The  Steering Committee of the North Star Caucus makes the following statement on the campaign to expel Jamaal Bowman from DSA and the political strategy and efforts behind these efforts.
 
 
THE CAMPAIGN TO EXPEL REP JAMAAL BOWMAN:
WE BELIEVE THAT DSA MUST ACT ON THE BASIS OF THE PRINCIPLES AND VALUES OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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We of the North Star Caucus of DSA support our National Political Committee's decision not to expel Congressman Jamaal Bowman. In addition to the pragmatic reasons the NPC outlined in its statement, expulsion of a member for a partial dissent on a single issue profoundly betrays the founding organizational principles that we hold dear and believe have been -- and will be -- crucial to our integrity, survival, and growth. 

DSA’s notion of democratic socialism is rooted in our origin as a pluralistic organization that, from our founding in 1982, brought together diverse strands of the left. To honor and continue that tradition, DSA must be an organization characterized by healthy dialogue and debate over tactical and strategic perspectives on how to advance and achieve democratic socialism. Our vision of democratic socialism is the basis for our shared politics, while also creating the space for diverse strategies, tactics, and points of view. This is what gives life to the notion of DSA as an inclusive, democratic socialist organization. This is what has made it possible for us to grow during a period of ascendant rightist politics.

It is that commitment to pluralism, rooted in the core values and politics put forth in the DSA Constitution, which guides our work. 

DSA’s approach to political discussion and action means that we, as an organization, do not seek to impose a single course of action upon members who may be uncomfortable with specific programs and strategies. This organizational practice reflects our commitment to the democratic demands we place on society as whole. A democratic organization prioritizes consensus-building as the central principle of organization and governance. 

Our effectiveness in modeling this approach to political discussion and action boosts recruitment and encourages participation, which strengthens the democratic praxis in our work. 

This conception of how DSA has functioned in the past and should in the future was in conflict with the campaign to expel Congressman Jamaal Bowman. 
 
The notion that expulsion is the best approach to deal with disagreements over tactics or strategy implies a highly centralized organization with little room for discussion and debate. Carried to the extreme, this approach would turn DSA into a cadre organization that operates with some version of centralized discipline which individual members – including elected officials – would be obligated to follow.

We welcome members from current or former Leninist organizations who have joined DSA, but DSA has grown in part because it has consistently rejected being an organization that imposes discipline on its members or expels members for having policy disagreements.

More to the point, a democratic socialist organization has no business dictating to members who have succeeded in winning election to public office. No accomplished, self-respecting politician would accept such demands, and neither would their voters. Only the politically inexperienced would expect otherwise. Principled criticism can be appropriate, but untoward, futile pretensions of control weaken the substantive force of any such criticism.

Whatever one might make of a century of failed efforts to build politically successful organizations along such cadre lines in the U.S., this perspective is clearly not a helpful guide in the current historical situation. Today in DSA, political leadership should not be imposed through organizational dicta, but must be exercised through a project of building political and cultural hegemony, in coalition with others in a broad progressive left.

The voluntary and enthusiastic support of the working class can only be earned through the power of persuasion, in a setting of comradely dialog inside DSA and in amicable external relations with the broad, progressive left.

We oppose any effort to expel allies or demonize fraternal, progressive formations. Only through dialogue, debate, and education, can we strengthen and clarify our own positions, attract more members, and work with allies in solidarity with oppressed people.

Demands to expel Rep. Bowman run up against political reality. DSA is not nearly strong enough to impose our will on Bowman, AOC, Sanders, or others who are elected by a constituency much broader than ourselves. That path ends in isolation and political failure. 

Congressman Bowman’s actions regarding BDS, Palestine and Israel in no way come close to being in substantial disagreement with DSA. Resolutions passed at DSA conventions are not indivisible measures requiring absolute adherence. 

We therefore agree with the NPC decision to not expel allies such as Rep. Bowman. Rather, through dialogue, debate, and education, we can strengthen and clarify our own positions, win more members, and work with new allies in solidarity with oppressed people.

We hope that comradely dialogue will enable us to move beyond the current conflict and re-focus our efforts on forging an effective approach to international peace and solidarity work. 

Steering Committee. North Star Caucus.
​December 7, 2021

This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American 

​Not only is liberalism too weak to resist the predations of metastatic capitalism; so is social democracy.

