The Socialist Awakening by John B. Judis

Author:John B. Judis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Berniecrats and Trotskyists

If you look at the DSA’s membership of approximately 70,000, there are probably 1,500 to 2,000 dedicated activists who live and breathe the organization. Beyond that, there are about 15,000 members who go to at least several meetings a year and can be called on to work on campaigns. (These numbers account for the 24 percent of the organization that voted in the 2019 referendum on whether to endorse Sanders.) The other members pay annual dues the way that they would annually contribute to the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood.

Many of the paper members and some of the semi-activists are what Sunkara has called “Berniecrats”—they were inspired to join the DSA by his campaign and share his view of socialism as Scandinavian social democracy and as the fulfillment of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights and an opposition to racial and sexual discrimination. Some of the activists and political officials among DSA’s leaders have broken with orthodox Marxism. David Duhalde joined DSA’s youth group in 2003 when he was at Bowdoin. After graduation, he was an organizer for the Young Democratic Socialists. He became DSA’s deputy director in 2015, at a time when the membership exploded. After the 2016 election, he become the political director of Sanders’s Our Revolution, and is now the vice-chair of DSA’s Fund, which gives grants to organizations and publications. “I view socialism emerging through social democracy,” says Duhalde. “I see a lot of striving for a social democracy in a [Eduard] Bernstein fashion that will one day become a socialist society.… I’m more concerned with building social democracy day to day than with what socialism looks like when we get there.”

Khalid Kamau helped organize a Black Lives Matter chapter in Atlanta in 2015. In 2016, he joined DSA and worked on the Sanders campaign, becoming a convention delegate. That experience, he says, inspired him to run for city council in 2017 in South Fulton, southwest of Atlanta; he won with 67 percent of the vote. With the council merely being a part-time job, Kamau moonlights as a Lyft driver.

Kamau described himself as a “Christian, vegan-eating socialist.” “At my church,” he explains, “we had a young lady. She wasn’t going to be able to go back to school because she couldn’t pay her bills. We raised a thousand dollars to play her bills. That’s socialism.” When a DSA caucus proposed that the organization only back candidates who were declared socialists, he disagreed. “When we are involved in a campaign,” Kamau, who was the chairman of Metro Atlanta DSA, said, “it helps if they are socialist. But if they are half-decent, that’s fine. Socialism is about people being more important than profits.” Kamau added, “To me the journey is more important than the destination.” When I told him that he was echoing Bernstein, he said he didn’t know about “evolutionary socialism.”

Vaughn Stewart, thirty-one, is a state legislator from Montgomery County, Maryland. Originally from Anniston, Alabama, he and his wife moved to Maryland after he finished law school.

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