DSA and the Battle for Suburbia
Today I attended a counter-demonstration to one staged by the county Republican Party. I continue to stress the importance of Loudoun County in the Grand Scheme of Things. Of course, I could be biased because I live here. We usually attach greater importance to work and events to which we are closer. Here is some background on the situation, which in retrospect proved too upbeat.
Why is Loudoun important? Well Virginia is important for Democratic candidates for president in the Electoral College. The Democrats cannot afford to concede any purple states’ electoral votes, senators, or members of the House. Loudoun is important in Virginia for the following reason: it is majority Democratic, but if it supplies too small a margin of victory for Democrats, we get a Republican majority statewide. This is what resulted in the G.O.P. flipping the top three offices in the state – the governor, the attorney-general, and the lieutenant governor. Our new governor, former hedge fund tyro Glenn Youngkin, has proven adept at floating between Trumpiness and the suburban voters he needed to win in 2020, albeit by a hair. His two running mates are more explicitly MAGA, and one of them will be poised to succeed him.
The good guys:
Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans appear to understand the relevance of Loudoun. They have been fueling a full-spectrum attack on county office-holders, targeting the school board, the county attorney, the Board of Elections, and the Board of Supervisors. The current target is our Democratic Member of Congress, Jennifer Wexton. The local rally focused on her challenger, one Hung Cao, a Vietnamese immigrant, Naval academy graduate, and combat veteran.
The bad guys
Wexton has been invisible until recently now that the election approaches. Most annoying to me, she was AWOL during the Critical Race Theory (CRT) brouhaha that Cao and the Republicans are still flogging. Her platform is basically she is a nice lady, she’s a mom, and she was a prosecutor. Cao is pretty unashamedly ultra-right, though his campaign commercials that inundated me over Pandora on the way home limited their pitch to his military service record and his immigrant origins. Cao delivered a speech at the rally today, revealing that his political gifts are modest. More interesting was an avowal by the first speaker at the rally, to the effect that “white nationalism is just gratefulness” (sic). Somebody do a seminar on that gem. They insisted that being against CRT made you the real anti-racist.
The G.O.P. rally billed an entire roster of local MAGA celebrities, a number of which have been agitating against the public school system, CRT, indulging LGBTQ people (“groomers”), and stocking dirty books in the school libraries. There might have been a hundred attendees, which in light of the promotion of the event might not be considered a big success. Our little counter-demo, run on a shoestring, was about forty people.
The striking thing about both groups was how defensive they were. The Republicans were trying to portray their anti-CRT stance as anti-racist. I’ve mentioned Cao’s focus on his service record. The Democrats were all about “Truth” and “Facts” (two of our signs). One of our folks had a sign reading ‘CRT’ stands for “Culturally Responsive Teaching.” This is suburbia, in a very well-off county. The Republicans were a bit more aggressive with their signs, coming over to take up posts in our space, but not very much so. There were no nasty Proud Boys in evidence. I presume the election will hinge on party identification. Youngkin did lose the county.
Meanwhile, where was DSA? Somewhere else, naturally, pushing pro-labor stuff in another county. This actually made more sense than it might sound like. The Democrats of Loudoun are slim pickings, demographically speaking, for a socialist organization.
I mentioned to the rally organizer that I was in DSA, and she looked at me as if I was from Mars. (I do think that Leesburg, an island of deep blue in the county, is ripe for a DSA chapter.) The dilemma is that if the state goes red because Loudoun does not go big for blue, the space for progressive politics in the state will narrow. Our new MAGA attorney-general has already begun to harass local Democratic officials.
At the same time, one could hardly blame DSA cadres for being uninspired about appealing to well-off suburbanites to vote for Wexton.
In general, our failure thus far to crack the working class makes our fate dependent on the unsteady support for anodyne Democrats from well-off, suburban white people. This is not a secure position to be in.