Making a Popular Front Work

It’s easy to feel discouraged and disgusted by the United States at present. The fascists in government whipsaw between slapstick self-sabotage and the chilling facilitation of murder, social and otherwise. The only viable opposition party is caught between a base that is baying for the blood of tyrants to soak the liberty tree and a leadership that thinks if they stick their head between the pages of Abundance and click their heels three times, they might wish themselves back into the Long '90s. The algorithms are melting our brains faster than the LLM effluents are melting the Humboldt Glacier.

And yet there are green shoots springing on the American left. The Democratic Socialists of America are on the march in old New York (and elsewhere!), knocking several machine-pol barnacles off of the ship of state last month in a series of primary victories that proved decisively that Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo was no fluke. Evelyn Normielib is singing the Internationale, and DSAers who were posting Glowing Eyes Dzerzhinsky memes in mid-2020 are lining up to vote in the primaries of the Democratic Party. The vibes could be worse.

As a Milwaukee socialist of Marxist convictions and liberal dispositions, I’m broadly encouraged by these developments (it’s lovely to see the laggards in Manhattan catching up to us at last—we knew you had it in you, comrades). Pace comrade Gramsci, our interregnum may be birthing that strangest and most welcome of hybrid monstrosities, the popular front. A genuine and operable coalition of the liberal and socialist left is something that hasn’t flexed its muscle in American politics in a sustained way since at least the 1960s, perhaps not since the 1930s. But there are obstacles ahead for constructive left-liberal cooperation.

Although Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis is not at all wrong that liberalism and socialism share a common ancestry in the classical radicalism of the late 18th century, anybody who grew up with brothers or sisters knows that no fight can turn as nasty as a sibling rivalry. The differences between our two traditions are real, not mere phantoms of overexcited posters. The appropriate role of capital, the rights of private property, the proper form of democratic organization in society, the wisest response to the climate crisis, the maintenance of the American Empire (and whether it should be maintained at all)—on all of these points and many more, the differences between socialists and liberals are real and important. They cannot be ignored. They should not be ignored.

This is not a quixotic attempt to resolve contradictions that have festered since before the Old Moor put pen to paper or J. S. Mill was a twinkle in his father’s eye. Rather I’d like to highlight three immediate challenges to the nascent DSA-liberal popular front, and propose a few avenues for constructive cooperation. Specifically:

1. The hostility of many DSA members towards the Democratic Party as an institution, and the hostility of many Democrats towards the DSA.

2. The sometimes wide gap between socialist and liberal conceptions of the good in regards to US foreign policy.

3. The suspicion of technical expertise and meritocracy among some socialists in the DSA.

The Democratic Party

That the average DSA member holds the Democratic Party in deep contempt should come as no surprise to the reader of this publication; to no small extent, this is the issue on which my beloved and fractious sect is most aligned with the general will of the American public. Our list of grievances is long: the neoliberal vise that began to bite under Carter and Clinton, the way the Watergate Babies drank the corporate Kool Aid to become Atari Democrats, liberal hawks cheerfully taking their spots in the Iraq War’s amen corner, and bruised and bitter feelings over the failed Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020, defeats that birthed endless (sometimes spurious) accusations of perfidy and conspiracy. So practiced is this litany of resentments and defeat that not a few socialists who are otherwise gracious and thoughtful comrades can allow their bitterness to get the better of them, real and imagined sins of Democratic Parties past weighing like a nightmare on our minds.

At its worst, this impulse leads to a sort of nihilistic self-indulgence in which any coordination with or interaction with the actual electoral politics of the United States is considered anathema to real socialism. From this navel-gazing, a number of morbid symptoms arise: ever more bespoke flavors of political radicalism, ever more arcane points of procedure, ever more strident condemnations and vituperative purges, ever more calls for debate without resolution and ideological diversity without result—critiquing power forever without ever wielding it, as the accusation goes. Internally, we Midwestern socialists sometimes call this tendency ultraliberalism (forgive the term).

