DSA in the tent
A conversation between Searchlight's Tré Easton and socialist union organizer Cassie Pritchard
The allegations are true. I’m a certified terminally online POASTER. Even as I find the social media platform formerly known as Twitter deeply exhausting and toxic, I still enjoy connecting with people online, usually over politics (and occasionally over Philadelphia Eagles fandom). We’ve lost the art of the discourse—especially across differences of opinion. Crazy as it sounds, I genuinely find utility in engaging with people this way.
But obviously this is not the best way to have political discourse. To remedy that, I invited my internet (and now real-life) politics friend Cassie Pritchard to the Searchlight office for a chat. Cassie is a long-time DSA organizer. She’s someone with deeply held socialist opinions, but she’s also heterodox. She understands the electoral benefits of moderation. She recognizes that the Democratic Party is best when it’s a “Big Tent.” And she’s a YIMBY!
At a moment when the DSA and progressive left are feeling their strongest, it’s easy to caricature their movement as overly dogmatic and unrealistic. To be clear, there are certainly people in the DSA (including some of their leaders) who I think have some pretty-half baked views of the world. I also think that Democrats would do well to aggressively and consistently call out the excesses (and in some cases patent absurdities) within the DSA platform. But Cassie has a comparatively nuanced view of political constraints and a clear-eyed approach to public opinion. She recently wrote a powerful essay reflecting on the public’s views of trans women, an issue that is quite personal to her because she transitioned in her 30s.
We need more of this honest and self-reflective thinking from ALL factions of the Democratic Party. As the party begins to unify after a bitter and particularly divisive primary season, this is more important than ever.
I think it’s critical to always be reassessing one’s priors. That’s part of the ethos at Searchlight. It’s easy to take up a factional position and constantly defend it to the hilt. It’s incredibly difficult to admit where your own worldview may have limitations and, even more, where your opponents’ may have true merit.
One of Western democracy’s great liberals, John Stuart Mill, perhaps said it best:
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
If you have a strong opinion about the DSA—and odds are if you’ve gotten this far, you do—ask yourself: have you heard their arguments in “their most plausible and persuasive form?”
If we have a better sense of where each of us is coming from, we might be able to salvage the Democratic Party and, indeed, the country we’re all lucky to call home.
-Tré (Searchlight VP and cynically happy political warrior)