DSA Debate on "Democracy" in the U.S.

DSA's Education Committee organized a debate between Luke Pickrell and Jerry Harris about democracy, the Constitution, and the 2024 presidential elections.

Perspectives on American ‘Democracy’ 

This is an edited version of Luke’s opening remarks at a recent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) debate.

Democracy and the U.S. Constitution are the most critical topics facing the American left today. The Constitution always shapes our lives, but awareness of its power is heightened during presidential elections. And wouldn’t you know it, this is an election year. The Democrats’ message is clear. Trump is an aspiring dictator, and the MAGA movement is fascist. Only a vote for Joe will neutralize the bad guys because only Democrats will defend democracy, maintain the “guard rails” of the Constitution, and ensure the sun keeps rising each morning. 

I have three arguments this afternoon, each under the umbrella of “democratic republicanism.” The first is that contrary to what Biden says, the U.S. is not a democracy. Second, we should care that we don’t live in a democracy. Third, the theory of classical Marxism (everything before the Bolsheviks established a one-party state), along with the history of the Civil Rights Movement and Students for a Democratic Society, has much to offer a mass democratic socialist movement in this country. 

Democratic republicanism is one of three perspectives on the American left. The other two I’ll call “electoral” and “socialist.” These two put the struggle for democracy on the back burner.

The electoral perspective says democracy is the ability to vote. The U.S. is more or less democratic, and the best strategy is to work through the three branches of government to enact progressive laws. Doubt can grow within the electoral camp when legislation runs into the brick wall of the Senate. For example, one senator, Joe Manchin, who represents a minuscule percentage of the population, stopped Biden’s stripped-down Build Back Better Act. Hard work can feel Sysophian: roll the rock up, only to watch it fall back down. People start thinking about uncapping the House, abolishing the filibuster, putting term limits on Justices, and retiring the Electoral College. 

The socialist perspective also downplays the importance of the Constitution. There are more critical things to consider than the law and “bourgeois democracy.” Many positions fall under the socialist umbrella. But, all believe a socialist revolution is needed to realize democracy and that the way to bring about this revolution is by spreading “socialist consciousness” and supporting anything that builds the “class struggle.” Political agitation is linking every problem to capitalism and every solution to socialism. Political strategy is either ignoring politics and “building working class power,” using the political arena to spread the good news of socialism, or combining the two. 

Democratic republicanism says the working class must first “win the battle for democracy.” A democratic revolution is needed to realize socialism. Democracy is defined as complete and unobstructed political rule by the people. A democratic state is one in which total lawmaking power is vested in a unicameral legislature elected by universal and equal suffrage. 

In a democratic state, the principle of one person and one equal vote is supreme. Victor Berger described this principle to an American audience on the House floor in 1911. The Senate, he said, is an “obstructive and useless body, a menace to the people's liberties, and an obstacle to social growth...All legislative powers [will] be vested in the House of Representatives. Its enactments, subject to a referendum…[will] be the supreme law, and the president shall have no power to veto them, nor [will] any court have the power to invalidate them.” 

The theoretical roots of democratic republicanism are in Tom Paine’s Common Sense, Rights of Man and Dissertation on the First Principles of Government; the Pennsylvania Consitution from 1776; The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, the Constitution of 1793, and Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman; the British People’s Charter of 1838; and Babeuf’s Manifesto of the Equals. Marx and Engels grabbed hold of those roots, as seen in texts like The Principles of Communism, the Communist Manifesto, and the Critique of the Draft [German] Social-Democratic Program of 1891. The theory lived on within the socialist movements after their deaths, as seen in Kautsky’s The Republic and Social Democracy in France, Luxemburg’s Theory and Practice, the 1903 Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party Program, and the American Socialist Party Platform of 1912. In the United States, the struggle for democracy was driven back underground by the counterrevolution against Reconstruction. 

From Tom Paine: “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote and no more in the choice of representatives.” From Marx: “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” From Engels: “Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us, the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.” And from the Socialist Party of America: Abolish the Senate and the President's veto power, elect the President and Vice-President by direct vote, and abolish the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review. 

Recently, a few historians have rediscovered the centrality of democracy to Lenin’s political thought. If you were willing to fight for political freedom,” wrote Lars Lih in 2005, “you were Lenin's ally, even if you were hostile to socialism. If you downgraded the goal of political freedom in any way, you were Lenin's foe, even if you were a committed socialist.” Lih read Neil Harding, who, in 1977, wrote that according to Lenin, workers didn’t have to have come to “socialist consciousness” to acquire “political consciousness.” Neil Harding worked contemporaneously with Hal Draper, who did his part in debunking the myth of an undemocratic Lenin. This is almost all the theory and history needed for a mass democratic socialist movement in the U.S. 

“Any propagandist and agitator,” wrote Lenin, must “find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.” 