Robert Kuttner,

All of my adult life, I’ve considered myself a left-liberal, tending toward social democrat. Much of that sensibility reflects the era of my early adulthood, a time when reformed capitalism seemed plausible and practical. The New Deal had created a fundamental shift of power and ideology. Free-market ideologues and Wall Street moguls were discredited and disgraced by the Great Crash. Financial markets were tightly regulated. Labor unions were empowered. Government demonstrated the value of public investment and social insurance. The mixed economy had arrived, seemingly for keeps, well defended by grateful voters.
But that moment turned out to be all too transient and fragile. What followed was not just a reversion to the laissez-faire of the 1920s. What has ensued is hyper-capitalism, impervious to the usual strategies of reform, turning humans and social institutions into expendable commodities, destroying the ability of people to thrive. Saving democracy, the planet, and decent lives for regular people requires moving beyond capitalism. To be an effective liberal today, you need to be a socialist.
I’ve long resisted the socialist label, on several grounds—partly because the habit of sectarian infighting sometimes makes socialism seem a caricature of itself; partly because the word “socialism” gives the right too fat a target in a country without much of a socialist tradition. Then again, socialist-baiting is standard Republican playbook even when Democrats propose the most timid of programs. After the House belatedly passed a badly stripped-down infrastructure bill, scores of Republicans absurdly claimed that this was socialism. If only.
I’m also uneasy in the company of some people to my left who indulge self-defeating slogans like “defund the police,” which are gifts to the right; or who are unhelpfully scornful of President Biden’s efforts. (Where do they expect him to find the votes in Congress for an even more robust left program?) Conversely, some admired friends from my generation who were once founders of Students for a Democratic Society and who are unabashed socialists are fervent Biden supporters. They’re political realists, while also pushing Biden to be more progressive in his aspirations. That’s my stance, too. So this essay is an exploration of the deepening toxicity of capitalism and the alternatives, not a brief for no-enemies-on-the-left.
When I was young, the liberal tradition was far more robust. “Liberal” evoked FDR. There was no Trumpism because New Deal liberalism delivered for the working class. This magazine was born very much in the liberal tradition. When Paul Starr, Bob Reich, and I founded the Prospect in 1989, we paid calls on two iconic older liberals to seek their blessing, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, and not on socialists Michael Harrington and Irving Howe (though both were personal heroes of mine as well as friends, and I’d written several pieces for Howe’s Dissent). A Prospect slogan, emblazoned on our cover, was A Journal for the Liberal Imagination.
That era and those assumptions have been overtaken by events. The system’s excesses are becoming steadily more grotesque. The profit maximization strategies of Amazon repeat the worst sweatshop conditions of a century ago, as if the labor movement had never existed. Likewise today’s slaughterhouses. Ultra-commercialization is infecting every corner of the medical system, harming patients and health workers alike, mocking the idea that markets are efficient. The supply chain crisis is the result of excessive globalization and deregulation. The platform monopolies have built their business models around surveillance capitalism and cultivation of addictive behaviors. Private equity firms and hedge funds are taking over sector after sector, from retail to nursing homes to newspapers, undermining workers and the viability of underlying enterprises. Wealth has never been more concentrated. What’s needed is substantial social ownership and a political consciousness to animate it.
Politically, socialism is no longer fringe. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, very nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination twice, because he articulated the frustrations and aspirations of working people. There is a good case that he had a better shot at beating Trump than Hillary Clinton. In 2019, YouGov reported that 70 percent of millennials, ages 23 to 38, have a positive view of socialism—not surprisingly, given their lifelong experience of hyper-capitalism. (Our friend John Judis goes more deeply into this shift in his 2020 book, The Socialist Awakening.) Standard economics has a concept called “revealed preference.” New products and prices reveal preferences people didn’t know they had. Same with ideologies, evidently. The surprise support for Bernie and democratic socialism was a revealed preference.
Biden has attempted to govern with expansive spending, taxing, and regulatory measures in the spirit of FDR. But his aspirations and credibility are being blunted by the corporate Democrats in his own party, reflecting the persistent undertow of capitalism. Biden’s heroic efforts, like Roosevelt’s, are well worth supporting—without illusions. The deeper sickness of the economy and society is hyper-capitalism, and we need to supplant it.
I’ve come around to this view gradually, not because my values have changed but because reality has changed. I’m a child of the New Deal. My parents and grandfather cashed in their war bonds in 1948 for a down payment on a 900-square-foot house in suburbia, financed with my dad’s 2.5 percent GI loan. When my father was stricken with cancer in 1952, the VA, which provided high-quality socialized medicine for an entire generation of men, paid for all of his excellent care. After he died, my mom was able to keep our house with a part-time job, thanks to his veterans pension and Social Security.
What’s needed is substantial social ownership and a political consciousness to animate it.
So I was a New Dealer in my bones before ever studying Roosevelt. Two sacred words in my house were VA and Social Security. I also acquired a sense of social class growing up as a poor kid in a rich town. Yet this was an era of substantial upward mobility. Like others of my generation, I was able to go to college with no debt.
Despite the loss of my father, despite the vague worry of being blown to hell in a nuclear exchange, despite the persistent racism and the inconclusive struggles for civil rights, America seemed like a hopeful place when I went off to college in 1961. When I became a journalist and for a time a Senate investigator, my sensibility continued to be left-liberal. Reform seemed worth the struggle, and it seemed possible.
One of my proudest achievements was an investigation and a series of hearings for the Senate Banking Committee on redlining and community disinvestment. Guided by local activists, we demonstrated that banks in many urban neighborhoods were pulling savings out of the community but refusing to put mortgage loans back in. Under the leadership of a great progressive, Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire, we passed three bills. One required banks to disclose where they were making their loans, so that activists could pressure them. A second created an affirmative obligation for banks to reinvest in communities. A third created a housing assistance program for moderate-income homeowners.
One of our star witnesses was an idealistic and smart community banker named Ron Grzywinski, who had built the South Shore National Bank in Chicago (later renamed ShoreBank) as a model institution to finance low-income homeownership and local business on Chicago’s mostly Black South Side. A little later, after I moved back to journalism, other legislation used that bank as a template for a new kind of lender, the community development financial institution, spawning dozens of others following the ShoreBank model.
This was heady stuff. Working with local organizers, you could actually legislate, and it could make a difference on the ground. And then it all turned to shit. And how it turned to shit is instructive.
While we liberals were idealistically promoting community reinvestment, the real power players on Wall Street and their allies in Washington were inventing subprime. Bill Clinton was supporting ShoreBank and kindred community lenders with one hand. (He actually made the ShoreBank model part of his 1992 campaign stump speech.) But with the other, he was promoting the extreme financial deregulation and speculation that led to fraudulent mortgage-backed securities and the 2008 financial collapse. Subprime “exploding” mortgages designed to default were cynically targeted at exactly the populations and communities our work on community reinvestment sought to help. In the wake of the collapse, close to ten million families, disproportionately Black and brown, lost their homes. Three decades of work increasing homeownership for working people was wiped out.
In a perfect final touch, the government bailed out all the big investment banks that had bankrolled the subprime lenders and underwritten the faked mortgage-backed bonds that collapsed in 2008. They were too big to fail. But ShoreBank, which had not participated in subprime at all, got caught in the general downdraft of falling property values. It was deemed too small to matter. Barack Obama was not embarrassed to bail out Wall Street. But since ShoreBank was in his old neighborhood, his handlers were concerned that saving the local community bank might not look good. So ShoreBank got no federal aid and was allowed to fail.
Look at the past century, and you see good people doing hard and noble work that produces results that stick—for a time: labor organizers, community activists, civil rights workers. And then much of it, even most of it, gets wiped out and worse.
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AP PHOTO
The liberal tradition, as represented by Franklin Roosevelt, was once far more robust.
DURING A LIFETIME that has blended journalism, activism, scholarly research, and teaching, I’ve tried to get my mind around the relationship between markets, social justice, and democracy. My most ambitious book, published in 1997, was called Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. In that book, I looked at every sector of the economy and demonstrated that contrary to the conceits of orthodox economics, “market failure” was not an exceptional case; in much of the economy, market inefficiency was the norm. You could improve on it with social investment and regulation. As one reviewer aptly wrote, my quarrel “is not with capitalism per se.”
Rereading that book after 25 years, I now realize that my conclusions were right but my framing was off. The problem was not “markets” or the technical mistakes of economists. It was capitalism as a system. Why, after all, would a nation come up with a health system like ours that is so staggeringly inefficient, inconvenient, and brutal? What kind of system would tolerate surprise billing that bankrupts families, or deny sick people lifesaving drugs that cost a few cents to manufacture? What kind of system would overuse profitable procedures for the insured, such as endoscopies, while disallowing lifesaving surgeries and drugs for people who can’t pay? A capitalist one.
All of these seeming inefficiencies are in fact highly efficient—from the perspective of profit maximization. They are so totally ingrained that efforts at incremental reform only make the system that much more convoluted. Recently, The New York Times ran an obtuse piece titled “Why Aren’t More People Comparison Shopping for Health Plans?” The piece, by Paula Span, quoting a Kaiser study, reported that 71 percent of recipients did not shop around for Medicare Advantage and Part D drug plans, even though they might have saved money. The author added: “Some of that inertia may reflect people’s satisfaction with their coverage; it might also indicate an overwhelming amount of choice. For 2022, beneficiaries face an average of 33 Medicare Advantage plans to select from (but 56 in Philadelphia and 63 in Cincinnati) and 30 stand-alone Part D plans.”
Rather than including even a paragraph on how our absurd system got this way, she concluded by urging people to shop around: “[I]t’s open enrollment season. SHIP programs in every state, with 12,500 trained team members, represent the best source of unbiased information and work with more than 2.5 million people each year.”
What the piece did not point out is that the private insurance industry uses a trusted public brand, Medicare, to market for-profit products, offering bewildering “choices” precisely to confuse and manipulate subscribers; and that the idea of shopping around for drug benefits is preposterous on its face. Far superior would be universal drug benefits under public Medicare; or even better, under national health insurance, with prices negotiated by the system. Still more efficient would be a socialized drug industry with no profit motive at all.
But all of this is precluded by the sheer political power of the insurance and drug industries, which have corrupted Democrats and Republicans alike. The assumptions that this is how the system has to work are so deeply engrained that our most serious newspaper, rather than explaining the real choices that ought to be on the table, provides anodyne advice on how to shop around within a rigged system.
Look around the entire economy, and you find case after case where the sheer power of capital is precluding more social approaches that are not only more decent and fair, but far more efficient and streamlined, and less costly to citizens and the economy. The for-profit sector keeps crowding out public and not-for-profit alternatives. And because they need to swim in a market pool defined by profit-maximizing corporations, large not-for-profits are increasingly indistinguishable from their for-profit cousins. (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” —George Orwell, Animal Farm)
The Massachusetts General Hospital, nominally one of the great nonprofits, plays exactly the same games as the commercial for-profits: buying up referral networks, gaming insurance reimbursements, investing in more profitable specialties, and maximizing market share. Back in the day, when the entire health system was less commercialized, when did community hospitals worry about market share? When did they buy up medical practices? It isn’t just that market institutions crowd out non-market ones. It’s that market norms crowd out other norms and other values. As someone once said, all that is solid melts into air.
THAT, OF COURSE, WAS MARX. I never went through a Marxian phase. In the 1960s, at the peak of the postwar boom when I was in college and graduate school, the concepts and language of Marxism seemed quaint and silly. The proletariat, rather than rising up against the bourgeoisie, had joined the middle class via effective trade unions. The middle class, far from being immiserated, was content and growing. Nations that invoked Marx were economic failures. They were not dictatorships of the proletariat but plain old corrupt dictatorships. The reserve army of the unemployed had not materialized, nor had the law of the falling rate of profits, nor the hegemony of capitalist ideas. In Europe, social democracy was alive and well. Thanks to countervailing power, the state was far from Marx’s executive committee of the working class. It was the instrument of workers and citizens working to tame capitalism in the public interest.
Well, gentle reader, that era turned out to be a blip—the consequence of historically anomalous constraints on the economic and political power of capital in a capitalist economy. In the intervening years, I haven’t become more Marxian. The world has become more Marxian.
The era of social democracy and managed capitalism lasted barely a generation before capitalists recovered their normal immense power in economies whose ownership remained fundamentally capitalist. With hyper-globalization, a worldwide reserve army of the unemployed does batter down wages and marginalizes the political power of labor in the democracies. A lumpenproletariatof the homeless and stateless migrants rends the social fabric. Even elite professions are becoming proletarianized. It is no longer risible to use “capital,” Marx-style, as a collective noun. Far too much of society is indeed becoming commodified. The idea that things have to be this way, perhaps with social buffers around the edges, is close to hegemonic.
I haven’t become more Marxian. The world has become more Marxian.
But while Marxism provides some useful insights, I would not call myself a Marxist. The Marxian characterization of historical laws is far too mechanistic. Marx neglected to attend to how democracy would actually work, if socialism ever arrived. And he got the most important thing of all dead wrong. Marx thought that when the crisis finally came, workers of all countries would unite in their collective interest. But as the history of the past century proves again and again, when market forces overwhelm the security and livelihoods of working people, they are far more likely to turn to ultra-nationalism and fascism.
The great prophetic critic of that dynamic is not Karl Marx but Karl Polanyi. Like Marx, Polanyi astutely explained the tendency of capitalism to commodify things that needed to operate by other norms and values, such as human society and human labor. Unlike Marx, Polanyi appreciated the risks of fascism. Most importantly, Polanyi saw tendencies rather than iron laws. He left room for human agency and diverse experimentation.
Polanyi came of age as a journalist and public intellectual in the 1920s, in what was then known as Red Vienna. The city of Vienna had socialist municipal governments from 1919 until 1934. During this remarkable period, the city government created social housing for the middle class as well as the working class, a model to this day. Vienna levied taxes on employers of private servants as well as taxes on cars, horse racing, and other luxuries, to help finance an array of services, including family allowances for parents, preschools, and unemployment insurance run through the trade unions. Electricity, gas, and water were socially owned. None of this undermined Austria’s private economy, which was far more endangered by the austerity policies criticized by Polanyi. In his theoretical work, Polanyi viewed democratic socialism as the system to carry out the political liberalism of the Enlightenment, and economic liberalism (laissez-faire) as corrosive of political liberalism.
Polanyi published his epic book on capitalism, The Great Transformation, in 1944. He lived another 20 years, long enough to see some evidence that the democracies were taking history’s lessons to heart and constraining capitalism’s destructive tendencies, and to hope that we would go beyond social democracy to democratic socialism. He did not live long enough to see it all reversed, confirming his darker insights.
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NOPPASIN WONGCHUM GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
In the 1920s, Karl Polanyi’s Red Vienna featured socially owned housing, water, and electricity, and used taxes on the rich to finance child allowances, preschools, and other social services.
One of Polanyi’s most powerful concepts is what he called the “double movement.” Capitalism overwhelms other social institutions on which ordinary life and economic security depend. Eventually, the common people revolt and are willing to sacrifice democracy for a measure of security and respect. Thus does capitalism destroy democracy in a bank shot. Capitalism also destroys democracy directly, by substituting money and power for citizenship, precluding reformist remedies, and signaling the common people that they are fools to think that voting could make a difference.
Polanyi’s double movement uncannily describes our own era. Ordinary people are disaffected from the dislocations and excesses of capitalism but unsure whom to blame or whom to trust. Ever since Carter, much of the Democratic Party has been so compromised and bedded down with Wall Street that displaced middle- and working-class people are skeptical that Democrats and liberal remedies can make much of a difference in their lives. The cumulative result is Trumpism, a weird combination of racist nationalism and redoubled corporate rule. Libertarians like to teach that liberal democracy and free markets are handmaidens. But autocrats from Trump to Hitler to Xi demonstrate that dictatorship and market modes of production and employment can coexist all too well. The signal disgrace of our era is the ease with which the corporate center-right has gone along with Trump and the Republican efforts to destroy what remains of democracy. If it’s possible to oust unions, cut taxes, and gut regulation, losing democracy is a price worth paying, if it’s a price at all.
Yet Polanyi’s sensibility gives me some hope. Looking at the tendency of capitalism to crush efforts to build decent human economies, you can become a defeatist and a cynic; or you can keep at it, appreciating that sometimes solidarity produces results and that nothing lasts forever. The 15 years of Polanyi’s Red Vienna stand as a model. Likewise the 40 years between the 1930s and the 1970s when the New Deal system contoured America. Swedish social democracy has been around for almost a century. While global capitalism keeps chipping away at the Swedish model, that model continues to provide decent lives for most Swedes. As capitalism goes, a century of decency is pretty good.
When we had a 30th anniversary testimonial dinner for the Prospect in October 2019, I gave a talk invoking Camus’s celebrated essay The Myth of Sisyphus. As you will recall, Sisyphus is condemned to push a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down. His every effort is futile. Yet Camus ends his essay with the words “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” When I first read that, it seemed preposterous. Happy? Then I appreciated the insight that the joy is in the struggle. And then, I finally got the larger point. The rock, ultimately, is death. In the end, it crushes us all. But along the way, we build the best life and the best society that we can, recognizing that nothing lasts forever.
So with that credo, Sisyphus Happy, what is to be done? For if we can’t even produce reformed capitalism, how on earth do we move toward democratic socialism?
ONE THING THAT NEEDS to be done is to keep pushing outward the boundaries of the possible. In a seeming paradox, the more socialistic elements of Biden’s full $3.5 trillion program are the most popular—the paid family leave, the child allowance, the social provision of child care, the free tuition for community college, the social enhancements to health care. Revealed preference. Yet the press, in its myopia, concluded that the Democrats had a rough election in November because Biden’s program was too left-wing. Sorting out the Democrats’ election defeat, The New York Times, channeling Fox, published a monumentally stupid editorial titled “Face Reality, Democrats.” It claimed, “Tuesday’s results are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push …”
In fact, the Democrats were repudiated because they and Biden couldn’t get their act together and looked like a party that couldn’t govern. And the reason they couldn’t reach agreement on a budget reflected the perverse influence not of “moderates,” as the press keeps calling them, but of corporate Democrats. Most of Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s gang of obstructionists in the House represent districts whose constituents support Biden’s program. The Gottheimer naysayers oppose it not because that’s what it takes to get elected, but because of their corporate debts and alliances.
In individualistic America, the citizenry supposedly mistrusts government. But once socialistic programs are enacted, they are immensely popular. Chattanooga has the country’s cheapest and fastest broadband provided by the local public power company—pure socialism. Ask the citizens if they want to return to slower, more costly, and less reliable private broadband. Our most popular programs are the most socialistic—Social Security and Medicare. Revealed preference again.
That same Times editorial quotes Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Virginia Democrat, saying, “Nobody elected him [Biden] to be F.D.R.” Maybe not, but last spring when the pandemic emergency, the recession, and the progressive movement impelled Biden to govern in the spirit of FDR, the citizenry liked what they saw. It was only when the momentum was stalled by Republicans and corporate Democrats that Biden started looking feckless.
Given the immense corporate undertow in American politics, Biden’s program, even if fully enacted, would be necessary but not sufficient. He has made a good beginning with his regulatory appointments aimed at breaking up extreme corporate concentration. He needs to go a lot further by getting rid of the dark financial pools of private equity and hedge funds, and by constraining private capital generally.
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J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP PHOTO
Bernie Sanders has been a champion of social ownership going back to land trusts during his mayoralty in Burlington.
ONE BASIC STRATEGY, I think, is to keep creating islands of social ownership and to limit capitalist ones. Our colleague Ganesh Sitaraman calls these “public options.” Ideas like postal banking and other forms of public banking, such as establishing individual accounts directly at the Federal Reserve or a green development bank, can do that. Likewise public power and public broadband. Or the original public option of socialized health care. Or direct public development and distribution of patent-free drugs. Social institutions like these demonstrate the superior equity and efficiency of socially owned alternatives; they also weaken competing private ones and thus the political power of capital. As Chattanooga suggests, this can be done at the municipal level, as well as by states and the national government.
Social ownership doesn’t mean just government institutions, but incudes others that are noncapitalist in their logic and ownership structure. Once, such institutions were plentiful in America. The New Deal created islands of public ownership, such as public power, public housing, and public financial institutions like the original Fannie Mae and a much enlarged Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the first half of the 20th century was also an era of noncapitalist mutual and nonprofit institutions.
Most savings and loans were nonprofits; most insurance companies were mutually owned. The first wave of prepaid group health plans were co-ops. These embodied values other than capitalist ones; they promoted direct democratic governance in ways that bureaucracies don’t; and they stood as bulwarks against the relentless incursion of capitalist institutions. In recent decades, however, financial capital viewed these institutions as pools of money they wished to appropriate. The stewards of these institutions saw a chance to cash in and enrich themselves. Congress obliged by making such conversions legal. Most mutual financial institutions have become conventional for-profits. Most nonprofit health plans were converted to for-profit HMOs. This sector needs to be reclaimed.
I happen to love public libraries, not just because I love books, but because when you enter a library nobody is trying to sell you anything. It is free and the ethic is noncommercial. It is like breathing different air. Public radio, despite the annoyance of encroaching quasi-commercials, is still light years away from commercial broadcasting in its basic ethic. We need more such institutional oases of non-market norms.
Housing is an emblematic area where America’s attempts to graft some social objectives onto a for-profit system controlled by developers and financiers are inefficient and pitiful. Our subsidies to create affordable housing include a low-income tax credit that is complex and bureaucratic for community housing developers to use, and that delivers much of the subsidy to financial operators who syndicate the tax shelter to other rich people. A second instrument, housing vouchers, does not meet the need and bids up prices and profits to landlords. A third gimmick, requiring developers of luxury housing to set aside some affordable units, is woefully inadequate. Far better would be the creation of a large, genuinely social housing sector that need not be traditional public housing. We have a model for this in the form of housing land trusts that create diverse forms of social housing permanently protected from market pressures—pioneered in Bernie Sanders’s Burlington and in Karl Polanyi’s Red Vienna.
Not only is liberalism too weak to resist the predations of metastatic capitalism; so is social democracy.
We also need to resist and reverse privatization. Institutions that should be public have been increasingly privatized, with results that provide windfall gains to private capital. For everyone else, the flip side is added costs, debased public values, and degraded services to ordinary citizens. These include privatized prisons, privatized Medicaid and Medicare, privatized voucher schools, privatized highways and parking meters, privatized management of public-transit systems, and a great deal more. Regulation itself has been increasingly privatized, as public agencies have delegated their authority to “self-regulatory agencies” that are thinly disguised trade associations. A comprehensive and depressing guide to this is the superb new book The Privatization of Everything, by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian. Here again, it’s important to appreciate that this tendency is not just “privatization,” a neutral-sounding term that suggests well-intentioned policy strategies that sometimes went awry. What’s at work here is yet another realm of the relentless encroachment of capitalism as a system.
It would be good to get more creative in devising new forms of social ownership. Peter Barnes’s latest book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property, provides some ingenious ways to think about this goal. It was Barnes who first pointed to the Alaska Permanent Fund as a more general model. When oil was discovered on Alaska’s North Slope in the 1970s, the governor, a renegade Republican named Jay Hammond, rather than hand all the profits to the oil companies, sponsored a public fund that would pay all Alaskans annual dividends in equal amounts. Barnes calls for collective sources of wealth (such as sunlight) that are privately exploited to generate dividends and trust funds for all. Thomas Piketty, in his new book, Time for Socialism, calls for a “universal capital endowment” of about $150,000, to be paid to every adult at age 25, financed by taxes on extreme wealth.
These ideas are ingenious technical policy solutions. But to gain political traction, they require a movement built on a coherent understanding of capitalism as a system. The labor movement is one such movement and, just between us, much of it is socialist. A weakness of the American liberal tradition, even at its apex under FDR, was that it was disconnected from a comprehensive critique of capitalism as a system. As Albert Hirschman pointed out, FDR sold his reforms as merely pragmatic. Writing in the 1980s, as Reagan was reversing the New Deal, Hirschman observed, “Today, of course, we can appreciate the high cost of Roosevelt’s maneuver. The New Deal reforms … were never truly consolidated as an integral part of a new economic order or ideology.”
MORE THAN 20 YEARS AGO, Paul Starr and I had an exchange in the Prospect on the relationship between liberalism, social democracy, and socialism. Both pieces are well worth rereading in light of subsequent events. Paul, in a piece titled “Liberalism After Socialism,” was writing not that long after the collapse of communism. His basic argument was that liberalism and socialism come out of entirely different traditions; that it’s a categorical and political mistake to blur them with something called social democracy; and that the liberal tradition is capacious enough to include all the reform that we need. He concluded his Prospect essay with these words: “While the house of liberalism in America has many rooms, it should not be allowed to become the last refuge of a defeated and disappointed socialism. When socialism was young and full of fervor, some liberals were understandably infatuated and thought of marrying their political values to socialist economics. But the romance should be over once and for all.”