The antagonism is mutual, in our defense. Former Speaker Pelosi was fond of declaring ex cathedra that the Democrats ‘are capitalists, and that’s just the way it is’. The right wing of American liberalism has gone absolutely apoplectic at the DSA’s successes in New York, shrieking for the mods to do something and accusing the candidates of being idiotic liabilities at best or Hamasniks and Stalinists at worst. And from Colorado to Milwaukee, from Seattle to Washington, the old guard of Democrats are hopping mad at our arrivistes coming in and wrecking the party. Some of this mishigas is an expression of the sincere fear that association with socialism is electoral kryptonite, the old anxiety that anything with a whiff of hammers and sickles will spook Chuck Schumer’s imaginary Baileys. Some of it grows out of sincere ideological disagreement about the role of the state, unions, capital, and community organizations in public life. And a great deal of it, as always, is borne of petty rivalries and the desire to maintain one’s position in the hierarchy of the Party and its orrery of nonprofits. Eris and her golden apple have nothing on the strife sown by the Iron Law of Institutions.

But what’s so odd about all this angst about the Democratic Party as an institution is that the Democratic Party barely is an institution. Despite what overheated posters will assert, the Democratic National Committee is largely a feckless agglomeration of overpaid mediocrities, not a cabal charged by capital to crush the red hydra at all hazards. The Democratic Party’s monopoly over one of our superannuated republic’s two viable ballot lines is its greatest strength, and one that at this point has almost nothing to do with the organizational structure of the party itself. Happily, many DSA chapters have realized this, and are practicing a form of benign electoral entryism. Nothing soothes bruised feelings like success, and the successes in New York and elsewhere have done much to convince skeptical DSAers that Paris is well worth a Mass, or rather, that Gracie Mansion is well worth some cringe. And the more sensible Democrats have realized that far from sabotaging the party, this influx of highly motivated reformers might be just the kind of bracing tonic that the ailing old donkey needed.

One thing that could make this modus vivendi more permanent would be a strengthening and formalization of the Democratic Party’s coalitional nature. It’s a fairly well established concept in American politics that the Democratic Party is less like a party and more like a parliamentary coalition of five or six different pseudoparties. Within the shell of the Democrats, position and influence are contested between the Moderate Party, the Liberal Party, the Labor Party, the Black People’s Dignity Party, The Climate Party, and (only recently) the Socialist Party. In theory, the congressional caucuses of the Democratic Party’s congressional delegation are supposed to give these different factions a means of working out their differences in a parliamentary way. In practice, when everybody is a Progressive, nobody is.

It would be healthier for the Democrats to formalize these different factions into more functional caucuses with clearer ideological lines (something moderates tend to hate, as their ideology is deeply unpopular with their own base). This would give Democrats something tangible to offer the socialist left—"vote for us and we’ll provide seats to your caucus on the following committees." Many socialists, rightly or wrongly, tend to assume that the Democratic Party is always waiting for a chance to stab them in the back. This would be a measurable, tangible exercise in brokerage that could demonstrate to the socialist left whether the Democrats are bargaining in good faith or not.

Foreign Policy

On matters of foreign policy, disagreements and differences between socialists and liberals can turn downright venomous. With some honorable exceptions, it took awhile for the institutional mainstream of American liberalism to catch up to the socialist left in recognizing that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. The grievances stretch back much farther than October 7th or even the Iraq War. During the Cold War, far too many liberals were willing to make excuses for anticommunist dictators in the name of parrying the influence of the Soviets. Mobutu might be a thief and a monster, Pinochet might hurl journalists and labor leaders from helicopters, the Shah’s SAVAK might be a Gestapo on the Gulf, but at least they weren’t in hock to Moscow.

