For Peace, Democracy, and Socialism

How should socialists position ourselves and our movement in the face of American decline and ongoing threats to democracy? Aziz Rana, DSA-endorsed candidate for Congress Oliver Larkin, and St Petersburg, FL’s socialist in office, Richie Floyd, discussed the current political terrain on a mass call recorded Weds 05/20, presented here as a podcast. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And the result is a dramatic overrepresentation in the present of a political coalition associated with the far right that is demographically and economically wildly out of step with where this country is. As we'll talk later, this is a feature that goes all the way back, frankly, to the founding, but we're feeling it in pronounced ways right now.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hi comrades, and welcome to CLASS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC. My name's Michaela, and I'm the current chair of NPEC and a member of North New Jersey DSA. And on class this week, we're delighted to release last week's Mass Call for Peace, Democracy, and Socialism. This episode comes right on the heels of a number of exciting DSA primary wins. From Robert Bell and Louisville for Kentucky State House, to Chris Rabb for Congress down in Philly, to Dr. Tammy Carpenter from Portland DSA for Oregon State House, to Bobby Nichols for Tampe, Arizona's City Council, and several more, as well as a number of well-positioned comrades heading into runoff races. Congrats to all. 2026 is shaping up to be a big test for the socialist movement's growing appeal in the United States. And elections and voting are, of course, how most Americans engage with politics. Contesting elections is one of the main ways that we can wield movement power and get our message across to the widest swathes of our base, the working class. The Supreme Court has recently taken the last leg off of the Voting Rights Act, rendering it incapable of protecting minority communities in the South and elsewhere from gerrymandering schemes designed to disproportionately advantage whites, which in many states traditionally vote with the right. With these trials, average Americans are more and more facing the question themselves what is left of U.S. democracy? Many leftists over the years have decried participating in U.S. elections, essentially arguing that the compromises and costs are too great for the temporary benefits socialists in office can confer to our movement. But the strategy DSA has chosen is the democratic road to socialism, paved with broken stones it may be. How should we position ourselves? On the call, we're delighted to share with you now, recorded on Wednesday, May 20th, Aziz Rana, a constitutional theorist at Boston College Law School, Oliver Larkin, a DSA candidate for Florida's 25th District, and Richie Floyd, a several-term socialist in office in St. Petersburg, Florida, discuss this very quandary. Moderating the call, you'll hear Sid, a member of our National Political Committee. Before we dive into the call, a reminder that CLAS is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter and Peck's Monthly Newsletter using the provided links. So, without further ado, here is For Peace, Democracy, and Socialism.

SPEAKER_05 3:18

Welcome everyone to our Zoom forum with the National Electoral Commission. It is absolutely wonderful to have so many folks joining, especially from all across the country, as we are leading the fight for socialism here and everywhere else. It is lovely to have everyone for this event. Once again, for Peace, Democracy, and Socialism, featuring Oliver Larkin, Aziz Rana, and Richie Floyd. This event, of course, is being put on by Oliver's campaign for Congress in Florida's 25th district, and DSA's National Electoral Commission, where we hope to bring important discussions about the electoral issues that matter to socialists all across the country. So I want to begin by introducing myself. My name is Sidney Carlson White. I am on DSA's National Political Committee. I do a lot of electoral work. I'm based in central Brooklyn, uh DSA, New York City DSA. And it is really wonderful to have everyone here to fight the battle to win democracy in Florida and beyond. I want to briefly uh turn to each of our panelists today to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what they do and why they're here. Want to start with Oliver.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

Yeah, hello, comrades. My name is Oliver Larkin. I'm a Democratic Socialist member of Broward DSA. I've been a DSA member since 2020, running in the Democratic primary against Jared Moskowitz in Florida's 25th Congressional District. My background is as a union organizer. I organized with the News Guild, Communication Workers of America, Washington, Baltimore, local 32035 to organize my workplace in 2018, former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer and running a bold campaign for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, ending U.S. military support for Israel and standing on anti-Zionist principles, and really uh running a campaign for the working class. Uh, the working class is the majority all across the nation, and South Florida is no different. So very excited for the conversation this evening.