 

By Michael A. Dover
​
The recent public calls for the expulsion of Congressman Jamaal Bowman from DSA raise serious issues for DSA. I have written the Congressman to applaud his courage in speaking from conviction and for using his position in Congress to establishing relationship with Israelis and Palestinians both in the Middle East and in the United States.
I have also written the NPC in the hopes that in meeting with comrade Bowman, they clarify his rights as a member to hold opinions and to take actions which may differ from DSA convention resolutions and platform planks. I oppose the view that endorsement of a candidate who is elected to office requires them to represent our views rather than the elected officials views as to how to represent their constituents.
Also, I note the provisions of Article III (Members), Section 4 of the CSA Constitution. I further note that the relevant bylaws provision, Section 3, refers to “substantial disagreement with the principles or policies of the organization,” but that there is no definition of principles or policies. 
In the absence of any future convention action or previous notice to members as to such a definition, I feel that the NPC should clarify its understanding of its meaning. The NPC should state that Article I of the DSA Constitution is the most appropriate and fair definition at this time. After all, the convention explicitly declined to require agreement with the platform planks, and there has never been a formal expectation that members agree with particular convention resolutions.
Such a clear statement is necessary in order to stave off weaponization of national and local Codes of Conduct to inhibit rigorous debate and toleration of disagreement among our members. I am concerned that public calls by individuals and DSA bodies for expulsion of members or for consideration of their expulsion can contribute to silencing and marginalizing members with whom one disagrees. If members or collective bodies have such concerns, they should be raised through proper channels to the HGO officers.
 
Michael A. Dover
Member of North Star 

 North Star’s Role in DSA: What Is To Be Done?
 
 
What role should North Star DSA play in DSA? What objectives should we be pursuing? In discussing this question, the Steering Committee came to the view that it would be best, at this point in our history, to have a robust discussion of what that role and those objectives should be amongst everyone in our group. We thought that it was important to have a perspective that was broadly understood amongst us, which could only be achieved by involving more of us in the conversation, and we thought that with the many decades of experience that our group has, the conversation would be far richer by including more voices.
 
A conversation like this can go in many directions, not all of which are constructive, so we want to set a few parameters. First, if parts of the conversation become tangential to the main purpose here (as sometimes happens on our Google group list serve {-;) we will move them to their own separate thread, where they can continue without consuming or derailing the main conversation. Second, we would like the conversation to be grounded, rather than to devolve into a discussion of theory which is abstract and general, or become a discussion of broad principles that do not readily translate into ‘what is to be done.’ To that end, we should suggest a number of guiding questions:
·        What is the defining characteristic(s) of our current political moment?
·        Given this political moment, what are the tasks of the left and DSA?
·        What political strategies and approaches are best aligned with meeting these tasks?
·        What are the strengths and weaknesses of DSA, in terms of its understanding of the political moment and the tasks it poses, and in terms of the political strategies and approaches that are best aligned with meeting these tasks?
·        How should we act and intervene within DSA to build on its strengths and addresses its weaknesses?
 
We would like to commence this conversation with a contribution from Leo Casey. It is written in the form of six theses, so the argument is broken up into discrete points with which you may agree, disagree, or conclude that something vital is missing. The purpose of presenting this argument in the form of theses is that it will allow members to be precise about their agreement or disagreement with its different component parts.
 
If you decide that you would like to present your own set of theses, feel free to do so on our list serve.  If you decide that you would like to respond to Leo’s theses or to someone else’s points, we would like to suggest some ways to do so.
·        If you agree, don’t just say ‘I agree,’ but explain why you agree and what you conclude from your agreement.
·        If you disagree, don’t just say ‘I disagree,’ but explain why you disagree and what different political direction your disagreement would take North Star DSA.
·        If you think something is missing, make a case why it is not just an additional point that would make the argument more precise or elaborate, but something really essential that speaks directly to how we should intervene in DSA.
Duane Campbell for the North Star Steering Committee
 
With that, here is Leo’s opening contribution:
Leo Casey
 
Six Theses:
 
1.     What defines the current political movement in the U.S. is the imminent danger of a right-wing racist and authoritarian movement seizing state power, with the loss of what remains of American democracy. This movement – which must be properly called neo-fascist – has already captured one of the two major political parties, and it is now laying the groundwork for overturning democratic elections in which it is defeated. What is now taking place in state capitols across the country are efforts to ensure that when the next time elections are held, voter suppression and gerrymandering will make it more difficult for anti-fascist forces to win, and that when the results still go against the neo-fascist candidates, they will be overturned. Successful coup d’états often follow failed ones, and these efforts are based on an analysis of why the attempted long coup d’état that took place in the aftermath of the 2020 election, culminating with the January 6th insurrection, failed – the objective is to eliminate obstacles to the victory of the next neo-fascist coup d’état.
 
2.     The political imperative of this moment, therefore, is the defeat of this neo-fascist movement. If it is not defeated, and if consequently what remains of American democracy is lost, all else – the labor movement, the struggles against racism, sexism, anti-queer bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant prejudice, the battle against climate change and on behalf of democratic rights of free expression, a free media, and the rule of law – is lost with it. The organized left – including DSA – is part of what will be lost. This is a political moment of truth that the U.S. has not seen since the Civil War and the struggle to end slavery.
 
3.     To accomplish this political imperative of defeating neo-fascism, the broadest possible left-center coalition must be organized, uniting all who would defend democratic rule, regardless of other issues on which we will disagree. There is no more serious error in this political moment than the sectarian error of identifying centrist forces that must be included in this coalition as the main political enemy of the left, either rhetorically or in practice. This coalition will be stronger, and more politically foresighted, to the extent that the left is hegemonic within it, but we should conceive that role as one of political leadership in coalition, not as excluding centrist forces and narrowing the base of the democratic coalition.
 
4.     In the U.S., there is a broad mass left (most significantly, the labor movement, civil rights and anti-racist movements, women’s movement, LGBTQ movement, immigrant rights movement, religious progressives, community organizing movement and environmental movement) and a much smaller organized left (organizations established around an explicitly left politics, such as DSA, Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, MoveOn, Indivisible, Our Revolution, and various socialist groups.) The organized left in the U.S. has historically been weak, marked by the failure to develop a mass labor or social democratic political party, but it can – and should – play a role in the mobilization of the broad left and the organization of a broad center-left coalition for democracy. Indeed, there are political opportunities in playing that role – in many countries, the left has often grown into a more significant force when it has played an active leadership role in a broad front against fascism.
 
5.     As a result of its growth over the last five years, DSA has the most potential of the groups on the organized left – it has more members and more activists than the other groups, and has had real political victories in recent years, especially in electoral politics, not just the failures that have historically defined the socialist left in the U.S. But it is being held back by:
o   an inability to fully recognize that the main danger of the political moment lies in the neo-fascist movement, an inability which is expressed in its practical tendency to see centrists as a political foe equal to that of the right (the hesitancy and/or unwillingness to call for a vote for Biden-Harris in 2020, and the stance of only supporting openly democratic socialist candidates and members for office);
o   a sectarian disposition that fails to understand how DSA’s growth and current strengths came primarily out of coalition efforts in electoral politics (most especially around the Bernie Sanders campaigns, the AOC victory and the development of ‘the squad’ in Congress) and out of broad opposition to Trump and the rise of neo-fascism; instead, it overestimates its power in terms of its own internal organizational capacity. This disposition leads to a ‘go it alone’ approach that devalues and disparages coalition work with others on the organized left, and to an obliviousness of the importance – indeed, the necessity – of a broad center-left coalition to oppose neo-fascism;
o   the heritage of political marginality in an U.S. socialist movement that has too often defined itself not around what it could accomplish politically, but around fidelity to a set of political dogmas, such that actual political breakthroughs – even on the small scale of electing five open democratic socialists to the U.S. Congress – are treated with suspicion and even hostility, as little more than openings for betrayal of political principle. This heritage finds expression in a series of attacks within DSA on the very leaders – the democratic socialists in Congress – who are the public face of democratic socialism and DSA at this moment;
o   and following from the above, the absence of a strategic perspective which understands how to build power, and the importance of accumulating victories in building power. By strategic perspective, I mean a (Gramscian) understanding of the political terrain on which we struggle, with an analysis and long-term strategy of how to best situate ourselves on that terrain, choosing the battles that we have the best chance of winning and avoiding as much as possible the battles that lead to almost certain political defeat.
6.     Given the above, DSA North Star understands its role in DSA as:
o   developing organizational clarity on the imminent danger of a neo-fascist seizure of political power, and the concomitant loss of American democracy, as the defining feature of our political moment;
o   urging DSA to play a constructive role in organizing a broad center-left coalition to oppose that neo-fascist danger, and to see that as a primary focus of its work;
o   promoting generally within DSA a politics of working in coalition with others on the organizational left and the broad left;
o   opposing attacks on elected officials who are members of DSA and its public face;
o   engendering discussion within DSA of the need for a strategic perspective, and what it might include.
 
 
You are invited to join the dialogue. Use the comments section.
 
 
 

Leo Casey responds to critics of our positions on the DSA Discussion Board.

​ https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/why-the-attacks-on-jamaal-bowman-are-terribly-wrong/18108/24

 