My own tradition is hardly innocent. More than a few American reds fumbled to excuse real and terrible excesses of Marxist-Leninist regimes during the Cold War, convinced (or pretending to be convinced) by the need to present a united front against American empire and NATO. Overheated posters today can be found explaining that nationalism isn’t so bad when General Secretary Xi does it, as if defending what is admirable in the People’s Republic means we care nothing for the real fears and sufferings of people in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, or Taiwan. At its worst, a reflexive anti-Americanism without thought or consideration has even led some leftists who should know better to forsake our Ukrainian comrades and play rhetorical anti-anti-anti games about the Russian invasion. This last is particularly galling to those of us who can see the Russian fascist state for what it is, a religious-nationalist expansionary empire that imprisons Marxists and uses its young men as cannon fodder, overseen by a shameless traitor who forsook the Communist cause in favor of squatting like a cosplaying Romanov vulture in the ruins of October.

Depressingly, these historical episodes loom large in the liberal-socialist discourse not as experiences to learn from, but as ammunition to fire at the opposing side. Mutual polarization and mutual suspicion are the result, with neither of our traditions responding in terribly constructive ways. Socialists are accused of ‘campism’ for offering even measured criticisms of Atlantic Council or Council on Foreign Relations boilerplate. Liberals can get so frustrated with being called ‘baby killer’ that they start making pride flags with the Lockheed Martin logo. Both of us, God have mercy on our souls, have resorted to the last refuge of scoundrels: posting screenshots from Paradox Interactive grand strategy games.

How to navigate out of this impasse? One way would be to rediscover the First International's tradition of supporting self-determination of peoples while still advocating for socialist (or at least, progressive) transformations within free nations. The man who was the de facto Marshal of the International, Giuseppe Garibaldi, carried the banner of liberation from tyranny across the Atlantic twice. Marx and Engels were uncompromising supporters of the Union in the United States Civil War. The Paris Commune was first and foremost a revolutionary insurrection against the dictatorial and corrupt imperial regime of Napoleon III, yes, but it was also an episode of armed self defense against the Prussian army advancing on the walls of the city. To support the struggle of anti-imperialism everywhere, not exclusively against the doddering hegemony of the United States, is a cause to which socialists can lend their ideological and political firepower.

The reverse holds as well. Liberals of good conscience should reciprocate socialist support for Ukraine’s efforts against Russia with uncompromising and firm support for the Palestinian liberation struggle and, yes, support for the Cuban Republic against the naked warmongering that has emanated from Washington for decades. Rather than paeans to a deceased ‘rules-based world order’ (never quite all it was cracked up to be), liberals and socialists should find opportunities to organize around shared principles applied without fear or favor: anti-imperialism, self-determination, and human rights.

Meritocracy and ‘Seriousness’

There is a tension at work between socialist and liberal ideas of expertise and technical policymaking. Again, some of this is a matter of mutual suspicion and mutual misperception rather than a reflection of reality: socialists think liberals are bloodless tinkerers rearranging the deck chairs on capital’s Titanic, liberals think socialists are immature sloganeers more interested in chasing the dragon of internet clout than actually making policy to benefit the working class. But there are also real differences of mindset and approach that deserve investigation and remedy.

Many twenty-first century socialists in the United States have come to the conclusion that the ‘experts’, so-called, are at best incompetent and at worst malicious. And for good reason. For the last quarter century, our best experts have delivered to Americans massive deindustrialization, the War in Iraq, the global financial crisis, a Wall Street bailout for that crisis, and other brilliant strokes of statecraft, all adjudicated as sensible and appropriate by the New York Times and the Council on Foreign Relations with all the irenic confidence of a Jesuit in his robes. This attitude has only been reinforced during the Trump era, where the apparatus of state really is controlled by obvious morons and the most credentialed and expert opposition has been, let us say, unevenly effective in their efforts. American socialists have not arrived at their distaste for the Smartest Guys In The Room out of immature iconoclasm.

