Socialism in America, New York Magazine-style
By: Ross Barkan
Tags: Dsa, Politics, Democratic Socialism, Socialism

The drive for narrative can represent both the very best and worst of what journalism has to offer. At its essence, narrative is a device hatched from literary fiction, where language is allowed to violate order and soar, and naturally bleeds into nonfiction, especially when practiced by those who aspire to write well. Journalists are always on the hunt for narratives. They want to tell stories, good stories. Editors and publications nurture this human instinct. In our fractured digital age, we are as hungry as ever to arrange the glittering dandruff of life into something compelling.

Inevitably, a story like Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s treatment of the socialist rise in New York Magazine would arrive. Splashed across the magazine’s cover this week, the story is riveting and gossipy and highbrow when it needs to be, inhaling the scene of democratic socialism in New York. Many of the people namechecked are people I know personally or in passing. I’ve been to that happy hour, slurped drinks in that publishing house’s loft space, traded messages with the brilliant Facebook essayist. Like Gossip Girl, Gawker, and the New York Observer of yore, this magazine is after a certain kind of New York: insular, clannish, preppy, and, above all else, sexy.

That’s the thesis here. Socialism has sex appeal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most famous freshman member of Congress ever and she will identify as a democratic socialist. Julia Salazar is a New York state senator and a democratic socialist. Neither of them are 30. And all the people flocking to the movement seem to be born around the same time.

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the booming organization that is now the face of socialism and responsible for an underrated amount of grassroots organizing, are peeved about this piece. And, well, I understand. They weren’t looking for the Gossip Girl line. They are a serious organization. They knock on a lot of doors. It’s not as thrilling or wondrous as a Valentine’s Day loft party with lefty Twitter influencers. Canvassers don’t make good characters.

Day-to-day life in DSA, if you’re committed enough, is not about attending happy hours or even the impenetrable, easily-mocked endorsement processes. If you’re involved in electoral work, it’s grueling and world-affirming. You’re going to knock on the doors of strangers, have conversations about candidates and policies, and log data. You’re doing it in the heat or the pouring rain. You are attempting to moblize people. It’s a story worth telling. It’s not the story told here.

That’s the danger of narrative. A journalist hangs around with the same kind of people and gets an idea. In this piece, he may run into friends from Brown who are now socialists. Where are socialists most easily found? On Twitter, because they don’t wear bright red t-shirts and caps identifying themselves in real life. Or at a party or two.

Is this approach wrong? Not necessarily. It’s incomplete. As a social tale alone, it sings. I really enjoyed reading it. I will reread it.

As a story of socialism’s rise in America, in New York City, the nuts-and-bolts of it, it doesn’t deliver, though perhaps that was never its intention. Right now, DSA is engaged in a battle to elect the next district attorney of Queens. Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender, is a candidate in the Larry Krasner mode and someone who, if she can somehow defeat six rivals, has the ability to profoundly reshape the criminal justice system in one of the largest counties in America. Cabán doesn’t rate a mention in the magazine piece. If Ocasio-Cortez’s power to transform politics lies less in her office than her influence— she is a first-termer in a body of 435, up against a Republican-controlled Senate — Cabán’s power could exist in the inverse: her office endows her immediately with the ability to change the lives of many thousands of people, if not more.

I’ll address my own quote in the piece, which I stand by, and another from the founder of Jacobin, a socialist magazine. I told the reporter who wrote the piece that DSA can be an intimidating entity for newcomers and that it has yet to become a genuine working class organization. In my estimation, these two challenges bleed into each other. First, there is nothing wrong with college-educated, affluent people supporting some form of socialism — I would describe myself as a socialist, or at least someone who believes the profit motive must be excised from as many facets of society as possible — driving a movement. Successful leftist movements have always involved the educated. It’s important for those who have privilege to recognize their privilege and act accordingly.

A different New York Magazine story could have explored why recent leftist and socialist movements in the United States have been fueled by this affluent, white collar class and not the people who would probably benefit from socialism the most; why labor unions, in New York and elsewhere, have wholly abandoned their radical roots, propping up centrist Democrats or outright Republicans in exchange for half a loaf or less. Nineteenth and early 20th century socialism looked very different. It was poorer and it was certainly less white, with remarkable figures like Paul Robeson and Hubert Harrison at the vanguard. If any figure today harkens to those beginnings, it’s Bernie Sanders, who has been vilified by the neoliberal center for harping too much on class, though he knows exactly the score.

In New York City, DSA still thrives in areas where young people with college educations cluster, and has little presence elsewhere. As time goes on, it will be important for the organization to establish chapters in neglected communities like Coney Island, Brownsville, East New York, Southeast Queens, and wherever else only establishment Democratic politics have had any kind of beachhead. This won’t be easy. I do believe DSA is up to the challenge. They are blessed with energy and organizational talent. It will be a matter of doing what they do best — knocking on doors and having conversations.

It will also mean understanding how the working class talks. This is the point I was alluding to in New York Magazine. Language policing has been necessary to ensure that bigotry is no longer socially acceptable, as it was in the last half century, but it must not be used to alienate allies. Newcomers to DSA, especially those who haven’t attended certain schools or read the right books, will not know about the “progressive stack,” how to make introductions by first identifying the pronouns they prefer, or that it’s a faux pas to say “manpower” instead of “people-power.” This doesn’t mean we should abandon such practices. What it means is, you have to meet people where they are. Have patience. Political incorrectness should be corrected. But not all those who act and speak in such a way are endowed with original sin.

In the article, Bhaskar Sunkara, the Jacobin founder, attempts to make a point about the importance of class by stating, “I’d rather be a black middle-class person than a white poor person.” His point, argued more artfully in his forthcoming book, is that identity politics, without the bedrock of class, can become a cudgel for neoliberals to dismiss the importance of combating rapacious capitalism and greed. I disagree with how Sunkara made his point in the piece itself: it’s a silly thing to say, weighing the discrimination a black person faces against the lack of opportunity afforded to a poor white person. It’s a distracting contention. Everyone, when it’s over, retreats to their own camps, certain of their superiority.

What Sunkara could have said, however, is that race and class both matter. One does not triumph over the other in the privilege Olympics; they are intertwined, and the American story can’t be told without either. The oppression and exploitation of slaves and later share-croppers had its roots in pernicious racism and economics — white supremacy was a matter of good business. Plantation owners, in the calculus of 19th century capitalism, believed they were entitled to make as much money as they could at the expense of human life. Those who defended the status quo, including many in the North, argued it would be too disruptive to the American economy to just free such people. Their descendants have always been there to lecture to us that all kinds of economic liberation is not sensibile or feasible, that degradation must be the status quo. It recalls the old Fredric Jameson line: “It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”

America must learn class solidarity and perhaps DSA, in due time, will be the organization to spread that gospel. Liberals should stop mocking the largely white, homogenous townspeople of the Midwest who don’t understand the concept of white privilege because everyone looks the same and works a minimum wage retail job, if they can get one at all. And they must recognize these people have more in common, economically and even culturally, with black and brown NYCHA tenants battling deteriorating housing conditions than they imagine.

This is the most difficult aspect of the debate around race and class, because it’s not zero sum and never will be. Social media makes it seem so, because the construct of social media, particularly Twitter, often dissuades nuance, even when an influencer is threading. And it’s that sort of online combat that makes a magazine piece just a bit more entertaining.

Some DSA members may fret that this narrative is frozen in amber: they are too well-off, too white, too much a social club. The corporate media did them in again. But they still have the power to tell the story they want to tell. There will be more journalists and editors on the hunt for a narrative. There will be more opportunities to tell the truth as DSA sees it. They will just have to seize them.