, it needs this military to sustain its dominance over international trade and sea lanes. During the Cold War, it struggled with the USSR over which country would oversee the international order, but even at the height of the Soviet Union it was wealthier and more powerful. Through this dominance, it is able to keep open the trade routes that its economy and that of its allies depend on (through methods both fair and foul … though predominately foul). Yet this dominance comes at a steep price that only increases every year. Currently, the executive branch is asking for up to $1.5 trillion in military spending, nearly double what it was only a few years ago.

Of course, this is somewhat ironic since military overspending was one of the things that defeated the USSR. Since it had a smaller economy, it struggled to keep up with the US and had less left over to invest in commodity production, health care, the environment, and infrastructure. It was very good at building tanks, and made more of those than the US by a wide margin, yet it struggled to build enough cars for its people (and the cars it did build, the Lada, became a meme in its time for all the wrong reasons).

Despite this, all that money is buying less and less utility. It just waged a war with Iran (one that may start up again … who knows when) but promptly ran out of the interceptors and precision missiles it needed to defend its bases and strike its foe. At this point, Iran can effectively target any US base in the area with relative impunity. All the gulf states who depended on the US for their survival are seeming to question their decision, as they open themselves to the reality that trade through Hormuz will come with tolls to Iran and Oman. Many are now looking to Pakistan and Turkey as their protector, not the US.

There are many reasons for this. One is simple Military Keynesianism … military spending allows the US state to create demand to foster industry. When the US government orders military equipment, it keeps factories running in the Midwest and other places. The problem is that this is a remarkably inefficient way to generate demand. Consider the ridiculously expensive F-35 fighter jet. It is a wonder of modern martial technology but is also absurdly over-engineered to the point that they cost hundreds of millions of dollars per unit. Yet all it takes is one $30k Iranian Shahed drone to blow it up on the runway, and it doesn’t produce new value once it’s made. Compare this to spending on education, transit, or health care. This serves the same Keynesian function but at least has other effects that bolster the economy like training new workers, healing old ones, or just moving people and things around.

Another is corruption, at least of a sort. The military industry gives jobs to tons of contractors, analysts, lobbyists, and other expensive services in Northern Virginia. These people are entirely dependent on government contracts, absorb wealth, but don’t actually do anything to improve the rest of the economy beyond buying crap (and anyone with money can buy crap).

(2) Housing

The US is suffering an acute housing shortage. It’s not a real shortage mind you, but an engineered one. We have plenty of housing across the country, though a lot of it is in the wrong place. Rather, the problem is how we use housing in the US. It’s more than just a home, a place to raise your kids, and a venue to have family and friends over for dinner. More importantly, it’s an investment as a vector for inheritance and a retirement nest egg. You buy your house and it accrues value over the next few decades, allowing you to sell it upon retirement or perhaps just rent it out so your kids can sell it when you die.

The problem is that this only functions due to the mechanisms of supply and demand. Your house won’t accrue in value more than inflation if there’s enough housing on the market for everyone. What this means is that there’s a toxic incentive across the country to constrain housing supply (be that through NIMBY building codes or allowing a handful of rich individuals to buy extra vacation homes). This creates the rather unfortunate reality that kids cannot afford to live near their family, and often can only afford cramped apartments with roommates. Polyamory being a solution to expensive housing is a running meme among disaffected young Americans, and so many won’t be able to afford a home big enough to raise a family until their parents are dead and they’re long past menopause.

This same cycle hit the UK after Thatcher privatized housing in the 1980s. The UK had very cheap housing through to the 1970s because the government built large amounts of housing, treating it as a public good instead of as an investment. Thatcher argued that privatizing the housing market would make everyone rich, as everyone’s home would appreciate in value. Thus, she sold off much of the public housing stock to the residents for low prices and largely stopped building more. This did increase the net wealth of a lot of working class families who saw their homes double then triple then quadruple in value, but it also made housing unaffordable in the UK. Who would have thought there was a connection between high home prices and high housing prices?

(3) Health care

In the 1950s, America built a model of high health care coverage grounded on medicaid for the poorest, medicare for the eldest, and health insurance plans in job contracts for everyone else. This system never worked that well but worked well enough for health care to not be a central issue for most Americans. Yet as insurance rates went up and as the US deindustrialized, it became less and less viable for employers to pay for insurance. More and more of the costs were passed on to workers, insurance rates continued to rise, and hospitals became luxury institutions offering every test on God’s green earth for those who could pay while kicking everyone else out (unless they came in through the ER doors). Younger, healthier people were increasingly incentivized to risk it by just not getting insurance and hoping they don’t suddenly get cancer. Without younger people buying plans, health insurance companies had to increase rates even higher to cover the costs of high-risk patients, which became a kind of doom spiral of worsening coverage. Pharmaceutical companies lobbied governments to expand IP protections and constrain competition, creating artificial scarcity of medicine to bilk the insurance companies that were bilking the patients.

