Smartening up would have been the Democratic Party ejecting Swalwell because he was a known creep. Instead he was the front runner for the CA Governor until like a couple months before the election when scandal, NOT the party cleaning house, took him out.
DSA is its own party; DSA affiliated candidates only run as democrats because the US system basically all but disallows third party success. I guarantee you that DSA members would not associate themselves with neoliberal Democrats at all, given the choice.
I don't know enough about the Tea Party to confidently give my opinion, I am a bit too young to have been politically aware when they were in their heyday as far as I know.
Trump and MAGA also won elections. My point is winning with a shitty plan is not smartening up, unless your only goal is winning the current election. The Republicans committed suicide, we saw it live.
> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.
That reads as though you’re saying they want to abolish the democratic process, but as somebody living in a country with many of the democratic processes they’re proposing, looking in on what seems like a very dysfunctional democratic process in the US, it seems to be that they want to replace it with a much better version of itself.
While many people find the Leftist route of saving the country, the right route makes more sense to me. Reduce taxes to near zero - eliminate minimum wage - it's a recipe for starting companies. The left's answer is to destroy all companies. People think a company will exist in a leftist controlled world, but they're dead wrong.
I don't think so. I'm not an expert and I'm not an American. I did read their web site, I listen to what their candidates are saying and doing. I could very well be wrong. But when they say "socialism" there are two or three options. The first is they don't understand what that word means. The second is they do understand what that word means. The third is they've redefined this word. We already had a word for what people want, it's social-democratic, not socialism. So if they called themselves social-democrats and not socialists I would support them and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
"We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control."
What are they not saying? They are not saying things like we should raise taxes to fund social programs so we can be more like Europe. Europe is capitalist. Europe has free markets. DSA opposes capitalism. DSA wants to, in their words: "We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.".
What am I not understanding? Barrack Obama wanted accessible healthcare for all, he was not DSA. That's an awesome idea for the US that Democrats rallied behind and partly failed. Show me in DSA's words, material and action, how they are really social-democrats who just want more vacation, healthcare, worker protection while still maintaining capitalist free markets - like Europe. I mean they want all that but not in that way.
I think most of us want a moderate Democrat. I hope populism dies with Trump/MAGA in the coming years. We don’t need to match them with our own distasteful populism.
CHAZ was an idealistic symptom of applying John Lennon's Imagine to a neighborhood of Seattle, and it wasn't the only city tempted by this endeavor (if only it didn't finish with an arms dealer taking leadership of the locality);
"Defund the police" was a campaign slogan at last election.
I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are. If it's not socialism, it sure shares the same conclusions. And yet "The most extreme left in the US is the most extreme right wing for Europe" is a common belief.
>I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are.
I am often impressed how abusive and violent US policemen are. And they have budgets rivaling the defense spending of whole countries and are armed to the teeth with military grade equipment.
The world has moved forward. There was slavery in many places.
I had a similar discussion in real life. Where we concluded it that Roe vs. Wade being overturned was the biggest step backwards. Most of the other stuff is noise but this one is a biggy that's hard to fix. It sucks for Americans (which I'm not but I was debating an American).
Nobody is saying we can't let workers decide. Most of us are workers. Most of us vote. We are deciding. The US has also made progress on workers' rights at the state level to my understanding. At the end of the day we still have to lean on the democratic process, we need to debate policies and we need to get people to think critically and think things through. This is very hard to do today given the public discourse and tribalism.
Clearly a social component can exist within a democracy, European nations are an example of this? Are there any proposals more radical than European-adjacent style social policies?
As a citizen of one of the European countries you mentioned, let me tell you: The DSA would run as a center-left party in pretty much the entire union. You have—respectfully—not a clue what socialism means, because the DSA agenda has absolutely nothing in common with communism in the first place.
I disagree. When I moved from Finland to the US, I was surprised to find how popular actual "abolish private property" style socialism was among young Americans. I hanged out with leftist people when I was a student, and I kind of knew many of the people who eventually ended up running the Left Alliance (the main left-wing party). My impression was that they had all accepted free markets as a necessary evil, rather than advocating for the socialism of their predecessors. But it looks like Finnish students have started adopting American socialist ideas in the recent years.
Bernie is probably the most well-known democratic socialist in the US, but he is not a member of DSA. By his political positions he would be either in the left wing of Finnish Social Democratic Party or in the mainstream of the Left Alliance. He would probably choose the Left Alliance, since it is more like a coalition of like-minded activists, while the party is the primary actor for the Social Democrats.
AOC, another well-known democratic socialist, would also fit in the Left Alliance. She is part of the moderate wing of DSA. But if you start looking into the ideological wing, you find plenty of actual socialists who would make Finnish mainstream leftists uncomfortable.
I would argue that the USA suffers from its bipartisan system in a lot of ways; among them the problem of two parties having to span an incredibly wide range of political positions that are often so far apart to be almost irreconcilable. I'm pretty sure you will find some people with uncomfortable positions at the fringe seams of the Left Alliance as well, they are just organised in a very different system compared to the US and do not have the momentum to rally around these positions right now.
Fringe groups tend to start new political parties in the Finnish system. There are still two communist parties left, both offshoots of the pro-Soviet minority of the original communist party. One of them even has the official status of a political party, but probably not for long, as it lost its last seats in the 2021 local elections.
Yes, they are center-left at best, and your frenzied rebuttal against regular people trying to improve their lives and the country they live in is alarming. Free public transportation..the horror.
