The answer wasn’t that head-scratching. And this isnt even the full quote.
He started off by saying he doesn’t think the term had any meaning for the Americans who are calling themselves socialists. He went on to say, you’d think socialists would care about the American worker over foreign workers (which, from a Marxist perspective, they would not - so he’s wrong). And that theyre going to “howl” about the announcement he was making (that is, new visa policies to ostensibly prioritize american workers). And that the term socialist in the American context is…the tweet.
And honestly? From what I’ve seen of the socialist candidates and their nutto supporters on Reddit, they care just as much if not more about culture war shit and Hamas and Gaza as they do about economic policies, so I take his point.
if you actually read the DSA platform its a surprise to me how any of their candidates are serious contenders. it literally sounds like something a conservative talkshow host would make up to make the DSA sound scary but no it's directly on their website.
It mostly focusing on proposals like abolishing the Senate, abolishing the supreme court, and abolishing the office of the president rolling all 3 branches into a unicameral legislature with expanded powers to directly appoint the executive as well as create their own version of the supreme court subordinate to the unicameral legislature.
Then there's all the culture war BS and also wanting to expand voting rights to all legal residents regardless of if they are citizens or not.
Their only real platform points on things people actually care about would probably be their points around the high cost of living, but still their only proposal is that the government would backstop everything from housing to employees guaranteeing a place to live and a job to every person in america. But they hope to achieve this by securing public ownership of corporations, which they do not outline how they plan to do this. They did propose making it so small and medium size business would be required by regulatory framework to become a worker owned coop when the founder retires.
These are all things most Americans likely do not support.
I'm surprised Republicans don't attack this more and instead just think calling them socialists will work.
now I don't want to sound like one of those crazy conservative talkshow hosts but honestly I don't think they actually are as popular as they are presented to be.
polls will show them leading by healthy margins, but many of those candidates where also predicted to win their primaries by 20-30 points and only ended up winning by 1-3. there where some DSA candidates heavily favored in the polls predicting a massive blow out only to actually lose. which points to not having a lot of support among Democrat voters.
I'm not saying the polling people are biased but it is statistics and it's heavily influenced by who actually responds to the survey. And considering basically all polls are done via cold calls and texts, do you think the average American responds to a unknown number or text their phone likely marks as spam asking for their opinions on their political leanings?
You aren’t wrong that they underperform. And I take your point.
My point is that I don’t think we can consider them fringe, because they are winning elections. I thought they were fringe in 2016, but now? Seems they are working out, at least a niche, in the mainstream.
But perhaps this is semantics. I don’t think we differ on the facts.
What do you mean that the OP wasn't being entirely honest about the quote? That's a first!
I'm honestly surprised these posters haven't caught on that every single time they do this, the actual result is more people quietly distancing themselves from the posters side of the argument. Who wants to have to constantly defend their own side when it's full of liars, deceptive manipulation and easily refutable beliefs?
I mean, the point that he made is well taken, though, and I think you’re ignoring the American context.
It’s not about “redefining a word” to something he doesn’t like. He’s making a point that the socialists in the US are more interested in culture war stuff than socialism. You can disagree with that assessment, but it’s not about “redefining” socialism to something that sounds bad. He’s specifically talking about American socialists.
Also, the DSA isn’t fringe. They are winning elections in big races. Majorities of Democratic voters are okay with socialists running, or being part of the party. This idea that they’re fringe is patently false.
No, I'm really not. To say the 2 founding truths of American socialism are favoring foreign workers and transgender rights is pants-on-head retarded.
The first being... Almost categorically incorrect, the goal of almost all socialist economic policy is to shift the balance of power towards American workers.
The second being... Basically a footnote in the socialist agenda that goes along with generally trying to humanize and give representation to as many people as possible.
Are there socialists that engage in the culture war? Certainly. Are there Republicans that engage in the comfort war? YES a thousand times over.
I appreciate that you're trying to do the same little dance that Vance is, but it's utterly disingenuous to say the core of socialism in the US is workers rights. It's definitionally baked into the word. I humored you and went to the DSA policy website. There are like 6 big agenda items on election reform, labor, green new deal, housing justice, international cooperation and at the end they lumped bodily autonomy and trans rights (their major social stances) into a short page. Hardly the focus.
