The endorsement of Cynthia Nixon is simply the latest is a story of the left being drawn into the trap of the Democratic Party
When the Socialist Party of America finally ended after over 70 years it did so along two lines. The first was over the word socialist, which I’m not gonna go into because the only group that backed dropping the word socialist was so irrelevant it doesn’t even exist anymore. The other major issue was over the party line towards the Democratic Party. The left wing of the party, now the Socialist Party USA, backed strict independence from the Democratic Party. However the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee under Michael Harrington created the “inside outside strategy”. The strategy committed them to both working outside the Democratic Party to build worker power, while also working to reform the Democratic Party. However this strategy tied themselves to the fortune to the left wing of the Democratic Party, which coming off the total failure of the McGovern campaign, was about to enter 40 years of political marginalization. However the 2016 election changed everything, the rejection of the center in the success of the Sanders campaign and the failure of the Clinton campaign jump started the now Democratic Socialists of America. They bet hard on Sanders and won, and have leveraged that into further success at the ballot box.
However the shadow of Harrington looms large over the DSA. At the last, supposedly most left wing national convention, 5 different proposals distancing themselves from the Democratic Party, including one that simply stated that was their eventual goal, were voted down. The inside outside strategy, while having brought them their greatest successes is a trap. There are no shortcuts in organizing, and by taking the short cut of working within the structure of the Democratic they are dooming their project.
Many defenders of the inside outside strategy point to the success of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labor Party as a reason that the Democratic Party can be reformed, but this a misunderstanding of how the Labor and Democratic Party works. The Labor Party is a membership organization where its members have a say over how the party works. Although the parliamentary group can determine who gets to enter the leadership race, from there it is a vote among the members. The Democratic Party has no members; it’s an association of politicians and PACs with leadership belonging to appointed members. The people who take these appointed seats are prominent members of the Democratic Party (these are the super delegates who voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in 2016) and lobbyists who’s interests are inherently opposed to the left. That is how in the leadership contest directly after the 2016, the left wing candidate who clearly had the support of the majority of Democratic voters still lost. Even assuming the left wing could take control, those unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists would simply sit out the campaign or actively support the Republicans, which is exactly what happened in 1972 which destroyed the left wing of the Democratic Party.
So if reforming the Democrats is an impossible task, what would the effect be of cooperating with the Democrats in the short term? Well to start the fact that DSA members can win without the Democrat label shows the DSA has not built up the kind of support and infrastructure a viable third party would need. This leads to the question, how would those currently elected as Democrats respond to any attempt to split from the Democrats? Well it would be a threat to their career. Any eventual split would present great risks to those holding elected positions or seeking to hold elected positions. Their status as elected officials gives them influence the average rank and file does not, and their link with the Democrats gives them a material incentive to work against any attempt to split from the Democrats. They undeniably played a role in the defeat of the proposals to split from the Democratic Party at the last convention.
Then comes 2018, and the DSA endorses Cynthia Nixon in the New York governor election. Cynthia Nixon is, aside from a few proposals like universal health care, a standard Democrat and capitalist. This is the natural conclusion of cooperation with the Democrats, dropping even the pretense of doing so to build an anti-capitalist movement. This move is mutually beneficial to both the DSA who gets attention and Cynthia Nixon who solidifies her progressive credentials, but it also bring the DSA ever further within the orbit of the Democratic Party. This is not an abnormality, but only the latest in a trend of the DSA towards a Working Families style future, only serving as the sheepdog for the capitalist Democratic Party. There are those in the DSA who fight this future, and I call them my comrades, but every passing day the DSA builds more ties to the Democratic Party making their job ever harder. If an anti-capitalist movement is going to succeed, it is going to do so on its own basis, not piggybacking off a capitalist party.
