Events & Actions

Tuesday July 7 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 8 (6:45 PM – 9:00 PM) DSA SF General Meeting (zoom and in person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Thursday July 9 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Public Bank Project Meeting (zoom)

Thursday July 9 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Emergency Planning(1916 McAllister St)

Friday July 10 (9:30 AM – 10:30 AM) District 1 Coffee with Comrades (2 Clement St)

Saturday July 11 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) No Appetite for Apartheid: Consumer Pledge Canvass (Dolores Park)

Sunday July 12 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday July 13 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday July 13 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board Meeting – Existing Union Support (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 15 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) What Is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 16 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom)

Thursday July 16 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday July 18 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) HWG Food Service (Castro St & Market St)

Sunday July 19 (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM) Understanding Socialism with DSA SF (1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board – Flex Meeting (zoom)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Consumer canvass for No Appetite for Apartheid

Come out to the next consumer canvass for No Appetite for Apartheid; a boycott campaign to deshelve Israeli products from San Francisco stores which financially contribute to/perpetuate genocide and apartheid! We will be walking around Dolores Park on Saturday, July 11 from 11am – 1pm, to gather signatures from consumers who want to go apartheid-free!

Hope to see you there! RSVP here or in the QR code on the poster.

FREE PALESTINE 

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Course

Sign up here!

EWOC holds a regular training course to help you build your union from the ground up alongside workers in your industry. It doesn’t require an organizing background to understand the material, which covers topics including mapping and charting, building an organizing committee, uniting over common concerns, and how to take action. If you’re interested in becoming any level of organizer for EWOC, this course is mandatory.

This course will in person at the DSA office (1916 McAllister). We’ll watch the EWOC lecture together and then go through the discussion activities. If you can’t make all of the sessions, reach out to Caitlin Stanton (SF EWOC local lead coordinator) for accommodations.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: Developing Leadership
Tuesday, July 14 (7-8:30PM)

Week 2: The Organizing Conversation
Tuesday, July 21 (7-8:30PM)

Week 3: The Arc of the Campaign
Tuesday, July 28 (7-8:30PM)

Week 4: Inoculation and the Boss Campaign
Tuesday, August 4 (7-8:30PM)

Understanding socialism group reading & discussion

When: Wednesday, July 19th, 3:30-5PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

Join DSA SF’s Education Board for a group reading of excerpts from “The Long Transition Towards Socialism”. We’ll be examining what makes capitalism as a system function, its inherent contradictions, and how the transition to socialism can be achieved within those conditions.

No advance reading required! We’ll provide everything at the event

When: Wednesday, July 19th, 3:30-5PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

 Socialist Shop Talk

Come chat with comrades about socialism through the lens of current events! In this new series, we will read a short text together, then discuss and analyze it from a socialist point of view.

This is a low-key environment where comrades can develop their skills of applying socialist analysis to current events, while having an outlet to discuss and process everything that’s happening in the world together. This event is open to all, whether you’re socialism-curious, new to DSA, or a longtime member.

In this post-primary election session, we’ll discuss an article written by a DSA SF comrade discussing the role of electoral politics in progressing toward and winning socialism.

When: Wednesday, July 22nd, 7-9PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St
RSVP to come! 

Reportback: Social housing on the ballot in November

Last week, we submitted over 20,000 signatures to get the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act on the November 2026 ballot!
This measure will dedicate existing revenue from the city’s Prop I transfer tax — a tax passed in 2020 on ultra-luxury real estate deals over $10 million — to fund social and affordable housing along with eviction defense.
Join the fight, help us win in November: fairhousingsf.com/get-involved

Reportback: Solidarity rally

Last Friday, as many as 100 people rallied to show solidarity with immigrants in detention centers at Delaney Hall in New Jersey and Adelanto here in California who went on hunger strike to demand their freedom while protesting substandard living conditions, including lack of medical care and inedible food. GEO Group, the billion dollar corporation that runs both detention centers, also runs a so-called “re-entry facility” in the heart of the Tenderloin at the site of the Compton Cafeteria riots, the first documented uprising against police violence by the trans community in the U.S. DSA SF, alongside our partners at the Compton X Coalition and AROC Action, organized the rally to show support for hunger strikers’ demands while telling GEO Group that they aren’t welcome in our city.

Adam Rouhiainen is on the Red Madison Editorial Board.

Throughout Milwaukee, dozens of solar-powered cameras mounted on the side of the road record the license plate numbers, make and model, and unique features of every vehicle that passes by it. The data from these automated license plate readers (ALPRs) is streamed to and stored by a private company, Flock Safety, who puts it into a searchable database, with access given to law enforcement agencies around the country. In March 2025, Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala got busy, searching the database 179 times over the next two months for just two different vehicles.

Meanwhile, possibly by chance, Officer Ayala’s girlfriend at the time looked up her license plate number on haveibeenflocked.com; what she found was that “J. Aya” searched the Flock database for her license plate number over 100 times. The reason listed for these searches? “Investigation.”

According to the criminal complaint charging him with Attempted Misconduct in Public Office, Ayala made 124 license plate searches on his girlfriend’s vehicle, and another 55 searches on his ex’s. Both victims filed restraining orders; Ayala’s now ex-girlfriend wrote, “I was horrified, disgusted, embarrassed and terrified.” The second victim wrote, “When Ayala was using the Flock system repeatedly to stalk me via MPD resources, I feared for my safety.”

Milwaukee Police Department’s investigation into Officer Ayala began only after one of his victims searched for their own license plate on an activist website.

On May 7 of this year, The Milwaukee Police Department presented ALPR auditing guidelines. Each license plate search, and each officer’s searches, will be tested on a monthly basis for statistical outliers. This new auditing system, reducing the number of officers who have access to the Flock database down from 370 to 100, and the national news of Ayala’s misuse of Flock, was not enough to deter a second Milwaukee police officer from misusing the technology. Milwaukee Police Department Chief of Staff Heather Hough revealed this second instance of Flock misuse at the May 7 Fire and Police Commission meeting, saying, “There is an investigation pending, but I cannot disclose any other information at this time.”

MPD Chief of Staff Heather Hough discloses that a second Milwaukee officer is being investigated for ALPR misuse

Ayala ended up pleading guilty to a Class A misdemeanor, never having to deal with felony stalking charges. Menasha Police Officer Cristian Morales was not so lucky. On January 7 of this year, the Appleton Police Department arrested Officer Morales for stalking, a Class I felony. Their press release lacks any details on what Morales actually did, but a criminal complaint says Morales used the Flock network to search for his now ex-girlfriend’s vehicle 5 times in October 2025. He listed the reason for his searches as “welfare.” Morales’s ex-girlfriend wrote “I am concerned for my personal safety” in a petition for a restraining order.

