Part of this imo was that Johnson had no real connections to municipal power structures outside the CTUniverse and had to strip-mine grassroots/movement-adjacent organizations to staff his administration

Maybe we can get some more dem leaders on tv to say he’s doing a great job

Yes, the Rx of foregoing actual social democratic governance is foolish. On the other hand… it can be a counterweight in some ways to liberal(ish) tendencies that could collapse DSA into a less-well-funded WFP. Their argument against the Ossé endorsement in nyc was the most convincing one I read

How I feel about MUG in general: their analysis is largely correct, their characterizations of tendencies pretty spot-on, their prescriptions almost totally disconnected from reality and necessarily entailing permanent left marginality

Feel like democratic socialists need to get back to that constitutional agitation thing that they were doing from 2017 to 2019 which demands to abolish the electoral college, abolish the senate, and so on. Aziz Rana's scholarship on this country's legal mechanisms should be required reading.

Surely a symptom of my only having been active in big city chapters, but I’m more surprised if an elected *doesn’t* come personally to make their case at an endorsement meeting...

China Miéville’s October. Listened to it on audiobook; immediately listened to it all the way through again.

LA Taco has been doing the best local coverage

My pleasure

This is also why WFP has a large national staff and DSA has almost none. To many members this is a massive deficit in our organization, but to many members a sign that they’ve wrestled structural control out of the hands professionalized political class

DSA is technically also a 501(c)4 nonprofit, but the presence of left factions participating in member democracy has created a strong internal tension: ED role has been vacant since the longtime director was forced out by the factions seeking to cement a more party-like structure

WFP is trying to up their funding through recruiting dues paying individual members, but (at least last I asked staff) they depend on some amount of foundation funding. They also have a full on NGO structure, so unelected leaders: e.g. executive directors at the national and state levels

Sure! Full disclosure, I’m squarely a DSA partisan. But yes, national DSA is 98% funded by member dues, which trickles down to local chapters via a dues share formula. The other 2% is like, individual donations. Membership confers voting privileges for internal leadership elections.

The difference, fundamentally, is member democracy and foundation funding. Structural differences that reflect different theories of democratic change

H Mart got me with that big ass jar recently too, immediate life enhancer

SMUG is real and I know them personally