I am not sure there is value in winning over self-described socialists. There is certainly not if the intention is to get them involved in politics, but I suppose they could be valuable contributors in other career paths if they take a more rational approach to their career than their politics.
Assuming your values are broadly progressive, the net impact of self-declared socialists’ political participation is negative. DSA helped get five Congressional candidates elected in safe Dem seats, and nowhere else. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of current DSA members of Congress, the most conservative district any represents is Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16, with a Cook PVI of D+24 (meaning a Democrat typically gets 24 percentage points more here than the national average, and would win 74% to 26% in an evenly divided year.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Socialists_of_America_members_who_have_held_office_in_the_United_States#United_States_House_of_Representatives. DSA national did not endorse a winning Congressional candidate in any swing district in 2018 or 2020. https://electoral.dsausa.org/past-endorsements/. I’m not going to go look through their locals’ endorsements but I’d bet $100 the same holds true there if anyone wants to do the research.
And their impacts when elected are bad. The Borgen Project, a nonprofit focused on advocating for the needs of the global poor, rated Eliot Engel one of the top 10 champions of the global poor in Congress. https://borgenproject.org/tag/eliot-engel/. Jamaal Bowman replaced him with a more isolationist, more nationalist foreign policy. AOC spends millions and millions of dollars that could go to winning a swing district seat on social media ads for herself in her safe Dem seat.
Sanders did not come close to winning the Democratic nomination. He had a temporary lead that was a quirk of the timing of various primaries. Biden wound up with 2.5x as many delegates as Sanders.
I’m a self-described socialist. I also work at an EA-aligned nonprofit and co-organize one of the largest EA groups in the world. I know plenty of other EAs who do great work and identify as socialists or leftists.
But maybe EA would be better off without us because our political contributions are objectively wrong according to your analysis.
Your analysis assumes that the goal of anyone with left of center politics is to flip seats from red to blue, but this is not the goal of the DSA. Obviously, winning majorities is essential to enacting legislation, but the composition of those majorities will change what legislation looks like. In the example I linked above, Bernie was able to significantly influence the American Rescue Plan to get more unconditional cash to people who need it, among other things. In New York State, Dems hold super majorities in the Assembly and Senate. All 5 of DSA’s endorsed candidates won their primaries (the actually competitive election). One of them was the lead sponsor on the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, which significantly restricts the usage of solitary confinement (i.e. torture) in New York’s corrections facilities and just passed the Assembly and Senate with veto-proof majorities yesterday.
Eliot Engels:
supported the Iraq War
opposed the Iran deal
supported Saudi’s war on Yemen
Source. (The author of this article also wrote a defense of EA 5 years ago)
The nature of presidential primaries is that there is typically a clear front-runner by some point who captures the lions share of the remaining delegates. Even so, in 2016, the results were far closer, with Hillary receiving 55% of the popular vote to Bernie’s 43%.
Honestly, you sound ideologically opposed to socialism, which is fine. What’s frustrating is that you’re writing about politics with a certitude that doesn’t seem to match your understanding of it. You’re picking a few random data points and then asserting that this proves some very broad claim, like that socialists participating in politics is bad for progressives or that Engel is better than Bowman.
I am not ideologically opposed to anything. I am opposed on empirical grounds to Marxism, and approximately indifferent between centrist democrats and what most Americans refer to as “socialism” on the merits. I am also empirically opposed to anyone referring to themself as a “socialist” in American politics, because it’s a bad tactic in the elections that actually affect people’s lives. Even in dem-supermajority legislatures, self-described socialists don’t make up enough of the caucus to be the deciding vote on an issue that has a clean left-right divide.
I voted Sanders in 2016 because my uneducated instinct is “progressive good” and because I thought Clinton a particularly weak candidate. Then I learned how bad his record is on immigration (well to the right of Joe Biden, for example), and have deeply regretted that vote ever since. EA has moved me somewhat toward the Dem establishment and away from the Left because it has given me the tools to prioritize effectively between issues I care about. Which was something I always knew I should be doing, but didn’t know how to do before. I always noticed a strain of America Only-ism in some quarters of the Left that I was uncomfortable with, but it’s complicated, because I didn’t know how to weigh that against, e.g. the Left not listening to idiots like Larry Summers on economic policy, or the different version of xenophobia that a lot of centrists espouse. And it turns out that the answer is that politicians have to be evaluated individually based on their support for the global poor and not based on ideology. On the merits, Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman are pretty bad, Joe Biden meh but better than a Republican, AOC is pretty good, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker great . Republicans in the Trump era are consistently bad but someone like, idk, Lincoln Chaffee, might have been better than a lot of Dems in the 80s. And America Only-ism is definitely more common among self-described socialists than among people like Elizabeth Warren who are about as Left ideologically but don’t adopt the identity. And at least in my social circles it seems to be even more pronounced among activist types than among politicians.
Thinking that you can be opposed to a broad ideology on empirical grounds is simply mistaken. You can say something like ” the countries that adopted self-described Marxist governments fared worse than they would have otherwise”. But even that claim requires a lot of evidence to defend! Marxist revolutions didn’t happen in already wealthy countries with stable institutions. I don’t even consider myself a Marxist—I’m just trying to make the point that this stuff is too complicated to make a claim that an ideology is empirically right or wrong.
Ideology is like bad breath, you can’t smell your own. You have an ideology, whether you’d like to admit it or not!
I share your wish that American politics weren’t so focused on Americans and wish that Bernie were more of an internationalist. However, his platform on immigration in 2020 was better than any other candidate’s from an EA perspective IMO, even if his record may not have been great on it.
