It’s Bad for Socialists to Present Ourselves as Democrats
It’s not hand-wringing to be worried about tying the socialist movement to the Democratic Party. The party’s changing base and the confusion caused by socialists running as Dems are serious problems.
The question of how to relate to the Democratic Party continues to be a contentious question on the American left, especially within the Democratic Socialists of America. There’s no doubt that self-identified socialists have made great strides in winning elected office by running on the Democratic Party ballot line, and Bernie’s two campaigns in the Democratic presidential primary played a large role in reviving the socialist left in the United States. But many (myself included) continue to argue that, ultimately, workers need a party of their own.
Some socialists see the insistence on having a party independent of the Democrats as little more than a left-wing pathology. In December, for instance, my DSA comrade Sam Lewis tweeted, “The main political divide in DSA is between the people who want to build an independent socialist org that runs candidates on the Dem ballot line because of an unapologetic drive for working class power and the people who think we should do that but with more hand-wringing.” And in an essay in Jacobin last summer, Chris Maisano called concerns about working within the Democratic Party a “debilitating political neuralgia.”
But the Left’s tortured relationship to the Democrats is in fact rooted in substantive problems. And the refusal to face up to those problems is what is actually debilitating for the Left.
The Problem of Class Dealignment
One issue, as I pointed out in my response to Maisano, is that socialists are trying to organize the working class as a political force, and Democrats continue to be more and more unpopular with their traditional working-class base. This is part of the broader phenomenon of “class dealignment” that has been affecting center-left parties across the developed world. This should not come as a surprise; the Democratic Party long ago abandoned the New Deal politics that made it the default choice for workers for several decades.
Maisano has challenged this narrative, including in his reply to me. In his view, changes in the Democrats’ electorate are largely due to changes in the composition of the working class: more educated workers now make up a larger share, and blue-collar manual workers a smaller share. So while it is true that Democratic Party voters are trending more educated, and lower-education voters have become more likely to vote Republican, overall Democrats still command strong allegiance of working-class voters. And many of these voters — especially those with lots of education but lower incomes — are in fact sympathetic to a left-wing agenda.
But I’m not sure this argument really negates the central point made by theorists of class dealignment — that there is a continuing trajectory of lower-income, lower-education voters away from the Democratic Party toward the GOP, and a corresponding trajectory of higher-income, higher-education voters from the Republicans to the Democrats, and that this has troubling implications.
Yes, a significant amount of the loss of blue-collar voters can be chalked up to changing composition of the overall electorate, and those losses are being made up, at least in part, by winning over other segments of the working class. So this shift may not lead to a decline in Dems’ overall electoral prospects. (Though what will happen on that front if the trend continues unabated is unclear.) But that doesn’t mean the party’s increasing reliance on better-paid, better-educated workers is a benign or inconsequential development as far as socialists are concerned.
For one thing, as Maisano acknowledges, research shows that these higher-income, higher-education voters are typically more opposed to redistributive policy than lower-income voters. In a critique of the class dealignment perspective, Maisano cites a 2019 study by Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm which finds, he says, that voters with both high education and high incomes “are torn between opposition to redistribution and support for relatively liberal approaches to governance and citizenship questions.”
He also discusses a 2014 paper by Kitschelt and Rehm, which looks specifically at how white voters’ occupations have shaped their political preferences. Similarly, they found that those in managerial roles are likely to oppose redistributive efforts; while “technical professionals in engineering, design, or technology” are “not as strongly opposed to redistribution as managers, but are not consistently in favor of it.”
But these are precisely the groups that have been joining the Democratic ranks in increasing numbers, after decades of the party attempting to woo them. So socialists running in Democratic primaries appear to be speaking to a base that is increasingly hostile to our program — and given their privileged class positions, not entirely without reason.
The 2020 Democratic presidential primary seems to bear this out. Bernie Sanders, at the end of the day, only won 26 percent of the vote running on a class-focused, strongly redistributive platform; and even many of the more educated voters who purported to support progressive economic policies lined up behind Elizabeth Warren’s technocratic-liberal candidacy, splitting the left-leaning vote and arguably hindering Sanders’s early momentum. If we lump Warren’s 7 percent of supporters in with Sanders voters, that means the broader “progressive” group amounted to only a third of Democratic primary voters.
A Class for Itself?
The Democrats’ increasingly upscale base all bodes ill for winning workers over to a socialist project while associating ourselves with the Democratic brand. But the deeper problem here is not Democrats’ increasing unpopularity with working-class voters. It’s that socialists’ goals of organizing workers on a class basis and building class consciousness — convincing workers that they can and should fight together to advance their shared interests — are fundamentally at odds with working within the capitalist-dominated Democratic Party. As I wrote in September of last year:
The more fundamental problem, though, is that socialists can’t succeed in organizing workers on a class basis if they are constantly sending confusing signals about what they stand for and whose side they’re on. When they hobnob with politicians who support the war machine and take money from billionaires and oppose raising taxes on the wealthy and vote to break strikes — or worse, when they’re convinced to do those things themselves — socialist politicians undermine their ability to cohere working-class people around an alternative political identity and agenda.
How do we convey to ordinary people that we are building a political project to advance working-class power when we align ourselves publicly with a president and a party that gladly takes money and cues from billionaires and is giving out a bonanza of corporate handouts in lieu of a meaningful response to climate change?
That’s not to say it’s impossible to build an independent identity or distance ourselves from Biden and his ilk while tactically making use of the Democratic ballot line. In fact, I’ve advocated just that, and the Act Like an Independent Party resolution adopted at the last national DSA convention outlines important steps in that direction.
Maisano’s reply in Jacobin might lead one to think that he agrees with the spirit of this approach. He writes:
This does not, and should not, entail a chastened accommodation with the Democratic establishment. If anything, it entails heightening direct conflict with this establishment and its corporate funders — who would like nothing more than for the Left to spend precious time, energy, and resources on “independent” politics instead — through primary challenges and the advancement of a strongly left-wing legislative agenda.
Yet in practice, Maisano and others who emphasize the benefits of socialists running as Democrats tend to want to avoid taking the steps that would distinguish democratic socialists from the Democratic Party writ large. When myself and other comrades in the New York City chapter of DSA proposed a resolution in 2022 that would have required endorsed candidates for elected office to run as a bloc and project a unified “brand identity” as democratic socialists, Maisano argued against the resolution. He claimed that many Democratic primary voters in New York strongly identify with the Democratic Party, so it would be impossible for DSA to go after the Democratic Party “tout court.”
But to the extent that is true, it is precisely the identification of workers with the Democratic Party that a socialist political project should be trying to break. Maisano in effect wants to have it both ways, saying that socialists should “heighten direct conflict with the Democratic establishment” while holding also that this “does not require distancing ourselves from the Democratic Party label, and in practice often benefits from an association with it.” Yet that association is confusing and mystifying to the working-class base we are trying to build. Mike Parker put it well:
The real challenge is that a lot of working people think that the Democratic Party is the party that reflects them and organizes them in politics. But since the Democratic Party is actually controlled by the capitalist class, by reinforcing that notion that we have to focus simply on electing Democrats, that we need the Democratic Party for its name, what we’re really doing is accepting workers’ disorganization and their reliance on capitalist leadership in politics.
Measures like Act Like an Independent Party are not mere “hand-wringing,” as Sam Lewis would have us believe. They’re about trying to navigate the very real difficulties that come with trying to build a socialist project while working within the Democratic Party. Denying this means shutting down important debates about electoral strategy and refusing to acknowledge the challenges that we need to confront.