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Circular firing squad: Democratic Socialists consider expelling one of the few Democratic socialists who hold office in Massachusetts
By adamg on Wed, 07/05/2023 - 5:28pm
WBUR report some Cambridge members of the Democratic Socialists of America are moving to expel state Rep. Michael Connolly, who represents Cambridge and Somerville from the organization, for refusing to join two-minutes hates of Maura Healey and Michelle Wu.
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Comments
Great, they can buzz off
I'm skeptical of politicians who feel an obligation or pressure to fully support the plank of some non-elected organization. These groups who demand total allegiance are not good for democracy. They are no better than the billionaire donors who likewise expect obedience in return for support.
If a politician feels they can not to act independently, they don't deserve the office.
Yeah man, how dare an
Yeah man, how dare an activist organization hold people accountable for promises they made in exchange for an endorsement. Clearly the same thing as the Koch brothers. FOH
That's fine
My complaint is with politicians who feel beholden to activist organizations, not the inverse.
Just follow the money
Alot of these orgs are not what they seem. If I was a politician, I would stay as far away from these orgs as possible.
Just follow the money on any of these org's. You'd be surprised who's at the helm and who's really running the show.
I think we learned that with "Occupy"
DSA is funded entirely by
DSA is funded entirely by member dues. What are you talking about?
Did I say the DSA?
I didn't.
Who are you talking about then?
Because the subject of this article is the DSA and other than a vague gesture at a movement from 15 years ago, you didn't give any other information.
I haven't attended a DSA
I haven't attended a DSA meeting in a couple years, but if I remember correctly, there's been discussion of giving this guy the boot for a long time for a variety of reasons.
Any info as to those reasons?
Seems like he's been doing a perfectly ok job, I'd be curious what else they're expecting.
It's been a while and I wasn
It's been a while and I wasn't a part of the electoral working group, so I don't remember specifics. But it probably wouldn't be appropriate to post that info here anyway.
I'm honestly not sure why the DSA voting to expel one of its members is particularly newsworthy to anybody outside of the DSA. I was kind of surprised to see the story pop up.
Why Wouldn't it be Appropriate?
Connolly is one of the two or three most progressive politicians on Beacon Hill and is also an effective voice for his district. Right now it looks like he's being tossed for some very flimsy reasons that don't reflect well on the DSA, a group whose political aims I generally share.
By the rationale given, the DSA would throw out AOC and Bernie Sanders for their realpolitik support for Biden and some of his "milquetoast" bills. If a political action group makes itself that small and impotent, what's the point of existing at all?
It would be inappropriate for
It would be inappropriate for several reasons:
1. Those are internal DSA discussions, not public communications.
2. I am not on the comms team at Boston DSA.
3. I am technically no longer a DSA member, as I got burned out and stopped participating and paying dues.
4. Like I said above, I wasn't privy to all of the conversations around the issue.
But if you really want to know the reasons, given that your political views are somewhat aligned you could join DSA and attend the next general meeting, or you could read the internal document that somebody (my guess is Mike Connolly) leaked to WBUR:
https://media.wbur.org/wp/2023/07/motion-to-expel-mike-connolly-google-d...
I’m not joining
An organization that shoots itself in the foot over such petty differences
Yeah, I don't care if you
Yeah, I don't care if you join or not, man. If you look at the list of reasons listed in that referendum, they're not all petty. He joined DSA while running for office in 2016 so he could get an endorsement (and all of the member resources spent on canvassing, phone banking, etc. that go along with a DSA endorsement), has been AWOL pretty much ever since, has tried to leverage Boston DSA infrastructure to organize for candidates who are not endorsed by Boston DSA and consistently expresses opinions and support for candidates who are in direct opposition to the things that Boston DSA works hard to achieve. He clearly isn't aligned with the goals of the other members and is actively working against a lot of the things that they are spending a lot of time organizing for and this has been going on for literally years. It's not just because he likes Healy and Wu or whatever he said in that tweet.
People in these comments keep saying that this is being small minded and I fail to see how. What do they gain by having a state rep among their members who is only using them to signal his progressive bona fides and not doing anything to actually help out? I think a lot of people are getting hung up on the fact that he's an elected official (far from the only elected official who is a Boston DSA member by the way), but that just tells me that you don't understand what DSA actually is. Electoral politics are only one of many areas that DSA organizes in and a large chunk of the membership doesn't even believe in electoral politics as a viable way to realize any meaningful change. This guy's actions are actively harming the organization. I don't know why anybody would want to allow him to remain a member.
I know we're both speaking english
But it sure seems we're not speaking the same language. Good luck to DSA whilst they whittle themselves down to nothing with these purges. For a short time there, it seemed like they might be able to accomplish something positive.
Last I knew, there were over
Last I knew, there were over 1,000 dues-paying members of the Boston DSA chapter alone. I'm not sure what purges you're referring to other than this one person. And again, I think you've got a fundamental misunderstanding of what DSA is and does. Have a nice day.
We agree
You can say that again! I thought they were trying to affect political change.
Not Cambridge members of DSA
I just looked up all the names of those who want to expel Connolly and at most one of them lives in Cambridge. I suspect these are just the loonies from Somerville and/or Boston.
I think Somerville is pretty happy with him, too
I've heard nothing about anyone even thinking of running against him.
Yeah, he seems great
I don't know what their problem is.
No Fabians there
Revolution now or GTFO. Way to grow your cadres.
reds killed TRILLIONS
amirite
Enemy of the people!
He's clearly a Trotskyite and a Zinovievite, a bourgeois nationalist, and an English spy.
He's guilty of left-wing deviationism, Bukaharinism, rootless cosmopolitanism, and anti-Soviet agitation. He's been heard speaking German with agents of fascism! He's conspired with capitalist bosses Healey and Wu, along with agents of foreign secret services, to wreck the socialist economy and sell out the workers' and peasants' motherland!
Off to the Gulag with him!
blah blah blah
etc
""I think it's going to be a
""I think it's going to be a dead-end road if the left continues down this path of a circular firing squad," he said."
That's not "the left", that's three stops west of the left of the left fringe.
What a bunch of clowns, Wu and Healey are immensely popular with the Massachusetts mainstream left, this is the only way they can get attention.
Where are the real leftists today?
Posted around JP, at least along the SW Corridor, were flyers from a, presumably, Socialist organization reminding folks "Remember Stonewall, Fight back," etc.
Same coloring (black and white), same typeface, pretty much the same flyers I've seen for over 40 years. The words change slightly. But the flyers are fundamentally the same.
There was a time when there were bona fide leftists groups (there are none today to speak of). Organizations that lobbied valid and real critiques of the capitalism with socialist participation that we have now.
While they never showed much understanding of how capitalism relies upon emotion to be its engine, they still presented a freshness and fierceness in their ideals.
Now they just seem stuck in the past.
A viable leftist movement needs to recognize the genius of capitalism. That the invisible hand, the magic of supply and demand, the power of laissez-faire economics, all are fundamentally dependent on human desire. Desire that is a giant mangled ball of lusts, greed, need for safety, want of comfort and drives to pleasure. Any leftist ideology that can equal capitalism in doing the job of keeping this mangled ball rolling, can claim to have a genuine possibility of making this a better world.
Fine, but
DSA disagrees with you; it's right there in the name. DSA is not small minded, they just disagree with you.
Oh, good Lord. It's like
Oh, good Lord. It's like Mastodon.
Detailed Breakdown of the Charges from DSA
Here's a detailed explication of the DSA charges from the intercept: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/07/boston-dsa-mike-connolly/
It just seems so pointless and personal on the DSA leadership's part