Two weeks ago, the Kansas City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America held its annual meeting. The occasion was rich with irony, none of which was apparent to those in attendance.
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First of all, it took place at a venue that is an eloquent rebuttal to the whole premise of left-wing governance. The meeting was held at a former public elementary school in the Marlborough neighborhood of South Kansas City, a modest blue-collar area.
Erected in 1947, the school was renovated in the 1980s as part of a $3 billion court-ordered desegregation plan. Despite this application of “resources” (why not just say money?), the Kansas City, Missouri, School District essentially collapsed, lost its accreditation, and people of all races with school-age children fled. The school, still shining new in appearance, was abandoned and now serves as an LGBT Community Center.
The next of life’s little ironies, to use Hardy’s term, is the ages of those in attendance. There were several hundred young people gathered in the auditorium/gym well before the 9 a.m. Saturday starting time, with an average age somewhere around 28. At other left-wing events (e.g., a forum on “White Nationalism” at the K.C. Public Library), the average age seems to be around eighty, which is not surprising for the old fools who want to relive 1970s “Cambodia Spring.”
The irony consists of twenty-somethings flocking to an ideology that was discredited by Stalin’s show trials and purges in the 1930s.
Certainly, Marxism as a belief system should not have survived the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, before all but a handful of those in attendance were born. It’s as if George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn had never lived and been witness to the nightmare of communism.
The next bit of irony is the class background of those in attendance. By their manner of speech and dress, everyone appeared to have had a college education. They were overwhelmingly white, with roughly equal numbers of men and women (most of the latter seemed to be named “Caitlyn”). Gays, lesbians, and the transgender people were well represented, comprising at least twenty percent of those in attendance.
The crowd seemed, in short, to be what used to be called “clerical” workers: the people who work in call centers, have low-level administrative positions in nonprofits, are baristas in coffee shops, and labor in cubicles in some office park building.
No one looked like they were doing the kind of work with their hands—skilled or unskilled—which traditionally defined the proletariat.
At 9 o’clock sharp, a covey of theater kids stood on the steps to the stage, holding guitars and song sheets. They then began a spirited rendition of “The Internationale,” the anthem of Communism since the 1870s. (I say “spirited,” but it was a little hard to follow because everyone was wearing COVID masks. We were repeatedly admonished that masking was mandatory for all present, just like giving your preferred pronouns before you spoke.)
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The foregoing may seem silly—and it was—but the underlying substance was deadly serious. The agenda was supposed to take a day and a half! I’ve done my share of political organizing, and I have to say the leaders of the meeting did a good job of moving things along. Proxy cards with a QR code had been handed out to expedite voting and to give attendees access to a Zoom presentation of slides projected on a screen on stage.
There were endless committee reports, subcommittee reports, and, of course, steering committee reports. Each of the speakers had prepared remarks, and nothing in their tone or syntax would have been out of place at a corporate retreat. (“Let’s give it up for Caitlyn and all the others who made this year’s membership drive a success!”)
Where it got weird was when people went off script: “We’re all here to destroy capitalism, right?” “No one should be afraid of the word ‘Communism’!” People were addressed as “comrades” several dozen times.
The lectern was draped with a keffiyeh so we, of course, got our share of “Gaza” and “Genocide.” The bulk of the invective was directed at ICE, besides the usual whipping boys of the wealthy and corporations.
Some of their programs, though, were actually clever. One was a series of free clinics where volunteer mechanics would make sure your car’s tail lights were working so the chance of being apprehended as an illegal in a routine traffic stop was greatly reduced. The other issue raised and discussed was the advent of mass surveillance devices, starting with automatic license plate readers. One member shrewdly noted that the surveillance issue and data centers are the last bipartisan issues we have in this country and they, the DSA, should get ahead of the curve on this one.
I could only take so much Stalinist rhetoric after a while, though, and left late morning. On my way out, I picked up a copy of The Red Thread, the quarterly local DSA magazine, a 50-page, full-color slick publication, supposedly put out entirely at the members’ expense.
Just like the annual meeting itself, it made me realize how dedicated this organization is. There was a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money that went into this magazine. It was well written, historically cogent, and replete with references to Lenin, Karl Marx, Paul Robeson, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, and Terry Eagleton, the British critic who wrote Why Marx Was Right.
In conclusion, it should also be noted that there is not one position in the DSA platform that has not been embraced by local Democrat candidates for federal, state, and local office.
Bear in mind, moreover, there is a Marxist tactic called “entryism,” whereby Communists take over a center-left mainstream political party and then expel the “well-meaning” (DSA irony alert) liberals from its ranks. To paraphrase Trotsky, “You may not be interested in the DSA, but the DSA is interested in you!” Conservatives should be very concerned. To quote Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall!”
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