Democracy Beyond the Debate Floor
DSA’s 2019 convention was chaotic and often divisive. All major proposals inspired heated emotional debates, and every day featured equally contentious procedural motions. Now that we’ve all gone home, I’d like to spotlight the major convention victories around housing justice.
The final resolution passed by the convention was a package of three housing justice proposals (R40, R57, R64) but most of our work happened off the debate floor in panels, workshops, and informal meetings of local leaders. The broad consensus we developed over the course of the weekend should be a model for other issue-based campaigns as they struggle to move past DSA’s factionalism and internal strife.
While I am a member of MDC DSA and an organizer with Stomp Out Slumlords, and reached out to confirm details of events I wasn’t present for, I don’t speak for any other delegation or campaign. Since I would like to stress that the success around housing was a result of cross-faction collaboration, I’ve also noted local and caucus affiliations where I can. Please feel free to reach out via twitter (@allisongeroi) or email (allisongeroi@gmail.com) if you spot any inaccuracies or misconceptions.
Friday: Initial Discussions
Towards the end of the first day, team housing hit a snag: debate over convention rules had run long, so the body had approved a motion to extend debate two hours (until 7:00PM). This effectively cancelled the housing panel and endangered the following informal discussion we had scheduled for that night.
Ray V. (Metro DC, unaffiliated) and I (Metro DC, unaffiliated) found other housing leaders on the floor and came up with a plan: we would move to reconsider the schedule change, arguing that our panel and breakout was a vital opportunity for intra-local collaboration. We drafted a proposed motion, and quickly started to whip votes. CPN agreed to send out a text via their voting line to support the motion, and Dan Q. (Asheville, LSC) said they would request the same from LSC’s floor team. Other housing leaders agreed to send messages to their local delegates. We were sure we had the votes, but in the end we didn’t need to make the motion: another delegate moved to cancel Saturday’s morning session and use the time for voting, returning Friday night’s post-debate schedule to its original form. The motion passed. Nonetheless, Friday’s brief scheduling panic confirmed that housing leaders across locals and formations were on the same side. We wanted to get our work done efficiently and without unnecessary conflict on the floor.
At the housing panel, four locals (Metro DC, New York City, Des Moines, and Chicago) gave a short presentation on their housing work. You can see my livetweet of that discussion here. After presentations, the floor opened to Q&A from panel attendees. Discussion included both strategic questions (e.g. building and working with coalitions) and policy-level ideas (e.g. whether we should advocate for community land trusts). While we ran out of time for the planned small group discussions and reportbacks, we continued those discussions informally upstairs and at dinner.
Friday’s discussions were about each local’s current housing justice campaigns, not any of the resolutions up for a vote. Over the course of the night, a few things became clear. First, tenant organizing looks similar across very different cities. The tenants we support primarily want better conditions, an end to evictions, and an end to rent hikes. Second, while we are currently waging hyper-local battles against landlords, we need to collaborate and coordinate the fight against major national landlords.
Saturday: Democracy Off the Debate Floor
On Saturday afternoon, we optimistically believed all three housing proposals would reach the floor by the end of the day. To prepare for the vote, housing leaders from Metro DC, LA, Chicago, NYC, East Bay, Boston, Flagstaff, and other chapters met over lunch to hash out our different perspectives on R57, R40, and R64. Thanks to the three or four hours we spent discussing our ongoing work the previous night, we were able to dive into political discussion without having to spend much time explaining our local contexts.
Basically every major faction (LSC, CPN, B&R, Build, Emerge, plus unaffiliated members) was represented and conflicts in vision were clearly laid out. A comrade from Chicago was concerned that R57 may confine DSA to a single approach and limit our energy to experiment with other tactics. A comrade from Boston was opposed to implementing a top-down nationwide campaign. I agreed, citing the failings of the M4A campaign-in-a-box. Peter G. (MDC, CPN) pointed out that both R57 and R40 created a national body, and we needed to decide if they were duplicative or in conflict.
Concerns were addressed well, if not fully resolved. Most leaders at the table wanted to prioritize the passage of R57, as it came before R40 on the agenda, even though some of us had concerns about hiring staff. One of the authors of R40 suggested that if R57 failed on the floor because of the staff hire, we could advocate for R40 as a budget alternative backed by all housing leaders. Arielle S. (LA, CPN), author of R57, accepted that hiring a staff member could be a recommendation, not a mandate, to the NPC. We decided only a single national body should be created if both R57 and R40 passed. I was thrilled to hear almost everyone, regardless of faction, agree that a national housing group would function primarily as a space to share resources and develop a strategy for national targets, rather than a campaign-in-a-box that would be exported to locals.
Most importantly, we planned how to create the national housing commission at that lunch meeting, rather than waiting until after R57 or R40 came up for a vote. Four leaders in attendance, from locals spread across the country, were chosen to set up a conference call with everyone who had signed up at Friday’s panel. These leaders will also schedule an election in the coming weeks. Debates about what the commission should do (offer local reports versus strategize versus something else) started at the lunch table, and will continue as we implement the resolution.
Sunday: The Final Vote
Surprising no one, the convention quickly went off schedule on Sunday. When it became clear that we would not reach the housing section of the agenda by the end of the day, Peter G. (MDC, CPN) decided to make a motion to pass all three resolutions (R57, R40, R64) as a single package after consulting Arielle S. (LA, CPN), Ray V. (MDC, unaffiliated), and a Signal chat of local housing leaders. The motion was similar to one on Saturday that packaged and passed three anti-imperial resolutions (R50, R35, R62). It passed, Arielle S. spoke to motivate all three resolutions, and the package passed near-unanimously.
The vote was essentially a formality. After Saturday’s lunch meeting, housing leaders were prepared to form a national body that could support local work and share resources, regardless of whether we were officially chartered by the convention. While it may have seemed anticlimactic to most delegates, this was a huge victory: as our national conventions continue to grow and become busier, local leaders must find a way to build consensus before proposals reach the floor.
This consensus was partially built by local experimentation, which refines ideas before we commit to them as a national body. Many of the chapters in major cities (Metro DC, LA, New York City, Baltimore) and smaller areas (Des Moines, Tacoma) have spent the last two years fine-tuning housing campaigns and were able to evaluate proposals based on whether they will make our work easier or harder.
Consensus would never have been reached without in-person discussion and compromise. None of the three resolutions had gotten enough support to be placed on the consent agenda, and local leaders had still not come to an agreement on which resolution to support before arriving in Atlanta (in Metro DC in particular, there were significant tensions between core SOS organizers and CPN members). Connecting faces to our email chains, and building trust by talking through and learning about each other’s local work, was what made it easy to package and pass every resolution in just a few minutes at the end of an exhausting day. While many delegates at the convention would have preferred to extend debate time to work through resolutions, we proved that debate does not need to be the primary mode of discussion at the convention.
