Two and a Half Cheers for the Dirty Stay
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the authors.
Since at least 2017, DSA members have been arguing about “the break”—the putative moment when we will split from the Democratic Party—and our relationship to the Dems more generally. These, ahem, discussions, have only been getting more virulent recently, particularly in the face of the 2024 presidential election’s choice between Trump and Biden/Harris, and as chapters across the country struggle with how to relate to DSA electeds once they’re actually in office.
Last week, fellow SMC comrade David Duhalde released an article making the correct observation that DSA leadership and membership alike continue to be oriented around intervening in Democratic Party primaries, despite numerous resolutions expressing our interest in starting our own party: a situation he dubs “the dirty stay.” He rightly points out that there is a mismatch between our immediate strategy (operating within the Democratic Party) and the long-term goal of party-building and urges us to adopt the “more honest orientation” of fully embracing our current status as a faction within the Democratic Party.
Perhaps predictably, this argument received backlash from others within the organization, especially among those who see party building as a critical goal for the socialist project. But rather than viewing it as an unpleasant contradiction that should be resolved by giving up on the party project, we think that the core tension of the dirty stay—the conflict between our ambition to build a new party and our dependence on the Democratic ballot line and electorate—is what makes DSA’s electoral program work.
“DSA can never be and will never be simply a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party. We are not exclusively an electoral organization. ”
First, DSA can never be and will never be simply a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party. We are not exclusively an electoral organization. We do many things that the Democrats have no interest in doing. We organize across different terrains, using diverse tactics, in hopes of cohering and articulating a working-class majority that does not currently exist. We have political education, social events, and internally and externally facing publications.
In other words, we have a robust, democratic, social, and political life that is not reducible to the infrastructure necessary to get people elected. In fact, it is precisely our ability to do both—build a base through organizing projects among workers, tenants, immigrants, and the broad masses that we can then articulate through elections that win us power in the state—that sets us apart from the Democrats and from the indeterminate soup of the progressive NGO left.
We can’t break.
The factual situation described by break-skeptics is real and serious. It describes real contradictions that aren’t easily dismissed. The inescapable truth is that America is a deeply divided country, and we fall squarely on one side of it. No matter how corrupt, or pro-capitalist, or imperialist the Democrats might be, the logic that they are “materially the same” as the Republicans simply does not hold. Even the worst blue state is starkly different from red-state government on a series of key issues that dirty breakers, or even the more dogmatic clean breakers, fail to look squarely in the eye.
As much as we can point to issues where there is little daylight between the parties, such as the genocide in Gaza, there is one party intent on eliminating bodily autonomy for 52% of the population and one party that seeks to protect it. There is one party that consistently undermines Black political representation in America, and one through which Black political participation overwhelmingly runs. There is one party that (however attenuated) protects the existence of the labor movement in this country, and one that has been incredibly successful over nearly one hundred years in trying to destroy it. As much as they try, breakers cannot wish away the fundamental contradiction of American politics. It simply is.
Attempts by breakers (clean and dirty) to dodge these contradictions have become increasingly destructive. Whether it is striving to misunderstand and alienate AOC at every turn, writing in ever more elaborate loyalty tests for elected officials and members alike, or the paranoiac politics of combating “NGO co-optation” by internal enemies, the impulse to turn away from political reality has led to increasingly vicious and self-destructive internal politics.
The truth is that the broad spectrum of American opinion that stands to the left of center is represented in the state by the liberal coalition of the Democratic party, and the formal ways out of that have mostly been written out of law or custom since the 1930s.
We must break.
But that’s such a bummer, isn’t it? No one wants to sign up to be in the club that adjuncts for the Democrats but doesn’t even get cut in on the fun graft. And while it might be technically correct, it feels hollow to say that the legalistic, contentless nature of the American two-party system means that we sneakily can have a party, just not in a way you could explain to your grandma.
“People don’t join DSA because of a set of policy commitments. We join because it promises that political life can look and feel different than it does right now.”
