Defended Into Irrelevance
How the socialist left traded political machinery for social feeds, and why its defense concedes the case
In late June, after a string of primary victories by candidates backed by New York’s mayor, a familiar alarm sounded from the center of American politics. Former Senator Joe Manchin warned that the extremes were driving the national conversation and leaving most of the country behind.
The New York Times, defending its coverage of one of the winners, explained that it had spent years documenting extreme views on both sides. The alarm was framed as a new story about a country drifting toward its extremes.
The most persuasive response to the alarm came from the left-of-center press.1 Writing in The New Republic, Perry Bacon rejected the equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right, and he was right to do so.2
The left practices electoral democracy; its program is popular in some quarters; its officeholders are a small minority. The equivalence records none of these distinctions. Bacon, however, is answering the wrong question, and so are the centrists whose alarm he corrects.
The socialist left of 2026 has won real ground: the mayoralty of the largest city in the country, a handful of congressional seats, city council seats in Portland and elsewhere; it took most of them not from the right but from the Democratic Party’s own bench.
Those victories deserve credit, and they answer one question: the left can win power. What remains unsettled is whether it can hold it. The Democratic Socialists of America is a nonprofit organized through committees and 501(c)(4)s. It is not a party with a ballot line and the discipline a ballot line imposes, and it is not a union with members bound by a contract and a shared material interest. Whether a nonprofit can turn election nights into power that survives the term is the question both the alarm and the defense avoid.
The question has been posed before. In 1915, the Nonpartisan League, a dues-funded farmers’ organization, captured North Dakota’s government by running its candidates through Republican primaries: it elected a governor, chartered a state bank and a state mill, and within five years saw that governor become the first in American history to be recalled. The League survived only by merging into the Democratic Party, whose North Dakota affiliate still carries its initials.
Twenty-five years earlier, the Farmers’ Alliance had won legislatures across Kansas and the South on borrowed ballot lines, concluded within two years that it could not keep what it had won, and reorganized as the People’s Party. In the 1850s, when the Know-Nothings began winning elections, they shed their fraternal shell and announced themselves as the American Party.
In 2010, the Tea Party sent a generation of insurgents to Congress through committees and 501(c)(4)s; those insurgents persist mainly as the Freedom Caucus, disciplined not by the organizations that launched them but by the Republican primary. The one long-running socialist administration in American history, Milwaukee’s, governed city hall for most of the half century after 1910 in the opposite form: a party with a ballot line, a dues-paying membership, and candidates bound to a program. In the American record, the nonprofit and committee forms win office; the party form keeps it.3
The left’s recent victories are real, but the machinery to sustain them does not yet exist. For a decade, the left has traded for display the organization that would make its wins compound instead of evaporate. It has invoked a class it has not organized, substituted a social media audience for a party, and relied on institutions whose members never agreed to lend them to the left. It needs the machinery it has declined to build.4
Three Substitutions
The reason to doubt that these gains will last is that each rests on a substitution, display in place of organization. Marx distinguished a class in itself, a shared position in production, from a class for itself, a class that has recognized that position and organized to act on it.5 The American working class is the first and not yet the second. The post-Sanders left invokes the second while holding only the first. By defining the working class as everyone who is not a billionaire, the left folds salaried professionals, public-sector employees, and university faculty into the same category as warehouse and food-service labor, and then licenses a coalition of credentialed professionals to claim the standing of a class to which that coalition does not belong.6
The left organizes on social media, but a platform is not a party. The political theorist Jodi Dean calls this condition “communicative capitalism”: speech enters a circuit that translates it into engagement and disperses it as revenue, rewarding intensity over organization.7 The more a post inflames, the more it circulates; nothing in that circuit requires it to connect to dues, meetings, or votes. An online manifesto can reach a million readers without producing a single meeting. Face-to-face organizing produces members, obligations, and structures that outlast the news cycle.
The party form once concentrated that energy and pointed it toward a decision; algorithmic engagement, by contrast, directs the same energy toward revenue for the platform. A party answers to its members; a platform answers to its advertisers. A zoning vote becomes historic; the next post displaces the last; and the organization that won the vote recedes into the background of its own announcement. A socialist mayor elected by that circuit is not a socialist party, and winning the office does not come with the machinery that will outlast the term.8
The left builds inside someone else’s machinery: unions made by their members, not by the left. The Rank-and-File Strategy directs members into targeted unions, which it treats not as ends accountable to their members but as instruments for a political program. Since 2025, that program has been joined by an anti-Zionist test for any candidate seeking the DSA’s endorsement.
In Oregon, for example, endorsements in Portland City Council races have turned on international questions that many members never debated in a meeting. The dues-paying member who joined for a contract is enrolled, without a vote, in a project whose aims may not be hers. This institutional capture generates strikes, protests, and headlines, but it draws on a solidarity it did not create.
A union that subordinates its members’ shared material interests to a faction’s political program trades solidarity for ideological purity, handing legislators a ready argument: that the union speaks for a movement, not for its members.9
None of the three substitutions is a failure of will alone. Union density stands near a tenth of the workforce, the institutions that once carried working-class life are gone, and social media is the only assembly ground a demobilized city still offers. Those obstacles explain the substitutions. They do not redeem them. The class persists as a label, not as an organization, and the difficulty of the work does not turn the label into a fact. A movement that mistakes social media for the party will not build the party on the day conditions allow. If a more favorable moment arrives, it will find a left with slogans, candidates, and hashtags, but still without the mass organizations that could seize it.