These Milwaukee and Menasha/Appleton incidents of police misuse of ALPRs were ultimately disclosed to the public in some form by the police departments themselves. The Kenosha County Sheriff Department has been much more silent about their ALPR misuse incident. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner show Kenosha County sheriff’s deputy Frank McGrath made 16 Flock searches on a vehicle owned by another deputy. Why? From the Examiner’s analysis of the records they obtained, “McGrath was apparently stalking another Kenosha County deputy whom he was dating.” McGrath was offered a severance package to resign; he has not been charged with a crime.

Security issues involving government use of intelligence to spy on a love interest are not a new concept; the NSA even coined the term LOVINT since at least 2013 to describe such issues occurring in their agency. How has Wisconsin prepared for the age of fast and efficient image detection?

Wisconsin has no statewide oversight on local police’s use of ALPRs. By default, Flock stores all collected data for 30 days. The previously mentioned cases of police misconduct show that this is not nearly a small enough window of time to prevent bad actors in the government from infringing on people’s privacy. In contrast, New Hampshire must delete all ALPR data within 3 minutes of collection if there is no investigation hit.

Over 200 police forces across Wisconsin have contracts with Flock; some have auditing guidelines, as we saw in Milwaukee, and some have no publicly stated policy at all.

One of those 200 used to be the Dane County Sheriff. Some time in late 2022, the Dane County Sheriff began a pilot program of 26 Flock cameras. The County Board officially approved $80,000 in funding for Flock ALPRs in 2023. After a dozen MADSA members and other privacy advocates showed up to the April 20, 2026 Board meeting to speak against Flock, County Board voted to end their Flock contract by May 1.

Victory was short lived, because on June 4, the County Board held a vote to reinstate the $80,000 for a different ALPR network. MADSA members showed up again to speak against police surveillance networks. Is the Dane County Board of Supervisors aware of the aforementioned ALPR security issues we’ve seen, just in Wisconsin? I spoke at the June 4 County Board Meeting to make sure they were, reading off each of the previous four Wisconsin love interest spying cases. I also argued that any ALPR network, not just Flock, could be abused by individual officers.

Dane County Supervisors speaking against ALPRs included MADSA member Aria Trucios and MADSA-endorsed Heidi Wegleitner. On the capitalist incentives that private surveillance companies have when working with law enforcement, Supervisor Trucios argued, “The profit motive necessarily will push companies to seek as much profit out of that as possible, and the best way to seek that profit is by finding ways to aggregate that data, even if you anonymize it, share it with other partners, sell it off to other partners.”

Speaking about basic privacy and potential Fourth Amendment violations, Trucios continues: “It would be feasible that a federal agency would step in and say actually this is a matter of national security that we have a dragnet ability to track anybody within the U.S. at any time… I don’t believe that we should be privatizing our way around the Fourth Amendment. I don’t think our citizens and residents should be paying to create this dragnet automated tracking system.” On how this type of technology is still untested in the U.S. court system, they add, “Would we want to be the institution that’s on the hook?”

Dane County Supervisors Trucios and Wegleitner explain the issues with ALPR networks

Supervisor Wegleitner spoke about overpolicing communities of color. “I think the amount of surveillance we have all around us over the last 40 years also coincides with mass incarceration in this country and real harm inflicted on black and brown communities… Instead of law enforcement reacting to criminal behavior based on individualized suspicion, we have massive data networks and predictive data tracking and technology being funneled to law enforcement to try to intervene, to more closely monitor, to further overpolice and surveil communities that have always, consistently been harmed by law enforcement activities, that have disproportionate contact with the criminal legal system, that are disproportionally sitting in our jail right now, in our prisons. This automatic license plate reader system takes us further down that path.” Hinting at the security lapses we’ve seen with Flock, Wegleitner argues, “We don’t have the capacity of this Board and our committees to ensure this won’t be used for harm… I don’t see how a system like this could not be used for harm.”

At this June 4 meeting, the Board voted 26 to 7 to restore the $80,000 to the Sheriff for a new ALPR system “with enhanced privacy, security, transparency, and data control safeguards.”

Meanwhile, Flock cameras are still active throughout the Madison Area. Even though Dane County will be using a new ALPR provider, and Madison Police have never had a contract with Flock, Four Flock cameras are located on the Capitol square as contracted with the State, UW-Madison has several Flock cameras throughout campus strategically pointed at crowded roads, and Maple Bluff has about a dozen.

ALPRs have reached the attention of only one candidate in the Wisconsin Governor’s race. In her AI policy, Francesca Hong singles out Flock specifically, demanding an “open-source, independently audited, and not controlled by a private vendor with a financial interest in its continued use.” Add a narrow data retention window, and we might be getting somewhere. No other candidate for Governor has Flock, ALPRs, or police surveillance policies on their website. This is particularly telling for Milwaukee County Executive and gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, who has seemingly made no recent statements in regards to the current debate over Flock in Milwaukee.

Even if the Wisconsin state government fails to regulate the various police forces across the state, we have various tools for more direct action. The site haveibeenflocked.com was used by the Josue Ayala’s victim to start that investigation. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner uncovered the Kenosha County Sheriff Department’s lack of action regarding their deputy’s misuse of Flock. DSA chapters, privacy advocates, and abolitionist groups are speaking out against Flock, and Fitchburg, Monona, Verona, UW-Police, and Dane County have all ended or are in the process of ending their Flock contracts. Even though Flock has earned the majority of recent attention on ALPR misuse, any brand of ALPR network recording every vehicle passing by its cameras and storing it into a searchable database is poised for misuse and violates our basic privacy rights.

Greeting to our comrades in the United States. In the past, you have been members of the International League of Religious Socialists, the longest-lived socialist organization in Europe. For its centennial Congress, the ILRS met in Barcelona in April and also participated in the Global Progressive Mobilisation Conference that brought together 5,000 people from trade unions, social democratic and socialist parties, and movements fighting for justice and peace.

During the ILRS Congress I had the honor of being elected president, along with an 11-member executive committee. In my home country of Norway, I am the leader of Kristne Arbeidere (Christian Labour), an independent organization within the Norwegian Labour Movement.

The ILRS is an organization for reflection and action that brings together national organizations of religious people who channel their political commitment through socialist and social-democratic parties. The member organizations are for the most part Christians, but membership is not limited to one faith. As Europe has become multifaith, so has the ILRS. Our hope is to expand beyond eurocentrism.

