Re: "Nero fiddles while Rome burns"

Carl,

Thank you for reading the comments closely enough to argue with them. Three corrections, then three places where you are right and I am not.

First, the attribution. You have me concluding "that there is a vibrant part of the Democratic Party." I did not write that, and I do not think it. The DSA victories are not evidence that the party contains a healthy wing. They are evidence that the socialist left is now producing officeholders faster than it is producing any means of holding them. That is why I raised them. An accountability argument is not a realignment argument. It runs in the opposite direction. The reason to attend to the electoral arena is that it is the arena in which our people are captured, not the arena in which they are being freed.

The capture does not require anyone to be a fraud. A socialist elected without recall, without a workers' wage, without a mandate that binds, does not become a careerist by betrayal. He becomes one by the ordinary operation of the office. The staff who brief him, the donors who return his calls, the caucus discipline of the body he sits in, the calendar that fills up eighteen months out. None of this involves a decision to sell anyone out. That is the entire point, and it is why the question of what an office does to a person cannot be answered by asking who the person is.

Second, the inversion. "Yes, I would agree, but first they have to get elected." That is the whole problem stated in eleven words.

Accountability deferred until after the election is accountability that never arrives, for three reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's sincerity. The mechanism has to be a condition of endorsement, because that is the only moment at which the candidate needs something from us and we need nothing from him. After the win the direction of need reverses permanently. The apparatus capable of imposing a condition, the campaign, dissolves the week it succeeds. And no one who has just won an office votes to install the procedure by which he can be removed from it.

Recall provisions, the workers' wage, a binding mandate, and a fraction that meets and decides and can discipline its own members: none of these can be retrofitted. They are installed before, or they are not installed. So "first they have to get elected" is not a sequencing preference. It is the operation by which the demand is displaced onto a moment at which it cannot be satisfied, and it is the same operation I have spent a year documenting in every caucus in DSA. I did not expect to find it in a criticism of my own piece, but there it is.

Third, John. You place me in a line with the conclusion that leftists should hope for a Democratic victory. John and I have had this out on this list at some length, and I conceded most of his substance, including the substance you are restating: the threat to the count is real, the litigation strategy is a strategy of hope, and only a stoppage broad enough to make the country ungovernable stops a seizure. What I did not concede is the diagnosis, and I do not concede this conclusion either. A hope is not a strategy. A hope binds no one and can be held to nothing. The Democratic Party will do in November what it is structurally capable of doing, and our hopes will not enter into it. The question is whether anything on our side of the ledger can oblige anyone to do anything on a particular date, and the answer at present is no. That is not a reason to abstain from the electoral field. It is a reason to enter it for the purpose of building the instrument rather than for the purpose of adding to a total.

Now the places where you are are right.

You are right about the union officialdom, and you are more right than you let on. "A step forward, although not a dramatic breakthrough" is the kind of phrase written to avoid a fight with people we would prefer to keep working with. It is the same evasion in miniature that I have been criticizing at scale. Naming Fain on tariffs and saying nothing else about the officialdom is a choice, and the editorial should own it. I should have said so in the comments and did not.

You are right about el-Sayed and "money in your pocket" and right that "make the connection" is not a solvent. Connection made economistically produces a constituency that will abandon the international position the moment the domestic payoff fails to materialize, which it will. That deserved more than the sentence it got.

And you are right about the closing line. If three weeks of this list demonstrate anything, it is that we do not agree on what socialism is, and writing that our readers need no lecture on the subject was a courtesy to the audience rather than a description of it. Fair hit. I will not repeat it.

On Dearborn, I grant the difference and dispute what follows from it. Every Democratic official in the state condemned the provocation, and no Republican did, and that is a real, observable, non-trivial difference that anyone pretending otherwise is lying about. Now look at what the statements instructed people to do. Stay home. Stay peaceful. That is a condemnation issued by bodies that possess no mechanism for converting a condemnation into an action, and not one of them can be held to it next month. It is the same structure Mark and I were circling in the Cuba exchange: NNOC has assembled an impressive list of city councils and labor bodies that have voted the blockade should end, and not one of those votes obligates the body that cast it to do anything at all. The resolution sits in the list. The condemnation sits in the news cycle. Both are real, and neither is a commitment.

Which is why "at election time, after the primaries, the Democratic Party IS the alternative to the Republicans" settles less than you want it to. As a description of the ballot, it is simply true, and I have never said otherwise. The ballot is a menu. A menu is not a strategy, and choosing correctly from it is a decision that takes four seconds and commits the chooser to nothing on the fifth.

So let me put the question back rather than end on an agreement. Name the mechanism. If accountability comes after the election, describe the procedure. Which body recalls a DSA officeholder who votes against the platform he ran on, by what majority, on what timeline, and with what consequence he cannot simply absorb? If your answer is that no such procedure exists but that we should elect them anyway and build it later, then we agree about the facts and disagree only about what to call the plan.

--
Tony


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