The DSA is the largest US socialist org in 99 years -- and the first mass org in half a century.
That's a big fucking deal!
Thread:🧵
At 90,000 members, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the biggest socialist organization in the United States since 1914. 🧵
That's 99 years ago:
It's hard to overstate how much the DSA dominates the modern socialist left. It dwarfs every other org. 🧵
The DSA's membership makes up about 90% of organized socialists -- even if we assume that the ~45 tiny socialist orgs with no public membership info have ~250 members each:
How did DSA get here? 🧵
1: Electoral work: DSA grew enormously from the massive popularity of Bernie Sanders and AOC.
2: Anti-Trump energy: DSA and most progressive orgs grew enormously as people organized against Trump's racist, sexist, and anti-queer threat.
Interest in democratic socialism has declined since Trump left office. Easy anti-Trump recruitment is over: 🧵
Where should DSA go? 🧵
1. DSA's electoral work in the Dems got thousands of people into the org and built huge platforms for our reps to promote socialism.
2. DSA must cooperate with other socialist and progressive orgs to beat Trump in '24, then beat the movement behind him.
3. DSA must re-unionize the unorganized.
To learn a bit more about how massive the DSA is --and what that tells us about socialist strategy:
DSA's "platform" is 38 pages with 287 (!!) bullet points
It's >90% good policy, like Medicare For All & end the Senate
But has a bunch of stinkers, like "abolish USAID", "free **all** people from involuntary confinement", "eliminate sales taxes" 🤢, "protect small farmers" 🤮
100% agree on this. US police are terrible, in part, because they spend so much time enforcing misdemeanor offenses (like drug offenses) rather than halting & investigating serious crime (roughly 1/2 of murderers get away with it!).
- narrowly wins Seattle city council seat as open socialist
- Trot, loves to hate DSA
- looks like she will lose recall election
- joins DSA, we canvass for her, she wins by <1%
- resigns her city council position
- becomes a full-time anti-DSA podcaster
- her Trot org splits in three (lol), she takes ~200 ppl
- she talks shit about Zohran (DSA), until he wins
- her org uses his win & face to promote her vanity campaign for US House (will get <5%)
- she talks more shit about Zohran
What can you say but opportunist?
"They don't want power. They want to endlessly podcast about power."
For good and bad, the world was on demographic track for a Long American Century.
At current growth, fertility, & immigration levels: The US would be the ONLY world power with exponential total GDP growth by 2100.
If Trump ends birthright citizenship, he ends that trajectory.
"America First" types ignore how immigration makes the USA stronger: It makes us bigger!
Remember when Japan was going to take over the world? Japan never stopped growing more productive -- it just stopped growing more populous.
Without immigration, the US would be shrinking.
All the world's geniuses want to move here.
Trumpists would turn them away -- and lower innovation, lower growth, lower population, weaken the USA -- all to please mediocre White racists that can't intellectually compete.
Trumpists are genuinely too stupid to run an empire.