We don’t believe in religious states, but we believe in practicing our faith and taking the values of our faith out to the people. Faith that does not influence our attitudes toward other humans, becomes a dead and dormant faith. 

Our member organizations want to build bridges among communities and parties committed to policies in favor of peace, social justice, the care of the planet, gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights. We live in an unsafe world, and much of what the labor movement has built is threatened by right-wing populism and right-wing extremism.

In its Constitution, the ILRS states that one of its primary aims is “to reduce the historical prejudices and to overcome the traditional prejudices between religious believers, religious communities and the socialist movement.” 

Religious socialists choose to believe in a future that is good for people. The labor movement has always been working with faith in the future, and we will continue to do so. I believe that goodness triumphs over evil, that solidarity triumphs over selfishness, fair distribution triumphs over injustice, love triumphs over hatred,  and dialogue and peace triumph over war.

We are happy to have reopened communication with the Religion and Socialism Working Group in DSA and we hope to continue dialogue with you.

The world needs us more than ever!

The post Letter to U.S. Religious Socialists appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Kiros. Valdez. Avila Chevalier. Lewis George. Roy. Rent freeze and budget. Membership surge. All this and more in this monthly wrap-up of chapter news.

The post Chapter and Verse: Mensis Mirabilis appeared first on Democratic Left.

After joining in early 2025, my first interactions with MADSA left me, Corrin, unsure on what to do next. I attended DSA 101 and joined a few General Membership Meetings to start learning more. I knew I wanted to stay involved in the chapter’s work to advocate for bold, transformative changes to society to build a more democratic and sustainable future. The problem was that I didn’t really know anybody and I didn’t have a clear project to work on. Luckily for me, there was a brand new organizing effort in the Fitchrona area, where I live and work, that gave me the chance to develop my community organizing skills. That effort developed into the first-ever branch of MADSA.

Today, the Southern Dane County Branch, which has doubled in size in the last year, promotes MADSA’s campaigns and goals in the region. We’ve kicked off two priority campaigns to support Francesca Hong’s gubernatorial campaign and to build social connections with the branch. Here’s how we built the branch.

Branch Development

The inaugural meeting of what would become the branch took place in February 2025 at the Verona Public Library. This location was explicitly chosen to be outside of the Madison city limits to draw in suburban members who may struggle to make it to the isthmus on weekdays. Meetings functioned as experiments, a marked contrast to the usual DSA chapter body structure with a direct focus. The priority was getting people in a room together to start figuring out what issues we could focus on in Verona that wouldn’t be suitable for the entire chapter of MADSA. Over multiple monthly meet-ups, a common structure evolved to include report-backs on local politics, reviews of chapter decisions that affect local members, and an article we read out loud and discussed for about 20 minutes at the end of each meeting.

After some initial power mapping, tenant organizing quickly became a priority, especially given the large rent hikes in the area after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We compiled a list of our allies, such as unions and left-leaning cafes and bookstores. Over the summer, we drafted and executed a plan for posturing for the Queer Liberation March, helping to build visibility for the chapter’s activities beyond the isthmus. We had early successes as two Verona Common Council members attended our meetings, as well as a Saint Louis DSA member who was in the area for work and found the meeting posted on MADSA’s website.

These small examples of autonomous member activity demonstrated we could organize around chapter goals within our region. This led us to think about formalizing as an accountable chapter body. Luckily enough for us, MADSA already had branches in the bylaws, even though as far as we know there hadn’t been any before. The base requirements for branch formation were already met; we already had five consistent members, so we began the more challenging task of creating bylaws for the branch.

We based the first drafts of the bylaws on a those of a branch of Louisville DSA. From there, we tailored the bylaws to fit with the language in MADSA’s bylaws and sought feedback from the Executive Committee to develop a second and third draft. This brought up many interesting questions. What authority should branches have to act independently in the name of the chapter as a whole? What kind of leadership structure should it have? Should the branch be empowered to send a voting representative to the Executive Committee? After a month or so of edits, the Executive Committee agreed to agendize the creation of the branch at the December 2025 MADSA General Meeting. The branch and the chapter agreed to limit the branch to public events supporting the work of chapter bodies. We landed on the usual structure of MADSA leadership by having two co-chairs, and we decided to send a voting representative to Executive Committee. We added plans for our future growth, including creating a steering committee after reaching fifteen average members in attendance. After some debate at the General Meeting, the resolution passed overwhelmingly, and the Southern Dane County Branch became an official chapter body.

With that milestone behind us, we began to put forward a vision for how we could grow as a chapter body. We passed a resolution to commit to two priority campaigns, one internal-focused and one external-focused, to balance limited bandwidth with the need to have meaningful work to drive engagement. This inside-outside organizing model was based on a blog post we read together written by a Boston DSA member. Just after MADSA’s yearly convention, we settled on our two priority campaigns: firstly, to support the chapter’s endorsed candidate for Wisconsin Governor, Francesca Hong, via canvassing in the branch area, and secondly, to organize social events for branch members to build cohesion and get new members involved. Our first canvassing event was a success, bringing in new faces to the group as we knocked about 200 doors. We followed that up with our first social event at a nearby bar. These campaigns are just getting started, and with the branch, there is a ton of potential to make a difference in the areas where our members live and work.

Lessons Learned and Successes

These are the lessons and takeaways that I think are the most important to the branch and MADSA as a whole.

There’s significant value in having a low barrier to entry for new members. Several members attended the branch meetings before getting involved in General Meetings with the complexities of Robert’s Rules, and they’ve told me that they’re glad they did. Having a convenient location with a smaller group of people and easy-to-understand procedures helps get people in the door, and before long these members began joining other chapter bodies, like working groups and campaigns. Once there, they often already knew a fellow branch member and were more comfortable and more likely to keep coming back.

Since the branch membership are all fairly close to each other geographically, it was easy to start forming carpool groups to General Meetings and other events. This helped build camaraderie and saved some gas to boot.

Integrating political education into branch meetings was surprisingly valuable. The choice to read articles together forced us to select short, to-the-point praxis pieces by fellow DSA members from a variety of chapters, caucuses, and online blogs. These pieces provide important, high-yield learning points meant to be shared with other DSA members rather than for an academic or theoretical audience.

Still, not everything came up roses. One of our thorny moments occurred when we elected a branch representative to the Executive Committee; it became quickly apparent that in practice this could lead to some difficult questions. With only a limited membership and single-digit attendance, our representative suddenly had as much voting power on the committee as chapter co-chairs. Pretty quickly, both chapter and branch members began to feel that sending a voting member felt undemocratic. Although a resolution at MADSA’s yearly convention that would have stripped branch members of voting representatives didn’t end up passing, we decided not to send a voting representative for the time being.

