On the Sidelines: DSA’s Abstentionism on Biden vs. Trump
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
Both the Stansbury Forum and Organizing Upgrade felt it important to maximize the exposure of this piece and are co-publishing.
The results are in: Trump was defeated and Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president on January 20, 2021. This victory is the product of a broad, popular united front. Popular, because there was an alliance of cross-class forces that opposed Trump. United, in that these forces agreed on a shared objective – electing Biden and Harris – to remove him from office. In such a broad front, the reasons for uniting to throw out Trump were varied. Many were offended and outraged by his anti-democratic rhetoric and conduct. He repulsed millions with his overt racist, jingoist and sexist behavior, and his cultivation and encouragement of white supremacists.
Activists in the labor movement saw his attacks as weakening our already feeble bargaining power and ability to fight for our members. Regulations protecting everything from air quality and wilderness areas to labor and occupational health standards were gutted. The left clearly understood that four more years of Trump and his deepening authoritarianism would make it nearly impossible to realize progressive reforms like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal and the much needed labor law reforms proposed in the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.
The heroes of this election victory are the thousands of grassroots political activists who busted their butts to defeat Trump by working for Biden, particularly in the key battleground states. Thousands of our comrades in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other socialists worked side-by-side with leaders and activists in black and brown organizations, women’s organizations, and labor unions like UNITE-HERE and SEIU. Because of our collective participation in this struggle to elect Biden and Harris we have forged new or deeper ties with organizations and individuals open to discussion and struggle over the way forward in the future Biden administration.
Few, if any, of the comrades we campaigned with had illusions about the reality of who Biden actually is or what he represents. They can recite chapter and verse his personal flaws and long history of complicity with the neo-liberal project. Nevertheless, there was a broad understanding that Trump had to go — and that our efforts would be key to an electoral victory.
BERNIE OR BUST
But where was DSA — the largest socialist organization in the U.S. — during this Presidential election? While many members individually were leaders in the work to elect Biden — as an organization, we sat on the sidelines. This was the result of a “Bernie or Bust” position requiring DSA to abstain from supporting Biden pushed through by a narrow majority of delegates at DSA’s 2019 convention.
That puts DSA in the embarrassing position of now advancing a program and promoting actions for the first 100 days of the Biden administration, while as an organization it played no formal role in achieving that opportunity. Are we to understand that it would have been an equally useful result to be heading into the first 100 days of a Trump administration? Of course not! As long time trade unionists, we view this refusal to come off the sidelines as analogous to a faction within the union deciding that they don’t like the leaders of a strike or their politics. The faction doesn’t participate in picketing, or the strike kitchen, or the mass demonstrations. Then, these “do nothings” who essentially sat out the strike, come to the union hall insisting on a major role in determining the terms of the strike settlement.
A SOCIALIST’S PLACE IS IN THE STRUGGLE
DSA’s formal abstention from the Biden campaign reflects a larger ideological issue that plagues the organization: a flawed understanding of the “special role of socialists.” The constant refrain from many members is, “We are socialists and we have a special role!” Yes, socialists do have a special role to play in leading popular movements by being the most active and dedicated fighters in the struggle. That dedication and commitment — not pontificating about the problems with the “misleaders/sheepherders” or the neo-liberal from Delaware — is what opens up the opportunity to win the “uninitiated” to our socialist ideas and class analysis.
If this simple concept needs political window dressing from the socialist liturgy, here is a quote from Karl Marx from 1875 in a letter to Wilhelm Bracke: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”
Bernie Sanders’s entrance onto the national election stage as a Democratic Socialist in the 2016 Democratic primaries was one of the principal causes of DSA’s rapid growth. Instead of choosing a third party route, Sanders wisely jumped into the admittedly murky swamp of Democratic Party politics. And by doing so, his socialist message and working class perspective blossomed and flourished in the mainstream in ways that were hitherto unimaginable.
Again in 2020, Sanders ran as a Democrat in a much more complicated candidate field. Bernie’s campaign forced the other candidates to contend with his programmatic initiatives addressing a rigged economy and our broken democracy. After the Democratic Party consolidated its support behind Biden and Bernie withdrew, he clearly understood what was at stake. Facing “the most dangerous president in US history,” he actively campaigned to get his base to support Biden and Harris.
DSA’s experience in the 2020 election can be a teachable moment. It’s time to acknowledge that “Bernie or Bust” was a major tactical and strategic error. Now, with critical reflection, it can lead to a more mature approach to our electoral politics. That maturation should begin with a disavowal of the position taken by many DSA chapters in local races that they can only support self-proclaimed socialist candidates. This too has again led to the isolation of socialists from the actual struggle over the needs and interests of our class. Many candidates stand with us on the issues. They stand for positions that will benefit the lot of working people and people of color. Their successful election would result in policies benefiting the lives of the working class. Again, this abstention is contradictory to the needs and interests of the people we purport to fight for. It just isolates us from the potential to make gains, win reforms and win respect for our analysis and ideas.
Let’s learn from 2020. Now it’s time to fight for two Senate seats in Georgia to create the most favorable playing field on which to challenge — and push — the neo-liberal President-elect Joe Biden.