Respectfully, you may have skimmed some material or watched a couple of minutes of MSNOW, because you wouldn't come to the conclusion that the DSA just wants free public transportation otherwise. Key aspects of the DSA's goals and the actual policy implementation actions of elected DSA-aligned politicians that are quite well aligned with the position of a person holding communist and other relatively extremist sympathies:
- state-controlled grocery stores [0]
- public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries [1]
- abolition in full of police and prisons ("cut police budgets annually toward zero") [1]
- ending sanctions on states backing terrorist activities [1]
- permitting open, uncontrolled immigration [2]
- disregarding the existence of Israel ("democratic secular state [Palestine], from the river to the sea") [3]
- giving voting rights to noncitizens and prisoners [4]
I think what amazes me the most is that you read all of that and said “nope”.
I can’t wrap my head around why you would sacrifice your life and well being so that a small number of people can become impossibly wealthy?
I read those pages and find it absolutely fantastic. How someone could fight for the position to be a wage slave with no security against inflation, cost of living or bankruptcy or homelessness due to illness is frankly insane.
Canada has government-rune liquor stores, they're doing ok. Not exactly a "grocery store", but still PRETTY SHOCKING. UK has co-op (chains). There's Mondragon in Spain - I know it's employee-owned but that's not much different than government-owned if you really think about it.
Public-transit where I live is not free, but it is subsidized, with various recent efforts from municipal and state governments to further reduce costs for all residents.
Germany is defined as Social Democracy or a Social Market Economy. It marries free-market capitalism with social welfare policies, state regulation, and collective bargaining to ensure economic growth and social security, including robust social safety nets.
The US once had stronger unions and basic worker-oriented safety nets. This has been dismantled since the 80s, while piling on the National Debt by pilfering the treasury and "returning" the money to the (rich) end of the tax base.
There was a great quote in the original Deus Ex: "In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent."
In my mind the DSA is trying to shift the Overton window towards something more reasonable, that has already existed in the US. Focusing on the extremes to dismiss the DSA entirely is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Free public tenant is very common. The wealthy being massive sources of the problem is very common. The U.K., hardly a bastion of socialist views, has massive amounts of food banks and he only attempt to overturn democracy I’ve seen was on Jan 6th 2021.
"The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 100,000 members and chapters in all 50 states. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few."
"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society."
"democratic socialism" is an oxymoron. socialism conflicts directly with democratic values. At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side. All previous socialist "experiments" were not democracies.
If 'democratic values' are everyone having an equal voice in how the systems of a country are arranged. And if those people, through a democratic process, decide that the systems of their country shouldn't support the exploitative elements of capitalism, then it would definitely be democracy in action to make that come true. Anything counter to that would be, by definition, anti-democratic.
When you say "socialism conflicts directly with democratic values" I genuinely have no idea what "democratic values" you're talking about.
Scandinavian countries you are referring to are practicing Social Democracy, they are not Democratic Socialist states.
In other words, Social Democrat != Democratic Socialist
Scandinavian model relies on competitive private enterprise to create wealth, combined with strong labor union collective bargaining, universal public services, and high consumption/income taxes that apply broadly across society.
DSA seeks to move past or dismantle the capitalist economic system, advocating for social, public, or worker ownership of the means of production.[1]
"We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation."
From the linked website. Now, that's not quite "the means of production", explicitly stated. It's just "the key economic drivers", so most of the means of production.
Maybe you ought to be a little less quick to accuse others of lying.
Those still sound like Scandinavia? Energy Production - Vattenfall in Sweden, the Norway oil fund. Transportation? Public transport is mostly publicly owned (trains go back and forth with failed privatization attempts), the road network is wholly state-owned (unlike e.g. Japan where the whole highway network is privatized and tolled)
"Democratic Socialism" is VERY different from "Social Democracy"
In socialism with supposed democracy, where the state owns the means of production and supposedly the workers supposedly have a say about everything, they actually end up with a say about nothing (at least not without greasing the right palms in the inevitably corrupt system that arises).
In Social Democracy, capitalism is the underlying system, where corporations and workers can own means of production, but it operates under sufficient regulation that the excesses and systemic failures of captialism (e.g., failure to prevent Tragedies Of The Commons, tendency towards monopoly and excess concentration of power, consistent tendency to abuse and impoverish workers, etc.), you end up with successful systems like Northern Europe.
The two are very different, and we need to hold the DSA people to the latter and not let them sneak in the former.
I reference direct statements by DSA made on their own websites that they aim to
* replace capitalism [0]
* own means of production [0]
I state the fact that Scandinavian/Nordic countries are Social Democracies (embracing capitalism) and Not Democratic Socialist countries.
You state that Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism is the same.
I ask you "tell me how Social Democrat parties of Denmark or Sweden views on capitalism same thing as DSA view" [1]
And your response is "nobody wants to replace capitalism, you're being absurd
reply" inspite of official DSA statements that i linked to in [0]
My 2 points stand:
* DSA is pretty clear about its desires to replace capitalism [0] and own means of production [0]
* Nordic countries are Social Democracies. THey embrace capitalism, not aim to replace it (as its stated on DSA's own site). Your statement is factually wrong, unless you can find it in your heart to prove me wrong.
I dont know why you felt that bringing Israel discussion about clear socialist goals of DSA will help your argument whatever that is, but try to keep focus about systematic issues with DSA, not geo-political.
They themselves literally say out loud that they want to abolish our existing institutions. If you want to debate that point, go debate the DSA candidates themselves.
You must live under a rock. A quick search will find you plenty of video of politicians talking about defunding things, cancelling Thanksgiving, abolishing ICE or the FDA or the Senate, undercutting small businesses, introducing rationing, etc, etc.
clearly they are smartening up