#491 — The Suicide of the Left

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Sam Harris** (0:25)
I'm here with James Kirchick. Jamie, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

**James Kirchick** (0:28)
Thanks for having me, Sam.

**Sam Harris** (0:30)
If memory serves, I wrote you a fairly plaintive email not that long ago, just more or less crying out to the universe who is going to write an article that reveals just how awful the DSA is and how this emerging suicide pact of embrasure from the Democratic Party is just completely dysfunctional, and yet it seems to be in the making.
You have written that article over at The Atlantic where you now are. You used to be at The New York Times. I think we want to talk about how and why you made this transition. But over at The Atlantic, people can read your article which is currently titled The DSA Is a Parasite. The left-wing faction is hijacking the Democratic Party. So I want to get into that.
I want to link it up with our, I think, concerns we share about the state of American politics. But I'll save you a little time by just quickly summarizing these facts. The DSA platform calls for abolishing the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Pentagon, the police, prisons, border enforcement, all debt, capitalism, and private property itself. So I guess the big picture question, which I don't know if you have an answer to, or I would like us to never lose sight of it. How is it that mainstream Democrats, but literally every mainstream Democrat, hasn't recognized that this group and their consultation, their approval, any input from them at all, should be treated like plutonium?

**James Kirchick** (2:02)
Yeah. So I think this has been a problem on the left, really for a century. If you go back to the Cold War, there were many people on the left who refused to see the danger of communism. There was the Progressive Party, which was basically controlled by the Communist Party. They ran a presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, who had been the vice president of FDR, and then served as agricultural secretary as well.
That party wasn't an openly pro-communist party because there was a communist party in the United States, but it was a party of fellow travelers, which is the term that came up in that time to describe people who were ideologically sympathetic to communism, but weren't communists themselves. There was this other term that came up of how liberals might describe communists, which was where they were liberals in a hurry, which is that we basically share the same outcomes, the same fundamental beliefs, but they want to get there a little faster. They want to break a few more eggs before we get there. I still think there is this residual sympathy among people on the left in the United States for people on the extreme left. There's even some sense of admiration for them, that we're not as courageous as they are. I wish I could be as courageous as Zohran Mamdani and can't come out and say the things that he's saying, but I'm stuck here in my political reality where I have to do the day-to-day give and take with the Republicans. There are Democrats who have spoken out very clearly against this. I want to make that absolutely clear. Josh Gottheimer, who's a congressman, Jared Moskowitz, who's a congressman, Tom Swazee, these are all moderate Democrats and obviously John Fetterman, who's been probably the most vocal of them all. But there is this fear and I think among the intellectual class, like sort of journalist types, the Ezra Clines, if you will, it's a fear of not being seen as cool, because the DSA is cool. They're the cool kids at the cool kids table. There's a lot of pressure if you are a center-left or left liberal commentator, there's a lot of pressure not to make fun of the cool kids, because then the cool kids are going to come and steal your lunch money.
That's just been a factor, I think, of American intellectual life for a very long time.
I think people on the left need to understand that, if you're a liberal Democrat, you really do not share anything in common with the DSA because they are not democratic, and that is ultimately the most important element of what we should all be able to agree to in the United States, left or right, wherever you are in the political spectrum, that we believe in democratic processes and the rule of law, very basic things that should not be politicized. The DSA does not believe in those things. Sam, you only mentioned half their platform, but if you look at their foreign policy, that to me is almost even more revealing, because they endorse and support and offer solidarity to a wide range of the most despicable communist dictatorships on earth, from North Korea to the Cuban dictatorship. So they have no ground on which to call themselves democratic socialists. They really are sort of in between that, and I would say just outright communists, most of them at this point. The party is controlled. If you look at the actual Politburo, if you will, right, it's actually composed of, most of the people on that are openly declared Marxists. And so I think it really is not McCarthyite red baiting to refer to them as a communist or a communist aligned political organization.