Talk:Democratic Socialists of America/Archive 4

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Is DSA a party?

The issue of whether DSA is a political party and whether elected officials who are members of DSA should be listed in the infobox has come up repeatedly, so I am restarting this conversation again to avoid edit-warring. Talk:Democratic_Socialists_of_America/Archive_3#Concerning_Members, Talk:Democratic_Socialists_of_America/Archive_2#Should_the_infobox_include_seats_held? and Talk:Democratic_Socialists_of_America/Archive_1#Partyship_and_seats_in_infobox have discussed this issue at length. To state the facts, DSA is not, by an definition, a political party in the US context. Members run almost exclusively as part of the Democratic Party and the organization itself is registered as a political non-profit organization. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it below. Otherwise, I'd like to stop having this conversation over and over again. I'm tagging editors who previously participated in discussions on this matter: User:Objective3000, User:Elli, User:Madglad, User:The Four Deuces, User:Cullen328, User:Netx444, User:JesseRafe, User:Jonathan Williams, User:Kencf0618, User:JayBeeEll, User:Zellfire999, User:Blocky858, User:4kbw9Df3Tw, User:Googleguy007.--User:Namiba 14:51, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

• No - The DSA endorses candidates. It does not organize competitions for political offices. O3000, Ret. (talk) 14:58, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Misleading whether or not the DSA is a political part is irrelevant to whether or not its members who hold office should be shown. Imo it is not a party and its members who hold office should be shown. Googleguy007 (talk) 15:07, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

If DSA does not nominate them nor does it exercise any control over their actions, why should this information be in the infobox? Would you say the same for the Sierra Club PAC?--User:Namiba 15:32, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Imho it should be in the infobox because for an explicitly political, somewhat party structured organization, having members in government is relevant information. Googleguy007 (talk) 17:27, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Lots of special interest groups, pressure groups, labor unions etc. from moveon.org and the NRA to the UAW endorse candidates and have members elected to office. There is no reason why the DSA should be treated differently.

The only difference is that the DSA is a successor to the Socialist Party of America, but its members made a decision not to be a political party. TFD (talk) 16:40, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Undecided, I think it is sufficiently party-like, and membership of electeds is clear enough, that seats could be listed. It isn't like the Sierra Club or the NRA in the sense that it isn't a single-issue group.

However, there doesn't seem to be much precedent for listing seats among current non-explicit parties. The Ugandan and Myanmar militaries list seats despite not being parties, although at least in Myanmar's case seats are reserved for the military. Another example is the Girondins page, which lists electoral history despite "never [being] an official organization or political party." I think it would be good to have neutral 3rd-party sources describing DSA as a party before re-adding a seat count to the page. Exobiotic 💬 ✒️ 16:29, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

There are other multi-issue groups that endorse candidates, such as Justice Democrats, MoveOn, Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America (not to be confused with the Congressional Progressive Caucus), and 21st Century Democrats. TFD (talk) 16:52, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

An important factor to consider (beyond the fact that otherstuff not having this section doesnt make it inherently unneeded) is that the DSA is a fully fledged major political organization, beyond simply being a PAC like most of the linked groups, and that the people included in the seat-count are members of the organization, not just politicians who have recieved endorsements. Googleguy007 (talk) 17:31, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the ping. I will repeat myself from 4.75 years ago, because the relevant issues have not changed: The questionable nature of the relevant comparison is one of several good reasons this should simply not appear in the infobox -- it should instead be treated properly, in the article text. Other good reasons are that DSA is not actually a political party: no one was elected on a DSA ballot line, belonging to DSA does not preclude one from belonging to political parties, and so on. --JBL (talk) 17:27, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

DSA is in no way, shape or form a political party, and should not be treated as one. Cullen328 (talk) 17:33, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

DSA is not presently a party, but in my opinion should still list seats and other similar infobox information. It does have parliamentary representation, and it functions in many ways as more of a traditional "party" structure than the Democrats, who are not really a membership organization. Additionally, there are ongoing discussions within the organization about making the transition to a party.

