They Always Borrow the Party First

Is this really what you want?

The Bolsheviks did not begin by announcing a one-party dictatorship. They entered the soviets, the workers and soldiers councils that already existed, and they promised land, peace, and a Constituent Assembly elected by the whole people. In November 1917 that assembly was chosen. The Socialist Revolutionaries won a clear majority. The Bolsheviks took about a quarter of the vote. When the assembly met in January 1918 and refused to ratify Lenin’s claim to exclusive power, the doors were locked. Troops fired on crowds who came to defend it. The Cheka followed. Dual power, the coexistence of an official government and a parallel authority that answered only to the party, had done its work. Parliamentary democracy was declared a bourgeois relic. Soviet democracy was declared a higher form. Then the party swallowed the soviets.

Mao learned the same lesson in a different landscape. The Chinese Communists joined a united front with the Nationalists, kept their own discipline, and treated the alliance as a stage. After 1949 they spoke of “New Democracy”, a transitional order in which private capital and other classes would still have a place. That stage was shortened. Socialist transformation came early. Then came the Great Leap, a campaign to remake the economy by will, and a famine that killed tens of millions. The Cultural Revolution sent the young against teachers, officials, and the “old” culture itself. The promise was liberation. The result was a party that could not be voted out (sounds like California) and a country that paid for theory with bodies.

The borrowed party

The Democratic Socialists of America are not the Petrograd garrison. Indivisible is not the Red Guard. They organize primaries, phone banks, and protest days. They do not run a secret police. That difference matters. So does the resemblance in method.

DSA’s own strategy talk has a name: the dirty break, or, when the break keeps getting postponed, the dirty stay. Use the Democratic ballot line. Build donor lists, volunteer networks, and candidate discipline that belong to the organization rather than to the party whose name appears on the ballot. Realign the party from inside. Some caucuses want an eventual split. Others want to keep the husk and fill it. Marxist Unity Group and kindred factions say the Constitution itself must go. The official platform already calls for a new constitution, the end of the Senate and the Electoral College, and an executive and judiciary subordinate to a single chamber. Public ownership of the largest firms is not a metaphor. Chapter voices have spoken of taking the empire down from within and of overthrow through revolutionary struggle.

That is dual power in civic clothing. The existing party supplies legality and voters. The movement supplies the program that treats those voters’ republic as illegitimate, a structure imposed by slaveowners and capitalists, “no democracy at all.”

Indivisible supplies scale. It frames the other side as a regime, not a rival coalition. It trains chapters to play hardball in cities and states, to primary Democrats who will not fight hard enough, and to treat mass protest as strategy rather than therapy. It does not write the new constitution. It helps create the climate in which writing one sounds like justice instead of rupture.

The stage that never stays temporary

Lenin used the language of soviets until the soviets could be owned. Mao used New Democracy until it became an obstacle. Every such movement tells the public that the old forms are only a vehicle. The vehicle is driven until the destination is reached. Then the vehicle is discarded.

DSA’s documents are unusually plain about the destination: a democratic socialist republic built from the ground up. Checks that protect minorities, an independent court, a Senate that slows the House, a presidency that is not a clerk of Congress: these are described as devices of class rule. Arendt saw how resentment becomes a philosophy, how the desire to force recognition on the “normal strata” can outrun any concern for what remains after the performance. The American version does not need bombs to do that work. It needs a story in which the founding is a crime and the present order is a mask.

What winning looked like

Russia after the locked doors of the Tauride Palace was not a workers’ paradise. It was civil war, grain seizures, and a party that defined opposition as counterrevolution. China after the united front was not a gentle cooperative commonwealth. It was campaigns that treated experts, peasants, and memory as raw material. The body counts are not ancient gossip. They are the record of what happens when a movement that calls the existing constitution a fraud finally holds the only power that counts.

No serious person should claim that a DSA chapter in Brooklyn is about to launch a Great Leap. The question is whether the logic is kin. If the Senate is a usurpation, why keep it once you can write the new charter? If the Court is a tool of capital, why leave it independent? If the other party is a fascist regime, why accept its victories as binding? The Bolsheviks and the Maoists answered those questions after they no longer needed the borrowed institutions. The answers were not subtle.

Is this really what you want?

You can want cheaper rent and a less arrogant elite without wanting a political movement that treats the American experiment as debris. You can hate corruption without needing a single chamber that owns the executive, the courts, and the commanding heights of the economy. You can protest a president without training yourself to see half the country as an occupying force.

The old revolutions sold bread and dignity and delivered a party that could not lose. The new movements sell affordability and democracy and write platforms that dissolve the very restraints that keep political conflict from becoming a hunt for enemies. If that is the road, say so. If it is not, stop walking it because the slogans feel righteous. History already ran this experiment. The results are in the archives and in the graveyards. Is this really what you want?