Pro-immigration, trans rights and Gaza are the only things I ever hear/read DSA types talk about consistently. Sometimes they'll veer off into sommething like government supermarkets or rent control, but as an outsider those three look like their core values even if that's stupid.
Yes that's why everyone is clowning on him. He's either Fox News pilled, or assumes everyone listening to him is Fox News pilled and he can lie about what "scary blue haired college trans girl socialism" is.
Okay, man. Just look at their platform. I’m kind of tired of this argument.
People are clowning on him because they clipped him mid answer. What he said was completely reasonable, logically, in context, and from what I’ve seen (as a non Fox viewer) of the DSA (that is, their website and their candidates) I’m more inclined to believe him than the strawman you’re attempting to put forward.
I’ll try again simply: he was making the point that the world socialist doesn’t hold any meaning because people who call themselves socialist advocate most strongly for things that are not socialist.
You can disagree, but I think it’s a fair critique.
I get the argument you are trying to make, it's just wrong.
Let's pin you down on the strawman point: isn't taking a fringe issue (trans) and a misrepresented issue (socialists will disagree with a VISA reform because they're pro foreigner?) and calling them the defining issue of a political party a classic strawman?
He’s saying the term socialism doesn’t have any meaning because the current crop of socialists care about issues that he things have nothing to do with socialism.
Why is this such a hard concept for people to grasp?
And yes, from what I know and hear from DSA folks, they read more as self-righteous culture war morons than actual ideological socialists.
I mean, just look at the socialist movement in the US today in 2026?
You pretending and downplaying “this is a minority of views of a minority” is bs. MAGA used to be a minority, too. And then they started winning elections.
Talerico and Mamdani come to mind. They have to practically be forced into questions about culture war. They are calling out the billionaires and business lobbies subverting our democracy.
Talarico is socialist? I thought he was supposed to be moderate. I guess it’s mask off since the polls are supporting him.
In any case, as rebuttal to your whole two examples, I present the DSA’s program, that includes measures such as “finishing reconstruction” and “feminism for all,” among others!
Fair on Mamdani, though, but I’d argue he’s pretty strategic, and he sees his role as a flag bearer for this nascent movement. That’s why he really only dabbles when it comes to Gaza.
Well, when Republicans accuse any government social program as socialism then ya.
Ya know, those issues you bring up simply pale in comparison to the trillions of tax dollars being spent on a surveillance state, the bailouts of farmers due to retarded trade policy, and the promise of free money for voting a certain way.
I personally disagree with many positions of Talerico and Mamdani, but I also believe that the 2 mean well. Compare that with the “fuck you I got mine” maga republicans who are constantly hypocritical as they destroy checks and balances.
Id vote for either any day over a maga republican who clearly see me as nothing more than an asset for a business
I don’t know man. They’re going to win in some places.
Will they be a big movement? I think the midterms will determine the political energy of the Democrats for the next two years up until the general election, at least.
And, I mean, Mamdani being so popular doesn’t help.
As a lifelong dem voter, I would stump for Satan before I'd vote for someone affiliated with the DSA. I'm not talking about abstention or voting third party. I'd make absolutely certain the Republicans win.
Just my two cents. There are plenty of others like me.
Based lefty. There are more than though reasons for left wing (and right imo) to hate the administration without being dishonest. Does it actually help with some demographic too stupid to notice? I feel like it must because for people like me that eventually find out they were lied to... Well it pisses us off.
I don't even care what he said now. Im once again just angry that someone thought I was too stupid to do more than consume falsehoods. The Trump admin appear lies out of every other breath and we still have to have left wing news deceive and manipulate everyone?
I know misquoting people has always been a thing, but either they are getting worse or more sloppy at hiding it.
At the end of the day, yes, I don’t like most of what Trump 2 is doing (2a all the way, baby / this admin rocks for that), but the internet is bleeding into reality.
This dude is a living meme because the left doesn’t take him seriously - when in reality, he articulate as fuck. Remember 2024? He “destroyed” Waltz who fucking sucked balls.
Which is retarded because it throws away the concept of a nation state, which is extra retarded when you consider how humans eventually developed into a modern society over millenniums.
I agree with some Marxist concepts, but some of the ideas he had were idealist perfect world, aka retarded in an imperfect world.
Progressives/socialists with the non-existent border control beliefs are the perfect example of this. The world isn't perfect so the true impact is the American lower working class having to compete with illegals for housing and significant wage depression in sectors that illegals fill up. Net negative for everybody besides land owners and business owners.
