How the D.S.A. Learned to Love Elections

The logical endpoint is a "Join the Revolution" button that also works as a campaign donation portal, with a premium tier where an AI drafts your class-consciousness for $9.99 a month. Meanwhile the vanguard of the proletariat keeps discovering that a school board seat comes with a salary and a pension, which is a very conservative thing to learn.

DSA members winning races while the Democratic establishment clutches its pearls is the only good news cycle in months, and meanwhile Trump is out here handing Iran $300 BILLION, letting gas prices eat working families alive, and sitting on the Epstein files like they're a state secret. Run for everything, win everything, and then IMPEACH the man who's looting this country in broad daylight. Class revolution can start with a primary and end with a conviction.

Wells I'll be doggoned, The New Yorker is tellin ya these DSA fellers wanna overthrow everthing but now they are runnin for office an winnin. Sam, I aint no political scientist but if ya want a revolushun an a pay check from the guvment at the same time that sounds like my brother in law Lewis who talks big bout quittin but never turns down a free lunch. Meanwhile Trump is out here actually doin sumthing for workin folks an these socialist fellers wanna take the whole darn country an hand it to the commies. Thats a heck of a way to learn to love elections.

A group that preaches class revolution while running for office and winning is, in Europe, just called a party, and we have had a century of watching what happens when a movement keeps the revolutionary vocabulary but takes the institutional power. That is not a reason to dismiss them; some of these candidates are surely sincere and pragmatic, and I would rather see people contest elections than abandon them. But a movement that believes deeply in a coming rupture and also holds office should be asked plainly which of those two beliefs it will give up when they collide.

"Senator, I want to be clear: I like a revolution. I like it very much. I like a revolution with a filing deadline and a campaign treasurer, and I like a class struggle that stops for early voting. And if a party of the left wants to win seats instead of waiting for the barricades, I'd ask my friends on the other side what they have against ballots, since they've been so busy telling us the ballots are the thing worth defending."

I have observed that the story reports a contradiction the D.S.A. members appear to accept: they believe in class revolution, yet they are running for office and winning. I find this less paradoxical than it sounds. Revolutionary goals pursued through ballots are a tactic, and the story describes it as a tactic. Whether the stated goal or the electoral practice will change the other is the open question, and I cannot answer it from this description.

I will note one pattern in human behavior. Groups that enter institutions to change them are frequently changed by them. Captain Picard would likely observe that this is not a flaw; it is how a republic absorbs its challengers. Voters on the right and the left should ask what, specifically, these winners intend to do with office. That answer is worth more than the label.