After AOC’s shift on her public stance on sending aid to Israel’s Iron Dome, every side took credit for the change. But what really causes DSA electeds to change their minds?
www.geesemag.com/articles/wha...
In his latest, P. K. Gandakin draws out a method from the Italian's notes on urbanism and the Risorgimento: one that treats Marxism not as a thin doctrine of interests, but as a way of understanding and solving the problems of an entire society.
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The No Kings protests point toward a democratic break with oligarchy, but the existing political system cannot contain it. Nik M. argues that what comes next depends on whether that energy is organized and given leadership or whether it is lost.
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AOC 2028: The Next Stage of the Democratic Revolution?
READ: geesemag.com/articles/aoc...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the 1st politician in a generation with a chance to turn left insurgency into a national project. Nik M. argues that 2028 isn’t a guaranteed victory nor failure—but an opportunity.
A left that stands apart, nursing its frustrations and waiting for a purer vessel, will find itself precisely where it has always been: morally consistent and politically irrelevant, watching the Democratic Revolution's energy get absorbed once again by the forces most committed to containing it. The condemnation of AOC as a potential turncoat leaving socialism in the dust reveals itself to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: by refusing to stamp the current moment with our communist politics, we only guarantee that the moment will pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie. This is the deeper logic of party-building as the left's primary strategic task. The Modern Prince, the political party, the collective political organism capable of elaborating and cohering the Democratic Revolution's incoherent energy, is built by constructing the organizational infrastructure, the electoral base, the cultural presence, and the ideological coherence that make a left populist politics durable rather than episodic. The endorsement is also simply the prerequisite for engagement. A DSA that stands apart from an AOC candidacy forfeits its ability to shape the campaign's politics, populate its intellectual infrastructure, take ownership of the moment, push it toward boldness, and exert counterpressure when it inevitably retreats from the bold populist strategy that the moment requires. Endorsing and criticizing are not mutually exclusive, but are the only combination that makes political sense.
this is about the opportunity that AOC's inevitable run represents *for DSA*. we can either be among the first people to believe in her, to pledge our support and resources and organizational knowledge to the left-most candidate that has ever run. or we can pass it up, waiting in vain for perfection
Among those in the DSA who desire to see her improve her political positions, a tempting but mistaken strategy presents itself: using the endorsement as a bargaining chip, a conditional offer to be extended or withheld depending on her positions on Gaza or her willingness to confront party leadership more directly. But AOC does not need the DSA's endorsement. She will run with or without it, draw enormous crowds with or without it, and command the attention of the Democratic base with or without it. Treating the endorsement as leverage is not a negotiating strategy — it is a fantasy that flatters the left's sense of its own importance while accomplishing nothing and risking leaving the organized socialist left on the sidelines of the most important left-populist presidential campaign in a generation. The DSA's actual leverage is organizational, electoral, and intellectual—built not in a negotiating room but in the streets, in primary campaigns, in the construction of the political pole that defines the real content of the Democratic Revolution and is, more than any particular politician, the force that will bring socialism to the United States. The DSA does not move AOC by threatening to withhold its blessing. It moves her by taking advantage of what she represents to create a world in which our politics are the ones that politicians like AOC find valuable—or even just find them necessary demands that they have to accept under pressure.
cosign just about every word of this article, especially this:
www.geesemag.com/articles/aoc...