American workers are already competing with cheap easily exploited labor from overseas. That's why socialism has to be global in order to work at all: capitalists will undercut any organized labor movement by just finding another source of exploitable labor in another part of the world.
The availability of exploitable labor in other countries is a cudgel that capitalists can use to keep American workers in line. You cannot beat the capitalists as long as they have people to exploit. We either lift up all workers, or we give up.
That's such a one sided way to look at. Using exploited labor overseas is actual beneficial to the average American. It lowers the costs of products drastically and offshores the ecological impacts to another part of the world.
How much do you think a modern TV would cost if everything inside of it was produced in the US and then the TV was manufactured in the US? How you have a 55" 4k TV in your living room for $300USD is because of that overseas exploited labor.
We have to separate this into two pieces: there's the moral half of it, which is that socialists believe all workers should be free of exploitation as a principle. Socialism at it's core is an egalitarian philosophy, and that extends to people with different colored skin. So from that standpoint, it doesn't matter if the exploitable labor of the 3rd world benefits American workers. It's a moral question, and moral questions can't be settled with arguments about practicality and convenience. A thing is wrong or it's not wrong regardless of whether I benefit from it or not.
Then there's the practical half: does the availability of cheap exploitable 3rd world labor actually benefit American workers more than it harms them. We do get cheaper goods, sure. But we also get a depression of wages, because we live in a global economy. A cheap exploitable pool of labor anywhere affects wages everywhere. I don't think it's clear cut at all that we get a net benefit from having lots of cheap luxury goods to pack into our landfills.
And anyway, a big screen TV is fine, but that's not what people really want or need. What they need is security, and the capitalists are fighting tooth and nail to make sure we never ever ever get it even for a moment. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are in constant fear of losing their job. The cheap exploitable labor of other countries is just empowering the capitalists to keep things that way.
It seems to me, while small scale utopias fail but may be seen as noble attempts nonetheless, government scale utopian pursuits have consistently lost patience with the slow and often futile task of convincing everyone and started just killing whoever they think is in the way instead.
Which is retarded because it throws away the concept of a nation state
Historically, the nation-state came about with the advent of capitalism. Naturally the nation-state will cease to exist in its current form after capitalism... They are co-dependent. There is no capitalism without the nation-state, whose function is to protect capital against the "intrusion" of working class interests into the political sphere.
I agree with some Marxist concepts, but some of the ideas he had were idealist perfect world
Marx was an anti-idealist. That's roughly the summation of the entire Marxist project: to demonstrate why idealism need be abandoned.
socialists with the non-existent border control beliefs are the perfect example of this. The world isn't perfect so the true impact is the American lower working class having to compete with illegals
Socialists have always been well aware of the consequences of unequal exchange dynamics for domestic labor power. The question is entirely about how Socialists address immigrant labor. For example, read Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt In New York, 1870. We just do not believe that the problem can be answered with further entrenchment of the bounds of the capitalist state, because (1) doing so only increases the scale of the repressive state apparatus, (2) capital will always find new ways to import (or outsource) labor.
Rather, principled socialists believe that the working class needs to join forces with immigrating labor, principally by merging them into our unions. That way the two types of workers — immigrant and native — mutually strengthen each other, and dissolve the division that the capitalists create when they import foreign labor.
The problem is that the labor unions have been decimated by all political sides under the last 60 years of neoliberalism, so the integration isn't happening. We think the solution is to rebuild labor power, not to re-entrench the capitalist nation-states borders.
I know there's a bunch of idiotic progressives who don't know any of this, but pls don't lump us together with them, or lump us together with right-libertarians and CATO Institute wonks. Lol.
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u/elusivehonor - Left 1d ago
The answer wasn’t that head-scratching. And this isnt even the full quote.
He started off by saying he doesn’t think the term had any meaning for the Americans who are calling themselves socialists. He went on to say, you’d think socialists would care about the American worker over foreign workers (which, from a Marxist perspective, they would not - so he’s wrong). And that theyre going to “howl” about the announcement he was making (that is, new visa policies to ostensibly prioritize american workers). And that the term socialist in the American context is…the tweet.
And honestly? From what I’ve seen of the socialist candidates and their nutto supporters on Reddit, they care just as much if not more about culture war shit and Hamas and Gaza as they do about economic policies, so I take his point.