We also had some difficulty keeping new members involved beyond the core membership. With relatively infrequent monthly meetings, missing one meeting felt like a big setback. Many members showed up just once or twice. We have addressed this by planning additional events beyond the branch meetings to help keep people coming back. We expect that our branch campaigns will make visitors feel that they are using their time wisely and will drive retention.

Conclusion

Now that the first branch of MADSA has been formed, it’s easier than ever for new branches to be formed. Using our bylaws as a reference, a new branch could bypass a lot of the logistical challenges that slowed us down while formalizing. Especially now that neighborhood groups have popped up all over the city and beyond as ICE OUT organizing has exploded city-wide, there are ready-made networks that a branch can integrate with to bring more members into the chapter and our work. Consider setting up a casual event in your area and help grow a new branch, and by extension, MADSA along with it.

Blair Goodman and Colin Gillis are members of DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus.

There is a meeting today in a DSA chapter somewhere in this country. Someone new showed up. They sat through an hour of business they did not understand, watched three veterans talk past each other about something that happened two years ago, and left without anyone getting their contact information. They will not come back.

There is another meeting happening somewhere else. It started on time. Someone explained the agenda. New members were introduced and offered a specific thing to do before the next gathering. At the end, a person who had never been to a socialist meeting in their life walked out feeling like they had joined something real.

The difference between those two rooms is not ideological. It is organizational. Over the last two years, DSA has grown enormously, climbing from roughly 50,000 members to over 100,000 nationally. There are many reasons for the surge: the unpopularity of Donald Trump and his policies, and the historic victory of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, chief among them. We want to name another cause whose importance has been badly underappreciated: DSA is able to seize this moment in part because it has spent years promoting and standardizing good practice in how meetings are run and how chapters are built.

Some may perceive this focus on infrastructure as a retreat from politics. They may say Robert’s Rules is a distraction from class struggle, that worrying about meeting culture means you have run out of things to say about capitalism. Building a socialist organization that can sustain itself, develop new leaders, and prosecute a political project over the years requires the same seriousness about institutional conditions that any fighting organization brings to its work. Infrastructure points outward. A chapter that runs perfect meetings but never knocks on a door has missed the point just as badly as one that canvasses every weekend but cannot keep the people it recruits. The two approaches depend on each other. The capacity to do mass work depends on building an institution capable of holding and developing the people who show up to do it.

That institution is built at the chapter level. A friend who rarely participates but is an influential member of our local political community attended a General Membership Meeting earlier this year, in March. Afterward, he confessed he was taken aback by some of the positions members took in a debate about electoralism, but he spent more time talking about how impressed he was with the facilitation. A hybrid meeting of more than a hundred people was expertly run, allowing members to disagree forcefully and in a comradely way. There is a material dimension to organizational hygiene, too. This year, the branch secured office space in the Labor Temple. That is not solely a procedural decision. It is a declaration that the chapter believes in its own future, and members respond to it because serious institutions attract serious people. It is also a clear upgrade: our previous space was plagued by flies and clutter. The new one is bright and well-appointed, in the heart of Madison’s labor community. Physical space, financial stability, trained facilitators, documented roles, and meeting cultures that do not drive working people away are all part of the same project. Ninety percent of movement building is infrastructure.

The left has two recurring ways of falling apart. The first is structurelessness. This occurs when a movement refuses formal leadership and decision rules. Without clearly defined processes and roles for meetings, informal power does not simply vanish. Instead, it becomes unaccountable. Occupy Wall Street had enormous energy and no machinery to hold it, and the encampments scattered without leaving a durable organization behind. The second is the cadre model, which imposes discipline and public unity and treats standing disagreement as a threat to be managed. It can act decisively, but it cannot absorb dissent. The International Socialist Organization, the most significant American group in that tradition, dissolved in 2019. Many of its most dedicated organizers found their way into DSA, where disagreement need not mean departure. DSA’s wager is that democratic process is the alternative to both: an organization that can hold real ideological disagreement and still function, as long as members share a process that makes disagreement productive rather than fatal.

What does this mean concretely? It means a new member should leave their first meeting knowing three things: what the chapter is working on, what they can do, and who to call. It means meetings should start and end on time, not because punctuality is a bourgeois virtue, but because respecting people’s time is how you keep working-class members who have two jobs and a commute. It means decisions should be made transparently so that members who disagree with the outcome can nonetheless trust the process that produced it. And it means leadership development is not a program you launch when things are going well. It is the continuous work of an organization that intends to survive its own successes.

The difference shows up in the work itself. A chapter with real infrastructure can organize tenant unions, building by building, showing up consistently enough that residents trust it with something real. It can run a rigorous endorsement process, reliably put canvassers on doors, and hold the candidates it elects to something after elections are over. A chapter without it cannot do any of those things consistently, regardless of how correct its politics are. Infrastructure is not what you build after you figure out what you stand for, it is what lets you stand for anything at all.

Process gets weaponized. Rules of order can be used to slow decisions, bury inconvenient resolutions, or exhaust opponents. This happens across the political spectrum within DSA, and anyone who has attended a contentious convention knows it. But the answer to procedural manipulation is not less procedure. It is better shared norms, practiced consistently, at every level of the organization. The chapter meeting is where those norms are built or broken, not the convention floor.

DSA is a big tent. Whether this big tent stands or falls depends above all on whether the chapters inside it are real institutions: communities that retain members, train successors, and show up with capacity when the political moment demands it — that is built meeting by meeting, office by office, follow-up call by follow-up call.

To the comrade reading this who just joined: the arguments you will encounter inside DSA are real arguments, worth having, among people who mostly want the same things. You have every right to form your own view of them, but know that a chapter that works is not a chapter that has resolved its political disagreements. It is a chapter that has built the capacity to have them, keep its members, and still show up next month. That capacity is not separate from socialism. It is what socialism looks like in practice, right now, in the rooms where we organize.

Frederick Douglass’s classic oration, given on July 5, 1852, 174 years ago tomorrow, in Rochester, New York, is an essential text for any celebration of America’s holiday of independence. At a time when those in power in this country consistently attempt to remove or minimize the proper–indeed, in an important sense actually patriotic–acknowledgment and reflection upon our country’s injustices, Douglass’s words still cut to the heart of the American story. Between the festivities of the day, find the time to read the whole thing here and join with other DSA members, civil rights activists, conscientious religious believers, and all others of good will to resolve that Douglass’s example of agitation and prophecy will never, ever, perish from the earth, or lay ignored and in vain.

