Why Not Zohran?
DSA, the Progressive Blob, and ways to move electeds that aren’t threatening to beat them with hammers.
ed note: Hello - I am back! Posts will remain very occasional, but I have something larger for the summer planned that I have co-written w/ Mrs. Jante. Additionally, I’d like to thank Kareem from NYC for inspiring this post via a conversation on twitter.
Who could love a guy like Lander? Certainly not voters, at least so far. To people in DSA, he is so transparently yesterday’s news: too squishy for the left, too bleeding heart for the right, way, way too white for America’s only world-city (the current poll leader proves this). At least Bill DeBlasio had swag. [update: after this article went to print Mr. Lander allegedly acquired some swag.]
It turns out there is a big constituency for him, however. One group of people for whom he’s the answer to all of life’s problems, an embodiment of the Progressive project. Those people are Groups, and the kind of person around Groups who thinks about politics so much that they have to theorize themselves as Progressive. They think that he’s just moderate enough to be a Serious Person while being committed to Progressive Change for Our Communities. Why wouldn’t you endorse him? He’s our guy! You wouldn’t endorse a no-hoper-radical like Zohran would you? To a slim but influential slice of New York, Lander’s the cat’s pajamas.
A couple of DSA endorsed elected officials happen to be sympathetic to this argument, and have caused a stir by not ranking Zohran #1 when debuting their endorsements. This has launched a minor wave of people sensibly calling this behavior “dumb as hell.” But it’s worth interrogating why they did and what to do about it. And for that, I have to start with a story.
I remember when I was on the electoral committee of my humble, provincial chapter, far from the hustle and lights of the Big Apple. We had to make a decision on whether to endorse in a city council race. The candidate was fine enough - he had a lefty pedigree, had been recruited to run by capable people, was staffing up, and was willing to develop a real relationship with us. The opponent was right wing. But what I remember most was the people who were closest to The Progressive Scene both on our electoral committee and in the chapter kept on saying, “everybody hates [this guy’s opponent!]” with the implication that the race would be a slam dunk. The staffer who worked for the progressive City Councilor but had communist sympathies? “Everybody hates [opponent!]” The professional activist? “Everybody hates [opponent!]” The hardened (and quite talented) progressive campaign staffers, of whom this city has about 10? “Everybody hates [opponent!]’” They said it with the same tone and emphasis too, like it was a political slogan. I remember asking myself, who exactly is this ‘everybody’ we’re talking about?
It turns out ‘everybody’ didn’t include about 51% of the district’s residents who voted in that election. It turns out they liked [opponent] just fine, or at least well enough. ‘Everybody’ was not enough somebodies to win. Rather, ‘everybody’ ended up being the affluent liberal homeowner base within the district, not-coincidentally a longtime hub of left-liberal civic and progressive activism since the 1970s, and a lot of people around City Hall who had had to deal with [opponent]’s seemingly quite difficult personality. Which is all well and good, but not how I would define ‘everybody.’
It was a great idea to endorse the candidate (I argued against it; I was wrong). He’s done great things since, and I have every confidence he can win next time. But that experience taught me to be careful whenever a political operative (or a ‘grasstop’ volunteer, as the progressive argot would term non-professionals sophisticated enough to be in The Club) makes an evaluation without evidence. Especially if it’s the kind of thing that makes them seem like a smart and savvy macher. It’s basically guaranteed to be wrong then.
The other thing it taught me was the hidden power that those to our right hold and DSA can’t quite bring itself to understand or trust. The Progressive movement is extraordinarily good at creating an elite social world and shaping conventional wisdom – at least to itself. And because it’s nice and well funded and professionalized, it’s good at marketing that conventional wisdom as reputable and knowledgeable to a wider circle beyond them, to include a lot of well meaning people with whom they share some policy preferences.
We often critique them for being incoherent, weak, and disorganized, but that’s only true to a certain extent. At least in my experience in the far-flung provinces, the Progressive Scene is broadly quite bad at reaching a working class majority, organizing campaigns, and coordinating proactive political action, but is incredibly good at promulgating conventional wisdom to the highly-educated broad left. And in a democracy as vitiated as ours, the conventional wisdom of highly educated people is a powerful thing! The Progressive Scene in my city influences who runs for office, what policies get talked about, which unions are viewed as worth talking to and which aren’t. Progressive Conventional Wisdom has a real voting base in not a few wards in my city.
The moderates and right wingers are if anything even better at it than Progressives are. State Capitals and city downtowns are insular bubbles that are tailor-made for the cultivation of conventional wisdom. The psyops Progressives conduct on each other over 2pm weekday coffees when everyone else is working are one thing. The Right can do that to elected officials with the power of money day in day out. Some of the most powerful lobbying money you can spend isn't campaign contributions but instead securing meetings and dinners with legislators/staff, or funding think tanks to put out reports that make your point of view plausible and making sure they circulate to everyone in the bubble. I haven’t read Gramsci so forgive me for being a pseud, but they’re good at creating, you know, hegemony.
Our electeds, god love em, have the good sense to avoid center and right wing conventional wisdom most of the time. But when we leave them alone and vulnerable during the weekdays when we are all at work and when they are at the Capitol (or City Hall), they are susceptible to the confidential coffee meeting, to the promulgation of a poisonous progressive mindvirus, to the clandestine cultivation of conventional wisdom. Zohran can’t win, everybody knows that. Lander’s a really sensible and sweet guy with good policies. You have to get with reality.
They’re defenseless! And the people talking with them are so knowledgeable. And the midday coffee is weirdly good.