I think that Comrades Ryan Mosgrove's and Jason Schulman's responses here are substantive, albeit politically mistaken in my view. I take a pass on comments that are little more than name calling and political posturing, but I feel that it if there is going to be constructive political debate and dialogue on this site, each of us should engage substantive comments with which we differ, as much as we are able to do so.
My disagreements with them are basically two -- what I would describe first, as the absence of a strategic outlook in their views of how we should advance our politics, at least as it relates to the question at hand, and second, as a misunderstanding of where DSA's power and influence lies, and what that means in terms of how we should relate to elected officials and other parts of the broad progressive left.
The Absence of a Strategic Perspective
On the first count, I disagree with the view that democratic socialist politics is constituted by a set of fixed principles that one then advocates in all circumstances, and against which one measures all actual political interventions. Political debate and political struggle more generally are conducted on a strategic battlefield, not written down on an empty page in a book where we can lay down our principles as we wish. (Somebody once wrote, we make history, but not as we please.) It takes place on a complex terrain, with points where our forces are in strategically strong positions to win battles and points where our forces are in strategically weak positions and will almost certainly lose battles. That terrain is dynamic: it changes and shifts, and what was a strong point yesterday can be a weak point tomorrow, and vice versa. It is particularly important to have a sober assessment of one's own forces, of one’s strengths and weaknesses: overestimating your own strength invariably sends you into battles at your weak points and the foe's strong points, and it leads to losses with long-lasting strategic consequences. Even forces that are a relatively weak position, such as the left in Congress and in the U.S. more broadly, can win battles, but only when they pick them carefully, identifying positions of relative weakness for the stronger enemy. Power is accumulated when you win battles; it is dissipated when you lose them. Identifying and understanding the key points of leverage is essential in building and exercising power in politics.
What strikes me about both Ryan's and Jason's approaches to the Iron Dome vote was that they ignore all the strategic questions, that they pay no attention to the strategic terrain on which the question of Israel and Palestine is fought, and instead treat the question as simply one in which we should measure that vote against what they think is a correct position of principle on the Israel-Palestine question. I have differences with how they understand they understand a principled position, differences what is happening in Israel and Palestine, at least insofar as I understand their positions from their comments here. But I have a more far-reaching difference with their insistence on treating the vote as an issue of principle alone, without any consideration of the strategic terrain in play. In isolation from a consideration of the strategic battlefield on which politics is conducted, principle quickly hardens into dogma, and dogma invariably isolates and paves the way to defeat.
This absence of a strategic perspective is important because AOC and Jamaal Bowman are employing savvy understandings of politics that combine principle and strategy in their approaches to the Israel-Palestine question. Both have taken courageous stances in support of Palestinian self-determination and right, and both have taken votes in Congress that reflected those positions -- and garnered significant push back from AIPAC and its allies for doing so. It is not insignificant that Congressman Richie Torres, who decided to stake out for himself a political profile that is in opposition to AOC, Bowman and the democratic left in NYC, decided to go after them on the question of Israel and Palestine. It is also not insignificant that the folks who are behind the recent calls to NYC voters saying that democratic socialist candidates for elected office support Hamas’ attack on Israel chose this issue. All of this reflects how our opponents understand the political terrain – that AOC’s and Bowman’s support of Palestinian self-determination and rights and their willingness to buck AIPAC on votes such as the McCollum bill is a politically weak point, that can be used against them. It would be foolish to not recognize this reality, and to proceed without consideration of what that means on how to engage the issue strategically. And AOC and Bowman are not politically foolish.
In this context and on this strategic terrain of the Israel-Palestine question (which varies in different parts of the country: AOC’s and Bowman’s NYC is not Detroit, St. Louis or Minneapolis), the Iron Dome bill was specifically framed as providing protection from Hamas' practice of indiscriminately sending missiles into civilian centers inside Israel. It was a strategic trap, where opposition to the bill would be represented as support for Hamas' indefensible waging of war against civilians. Whatever you think of the ways in which ‘principle’ has been constructed on the Israel and Palestine question, to insist that this was "the hill to die on," to choose this vote as the place to have your fight, at the strongest possible point for your opponents and the weakest possible point for you, is to embrace certain defeat, with long-lasting negative strategic consequences for being able to advance Palestinian rights and self-determination in the Congress. There was a reason why the vote on this was 420 to 9, and it wasn’t because there are only nine members of Congress that support Palestinian self-determination and rights. By contrast, a savvy strategic approach would be looking for votes and ways to frame the question that focused on the weaknesses of AIPAC, such as the occupation of the West Bank and the de facto Israeli government policy of annexation by settlement, or of the efforts at expropriating Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
The Misunderstanding of DSA’s Power and Influence
Both Comrade Ryan’s and Comrade Jason’s comments express a view toward elected officials who are DSA members which borders on antagonism: Ryan talks about DSA needing “to confront” elected officials who are members and Jason says that DSA shouldn’t have “to kowtow” (an unfortunate term that should be avoided) to them. In addition to the resentment expressed in those sentiments, there is an implied view that elected officials owe their positions to DSA and should be under DSA “discipline” to follow the organization’s line.
There is much to unpack in these attitudes, but I will limit myself to a few points here. To begin, the notion that elected officials such as AOC and Bowman owe their election to DSA seriously misunderstands the broad nature of the coalitions that just re-elected AOC and put Bowman into office for the most time – coalitions that included, along with DSA, the Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, Sunrise, Our Revolution, Make the Road, and various unions and community organizations, just to identify some of the better-known participants. Every one of those organizations understands that they are part of a broad coalition, and every one of them sees their power and influence in that context, as a contribution to a larger movement. A presumptuous DSA declaration that we were uniquely responsible for their election, and that we had the right to “discipline” them for failing to meet one or another of our litmus tests, wouldn’t just alienate the elected officials – it would be an act of sectarianism just as certain to alienate every other organization in the coalition. DSA would politically isolate itself, putting ourselves in the poorest of strategic positions, and the power and influence we have amassed from our contribution to these coalitions will quickly dissipate. We would lose members who joined and were active precisely because they saw it as an effective vehicle for advancing that coalition and electing people like AOC and Bowman. In misunderstanding the nature and extent of our power, and how it had been built in coalition, we would commit the cardinal political sin of overestimating our own strength, to our detriment.
Part of the problem here and part of the origins of the resentment expressed – and I will end on this point – is a (mis)understanding of how political power and effective political organization can be built on the U.S. left, by socialists. The implicit notion here is that the DSA should be a cadre organization that operates with some version of discipline, in which individual members – including elected officials – are required to follow the line of the organization. The resentment develops because AOC and Bowman are not, in fact, dependent upon DSA in ways that would actually allow the organization to successfully impose such discipline. Whatever one might make of a century of failed efforts to build politically successful organizations along these lines in the U.S., in various political traditions, it is clearly an archaic and less than helpful conception in the current historical moment. It is certainly the not the way in which has grown to this point. In our times, political leadership cannot be imposed through organizational dicta, but must be exercised through a project of building political and cultural hegemony, in coalition with others on the broad progressive left




https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/why-the-attacks-on-jamaal-bowman-are-terribly-wrong/18108/24

 

https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/why-the-attacks-on-jamaal-bowman-are-terribly-wrong/18108/24

 

See prior post and the comments.

To Those Who Criticize the Jamaal Bowman Vote
 
Jamaal Bowman beat Elliot Engel in a primary to win his seat. Engel was an unquestioning supporter of whatever the government of Israel did, along the lines of AIPAC. He never found a reason to criticize anything Israel under Netanyahu did.
 
Bowman distinguished himself as a supporter of Palestinian rights. During the war in May, he (and AOC) took on neighboring Congressman Ritchie Torres, who has continued the Engel tradition. In response to Torres, Bowman wrote (https://www.yahoo.com/now/u-rep-bowman-disputes-fellow-142010274.html):
My brother Ritchie, this is not about a Twitter mob,” Bowman tweeted. “This is about justice, humanity, and equality. This is about Palestinians deserving peace, land, and self-determination, like everyone else.”
He continued in a thread, writing: “This is about Palestinians having their land and homes taken from them and our ignorance of Palestinian pain. That is the truth, my brother. The Palestinians are an occupied people. They are an oppressed people. Innocent people and children are suffering as America supports the occupation and denies Palestinians freedom.”
“Let us build a world,” he concluded, “where not another person dies senselessly and where we recognize and respect the humanity of all.”
This is not just a rhetorical stance. Bowman has taken votes in Congress on Israeli aid -- and taken heat for them -- that went against the AIPAC line. (https://forward.com/fast-forward/469039/jamaal-bowman-defends-support-of-bill-to-regulate-aid-to-israel/)

To characterize Bowman as "voting for the IDF," as was done here, is a gross misrepresentation of his record, and a serious misunderstanding of the Iron Dome vote, which went down 420 to 9 and had been framed as protection against the Hamas practice of indiscriminately firing missiles into civilian centers inside Israel.
The call for Bowman's "discipline" by DSA is not only a direct attack on him, but a calculated shot across the bow of AOC, given her vote on the Iron Dome legislation. It is targeting two of the most courageous leaders for Palestinian rights in the U.S. Congress, both of whom represent districts with significant numbers of voters who care about Israel's survival, in the name of Palestinian rights. It is imposing a moral purity test of the most absurdly sectarian sort.

I don't doubt for a second that a number of the people who signed that letter did so because they are opposed on principle to DSA supporting democratic socialists who run and are elected on the Democratic Party line. Purity tests on Israel and Palestine are just a bonus for them.

But if they are successful -- either by having the NPC entertain their proposal or simply in a war of attrition against DSA electeds that makes them decide that the tsuris is not worth it -- they will have destroyed DSA as an organization with political value, and remade it into a sectarian shell.
The defense of Bowman and AOC against such attacks is where we must make our stand.
​Leo Casey
-- 
 

The National Political Committee of DSA condemns in the strongest possible terms the inhumane treatment of the 12,000+ asylum seekers currently stuck under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. These migrants have been forced to wait in a makeshift camp after crossing the Rio Grande for their petitions to be processed with little food, water, medicine, or shelter from the elements. They’ve also endured anti-Black violence at the hands of Customs and Border Protection, with reported shouts of “Go Back to Mexico” despite many of the migrants originating from Haiti, further adding to the erasure of Black immigrants in the discussion around immigration.
In May, the administration ruled that people coming to the US from Haiti would be granted TPS designation due to ongoing political unrest and climate disasters. We know these crises are rooted in US imperialism and western colonization. Instead of receiving them with dignity, 86 people were deported under Title 42, and there are more flights scheduled to depart this week.
The deportation flights must end, the border must be demilitarized, and these migrants must be allowed in. They should be allowed to petition for asylum for the violence they are fleeing. We reaffirm our position that ICE and CBP serve no purpose other than to enact racist violence in the name of xenophobic policies, designed to force the people of the Global South into a permanently-maintained, exploitable underclass. We call for these policies and the agencies that enforce them to be defunded, disarmed, and dismantled.
Time and again, the US has shown its disregard for the humane treatment of asylum seekers and migrants, and as the reconciliation bill is being finalized, it’s more important than ever that a pathway to citizenship be included. A budget is a political and moral document, and regardless of what the Senate Parliamentarian recommends, Senate Democrats and President Biden have the power to ensure millions of people living in the US are no longer arbitrarily disenfranchised.
As DSA, we will continue the public pressure to ensure that parts of the PRO Act and Green New Deal for Public Schools are in the national budget and infrastructure bill, because we recognize how the climate crisis drives migration, and thus the US obligation to house and provide universal public services to those who seek refuge from man-made disasters.  The investment of $3.5 trillion into our safety, livelihoods, and addressing the climate crisis are not optional but absolutely necessary.
We encourage members to get involved with our Immigrant Rights Working Group and join our Green New Deal campaign for shifts this weekend.

El Comité Político Nacional de los Socialistas Democráticos de América condena en los términos más enérgicos posibles el trato inhumano de los 12,000 solicitantes de asilo actualmente atrapados bajo un puente en Del Río, Texas. Estos migrantes se han visto obligados a esperar en un campamento improvisado después de cruzar el Río Bravo para que sus peticiones sean procesadas con poca comida, agua, medicinas o refugio de los elementos. También han soportado la violencia anti-negra a manos de la migra, Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza, con reporteos de gritos de “Vete a México” a pesar de que muchos de los migrantes son de Haití, añadiendo aún más al borrado de los inmigrantes negros en la discusión sobre inmigración.
En mayo, la administración dictaminó que a las personas que llegan a Estados Unidos desde Haití se les concedería la designación del TPS debido a los continuos disturbios políticos y desastres climáticos. Sabemos que estas crisis están arraigadas en el imperialismo estadounidense y en la colonización occidental. En lugar de recibirlos con dignidad, 86 personas fueron deportadas bajo el Título 42, y hay más vuelos programados para salir esta semana.
Los vuelos de deportación deben terminar, la frontera debe ser desmilitarizada y estos migrantes deben ser admitidos. Se les debe permitir solicitar asilo por la violencia de la que huyen sin más violencia. Reafirmamos nuestra posición de que ICE y CBP no tienen otro propósito que promulgar violencia racista en nombre de políticas xenófobas, diseñadas para forzar al pueblo de los países del Sur a una subclase explotable y permanentemente mantenida. Pedimos que estas políticas y las agencias que las hacen cumplir sean desfinanciadas, desarmadas, y desmanteladas.
Una y otra vez, los Estados Unidos ha mostrado su desprecio por el trato humano de los solicitantes de asilo y los migrantes, y a medida que se está finalizando el proyecto de ley de reconciliación, es más importante que nunca que se incluya un camino hacia la ciudadanía. Un presupuesto es un documento político y moral, e independientemente de lo que recomiende el parlamentario del Senado, los demócratas del Senado y el presidente Biden tienen el poder de garantizar que millones de personas que viven en los Estados Unidos ya no sean arbitrariamente privadas de sus derechos.
Como DSA, continuaremos la presión pública para asegurar que partes del PRO Act y el Nuevo Trato Verde para las Escuelas Públicas estén en el presupuesto nacional y en la factura de infraestructura, porque reconocemos cómo la crisis climática impulsa la migración, y por lo tanto, la obligación de los Estados Unidos de albergar y proporcionar servicios públicos universales a quienes buscan refugio de desastres provocados por el hombre. La inversión de $3.5 billones en nuestra seguridad, medios de vida y para abordar la crisis climática no es opcional sino absolutamente necesaria.
Animamos a nuestros miembros a que se involucren con nuestro grupo de trabajo sobre Derechos de los Inmigrantes y se unan a nuestra campaña GND4PS para turnos este fin de semana.