An Ironic Defense
On the basic question of democratic legitimacy, Bacon is right: the left accepts the elections it loses, while the movement it is compared to tried to overturn one. On that point, the asymmetry is not close, and the centrists who blur it are evading a real difference between the two.
His remaining defenses are the three substitutions, mistaken for virtues. He says the left is loyal to the electoral form; in practice, it relies on elections in place of an organized class. He says its program is popular; yet polling well is what a class in itself can do without becoming a class for itself, and majorities have favored redistribution for decades while the power to enact it did not exist. He says its officeholders are powerless: each of the two socialists who recently won House primaries ranks, by his own count, around the 250th among Democrats in Washington. He calls anyone who thinks the two blocs are close in power “either stupid or dishonest.” A social media presence, a handful of captured locals, and a roster of officeholders do not make a party. Point by point, Bacon shows that the left is not dangerous because it is not yet a force capable of holding what it wins. The irony of Bacon’s defense is that he is entirely correct.
The weakness, in Bacon’s telling, is the centrists’ fault. The conflation of socialist and Trumpist, he writes, is a rhetorical tool, and the harm lies with the people who wield it. That account is too generous to the left and too hard on its critics. The centrists did not invent the left’s organizational fragility; they merely described it. A decade of invoking a class without organizing it, and of announcing victories without building the machinery to sustain them, has produced a left whose harmlessness a single column can assert without contradiction. The conflation works because the condition it names is real.
Bacon never asks what would make the left worth fearing or defending. He measures the socialist left against the MAGA right and finds the socialist left smaller. By that narrow measure, he is accurate. But smallness is not harmlessness, and a harmless left is not a program at all. A left that had organized the class it invokes would not need a sympathetic columnist to point out how little it can do; it would be a power its opponents would have to answer, the way organized labor once forced answers from employers and courts. Bacon can defend the left only in the language of reassurance; the left’s present weakness will not support anything bolder. The defense that the left is no threat is also the admission that it has not yet become anything its opponents are required to reckon with.
His advice points the same way. Socialists, liberals, and pro-democracy conservatives should contest the primaries and then unite to defeat the right in the general election. The arithmetic is sound, but it exposes the mechanism of the left’s own containment: the major party as the place where insurgent energy is gathered, ranked, and filed into a permanent minority. The promise that the left is no threat and the demand that it fall into line are the same claim.
A left worth fearing or defending would do the opposite of all three. It would organize the class it invokes into dues-funded organizations it controls, link elected officials to those organizations through binding obligations rather than biographical affinity, and build unions and parties that answer first to their members’ shared material interests. It would treat elections as one tactic among others, not as a substitute for the organized base it lacks.
The equivalence is false, and the left’s defenders are right to reject it, but their very defense reveals a more serious danger. The danger is not that the left is called extreme. The danger is that the description offered in its defense is accurate: a class invoked and not organized, social media where a party should stand, a union captured and not built. The left has shown it can win offices; it has not shown it can hold them. A movement can survive being called dangerous. It is harder to survive being defended into irrelevance, and hardest of all when the defense is true. If the left is to escape that condition, it will have to do the thing it has so far described more often than it has done: build the machinery that could make its own arguments finally matter.
Notes
1. Paul Krugman has offered a stronger version of the same case, arguing that most self-described democratic socialists are in fact social democrats, supporters of progressive taxation, a safety net, and market regulation, and that the appeal of “socialism” reflects anger at oligarchy rather than support for socialism as such. Where Bacon defends the left as harmless, Krugman defends it as, in substance, not socialist at all. See Paul Krugman, “There Are Very Few Socialists in America,” Paul Krugman (Substack), July 2, 2026.
2. Perry Bacon, “Democratic Centrists Need to Stop Saying ‘Both Sides’ Have ‘Extremes,’” The New Republic, June 30, 2026, https://newrepublic.com/article/212517/. Former Senator Joe Manchin’s remark and the statement attributed to The New York Times are quoted there, as are the officeholder tallies cited below.
3. On the Nonpartisan League and the recall of Governor Lynn Frazier, Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (University of Minnesota Press, 1955). On the Farmers’ Alliance and the founding of the People’s Party, Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976). On Milwaukee’s Socialist administrations, Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12, no. 1 (1985): 51–74.
4. The three arguments are developed at length in Ramin Farahmandpur, “The Trojan Horse Strategy: How the DSA Is Using Unions as Political Vehicles,” Academic Gadfly, March 6, 2026; “The Feed and the Party: The Illusion of Machinery in Municipal Socialism,” Academic Gadfly, April 24, 2026; and “The Imagined Proletariat: Rhetoric without a Subject,” Academic Gadfly, May 2, 2026, https://academicgadfly.substack.com.
5. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), for the formulation of a class “for itself”; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–46).
6. On the working class defined by negation against “billionaires” and the absorption of distinct strata into one category, Farahmandpur, “The Imagined Proletariat” (note 4). Union density figures are drawn from the same source.
7. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity, 2010); Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke, 2009); Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016); and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso, 2019).
8. On the genres of the feed and the distinction between a DSA-endorsed mayor and a party that would hold the office accountable, Farahmandpur, “The Feed and the Party” (note 4).
9. On the Rank-and-File Strategy, the 2025 endorsement test, and the Oregon record, including the Portland City Council campaigns and the “Socialists in Office” committee, Farahmandpur, “The Trojan Horse Strategy” (note 4).