We signed up for DSA because a guy named Bernie Sanders showed that being an Independent and speaking to the needs of ordinary people created an opening to beat (or at least bloody) Democrats; because a bartender from Queens knocked off a guy on the fast track to be Speaker of the House in a primary; and because it looked for a hot second like the entire political system might collapse in 2020. People don’t join DSA because of a set of policy commitments. We join because it promises that political life can look and feel different than it does right now. People join DSA because of the possibility—however evanescent—of a transcendent break that delivers us from the drudgery and decline of the contemporary United States.
In other words, the dirty stay isn’t a result of a contradiction in what we say and what we do— it’s a contradiction between what we can do and why we do it in the first place. When approached responsibly, it is a contradiction that adds, rather than saps energy.
This contradiction—between engagement with the institutions of American political life as they exist and promising the possibility of transcending them—goes beyond the party question and suffuses all of our most productive work. We elect Democrats, but Democrats who participate in socialist politics and are connected to a socialist political base on the promise that this will transform American political life. We organize in established unions, even unions with checkered pasts, on the promise that doing so can revitalize them. When we organize workers into new unions with EWOC, we counsel them to seek representation under the umbrella of the NLRA—the law that imperfectly protects workers’ rights and inextricably ties the fortunes of the labor movement to the fortunes of the Democratic party. We do that because it is the most sustainable (really, only sustainable) way to maintain a union, and on the promise that if enough workers organize we can reform labor law (or at least the terms of labor peace) to fundamentally rebalance workplace power. We are in a “dirty stay” not just with the Democrats, but with America itself.
“ We are in a ‘dirty stay’ not just with the Democrats, but with America itself. ”
The desire to break does more than keep morale up. The fact of the matter is that even if we continue to rely on their ballot line—and, for the foreseeable future, their votes—we don’t depend on them for our political future. While in some cases we depend on Democratic Party infrastructure, we already are in the business of building our own lists, our own orientations to the legislature, our own turnout plans. All that infrastructure building is crucial now, not in some hypothetical future worker’s party, because it gives us the chance to talk to people about the politics we care about in the ways we want to. Whatever political independence we have, it comes from the fact that we can write our own legislation and support our legislators, socially and materially, in casting difficult votes. That doesn’t go away because we’re running in Democratic primaries, but it also doesn’t happen if we are not actively pursuing political independence.
It would be foolhardy to suggest that there is no pull towards the center for our legislators when they caucus with Democrats. The desire to break reminds us that we need to actively counteract those incentives by building our own political communities through organizing that connects elections to other sites of working-class struggle.
If we embrace the dirty stay instead of trying to resolve the party question once and for all, we can have our cake and eat it too. The relentless pragmatism of having to stay keeps us pointed to where politics is actually happening and the real limitations of our present. At its best, the urge to break prevents us from getting swept up in the exigencies of the moment. It calls us to explain and justify each move with respect to the future we want to build, which when deployed responsibly, is a necessary corrective to the relentless pull towards moderation that happens when you’re trying to accomplish things in the present.
It doesn’t matter whether the break is going to happen or not, it matters what we can accomplish when we orient our action to that ideal. “The break,” however it is conceptualized, is a political horizon that we can work for, even if we don’t know what it means, when it might happen, or what it could look like.
Long live the dirty stay.
Duhalde is right that we need to be able to intervene in important general elections on behalf of our side in the objective coalitions that divide America in two. But getting to that place is not a question of getting out of the dirty stay, but becoming yet more comfortable with it. Our way forward is neither to accept that the liberal coalition will look like this forever, as Duhalde suggests, nor is it the breaker’s path of flying the red banner in defiance of an objective truth that dozens of millions of Americans acknowledge. Instead, our task is to live with the tension with clear eyes and a full heart.
Our agnosticism might read as dour pessimism to the breakers, or telltale evidence of secret treason hidden in our breasts. To stayers, it might seem like needless obfuscation or strategic confusion. But surely in 2024, isn't real agnosticism about the party question—a true refusal to say how the future must unfold, as ironclad extrapolation of present action or timeless theory—the most hopeful and honest option available?
The dirty stay can be productive or it can be pathological, but it's real and not something we can simply opt out of. We can’t break. We must break. Long live the dirty stay.