Obamacare was supposed to fix this, but just improved things on the margins. It pushed everyone to buy health insurance, theoretically dealing with the problem of people just going uninsured, and slapped some regulations and subsidies to keep costs somewhat under control. Yet it was at best a temporary solution, as many didn’t want to be forced to buy still-expensive insurance they didn’t need. So many of the costs, from administrative bloat to excessive testing to pharmaceutical gouging, went unaddressed.

(4) The economy

The rest of the economy isn’t exactly in a stellar state either. Aside from real estate, health care, and the military, the engine for growth in the US economy has been “technological innovation” since at least the 1970s. Personal computers, the internet, cellphones, and social media all came out of the happy marriage between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. At first, this did create lots of jobs, ensuring that job losses in one sector were compensated by new jobs elsewhere.

By the Obama administration, this engine started to sputter. It was harder and harder to find good jobs, and employers became increasingly predatory. The solution was “learn to code!” as individuals were driven to become tech workers. Supposedly, this would allow workers to lean into this remaining growth industry.

Yet since Covid, the new big industry is so-called “AI”. Though most of the “artificial intelligence” we’ve developed is a glorified search engine, it nonetheless is very good at making people’s jobs redundant. Ironically, it is particularly good at coding which makes Obama’s “learn to code” pitch age like a gallon of milk left in a car parked in Phoenix, Arizona in July. Of course, it less eliminates jobs so much as makes them much easier. This process of deskilling means workers simply cannot get the wages they used to be able to.

What’s worse is the younger generation, facing the worst job market in a long time, also has more student debt and credit card debt than ever. This means they have lower wages and more liabilities cutting into those wages. This, in turn, makes it even harder to afford the basics like food, housing, and health insurance (the latter two, as mentioned, are also more expensive than ever). This isn’t even getting to the fact that data centers are driving up people’s water and power bills, not to mention the absurd levels of noise and pollution that some create.

Another boom industry is sports gambling and “prediction markets” (which is a fancy way of saying “gambling on literally anything”). I don’t think I need to explain how gambling is a net negative to the overall economy. It’s simply a way to weaponize people’s addictive personalities against them to drain their cash in the most irresponsible way imaginable.

The other boom industry, of course, is mass surveillance and Palantir. Don’t get me started on that, but needless to say, surveilling Americans with Flock Cameras and other intrusive technologies not only undermines civil liberties but doesn’t do anything to improve the rest of the economy.

The crisis for the mainstream parties

The problem is that mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike have no solution to these issues. In fact, they largely just continue to lean into the economic orthodoxy and geopolitical posture that has produced them. Both parties want to continue military spending, not to mention uncritical support for Israel (both in the form of direct financial aid and diplomatic support). Both parties want to maintain the largely private real estate market. Both parties are uninterested in fixing health insurance. Both parties are committed to the same economic model that brings us loud data centers, high energy bills, and an entirely unaccountable bourgeois elite in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I haven’t even touched climate change, something that mainstream democrats at best acknowledge as real while proposing the most marginal fixes imaginable.

This means that their outrage towards DSA and its candidates is entirely ridiculous, and their efforts to undermine their candidates will become less and less likely to succeed as time goes on. Simply put, they put no effort whatsoever into understanding why people are moving towards outright socialism, albeit a moderate flavor, in a country whose political culture was once defined by its red-baiting and anticommunism.

Consider the 2024 Harris campaign. Harris’s centrist advisors told her to campaign with the Cheneys, the least popular political dynasty in America. The Cheneys, of course, lied to the US repeatedly about the reasons to invade Iraq as well as the trajectory of the war. Nonetheless, Harris went along with this terrible advice. She was not entirely unaware of some of the problems facing young voters, like outrageous housing prices, but her policy solution was limited to offering a modest grant to first-time home buyers. It did not address the systemic problem in the housing market; it was at best a short-term palliative effort. On top of this, aside from Elon Musk and a few other unambiguously pro-Trump billionaires, her campaign was aiming for support from the same oligarchs who created and benefit most from the system. Notably, this isn’t anything particular to Harris, and it’s likely most Democratic candidates would have done the same because the entire generation of political leaders in the party belongs to the same orthodoxy.

