Did "Socialism" and "Defund the Police" hurt Dems at the ballot box?

Spanberger and Clyburn say yes, while AOC says no.

Did “Socialism” and “Defund the Police” hurt congressional Democrats in last week’s election?

Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) say yes, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says no.

Reps. Abigail Spanberger, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and James Clyburn.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Spanberger Criticizes Socialism and Defund the Police

The fight began when Spanberger, speaking on a Dems-only conference call with Speaker Pelosi last Thursday, went off against the notion that Democrats did well on election day:

“If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022.”

Spanberger’s first criticism was of the campaign to “Defund the Police”:

"The number one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely re-won, was defunding the police.And I've heard from colleagues who have said 'Oh, it's the language of the streets. We should respect that.' We're in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we're talking about. If we don't mean we should defund the police, we shouldn't say that."

Then the congresswoman went off on “socialism”:

“We want to talk about funding social services, and ensuring good engagement in community policing, let's talk about what we are for. And we need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again. Because while people think it doesn't matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of it.”

Ocasio-Cortez Responds

The next day, Ocasio-Cortez responded with a Twitter thread that, among other things, claimed Spanberger was attacking “progressivism” overall, and Ocasio-Cortez suggested that voters who have negative views of “socialism” and “Defund the Police” are motivated by racism (and while you could at least make that argument about the police debate, it’s a non sequitur when discussing socialism).

On Saturday, after Biden was elected President-elect, Ocasio-Cortez did an interview with the New York Times, in which she again suggested that Spanberger was criticizing all progressives.

Clyburn Weighs In, and AOC Responds

Then on Sunday, Clyburn weighed in, arguing that “Defund the Police” cost Democrat Jaime Harrison his South Carolina US Senate race against Lindsey Graham:

Meet the Press @MeetThePress

EARLIER: Rep. Jim Clyburn says Democratic Senate challenger "Jaime Harrison started to plateau when 'Defund the Police' showed up ... on TV right across his head." #MTP @WhipClyburn: "I have always said that these headlines can kill a political effort."

And that same morning, Ocasio-Cortez went on Jake Tapper’s CNN show, and suggested that no member of Congress had ever embraced “socialism” or “defunding the police.”

Let’s Deconstruct This

There are several issues here:

1) Erroneously conflating Socialism and Progressivism.

Over the past year, there’s been growing confusion in the media that socialism is simply a synonym of progressivism. And thus, as Ocasio-Cortez suggested this past week, any attack on socialism is really an attack on progressivism. The logic is wrong. I’m a proud progressive, but I’m not a socialist (or “democratic socialist” — we’ll get to that distinction in a minute). And regardless of your ideology, you can have concerns about the impact of the word “socialism” on voters without necessarily having similar concerns about the word “progressivism.” I suspect the confusion is intentional, as it’s a way for for the democratic socialist wing of the left to mainstream itself. Nonetheless, it’s not accurate, and it risks damaging the progressive brand.

2) It’s not true that no member of Congress embraced Defund the Police.

While Ocasio-Cortez says that “not a single member of Congress… campaigned on socialism or defunding the police,” that argument is a bit disingenuous. Two of her top allies in Congress, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, openly embraced the term “Defund the Police” not five months ago:

Now, perhaps Tlaib and Omar embraced defunding the police in June of this year, but didn’t mention it as the election approached, but that’s a nuance without a difference. They clearly supported the movement, and the slogan, and it was a huge nationwide story for weeks. It would be no great surprise if voters associated both with Democrats, who were generally supportive of the movement, while some of us expressed concern about the slogan at the time, including Rep. Clyburn, and got a lot of pushback for it.

3) It’s not true that no Democratic candidate has embraced socialism.

As for the suggestion that no one ran on socialism, Ocasio-Cortez is herself a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” — and she ran, with a lot of nationwide support from Democratic voters and donors. And she is often promoted as the new face of the Democratic party, and as a future senatorial and presidential pick.

Then there’s the fact that Democrats almost chose a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, as our presidential nominee for the second time this year.

Now, before anyone goes down the rabbit hole of “democratic socialists aren’t socialists,” good luck explaining that to voters outside of the whitest corners of Brooklyn. If you’re going to call yourself a democratic socialist, you’re welcoming the confusion. But there’s another issue. Why not call themselves “social democrats,” which is the established term among most of the European left wing parties that American democratic socialists admire? Democratic socialist is an archaic term used by the more extreme left-wing parties in Europe.

Also, back in the day, Sanders would use the terms socialist and democratic socialist interchangeably: “I am a socialist and everyone knows that. They also understand that my kind of democratic socialism has nothing to do with authoritarian communism."

It’s a bit difficult for us to claim that our party has nothing to do with socialism when we have two democratic socialists as the standard bearers of our left wing, and one of them has proudly called himself a socialist.

And finally, even Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization which Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib belong to, calls themselves “socialists” all over their Web site. Here, for example, is the footer on the DSA site:

And Ocasio-Cortez just helped elect two more DSA members to Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. So clearly, there’s an election connection.

4) “Inning” socialism.

Finally, this recent effort to “in” socialism, and claim that it has no influence at all on the Democratic party, flies in the face of polls showing growing support for socialism on the left, particularly among Gen Z and Millennials:

It also contradicts a debate many of us witness on a regular basis. Since the advent of Sanders’ presidential campaign, we’ve been having an open discussion on the left as to how comfortable we are with socialism, with many defending it. That debate was only heightened with the election of Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib in 2018, and now Bush and Bowman in 2020.

This is an issue our party is going to have to come to terms with.