I am not sure there is value in winning over self-described socialists. There is certainly not if the intention is to get them involved in politics, but I suppose they could be valuable contributors in other career paths if they take a more rational approach to their career than their politics.
Assuming your values are broadly progressive, the net impact of self-declared socialists’ political participation is negative. DSA helped get five Congressional candidates elected in safe Dem seats, and nowhere else. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of current DSA members of Congress, the most conservative district any represents is Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16, with a Cook PVI of D+24 (meaning a Democrat typically gets 24 percentage points more here than the national average, and would win 74% to 26% in an evenly divided year.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Socialists_of_America_members_who_have_held_office_in_the_United_States#United_States_House_of_Representatives. DSA national did not endorse a winning Congressional candidate in any swing district in 2018 or 2020. https://electoral.dsausa.org/past-endorsements/. I’m not going to go look through their locals’ endorsements but I’d bet $100 the same holds true there if anyone wants to do the research.
And their impacts when elected are bad. The Borgen Project, a nonprofit focused on advocating for the needs of the global poor, rated Eliot Engel one of the top 10 champions of the global poor in Congress. https://borgenproject.org/tag/eliot-engel/. Jamaal Bowman replaced him with a more isolationist, more nationalist foreign policy. AOC spends millions and millions of dollars that could go to winning a swing district seat on social media ads for herself in her safe Dem seat.
Sanders did not come close to winning the Democratic nomination. He had a temporary lead that was a quirk of the timing of various primaries. Biden wound up with 2.5x as many delegates as Sanders.
I’m a self-described socialist. I also work at an EA-aligned nonprofit and co-organize one of the largest EA groups in the world. I know plenty of other EAs who do great work and identify as socialists or leftists.
But maybe EA would be better off without us because our political contributions are objectively wrong according to your analysis.
Your analysis assumes that the goal of anyone with left of center politics is to flip seats from red to blue, but this is not the goal of the DSA. Obviously, winning majorities is essential to enacting legislation, but the composition of those majorities will change what legislation looks like. In the example I linked above, Bernie was able to significantly influence the American Rescue Plan to get more unconditional cash to people who need it, among other things. In New York State, Dems hold super majorities in the Assembly and Senate. All 5 of DSA’s endorsed candidates won their primaries (the actually competitive election). One of them was the lead sponsor on the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, which significantly restricts the usage of solitary confinement (i.e. torture) in New York’s corrections facilities and just passed the Assembly and Senate with veto-proof majorities yesterday.
Eliot Engels:
supported the Iraq War
opposed the Iran deal
supported Saudi’s war on Yemen
Source. (The author of this article also wrote a defense of EA 5 years ago)
The nature of presidential primaries is that there is typically a clear front-runner by some point who captures the lions share of the remaining delegates. Even so, in 2016, the results were far closer, with Hillary receiving 55% of the popular vote to Bernie’s 43%.
Honestly, you sound ideologically opposed to socialism, which is fine. What’s frustrating is that you’re writing about politics with a certitude that doesn’t seem to match your understanding of it. You’re picking a few random data points and then asserting that this proves some very broad claim, like that socialists participating in politics is bad for progressives or that Engel is better than Bowman.
I am not ideologically opposed to anything. I am opposed on empirical grounds to Marxism, and approximately indifferent between centrist democrats and what most Americans refer to as “socialism” on the merits. I am also empirically opposed to anyone referring to themself as a “socialist” in American politics, because it’s a bad tactic in the elections that actually affect people’s lives. Even in dem-supermajority legislatures, self-described socialists don’t make up enough of the caucus to be the deciding vote on an issue that has a clean left-right divide.
I voted Sanders in 2016 because my uneducated instinct is “progressive good” and because I thought Clinton a particularly weak candidate. Then I learned how bad his record is on immigration (well to the right of Joe Biden, for example), and have deeply regretted that vote ever since. EA has moved me somewhat toward the Dem establishment and away from the Left because it has given me the tools to prioritize effectively between issues I care about. Which was something I always knew I should be doing, but didn’t know how to do before. I always noticed a strain of America Only-ism in some quarters of the Left that I was uncomfortable with, but it’s complicated, because I didn’t know how to weigh that against, e.g. the Left not listening to idiots like Larry Summers on economic policy, or the different version of xenophobia that a lot of centrists espouse. And it turns out that the answer is that politicians have to be evaluated individually based on their support for the global poor and not based on ideology. On the merits, Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman are pretty bad, Joe Biden meh but better than a Republican, AOC is pretty good, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker great . Republicans in the Trump era are consistently bad but someone like, idk, Lincoln Chaffee, might have been better than a lot of Dems in the 80s. And America Only-ism is definitely more common among self-described socialists than among people like Elizabeth Warren who are about as Left ideologically but don’t adopt the identity. And at least in my social circles it seems to be even more pronounced among activist types than among politicians.
Thinking that you can be opposed to a broad ideology on empirical grounds is simply mistaken. You can say something like ” the countries that adopted self-described Marxist governments fared worse than they would have otherwise”. But even that claim requires a lot of evidence to defend! Marxist revolutions didn’t happen in already wealthy countries with stable institutions. I don’t even consider myself a Marxist—I’m just trying to make the point that this stuff is too complicated to make a claim that an ideology is empirically right or wrong.
Ideology is like bad breath, you can’t smell your own. You have an ideology, whether you’d like to admit it or not!
I share your wish that American politics weren’t so focused on Americans and wish that Bernie were more of an internationalist. However, his platform on immigration in 2020 was better than any other candidate’s from an EA perspective IMO, even if his record may not have been great on it.