A radical left political movement, the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, is a small but growing feature of U.S. politics.
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It is attracting voters who are defecting from mainstream DNC candidates in state elections, to ones called “DSA-adjacent.”
The DSA is not (yet) a political party. It is an activist organization which is fielding candidates who align with the Democrat party in order to take advantage of its ballot dominance. It’s a smart tactic to quickly gain seats under the DNC umbrella, while extending the DNC’s “product line” to young urban political consumers. It’s classic marketing strategy
The DSA’s core base is also ready-made, and efficiently concentrated. Its common, unifying affiliation is college. Graduates make up that base, but the actual political organization, recruitment, and activism, leverages the university system. Students, faculty and staff are ideologically “pre-packaged” on college campuses. That ideology, which fuels the DSA, is in full bloom there: all the DSA has to do is set up their university chapters, and then open the flood gates to young, radicalized voters lining up to join.
Our universities and colleges have historically provided many traditional benefits such as preserving and transmitting important knowledge, and skills. Students, when put to the test, can develop stronger powers of mind, and emerge with good mental habits.
Unfortunately, a lot of other things get transmitted on college campuses that can corrupt a student’s independent thinking. Some call this the “silent curriculum” where subtle social conditioning occurs from campus culture.
Colleges create a unique social environment that is quite different from what young adults may be used to.
At the core of this environment is the relationship between students and faculty. It isn’t that students are just much younger, and professors older, and thereby take the place of a parent figure. The deference shown by students toward faculty is actually structural: a student is in a subordinated institutional hierarchy of authority, and is seeking approval from that authority. That approval takes the form of grades, credits, recommendations, and a degree. With that, is formed the expectation of a career, but also social standing.
With social standing comes entitlement—but more than that is created. Economist Thomas Sowell calls it the “vision of the anointed” where the conceit of intellectual elitism forms a new shared behavioral code. That code, more than anything else, directs the pursuit of top-down social policy, because they know better than you do, what it should be.
But how exactly does all this happen?
Part of the explanation is that much of college, for most students, is organized in ways that tend to look “backwards” to reinterpreted information and knowledge, and not always with specific, practical objectives in mind.
This is why political grievances can be more easily formed in academic environments: Political organizers don’t hold out a future; they point to their view of the past, and agitate in order to “settle scores,” and reorder current circumstances. If the scores are thought to stem from grand theories of social history and can be linked to one race, class or group, then a mass movement may result. This appeals fundamentally, of course, to infantile behavior and frustrated wants, which is always an easy frustration to reactivate. Marxism functions precisely this way: it offers moral and emotional gratification, while ignoring the adult reality of tradeoffs.
So it’s little wonder that our college campuses are the most natural and rich source of DSA membership. It holds out to students a confirmation of their adolescent utopian ideals, and frustrated hopes. The DSA’s political solution to the difficulties of life is framed, however, strictly in terms of shared group solidarity.
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Rarely on college campuses does the individual form the intellectual basis of political philosophy. Human and legal rights are always emphasized of course, but those rights, such as free speech, are packaged as collective rights that come from collective cohesion around a common ideology.
In academia, the group is the source of truth. Opposition to the group creates distrust, and is even judged dangerous. In this way, academic group culture is socialism’s fundamental method of self-policing through group belief structure. As philosopher Michael Foucault put it in his book Discipline and Punish, “A despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but the politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas.”
This makes college the ideal institution to form the fusion of knowledge and political power. That fusion works through language, which is why language is the fundamental phenomenon that changes college students, and it is the first thing that parents notice when they come home: their language has been altered. Political activism works by forming dominant political ideology, and such a commitment requires control of language.
In contrast, a professor writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, attributed the vulnerability of college students to socialism’s charms, simply to the way they live day-to-day on campus: they don’t explicitly pay up front for everything they need, as they need it, like they might as working adults.
Instead, their daily economic purchases are bundled into an “all you can eat” menu where actual costs are hidden. That may include their dormitory, meal plans, medical services, supplies, and numerous entertainment events (the professor doesn’t discuss the reality that many students are on a tight budget, and learn how to make ends meet).
If such a lack of point-of-purchase transactions otherwise somehow promotes an expectation of social welfare later in life, then to make the professor’s hypothesis correct, all the “free” goods and services that students previously enjoyed while living at home with their parents, should produce the same result. It doesn’t.
Fortunately for many, home life includes parents who work for a living, bring home a paycheck, and indeed pay for all the groceries, cars, gas, and clothes—but also provide much more. They are often taking care of extended family, a small business, and balancing many demands. Young adults absorb a work ethic from their parents (and grandparents). Many also get solid direction on economics and family values, including religion.
Unfortunately, colleges are filled with faculty who embrace some form of victimization, are politically progressive, and may have some disdain for two-parent, man and woman marriage and values (I’m not disrespecting single parents). If faculty included more conservatives, or even moderate democrats, campus culture would be entirely different, whether there was all-in pricing, or pay-as-you-go. It’s a red herring argument from a professor that doesn’t want to get at the real problem: faculty, and student mirroring of their ideas and behavior.
In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argued that people who consider themselves victims will invert normal morality, and develop a “slave morality,” resulting in contempt and resentment. Resentment leads to class envy, and entitlement. That is the dominant faculty culture transmitted to students, and why the DSA can harvest voters from the seeds planted in college.
Matthew G. Andersson is a former business chief executive and author. He testified before the US Senate, and the Connecticut General Assembly concerning higher education. He has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and is a regular contributor to the National Association of Scholars publication, Minding the Campus. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and University of Texas at Austin.
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