Two months ago I reported on the visit to Australia of Bhaskar Sunkara, one of the leading lights of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). I suggested then that Sunkara’s commitment to democracy sat a little uneasily with his determination to see public policy in black-and-white terms as a conflict of labor and capital, raising doubts as to how democratic government by his comrades would ever be in practice.
The DSA have been in the news the last couple of weeks with the release of their new platform, titled “Workers Deserve More!” You can read it here and form your own opinion about how realistic or coherent its policies are and whether they would be of any benefit to workers. But the most controversy has centred on what it says about democracy.
“For the working class to govern,” the platform proclaims, “we need a new political system.” You might wonder how democratic that could be if only one class gets to govern, and the details might not reassure you. They involve what we might describe as the removal of checks and balances:
Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.
Regular readers will guess that I’m not opposed to all of that agenda. I think multi-party systems, proportional representation and ranked choice (i.e. preferential) voting are all fine things. More generally, I’ve argued before that presidential systems like that of the United States have shown themselves less well adapted to the modern era than parliamentary systems, which presumably is what “an executive … chosen by and subordinate to Congress” would amount to.
And America’s Senate has a host of problems of its own. Jonathan Chait, otherwise no friend of the DSA, endorsed the call for its abolition, pointing out the fact that their most sensible proposal was the one to attract the strongest opposition:
[A]lthough the DSA’s platform is indeed chock-full of maniacal proposals, on this particular idea, the maniacs have a point. The Senate is a vestigial deformity upon the Constitution whose elimination, unlikely though it might be, would rank among the great democratic advances in American history.
But although single-chamber parliamentary systems work well across much of Europe, they depend on a web of traditions and institutions: not just proportional representation, but also an independent judiciary and numerous other constitutional safeguards (ombudsmen, auditors, electoral commissions, and so on). There is no sign that the DSA, with their hostility to judicial review, have anything like that in mind.
Rather they hark back to an earlier time and a more naïve view of democracy associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Jacobins – appropriately enough, since the magazine Sunkara helped found is called Jacobin. They had the idea that the mass of people were inherently virtuous and could be trusted to exercise power without worrying about institutional constraints, by way of elected assemblies that would combine legislative, executive and judicial functions.
It didn’t work. Once in power, the Jacobins and others like them maintained their position by excluding all those they deemed to be insufficiently virtuous. But they at least had the excuse that democracy then was a new and untried idea; a certain amount of trial and error was unavoidable (and some of their experiments did actually turn out quite well). The DSA cannot plead ignorance: if they fail to heed the lessons of the last 250 years they will rightly be blamed for it.
Earlier this year in the series “Crisis on the right” I explained that a large part of the Australian Liberal Party’s problem was that it had been trying to accommodate not two but three competing ideological strands – liberal, conservative and neo-fascist. The Democratic Party has the corresponding problem on the left, made worse by America’s institutionalisation of the two-party system: it has to straddle centrists, social democrats and actual socialists.
In a European-style multi-party system, there would most likely be three separate parties: a liberal party (although the Democrats use that word in a different sense), a centre-left party and a far-left party. Ironically enough, the outcome of one of the reforms that the DSA say they want could easily be that they would be corralled in a permanent minority position like their European counterparts.*
Instead, with nowhere else to go, the DSA are pursuing their goals through the Democrats, with some success – although whether that reflects voter sympathy with their policies or simply dissatisfaction with an out-of-touch establishment is far from certain. Next week we’ll have a look at some other reasons why candidates aligned with the DSA might be picking up support.
* A few years ago I noted the way that most mainstream centre-left parties had deserted Socialist International because it had drifted too far to the left. The DSA went the other way: they left Socialist International in 2017 because they thought it was too far to the right. They now line up with fringe outfits like Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25.
The World is Not Enough 