SPEAKER_05 5:23

Thank you. I want to jump to Richie Floyd.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Hey y'all, my name is Richie Floyd. I am a DSA member with Pinellas County DSA in St. Petersburg, Florida. And I uh am an elected official. I am elected to St. Petersburg City Council District 8. I first got elected in 2021 after we ran uh a grassroots campaign modeled off of all the other DSA campaigns you see around the country, uh small dollar donors, door to door. And since then I've worked on a lot of issues, uh, particularly around housing, infrastructure, uh, and a lot of things around democracy and voting rights as well. Uh before I was elected, I was a teacher, uh active in my union, rank and file union member. Uh, and uh, you know, happy to be here this evening and happy to talk about what I think uh could be a very bright future for our state and for the South and our country.

SPEAKER_05 6:21

Thank you so much. And of course, Aziz.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Hi, thanks so much uh for including me. It's really a pleasure to be part of the conversation and part of DSA's uh larger community. So uh my name is Aziz Rana. I'm an educator, I teach constitutional law, and really my work in writing is focused on how to think about the politics of democracy and freedom at home and how it connects to anti-imperial principles globally. I've been involved in you know various kinds of cases and questions around these themes. And I'm especially excited about the kind of organizing the DSA represents. Maybe this is something we will have an opportunity to talk about, which is the idea of a political party that's not about just connecting folks that want to be elected to fundraisers and treating essentially voters as outputs, but rather conceiving of the party as a mass membership organization committed to a project of equal and effective freedom for all. So it's wonderful to be here.

SPEAKER_05 7:23

Thank you. It really is wonderful to have all three of you to join this conversation about what we are trying to fight for, right? We're all here, the only reason that we're here is because we don't live in a real democracy, right? We don't live in a democracy in our workplaces, in our political system, where two senators from Wyoming can vote with as much power as the entire population of California. We don't live in a functional democracy, and it's up to us as socialists to continue to highlight that, to point, to point it out. I, of course, am a member of DSA's National Political Committee, and this venture would not be possible without the work of our comrades involved in electoral work across the country. Socialist cash takes out capitalist trash. Slate has been raising tens of thousands of dollars already for primaries across the country, and as you probably know, we've been winning. Last night in Philadelphia, Chris Robb won the race for U.S. House of Representatives, Pennsylvania's third district, bringing an anti-Zionist, anti-APAC, anti-capitalist voice into Congress in the bluest district in the United States. This was possible because Philly DSA threw down to make sure Chris got elected, and we were very happy to help support him at the national level as well. Of course, his wasn't the only win. We had candidates all across the country, including Robert Lavertis Bell in the South in Kentucky, who won his race. We have uh Mark Pinsley in Pennsylvania, of course, Gabriel Sanchez, uh, who won election to the Georgia State House as well. Of course, we have Samson going to a runoff. So we can see that we already have this nationwide movement to fight for the principles of socialism, and of course, our workers deserve more platform, which demands much greater democratic representation for all. If you are a DSA member and you have been involved in electoral work, if you were hitting the doors for Rob, if you were hitting the doors or making phone calls for candidates all across the country, you are invited to join the National Electoral Commission. This commission allows us to make endorsements nationally. It allows us to run our phone banks, which are raising money for Richie Floyd and Oliver Larkin right now, and it allows you, yes, you a DSA member, to make decisions around what endorsements we make, how we engage in electoral politics across the country, shaping the face and the mode of organizing for DSA everywhere. I want now to turn to our panelists to talk a little bit about what is going on right now. If you've been paying attention, you probably know that the crooked Supreme Court has essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act by destroying Section 2, opening the door for even more undemocratic gerrymandering, attacks on black voters across the country, and of course, uh continuing to degrade our already essentially non-existent democracy. The theme of tonight's conversation is to win the battle for democracy in Florida and beyond. And we have what a lot of people, especially liberal commentators, are talking about as a crisis of democracy, where the Supreme Court is doing, well, what the Supreme Court does and legislating from the bench, and state legislatures across the country are taking advantage and gerrymandering states all across the South and making sure that black voters do not have a chance to pick our representatives. I wanted to start with Oliver, who is helping lead the fight against this, to talk a little bit about how this uh these attacks from both the state legislature and the Supreme Court are attacking attacking Floridians and what you think needs to be done right now in this moment to fight back.

