As DSA gets stronger, and as we get better at winning elections, more candidates will seek our endorsement. In some chapters, this has reached the point that multiple DSA members are interested in running for the same seat, and they all seek the chapter’s endorsement. This has not happened yet in our chapter, but it is only a matter of time, and we should be prepared for that to happen. In this piece, I will explain why we should view the DSA endorsement process as the determination of who the sole DSA candidate is in a given race, and expect all members to abide by the result.
Liberalism in Electoral Work
Many people in DSA, especially those of us with prior electoral experience, come from liberal organizing backgrounds. As a result, we have learned various assumptions about how politics works, and elections in particular. One of these assumptions is based on the fact that everyone has the legal right to run for any office (as long as they meet the legal qualifications). Comrades who still have a liberal view of electoral work view the decision to run for office as an individual decision. A candidate may confer with their family, friends, and political allies before deciding to run, but the decision is still made by the individual. Just as the liberal ideological framework in general privileges the capitalist class, this individual decision-making privileges the wealthy1. A well-off candidate, with well-off family and friends, can easily start a campaign as an individual and raise enough money to be taken seriously by institutional actors. However, if the candidate is not well-off, and most of their friends and family are not, then they will have a much harder time raising enough money as an individual to be taken seriously. While there are individual socialists who are well-off, in order to build a strong socialist project, we need a scalable model that can work for working class candidates regardless of personal wealth.
Part of the socialist model of organizing, whether electoral or otherwise, is that major campaigns do not start as a result of individual decisions; they start from collective decisions made by a party2. In order for electoral work to be a viable terrain of struggle for the socialist movement, we need to view the decision to launch an electoral campaign through this lens. Running a socialist candidate for office is a decision made by the organization, not by the individual candidate. As we work together to convert ourselves from atomized liberal individuals to members of a socialist organization, we need to identify these elements of liberal ideology and replace them with socialist frameworks. Granted, any decision made by the organization will start with an idea proposed by an individual member, but we need to draw a distinction between the origin of the idea and the point of decision: while any member can (and should) suggest that they or someone else would be a good candidate to run for any particular office, only the organization makes the decision about who will run for which office.
Socialist Framework in Practice
Applying the socialist framework to electoral work, the decision of whether or not to run a campaign is made by the organization, and then it is a campaign by the organization, not by an individual. In a cadre organization (an organization that only has active members and no paper members), this would mean that all the members would actively support the campaign (to the extent possible given their commitments to other campaigns). However, DSA is not a cadre organization, so there is no requirement that everyone support the campaign. Regardless, just like with any other campaign, we would expect all members to at least refrain from acting in opposition to the campaign, and running against a DSA-endorsed candidate would certainly count as acting in opposition to the campaign.
Because we cannot instantly replace the liberal framework with the socialist framework, we should expect that there will still be some electoral campaigns that start from individual decisions rather than organizational decisions. Thus, we will have some members who continue their campaigns even if they do not get the chapter’s endorsement. Over time, this should become less common, but in the short term, we should at least make sure that we don’t have members actively opposing the chapter’s campaigns by running against endorsed candidates.
Why do we run candidates?
There are multiple different perspectives on why we run candidates for elected office. The Bernstein model is to elect socialist majorities in legislative bodies and pass laws that will transition to socialism. The Miliband model assumes that the capitalist class will resist such laws, leading to a revolutionary rupture. Other models assume that the capitalist class will initiate a crackdown before we can elect a socialist majority, so the non-electoral wings of the party need to be as strong as possible before the crackdown comes. In these models, socialists in elected office need to serve as tribunes of the people and/or organizers, using their office to strengthen the other wings of the party.
While these perspectives have significant disagreements, they share one common feature: socialist elected officials will have to take actions that are risky to their political career but serve the interests of the party. In order to make this decision, the SIO will have to prioritize the interests of the organization above their individual political career. While we can never be absolutely confident that any SIO will put the interests of the party above their political career in all situations, we can at least implement a filter to identify some of the potential candidates who will prioritize their own political career: requiring a commitment to abide by the result of the endorsement process. Continuing to run even if the chapter endorses a different candidate would be an act of prioritizing one’s individual political career over the interests of the organization. Thus, someone who refuses to commit to end their campaign if the chapter endorses a different candidate for that race is a candidate who would be more likely to prioritize their individual political career over the interests of the organization in other contexts as well.
Instrumental case for democracy
However, prioritizing one’s individual political career is not the only reason why a candidate might be inclined to continue running even if someone else gets the endorsement. The candidate may simply believe that they are the best possible candidate for the organization to run for that office. Presumably, all of our candidates believe this, because they would not have agreed to run otherwise. However, believing oneself to be the best choice for the organization to run for an office does not mean that one should continue to run after the organization decides to run someone else, for the simple reason that everyone can be wrong sometimes.
Although we believe that democratic decision-making is inherently good, it also has instrumental value: Because we can all be wrong, a single person making a decision always has a risk of making the wrong decision. However, if the decision is made by a vote among multiple people who all have sufficient knowledge of the situation that they are more likely to be correct than not, then the group decision is much more likely to be correct than any one individual. The advantage provided by democracy is even greater when we engage in deliberation prior to the vote, sharing the relevant knowledge that each of us have, and then test our positions through carrying out the democratical decision, expanding our pool of available knowledge.
In any major decisions that we make as an organization, we all need the humility to accept that the group decision is more likely to be correct than any one of us is as an individual. This principle applies just as much to choosing which candidate to run as it does to any other decision about a campaign. Thus, even though a candidate believes themself to be the best choice for the organization to run for a particular office, humility with respect to democratic decision-making and prioritizing the interests of the organization over the candidate’s individual political career still require that the candidate abide by the results of the endorsement process and not run if a different candidate is endorsed.
by Eric Herde
