Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.
Before you continue reading today’s column, have a listen through David Remnick’s New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Megan Romer. Remnick’s interviewee is the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. The conversation is just 29 minutes long, but it is extremely illuminating.
Three weeks ago I published an article in these pages under the headline, “Democratic Socialists vs. Social Democrats.” In that piece, I argued that America’s ascendant democratic socialists are not like their pro-democracy, pro-welfare-state foils in Northern Europe.
In their interview, Remnick asked the DSA’s Romer: “Is there a model for a politics or a society that is real and existing in this world that you would like to see the United States copy?”
Here was an opportunity to prove me wrong. Romer could have named Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, and I’d be forced to reconsider my original thesis.
“I think there are lessons we can take from different socialist projects,” the DSA co-chair answered, before naming one such project: Cuba, citing lessons Americans can learn from the Caribbean island nation’s “participatory democracy.”
Cuba, of course, has no “participatory democracy;” it’s a “people’s democracy” of the kind that once ruled in the [East] German Democratic Republic and still reigns in the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea. Cuba is a communist dictatorship in its seventh decade. The Communist Party’s dominant role is enshrined in the Cuban Constitution (a document Romer lauds for its “queer friendliness”).
This was just one of many instances during the sub-half-hour conversation in which Romer beclowned herself. We could point to the way Romer champions a zero-sum call for the dissolution of the State of Israel while conceding that she has no knowledge of the most consequential negotiations in recent Israeli-Palestinian history.
Or we might consider her total opposition to US military aid to Ukraine, a position that surely makes her popular with the likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Tucker Carlson. It is clear that she is out of her depth.
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Indeed, the takeaway in many quarters is that Romer is a buffoon unworthy of our attention. As one reader insisted to me earlier this week, “100% of Americans don’t know who Romer is.”
Megan Romer is a buffoon. Still, anyone who knows who the current president of the United States is surely recognizes that buffoonery is no obstacle to great power and influence. Idiots can inflict a lot of damage when their views go unchallenged.
Romer, according to her own retelling in the New Yorker interview, was a Hillary Clinton Democrat before 2016. A decade later, she is confidently quoting Marx as if she just walked out of a compulsory course on Scientific Communism in mid-century Moscow.
A YouGov/Cato Institute poll recently found that 34% of Americans aged 18-29 hold a “favorable view” of communism. Perhaps Romer, who’s now in her early 40s, was among that cohort of younger American adults who were communist-curious. She is profoundly ignorant, but ignorance is powerful.
As to the reader’s point that the DSA leader is an unknown for 100% of Americans, this is very much untrue (be careful with absolutes!). Before the New Yorker Radio Hour, Romer made a stop through Fox News, which is watched by millions of Americans. Romer’s Fox interlocutor ran through a host of extreme positions, from fully open borders to complete abolition of prisons. Romer cheerfully confirmed that each of these out-there viewpoints is, in fact, the platform of DSA.
As the DSA’s influence grows, exchanges like these will shape how huge swaths of the voting public understand the Democratic Party. One need only look at Michigan. Democrats’ chances of holding onto the state’s second US Senate seat tanked after democratic-socialist-adjacent Abdul El-Sayed won last week’s primary. And, as bad options go, El-Sayed is not even the worst. He embraced and campaigned with Maoist cosplayer Hasan Piker and blithely dismissed an attack on a Jewish preschool as a case of “hurt people hurting people.” But he’s not formally a member of the DSA and rejects the socialist label. Even still, El-Sayed’s primary victory may prove a pyrrhic one for Democrats.
The Democratic Party has been largely feckless in the face of this self-destructive radicalizing force gaining traction inside of its house. The establishment coalesced around weak and uninspiring candidates like Congresswoman Haley Stevens in Michigan, or got behind people who were literally compromised—in the case of Andrew Cuomo in New York City.
I have made clear my deep issues with politicians like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, but I also understand why people were not particularly moved to vote for their opponents. Extremism looks attractive when the establishment does not deliver.
Meanwhile, traditional Democrats too often fall right in line when a DSA-style candidate wins. Stevens immediately reconciled with El-Sayed. Chuck Schumer even endorsed Graham Platner. Far-left insurgents are able to take the Democratic Party’s institutional support for granted.
Now, I don’t expect Democrats to turn around and stump for authoritarian-right MAGA Republicans (nor would I recommend that they do). But the party should play hardball with upstart candidates. If a person wants access to the party’s resources and high-profile endorsements, they should be required to disavow toxic positions and associations. Democrats must internalize what it means for people like Megan Romer to claim its ballot line. The Democrats should take seriously their base’s burgeoning tolerance for illiberal ideologies, no doubt energized by the influx of funding for US universities from foreign authoritarian regimes (Qatar is the top foreign government donor to American campuses, followed by China; Saudi Arabia is fifth).
For Democrats, facing these challenges is a moral imperative and a strategic one. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement captured the Republican Party because the old guard rolled over as proto-fascists crashed through the doors. The answer to fascism cannot be Marxism, and voters in the middle must see that the Democratic Party understands this.
Bro, we just want fucking healthcare like all the other countries. We're really just talking about capitalism with stronger social safety nets, unless tax loopholes for the wealthy.
I want to barf every time I see privileged people preaching for communism. Megan Romer is lying to herself and others that hardcore socialism is the answer to our ills.