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Peter Olney is on the Steering Committee of DSA’s Labor Commission and a lifelong union organizer. In 2020, he volunteered with Seed the Vote (STV) to work on the Biden campaign in Maricopa County Arizona. Rand Wilson, also a lifelong union organizer, has been a member of DSA since 1986. After Sanders declared for the Democratic nomination in 2015, Wilson registered as a Democrat for the first time. He was elected a delegate to the 2016 DNC convention and was a member of the DNC Credentials Committee for the 2020 convention.
In my view as an outsider most articles published in the Forum are a rehash of what workers and the civil society already know i.e. corporate power, urban despair, urban and rural divide, lack of human rights. Workers know about being exploited. Workers know their reps are sleeping with management. Latinos, African Americans, women, gays, the homeless have not buried their subjugation in a mental coffin. On the contrary they are expecting a change. Also in my view the reason people are not posting comments in the Forum is because it is not addressing this issue which is fundamental to their present conditions and lives.
Peter’s mantra “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. (Karl Mark, The German Ideology, pg# 571) is not included in the 79 articles he published in the Forum.
I’m aware the Forum is not an organ of any left leaning mass movement or political party but, in my opinion, workers, Latinos, African Americans, women and so on could benefit if the Forum promotes some articles that suggest a structural change in this country. I’m sure this approach would be in Jeff’s way of thinking.
Right here in Boston, DSA has been mobilizing members to elect socialists down ballot in the Sept 1st primary. DSA has been doing great work around tenant organizing, desperately needed given that our state let the eviction moratorium expire on 10/17. There have been folks working hard to support the teachers’ demands around safe school conditions, folks working on defund to get money from policing to communities and folks working in an environmental justice campaign to stop the eversource substation in Eastie.
This is crucial work we can’t skip out on, it’s all been happening at the same time as the presidential, and I’ll be the first to admit we don’t do enough and there is room for improvement.
But the idea that somehow we are “on the sidelines” only makes sense if you take a narrow view of what we should be doing focused on the Presidential + Senate, and I’d argue that’s why the left is in such a weak position. It just took a few phone calls for Obama to crush Bernie’s campaign. We need stronger working class institutions (labor unions, tenants unions, etc.) if we’re going to seriously contest and win power.
[The vote at the convention was much more about people wanting to be clear that this basebuilding work shouldn’t be delayed by having us devote resources to Biden’s campaign, rather than some sort of purity position like “both Trump and Biden are equally bad”. We could have an argument about the optics of that resolution or other ways of accomplishing the same goal, but you know just as well as I do how democratic organizations work, you end up with something messy in public almost always!]
Nevertheless, I will always read a Rand Wilson & Peter Olney article. I’ve enjoyed organizing in person with you pre-covid, Rand, and look forward to it again soon!
Many, if not most, of those who’ve become DSA members in the last 4-5 years have been deeply conditioned to “pep-squad” all-or-nothing politics. As a result, they will inevitably move to form a “team” with specific rules of membership. “Bernie or Bust” is an example of how that works, and is something all organizations working to change the system need to be aware of and prepared to address.
So is the idea that anyone who is a “real socialist” never stoop to running as a Democrat but must sign on with a third party that dooms their efforts to be elected, in the name of “purity of principle”. It’s destroyed just about every past effort to make the same kinds of changes we’re fighting for now, and it will do the same for ours unless we address it.
It would be good for Stansbury Forum to post something from the other side of this debate.–Hardy Green
Rand, you raise an important question. As a DSA member who has admittedly not been very involved, it doesn’t bother me that the organization chose not to actively campaign for Biden. Here’s why.
(1) Implicit in your position is that a broad GOTV effort by DSA would have made an appreciable difference in the outcome. I’m not sure that it would have impacted anything. (Indeed, I’m not sure they even have the ability structurally to coordinate a centralized national campaign like that.) There is overlap between progressive organizations and members had other opportunities to volunteer for Biden if they chose to.
(2) While certainly a Biden victory was important, we can’t just be focused on the President in our politics. We have to have more attention paid to congressional and down-ballot races, if we have a hope of meaningful change in this country. The Democrats didn’t perform very well down-ballot, while socialists expanded their numbers.
(3) As a dues-paying member of a small organization, I would be concerned that putting a lot of resources into a GOTV effort for Biden would have taken resources away from other important longer-term capacity-building priorities. The DSA has a responsibility to use those resources wisely. With so much money pouring into the presidential race, I am glad that DSA leaders didn’t decide to blow it on efforts where the relative impact of those efforts might not have amounted to much.
(4) Also you seem to suggest in your article that the DSA would have potentially benefited in terms of patronage points if they had supported Biden. So far it looks like Biden isn’t paying back progressives much. How would it look for the organization to invest heavily in the Biden GOTV effort, only to have Democrats shut us out once they get in to office?
These are just my thoughts. I’m not very informed about the DSA’s decisions so don’t know their reasoning. I don’t disagree that supporting Biden over Trump was important, but just think resources also need to be put into building socialist infrastructure and focusing on local candidates.