Today, my audience is Jerry and any other DSA members listening, which I hope includes Baskhar Sunkara, Eric Blanc, Chris Maisano, and Seth Ackerman — publishers and writers for Jacobin who have, over the years, recognized that the U.S. political system is not democratic and who have written persuasively about it. This is commendable. But simultaneously, they confusingly refer to the U.S. as a capitalist democracy. DSA’s political platform is similarly confusing: the U.S. is “no democracy at all,” and, at the same time, we should “strengthen and deepen” our democracy.  Why the inconsistency? What would it mean to admit the U.S. isn’t a democracy, engage with Marx and Engels’s democratic republicanism, and conclude that the “first step” is to win an actual democracy? 

People don’t forget when the government gives a collective shrug in the face of popular legislation. People don’t forget getting screwed over. The Obama administration oversaw bank bailouts and home foreclosures during the Great Recession. In 2013, a universal background check bill was filibustered to death by 45 senators representing only 38 percent of the population. The following year, a bill to raise the minimum wage, supported by two-thirds of Americans, died in the Senate. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote and won the election. Two years ago, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was blocked by a Republican Senate majority representing seven million fewer voters than the Senate Democratic minority that backed it. Concurrently, the Build Back Better Act was processed through the legislative meat grinder. It emerged in tatters. Then, the Democrats let the Child Tax Credit die, sending 65 million children back into poverty, and the Supreme Court blocked student debt relief and jeopardized abortion access. Not to mention the war, the endless war that you or I have no control over even if the president sought congressional approval. 

In the face of mass political apathy and growing discontent, the Democratic Party fearmongers and distorts and manipulates the meaning of "democracy" for its own purposes. If the Democrats cared about democracy or, at the very least, cared about stopping Trump, they would demand a democratic constitution. Trump and the far right didn’t get to where they are despite our revered Constitution. They got there because of it and with help from the Democratic Party. Ultimately, the only meaningful division between political movements is the question of democracy: you want it or don’t. You fight the Constitution, or you support it. 

Our situation parallels France's debate surrounding the Dreyfus Affair and Alexander Millerand joining the government in 1899 to “defend the republic.” To “save democracy,” the bourgeois republicans admonished the opposition to silence all criticism and rally around the Constitution. But Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg weren’t fooled. Despite official pronouncements of an external enemy, the republic was ultimately at risk from itself. Luxemburg and Kautsky advocated democratic republican principles as the only way to defend against the threat of the Right. “If we want to strengthen the propagandist power of the republican idea in France,” Kautsky explained, “then we have to show, above all, that the republic we want – the republic that the fighters of 1793, 1848, and 1871 strove to achieve – is fundamentally different from the republic of today.”

To wrap up, I’ll touch on two organizations and their relationship to the Constitution: the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). 

There’s a tendency for the American left to label SDS and the Civil Rights Movement “not socialist” and thereby dismiss two decades of our history as unimportant. That’s disappointing. In 1968, Martin Luther King wrote that the Civil Rights Movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights.” Today’s Poor People’s Campaign attempts to carry on King’s legacy. But they do so while working explicitly within the Constitution’s parameters. Their campaign calls for a Third Reconstruction. They want to do many laudable things, including raising the federal minimum wage, guaranteeing the right to form a union, expanding healthcare and access to housing, increasing taxes on the wealthy, and reforming the Supreme Court. All of these demands will slam against the minoritarian checks of the Constitution, including the “obstructive and useless” Senate described by Berger.

SDS understood that the United States had a democracy problem. In 1962, the Port Huron Statement described a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in the social decisions determining the quality and direction of her life, and that society be organized to encourage independence and common participation. Tom Hayden made an ambiguous comment about the Constitution in a draft of the Port Huron Statement. But (and this is important) SDS failed to cross the conceptual rubicon. No one asked if participatory democracy was possible in a country with an undemocratic constitution. This was a missed opportunity, but today’s left can connect the dots with the perspective of hindsight.

So, what do we do now? 

Our disagreement concerns something other than the undemocratic structure of the U.S. constitutional order and the ultimate goal of a socialized economy. We disagree on the content of our political message – the ideas we present to the public. Going back to the three “left” perspectives, will a vision of what life could be like in a future socialist society be the primary means by which we seek to persuade people to become politically active? Or should concrete demands for the immediate improvement of peoples’ lives through electoral campaigns and legislation be the primary focus of our work? Or should those concrete demands be coupled simultaneously with criticisms of our undemocratic political system to explain the lack of legislative progress and the necessity of democracy? 

Labor, ecology, health, education, housing, criminal justice, trans rights, international affairs — DSA members are active in many struggles, all of which come down to who has political power. Democracy is the solution to the present lack of reforms. It will also lead to democratic control and management of the economy. DSA must resolve the contradictions in its political program and become the vanguard of a movement for a democratic constitution. We, along with our elected members in office, must seize the banner of democracy from the Democratic Party and brand the Democrats as hypocrites and charlatans. This government is illegitimate because it is not of the people, by the people, or for the people: it’s not a democracy. Contradictions between what people want and what the Constitution will allow continue to build. The struggle for one person, one equal vote, and a unicameral legislature will continue.