Not that anyone is asking, but I used to go to meetings for the local Dems. Without me, the average age was probably 75. People would ask why no young folks were there. I said that if you want young folks, you need to support Bernie. They ignored me so I stopped going. (One lady thought that young people are huge fans of Beto lol). I wish we had an org where I live but this place is very very rural and so many left-leaning people here are also hardcore fucking anti-vaxxers. It drives me insane.

Edit: also the local dems have been run by the same handful of gerontocrats FOREVER and they will only offer token support to any leftist candidates who actually win their primaries.

DSA is hot shit in most of the country, especially in the big cities. the politics runs liberal but even more than that, the org is captured by the worst sort of people, more obsessed with their personal power in the org than with what they might accomplish. I spent about two years trying to make the org less useless but the last convention convinced me it wasn’t a worthwhile use of time. but that and my time in a chapter’s leadership means I have a lot of stories about the org. AMA, I guess.

Here my one and only experience with PSL:

There was a large scale teacher strike in the state and some anarchists set up a table at the rally. The anarchists let PSL drop off some flyers at the table so the anarchists could hand then out for them. I got one which said there was a meeting that weekend.

I show up a little early ~5-10mins , and of course no one is there. I wait around for about 20 minutes and finally someone, a white lady, shows up. She swears she’s not the only member and the rest are in the way. We have some small talk about the strike and probably another 10 minutes later a van pulls up. What follows is the most “American leftist moment” of my life.

First guy to get out is a young white guy. Once his feet hit the ground, he immediately take a massive hit from his modkit and blows a quite impressive sized cloud. Then a old white guy get outs and starts unloading boxes of…guess what? Newspapers. The 3 sit down and we’re all given newspapers. It becomes clear to me now this is everyone that is going to show up.

Remember how there was a teacher strike in my state? Well we immediately launch into a discussion about Assad, Syria, chemical weapons and imperialism since that’s the front page news of their newspaper. This dominated the majority of the meeting but we all agreed that the US should fuck off. We have a quick 10 minute discussion about the strike before everyone has to leave.

Overall org rating: Better than trots because at least they don’t support imperialism in the newspaper

Fuck The People’s Front of Judea, fucking revisionists! And those splitters in The People’s Popular Front of Judea didn’t improve anything.

All true revolutionaries are proud members of the Judean People’s Front.

I was involved with DSA for a couple years, til 2017 “officially” (I’d moved away a few months before my dues ran out). It was a weird group: a clique of succdems, a clique of idpol obsessed Maoists, and like 4 folks who wanted to engage in “normal” direct action. It got better as the Bernie obsessives left, the Maoists tried to launch their own group and split from DSA, and more folks interested in direct action joined.

Eventually (surprise!) the Maoist group fell apart and narced to the cops on each other, the direct action types took over the DSA, and I occasionally join their actions, and the succdems ran for positions within the Democratic party. I’ve not renewed my membership, though, and don’t plan on it.

And I’m still wary of self proclaimed Maoists since then. Just hearing the toughest talk from them for two years, to then find out they ratted each other out after some pretty mild police pressure.