It seems that most weeks, recently, are the kind where decades happen (which Lenin never actually said, but it’s a nice turn of phrase). A live-streamed genocide, approaching its third year as millions starve. Thousands of state-sponsored disappearances by newly-deputized suburban brutes in Marvel t-shirts. A spate of political assassinations which has spawned comparisons to Italy’s Years of Lead. Amidst the maelstrom of a dying empire, the push-and-pull of political action happens quickly, constantly, all around us, and antagonisms are multiple. Alliances shift. Coalitions cohere and dissolve. The faces of our friends become difficult to distinguish from those of our enemies. And yet, the more difficult it becomes, the more crucial is this distinction. As another famous revolutionary really did say: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.”
As we approach the 2025 National Convention, aware of the catastrophes unfolding around us and of the brief flashes of revolutionary potential that emerge from within those catastrophes, one of the most pressing (and contentious) questions that DSA members and convention delegates face is that of our relationship with the Democratic Party.
This question is really not one but many: What is the exact nature of that relationship, historically and in the present? What is its future? Are we doing Democratic Party entryism, or making a brief and uneasy alliance? When (if) the break comes, will it be “clean” or “dirty”? Are we creating, as Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella argued so provocatively in a 2019 article for Catalyst, a “party-surrogate”? What the hell is a “party-surrogate,” anyway?
The questions raised by our controversial but ongoing relationship with the Democratic Party pervade the resolutions up for deliberation at convention, which range from calling to run more candidates as independents (CR05: National Electoral Commission Consensus Resolution) to declaring the Democratic ballot line the only viable path toward socialism (R18: Seize the Moment! Defeat Corporate Democrats and Elect More Socialists) to an equivocating mix of fiery anti-Democratic rhetoric and milquetoast proposals for concrete action (R05: Fight Fascism, Build Socialism). The aim of this brief article is not to take on the quixotic task of dissecting and critiquing each resolution which touches on the question of the Democratic Party, but to provide a theoretical corrective to the way we think through electoral issues on the whole.
My intervention is twofold: first, the argument in favor of gaining power primarily through the Democratic Party apparatus is based on the fallacious assumption that the Democratic Party will provide us access to “the masses”; second, not just the content but the form of Democratic Party politics is hostile (if not totally antithetical) to the formation of a genuine socialist party of the masses. In order to chart a path forward with respect to the Democratic Party and electoralism generally, we must first refine our analysis of what constitutes a political party and where political power resides.
The accusation most frequently hurled at the DSA’s more electorally-skeptical left wing is that of “sectarianism.” Those who advocate most strongly for strategic alignment with the Democratic Party love to pose a loaded question: Do we want to be a party of the masses, or a sect?
Leaving aside the dubious deployment of the term “sect,” which is normally understood to refer to a distinct offshoot of a larger group, this question—when asked in this context—makes the assumption that aligning with the Democrats will enable us to become a mass party and that becoming a party of the masses requires aligning with Democrats. Further, it implies that it is acceptable and even desirable to make political sacrifices in order to do so, lest we become a “sect” which holds stubbornly to extreme and rigid beliefs (echoing the constant kvetching by left-liberals about leftists imposing “purity tests” such as requiring political allies to oppose genocide).
The most obvious hole in this argument is that the Democratic Party is horrendously unpopular. Recent polling by CNN and The Wall Street Journal put Democrats’ favorability rankings at a dismal 28% and 33% respectively, the lowest since the early ‘90s. Among registered voters, only about 33% are registered Democrats (though about 49% “lean” Democratic), and less than three quarters of voting-age Americans are even registered to vote — only about 65% voted in the 2024 presidential elections. Some masses, indeed.
A quarter-to-a-third of the US population is still, of course, a decent crowd — far more than DSA can muster, at least for now. But the Democrats’ historically low approval rating comes at a time when they are (ostensibly) on the offensive against an autocracy of dunces with an almost equally low approval rating, a position which should give them a boost in the polls. And even the most loyal Democratic voters are not necessarily enthusiastic about the Democratic political project; the “no matter who” in “Vote blue no matter who” betrays a resigned pragmatism, rather than passionate conviction, among the Dems’ most dependable foot soldiers.
