The DSA, Harpers, and a Shame

I subscribe to Harper's Magazine. I’ve read it for years. The most recent issue, however, contained a letter that I found particularly fascinating, and disturbing. It was titled “Left Behind” and was from Maurice Isserman, who identified himself as a professor of history, at Hamilton College.

Professor Isserman was responding to a piece in Harper’s on the failure of the American left to make a real impression on the last election. In particular, Isserman was interested in the failure of the Democratic Socialists of America organization to be anything more than a sideshow in the battle against Trump. He has an excellent perspective on the problem given that he was a founder of the DSA, though he has since left it because of a variety of issues and concerns.

In his letter, though, he notes that the DSA does not support Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom are arguably the most legitimate and certainly the most energetic leaders of the American Left at the moment. In fact, he says in the letter, certain members of the DSA have branded Sanders and AOC as “traitors” for their support of Biden and then Harris. In other words, for not being pure enough in their radicalism. How dare they compromise with reality?

I was startled and disappointed to learn that the DSA had said any such thing. I’m not a member of the organization, but I knew about it in my younger days and vaguely approved of it. Not that I’m a socialist, particularly, but I’m always at least a little bit supportive of any organization that offers an alternative to the fundamentalist Ayn Randism that’s usually foisted on American culture.

But to find that they had fallen so far, so fast, was disappointing. You expect, say, the Green Party of Jill Stein to engage in such antics, but not the DSA. Yet, there they are, being so damn pure and holy and self-righteous that they can’t bother to support the Democrats in general and AOC/Sanders in particular. 

And one does have to wonder how much that kind of attitude on the Left, whether at the DSA or anywhere else, crippled the Biden and then Harris campaigns, and whether it didn’t assist Trump back into the White House. Or, if it didn’t significantly impact the benighted election of 2024, how much it is holding back the Democrats, and Progressives, everywhere.

Simply put, it seems that (once again) the reformers need themselves to be reformed. Until they have learned the art of the possible, the worth of compromise, and the importance of limited victory today so that greater victories may be won tomorrow, they will be useless.

Or, worse, they will give aid and comfort to the enemy. And thus must be considered, in their indirect way, among our enemies themselves. Little Trumps, in other words, or MAGAs in mufti, lacking only the red hats, and the ridiculous yellow flags with snakes.