The goals of the DSA sound lofty and noble, but DSA implementation of those goals is highly unpopular with the electorate. “Community-controlled alternatives to punitive policing” is defunding the police. “Affordable housing” and “renter protections” is rent control. “Using democratic institutions to serve working people, not corporate profit” is inserting government in wage negotiations between private businesses and employees or contractors (see the ride-share driver debacle). “Municipal grocery stores to combat corporate food apartheid” is government competing with private businesses.
No, thank you, Hanson. You can keep your brand of progressivism. Even though it’s not perfect, I’m sticking with the DFL as is.
Steve Millikan, Minneapolis
In a letter to the editor on Tuesday, a reader proposes that “the extreme left of Minneapolis” — presumably meaning the leading challenger to Mayor Jacob Frey, the majority of the City Council and all their supporters — no longer be labeled as “progressives” but only as “socialists,” which is said to be “concise and accurate” (“Socialists and progressives. That’s all”).
I have a companion proposal. Since the concise and accurate definition of socialism is when some social good or service is owned publicly and operated for the good of all rather than owned privately for profit (e.g., our public schools, libraries, roads, bridges, parks, and police and fire departments), I’d like to propose that every time a candidate or commentator raises an alarm about “socialism,” they be required to say, in the same breath, precisely which public goods or services they are demanding be kept in, or returned to, private, for-profit hands rather than being owned by, and run for the benefit of, the public in general.