Leftward Bound

“I have never been to a Democratic Convention in my life,” said Chrys Shimizu. “This is my first one. And it’s all because of Bernie!”

‘Bernie’ refers, of course, to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the 78-year-old Vermont Senator and two-time presidential hopeful whose outsize influence has markedly moved the national conversation on key social issues to the left.

Shimizu, owner and operator of Topper Packaging, a small business based out of Chatsworth, rattled off a list of issues that resonate. “Health care as a human right. It’s about time. Free public colleges, ending student debt, ending endless wars, making unions strong again, the Green New Deal!”

Standing outside the California State Democratic Convention in Long Beach, Shimizu brushed off concerns that the issues near and dear to her heart – and Sanders – are pillars of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country. “I’m a business owner,” she said. “I love capitalism!”

Shimizu went one step further. “Your firefighters are being paid by our taxes” she said. “That is democratic socialism. Our elementary schools K-12 is paid for by our taxes. That’s democratic socialism! All these things that we take for granted are democratic socialism.”

Shimizu and the rest of the electorate will get the chance to have their voices heard in the 2020 election cycle, particularly in California, a state dominated by Democrats. Orange County, long a GOP stronghold, now has more registered Democrats than Republicans for the first time since 1978. The state has not elected a Republican Senator in over 30 years.

“The Republican Party in California made itself irrelevant,” said Frank Zerunyan, a professor of the practice of governance at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at USC. “When you have a population growth in the [Latinx] community and you go anti- that community, you make yourself irrelevant.”

Frank Zerunyan

As a result, many voters in California looking for change, particularly voters of color, cannot look to the Republican Party. “I don’t blame them,” Zerunyan said. “It shifted the center to the left. Instead of being right to left, it’s center to left...you start already at the middle.” What he is describing is a shift in what is known as the Overton Window.

The Overton Window refers to the range of acceptable discourse surrounding an idea and its political viability, ranging from the unthinkable to the popular. A shift in that window occurs when those with policy ideas outside the mainstream, like socialists, slowly convince others of their viability.

To be sure, the fraction of Democrats voting in California who describe themselves as socialists is tiny, relative to the whole. Yet key socialist tenants like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, long advocated for by the organization, have become part of the mainstream political debate in California and the rest of the country. Statewide polls in California show Sanders neck-and-neck with former Vice President Joe Biden.

In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a DSA-supported bill banning all future immigrant detention facilities in the state. Just a few short years earlier, Barack Obama deported more immigrants than any commander-in-chief before him with little political blowback, even as his administration constructed cages to house migrant children. That’s the Overton Window shifting.

At the same time, California’s population growth has slowed dramatically. More people actually left the state then joined it in 2018. “What’s happening is people who are leaving are more middle of the road or more right leaning because they feel that their voices are irrelevant,” Zerunyan said.

Filling that void instead are voices more like those in the DSA. One of them is Elie Nehme, who has been in the organization for a few years going back to his time as a college student helping organize Youth DSA events at Long Beach State. The son of two immigrants from Lebanon, Nehme is a Marxist, “as far left as you can get,” he said. “It was my way of coping with growing up.”

DSA Member Elie Nehme

In the year since the election to Congress of DSA members Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Rashida Tliab, membership at the LA chapter has swelled by around 300 to 1,572, making it the third largest chapter in the country after New York City and Washington, D.C. Nationwide, the group boasts around 56,000.

Zerunyan believes that Medicare For All is not a viable policy solution. “If you look at the economic numbers, it is astounding that anybody would even suggest such a thing,” he said. “I don’t even consider that serious. While that may be very interesting for the base of left-leaning coastal cities, the heartland is not going to go for it... I’m not even sure California will go for it when it’s all said and done.”

“That’s not how governance works,” he said. “We’re all in it together... we’ve got to find a consensus voice to govern.” In addition to his academic background, Zerunyan is a three-term Mayor of Rolling Hills Estates, an affluent, predominantly white and Asian community with a median annual income of $152,000. He continues to serve on the city council and served on California’s state regulatory board under Gov. Schwarzenegger.

Nehme isn’t convinced by the argument from Zerunyan and others that the socialist agenda is unaffordable. “We manage to find money for anything else,” Nehme said. “The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan... bailing out the banks, Bush’s tax, Trump’s tax.”

“We spend three and a half trillion dollars over ten years on a fighter jet that doesn’t work, that’s fine, we’re doing it for national security,” he continued, referencing the failed F-35 program. “But the ordinary pensioner? What with their dreams of retiring while they're 70 years old and working at Walmart as a greeter? No, we can't afford that. We're feeding in an entitlement crisis... what it means is that your priorities are not about caring for people.”