The post “What, to the American Slave, is Your Fourth of July?” appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

This July 4th, we will see celebrations from both major political parties in this country. The Republican Party will venerate 250 years by claiming America’s successes, echoing a return to some glorious past, and stating America is greater than ever while millions in this country are desperate to live dignified lives. The Democratic Party will venerate the “endurance” of our institutions and claim we must fight rising fascism as “joyful warriors”, but show no warrior fight against the fascism we see today.

We will see both parties celebrate this major achievement of our country and each party will sum up America in one word. For the Republicans, the word will be “tradition”. For the Democrats, it will be “progress”. For the working class of America, this nation can be summed up in one word; struggle. Struggle is what defines our nation today and it’s time for an explanation why.

Since the founding of this nation, the people of the United States have been in the struggle for true democracy. With America’s gravest and most egregious sin of chattel slavery, Black Americans have always been at the forefront of the struggle for true democracy. For hundreds of years, my people were enslaved to a nation that prides itself upon the words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

What type of nation prides itself on these words but doesn’t ensure those words are true for all of its people? It’s because the founders of this nation didn’t see my people as citizens; they specified they were 3/5ths of a person, to be exact. As the chains of chattel slavery hung heavy upon my people, we believed we deserved more — and we do. The time would come when chattel slavery would be over for all Black people throughout this land and our time came.

In the US Civil War, it was the North vs the South. Brother vs Brother. Union vs Confederate. Billy Yank vs Johnny Rebel. Many names and reasonings have been given about why the Civil War was conducted but we all know the primary reason — to destroy or maintain the evil of chattel slavery. Throughout the South, states codified slavery into law and they needed the unpaid labor to maintain their slave economies. The Confederacy would fight tooth and nail to “maintain their way of life” and many freed slaves would do their part to destroy this delusion of life. From espionage to entire regiments of Black troops in the Union, freed slaves fought for their liberation and recognized that if they were to win their freedom, they must fight for it.

As the war raged on, thousands of Americans were killed and a chance of true democracy emerged. With the passage of the 13th amendment and the Union victory in the Civil War, Black people had the first opportunity to actually be American. With this opportunity came America’s first chance at being a true democracy. Sadly, even with these efforts, democracy fell through our fingers. Years after the Civil War, the efforts of Reconstruction were never truly lived out. As Black people, we fought for our liberation from one entity to then be in chains by another — Jim Crow. Laws were now made against Black people for everything in our existence, giving us third class citizenship in a land that was made for you and me. Or was it made for you and not for me?

Fast forward years into Jim Crow and the rise of the Civil Rights movement, Black people once again fought against Jim Crow and won civil rights laws that ensured our existence in this country. As time has gone on, we have made great strides for freedom in this country, but in 2026, we are falling backwards. As fascism rises in this country, America has exported its imperial violence throughout the world, from Palestine to Cuba.

As it does so, that imperial violence exported is already felt upon Americans, and most specifically Black Americans. Our rights stripped away, over 800,000 Black women losing their jobs, voting rights falling to the wayside, our children being shot through state violence, new technologies discriminating against us, capitalism alienating us from everything, etc. We are again raging war against a system that was never truly built for us nor by us.

Black people have been this country’s most ardent advocates for a true democratic country. But you might ask: what is a true democracy?

A true democracy is a democratic republic that is rooted in universal emancipation, universal education and universal participation. A true democracy would never take away the rights of a group from participating in the democratic process. A true democracy would never deprive the people quality education to keep them numb from the woes of capitalism and its evils. A true democracy would never work to enslave its population to keep them alienated from everything they deserve. Black people have fought for the struggle for true democracy and we are doing so in every arena we are in. This historical struggle is a liberatory struggle and it is a necessary one, to fight against fascism and its companion, capitalism.

As Black people living in the heart of empire, my people face an interesting contradiction. We live in a capitalist system. We wish all the best for America to be a land for you and me. My people have engaged in this historical struggle for liberation for hundreds of years and on America’s 250th birthday, the answer is clear.

To fight fascism, my people will do so together. To fight capitalism, we will do so with all oppressed peoples under the trillionaire’s boot, with the collective love and solidarity of socialism. I’m proud to be a part of this struggle and I’m blessed to be a Black man fighting for the liberation of my people, which will lead to the liberation of all in this country.

As the 4th of July arrives, celebrate. Shoot your fireworks, cook, barbecue, hug your loved ones and have a good time. As you celebrate, celebrate not because of “tradition” or “progress”. Celebrate because of what could be of America. Celebrate and advocate for the struggle for true democracy. We the people are the inheritors of this historical struggle and it is up to all of us, to ensure the sacrifices of our ancestors are not tossed aside, but uplifted. This struggle is worth it and to make it a reality, we must,

“Lift every voice and sing.

Till earth and heaven ring.

Ring with the harmonies of liberty

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.”

Reese is a Democratic Socialist and member of the Membership Engagement Committee. Currently uncaucused and a part of the Detroit Democracy Coalition — a coalition of caucuses dedicated to democracy, education, and participation in MDDSA.

America 250: The Struggle for True Democracy was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Carl W.

In the Year of Our Lord 2026, the vibes are extremely fucked. They are disgusting.

Oh say can you see, from the rancid green Reflecting Pool, to the open construction pit of the Crypto Bribe Ballroom in the ruins of the White House, next to the Monster Energy Drink sponsored UFC octagon where CTE-addled transphobes bludgeon each other into oblivion; we come to the last sad vestige of this pathetic, limping “celebration” of the empire: the Freedom 250 Great America State Fair.

It’s kinda perfect, isn’t it? It’s like they built a physical metaphor or something.

There are more people in our General Meetings than at this Fair. The cheap plaster hides an empty, hollow affair celebrated by no one; the simulacrum of dignity and power. Just like Trump’s fake golden Oval Office, bought at Home Depot and spray-painted. A fake on a fake, it’s fugazis all the way down.

This entire affair reeks of desperation, of AI-generated fantasy crashing into the reality of the moment. The banks are out of money, the oil wells are running dry, and the people of this country are finally seeing the empire for what it is: a casino run by pedophiles ripping the copper out of the walls, meanwhile half a million don’t know where they’ll sleep tonight. The decrepit rapist president makes over a billion dollars in Pisscoins while people pay $5 a gallon and go bankrupt from toenail infections.

Nationally, the decaying facade has gone stupid, a pathetic display of cheap white masculinity, the imperial combover hiding the growing bald spot. Wait until the Cybertruck with the Joker car wrap shows up. The rants from the front seat about woke Star Wars will be epic.