​

​Don’t Start Another Cold WarBy Bernie SandersJune 17, 2021

The unprecedented global challenges that the United States faces today—climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, massive economic inequality, terrorism, corruption, authoritarianism—are shared global challenges. They cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. They require increased international cooperation—including with China, the most populous country on earth.
It is distressing and dangerous, therefore, that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle. The prevalence of this view will create a political environment in which the cooperation that the world desperately needs will be increasingly difficult to achieve.
It is quite remarkable how quickly conventional wisdom on this issue has changed. Just over two decades ago, in September 2000, corporate America and the leadership of both political parties strongly supported granting China “permanent normal trade relations” status, or PNTR. At that time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the corporate media, and virtually every establishment foreign policy pundit in Washington insisted that PNTR was necessary to keep U.S. companies competitive by giving them access to China’s growing market, and that the liberalization of China’s economy would be accompanied by the liberalization of China’s government with regard to democracy and human rights.
This position was seen as obviously and unassailably correct. Granting PNTR, the economist Nicholas Lardy of the centrist Brookings Institution argued in the spring of 2000, would “provide an important boost to China’s leadership, that is taking significant economic and political risks in order to meet the demands of the international community for substantial additional economic reforms.” The denial of PNTR, on the other hand, “would mean that U.S. companies would not benefit from the most important commitments China has made to become a member” of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Writing around the same time, the political scientist Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute put it more bluntly. “American trade with China is a good thing, for America and for the expansion of freedom in China,” he asserted. “That seems, or should seem, obvious.”
Well, it wasn’t obvious to me, which is why I helped lead the opposition to that disastrous trade agreement. What I knew then, and what many working people knew, was that allowing American companies to move to China and hire workers there at starvation wages would spur a race to the bottom, resulting in the loss of good-paying union jobs in the United States and lower wages for American workers. And that’s exactly what happened. In the roughly two decades that followed, around two million American jobs were lost, more than 40,000 factories shut down, and American workers experienced wage stagnation—even while corporations made billions and executives were richly rewarded. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election in part by campaigning against U.S. trade policies, tapping into the real economic struggles of many voters with his phony and divisive populism.
Meanwhile, needless to say, freedom, democracy, and human rights in China have not expanded. They have been severely curtailed as China has moved in a more authoritarian direction, and China has become increasingly aggressive on the global stage. The pendulum of conventional wisdom in Washington has now swung from being far too optimistic about the opportunities presented by unfettered trade with China to being far too hawkish about the threats posed by the richer, stronger, more authoritarian China that has been one result of that increased trade.
In February 2020, the Brookings analyst Bruce Jones wrote that “China’s rise—to the position of the world’s second-largest economy, its largest energy consumer, and its number two defense spender—has unsettled global affairs” and that mobilizing “to confront the new realities of great power rivalry is the challenge for American statecraft in the period ahead.” A few months ago, my conservative colleague Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, compared the threat from China to the one posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War: “Once again, America confronts a powerful totalitarian adversary that seeks to dominate Eurasia and remake the world order,” he argued. And just as Washington reorganized the U.S. national security architecture after World War II to prepare for conflict with Moscow, Cotton wrote, “today, America’s long-term economic, industrial, and technological efforts need to be updated to reflect the growing threat posed by Communist China.” And just last month, Kurt Campbell, the U.S. National Security Council’s top Asia policy official, said that “the period that was broadly described as engagement [with China] has come to an end” and that going forward, “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE
Twenty years ago, the American economic and political establishment was wrong about China. Today, the consensus view has changed, but it is once again wrong. Now, instead of extolling the virtues of free trade and openness toward China, the establishment beats the drums for a new Cold War, casting China as an existential threat to the United States. We are already hearing politicians and representatives of the military-industrial complex using this as the latest pretext for larger and larger defense budgets. 
I believe it is important to challenge this new consensus—just as it was important to challenge the old one. The Chinese government is surely guilty of many policies and practices that I oppose and that all Americans should oppose: the theft of technology, the suppression of workers’ rights and the press, the repression taking place in Tibet and Hong Kong, Beijing’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan, and the Chinese government’s atrocious policies toward the Uyghur people. The United States should also be concerned about China’s aggressive global ambitions. The United States should continue to press these issues in bilateral talks with the Chinese government and in multilateral institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council. That approach would be far more credible and effective if the United States upholds a consistent position on human rights toward its own allies and partners.
Americans must resist the temptation to try to forge national unity through hostility and fear.
Organizing our foreign policy around a zero-sum global confrontation with China, however, will fail to produce better Chinese behavior and be politically dangerous and strategically counterproductive. The rush to confront China has a very recent precedent: the global “war on terror.” In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the American political establishment quickly concluded that antiterrorism had to become the overriding focus of U.S. foreign policy. Almost two decades and $6 trillion later, it’s become clear that national unity was exploited to launch a series of endless wars that proved enormously costly in human, economic, and strategic terms and that gave rise to xenophobia and bigotry in U.S. politics—the brunt of it borne by American Muslim and Arab communities. It is no surprise that today, in a climate of relentless fearmongering about China, the country is experiencing an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. Right now, the United States is more divided than it has been in recent history. But the experience of the last two decades should have shown us that Americans must resist the temptation to try to forge national unity through hostility and fear.
A BETTER WAY FORWARD
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly recognized the rise of authoritarianism as a major threat to democracy. The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, however, is taking place not between countries but within them—including in the United States. And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can. That is why we must revitalize American democracy, restoring people’s faith in government by addressing the long-neglected needs of working families. We must create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and combating climate change. We must address the crises we face in health care, housing, education, criminal justice, immigration, and so many other areas. We must do this not only because it will make us more competitive with China or any other country but because it will better serve the needs of the American people.
Although the primary concern of the U.S. government is the security and prosperity of the American people, we should also recognize that in our deeply interconnected world, our security and prosperity are connected to people everywhere. To that end, it is in our interest to work with other wealthy nations to raise living standards around the world and diminish the grotesque economic inequality that authoritarian forces everywhere exploit to build their own political power and undermine democracy. 
The Biden administration has pushed for a global minimum corporate tax. This is a good step toward ending the race to the bottom. But we must think even bigger: a global minimum wage, which would strengthen the rights of workers around the world, providing millions more with the chance for a decent, dignified life and diminishing the ability of multinational corporations to exploit the world’s neediest populations. To help poor countries raise their living standards as they integrate into the global economy, the United States and other rich countries should significantly increase their investments in sustainable development.
For the American people to thrive, others around the world need to believe that the United States is their ally and that their successes are our successes. Biden is doing exactly the right thing by providing $4 billion in support for the global vaccine initiative known as COVAX, by sharing 500 million vaccine doses with the world, and by backing a WTO intellectual property waiver that would enable poorer countries to produce vaccines themselves. China deserves acknowledgment for the steps it has taken to provide vaccines, but the United States can do even more. When people around the world see the American flag, it should be attached to packages of lifesaving aid, not drones and bombs.
Creating true security and prosperity for working people in the United States and China alike demands building a more equitable global system that prioritizes human needs over corporate greed and militarism. In the United States, handing billions more in taxpayer dollars to corporations and the Pentagon while inflaming bigotry will not serve these goals.
Americans must not be naive about China’s repression, disregard for human rights, and global ambitions. I strongly believe that the American people have an interest in strengthening global norms that respect the rights and dignity of all people—in the United States, in China, and around the world. I fear, however, that the growing bipartisan push for a confrontation with China will set back those goals and risks empowering authoritarian, ultranationalistic forces in both countries. It will also deflect attention from the shared common interests the two countries have in combating truly existential threats such as climate change, pandemics, and the destruction that a nuclear war would bring.
Developing a mutually beneficial relationship with China will not be easy. But we can do better than a new Cold War.
 
Senator Bernie Sanders
Foreign Policy.

Jesse Jackson. 
 

Sept 14, 2021 - Record fires in Oregon and California. Floods in Houston and New York. Deadly winter storms in Texas. Droughts across much of the west.
 
Flash floods in England and Germany. Blinding dust storms in China. One-hundred-year cyclones devastate Fiji and Indonesia. Deadly droughts across subSaharan Africa. Wildfires in Greece and Italy.
 
The year is not over yet, but in the United States and across the world, the toll in lives and destruction is growing in storms of biblical proportion.
 
Despite popular support for reforms, big interests are mobilized against change led by Big Oil, the coal barons, and companies hooked on fossil fuels, the deadly crack of our time.
The poorest peoples and the poorest nations are most at risk, but no one is insulated against the impact. The wealthy on Lake Tahoe are evacuated in the face of unprecedented wildfires.
 
Texan oilmen struggle when record winter storms shut down the electric system. Wall Street bankers are hit with floods sweeping through subways and streets. As the storms increase, food supplies and prices will be hit. Millions will be displaced.
 
There is no longer any doubt about the reality of global warming, the dangers of it, or the causes of it. Republicans who for years scorned the reality of global warming—Donald Trump dubbed it a "Chinese hoax"—now accept that it is real. Corrupted scientists paid by oil companies that argued the crisis wasn't manmade, now quietly reverse their opinions.
 
Now the only question is: what will we do in the face of what the United Nations warns is literally an existential threat?
 
We can't undo what we have done, but we can alter how bad the future becomes. We can move to sustainable and efficient energy systems, make production and housing and transport more energy efficient, replant forests, invent new ways to generate or save energy, or more.
 
In its last authoritative report, the UN issued what it called a "code red for humanity." The change must take place over the next decade or we will seed calamities too horrible to imagine. Already this year, the town Lytton, British Columbia, in Canada was erased by a hit so extreme—temperatures reached 121 degrees—that it literally went up in smoke and was reduced to ashes.
 
And yet, we keep putting more and more carbon in the atmosphere. Like addicts on drugs, we know we are killing ourselves but can't resist the high. Feeding deadly drug addictions—from heroin to crack to fentanyl—are multi-trillion dollar enterprises, some corporate, some gangs, all criminal. They have the power not only to slake the thirst of the addicted, but to corrupt the guardians—the police on the street, the politicians in the suites, the CEOs in the boardrooms.
 
Can we summon up the awareness, the moral courage, and the popular demand to meet this clear, present and growing threat to our lives? Over the next few weeks, Congress will face yet one more skirmish in this struggle between the blind and the aware, the corrupt and the alarmed, the powers that be and the powers that must be.
 
Democrats in the House and Senate are now working to draft and to pass the core elements of Joe Biden's Build Back Better Plan. Central to that are the first major investments in addressing climate change—mass transit, electric cars, rebuilding housing, solar and wind energy, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, modernizing the electric grid, creating a civilian climate corps that can enlist the energy of the young to retrofit houses and plant trees and much more.
 
Republicans no longer deny the existence of the threat and admit that it is manmade in origin. Now they argue that it is too costly to do anything about it. They raise alarms that developing new energy and electric cars and retrofitting homes will somehow hurt jobs and the economy, when in fact, the transition to sustainable energy will be a source of new demand, new invention and new jobs and growth.
 
Moreover, the U.S. would surely benefit if it became the leader in the new green technologies that surely will drive growth markets across the world. Plus, with their leaders convinced they will benefit politically if Biden fails, Republicans have lined up unanimously to oppose the Biden plan.
 
So, making progress on climate demands completely on Democrats. With the Senate split 5050 between the two parties, and Republicans unanimously opposed, Democrats must vote unanimously so Vice President Harris can break the tie to pass a budget bill that would contain the first major investments in dealing with climate change.
 
That won't be easy. Despite popular support for reforms, big interests are mobilized against change led by Big Oil, the coal barons, and companies hooked on fossil fuels, the deadly crack of our time. An army of lobbyists has descended on Washington. Deep-pocket donors are calling in their chips. When a politician like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) says he needs "greater clarity," and won't support the Biden plan, particularly its measures designed to accelerate the transition to renewable energy by utility companies, he isn't confused; he is compromised.
 
The legislative process—the ugly sausagemaking of the Congress—is confusing, secret and arcane. It seldom generates headlines or attention. But right now—in the next few weeks—this Congress will decide if we take the first steps to address a threat already taking a rising toll in lives and destruction. The interests invested in stopping change are mobilized. The only hope is that we the people rise up to demand the change that is desperately needed.
 
Jesse Jackson is an AfricanAmerican civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH. 
Chicago Sun Times, via Common Dreams. 
 
Also see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjHm6ST3H3Q

 

Not a Nation of Immigrants.
 
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian, activist, and author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2015). This article is adapted from the introduction of her latest book, Not A Nation of Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2021).

On George Washington’s birthday, 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, changed the agency’s official mission statement, dropping the language of “a nation of immigrants” to describe the United States. The previous mission statement had said the agency “secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”1 The revised mission statement reads: “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”2
​
The Trump administration’s official negation of the United States as a nation of immigrants was unlikely to change the liberal rhetoric. During Joe Biden’s 2020 bid for the presidency, the campaign issued a statement on his immigration plan, titled “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants,” asserting that “unless your ancestors were native to these shores, or forcibly enslaved and brought here as part of our original sin as a nation, most Americans can trace their family history back to a choice—a choice to leave behind everything that was familiar in search of new opportunities and a new life.”3 Unlike the previous “nation of immigrants” statement, the Biden campaign did acknowledge prior and continuing Native presence, as well as specifying that enslaved Africans were not immigrants. However, the new rhetoric continues to mask the settler-colonial violence that established and maintained the United States and turns immigrants into settlers.
 
Read the important essay. From Monthly Review.
 
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/09/01/not-a-nation-of-immigrants/
 
 

by David Anderson

In 2020, the three major TV networks, CBS, ABC, and NBC, devoted only five minutes to Afghanistan, according to the Tyndall Report. Major news organizations have pretty much ignored the war in Afghanistan.
“Ask yourself how often Afghanistan has been a lead story for the last twenty years,” Oliver Willis of the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America recently remarked. “American media is putrid at covering the world and it directly leads to a public constantly surprised by topics and issues.”
New York Times reporter Liam Stack tweeted, “There will be many partisan efforts to spin the Fall of Afghanistan, but after 20 years and four presidents from two parties, the entire U.S. governing class is implicated in this. Every official or DC think tanker or cable news talking head you see on TV today.”
As the war ends, Joe Biden is being lambasted by the entire Republican party, a certain number of prominent Democrats, and many in the Beltway chattering class for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Architects of “the war on terror” crawled out from under their rocks to growl. Tony Blair said Biden was “imbecilic.” Even Henry Kissinger emerged from his crypt. Nobody mentioned George W. Bush and how he changed his focus from Afghanistan to attacking Iraq. Nobody mentioned his “weapons of mass destruction” lies.
In a Times op-ed, Ryan C. Crocker, who was Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan and has worked for administrations of both parties, complained that Biden hasn’t shown the “strategic patience” of the kind that has kept American troops in South Korea for more than seven decades.
He says, “Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure.”
That is absurd. Unlike South Korea, Germany and Japan (countries with a seemingly permanent U.S. military presence), Afghanistan has never been stable since the U.S. invasion and has been in the middle of a brutal civil war.
The chairs of the Senate’s leading foreign policy committees (who are all Democrats) are calling for an investigation of how Biden handled the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
That’s good. However, we need a thorough investigation of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan for the last 20 years. No, for the last 40 years. Let’s examine the decisions by the Carter and Reagan administrations to arm and train Afghan mujahadeen against the Soviets.
Unfortunately, in December 2019, there wasn’t a push to investigate the revelations in the “Afghanistan Papers” published in the Washington Post. Using the Freedom of Information Act (after a three year court battle) reporter Craig Whitlock obtained more than 2,000 pages of interviews with more than 400 key insiders — senior generals, Afghan governors, diplomats, aid officials, and policy advisers — conducted during a federal review of the “Lessons Learned” in Afghanistan.
John Sopko, who leads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which conducted the review, admitted to the Post that the records show the American people “have constantly been lied to.”
Peter Beaumont of the Guardian says the papers tell a story of “how successive presidents from Bush through Obama to Donald Trump, publicly rejected ‘nation-building’ but created a violent, corrupt and dysfunctional state only barely propped up by U.S. arms.”
In one interview, Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for south and central Asian affairs between 2006 and 2009, said America’s mission was incoherent and contradictory. He explained;
“If we think our exit strategy is to either beat the Taliban – which can’t be done given the local, regional, and cross border circumstances – or to establish an Afghan government that is capable of delivering good government to its citizens using American tools and methods, then we do not have an exit strategy because both of those are impossible.”
Daniel Ellsberg said the “Afghanistan Papers” are similar to the “Pentagon Papers” (a secret history of the Vietnam war by the Defense Department) which he leaked. Both papers showed how the government intentionally and systematically misled the American people. He remarked, “The presidents and the generals had a pretty realistic view of what they were up against, which they did not want to admit to the American people.”
Joe Biden promised to end America’s longest war. He did it. He didn’t promise a happy ending.
###


https://www.boulderweekly.com/opinion/the-anderson-file/dishonest-trashing-of-biden-amid-imperial-delusions-of-grandeur/
 

Making Immigration Matter
AUGUST 25, 2021 BY  REVIEW BY VIRAL MISTRY
Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future
Ruth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava, and Penny Lewis, eds.
The New Press, 2021, 336pp., $18.98 paperback. 
Posted on the Democratic Left blog.  