Longtime socialist Robert 'Gabe' Gabrielsky

While the DSA may be slowly influencing policy, what it is not is a political party unto itself, a fact which draws Robert ‘Gabe’ Gabrielsky’s ire. Gabrielsky, 76 and a socialist for over half a century, is something of a walking socialism encyclopedia, capable of delineating long-gone conflicts between the Maoists, the Trotskyists, the Leninites and more. The Los Angeles DSA even has him regularly give lectures to new members to educate them about the history of the movement.

Gabrielsky first joined the Young People’s Socialist League, better known as YPSL, in 1964, not long after the March on Washington. Another member of YPSL during that time was a young Bernie Sanders. “Talk to anyone who was at the national convention, they’ll tell you it was total chaos. 1000 people cannot be a deliberative body,” he lamented.

“It needs to be organized like the old Socialist Party was organized, like the big parties are organized – at the state level,” Gabrielsky said of the DSA’s structure. Instead, it’s organized at the city level, and then further into subcommittees that can meet and organize around a specific issue like health care, immigration reform or climate change.

For Nehme at least, “the dream is that the DSA eventually becomes a party, but the big debate within DSA is whether or not we should be doing electoral work to begin with,” Nehme said. “It’s a debate that’s existed in the American left since it created itself...whether we should run for office or whether we should just have direct action.”

Nehme is skeptical of Bernie Sanders’ chances to win the election in 2020, but “it’s the best thing we’ve got in a generation or two, might as well hold onto it and push it as long as it can go,” he said.

One of the subcommittees within the DSA’s organizational structure is the Membership Committee, of which Ellie Nehme is a part. It’s an internal-facing group tasked with helping devise ways to grow the ranks and retain new members like Ryan Hunter, who attended his first DSA meeting in November.

“I think everybody with a left sensibility feels like there’s more that they could be doing right now,” he said. “Outside of a really defined movement like DSA there’s not a lot of clarity about what actions should be taken, and you end up with a really inconsistent, vague activism.”

While Hunter believes that voting for Sanders is “probably the correct decision,” he doesn’t want the group taking a scorched earth approach.

“I think [Elizabeth] Warren can be a gateway drug into socialism and into DSA for a lot of people who are not really concerned with ideology,” he said. “I think there's a lot of people that would align themselves with DSA, but there's maybe just something in their way at the moment. And it might be a perceived ideological barrier where maybe if they really look into what DSA stands for, they might actually realize there are more aligned than they thought.”

Hunter echoed Zerunyan’s approach that consensus is needed to make substantive changes. “There is a contingent of the left that basically says if you have wrong-think on one issue, I don’t want you on the team,” he said. But talking to people is the only way that you ever connect and if you don’t connect, you’re not winning anyone over to your point of view.”

Hunter and Nehme are just two more of the many young people increasingly fed up in America. Rising income inequality, stagnant wages, and massive student debt loads have caused a generation of Americans to begin looking for alternatives. Fewer than 50% of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of capitalism while 70% of Millennials in 2019 say they are at least somewhat likely to vote for a socialist candidate.

Those figures come as no surprise to Zerunyan. “The millennial generation’s definition of success is substantially different than mine,” he said. “It cares much more than mine did about social issues, and environmental sustainability.”

Hunter’s goals go beyond just getting Democratic candidates elected. “I would like to be able to look back and feel that this moment was not squandered,” he said. He wants to be able to look back and say that he “contributed in some small way to helping this moment solidify into a long-term sustainable movement.”

A long-term sustainable movement is something Gabrielsky knows a little about. After YPSL collapsed in 1972, he bounced around for a bit before eventually becoming one of the original members of the DSA back when it was first formed in 1982.

Ryan Hunter

He drifted in and out of the organization over the ensuing years but rejoined the organization again in November 2016, following the election of Donald Trump. “Oh, it’s way better now,” he said of the democratic socialist movement today compared to his ‘60s heyday. “Way, way, way better. When was there a democratic socialist organization of almost 60,000 members? Not since 1919. The Communist Party at its peak claimed 70,000 members. There’s nothing in living memory to compare it to.”

What does someone like Gabrielsky want exactly? “I consider the workers owning the means of production to be a minimum demand, not an ultimate” he said. “I’ve spent my entire life advocating for a mass independent party, the working class... The movement is everything.”

Gabrielsky has even run for office three times himself on the Green Party ticket, once for Congress and twice for the state legislature. “I’d do so again if asked,” he said. For him, the fight will never end, and certainly not if Bernie wins the election in 2020. “My tendency was [to say] whoever’s in power, get rid of,” he said with a laugh.

“It was Irving Howe who said socialism is the object of our desire,” he continued, referencing one of the founders of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which would later become the DSA. “The working class will always want more... you see that horizon there? The horizon is always disappearing.”

It’s Shimizu - who is not a DSA member - who summed up the rising democratic socialist movement most succinctly. “It means what we already have.” she told me. “It means what FDR saved this country with back in the ‘40s. How did he save it? By introducing programs just like Bernie Sanders is... We all are democratic socialists, and it’s time to wake up to that fact.”