We made it, chat. 250 years of pretending this isn’t some failed experiment: a dead strip mall with crypto billboards built atop a mass grave. The liberal impulse is that Trump is some uniquely destructive force, and everything before that was great, hunky-dory, and the Bad Orange Man ruined everything! A DANG CHEETO ruined it! The centrists and liberals of America think he’s some kind of video game boss, and if we can just beat him, all the fascists NPCs will despawn. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. This implosion was always built into the making, a straight line from theft, rape, and murder to international laughingstock. It was rotten from the start; the thieves arriving on these shores eager to grab everything they could, slap down a clapboard world, and kidnap people from the across the ocean to do all the work. Then a constant string of war, coups, economic sabotage, and mass exploitation of the entire world. Every right that the working class has gained has cost lives, we’ve had to retcon rights for women and people of color in every generation into a framework that was intentionally designed to exclude them. Every battle for worker rights has been costly, its victories temporary, and the results stolen by the liberal political class as trophies. 

And now, the forces of AI want to take the final ounce of power we have left: our labor and our literacy. They want drones, a calcified underclass of powerless, illiterate consumers living in tents at the edge of their gated communities.

There is a certain romanticism to the story of American progress, however, some fantasy of the ideal America of freedom, truth, and justice that belies an uncomfortable truth: any rights granted by this rotten structure can be taken away just as easily.

Another uncomfortable truth lies unspoken, that the foundations of this building are rotten, an open construction pit paid for with bribes, the Reflecting Pool liner is being stripped away, and meanwhile the front lawn is a Monster Energy drink ad.

Yet the liberal fantasy of democratic renewal is not coming, there is no Obama 2.0 waiting in the wings to be the dumpster of our hopes and dreams. For all of MAGA’s revanchist frothing, the cosmopolitan capitalism of American liberalism is equally as farcical. Competent imperial management is not the answer. Some techno-utopian vision of “capitalism with guardrails” is concept art, nothing more.

You can’t build a lasting stable society of democratic values while the entire economic under-girding is about ripping as many people off as possible and hoarding gold like Scrooge McDuck. You can’t have a permanent underclass of invisible, exploited workers and precarious castoffs and then expect them to turn around and sing God Bless America.

The death rictus grin of denial is slipping, the spell of the empire is fading. The contradictions are intensifying to a shrill degree, the capitalist veneer peeling off in chunks, just like the bottom of the rotting Reflecting Pool. And the people in charge are just dumping single bottles of bleach into it. There’s something so perfectly emblematic of the Reflecting Pool debacle, something that illustrates a greater crisis. Demand a fix to something that wasn’t broken, go for cheap, hollow spectacle, overpay a corrupt ally to do a shitty job, and when it goes terribly, pay another crony to an equally bad job at twice the price.

A core function of the American bureaucracy is to transfer as much public money into private pockets as humanly possible. That is the purpose of all wars, all projects, and all technology: to take as much as quickly as it can.

America as a political institution is becoming more and more a society of empty gestures, failed promises and half-assed attempts to do a landlord special and paint the veneer of strength and respectability when $36 billion of war money floats at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz. There goes your school, your healthcare, your housing, your roads, your future. The National Anthem is now a rusty toilet flushing sound.

This spectacle is also exhausting and boring. No one’s buying this shit anymore. And for many, especially black and brown folks, the decay of the empire never bothered them because the empire wasn’t meant for them anyway. 

Do you think those who bled and died for their rights and freedoms would feel celebrated by the Fourth of July Monster-themed energy drink? Which rumpled, overpriced football jersey speaks to the soul of America? What Freedom Truck best represents the spirit of… whatever?

But a sinking ship drags everyone down, even those in third class. And we’re all drowning just the same. Yet still, the discontent remains. The feeling continues, doesn’t it?

Hello, it’s us, your friendly neighborhood socialists. We’ve got some good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve got answers to your questions, and even answers to questions you may not have thought to ask.

The answer is not “better capitalism”, because there is no such thing. A varying shade of shit is still, well, shit. A New Deal 2.0 would be nice, but capable of the same dismantling that the current New Deal has undergone. It’s not enough. We should fight for those benefit and then keep going. Everything good about America is because of the working class, its greatest force for change and its greatest victim of the empire’s abuses. 3% tax credits and Trump Bad platitudes are over.

A tectonic shift is necessary. A reckoning with the sins of this country’s past and present.

The accelerating extremism of American fascism, now automated in technology with AI slop and outrage farms, powered by the full faith and power of the American police state, would laser target a tepid reformist agenda just like it has wiped away decades of legal precedent, benefits, and rights most people thought were settled.

This Fourth of July, everything must go. We’re holding a fire sale on the White House lawn, next to the demolition zone, passed-out podcasters and the discarded vape cartridges. DSA is the most promising vehicle for socialism that we’ve seen in our lifetimes; the best, most vibrant chance for a real future to believe in.

Socialism isn’t the answer because it’s just any alternative, it’s the answer because of what it does. A working class movement understands the truth: that your power comes from your labor, your body, yourself and melds it together with countless others who share the same truth. Capitalism rips us apart, makes us tiny little specks, powerless in front of the machine. Socialism binds us together in that amazing human family of an entire class of people.

It’s not just about universal healthcare and winning elections, it’s about demanding tomorrow and the possibility that it holds.

DSA is now over 116,000 members, growing every day with every victory, making it officially the largest socialist organization in American history. Now that’s something worth celebrating.

We’re workers just like you, tired of the mess we’ve been handed, tired of the failed promises and clownish spectacle, so fucking goddamn tired of the static and bullshit being pumped into our brains. We’re tired of being powerless. And we know you are too. So join up. The future is out there waiting.

So Happy 250th Birthday America, we got you a little something: class consciousness. Hope you like it.

The post Happy Birthday, America? appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

The week before Memorial Day, I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the first time. As a lifelong socialist, I had some misgivings about visiting our nation’s capitol on the eve of Trump’s garish and largely failed celebration of his own vanity for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Fortunately, my worries were overblown. I spent five days experiencing our country’s greatest historical treasures, including our nation’s Founding Documents, the Apollo 11 Command Module, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat (and the derringer that killed him), and countless other artifacts and historic sites. Seeing the Lincoln Memorial was extremely moving, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is a beautiful and underappreciated tribute to one of this country’s greatest presidents. Deliberately taking time to reflect on the intersection of my own values of internationalism, republicanism, democratic rights, and anti-militarism added another layer of meaning to the experience.

