Why Aren't We Democratic Socialists?

Socialism has been a bad word in this country for a long time. For more than 130 years, socialism has been scorned as the Trojan horse of full-blown communism, and anyone who espouses it deserves to be hauled before Joe McCarthy to renounce their beliefs. The reason for this, of course, is that socialism is the opposite of capitalism, our true national religion. Socialism is a threat to the capitalist belief that the fruits of labor belong to the owners and not the workers. Capitalism, communism, and socialism are all economic systems that operate within political systems. We’ve been told for 100 years that socialism is a bad economic system because some governments have been nominally socialist or even outright communist while also being authoritarian, colonialist, and/or anti-American.

But the fact is, democratic socialism has an overall successful track record in a lot of places. Here’s an article about the Democratic Socialist countries. They even have capitalism in those places! But they have social safety nets like paid family leave, universal healthcare, strong collective bargaining and workplace democracy protections, and greater equality.

I know all of these things intellectually and I’ve still never been able to call myself a socialist democrat or a democratic socialist, and I’m trying to figure out why. Here are some reasons I’m kicking around:

1. I grew up being told that communists are bad and that socialists are the same thing as communists.

I am a Gen X Cold War kid whose grandfathers hated commies and pinkos and fought Nazis and fascists, all of which get conflated with socialism. Socialists were to be blackballed as anti-American Russian sympathizers. One of my grandfathers did not want me to attend the University of Chicago because he strongly associated it with communists (and, let’s be honest, Jews, because anti-communism was partly antisemitic and partly anti-immigrant). The fact that the U of C was a big part of the Manhattan Project and had developed the economic policies championed by Ronald Reagan was not on my grandfather’s radar. It was a pinko place, and you know what else is pink? Homos. I can see through it all now, but when I was 17, I did not want to disappoint my grandfather, and I was already grappling with the rampant homophobia in my immediate vicinity, so I wasn’t about to champion socialism.

2. I associate DSA with fringe weirdo political groups like the Socialist Workers Party, the LaRouche movement, and other groups whose members have crazed looks in their eyes as they try to sell their literature at otherwise normal events.

Look, at most reasonably sized political events, there are going to be some crazy looking older white people who are selling newsletters that were printed in 1996 and the ink is smeared on their fingers and their newsie caps are barely containing their unbrushed hair. Their teeth are stained with the tobacco from their hand-rolled cigarettes. They can intimately describe the many divisions that their political sect has endured to stay pure. Their meetings are no doubt brutal self-criticism sessions. They are exhausting just to look at.

I rationally understand you can be a Democratic Socialist without becoming one of these people but that doesn’t shake my fear that I will become like them.

3. There’s no point because third parties cannot succeed in this country but can only undermine the two governing political parties.

It’s a truth almost universally acknowledged that the two-party political system in the United States is (1) very bad at ensuring an actual representative democracy and (2) so baked into our political system that no third party could possibly mount a successful national campaign. That doesn’t stop people from trying, of course. In fact, in my lifetime, at least two (Perot, Nader) and possibly three (Jill Stein) third party candidates garnered enough votes to affect the outcome of a presidential election without coming anywhere near winning. Somehow both consequential and non-consequential - the paradox of the electoral college system we inherited from our slaver founding fathers.

Notwithstanding the failure of any third party to break through, we have two independent senators (Sanders, King) who caucus with the Dems, and one (Murkowski) who won a write-in campaign when her party selected a different candidate. All three of them caucus with one of the major parties and I think their example points toward a possible way to legitimize third parties. More on that in a moment.

Right now, we have two third parties who qualify to run candidates for federal office in various states: the Greens and the Libertarians. A couple of other parties are able to run candidates in state and local elections, like the Constitution Party and Alliance Party. There’s a Vermont Progressive Party and a Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. In California and New York (and elsewhere), there’s a Working Families Party.

Finally, there’s the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are members. Mamdani and AOC are also Democrats. For all three of them, their DSA membership is a way of signaling where in the Democratic party they see themselves (to the left of other Dems). They somehow have not gotten bogged down in the fear-mongering of our elders or the crazed literature sales of the fringe parties (although Bernie really looks the part).

Dual party membership is obviously the solution. People should feel free to identify with a third party with the understanding that they will support the candidate that their party caucuses with. Maybe we already do; plenty of people call themselves progressive or liberal or moderate. The problem with those labels is that they have less meaning than the political parties do. I don’t know what progressive means, but I can go read the party platform of the Working Families Party and identify their candidates, all of whom caucus with the Democrats.

I’ve been chewing on this a lot because I think our political moment requires being more open about our political desires. When we emerge from this hellscape of a presidential administration/authoritarian takeover, we are going to need to be clear about the future we want. Some people, especially our current Democratic leadership, are going to want to return to some status quo, and they need to feel pressure to adopt new policy ideas if they want to keep their support.

I’m not sure where I am going with this. Let me know what you think.

Other stuff

I just finished read You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue (translated by Natasha Wimmer) which recounts the day that Hernan Cortes met the emperor Monteczuma and imagines different futures for its characters. It reads like a collaboration between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. Beautiful, brutal, a totally different world than I’ve ever considered.

I also listened to the audiobook of Quit by Annie Duke, which has dozens of great insights into the bias against quitting and how to decide when to quit. One of her insights is, “Quitting on time will usually (always) feel like quitting too early.” If there’s a hard decision to be made in your life (which is everyone), you should read this book.

If you like Wordle but wish it was timed, check out JoWordle. This is less a game and more just a fun thing to do: Draw A Fish.

For music, I’ve listened to Shake it to the Max by Moliy probably twenty times since I heard it on Friday. This video might scandalize readers over the age of 70 so if that’s you, just know that I warned you.

Okay, have a nice week.