There is also the problem of who, exactly, comprises these Democratic “masses.” The liberal’s stock answer has been, at least since the New Deal, that Democrats are the party of America’s oppressed, including the working class, racial minorities, women, immigrants, and (more recently) queer people. The claim to represent the working class has always been shaky for white voters, among whom support for Democrats increases markedly with level of education. And Black and Latino voters — that is, the segments of those populations who choose to partake in electoral politics at all — are abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. Nor is it clear who makes up the American “working class” (a term much fuzzier than the Marxist “proletariat”) and what exactly it would mean to represent their interests. Twenty-first century America, where 65% of people own homes and 14% own business equity, is not Victorian England, with its millions of urban industrial workers laboring side-by-side in smoky factories and sleeping ten-to-a-room in filthy tenements. Without a clear analysis of contemporary class structure — which requires, in our incredibly globalized economy, looking beyond the borders of the U.S. — appeals to the “American working class” are empty rhetorical gestures at best.
As Democrats, and indeed the whole bipartisan status quo, plummet in popularity, aligning with them in name and/or in deed might actually alienate the very masses we are trying to attract. It is not enough to decry “corporate Democrats” when people are increasingly disillusioned by the party in its entirety, and when the material program of the party is clearly dictated by those “corporate Democrats” who supposedly represent only the worst that the party has to offer. When our Socialists in Office run as Democrats, vote as and with Democrats, refer to themselves as Democrats, and defend the Democratic Party against the Republican, how can we expect voters to understand that we are not really Democrats, to trust us when we say we’re not like them? It is not when we refuse to work with the Democrats but when we fall in line behind them that we risk becoming a sect — a sect of the Democratic Party.
In fact, many of the people who should be our closest allies — namely other leftists, activists, and community organizations — fundamentally distrust DSA because of our relationship with the Democratic Party, because our most visible and powerful members behave like liberals while styling themselves socialists. Why are we contorting our politics and ourselves to win the approval of a cohort of imagined liberals when we could be building power alongside other radicals who already share many of our aims?
The Democratic Party is not the party of the masses, of the working class, of Black and brown people, of women, of queer people, or of anyone but a particular faction of the American bourgeois. The masses are the masses. Some prefer Democrats, some prefer Republicans, many prefer not to engage in electoral politics at all. To pretend that the Democratic Party is the only way to reach people is to do a disservice to those people and to ourselves.
I am not denying, however, that strategic alignment with Democrats — including running on a Democratic ballot line — can be a useful tactic in particular circumstances. In fact, I spent many hours this spring and summer canvassing for the Zohran Mamdani campaign. But it was precisely the ways in which the Zohran campaign did not look like a Democratic campaign that enabled him to pull off his historic upset. During my time canvassing — that is, speaking with hundreds of registered Democrats in New York City — I encountered dozens of people who were not excited about voting for a Democratic candidate and did not intend to vote in the primary at all. It was often through sharing our own frustrations with the Democrats and positioning Zohran as an alternative that my comrades and I were able to convince people to give him a chance.
The Zohran campaign was successful not only because of its content but because of its form. He did not rely on paid canvassers with strict scripts, career political consultants, or irritating text blasts. Canvassers volunteered because they wanted to, were encouraged to connect to voters on an individual level, and went for beers together after shifts. I personally convinced several friends to register in NYC just to vote for him, and I overheard countless strangers casually discussing Zohran’s messaging with friends in bars and cafes. The campaign also brought hundreds of people into NYC-DSA, where many of us are working to incorporate them into the myriad other groups and projects that DSA encompasses.
