DSA

Like most evenings recently, I was scrolling X to fill some idle time. Within seconds, I came across a rather rage-inducing post by New York State assembly member and congressional candidate Claire Valdez. Invoking Mexico’s struggle against “empire,” she promised to carry that struggle into Congress. Her framing, focused around the thinly veiled disdain for “empire,” raises an obvious question. What role does America assume in this story? Is the American political community one that she, alongside her DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) comrades, wants to improve, or is it an adversary to be dismantled from within?

In the Battle of the Acronyms, perhaps no contest is more ferocious than the slugfest between the DSA – that’s “D” for dumb and “S” for commie, I mean “socialist” – and ICE (always excepting TDS vs MAGA). A wacko woman steers her car into an ICE agent. He shoots her. The media calls make up and tries to turn the dead woman into the second coming of Saint George Floyd. There was a warehouse full of outrage just waiting to be paraded at prime time but somehow the entertainment fell flat. Renée Good, the woman in question, didn’t have what it takes to triumph in the victimology sweepstakes. The anti-Trump media wept for a week and then went on to other wheezes. Nevertheless the Democratic Socialists of America have kept an eye on ICE.

So, at time of writing, it looks as if voters don’t want to cancel Thanksgiving – on balance, at least. Come November, however, few Democrats will be expressing gratitude for their party’s vote-tabulation systems. Francesca Hong, it seems, will not be America’s first avowedly socialist state governor. She appears to have just lost an extremely tight primary to David Crowley, a Milwaukee County executive, in the gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin. Her failure does not mean that Democratic voters are returning to the establishment’s preferred path The long-view – and already ubiquitous – reaction to this news is to mark it down as a major blow for the Democratic Socialists of America and their bid to take over the Democratic establishment.

Is the United States a capitalist country, where bosses exploit workers, or is it a great empire, where colonists exploit subject peoples? American socialists and social democrats were never quite able to decide. “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” Bernie Sanders told GQ magazine in 2019. Yet he would also say that: “When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto. You don't know what it's like to be poor. You don't know what it's like to be hassled when you walk down the street.” In 2026 Sanders is an emeritus figure, and the “imperial” idea has won out.