As I moved through D.C., I also reflected on what it means to be an American in an era of fascism. We live in a time in which the far- right insists that it has a monopoly on the truth of American history. Every misremembered detail and twisted political narrative hammers the argument that America is naturally and inevitably dominated by violent anti-leftist prejudices and uniquely amenable to right-wing authoritarianism. Many on the left are eager to assert the same, that America will need to be rebuilt brick-by-brick in order to accommodate socialism.

The American experiment has had a profound influence on world history, both for better and for worse. It has touched every aspect of our lives, and it will continue to influence our political reality for far longer than any of us will be alive. We cannot escape it. We must reckon with both the good and the bad.

This Fourth of July, on the 250th anniversary of the signing of Declaration of Independence, in the context of the pain and uncertainty of the current moment, I pose a simple question:

Is there anything left to salvage?

Founding Violence

Any holistic discussion of the legacy of the United States of America must begin with a full-throated condemnation of both Indigenous genocide and the African slave trade. The process of converting enormous territories in the Americas into plantation colonies employing intensive slave labor spanning two continents amounts to one of the most horrific crimes in human history. Millions of human beings were ruthlessly murdered in this process, and millions more were forced to live in brutal, inhuman conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of their cultures and their inherent dignity as human beings. Entire nations and people groups were wiped out in this centuries-long process, and the suffering it brought into the world is truly incalculable.

The genocide of native peoples in the territory of the United States continued into the early twentieth century, and countless waves of state-sanctioned violence only ended once there was essentially nothing left for the government to take. This process was aided and sustained by a popular zeal among violent white colonists to push into newly acquired territories, exterminating the people already living there as they went. After the American frontier was declared “closed” in the 1890s, the state then embarked on an explicit campaign of cultural erasure, forcing native children into assimilationist boarding schools that operated well into the 1960s. It is also worth noting that many Latinos have Indigenous and Black ancestors, and modern racism and colorism directed against Latinos can be viewed through the lens of anti-Indigenous racism.

Millions of human beings were brought from Africa to the United States to work as chattel slaves from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Chattel slaves were legally considered to be property in the way draft animals are considered property, and enslaved people under this system were afforded effectively zero legal rights. To prevent solidarity from developing between African slaves and poor white indentured servants in the early colonies, colonial elites aggressively developed racist propaganda to convince white workers that Black slaves were an inferior, subservient race incapable of achieving full personhood.

The Constitution of the United States was initially written to protect the rights of wealthy slaveholders to continue this intolerably vile system. It afforded Southern states disproportionate power in the Congress and the Electoral College, and the plantation-owning Southern elites used their position within the government to expand and defend slavery until the American Civil War. After the war, the failure of the radical project of Reconstruction allowed white elites to terrorize Black people through formal racial segregation and horrific violence for another century, effectively ignoring the sweeping protections passed in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Despite the progress of the Civil Rights Movement toward achieving full legal equality for Black Americans, this campaign of violence and discrimination continues to this day.

The Constitution

For many decades in the United States, the “wisdom of the Founders” was considered sacrosanct. American school systems are heavily influenced by both a bipartisan patriotism-industrial complex and, more recently, the reimagining of American history through a far-right lens. This combination has led many schools to explicitly teach that the U.S. Constitution is “the greatest in the world.” In the relatively stable postwar era of U.S. politics, this was easy enough for most people to believe. Now it is obvious to the entire world that our constitution is woefully out-of-date. The document is among the shortest and hardest to amend of any democratic constitution today. Common-sense amendments such as national proportional representation, the abolition of the Electoral College, and banning unlimited corporate donations to political candidates are effectively impossible under the current system.

To give a sense of how difficult the Constitution is to amend, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified in 1992, nearly thirty-five years ago. It was a minor procedural amendment requiring that changes to congressional salaries take effect only after the next congressional election. It was introduced by Congress in the 1790s and allowed to sit for two centuries. The last major substantive amendment (lowering the voting age to 18 nationally) was ratified in 1971. The Equal Rights Amendment proposed in the 1970s (explicitly banning discrimination on the basis of sex) was narrowly defeated after a right-wing anti-feminist pressure campaign prevented its ratification by enough state legislatures.

In the current political climate, it would take a colossal remaking of the country’s political order to amend the Constitution even once in our lifetimes. The closest we are likely to get to overhauling the Constitution through formal mechanisms is the calling of a Constitutional Convention. Under present political circumstances, this convention would be dominated by Republican state delegations, likely resulting in the formalizing of one-party rule under the far right.

Criticism of the structural problems with the U.S. Constitution has filled entire books. Under the Electoral College system, the individual presidential votes of voters anyone in a solidly red or blue state (representing a large majority of the U.S. population) might as well be thrown directly in the trash, and deciding presidential elections on a state-by-state basis dramatically increases the likelihood of a disputed result.

For example, if the Electoral College didn’t exist, the Supreme Court’s theft of the 2000 presidential election on behalf of George W. Bush would have been impossible. Democrat Al Gore would have won the election by over half a million votes under a popular vote system. The closest presidential race in modern history by popular vote was the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and even then the margin was more than 100,000 votes across all fifty states. The hurdles to physically manufacturing or legally disqualifying that many votes would be enormous, much greater than flipping the slate of electors sent by a handful of states, as Trump tried to do in the leadup to January 6.

The structure of the Senate gives disproportionate power to small, rural states. There are no bans on partisan gerrymandering, and corporations are allowed to spend ungodly amounts of money on elections. The Supreme Court has been captured by the far-right and has become a kind of “super-legislature” at a time when Congress is effectively unable to pass meaningful laws. The Court just put the final nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, rapidly making Jim Crow-era levels of racial gerrymandering the norm in Republican states across the country. The U.S. Constitution affords almost no freedoms reflecting “positive rights” to things like housing, healthcare, quality education, stable work, union representation, rights to indigenous and minority representation, and many others. And on and on and on it goes.

Institutional Decay

The Constitution has been in a sorry state for well over a century, and the American government has been dysfunctional at a very basic level for at least the past twenty years. That danger is now being compounded by the gamification of politics and the economy, attempts by the current President of the United States to establish an illiberal, personalistic dictatorship, and the complete inability of the Democratic Party to resist either trend.

The post-pandemic period has been one of the most obscene periods of wealth concentration in human history. Last month, Elon Musk briefly became the first person in history to have a net worth of over $1 trillion, a literally unimaginable amount of money that he plans to use to build an independent space empire under his control to evade all existing law.