​https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/making-immigration-matter/


“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” 
Emma Lazarus’s famous words, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and at one time taught to every U.S. schoolchild, present one picture of this country. The reality, as many immigration activists and leftists are increasingly aware, is far from those hopeful words. The year before Lazarus’s poem was penned, the Chinese Exclusion Act became law—the first direct ethnic immigration restriction law of any major industrial country. The decades that followed saw an increase in nativist sentiment that ultimately led to a series of immigration restriction laws in the 1910s and early 1920s, capped off with quotas that essentially halted non-Western European immigration to the United States.
The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act replaced those laws with a new liberal vision that tried to recast the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” But the new policies, though more progressive than their predecessors, set the stage for the modern immigration detention state by refusing to directly challenge the nativist sentiment from which they emerged. As immigration from Global South nations increased, a bipartisan anti-immigrant consensus took hold, with new border policing and criminalization statutes coming down in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Decades of expanded border patrols, partial border fences, and new bureaucratic structures like the formation of the Department of Homeland Security gave Donald Trump all the tools he needed to build a political coalition primarily centered around anti-immigrant hostility and xenophobia. But the end of the Trump administration and the rise of the new Biden administration pose a difficult question for the broad coalition that opposed Trump and his open racist and nativist rhetoric: what do we actually do about immigration policy in the United States?
At its core, Immigration Matters struggles with this question. A collection of essays by progressive figures, it attempts to survey a broad range of perspectives for activists and policy makers. It starts by surveying the long, painful history of oppression inherent in our immigration laws. Alongside that history of state violence and repression, however, is an equal and opposite history of resistance and struggle for freedom driven by and for immigrants. From labor organizing to electoral involvement to targeted campaigns against complicit corporations, the book documents the diverse tactics people have taken to protect and empower immigrants. From there, various essays chart visions for the future. What strategies and tactics can we use to protect immigrants? What should be the nature of our immigration system? What would it look like to dismantle organizations such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)? What concessions can we win in the here and now, and what should be our approach moving forward? And how do we break the xenophobic electoral coalition that has united rural white folk with the corporate ruling class through their combined distrust and hatred for immigration from the Global South?
 
 
 

​Fulton Books 2021 141pp. available at bookstores every where or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play or Barnes and Noble.
 
Review by Paul Buhl.
The historical moment for 1960s radicals’ self-reflection may have arrived early a while ago, even before 1980 for the especially large egos, but has arrived in force mostly in the last few years. We are now evidently beginning a smallish rush on the market, smallish in part because many of the books are self-published, smallish in another part because these are not the celebrity-status famous people or even the purported Beautiful People. A certain modesty is a great source of their attractions.
​
Milt Tambor’s Democratic Socialist Adventures surely takes the cake for modesty. It is all about him and it is not about him. This is a fellow who grows up within a Jewish-American world and never seems entirely comfortable about being there— no doubt because the institutions and their big shots have shifted sharply right during our political lifetimes, even when the community itself remains largely liberal. Tambor is forever, in these pages, reaching out beyond the limits of that world toward others, as he searches for a career equal to his talents. He is a “people skill” person who works with social service clients, with fellow workers of various kinds, and with allies, smoothing out tensions and searching for solutions in place of conflicts.
Tambor, as he explains, became early in his career a unity-builder between Jewish and minority communities in Detroit. He had a fine mentor: Saul Wellman, an erstwhile Communist dignitary of note as well as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Wellman had been doing the work of bringing people together for decades when young Milt came on the scene in Detroit. A more than willing protege, the younger man showed himself eager to build alliances, for his own reasons. Born in 1938 and raised in Miami and New York in a highly religious household, he was too old for the New Left and perhaps skeptical of imagined utopias. Besides, trained in social work was and assigned to community projects, not on the campus where the New Left action mostly took place.
You might almost say that Milt Tambor was born for DSA, or what became DSA. 
On staff from 1965 at the UAW Retired Workers Center in Detroit, he was in a bargaining unit—a union within a union—for AFSCME. He soon set himself to organize various social work agencies as he prepared to go on to graduate school. He leaped into the labor movement’s own peace initiatives of the time, no easy matter when the AFL-CIO was led by super hawk George Meany and his circle of bureaucrats, enraged at peaceniks of any kind. Happily, the best of the old radicals were also against the war, almost as if the aging socialists of the 1930s-40s found a place to work together again. It was too little and too late, but meanwhile, Tambor had helped lead a strike of Detroit social workers, setting the pace for long term improvement of their collective situation. 
The New American Movement formed in 1971 had a special appeal to him, bringing him into closer contact with such revered figures as Dorothy Healey. By the middle 1980s, he had become part of a labor delegation in support of Central American uprisings in Nicaragua and El Salvador, once again in sharp contrast to the AFL-CIO leadership. He also went back to graduate school and became a scholar of unions in social work, as well as a labor educator. With a pension, he took retirement and headed for an Atlanta retirement in 2001, eager for new political opportunities.
DSA had meanwhile emerged, joining two Left organizations and in a sense, bringing a sense of reconciliation between warring communist and anticommunist traditions.  He was in the right place to push for Bernie Sanders, to build an Atlanta Metro DSA, and to secure the links with the labor movement that would make the movement a success in…. coalition building!  
Nothing spectacular here but everything useful. Milt Tambor teaches us, especially but not only the young, how to be the Jimmy and Jenny Higgins of today and tomorrow.

[Paul Buhle, founding editor of the new left journal RADICAL AMERICA, has published many books on the history of the US Left but in recent years turned to creating radical history graphic novels. His most recent is Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography, co-authored with Steve Max, illustrated by Noah Van Sciver. He is a retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University, and is currently working on the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of The American Left.

Milt was instrumental in founding DSA's Atlanta chapter in 2006 and rooting it in the workplace and community struggles of poor and working class Atlantans, whether through anti–forclosure, anti–gentrification, or workplace struggles, using tactics from public education, to electoral organizing, to direct action. In his memoir, Milt details how the chapter's work contributed to the building of a vibrant progressive movement in Atlanta.  
–Maria Svart, national director, Democratic Socialists of America
]

​by Leo Casey
 
What needs to be negotiated for U.S. K-12 schools to be reopened safely?
 
Quite a bit.
 
That statement may seem counterintuitive. We are now witnessing a potential unraveling of the hard-won progress in beating back the COVID-19 pandemic — and it is largely because of the failure of many of our fellow citizens to be vaccinated. Our patience is exhausted. Understandably, there is growing sentiment to simply mandate vaccines. For the frustrated, mandates — in schools and elsewhere — seem like an obvious step that would address the current crisis and put us back on track to controlling the pandemic. What is left to negotiate?
 
Yet the challenges are more complex. Yes, mass vaccination — over 90 percent of the population, such as countries like Iceland are well on their way to achieving — is an indispensable front in winning the fight against the COVID pandemic. Mandates can play an important role in getting to mass vaccination, and so they can and should be employed, particularly in healthcare, public safety, public education, mass transportation and other critical services. But it will require more than mandates to get us where we need to be with mass vaccination, and the mass vaccination that is now within our reach will not, by itself, be sufficient for schools to reopen safely this fall.
 
Let’s start with why mass vaccination is a positive, but not sufficient, condition for the safe reopening of schools. In fact, educators are already vaccinated at very close to the rates we need for the general population: both the AFT and the National Education Association calculate that somewhere in the vicinity of 90 percent of their K-12 educator members are vaccinated. This achievement comes in part because of the prodigious work of teacher unions to get their members vaccinated. A vaccination mandate for educators could improve that rate, and so is worth doing, but we need to be clear that it will be improvement largely at the margins: the numbers of unvaccinated educators are relatively small, and they include people who have genuine medical reasons and sincere religious beliefs for not being vaccinated and people who will leave teaching rather than be vaccinated. (Part of what must be negotiated is the procedures for identifying authentic medical and religious exemptions.)
 
More importantly, the most critical challenge of a safe reopening of schools is not the status of educators, with their high rates of vaccination, but that of students. In pre-K through 7th grade, none of the students will be vaccinated this fall, and in the higher grades, we have yet to reach a 50 percent vaccination threshold. So, vaccination will provide essential protection to the adult educator in the classroom, but that protection will be missing for the 15 to 30 students in the class who are unvaccinated. While as a rule the severity of the COVID disease declines with age, the ability to transmit the virus does not. If students communicate the virus to each other in the classroom — and here we must take into account the much greater transmissibility of the now dominant Delta variant — they will become vectors for the spread of the COVID virus to their families and to the community at large. And that would be very bad news for containing the pandemic.
 
Schools may be able to require vaccinations for students down the road, much as we currently require vaccinations for measles and mumps, but that is just not within our reach now — and the danger of a resurgence of the pandemic is now. So, the safe reopening of schools will depend not just on the vaccination of educators, but on employing mitigation strategies that reduce and abate the potential for transmission among students — the use of masks, physical distancing, appropriate ventilation, and regular and full cleaning of classrooms. The critical battle in the safe reopening of schools is around employing these mitigation strategies, especially universal masking. We must be able to turn back the efforts of elected officials like Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who is doing everything in his power to try to undermine universal masking in Florida’s schools, even as his state leads the nation in the resurgence of the pandemic with its highest daily number of new COVID cases — including cases among children — since the start of the pandemic. (It is telling that the reflexively anti-union commentators who were quick to attack teacher unions for saying that negotiations over these matters are necessary, like New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, have managed to overlook DeSantis’ attacks on mask mandates.)
 
The experience of teachers and their unions throughout the last year and a half is that left to their own predilections, too many school districts and local and state governments will not employ these mitigation strategies in the comprehensive ways that are required. The strategies can be costly (retrofitting poorly maintained school buildings with appropriate ventilation) and logistically difficult (finding space for smaller classes that allow for physical distancing). Even the easiest of these strategies to implement — universal masking — can become a subject of contention in an era where science and public health have been under attack by public figures like DeSantis. Moreover, the challenges to implementing these mitigation strategies are greater in schools that serve working-class and poor communities and communities of color, as their buildings are often aged and in poor repair and their class sizes are larger. Taking on the necessary work of mitigation strategies in schools is not for the faint-hearted.
 
Add to this on-the-ground reality a likely scenario for how vaccine mandates would roll out. There will certainly be legal challenges, and it is probable that courts will hold the mandates in abeyance while the issue is adjudicated. It is by no means certain that this Supreme Court would rule in favor of mandates, despite clear precedents for them. As a consequence, vaccine mandates will not be immediate fixes, but — assuming the Supreme Court does not strike them down — more medium- and long-range tools in the pandemic. It is essential that other means of achieving mass vaccination — education campaigns, incentive programs and requirements of weekly and even twice weekly COVID testing of the unvaccinated working in critical services such as education — not be abandoned in the name of pursuing mandates, but instead intensified.
 
In sum, vaccination mandates are not a “magic bullet” in the fight against COVID but one of many tools that need to be employed. We need all the tools we can muster in this battle, so mandates should be supported, but we also need to be clear about all that is needed to safely reopen schools and contain the pandemic. The common good of achieving both of these objectives is best met when teachers and their unions have a voice in the pandemic-related policies and practices of their schools, and when local school districts are required to negotiate these matters with them.
 
Leo Casey is the former director of the Albert Shanker Institute and is currently assistant to the president of the AFT.
 
Leo Casey
Assistant to the President
American Federation of Teachers
555 New Jersey Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
 
LCasey@AFT.ORG
202-879-4552
 
https://aftvoices.org/what-needs-to-be-negotiated-a65af72e067b
 

Oppose the California Recall 
The  California recall vote scheduled for Sept 14, is powered by a partisan, Republican coalition of national Republicans, anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-immigrant activists and Trump supporters. They seek to overturn the California governor’s election and their victory could threaten California’s economic recovery and Covid  control efforts.
From the Los Angeles Times: 
“Allied with radical and extreme elements… includ[ing] groups promoting distrust of government, science and medicine; peddlers of QAnon doomsday conspiracies; “patriots” readying for battle and one organization allied with the far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys.”

POLITICO reported how one of the co-founders and chief organizers of the recall- a former Yolo county deputy sheriff,  suggested it would be a good idea to “microchip” immigrants, and anti-immigrant rhetoric has been central to recall organizers’ appeals to supporters.

In addition to the anti Vaxxer extremism, the recall advocates reveal their anti immigrant  emphasis in the  published  official statement of reasons for the recall.  In the second sentence they say, 
“ Governor Newsom has implemented laws which are detrimental to the citizens of this state and our way of life. Laws he endorsed favor foreign nationals in our country illegally, over that of our own citizens….
And,  in the fourth sentence  they say, “ He has imposed sanctuary state status and fails to enforce immigration laws.”

That is how they argue in public for the record.  On social media they are much more blatant and aggressive. Could they be more clear? These are anti immigrant dog whistles.  And dog whistles work with some voters. 

This campaign is a  dangerous repeat  of the 1994 campaign of California  Prop.187 which initiated over 10 years of anti immigrant repression in the nation.   California  Proposition 187 was a hate crime.  It was a racists law, passed by 2/3 of California voters.  It banned over 600,000 immigrants from receiving needed food stamps, medical care.   Although overturned by a court decision at the state level in 1999, the elements of California  Prop. 187 became national law in 1996 as a part of the Immigration Reform and Control act of 1996 and the bipartisan  " Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193)."  during the Clinton Administration. 