We in DSA don’t trust hegemony. We are a stout, literal-minded folk. Our electoral project has been premised on an assumption that by bringing together masses of people, we’re accumulating some critical mass of hard power that we can wield with equal force against our enemies in the right wing of the Democratic party and (theoretically) to discipline our electeds. Much like a mother with a somewhat old-fashioned mindset, “we brought our Socialists In Office into this world, and we can take them out of it.” This opinion is a political compromise that has been hashed out in twitter groupchats at 1:30am, in Bushwick bars after a canvass, at Convention. GOD knows it has been hashed out at convention. The smart and savvy machers in the org love to explain it as the DSA Thing to curious new members. We’ve all come to believe in it as a kind of catechism. A slogan, if you will. Convention has created some of our own internal Conventional wisdom.
I think it’s a lie.
Not a lie told from one part of the organization to the other—not a malicious manipulation of the $ocial-DEMokkkrats or a bureaucratic smear to deceive the Membership into Canvassing. It’s a lie we’ve all told ourselves.
America is an unfortunately entrepreneurial and divided country. By which I don’t mean any of the million ways that applies to America normally, but rather that our system of electing people is uniquely focused on the individual officeholder. People hold seats, not parties. Part of this is because our Founding Fathers thought they could design a system that avoided parties entirely, which they associated with the noxious and corrupt politics of the British metropole. They succeeded, but not as well as they imagined they could. The other part is because of a series of 20th century legal reforms that in trying to ban corruption ended up banning society tout court by accident. So we do have party-like-objects hanging around, but the real political agents in American government are a collective of tremendously well entrenched individual incumbents with some policy preferences in common.
If you pair that with a healthily skeptical application of median voter theorem, you can start to see why trying to beat one of our electeds is a much steeper climb than we are prepared to scale at this particular moment in time. Unless they did something truly heinous—I mean committed a crime and not any of the ones some people think are cool—they can beat us if we try to get rid of them. There’s an ocean to our right in the electorate, and there’s any number of people to sell out to. Sure, we won an election before, but we won an election by making sure everyone got to know and like the person we’re now trying to tear down. Imagine knocking on a door and saying “hey look vote for X, not Y” and then trying to explain to your average primary voter how they didn’t endorse DSA’s candidate in a race, DSA’s endorsement policies, and watching that person’s eyes glaze over. And then imagine doing that enough times to win. And imagine the literal anything else the organization could do instead of trying to do that.
I think it’s safe to say we have an empty quiver on that front.
What’s worse, acting like we do is counterproductive. Elected officials, so I’m told, are human. I can at least confirm ours are. And humans, unfortunately, have a psychology. They have feelings, they have thoughts. They have an ego. And imagine a human that, as described above, is not obligated by force to give you the time of day. They’re free agents. Is a strategy of anger and empty threats likely to make someone who can walk out whenever they want likely to stick around? The hard power theory of DSA “accountability” isn’t just an empty threat—it’s actively harmful to try to bring into being. Even in a world where it worked one time, or twice, or three times, how many times do you think shouting at someone will work before they start to think about exit strategies?
So that leaves us at a bit of an impasse. It’s tempting to say “well okay, but then we can’t do anything! We’re just like the Democrats! Or WFP!” How, Jante, could you be so negative about our project? Debates on electoral strategy tend to leap towards these dramatic questions.
I’m not! I think we actually have a fair amount of leverage over our electeds. It’s helpful to point out that we’re all mad at some of our NYC SiOs for co-endorsing Losin’ Lander while also endorsing Zohran. RCV is a weird system—one of my least favorite pieces of Progressive Conventional Wisdom is that it’s “good” for “the left”; RCV sucks and produces weird collective action problems exactly like this. But plenty of our electeds have endorsed Zohran. Hell, our electeds are even supporting him in my very own small, rural, Southern chapter. It’s worth interrogating why they have! Some of it is, I’m sure, some behind-the-scenes strong-arming and Frank Conversations. That’s fine and good. I’m not saying that we have to be polite and deferential to people just because they are a SiO.
But a lot of it is surely that, in NYC in particular, we’ve started to accrete some of that good old-fashioned soft power. Not enough to beat those wily Progressives entirely, but NYC’s Socialists in Office Committee, their attention to staffing, their social density in Brooklyn and Queens, has surely gone some way to creating an alternate social world and body of knowledge for our elected officials that keeps them out of the suffocating air of the legislative chamber.
I think it’s reductive to think about power exclusively as a club that we can hold over people’s heads. It certainly can’t explain why we are where we are right now, because our coercive power over our own allies is precisely zero. Rather, simply by building a structure where we can reliably talk to our allies, communicate our interests, make them part of our social world, and give them access to new and better information, we’ve built a pretty coherent group of people.
It’s not a strategy that can work 100% of the time. It’s not the kind of strategy you can lay out in schematic order to the more literal, scientific kind of Marxist. I know it’s the kind of hippie-dippy bullshit that would drive a clean-breaker absolutely feral. The ‘hard power’ theory has been so baked into DSA’s political-consensus that it feels like giving up the revolutionary potential of the org to tell people to be more realistic.
But if you ask me how we make the next stage towards being a “party,” I’m not going to tell you that we need to figure out how to yell at people better. I’m not going to say that we need to pass a resolution that lays out how exactly we can and should relate to people. And I’m not going to say that we should ritually sacrifice an elected to improve morale. Instead I’m going to ask—how do we create a social world that frees up the ideological imagination of our electeds? How can we be producers of knowledge and conventional wisdom? How can we grow to the point where we acquire our own social gravity, where our presence can be felt just by walking the streets? How, even if we work normal hours and can’t be at those 2pm meetings, can we make seductively good coffee? That’s the next step.
I couldn’t agree more that this is very important. I have been struggling to articulate something like it for a while.