SPEAKER_04 11:29

Yeah, thank you, Sid. So right now, uh what we are experiencing in the state of Florida actually traces back, I would say, to 2013, because the attention right now is being rightfully paid to the Supreme Court's Louisiana V. Calais decision, which struck down sections of section two of the Voting Rights Act. But really, this has been a multi-decade assault on voting rights that we are experiencing. In 2013, with the Shelby County v. Holder decision in a case out of Alabama, the Supreme Court struck down for the first time since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5 and Section 4B, which enabled federal pre-clearance on uh states with a history of racial discrimination at the polling places. So that has opened the floodgates for the last 13 years of assaults in red states, including Florida, on our voting rights. And with this most recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Calais, what they struck down is section two, part of section two, that uh prohibited uh bans on uh race-based gerrymandering. So what we're seeing in the state of Florida, as recently as in 2020 and 2021, where we had about an even proportion of 16 Republican-held seats and 11 Democratic-held congressional seats, we've seen Governor DeSantis and the Florida Republican Party go back again and again with the 2022 gerrymander and now once again to take what was as recently as five years ago, a proportionate map, to now have the attempt to have a 24-to-floor split of Republican-held districts. And this has been enabled, thanks to an activist Supreme Court, to carry the water of the far-right Republican Fascist Party. And what we're seeing in our state is uh a court at the state level that is ignoring, that is completely flaunting uh the Fair Districts Amendment passed by Florida voters in 2010 with a 63% majority over the undemocratic 60% ballot threshold for constitutional ballot referendums. Florida voters have said we do not want to see partisan gerrymandering in our congressional maps. But with the assistance of the Supreme Court, Florida Republicans are moving ahead anyway. And this is uh really getting at the heart of black political representation across our state with crack ups of districts in South Florida, as well as uh Latino voter representation with uh the splitting of the Puerto Rican community in Central Florida into four different congressional districts. And today, on the anniversary of the uh uh Florida Emancipation Day, where Union troops came to Tallahassee, Union General Edward McCook stood on the steps of Knott House and read the Emancipation Proclamation one month before Juneteenth, where emancipation was spread to the people of Texas. Uh, we're now seeing this attack on our voting rights. And it has unfortunately been enabled by Democrats in Congress that have uh used fear-mongering about uh what Republicans may do without actually standing on principles of expanding democracy. We have seen over the past century, as the United States population has tripled, a lack of expanding the House of Representatives. So we have in our state where the population grows, the population grows in other states, but we can actually lose representation, even with the population growing higher, because we have this undemocratic cap, as well as the many other layers of uh state preemption of local laws. If uh Orange County in Orlando passes rent protections, uh freezing the rent, the state will preempt it. If uh Richie Floyd in the St. Petersburg City Council passes progressive measures, the state can preempt it. We have this 60% ballot threshold where in Florida, even though 57% of us voted for abortion rights in 2024, the minority wins. And so every layer of the deck is stacked against us, and we're going to need Congress to take action not only to expand voting rights, to expand democracy, because we know that this is an undemocratic constitution that must be reformed. The work of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment is only the start of what we need to continue to do to build a working class democracy for all of us. Not just a political democracy, but an economic democracy with guaranteed universal rights for all of us. And that is the project of our campaign, to finish the work of reconstruction in Florida, across the South, and to bend the arc of justice in the United States towards justice, equality, and peace for all of us.

SPEAKER_05 16:03

Wow. I I could not agree more with all of that. Really important to really check out the history of Emancipation Day in Florida. The history of uh formerly enslaved black Americans rising up and resisting, and also celebrating liberty is one of the most important stories in all of American history that needs to be celebrated. So thinking about democracy and the lack lack thereof, um, Richie, what do you think this threat has meant to you, to your constituents on the ground in St. Pete, and how it's affected how you organize, both for socialism and for democracy more broadly?

