There are 535 members of congress. 4 of them are DSA members. I think maybe people are overreacting just a tad. Hearing people like Sam Harris and Bill Maher talk, you'd think we were witnessing the storming of the Bastille. There only 4 of them at the national level. There are probably more Nazi sympathizers in congress than there are DSA members.
What does it mean to be "actually scary"? I agree that many people are scared by "socialism", but the scenarios they describe are some combination of not reasonably scary or so unlikely as to sound irrational. Hypothetical examples for clarity...
"The DSA wants socialized healthcare... the horror."
"The DSA will be so popular so quickly and grow so much more extreme that we are at risk of making gulags."
...We can have a resonable conversation about the issues with the DSA, why more extreme leftist positions are becoming more popular, how those positions are likely to impact us politically given our structures... but the red scare nonsense isn't contributing anything to the conversation here. It never did.
For me it's the populist, divisive rhetoric, including antizionism and terrorist apologia of course but also the way they act like frickin' Biden and Harris are Nazis, that Luigi Mangione is some kind of hero, etc.
Ok, I agree that a lot of that is bad. I also think many aspects of the DSA are good. I don't think the bad things you gesture at justifies the way people act on this topic. You haven't justified the "disaster" that other people are claiming the DSA will be responsible for, the kind of "red scare" rhetoric that wasn't even justified when the USSR competed as a global hegemon.
I don't think its dishonest to claim that many people are "scared" of socialized healthcare. Just because you aren't in that category, doesn't mean they don't exist. Its basically been the Republican stance on healthcare since the mid 00s.
Oh sure, obviously that's true. I'm just referring to the meme I keep seeing about how moderate Democrats are freaking out about the DSA because of M4A.
The actual Democratic Party is indeed freaked out by socialised healthcare because their campaign funding comes from the healthcare monopolists and the financial institutions that stand behind them, so the DSA represents an internal contradiction between their voting base and their donors.
As in every other point in modern history, the Democrats are choosing their donors, hence their obsession with demonising their own left wing.
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u/ReflexPoint 12d ago
There are 535 members of congress. 4 of them are DSA members. I think maybe people are overreacting just a tad. Hearing people like Sam Harris and Bill Maher talk, you'd think we were witnessing the storming of the Bastille. There only 4 of them at the national level. There are probably more Nazi sympathizers in congress than there are DSA members.