It is not uncommon for factions or caucuses to have infoboxes on Wikipedia. The official Congressional Caucuses have seat charts. Globally, there are many systems where different factions all run under the same banner, but the constituent entities (even when they are called parties), who have their strength determined in primaries, are still represented. Parties that are part of electoral alliances and do not run independently often still have representation charts- see Socialist Party (Ireland)Zellfire999 (talk) 19:04, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

The official Congressional Caucuses have seat charts. Hmm I wonder if I can spot any features that distinguish these groupings from DSA in a salient way .... (None of the other analogies is good either, but this one is ridiculous rather than just poor.) --JBL (talk) 19:31, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

• DSA is not a political party. It is analogous to an activist political organization or group, political action committee, or a caucus. Unlike the Working Families Party, they do not have ballot lines or conventions to nominate candidates on the ballot. They will just meet and choose who to endorse among independent or Democratic party candidates. Andre🚐 19:36, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

The DSA does not require the candidates it endorses to be members. Most famously, Bernie Sanders was never a member of the DSA. Looking at their website, it appears that most endorsees are not members. Also, the DSA members of Congress do not caucus together, but belong to the Squad, which includes all five DSA members plus three non-members. They also caucus with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Unlike a party or faction, there is no platform for endorsees to follow. IOW, it operates exactly like every other advocacy group that endorses candidates. TFD (talk) 19:39, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Iirc the candidate counts only included card-carrying members, regardless of endorsement status. Exobiotic 💬 ✒️ 13:10, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

How do you know whether an endorsed candidate is a member of the DSA? The NYC lists 13 endorsements, but only one of them say they are a member.[1] The Seattle DSA endorsed Kshama Sawamt in Dec. 17, 2020, even though she was a member of Socialist Alternative.[2] TFD (talk) 13:32, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

This doesnt seem to be an argument actually against including the information, just an issue that could make it more difficult. Googleguy007 (talk) 17:29, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

I am not saying the information should be excluded from the article, just that it does not belong in the info-box. If reliable sources do not give us the number of elected DSA members, then it lacks weight for inclusion in the info-box. How would we come up with a figure for the number of DSA members in state legislatures when we don't know how many candidates they endorsed are actually members? And of course members are free to seek election without their endorsement, which has also happened. So we have three categories: member but not endorsed, member and endorsed, non-member and endorsed. TFD (talk) 02:02, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

• Include per Googleguy007 and Zellfire999, the issue is the informative nature of the content to the reader. Being a DSA member is not like being a member of, or endorsed by, some non-profit like the Sierra Club. DSA, from national to local news, is known to have robust plebiscites on their endorsements (often members, not necessarily as pointed out - ergo, Sanders should not be listed, but Sawant was for a time) from, depending on the chapter, multiple working groups within a local chapter to get an endorsement. The non-profits where you pay dues by check and don't have meetings etc just settle it behind closed doors with leadership - that itself is a political action making DSA have a party-like apparatus. There's conventions (biennial?) where a constitution is amended and a platform is agreed (and disagreed) on and a party structure is re-created. That's not something that the NRA etc. does, or even something the other "major" parties do (change/amend their constitution/charter regularly, and their platform is usually set by their chair not by the members at large or even the delegates). While it doesn't run as a party in the narrow US sense of the ballot-line terms, it very much functions as one, and it's not a ballot-line party for murky and changing but ultimately pragmatic reasons as the US is a de facto two-party system with FPTP voting in almost every jurisdiction, so running a party-like org but not running party candidates is a practical "win elections" vs "party purity" consideration that they've made. WFP only ever formed as a party per se because its home, New York, allows fusion voting. Note how much less successful WFP has been in other states where a WFP vote is against a Democrat, so WFP functions more as a political advocacy org than a party in those states. Just a too-long aside about the Realpolitik about how DSA and WFP differ from each other and both from NRA/Sierra Club, and how a reader is better informed with DSA in the infobox than they would be without. JesseRafe (talk) 15:49, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

  The definitional question (who counts?) makes this totally unworkable: do we count DSA members? (As of when?) DSA endorsees? (As of when? Local or only national?) Etc. It's not that the question isn't interesting, it's that it can't be properly covered in the context of an infobox---that's what prose is for. (I agree with you and disagree with several people above that DSA is rather dissimilar from Sierra Club / NRA / etc. But it's also dissimilar from any of the institutions for which listing their representation is a straightforward and unambiguous matter suitable to an infobox.) --JBL (talk) 18:00, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

  IMHO we should just include current DSA members in federal, state, and local offices. Googleguy007 (talk) 18:58, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

  It is impossible to maintain such a list with any degree of accuracy over time. DSA membership rolls are not public records, there is no way to tell if someone who was a member at one point has continued as a member or not. --JBL (talk) 19:20, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

  I dont see why we cant just go with what RS say on this? Tbh this argument feels more like an invented reason to oppose it based on your pre-exiting opposition. Googleguy007 (talk) 20:55, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

  Yes well you could make this discussion personal for no reason, in violation of common politeness and core Wikipedia policy; or you could recognize that people may disagree with you in good faith, and be willing to leave it at that. --JBL (talk) 23:51, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

  ^ Agreed. Generalrelative (talk) 00:04, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

  We cannot go with what rs says on this because rs says nothing on this.