On the other hand, liberals are quick to point out that righteous anger is not a substitute for making sausage (Samantha Hancox-Li has helpfully referred to the danger in letting one’s emotions ‘drag one’s reason around’). Gentrification, to pick one example, may indeed be a frustrating injustice; that doesn’t mean that banning upzoning and making excuses for antisocial behavior are helpful approaches to the problem. To seize the apparatus of state and to turn it to useful ends are two different tasks—both matters of politics, yes, but the latter genuinely demands technical expertise in a variety of different fields. A community plagued by a cancer corridor is right and just to demand the closure of an oil refinery, and to organize to make that a reality; how to replace it with a resilient, grid-compatible molten-salt thermal solar plant is a question that benefits from the input of engineers.

Data centers are a major flashpoint for this particular tension, in which socialists often have the right of the politics (data centers are a massive waste of industrial capacity in service of plagiarism and revenge porn and their construction should be sharply curtailed), whereas liberals often raise qualifications over the technical details (some of the furor over water use by data centers can be overblown). The former are accused by the latter of patent slopulism for holding up cloudy jars of water at public hearings; the latter are accused by the former of being pointy-headed nitpickers uninterested in the genuine concerns of the working class. What to do?What could help to soothe this tension is reenergizing of the concept of public enterprise. A favorite of Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, the idea of a government that is proactive and creative rather than reactive (the French concept of the ‘politique volontariste’ is similar). Ideological space for an experimental verve in the public sphere (and funding for those experiments) can help channel expertise into the public good rather than allowing it to be continually captured by private interests or bogging down into the endless morass of nonprofitdom. Again, my home state’s example can be instructive: the Wisconsin Idea and tangible manifestations of it like the Ag Extension are concrete, historical instances of expert effort undertaken at the public expense for the public good. Zohran Mamdani is a poster child here; will his city-run grocery stores be a roaring success or a wet squib? It’s too soon to tell, but that he is trying something is obvious. Far better to be caught trying.

Conclusion

On July 1st, I attended an ICE Out Milwaukee demonstration at Kościuszko Park, not far from where I live, in the shadow of the statue of a man who devoted his life to liberty and the dignity of peoples. It was a sweltering day, almost 100 degrees. A few hundred people turned out, one of those small but vital manifestations of local democratic spirit that quietly keeps a pulse in what remains of our body politic. As I looked around, I was reminded why there is ample reason to have hope for a liberal-left popular front, despite the real and serious differences between our traditions. Boomers in church t-shirts with No Kings signs stood side by side with Zillennials in FRSO gear and keffiyehs. Pamphlets and help cards were circulated in English, Spanish, Hmong, Burmese, and French. Handmade signs with flags stood above the crowd; Mexican flags, American flags, red flags, Guatemalan flags, Palestinian flags. These people did not all agree with everything their neighbors thought; indeed, they may well have thought many of their fellow attendees’ opinions to be unconstructive, or tepid, or extreme, or centrist. And let it be said; to have such differences of perspective is altogether healthy and appropriate.

But in that moment, those differences were not ‘set aside’ or ‘abandoned’ for the sake of some bloodless ‘comity’. Rather, they were subsumed into a more immediate cause, the cause of defending our neighbors, our community, from the vicious predation of Stephen Miller’s lunatic Gestapo. A young man explained, emotionally, how ICE had smashed the windows of his car and dragged his fiancée away to be incarcerated. What united us was our outrage and anger at this injustice, this violation. At their best, the socialist and liberal traditions are ideologies with a sincere desire for the perfection of humanity, a defiant answer to the old traditionalist howl of obscurantism and hierarchy that reactionaries have been preaching since before Cato. Socialists and liberals should never abandon what is righteous in our traditions, nor should we shy away from sincere and spirited (even deeply contentious) argument and political competition. But so too we should not be held hostage to our ideologies merely for the sake of vanity. Let us disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Featured Image is No Kings Protest Downtown Miami, by Phillip Pessar