Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Establishment Democrats’ Response to DSA’s Electoral Wins Should Be of Concern to Anyone Invested in the Future of Black Politics

Whatever happened to “big tent” politics?

Establishment Democrats’ response to the electoral victories of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) should be of concern to anyone invested in the future of Black politics: The strategies Black Americans utilize to make our political demands legible within a system designed to narrow and delegitimize them.

At times Black politics has taken the form of polemic, as in David Walker’s Appeal. In other moments, it has taken the form of armed abolitionist resistance. Black politics have also been peaceful, as in the now-celebrated campaigns of the nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. When white conservative Republicans attempted to destroy the political power Black Americans gained during Reconstruction, Black politics became insurgent within the Republican Party itself. Black Americans enrolled in Union Leagues, constructed independent institutions, and formed oppositional factions within the party to protect Black political and social interests.

The DSA is practicing a similar form of insurgent Black politics. It uses the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle while organizing against the party’s leadership, donors, and ideological constraints, a legion of forces sometimes openly hostile to Black political imagination and possibility. Despite sloganeering as the vanguard for Black political representation, the establishment Democratic Party is mounting an opposition to the DSA’s contemporary iteration of Black insurgent politics.

“If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” said Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, after a slate of DSA-endorsed candidates defeated party incumbents to win Democratic primaries in New York. “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”

Democratic strategist and former Clinton adviser James Carville went further, suggesting Democrats purge the caucus of democratic socialists. Among them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who defeated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District. Speaking about Avila Chevalier’s victory, Carville argued that House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus.” “We believe in pluralism,” Carville insisted, before declaring that Avila Chevalier was “not a Democrat.” Her views, he said, are incompatible with the Democratic Party.

The views in question are social-media posts Avila Chevalier made admonishing Black and Arab men who fetishize white women (Avila Chevalier has deleted the posts and disavowed her comments). More recently, Van Jones criticized Avila Chevalier’s calls to abolish prisons and borders, positions he called “regressive nonsense.”

Certainly, Democrats are entitled to condemn Avila Chevalier’s remarks and are free to oppose prison abolition, open borders, or dispute any other “far-left” policy proposals espoused by DSA candidates. However, to suggest that the party should deny a democratically elected Black and Dominican woman a place in the Democratic caucus after she won a primary election for a congressional district that is 50 percent Hispanic and 24 percent Black is to delegitimize her voters’ political judgment.

Avila Chevalier won a plurality of predominantly Black precincts in a majority-minority congressional district that is one of the poorest in the country. Approximately one-fourth of the population lives below the poverty line, more than double the rate in the United States, and the district has the third highest poverty rate of the 148 majority-minority congressional districts. Those are the voters Avila Chevalier represents. To oppose the will of those voters is to infer that their attempt to redress their suffering through a politics that challenges entrenched power is invalid.

The establishment’s hostility to the DSA also reveals the narrowness of the Democratic Party’s “big tent.” There might not be room inside it for defunding the police, but there is room for politicians financed by corporations that profit from mass incarceration. There may be no room for aggressive redistributions of wealth, anticapitalist rhetoric, or open antagonism with the billionaire class, but there is room for Democrats who accept money from financial institutions that plunder wealth from Black communities. There may not be room for “nutty” policies like the eradication of borders, but there is ample room for politicians who support the colonization of Palestine and the domination of Palestinians.

Instead of treating the emergence of voters’ support for DSA-endorsed candidates as evidence of legitimate dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s economic and foreign-policy association, prominent members of the party establishment—including members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the CBCPAC—have often treated socialist insurgency as a threat to Black Americans, even alleging the DSA is flush with white supremacy.

Citing a 2021 DSA internal survey that revealed the organization is 82 percent white, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards........

© The Nation