Or consider the 2020 Biden campaign. With a challenge from his left from Bernie Sanders and with a fairly rocky start, Biden needed to promise real change albeit less radical change than what Sanders had on offer. Bernie offered Medicare for All, but Biden promised a public option (famously offered by Obama but then dropped purportedly to win Senator Joe Lieberman’s support). Bernie offered a Green New Deal, but Biden offered a bit more spending on climate change remediation. Bernie offered free college and a student debt jubilee, but Biden offered some low-cost repayment plans. Bernie ran on boosting the minimum wage, so Biden offered a modest minimum wage increase. What happened to these plans? The health insurance public option was quietly forgotten, green infrastructure got some spending but not nearly enough (and it was promptly disposed of by Trump), the low-cost repayment plans were inadequately secured and scrapped by Trump, and the minimum wage raise vanished into the political ether almost as fast as the public option did. Then in 2024, a Biden already suffering cognitive decline had the gall to run again without any substantive platform to deal with these problems, only to drop out too late to hold a real primary.

Largely, the party centrists in the Democrats simply hope that negative partisanship against Republicans is adequate to win people’s votes, while the country continues to crumble around them. They are utterly uninterested in interrogating the military, health care, the housing market, climate change, or even racism and misogyny in a systemic way. Rather, they hope that they can continue with the same policy platform as always (but maybe with a few bones to throw for minorities) just because the Republicans are scary.

The Republicans also have no real solutions either, except for faith, more war, and culture wars against minorities. Despite the fact that Trump himself ran on the same anxieties that motivate Bernie and DSA voters on the left, albeit from a conservative point of view, he promptly jumped right back into bed with the neoliberals and neoconservatives who got us here. The only thing he added was more violent immigration policing and tariffs that only made the affordability crisis worse.

Thus, it is likely that the DSA wing of the Democrats is going nowhere. If the party moderates actually do crush the DSA wing through sheer institutional force, they will only drive down voter enthusiasm and drive up the very cynicism that motivates the DSA’s current rise. Yet it is quite likely they don’t care, since they benefit from the cycling of power between the two parties and can just wait out a bad Republican administration in the hope that voters will return to them after four years of GOP incompetence. It doesn’t matter much to them that their own incompetence will just return Republicans to power.

Will the DSA succeed?

I am not a prophet of course, but signs are good for DSA candidates doing well in the Democratic Party for the time being. Simply put, as the crises in our economy and society get worse, those offering actual solutions (or at least just recognizing these crises) will benefit.

Yet the DSA faces storm clouds on the horizon too. Their policy platform remains too modest and moderate to actually deal with these problems. Mamdani’s rent freeze, for example, will help limit rent increases in the short term, but without a buildout of vast amounts of below-market-rate housing by the public sector there simply won’t be enough housing for everyone. YIMBY fixes simply aren’t adequate either; even if they boost supply, they will only build when and where they can profit after land and construction costs. They are also incentivized by the same supply and demand mechanics to avoid driving down the price of the housing they build too much.

Medicare for All will free individuals from burdensome insurance payments but won’t deal will other systemic problems like the pharma industry, it will only place the burden of that cost in everyone’s hands. Moreover, Medicare for All would throw the many workers in America’s massively bloated health insurance industry into unemployment.

Even if the DSA won overwhelming power in 2028, which is unlikely, they would face real economic limits in their ability to deal with these crises since they could only finance these reforms through the bond market. Yet thanks to generations of a big military and low taxes, a significant portion of the budget is already devoted to paying interest on past debt. Perhaps had the DSA of today taken power in 1992, they would have had an easier time implementing these policies.

Then there are the deep internal divisions within the DSA. These divisions are tolerable so long as it’s not in power and they remain united behind a common enemy, but the tensions between the moderate wing and the more radical wing will rear its ugly head as soon as the DSA has meaningful political power. The center of the DSA will come to function like the Democratic party elites today, fretting that their more radical comrades will undermine their short-term agenda, while the more radical wing will (rightly for the most part) see the initial reforms as at best a stepping stone to deeper changes.

Lastly, the populist approach of their politics is not great for building political agency or identifying the real enemy. Populism is good for building an enthusiastic voter base and getting people to the polls, but enthusiasm and votes do not translate to real political consciousness and agency. It also limits policies to those which are overwhelmingly popular, and don’t benefit the working class at the expense of small and medium businesses.

Despite these shortcomings, the DSA remains the only group in the USA speaking to the real economic anxieties of the American people. So long as these problems get worse under the watch of the centrists in both parties, they will thrive. This is why, ultimately, the pearl-clutching from moderate Democrats is as meaningless as it is laughable. Yet to really flourish long term, DSA members and leaders must be cool headed and aware of the real hazards they face moving forward.