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Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

> the American “left”

I like that you quote it there.

I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.

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Maybe because the country is blocked in a two-party systems? In other democratic countries, you do not have "the left" represented by one single entity. You instead have a multitude of political parties that can negotiate with each others to push for their political goals. That makes the political landscape dynamic, new parties are created, reorganized, disbanded all the time.

In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).

I don't understand it either. Looking from across the pond at what they do, the Democrat party would be considered highly conservative in Europe.

They executed Joe Hill and Fred Hampton, and imprisoned Eugene Debs for years.

Just look at COINTELPRO for example, that's what happens.

Propaganda and the dominant ideology, I think.

Although there’s still the CPUSA, PSL and even the DSA.

They are. For example Seattle has a council member from the Socialist Alternative party. There are a few Democratic congress representatives that are socialists (both in state and national level). Some socialist policies have successfully been pushed by socialist party members (e.g. the current medicare for all bill has around 100 democratic house members backing it up).

However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.

I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US.

There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.

It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.

I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.

DSA isn't no-quotes-left. It has gone full steam into identity politics if you ask me (I'm not American, but this is just based on what I've been seeing from them, correct me if I'm wrong). I don't mean that in a negative way and I'm not making any judgements of morality or anything, but no-quotes-left has a class conscience, today's left has an identity conscience (gender, ethnicity, etc). Both fight for equality (new left also for equity) but the ideology has shifted from a class struggle to a new kind of struggle that has replaced the nobility and bourgeoisie for the white cis male, and the proletariat for BIPOC, women, gender non conforming, etc.

Edit: equality+equity.

The DSA is a mix. It has grown in leaps and bounds, but before it did that it was this kind of small social democratic organization with a kind of unique politics that came from Michael Harrington, and was more interested in being a bit of a left wing lobby inside the Democrats.

With the rise of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of people getting into socialist and left wing politics, it became quite a bit broader and larger and vibrant. And my impression is it became of a centre of gravity for other left tendencies in the US to coalesce.

There's quite a few different groupings in there these days. I don't think you can make a broad generalization like you did here.

Apologies for the broad generalization (as I said, correct me if I'm wrong, and I stand corrected here). That being said, if what you say is true, it's a pity that either the main stream media's reporting doesn't reflect that diversity or that the louder voices don't leave space for the rest of viewpoints.

Agreed. I'm a far-left (libertarian) communist in America, and from what I've seen/read, the DSA is effectively the slightly-left wokish arm of the Democratic party. Think "public healthcare" with a big dose of "what are everyone's pronouns?!"

They're more concerned about trigger words and identity politics than dismantling capitalism.

IIRC up-thread I wrote complaining about "woke" leftists who are "three times as strict on culture-war issues as on economics", and I was referring precisely to today's DSA. As a supporter of the Harringtonite social-democratic class-struggle approach, what the org has become kind of disgusts me.

It's worth pointing out tho that the DSA members elected to congress were elected as Democrats.

Not necessarily - Bernie Sanders runs as an independent and just caucuses with the Democrats (same for Angus King, the other independent in the Senate, although he's not of the DSA). However, it doesn't look like anyone in the House is an independent, so maybe Bernie's the only one that does that.

Bernie Sanders isn't DSA, though generally the DSA likes him.

It's because of the 2 party system we are stuck with.

Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.

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