One of the things I've been highly critical of as a politically homeless Leftist is that I've watch the majority of the political movement and associated groups become radicalized by accelerationists who have slowly been taking over for the last decade.
This article by one of the founders of the DSA, Maurice Isserman, happened across my feed about this very type of radicalization, what it inevitably leads to, and why he left the DSA soon after 10/7 occurred.
You see, Isserman was a member of a group prior to the DSA known as SDS that fell apart for similar reasons that we see other political organizations and movements collapse; factional infighting and attempted coups.
In short, the SDS collapsed due to entryists.
In political vernacular "entryists" are persons belonging to another group, government, organization, or state that infiltrate another with the intent to subvert, damage, and/or takeover. Their origin is often said to be the 1930s in Trotskyist political strategies (it is also known as "The French Turn" in some circles) but the tactic itself predates the formalization of the term itself. As such, this is not a term a lot of people are familiar with, but are familiar with the tactics.
As Isserman puts it -
What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.
While not a traditional entryist group, I think back to the Tea Party Movement and how they took over the Republican Party during the Obama administration (technically they were an insurgent political faction that radicalized within the party rather than an outside faction that joined in order to capture it, but there are similarities in their methods).
I also think back to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and entryists took over before it could even be organized into something cohesive. I remember the infighting from different factions who wanted to push different messages in Philly, the confusion that happened due to said infighting, and the abandonment of the movement by people not members of said factions because they did not agree with the intended escalation of the messaging by factions/faction leaders and the disorganization that resulted from the politicking.
Ironically, Isserman talks about this type of phenomenon in regards to how the SDS collapsed.
All told, in that last frantic year of SDS’s existence, the factions in the organization (PL’s “worker-student alliance,” Weatherman, one or two others) amounted to no more than a few thousand members. The other 98,000 rank-and-filers (including me, and most of the small chapter to which I belonged) helplessly watched the unfolding disaster that left us politically homeless.
Isserman talks about how this pattern has repeated multiple times for Left Wing movements in the USA. I've personally seen this same pattern repeat ad nauseum with Leftist movements and political groups I have been a part of or aware of. As soon as something starts to get momentum then the entryists show up and try to take it over. This results in the collapse of the entire thing before any meaningful work can actually get done. The persons who took over and caused the collapse then return to shrieking about how this is proof that their radical beliefs are valid and the entire system/government/world/etc needs to be thrown out and that you can't trust "normies".
Isserman then makes this statement which is truly poignant -
When DSA was founded in 1982 it represented the merger of two groups, one based in the remnants of the labor/socialist left, the other drawn mostly from veterans of the New Left, both determined to learn from the political disasters of the 1960s.
The founders of the DSA were persons who watched the SDS collapse from factional infighting due to entryism. They were veterans who knew how bad factions were and put it into the bylaws.
From Isserman -
Tens of thousands of eager young recruits were energized by the 2016 presidential bid of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (although Sanders was not a member of DSA), and the election to Congress of DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in 2018, joined by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in 2020.
All well and good—except for the return of the entryists. Suddenly, in the eyes of revolutionary purists in a host of small competing sects, DSA was no longer to be sneered at as just a reformist swamp. “Why rob banks?” career criminal Willie Sutton was once allegedly asked by a reporter. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied. The exchange is apocryphal, but substitute warm bodies for cold cash, and it offers a concise explanation for DSA’s sudden attractiveness to sectarian strategists. Unknown numbers—hundreds, perhaps more—started joining in 2016, some of them former members of defunct Marxist-Leninist groups, others (in violation of DSA bylaws) still belonging to and carrying out the agendas of such groups. They proceeded to quarrel and compete among themselves, splitting and recombining under various banners like “Red Star,” “Marxist Unity Group,” and even the “Communist Caucus.” But they remained united in one overarching shared aim—to take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating “the left wing of the possible,” and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.
The founders of the DSA knew how dangerous factions and caucuses were. They knew how entryists worked because they all saw it happen in real time.
But, and I think this is key, the new members were young and distrusting of their elders because in their minds nothing has been done. As such, the bylaws, rules, SOPs, and procedures were and are just ignored because "they know better". If you have any experience in queer spaces as an elder queer it's not unlike younger queers dismissing anything their elders say or advise them about because "they know better", and then having the exact problem that the older individual was trying to help prevent.
As such, entryists and their ideologies were allowed to take over the DSA, all that it stood for, and change it into a monstrously antisemitic organization that demands purity and adherence to certain factions and their ideologies. All of their candidates have horrid foreign policy positions and the national organization (and local chapters) have all put out lip service messaging that barely hides the factional ideals that have subverted the organization from what it once was.
Isserman closes out his article with this -
So why am I quitting DSA? There are many reasons. But in the end, the most important comes down to the Sarah Silverman Rule #1 for Judging One’s Political Associates. An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist. It has, as Sarah says “lost me forever.”
Personally, I was once a DSA member. I still consider myself a demsoc and agree with the majority of the political beliefs. But I do not consider myself a DemSoc or DSA member anymore. They lost me years prior to 10/7 because I watched the factions take over and antisemitism become a norm in local and national meetings since 2018. I heard antisemitic conspiracy theories regularly from DSA members that were couched in Left Wing jargon constantly, things that I had heard constantly from both sides of the political spectrum with just different dog whistles attached (e.g. "Rothschilds" for the Left and "Soros" for the Right).
Inevitably the DSA will collapse from factional infighting, as do all groups that experience this type of takeover. Eventually the momentum of the Omnicause will wane and the factions will realize their political alliances were temporary. But until then we stuck watching it produce candidates who say things right out of the Nazi playbook, but in a Left Wing fashion.
(Please go read the entire article, it's very well written and goes in to more detail).
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