Four Lenses for Interpreting the DSA

“Low Over High, No Matter What”

By guest author M.L. Swartz.

The most significant recent mass political phenomenon in the United States is the Democratic Socialists of America, and second place probably isn’t close. The precipitous rise of their paid membership (from below 7,000 when Bernie Sanders ran in 2016 to over 100,000 now) and their repeatedly demonstrated ability to unseat Democratic congressional incumbents (often considered to be the hardest task in electoral politics), combined with the generational dynamic (they’re younger by decades than the people they’re supplanting), all suggest that they’re going to be a main character in the American story over the next few decades, and their unrelenting stance of hostility toward Actual-American people, institutions, and modes of thought indicate that their role will be that of the antagonist.

This calls first and foremost for understanding. Easy people to mock are often also difficult to beat. The public face of the DSA is one of comical faggotry and absurdity, but lazy misconceptions and character tropes about the nature of one’s enemies are an almost constant feature in the lore of the defeated, and many victories have been won by forces who were too quickly written off as unserious. In the interest of preventing that, I’ll present four interpretive lenses for the essence and motivation of their project. I believe they’re arranged in descending order of explanatory power, but I’m just as strongly convinced that each of them reveals something necessary.

Identitarian Hostility

The core of the DSA ethos is radicalism on behalf of the low against the high, as interpreted through the clichés of postwar power/privilege analysis. This means black above white, immigrant/indigenous above settler, and the transvested or female above straight men conventionally attired, in each and every instance where conflict might arise. DSA means more than this, but it does not mean less; the nightmare that Actual-Americans need to wake up to is the reality that the most powerful nascent political faction not only presumes them to be in the wrong on every current matter (of course, that has been the default in national-scale politics and business for quite some time), but also in the wrong by virtue of ontology in every hypothetical dispute, no matter the circumstances or conduct of the belligerents. If the New Deal regime previously had put us on trial for the crime of being born, the DSA innovation is to dispense with even that formality.

As such, one way to understand the movement is as an internalization of the rhetoric that the older postwar Democratic Party (and the business establishment that upheld it) had used to build coalitions between themselves and members of these “marginalized” groups. Coalition-building is so definitional to politics that the term “coalition politics” is almost tautological, but coalitions always have pecking orders, and the DSA is remarkable as an attempt to apply the low-over-high principle not only at a national level, but within the coalition itself: a rich homosexual would be required to defer to a poor one, a member of the so-called labor aristocracy to a barely-unionized service worker, or a leftist supporter of Israel to a leftist supporter of Palestine (more on this later!).

It’s easy to envision the long-term fissures this approach will create. It’s obviously a more degraded form of politics than what preceded it, but in the short term, simplicity of this sort will prove hard to defeat, especially within a paradigm where political legitimacy is derived from counting ballots produced by (or derived from) an increasingly simplified populace of people with less and less in common and an unprecedented (for America) paucity of ability to engage in reason or discourse.

There’s no reason “low over high, no matter what” couldn’t work for a relatively long time, more than long enough to destroy Actual America.

Class Anxiety

One way to understand pre-DSA national politics was as a competition between Democrats and Republicans to turn as many of their constituents as possible into homeowners. That competition has ended with both parties abandoning the field: Trump’s stated goal is to keep housing prices “strong,” which in this context means unprecedentedly high, while the DSA’s messaging on housing, which has proved immensely popular with young people, has to do with urban rent control and public housing. This change is a result of home ownership becoming unthinkable for an increasing percentage of urban young people, whether because they’re subalterns from overseas where it was never common (these form an integral part of the DSA constituency, it must be said), or because they’re native-born college graduates entering a job market where employment is tenuous, rent almost unbearable, and a house down payment inconceivable. Through this lens, DSA economic policy could be seen as a tactical retreat from a fading American dream to a Eurosocialist or even ’70s communist apartment block ideal that affords people a bit more stability than the year-long duration of a lease.

It could be pointed out that American urban housing is an artificially scarce good due to the creation of virtual no-go zones in many formerly dense black or Latin communities; but, while true, this observation is unlikely to persuade, given that it conflicts with the DSA first directive mentioned above (low over high, no matter what) and because of the fully hypothetical nature of the solution being proposed. Rent control, for all its faults, actually exists, but the Right (at least post-Giuliani) can’t point to examples of now peacefully settled urban zones that were formerly chaotic before their tough-on-crime and deportation-based policies were enacted.

There’s also an occupational component. DSA membership is mostly comprised of college-educated young people, and while the private sector of the white-collar world has shifted to automation and India-shoring, American governments and municipalities are still hiring, and the DSA campaigns on drastically increasing the size of the public sector. The Republican (and Classic Democrat) arguments for why this could not be done relied on the imperatives of structural continuity for the nation, but for this increasingly deracinated and childless new constituency, it no longer compels. Going forward, the political task will be to peel off the less resentful/alien members of this coalition with material carrots, while using sticks to drum the rest out of our polity. Perhaps understanding the economic backdrop of the enemy coalition will enable us to do so in time to preserve Actual America.

Antizionist Indignation

Conflicts of every type have a moral component. As the Apostle Paul observed in his Epistle to the Romans, people are categorically unwilling to die on behalf of bad men. More contemporarily, William Lind pointed out that the moral plane is a strategic theater as profound as any logistical or artillery grouping, and often more decisive. While electoral politics, the peaceful reification of combat, lowers the stakes significantly, scoundrelry and legerdemain still produce an awful stench, and people vote at least partially via their disgust mechanism. To wit: the recent shift in American public sympathy from Israel to Palestine, especially among the young, is unprecedented in scope. It is in this context I point out that, on this issue, especially post-Gaza, the DSA position of favoring the latter positions them advantageously against Classic (which is to say Israel Lobby-dependent) Democrats and — unless he can pull off an October Surprise balancing his perceived over-closeness to the Israel Lobby — against Trump and the Republicans as well. It is tactically and perhaps even morally irrelevant to point out that the DSA are merely employing their inane and noxious “low over high, no matter what” ethical rubric to this conflict rather than reasoning ethically the way we’d expect within the Western tradition. The public instinctively values outcomes over process, especially when presented with no alternative.

The Right as currently constituted loses badly on this issue, and will continue to do so until it can articulate such an alternative. People who claim that immigration is the primary moral question in our current situation, and that they’ll support whichever candidate is more restrictive on that issue, are perhaps expressing a rational position, but not one that is situated to defeat an entity like the DSA in single combat, especially nationwide.

Corruption Purging

Since at least World War II, the Democratic Party can best be understood as organized Ellis Islander crime’s voice in Washington. One meta-narrative for the subsequent years has been a party winning power with the rhetoric of racial grievance, extracting a percentage, and then rug-pulling the minorities who got them there. There are limitations to that thesis, and it presupposes a level of aptitude on the part of the new members of the Democratic coalition that is not directly in evidence, but it makes some sense of the DSA’s appeal to elite leftists who watched their peers, perhaps beneficiaries of organized crime connections and nepotism, getting rich while they did not.

Consequently, one way to understand them is as a vengeful alliance between Obama- and Bush-wave immigrants and the losers from the Ellis Island and Jackson–Vanik immigration cohorts against the winners from the latter two categories. Kissinger’s observation about the Iran–Iraq War seems apposite.

And that brings to mind perhaps the most likely failure mode for the Right in this internecine Classic-Democrat-versus-DSA conflict: that we take on refugees from the former group and see Actual-American influence over the rightist faction in American politics diluted even further. If this happens, the success or failure of the DSA would be almost immaterial; we will have lost just as badly as if they had beaten us themselves.