 These laws and policies are included in some of the most punitive and cruel  aspects of our current immigration enforcement system. How did this happen ?  In the Summer of 1993, a failing economy and governmental retrenchment combined to make Republican Governor Pete Wilson the most unpopular governor in recent history.  By November of 1994 Wilson won re-election with over 56% of the vote.  Two factors combined to deliver victory to Wilson; a mean spirited, divisive, and racist campaign directed against Mexican and Mexican Americans, and an inept campaign by Democratic Candidate Kathleen Brown. 

            The voters of California voted 62% to 38% in favor of Proposition 187, the  so called Save Our State initiative to restrict illegal immigration. A number of groups including FAIR, the Republican Party,  Zero Population Growth and the Perot organization worked together to qualify the initiative. 

            In 1994 California had a population that is 56.3 % White, 26.3 % Latino, 9.4% Asian, 7.4 % African American, and 0.6% other.  However, according to exit polls, the voters in this election were 80% white, 9% Latino, 7 % African American, and 4 % Asian. Exit polls show that Latinos voted against Prop. 187 by 3 to 1, African Americans split their vote 50 -50, and the Anglo electorate, then the majority, passed the proposition by over 60%.
             
            On campuses the Chicano/Latino youth mobilized in unprecedented numbers. School walk outs and protests occurred up and down the state – but campus politics could not match the power of enraged, organized, angry voters.   
            
     Make no mistake about it. This was an anti Mexican campaign.  While the Wilson said that he welcomed legal immigrants, the photos, the ads, the letters, the references, and the scapegoating clearly blamed Mexicans for the state’s economic crisis. 
The anti Mexican immigrant campaign of 1994  had far reaching  consequences.  For example, Proposition 186 on the same ballot would have provided a single payer health system for California, but it was defeated by the engaged voters.  In following years similar White voter majorities passed Proposition 209 banning Affirmative Action in California, and Proposition 227 banning bilingual education programs among others.
 
        Since Trump, blame the immigrant politics is on the Republican voter mobilization agenda once again. They are using the Covid economic crisis and blaming the current California governor for an endless series of problems related to the pandemic – and they are engaging and motivating the dangerous, armed white militarized organizations.  This agitation grows the white supremacy movement in the state and advances Republican politics- the same people who sought to overthrow the U.S. government on Jan.6, 2020. 
 
    California politics changed in the decade after the 1994  passing of Proposition 187. The Latino vote grew from about 20% of the electorate to 30 %.  A new younger generation of Latinos have now become active and elected leaders.  The growth of the Latino vote produced a major shift as California “Turned Blue,”  https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/01/03/the-blue-ing-of-california/ .  However the harmful national legislation that derived from the Proposition 187 campaign was never repealed.  It remains law. 
 
  And, bad race baiting politics did not go away.  In a substantive July 27, 2021, poll, some 47% of likely California voters would vote to recall Newsom, while some 50% oppose the recall.  And, the Republican right is much more engaged  and enthused in the campaign than are the Democrats.  A September election will be a low turnout election, which usually means an increased percentage of White voters. To date, the anti recall campaign has been unimaginative.
 
The recall campaign could be a decisive turning point similar to the attacks on union workers by then Governor Walker of 2010-2012 in Wisconsin.  With a mobilized  anti immigrant  anti Mexican campaign  a majority of California voters  could turn Republican once again. To avoid this calamity, every union, every progressive organization, every prodemocracy group, and certainly each of the many Latino political organizations should have their members walking precincts, working phone banks, and talking to their neighbors to make certain that a sufficient number of Democrats and independents understand the danger of this recall campaign. 
 
 
It is in each of our interests to unite to defeat this recall.
 
Dr. Duane E. Campbell,
Professor Emeritus. California State U- Sacramento
Co- Chair. Immigrants Rights Working Group,
Democratic Socialists of America
 
 
 
 

​Andrés E. Jiménez Montoya
 
 
This message follows my posting about current Mexican politics mentioning the presidency of the center-left incumbent Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
 
 In the speech, AMLO outlines and advocates a new InterAmerican relations doctrine, proposing the establishment of a new and unique “American Unión” modeled on the European Union. He also provides an open defense of the Cuban Republic and people, calling for the abolition of the OAS and US hegemony in the Americas. As many of you may know, Mexico is the chair of  the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and holds a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. This is truly a ground breaking speech and a signal to the social democratic and socialist democratic left in the Américas.
 
Here, again is the link to the English translation of AMLO’s speech that also featured remarks by the Chilean author Isabel Allende and a musical performance by Lila Downs:
https://roadtoliberation.org/speech-by-the-president-of-mexico-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-on-the-238th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-simon-bolivar-the-liberator/
 
Here’s a link to the speech in Spanish:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=amlo+discurrso+en+el+238+aniversario
 
Here’s a link to the entire program, including the AMLO speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KOUBvn1tJ4&t=19s
 
In Peace and Solidarity.
 
Andrés E. Jiménez Montoya,
Director Emeritus, California Policy Research Center, 
University of California. 

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/6/labor_leader_richard_trumka_death_legacywww.democracynow.org/2021/8/6/labor_leader_richard_trumka_death_legacy

Two important essays on how caucuses can be destructive to DSA and to democracy.  Recommended by a reader. 

What Momentum caucus did to the Philadelphia  chapter of DSA.  Feel free to share widely and discuss.
 
Caucuses, Consequences, and Construction: Caucuses, Conflict, and Convention Reassessed
We are building something here. We will be building something for a long time. And a basic respect for that fact should be universal among members of the organization.
 
 
https://ndeighley.substack.com/p/caucuses-consequences-and-construction
 
I want to write to you today about a document. It was a document written by someone who was very influential in my DSA chapter (Philly) until recently. It was initially a private document for the author’s caucus, but was unintentionally released by a separate caucus that viewed it as an essential training manual. The author’s caucus lost power in my chapter a few weeks ago after a years-long, incredibly bitter, and completely futile battle that destroyed many friendships, egos, and campaigns. It managed to produce not one, but two splinter organizations of Philly DSA. Many of the leading members of that caucus resigned from their positions in the organization in April, and it is unclear how many intend to return. 
The document is many things. It is a perceptive analysis of the development of blocs in an unorganized assembly and the dynamics of competitive meetings. It is the articulation of a political strategy that had proved rather successful at the time of its writing and had two years of gas left in the tank afterward. It is (implicitly) a theory of what democracy is and how it should function in a socialist organization. 
The document being examines.
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_Jy2FAeJsgE7vch03SpdIwTGiXt_Cnj/view?usp=sharing
 
Caucuses, Conflicts and Convention 
December 2018 
The following are notes on the process of caucus formation, the expression of political conflict, the meaning of internal democracy and some suggestions for our convention. This memo does not cover the entire breadth of our work as a caucus but merely the functions of the caucus as a democratic tool, in other words the following memo does not discuss our outward organizing but instead how precisely we plan to win priorities around which we tend to organize. Much of what is below was informed by reading about intra-party caucuses in Latin America and Europe as well as some classic liberal democratic theory. 
 
 
 
 

Resolution on the Defense of Immigrants and Refugees
Authors: Immigrants’ Rights Working Group Steering Committee
 
Whereas: Immigrants in the United States are living under apartheid conditions. Under the U.S. constitution, persons living in the U.S. are promised basic human rights; however, under the current legal framework migrants in the U.S. are disenfranchised from basic legal protections. The migrant working class constitutes at least 20 %  of the working class.  This working class population – residents of the U.S., must not be ignored by a socialist platform.  Political projects that do not include a substantive and realistic analysis  the migrant working class fail to understand both race and class in the U.S. and thus fail to address our  fundamental political tasks. 
 
Whereas: To achieve these ends we must first, promote the empowerment, self-determination and liberation of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, indigenous,  and other oppressed nationalities and immigrants within DSA and within the nation.   Our opposition must be of at a level sufficient enough to defeat these forces.
 
Be it resolved:
 
1)That the Democratic Socialists of America will make defense of immigrant and refugee rights a top national priority of the organization to be spear headed  by the National Immigrants Rights Working Group in coordination with national staff. 
2)That Democratic Socialists of America reaffirm our position that no human being is illegal and that all working people and oppressed people are welcome in our organization on an equal basis regardless of immigration or citizenship status.
3)That Democratic Socialists of America support the struggles of immigrant communities around immediate demands (such as restoring DACA)  as well as the right of immigrants and their communities to lead in this struggle and to determine its tactics.  We stand with Dreamers, TPS holders, farmworkers and community organizers who have worked tirelessly for legislative relief for migrant communities.   We push further for broad and inclusive legislation  and administrative actions that regularizes the status and ensures the full integration of all migrants and refugees
 
4)That Democratic Socialists of America demand:
●Abolition of ICE and the end to the persecution, jailing, and deportation of immigrants.    
●Aid to those fleeing from violence, political and economic turmoil, imperialism, colonialism, as well a global     warming induced climate change instead of  barring refugees at our borders and jailing those who arrive.
●Full labor rights for all those who work within the country and the integration of the labor movement with  those  who struggle for immigrant rights.

• Elimination of H-2 A, “guest worker” type programs.
• A firm and unequivocal stance in favor of immigrants and refugees, and the completion of the promises made by the Biden campaign. 

5)We recognize that the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the capitol highlighted the several unresolved  crises  racism and abuse of power in the  US. The National Immigrants Rights Working Group highlights those abuses targeted at immigrant communities and  will join with other immigrants rights groups to oppose the expansion of  this racist  anti  immigrant agenda. 
6)The National Immigrants Rights Working Group will  coordinate activities within DSA  under this resolution and develop a program of education on the history and political economy of immigration. 
 
 
Request: 
One quarter time staff person and appropriate support personnel and resources.  
 
We support the amendment.
Duane Campbell.  Immigrant Rights Working  Group. 
​

By Max B. Sawicky

​I'd like to underscore the importance of Leo's post. I've had a ringside seat on this and I've been yelling about it since April, so I'd like to add a few points, in the nature of friendly amendments.

The Right is whining that education on race introduces turmoil in schools and classrooms. Actually it is their own agitation that will do that. Rabid denunciations of teaching on elementary matters of race by adults will echo in classrooms. A race-blind pedagogy will render U.S. history more remote to POC and lead to the opposite result for which they clamor: less identification with U.S. citizenship.

But the campaign is not motivated by any of that. One of the original epicenters was in Loudoun County, Va., where I live. This has national strategic significance, in three ways. 1) it pressures teacher unions, one of the lynchpins of Democratic Party power nationwide; 2) it agitates Trump voters in Virginia, a key source of Democratic Party electoral votes; 3) it fuels the home-schooling movement.

On (2), the former head of the Loudoun County school board is using this issue as a springboard for his gubernatorial campaign. The state government went all-Democratic in recent years, and this issue, along with hype over gun control, has lead to frenzied public meetings of crazed voters. The gun control agitation was based in the rural counties. The CRT noise is focused in the biggest, wealthiest counties. Put them together, and you have the basis for Republican victory.

On (1) and (3), CRT hype promotes separation from public schools altogether, not unlike the formation of racist 'academies' in the South after Brown vs. Board of Ed. One can find talk locally by parents of hiring teachers to teach in their home to groups of five or so students. There are enough people here with the financial means to cause a non-trivial drain on public schools, leading to generalized lack of funding that will have disparate, negative impacts by class and race.

On ways to fight back, here are a couple of additional considerations.

This is a Trumpist movement, and Trumpists have substantially discredited themselves with their actions on Jan 6. Such antics would be likely to have their greatest negative response in precisely the middle-class localities where the CRT issue has been amped up. Jan 6 should be a millstone around the necks of the GOP everywhere.

In Loudoun Country, the school board is not up for election this year, so the Right is trying to set off a recall election. Here school board elections are formally non-partisan. Of course all electeds have some known party identification. Nevertheless, voters may resent being dragged into elections for those they have already approved at the ballot box, all the more so if the campaign is based on rubbish.

One added element locally has been protest over protocols on treatment of transgender students. The bathroom issue is rearing its head again. Parents of these students tend to be among the most energetic in response. There has also been flak over 'dirty books' being assigned for reading. (Actually they're not dirty and they have not been required reading.) Middle-class moderate parents are unlikely to be moved by these issues, so the campaign has the effect of energizing an excitable minority, but also isolating them.

Finally, I note that DSA in Virginia has been totally asleep at the switch on all of this. In my rudimentary understanding of organizing, politics entails talking about what others are talking about, not just what you want to talk about. Here the preferred issues are a pipeline that would run through the state, and the PRO act. If the R's retake power in the state, pipelines and labor rights will take their place alongside other, equally-critical problems.

It is time for educators to go on the offensive against the conservative campaign to ban critical race theory from schools.
Leo Casey ▪ July 14, 2021
 
Leo Casey, 
 
The American right ‘s latest culture war offensive is an all-out assault on critical race theory (CRT). Like other right-wing campaigns, the attack on CRT is taking place on two fronts one battle to define the term negatively in popular discourse, and another to enact laws and executive orders that severely restrict how racism is addressed in public schools and post-secondary public institutions. The two fronts work in tandem, feeding off each other; consequently, they must be addressed together.

The right has been shrewd in selecting its target. Founded in the 1970s by legal scholars, CRT has its roots in efforts to explore the ways that racial biases in the law result from structural and systemic inequities. In subsequent decades, the approach spread to disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, as well as to professional fields such as medicine and education, with the goal of investigating and analyzing systemic racism in different cultures and institutions. Today, its influence can be found in dozens of fields of research, and in thousands of texts by hundreds of authors.

Previously known to few outside of academia, it has become a racial Rorschach test, a canvas readymade for the projection of white anxieties, fears, and resentments. That is exactly what the right is counting on. The leading strategist behind the current attacks, Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, has explained that the “goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Writing in the New York Post and City Journal, Rufo linked the theory to a long list of negatively perceived terms and events, including Marxism, Stalin’s gulags, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, “Black Communism,” “anti-Americanism,” “omnipotent bureaucratic authority,” and “re-education camp[s].” Alongside this gallery of horrors, Rufo included terms that are employed in actual efforts to address racism in education—equity, social justice, and diversity—rendering them guilty by association.