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah, I think to pick up where Oliver left off, this has directly impacting my constituents, and what it looks like is uh us absolutely doing the work to finish Reconstruction, and we're going to need whoever the next leader of Congress is, Democratic leader of Congress, Democratic president, to be really committed to expanding voting rights, uh, not just you know at a national level and not just investigating the crimes done at a national level by uh the criminal enterprise that runs our country, but investigating crimes done by the criminal enterprise that runs Florida as well, uh, because we have the exact same thing going on. And so how this relates to my constituents, uh, I just want to harp on uh one specific thing that happened here. Uh Florida was, you know, perennially known as a swing state. I think if we had a more democratic system, we wouldn't have been that swingy of a place. Uh, this is a working class state that would elect working class leaders if they had an outlet for that, and just uh unfortunately hasn't had that outlet and hasn't had real voting rights. But before uh 20, I believe 2020, no, excuse me, 2018, we had uh disenfranchisement for uh people who had been previously connected for uh convicted of a felony, and um we passed in 2018 getting uh making it to where they were re they could be re-enfranchised. The issue was uh it got really poorly implemented by the state and it had almost no uh effect. But because there we have such a high immigrant population and uh a population of people who have been disenfranchised in this way, uh it's something like one in five adults in Florida aren't able to vote for those reasons. And so it's already not a very democratic system. But I want to get really specific. So uh in 2018, we all we we passed that amendment, but we also had a razor thin uh race for the governor's mansion, in which we saw someone who uh was nominally progressive, endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and uh ran ads on TV talking about Medicare for all uh come within a percentage point of winning the governor's race. And uh then in 2022, we had a shift where Ron DeSantis won uh his re-election for governor by 19 percentage points, the most the largest win in really like modern Florida history. And I think a lot of people focus on uh people moving here from up north during the pandemic uh because of our freedom or whatever. Um, but that's not what happened, and it's not, and I can speak exactly to what happened in St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, 6,000 less people voted in the 2022 gubernatorial election than voted in 2018. Of that 6,000, I'm not this is not an exaggeration. 5,900 of them were black democrats. Literally, all but 100 of them, like 90 something percent were black democrats who did not come out and vote in 2022 after 2018. Now, you can say, and it has complete legitimacy, that the Democratic candidate in 2022 was garbage uh and not really exciting for people. But another thing that happened was that during the primary, Ron DeSantis weaponized the ballot initiative in 2018 where we allowed returning citizens to get their rights to vote back. He weaponized it by arresting returning citizens that went and voted and filming it and putting it on TV. And it was on the nightly news every night for weeks. Uh, and it was pictures of young black and brown people arrested for voting and sent to jail. Every single one of them had the charges dropped. Not a single one of them did anything wrong, but it had the exact impact that they were hoping to have, and they suppressed turnout massively because of it. And so uh you can see that there's not just the malaise that you would expect from having a garbage Democratic Party, but there's also a real fear. Like, why would I put my neck out for something that I'm not excited by when consequences can befall me, like I saw on TV when they arrested those people. And so it's that kind of thing that's really suppressed the vote in the last handful of years in Florida, especially around young people and minorities. And so that's sort of how I've seen it take uh impact. Now, what I do to push back against that is a whole host of number of things. I mean, I've supported pushing for uh voting rights expansion, making our uh municipal elections easier to engage in, uh trying to push for public funding of elections on city council. And I've run into headwinds, uh, not just with you know my other council members, but with the state. I mean, we've passed progressive legislation around tenants' rights, workers' rights. And had them the next legislative session preempted. And so uh I really uh uh support and appreciate people like Oliver running for Congress, people across the country running for Congress that are interested in actually creating federal legislation and regulations around elections that will actually be democratic because as it stands right now, Florida uh we need uh the troops to roll back in here and tell us to be democratic, just like uh just like it's Reconstruction again.

SPEAKER_05 22:32

Thank you. The fact that like there is active voter suppression happening in this way, too, is in addition to the fact that there's nothing worth voting for, they will humiliate you. They will they will make you risk getting beaten up. Uh Aziz, what do you what do you think about all of this? Uh really the idea that it's been clear that the Voting Rights Act, even as incredibly valuable in 1965 as it was, it seems that it's very clearly not enough for a real democratic vision. How do you see what's happening in Florida reflected in the rest of American politics and the structures that make all of these things possible?