  I don't see the difference with the NRA. They endorse candidates, some of whom are members and there are members of the NRA elected to office they did not endorse. And we don't know who actually is a member.

  The DSA is not the Illuminati. They don't have a secret agenda, they just want to elect like minded people as does any other advocacy group. TFD (talk) 02:09, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Close enough to a party/We should only count endorsed individuals For the purposes of Wikipedia style guidelines, etc. we should generally treat DSA like it is a political party; it is clearly not like the Sierra Club or NRA for instance (one of many differences is that those are single area groups, while DSA is not). So, for instance, we should list their representation in the House (they have no Senate representation at this time).

However, for the purposes of determining their representation in Congress and elsewhere, we should only count individuals who were endorsed by DSA for said office. (As a quick and dirty comparison: Suppose we were calculating the Sierra Club's "representation" in Congress (which we should not do; it is a very different org than DSA). I think we would agree that we would not count Congressmembers who are Sierra Club members but failed to receive the Sierra Club's endorsement. Rather, we would only include those Congress members who were endorsed by the Sierra Club in their election.) ROADKILL (talk) 02:46, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

A recent article in Politico says that Rep. Bowman allowed his membership to lapse last year.[3] However, it was not reported at the time. What kind of party operates like that? TFD (talk) 04:07, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Loaded framing, it's a party-like organization. It is obvious that it is not a political party from the fact that it is simply not registered as a political party or named on ballots. I think the better question is whether it is a party-like organization, and that is the strategic orientation adopted by DSA. The organization's size as well as their Socialists in Office committees who enforce elected accountability make details typically reported for a party relevant for this organization. 4kbw9Df3Tw (talk) 09:21, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

AFAIK, the Socialists in Office Committees only operate for elections to the NY legislature, where members caucus together and are expected to carry out DSA policy. In Chicago, there is a Socialist Caucus in the city council, but members are selected by the caucus and do not have to be members of the DSA, follow their policies or have their endorsement. Otherwise, candidates do not have to be members of the DSA or even consider themselves democratic socialists or adhere to their policies to get their endorsements. In presidential races, they do not even have to agree to their endorsement. In the last election, they were divided between endorsing Joe Biden and Howie Hawkins so endorsed neither. But suppose they had endorsed Biden. Would that make him the first DSA president?

The reality is that when the Socialist Party of America folded, the former members that formed the DSA deliberately chose not to be a political party or a faction of the Democratic Party. Unlike a political party, their main function is not to get members elected. TFD (talk) 13:26, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Questionable sources

There seems to be a lot of uses of twitter and statements by DSA for sources, which is discouraged. I removed some but have kept a few up I am not sure about. What do people think? 3Kingdoms (talk) 20:08, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Agreed there are too many primary/discouraged sources, unfortunately some information is hard to find elsewhere. I've argued we should get rid of the Caucuses table for this reason (see above).

Edit: The relevant policy, from WP:PRIMARYCARE (emphasis mine):

"Material based on primary sources can be valuable and appropriate additions to Wikipedia articles, but only in the form of straightforward descriptive statements that any educated person ... will be able to verify are directly supported by the source." Exobiotic 💬 ✒️ 14:39, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Yeah I decided to remove the youth and Caucus sections because of this. However the whole page is full of this so I the note at the top. Honestly it seems like the whole "structure" section ought to be removed, but I will wait to hear from others. As a side note, how reliable is Jacobin for this page sense it makes a point of saying the two are close together, but not connected. Inclined to keep, but could also change based on the reasoning of others.3Kingdoms (talk) 20:13, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

there is a fine line between faithfully quoting a primary source with appropriate context and simply re-broadcasting somebody’s extremely WP:POV viewpoints by reproducing large volumes of their opinions. much of the preexisting article inlines far too much of the subject’s viewpoints, to the point of undue weight and does not provide enough surrounding context. we need to be especially careful when covering sources such as Jacobin which are explicitly Socialist-operated publications and don’t have sufficient independence to report neutrally.

isadora of ibiza (talk) 04:52, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Your position is not supported by policy. As Sen. Moynihan once said, we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not entitled to our own facts. TFD (talk) 14:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Jacobin themselves state on their About page:

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.

this should immediately disqualify them as a impartial source regarding anything relating to socialism or left-wing politics in general. this is not speculation, it is something they readily admit on their own website. isadora of ibiza (talk) 17:42, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Note that there's a distinction between reliability and neutrality. Jacobin is considered biased but reliable:

"There is a consensus that Jacobin is a generally reliable but biased source. Editors should take care to adhere to the neutral point of view policy when using Jacobin as a source in articles, for example by quoting and attributing statements that present its authors' opinions," Exobiotic 💬 ✒️ 15:34, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Agree with Exobiotic. Facts are either true or false, they are not dependent on the ideology of the writer. If a source reports true facts, it is reliable, if it reports false information, it is not.