Putting people in office is undeniably a way to gain material power and to build the party, but fetishizing the ballot line restricts us to a bourgeois understanding of the party form. The Democrats’ promise is precisely that people will not have to worry about politics. They can show up once a year at the ballot box and leave the rest to the career politicians (“go back to brunch,” as it were). The bipartisan bourgeois hegemony is maintained by the mass alienation of the people from the means of political and economic self-determination. The Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre writes of the alienated subject in the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life:
How does the individual see himself when faced with the enormous mass of the State? Like a minute speck, like a shadow. He becomes for himself an unreal appearance; but at the same time, by an absolute contradiction, the political fiction sanctions the private man, qua selfish individual with personal interests, as the supreme reality.
This is the paradox of the modern citizen: as an individual, he is both powerless and all-powerful. He is free to go to the ballot box and free to vote for any candidate he wishes, but he rarely harbors any hopes that his choice will result in much material change to his life.
The party form of both the Democratic and Republican Parties is one designed to divorce the political from the everyday life of its constituents, to curtain off the realm of “politics” and thus to blind us to the full spectrum of possibilities for political action. Politics is a game we play once every few years. For those of us who make a habit of following the news and participating in political organizations, it might rise to the level of a hobby, or even a passion. But once we have had our say by choosing one of the candidates the party has pre-selected for us (or, more accurately, simply signing off on the only candidate the party has deigned to provide us), we are admonished to leave politics to the politicians. If our representative betrays us, it must be because they have access to some system of knowledge and ethics beyond our reach, up there in the realm of the reified political. We simply cannot understand.
If we are to provide a serious alternative to the two-party system, this is precisely the form of bourgeois politics that we must overcome. Many of the arguments for continuing our relationship with the Democratic Party point out that they have funds, personnel, and infrastructure that could be of material use to us. But why should we want their incessant newsletters, destined to sit unopened in thousands of inboxes? Why should we want their smirking consultants and Botox-paralyzed PR reps? Why should we want their bumper stickers and t-shirts and yard signs?
The Zohran campaign offers a taste of another kind of politics: one where the political is not held separate from everyday life but pervades it, so that they are one and the same. But in order to truly facilitate this reintegration of the political into the everyday, our political vision must transcend the campaign. We need not necessarily reject electoral politics, but put them in their proper place — not as the ultimate expression of political life but one of its many forms.
Another accusation often leveled at leftists who critique electoralism is that we are “allergic to power.” But to say this is to accept a narrow, bourgeois concept of “power.” Formal offices of governance are one of the places where power may be found, but far from the only. Historically, radical political parties have looked far beyond the forms offered to them by bourgeois politics; perhaps the most obvious example is the Black Panther Party. While it did run candidates for political office, it is much better known for its community patrols, free breakfast program, and political education initiatives. The Black Panthers were certainly not allergic to power. Instead, they understood that power doesn’t come from a single person in office. Real power is much broader, richer, more diverse and more diffuse.
In other words, to privilege the electoral campaign as the primary way for socialists to create a mass party is to put the cart before the horse. Here’s one that Lenin actually said: “To every party at all worthy of the name a platform is something that has existed long before the elections; it is not something specially devised ‘for the elections’, but an inevitable result of the whole work of the party, of the way the work is organised, and of its whole trend in the given historical period.” We need a party whose work reaches far beyond the moment of the election, and this means more than just setting up regular meetings with candidates in office. It means expanding the forms of political action available to people in their everyday lives, doing the long, slow work of creating deep-rooted and resilient structures of collective life. Failure to do so will mean being relegated to the irrelevance of American third parties like the Greens, who pop up every election cycle and melt away just as quickly, barely a thorn in the side of the bipartisan political consensus. Play bourgeois games, win bourgeois prizes.
We need to be clear that the Democratic Party is, in the final analysis, an enemy. They are not allergic to power, either; they have it, and they use it to arm genocide, deport people, jail protestors, and defend the interests of capital. This does not mean that there is no place for them in our strategy — in fact, there almost certainly is. Mao allied with the Kuomintang against the Japanese, and Castro with liberals against Batista. But when the smoke cleared the communists emerged victorious, not because they won bourgeois games but because they refused them. The parties they built looked nothing like the ones that had come before.
Sammy Aiko Zimmerman is a Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, and member of DSA Emerge.