It is essential to keep in mind what’s at stake here. It’s not the reputation of CRT among scholars, and not even how the general public perceives it. It’s a campaign to drastically limit teaching and learning about racism in public K–12 and higher education, while inflaming the Republican base.

So far, six states have enacted laws, four have taken other forms of action (executive orders issued by state boards of education or directives from attorney generals), and another eight states have bills pending in legislatures controlled by Republicans. Bills introduced in an additional eight states appear to have stalled or failed in legislative sessions that are ending, although many are sure to be reintroduced when state legislatures reconvene.

How should educators respond? Ignoring attacks from the right won’t do, and neither will politely seeking to correct the record. Rufo isn’t participating in an academic colloquium. He’s writing propaganda, and propaganda doesn’t have to be logical or true to be effective.

A defensive response is guaranteed to lose. But there’s still time to push back. An effective positive response will need to meet four criteria.
 

1.  Go on the offense.

Educators should remind us that the attacks on CRT are without foundation, based on misrepresentations and out-of-context citations, and then quickly pivot to counter the political objectives of the attacks on CRT—especially the attempts to restrict teaching and learning about race.
 

1.  Focus on what matters.

The laws and executive orders that have been developed in the name of opposing CRT will do great harm to education. These measures are written in the language of mandates and prohibitions, and their definitions of what is required and what is proscribed are sweeping.

There is substantial overlap among the various state laws and orders. The Florida State Board of Education’s ban on the teaching of CRT characterizes it as the idea that “racism is not merely the product of prejudice but . . . is embedded in American society and its legal systems.” The Texas law requires that slavery and racism be taught as “deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.” A Republican bill in the Pennsylvania legislature would remove funding from any school district, college, or university where instructors “adopt, express or promote” a long list of prohibited ideas about race and sex in this same vein. In Congress, Republicans have introduced a bill to apply these provisions to Washington, D.C. public schools and charter schools, and a bill that would remove federal funding from schools that used the New York Times’ 1619 Project in instruction. A number of states have also prohibited the use of the 1619 Project.

How will this play out in classrooms? Take the ban on teaching that racism can be systemic and embedded in U.S. law and society and the requirement that slavery and racism be taught as contrary to the founding of the United States. How can the U.S. Constitution be properly taught without any consideration of the significant body of evidence that the entrenchment of racial slavery was not incidental, but part of its original design? How can a student understand the role of the Supreme Court in upholding systemic racism for much of its history, without an examination of how its Dred Scott ruling—that African Americans were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—was expressly based on the original language of the Constitution?

The proscriptions written into these laws and executive orders may well extend beyond the history of racism toward African Americans. How can the campaigns of extermination against indigenous peoples and the Trail of Tears be properly taught, if their manifest racism can’t be examined as central to the nation’s founding? How can the Chinese American Exclusion Act of 1882, forced deportations of Latinos in the 1920s and 1930s, and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War be properly taught without a discussion of systemic racism in society and law against Latinos and Asian Americans?

The problems with these measures extend well beyond the topics and ideas that may be taught. They could impede and inhibit efforts to make public schools, colleges, and universities into welcoming and nurturing places for students of all races by addressing the obstacles that students of color face. The campaign against CRT has targeted diversity and inclusion programs, as well as anti-bias training. It looks to undermine a culturally responsive pedagogy that allows students of color to see themselves, their experiences, and their heritage culture in their education, as white students already do.

Sweeping formulations of the sort found in these laws and executive orders invite legal challenges. Out of professional integrity, many educators will look for ways to continue to expose their students to a full and accurate account of U.S. history and society. Teacher unions will provide a vigorous defense for members who are disciplined or dismissed for teaching honest history. But none of the coming fight back should distract us from the political objectives of this mushrooming campaign: to enshrine in law and government policy an official mythology—an orthodoxy of who Americans are as a nation, how we came to be, and what we can aspire to become.
This campaign is producing what conservative commentator David French has described as “an extraordinary chilling effect on classroom speech.” The danger here lies not just in the broad and far-ranging language found in the laws and executive orders themselves, but in the climate of educational vigilantism they engender. School boards across the country have become the focus of an operation reminiscent of the early days of the Tea Party, with meetings consumed by fervid battles over the phantom use of CRT in K–12 classes—clashes organized by right-wing organizations and financed with dark money. A number of school districts are being inundated with Freedom of Information requests on the details of classroom instruction, and the proposed Pennsylvania law would allow private citizens to trigger official investigations of schools, colleges, and universities for alleged uses of CRT. More U.S. school board officials have been recalled in the last six months than at any time since such records have been kept. Teachers are increasingly fearful of how these laws and executive orders will be used, with some resorting to self-censorship to try to protect themselves. Reports are now surfacing of college courses on race being canceled, and even of entire academic departments being closed down.

At stake is the ability of educators to provide honest and accurate instruction on racism in American history and contemporary society.
 

1.  Remember who the public trusts to make decisions about education, and why.

Conservatives love to whip up resentment against intellectual and cultural elites. That is why academics and institutions like the New York Times have been selected as targets in the attacks on CRT. Resentment against cosmopolitan elites has been an enduring presence in American history; it resonates among parts of the American public who feel left behind. But it is far from the totality of our history and the current moment.

Who do most Americans trust? In public opinion polling on the most trusted professions, K–12 teachers continually rank at the top, alongside nurses and doctors—despite teachers having borne the brunt of many right-wing attacks, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. College faculty do not rank as high but still far outweigh groups at the bottom—including politicians. This ranking reflects the fact that, like healthcare, education is seen as “caring” work that a person enters to help others.

Teachers can draw on this trust to fight back against the laws. We might ask: Who should have the greatest say about how public schools, colleges, and universities address racism? Would we rather leave it up to the people who have studied how to educate our children and are experienced in that work, who have the closest relationship with our children and care about them as individuals? Or would we rather hand it over to politicians trying to win elections and increase their power by stoking bigotry?

While there is little cause for worry when elected officials decide that high school students should be taught American history and civics, or that a post-secondary institution should have a department of political science, detailed government mandates on what should be taught and how are problematic, both educationally and politically. Designing a curriculum is a complex undertaking that relies upon the professional expertise of educators. It is a process best insulated from the passions of political battle and shielded from crude government interventions meant to compel students into following a particular party line.
 

1. Make the argument that the freedom to teach and engage in scholarship is essential to democracy.

Most Americans accept that there will always be controversies about how to understand our history and society. The question is: How do we want those controversies and disagreements to be addressed in the classroom? Do we want them to be freely debated and deliberated, with all ideas subject to criticism and made better by that process? Or do we want the government to be able to preempt that debate, deciding which interpretations should be taught and learned by prohibiting and censoring other interpretations?

Airing disagreements over such matters is how knowledge advances. By contrast, the crass politicization of history and social science, with the use of propaganda to distort scholarship and education, is what authoritarian movements do. And sweeping state mandates on which topics and schools of thought can and cannot be discussed in education are what authoritarian governments do.

At the core of this fight is the ability of educators to teach their students the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. A number of these laws include restrictions on civic education; the Texas law specifically requires that a current controversy can only be taught “without giving deference to any one perspective.” Teachers of civics have long recognized that democratic education includes exposing students to multiple perspectives, especially when teaching controversies. Indeed, what is pernicious about the campaign against CRT is precisely the attempt to preclude exposure to different perspectives on racism, starting with our nation’s founding.

But in the current era, an equally important responsibility of teachers is providing students with accurate information and a factual basis for understanding controversies. These state laws and bills have been written to undermine that responsibility—to require educators who teach contemporary controversies such as who won the 2020 election and what happened in the January 6 insurrection to present truth and propaganda as equally plausible and acceptable perspectives, “without giving deference” to either. On these points, the defense of American democracy becomes inseparable from the academic freedom to teach honest history.
​
The story of American democracy cannot be told without according a central role to the Black freedom struggle. When that struggle moved forward—with the end of slavery, the Civil War amendments and Reconstruction, and again with the civil rights movement and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act—so did American democracy. It was the Fourteenth Amendment that provided the constitutional basis for court cases expanding civil liberties and civil rights during the last century, and the civil rights movement that provided the template for subsequent movements to expand rights, including the women’s movement and LGBTQ movement. And when that Black freedom struggle suffered defeats—with the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow and de jure racial segregation—so did American democracy. We rise—and fall—together. To realize the democratic promises of liberty and justice for all, the United States must embrace that Black freedom struggle. And educators must have the ability to teach the relationship between that struggle and American democracy.


Leo Casey has been a teacher of civics and history and a teacher unionist for four decades. He works at the American Federation of Teachers. And, a leader in North Star. 
 
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/culture-war-in-the-classroom?

The rich and powerful use racism to protect their interests and scapegoat communities of color. But there is an effective way to talk about both race and class when organizing for multiracial democracy.
 
Anika Fassia and Tinselyn Simms ▪ Summer 2021
 
 
This article is one in a series of arguments on class and race in our summer issue.
 Dissent Magazine.

We’re glad to be at a point in American political discourse where the question being posed is how to talk about race and class, rather than whether to do so. For too long, many on the left, especially white progressives, have shied away from talking directly about race and racism. Talking about race, they have argued, is divisive and costs us electoral victories. This approach centers the experiences of white voters, who don’t feel the direct impact of racism in our economy or democracy, and neglects the concerns of people of color, who make up a large portion of our base. It also ignores the fact that race is always being discussed by our opponents. By not responding to the racial sentiments of their narratives, we leave their potent messages unopposed. As a result, we lose persuadable voters and fail to mobilize our base.

Many of us who are doing the day-to-day organizing work to build a multiracial democracy struggle to find effective ways to talk about race and class. We often resort to tactics that either don’t connect with or alienate the people we are trying to move.

The Race Class Narrative (RCN), developed by Ian Haney López, Heather McGhee, and Anat Shenker-Osorio, is a rigorously researched framework that addresses these concerns. We can use it to fight back against the ways that strategic racism is weaponized by the rich and powerful to protect their interests, scapegoat communities of color, and leave us all fighting for scraps. It is a narrative structure that reveals the strategy of the right and builds cross-racial support for progressive policies.

This work is essential if we want to beat the right. As McGhee writes in her recent book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, if we
try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree . . . right up until they hear the counter-message that does talk, even implicitly, about race. Racial scapegoating about “illegals,” drugs, gangs, and riots undermines public support for working together. Our research showed that color-blind approaches that ignored racism didn’t beat the scapegoating zero-sum story; we had to be honest about racism’s role in dividing us in order to call people to their higher ideals.

The RCN tries to do just that. Rather than saying “all people” or “everyone,” the narrative advises those writing scripts for canvassing or for social media campaigns to use more specific language, such as “people of different races and from different places” or “white, Black, or brown.” Mentioning race like this helps to turn our vision of cross-racial solidarity into a reality.

To give an example, here is a message from the RCN research designed to build support for progressive issues and push back against divisiveness from our opposition:

America’s strength comes from our ability to work together—bringing together people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place where everyone can thrive, we cannot let the 1% and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from, or how much money they have. We need to join together to fight for our future, just like we won better wages, safer workplaces, and civil rights in our past. Coming together, we can elect new leaders who will deliver better healthcare for our families, quality schools for our kids, and a fair return on our work.

Across the country, organizations have used the RCN to move voters on important issues. In 2018, activists in Minnesota used it in Greater Than Fear, a campaign designed to push back against anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric and actions. Partners used the RCN research to build a strong campaign brand that included messaging guides, trainings, rallies, ads, print materials, and a digital strategy. On election night in 2018, the Minnesota House of Representatives flipped, turning blue. Democrats also won the gubernatorial, attorney general, secretary of state, and auditor races. Now, they are pushing an ambitious RCN-infused We Make Minnesota revenue campaign that could have long-lasting results for families across the state. They are not avoiding conversations about race and class but leaning into them to tell a story about how racism is deployed against all of us for the economic gains of a powerful few.

In the spring of 2019, People’s Action incorporated RCN into their deep canvassing program in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, with the goal of increasing support for including immigrants in expanded healthcare coverage. These states were chosen because they had all seen an uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment and white nationalist organizing, and because they were important to the 2020 election. Deep canvassing goes beyond typical door-knocking. It involves longer, candid conversations where canvassers ask voters to share emotionally significant experiences. Even though the conversations did not explicitly mention the president, at the end of this program, researchers found a 3 percent decrease in support for Trump plus a 20 percent increase in support for expanded healthcare coverage that would include undocumented immigrants—a shift that was larger than the shift in vote share from Democrat to Republican between 2012 and 2016. More conversations like this could have huge effects on electoral politics.

The movements that have dared to use the RCN have shown how strategically naming race and calling for multiracial prosperity can lead to progressive victories. More recently, using RCN has proven successful in ballot measures and in get-out-the-vote efforts. It was used in mailers and scripts to successfully support expanding Medicaid to 230,000 Missourians and had a positive impact on returned ballots and early in-person voting in Wisconsin.
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The RCN provides us with the beginnings of a roadmap to progressive victories, but more research is needed to create a strategy that can successfully conquer the right. We hope that the framework can provide a model for further research into the most effective ways to address strategic racism in its varied forms as we fight for a new democracy and economy.


Anika Fassia is the co-director of the new home for Race Class Narrative implementation, We Make the Future Action. Prior to this role, she served as Director of Outreach and Training at Race Class Narrative Action, where she led the outreach and partnerships of organizations spanning seven Midwestern states.
Tinselyn Simms is the co-director of We Make the Future Action. Prior to this role, she served as Assistant Director of Communications at the Service Employees International Union, where she led communications for the Racial Justice Center. She spearheaded the labor union’s involvement in Race Class Narrative research.