Using your reasoning, you could say that the ''NYT'' and other mainstream media provide a pro-democratic perspective and therefore should not be used as sources when writing about democracies. TFD (talk) 03:46, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

i’m sure you remember that if you scroll through the reliable sources list you will notice a pattern.

1. liberal: OK

2. green: OK

3. socialist: questionable

4. communist: bad

5. conservative bad

6. fascist: bad

7. libertarian: bad

8. reactionary: bad

i didn’t make the rule. if i made the rule it would look like this.

1. liberal: bad

2. green: bad

3. socialist: bad

4. communist: bad

5. conservative OK

6. fascist: bad

7. libertarian: bad

8. reactionary: OK

but everyone wants the sources that align with their star sign to be reliable, so the community reached a consensus that the liberal sources were the ones that are best for building an encyclopedia, and that was the compromise.

we need to ask hard questions about why we can’t find adequate sources that discuss the subject of this article and don’t come with warning labels on the reliable sources guide. some of these sections are just too detailed and rely so extensively on biased sources that they would never be allowed to stand alone as stub articles.

isadora of ibiza (talk) 06:36, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Fair. But removing the entire caucus section when there was no consensus arrived at is unwarranted when the majority of the sources in that section were not Twitter sources. It is fine to include primary sources when placed alongside secondary ones. If you are unhappy with the sources not all being peer-reviewed empirical studies, that is just an asinine justification not in line with the WP:RS guidelines. The fact that some sources are progressive-leaning is irrelevant to whether the sources are reliable. I see nothing wrong with sources like Truthout, The Nation, The New Republic, New Politics, Commune Mag, and AlterNet unless you can find third-party evidence of them mot being credible. If you use Media Bias/Fact Check, widely used in disinformation and media studies, to make these evaluations, for example, you'll find each of the sources I just mentioned have equal or higher credibility ratings than more widespread sources such as CNN, The New York Times, and Fox News. Jacobin is completely independent of DSA--the fact that some of its writers are DSA members is irrelevant when considering that there are plenty of other writers who are not and even then it remains a credible source despite its socialist leanings; of course, differentiate between opinion and factual statement. Even sources like the Weekly Worker which are affiliated with political parties can be helpful about descriptions if we are looking at factual statements and there is no reason to believe they are particularly not credible in their actual reporting of facts--I could not find a source suggesting they are not credible on that front. What you personally make of their general opinions/ideological leanings is irrelevant; all sources have a certain frame they are coming from, some are more explicit about it than others. What matters is if what they say is credible.

Additionally, you removed the caucus section despite a lack of consensus. Defaulting to keep is preferable as per WP:NOCON?. 4kbw9Df3Tw (talk) 10:24, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Alternet is considered nonreliable on wiki. Truthout seems mixed. The [Worker] has little discussion and seems undue weight for a minor source. Commune mag I could not find being discussed, and New Politics also has little discussion. There seems little reason to use them as sources/ if only they are covering it. While I personally am more favorable to media bias center, wiki is less. I at no point claimed that only "peer-reviewed empirical studies"be used. However, when entire sections are based solely on either primary sources or minor left-wing sites, and as IsadoraofIbiza explains those sources are then used to give to write from a POV view I question what they are really needed for. Given the topic I think it is reasonable to want to be careful with Jacobin. Since it is labeled a reliable, but biased source (personally I think that is too generous given its focus on opinion pieces and in my opinion questionable fact-checking) it can be used but should be with caution. 3Kingdoms (talk) 12:50, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I think that the caucus section and any other section that has questionable sources should be removed. I don't understand citing WP:NOCON? as it states frankly: "Often, people feel that "no consensus" should mean that the current status quo prevails, which, therefore, defaults to keep. That is not always the case." . It seems that there is only one person, 4kb, who wants to keep these sections while everyone else I have seen thus far is in favor of removing them. I support removing those sections. --Blocky858 (talk) 05:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)