Meanwhile, the traditional metrics of the U.S. economy are losing their relationship with reality. The government is engaging in massive deficit spending to prop up the economy in the context of a disastrous and wholly unnecessary war with Iran. Investments in the “transformative” technology of AI that are likely to generate no actual returns have pushed the stock market to new heights. The gamification of the economy and our political system through betting platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket has allowed consumers to “speculate” on almost literally anything, including war, death, and easily manipulated prop bets. Radically pro-business private equity firms have taken on a key role in this speculative economy, and these forces combined are likely leading America toward the next major economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Trump is in the process of consolidating his rule and doing as much damage to the American government as possible in service of his radically anti-government supporters and basest instincts. Eighteen months into his second term, ICE is still being used as an army of personal enforcers. The Supreme Court has endorsed Trump in his insatiable quest to enrich himself and his supporters on an unprecedented scale, and it has massively expanded his power through its selective interpretation of the Constitution.

The Democratic Party is woefully incapable of responding to this crisis. In Project 2029, the centrist think-tank wing of the party openly declares that its greatest ambitions to save U.S. democracy contain no substantive reforms to our broken system, instead focusing exclusively on failed slogans like “affordability” and “cutting red tape.” Gavin Newsom, the unpopular centrist California governor and an early 2028 frontrunner, has already seen fit to align himself with anti-trans bigots on his podcast in the hopes of scoring cheap political points. The party is overwhelmingly likely to engage in trickery and intra-party pressure tactics in 2028 to block a progressive nominee, similar to their undemocratic efforts in 2016 and 2020 to block the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. This process has already started in the context of the recent sweep of DSA-endorsed candidates in the Northeast, as centrist Democrats panic that the party will be captured by “far left” candidates who have the gall to run on a meaningful platform of reform.

The structural solutions centrist Democrats have proposed to this crisis are woefully inadequate, and they are all too likely to hand Republicans a third opportunity to destroy American democracy after a third GOP presidential victory in either 2028 or 2032. We’ve already watched it happen once. That’s assuming that Trump or his successor won’t abjectly refuse to leave office if they lose in 2028, as Trump infamously attempted in January 2021. 

It is by no means already too late to save American democracy. At the same time, we will not have an unlimited number of chances to stop Trump’s successors from establishing a more durable authoritarianism that could last a generation or more.

The Patriotism Question

There is a lot of cynicism on the left when it comes to American patriotism, and for very good reason. Marx held that workers must reject loyalty to any single nation, prioritizing instead the interests of the international proletariat. This instinct has been proven right over the past 150 years: socialist parties and governments have historically devolved into extremism and brutal violence when they abandon internationalism.

In the early twentieth century, it was not uncommon for socialists to embrace what we would now consider “American patriotism” to varying degrees. Figures including socialist organizer Eugene Debs saw much to admire in the core values of the American Revolution and the radical struggle to end slavery that had taken place just a few generations earlier. Debs admired figures including Lincoln and Jefferson, and he famously quipped in a 1901 speech: “I like the Fourth of July. It breathes a spirit of revolution.” This sentiment wasn’t limited to Debs. In the 1940s, the Communist Party, just past the height of its influence in America during the Depression in the 1930s, even renamed its New York night school “The Jefferson School of Social Science.”

The turn away from the New Deal era, which communists and socialists had played a significant role in implementing, and the beginning of the Second Red Scare in the late 1940s marked a major shift in the prospects of the American left. Socialists moved from a relatively hopeful era in which a broadly left-populist president was remaking U.S. economic life and talking openly about wealth redistribution to an extraordinarily repressive period in which all of society was mobilized to scorn and attack “the Reds.”

The definition of “Red” during this period was dutifully expanded to anyone who wasn’t willing to uncritically endorse America’s aggressive and imperialist foreign policy of the era, and to those who were too eager to continue economic reforms that were considered by capitalist political interests to be “subversive.” Americans were allowed to express themselves within a narrow band of political opinions, and anyone who attempted to break out of that consensus was openly discriminated against and targeted for surveillance or worse. Even after the worst of McCarthyism subsided, the American left was driven underground and continued to be targeted and marginalized.

By the late 1960s, the grinding carnage of the Vietnam War had cemented the U.S. in the minds of the left as an unrepentant imperialist power that would spill any amount of blood and spend endless hordes of treasure to ensure people in the Global South lived only under autocratic, pro-American client states. High-profile assassinations of leftist leaders including Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the organized repression of communists and other leftists hardened the notion that America was “irredeemable” in a fundamental way.

The modern American left still carries the scars of these previous eras of repression as we enter a dangerous new era.

Why Celebrate?

In some ways, it isn’t surprising that we’ve seen a total divorce between American patriotism and the country’s socialist left. Almost all American socialists living today have spent their entire lives being told that socialism is antithetical to and fundamentally incompatible with American values. The modern right-wing vision of American patriotism not only excludes leftists, but openly declares them to be enemies of the state. In an era of right-wing ascendency and total Democratic incompetence, it’s hard to imagine there is much to salvage.

Meanwhile, many leftists have spent years rejecting displays of American patriotism, and for very good reason. It’s easy to revile the flag our government paints on bombs that are dropped indiscriminately on innocents around the world. This is especially true at a time when American democracy has never felt less representative, functional, fair, or amenable to real reform.

I don’t have a definitive answer to any of these questions, and I don’t pretend to. But almost all of our American readers will live in this country for the rest of their lives. The outcome of the struggle for democracy and justice in the United States will reverberate for a century or more. We have a unique opportunity to shape that struggle today.

To the most radical among us: anyone who hopes for a total collapse and reconstitution of the American system is realistically going to be waiting for a very long time. Even then, the possibilities in such a scenario will be constrained by the political and social conditions of our reality today. Any future government on this continent, no matter how revolutionary, will necessarily bear a distinctly American character. As leftists, it is up to us to decide for ourselves what that character should be.

This Fourth of July, I encourage everyone to reflect on what parts of the American experiment are worth salvaging, great or small. We should celebrate the accomplishments of the great reformers of American history and build toward our own major expansion of worker and civil rights, which will be the first in over fifty years. We should honor and stand alongside the radical traditions of indigenous peoples, Black Americans, and immigrants from every country around the world. Constitutionalists should reflect on how we can remake American democracy into an experiment in unapologetic egalitarianism. Radicals should prepare the ground for mass nonviolent resistance and build a clear, positive vision for a more just political system. And we should all build the kind of deep, community-based solidarity that can sustain a socialist movement.

Everyone will have a different answer to this question. The only wrong answer is to abdicate all imagination and declare that we can find nothing to value in the last two and a half centuries of our history. That history is not dictated to us from the outside. We have to make meaning of it for ourselves, and today is the perfect day to start.

The post America at 250: What is There to Celebrate? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.