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Kshama Sawant Blew It - Ideological purity remains a dead end for the left. (www.joewrote.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/electoralism@hexbear.net
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[–] 27 points 1 month ago* (10 children)

I’ve fully come around on socialists running as Democrats. The DSA is a political party in the traditional sense of the term, the Democratic Party is not.

The Democratic Party is not a true political party, with an ideology and dues paying members who it has the ability to exclude. There’s no requirement to join, and no way to be kicked out. All you have to do to be a Democrat is tick the D box when you run for office. The Democratic Party is an apparatus of the US political system, in the same way that the House of Representatives is.

My biggest issue with the DSA running as Democrats is that they should also be running as Republicans in districts where that makes more sense. In fact, the Republican party is even less of an actual political party than the Democrats, and has basically no system internally to exclude people they’d like to exclude. There are no super delegates in the RNC.

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    I think the "Democratic Party" is a brand on the surface, and a donor base at it's core.

    The core can't be co-opted by DSA. If they're successful in co-opting the brand, the corporate donors will leave.

    The brand might be able to be co-opted, though. I dislike the brand as much as any other Hexbear, but other people do like it (🙄), so it isnt the worst electoral strategy to leverage it until it starts to crumble. Even if most of the donor base leaves, there will still be a fair amount of momentum left for "DSA Dems" to regroup and remain an electoral force, not to say it would be easy.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Behind the scenes, the reason DSA needs the Dems is because of all the data they have on voters and the infrastructure that comes with that data. The issue is they're not building their own infrastructure to hold onto that data. If the uniparty finds a way through laws or other means to strip DSA from using it, the electoral strategy is pretty much gone.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    entryism as heist, not as takeover, might have some legs.

    the uniparty uses ballot access to control 3rd parties so if you want to establish a record of governance you have to waste a bunch of effort getting on the ballot at all or you can get 40% of the vote for free by associating with a bourgeois party and then Lieberman it.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I think that would fail because local and state republican parties usually have the ability to strip the party label from candidates they don't like. They don't have super delegates but they also don't even pretend to be some open big tent party.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    They should be running on whatever ballot line allows them to reach the most proletarian voters. In many states that will actually be an unaffiliated ballot line because of primary spoiler laws. In states without those laws though they should run on whatever line seems best. Long shot campaigns for the Democratic primaries should be avoided though.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    democratic party is shock absorber of the left though (more like counterinsurgent left kelly )

    The Democratic Party: when the “it’s not going to be the graveyard of social movements anymore” insurgency meets the “we’re not going to be the graveyard of social movements anymore” establishment under the big tent and they resolve to keep being the graveyard of social movements

    (from here https://nitter.net/shaabiranks/status/2086208662423421398)

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