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It’s all in the name – Democrats first, Socialists second (if at all). If you want to see what the DSA is really all about, just have yourselves a long, steamy gawk at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s about sucking the blood of the Left by tempting us with fake “progressive” politicians who insist that the DNC is an institution worth saving and wasting our time and energy before zombifying the People’s movements and shuffling them off to the Movement Graveyard. But, hell; my peeps at the Socialist Equality Party and WSWS lay it out a lot better in words than I can at the moment. Here’s a couple of points from the SEP’s Ninth Congress Resolution re: the DSA, Jacobin Magazine & ilk:

16. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the initial beneficiary of this radicalization. But the DSA is not a socialist party. It is a faction of the Democratic Party, and its principal role is to block the development of an independent political movement of the working class, to capture the movement toward socialism and confine it within the framework of the capitalist two-party system. Wherever it holds office, this function is on display. In New York, Mamdani governs in coordination with the Democratic establishment and the Trump White House, imposing austerity on the workers who elected him, while DSA-aligned officials preside over the destruction of public education and expanding police budgets across the country.

17. The DSA’s central claim, that the Democratic Party can be transformed from within into an instrument of progressive change, is refuted by all historical experience. It is also exposed by the party’s own response to the DSA’s electoral victories. The Democrats’ “centrist” wing has issued a manifesto reaffirming that its members are “capitalists” and launching a new witch-hunt against the party’s own left.

– “The drive to dictatorship and the political radicalization in the United States”, Resolution of the Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US),
posted at the World Socialist Web Site 20 August 2026

…and here’s a quick rundown of DSA escapades over the last year or two:

> Jacobin’s defense of the Trump–Mamdani pact and the capitalist state
> How the Democratic Socialists of America helped sell out the Philadelphia municipal workers
> After NYC elections, Jacobin offers services of DSA to Democratic establishment, union bureaucracy
> Jacobin advises union bureaucracy on how to respond to wave of contract rejections
> Ocasio-Cortez says pro-Palestinian demonstrations should be ‘shut down’

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Continue reading "Look Cool; Vote DSA" »

I had this flash of inspiration from a post by my comrade Owen Paine, who writes for Stop Me Before I Vote Again, where he quips in his trademark beat poetic fashion:

yes the ever more empty “fatal center”
where all hope plunges down and down toward citizen despair
and corporate joy

If you’re like me, you’ve heard the blabbing heads on TV mention the Democrats “reaching across the aisle” and “moving to the center” so goddamn’ many times it makes you want to put your head through a plate-glass window.

If you’re also like me, you do a massive facepalm every time the Democrats attempt another ill-advised and entirely lame “reach across the aisle” and end up being screwed, blued and tattooed by the GOP yet again. You’d think by now the Dems would have learned something about how “the Center” is a great bottomless time and energy-sucking maw of Hell, but apparently they have the learning capacity of a housefly — and if you know anything about houseflies, you know that’s damn’ near absolute zero.

With that in mind, I present the Democratic Party attempting to “move to the center” and “reach across the aisle” and having what I call a Wile E. Coyote Moment. You know how, in those old cartoons, the coyote is chasing the road runner across the top of a mesa, and the road runner — traveling at near supersonic speed — rockets effortlessly over the edge and across the gap to the top of the neighboring mesa while the coyote, recklessly following him, gets about halfway across and suddenly realizes he’s way the hell out there in the air all by himself, and right in that moment he thinks to himself “what the fuck am I…” just before he begins that long fall? Well, kind of like that.

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Continue reading "The Abyss" »

Anyone out there who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention knows by now that American politics are — not to be too blunt about it — really, really fucked up. And, nothing’s more fucked up in American politics right now than the way most media hacks and astroturfers define and obsess over “the Center” and whine about “the war on moderates”. After the US mid-term elections of 2010, US media pundits spent endless hours discussing how the Democratic Party needed to “move to the Center” — neglecting to mention, of course, that moving to “the Center” would require them to move to the right. In the wake of the recent elections in Greece and France, the chattering heads on American TV pissed their pants as they desperately asked “will the Center hold?”.

Lost in all of this is the fact that over the past twenty years or so, the “Center” in the US has been moving steadily to the right. President Drone Strike, who’s spent his entire term falling all over himself to suck up to right-wing cranks like John Boehner, is persistently labeled a “centrist” by the media. Rightist whackjobs like Sean Hannity label pro-corporate status-quo mouthpieces like CNN and the New York Times “the Leftist media”. Bland, toothless institutions like the Democratic Party, MoveOn and the AFL-CIO are tagged as “the Left” by the media and, in the meantime, people and organizations with real, actual Left beliefs and values are… which brings us to the inspiration for this large and extensively-researched infographic.

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…and here’s more centrist hilarity from December 2010:
“No Labels: Not Left, Not Right, Not Nothing”.

Continue reading "The American Political Spectrum: an Infographic" »