The Left Isn’t Building a Faction Within the Democrats

Recent actions by the most prominent left-wingers in Congress show that they do not want to build an organized faction inside the Democratic Party.

Find the faction!

In a recent post for the Agitator, the blog of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Socialist Majority Caucus, David Duhalde argued the following:

I do not think DSA should return to a realignment strategy of trying to make the Democratic Party into a social-democratic party. I have written that I no longer believe that is a viable strategy. It makes more sense to build a socialist bloc in legislatures and contest for party offices as needed, but without any illusion of moving beyond a faction. For DSA, I especially want us to stop pretending we are building a third-party when a better and more honest orientation already exists, one in which we are fostering a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party, the party which most members will gravitate toward anyway.

The post stirred up quite a reaction among DSAers online, because it expresses opposition to a view strongly held by many in the organization: that DSA is (or should be) building its own party. That position is shared by people who have a variety of perspectives on how we go about doing that (or how we ought to be going about it):

1. By taking over the Democratic Party (“realignment”).

2. By tactically exploiting the Democratic ballot line to popularize our ideas, win elected office, and build our base, with the aim of breaking off to form our own party (“dirty break”).

3. By only running candidates on a third-party ballot line (“clean break”).¹

David is arguing that none of these strategies are really feasible, but also that none of them describes DSA’s actual practice, which has been “fostering a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party.”

I agree with David that DSA’s aspiration, so far, has more resembled building a faction within the Democrats than anything else. But even this is not an accurate description of most of the organization’s actual practice. Whether socialist-endorsed candidates and legislators act or present themselves as a unified bloc varies wildly when we look at different levels of government and different cities and states, casting doubt on the idea that most DSA elected officials see themselves as part of a faction (or would-be faction). New York State’s Socialists in Office are more cohesive in their activity; the socialist city councillors in, say, Chicago or Los Angeles less so. DSA-backed members of Congress (and their close allies, like other members of the Squad and Bernie Sanders) rarely act like such a bloc.

In fact, it has become increasingly obvious that neither Sanders, nor DSA congressmembers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, nor the rest of the Squad conceive of themselves as building a left-wing faction within the party. This was driven home by this week’s revelations that, in her bid to become the ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee, AOC told elected Democrats that she might stop backing primary challenges against incumbents. (AOC and some other members of the Squad famously came to Congress through such challenges.)

Set other potential problems with the faction-building strategy aside for the moment. (I discussed a couple of the most serious issues with socialists indefinitely working within the Democratic Party here.) Here is my question to Duhalde and others who share his position: If one of the Left’s most important standard-bearers in Congress is willing to give up electoral challenges against establishment incumbents, can we really say that socialists are building a faction at the federal level?

Or, consider the Uncommitted campaign, which Duhalde dubs a “success” that “showed that major electoral activity, including electoral activity for socialists, will occur around fights within the Democratic Party.” Uncommited was, to my mind, an admirable and strategically justified attempt to use the primary to put pressure on the Biden administration and, later, Kamala Harris’s campaign, to get the party to stop backing the genocide in Gaza. But the campaign did not succeed in its goals. It did not succeed in pressuring the administration to condition aid to Israel. It did not succeed in winning any but the most superficial changes in rhetoric from either Biden or Harris (if that). It did not even succeed in getting the Democratic National Convention to agree to have a Palestinian speaker, as the campaign had pleaded.

Yet Duhalde claims that Uncommitted was a success. Why? Because, he thinks, it contributed to Biden’s historic decision to drop out of the race. It is of course hard to know what factors contributed to Biden’s decision here, and what weight to give them respectively. Although the party establishment clearly had its own reasons for pushing him to step down,² perhaps the Uncommitted campaign helped oust Biden by crystallizing left-wing anger and making it impossible for that wing of the party to defend the president when the party’s right wing turned against him. In this way, Uncommitted might have played a role in pushing Biden out without advancing its real goal of supporting the Palestinian struggle.

Yet far from suggesting the promise of the “intra-Democratic faction” strategy, the whole episode seems like more evidence that there is no coherent left-wing faction in the party — and that advocates of that strategy are not taking the obstacles to it seriously. Because at the same time as Uncommitted was supposedly helping to push Biden out of the race, Bernie Sanders and AOC were pushing hardest for Biden to remain in. They even apparently secured promises around certain progressive domestic-policy proposals (though, notably, not around Gaza) from the president in exchange for their continued support. That is, far from acting in concert, the most prominent socialists in Congress were acting at cross purposes to the Uncommitted campaign at this crucial moment. At least at the federal level, then, it is quite a stretch to say that Sanders and the Squad are building a left-wing faction.

If democratic socialists in Congress do not, and do not seem to want to, work in common with each other and with movements outside of DC, that is a grave problem for advocates of a faction-building strategy. Why — right after an embarrassing election debacle for the party leadership — is the left’s most famous flag-bearer in Congress dangling assurances to party leaders that she’ll no longer support primary challenges? What sticks and carrots are at play inside the Democratic Party that make serious progressives like AOC and Bernie and others so obviously opposed to organizing as a faction? Might there be a conflict between prioritizing incremental legislative wins in the near term and building a coherent left-wing opposition within the party?

There’s a lot more to be said about this, but those who support a faction-building strategy have their work cut out for them in convincing the rest of us that they’re taking these questions seriously.

1. Note that neither of the first two perspectives are necessarily at odds with the “party surrogate” approach — roughly, the idea that in the near to medium term socialists should build informal party structures while using the Democratic ballot line as necessary. The party surrogate view is agnostic as to whether the ultimate aim is realigning or breaking with the party. It is, however, opposed to the clean break perspective, which eschews any positive engagement with the Democratic Party.

2. The timeline of events, I think, gives us pretty strong evidence for what was the biggest factor behind Biden’s withdrawal: a critical mass of liberal pundits and party leaders began calling on Biden to step back only after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, based on long-standing concerns about his cognitive abilities that were now impossible to ignore. This was weeks after the Democratic primary had concluded, and months after the Uncommitted campaign had notched its most significant scores in battleground states like Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.