A Rare Smart Move by the Gutless DNC

I’ve called the DNC “gutless” for refusing to bar Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members from its primaries, letting DSA radicals run against traditional democrats even though the DSA holds traditional Democrats in contempt. The party hasn’t had the will to exclude them outright. But it has now taken a modest step toward blocking another Bernie Sanders-style insurgency: naming South Carolina, rather than New Hampshire or Nevada, as the first primary state for the 2028 presidential race.

That choice matters. A DSA-aligned candidate — AOC, say — is unlikely to win a state that, in 2024, propelled Joe Biden past Sanders to the nomination. In South Carolina, as in much of the Deep South, the democratic electorate is dominated by black voters and college-educated white elites. With roughly sixty percent of South Carolina democrats Black, Jim Clyburn remains a kingmaker firmly in the establishment camp. His endorsement of Biden over Sanders saved Biden’s campaign. Any future nominee will effectively need Clyburn’s blessing — which leaves little room for a socialist candidate.

I wonder if anyone has pondered that black democrats are in the main, the ones with traditional democrat values. Yes, there are a few black DSA-aligned politicians — Cori Bush and Brandon Johnson among them — but black voters as a bloc are rarely socialist, even though a meaningful minority receives public assistance. Polling consistently shows black voters oppose emptying prisons or defunding the police, want better-funded schools and support school choice, and have resisted having undocumented immigrants placed in their neighborhoods. And with the possible exception of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, most blacks do know what a woman is. It is hard to find an item on the DSA platform that most black voters would actually endorse.

Working-class white voters in South Carolina, meanwhile, are solidly republican. Some on the left argue that’s simply because the GOP became a refuge for Southern voters who were once democrats. But the more accurate story is that the democratic party abandoned the working class — across racial lines — and became, in practice, a party of white elites. Both the party writ large and the DSA in particular present themselves as champions of working people, but figures like Graham Platner are the bourgeois professionals posing as proletarians and fooling no one.

By putting South Carolina first, the democratic Party has all but guaranteed that no left-wing, progressive, or DSA-aligned candidate can win the opening primary and ride that momentum into the rest of the primary calendar. The party still hasn’t the guts to formally expel its socialist wing, but at least they are taking steps to make certain that the socialists do not get a jump start on winning the nomination for president.