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Yeah, so I mean, I think the first thing to say is that obviously the Voting Rights Act was a landmark achievement and is an incredibly important bill. So it bans discrimination on the basis of race and voting nationwide. It has these two elements that Oliver was highlighting, section two, which allows the government as well as individual plaintiffs to contest when localities, other areas within the country engage in discrimination on the basis of race, including through the amended features of the 82 version of the bill saying that if you have shifts in the electoral map that discriminate in effect by engaging in vote dilution, then that's something that you can contest as a violation of the principle of equal voting representation on the basis of race. And that's precisely what the recent Calais decision ended up gutting. And then you had this preclearance system that said if there were areas in the country that had a history of discrimination on the basis of race, if they made changes to their electoral rules, that had to be pre pre-cleared by the Attorney General's office. And as Oliver noted, that's what the Shelby County decision from 2013 gutted. And so effectively, right now, the Voting Rights Act isn't operative. But here's the big thing, which is simply repassing the Voting Rights Act is not remotely sufficient. And we can see this by the fact that the larger undemocratic features of the constitutional system as a whole effectively submerged and defeated the act. And it's because, in a way, the logic that motivated the Voting Rights Act in the first place was premised on a very particular kind of liberal vision of democracy in the US. Namely, the thought was basically the US has a system of adequate representation. It's an if anything, it's a near ideal structure for liberal democracy. The problem isn't the electoral system, it's the specific issue of race. Race was disconnected from the overall question of democracy. And so the thought was if you can just ensure that there's equal representation on the basis of race, then the system as a whole will function as it should. But that's not ever really been the problem alone. It's always been how race connects to an overall structure of really profoundly oligarchic and authoritarian features of political decision making that end up combining to undermine something like meaningful democracy. And this is because the US constitutional system, as many folks in this room understand, is not built on the principle of one person, one vote. It's still built on the principle of representation for geographical units, for physical spaces rather than people. And in particular for the geographical unit of the state. So states have control over shaping the terms of their internal districts, and this produces a system of gerrymandering. And at the same time, state-based representation ends up shaping the structure of national and federal government in a host of other ways, not just the House of Representatives. So this is obviously the Senate, the presidency through the Electoral College, who's on the Supreme Court based on the fact that it's really the Senate and the president that end up shaping who's a member of the court. And the result is a dramatic overrepresentation in the present of a political coalition associated with the far right that is demographically and economically wildly out of step with where this country is. As we'll talk later, this is a feature that goes all the way back, frankly, to the founding, but we're feeling it in pronounced ways right now. And the result has been that a reconstructed Supreme Court on lines that represent this minority coalition and a reconstructed set of political decision makers through state-based representation have essentially colluded to fundamentally undermine the principles of democratic elections. So you have state actors that are operatives at the state level that engage in the kinds of practices that Oliver and Richie were highlighting. And then you have a Supreme Court that essentially validates those practices and opens the floodgates by creating permission structures for yet greater forms of voter disenfranchisement. And that the work together essentially to at the same time paralyze Congress from being able to be operative as a reform space. And so what it means, and this is where I'll end, is that the only solution going forward, if we're thinking institutionally, has to be one that's not just about repassing the Voting Rights Act, as important as it is, but fundamentally reconstructing our electoral system and our court system. That means using the opportunity, frankly, of Calais to repeal the Uniform Congressional District Act, which essentially limits the ability of having multi-member districts, moving towards something like proportional representation in our electoral system so that you actually have meaningful representation across the country. And then going hand in hand with that, having congressional uh policies that ban partisan uh gerrymandering and engage in, frankly, jurisdiction stripping to limit the capacity of the court to then intercede, also pass various legislative overrides of pa of other Supreme Court decisions, including Citizens United, to engage in systematic forms of campaign finance. And then that goes hand in hand with meaningful court reform. So not just term limits, not just ethics reforms which are necessary but insufficient, but expanding who's on the court, passing laws to ensure that you need a supermajority of the court in order to be able to pass decisions, and creating mechanisms whereby effectively a strengthened legislative process that operates on behalf of a multiracial, genuine majority can go hand in hand with a court that's cabined to ensure that it doesn't operate as an imperial actor, essentially facilitating de democratization at the state level and then unleashing a present to engage in various forms of violence.

SPEAKER_05 29:09

I think that's just such a succinct way of capturing what is wrong here, right? The anti-democratic aspects of American governance and the anti-democratic so-called solutions that people came up for them were always premised on the idea that the United States, which is of course one of the first liberal democracies like this, that these principles of geographic representation were wheeled into being through the so-called American Revolution, that there is something inherently good about it, or that it can be it can be preserved through these sets of tweaks. And of course, you're always going to get a situation where these right-wing state govern governments, even say, corporate Democrats who are happily gerrymandered into safe seats, are going to resist these things at every single turn because they know the system is set up to make sure that those incumbents are protected. Set up to make sure that these minorities will always be entrenched. And the idea of doing anything to dislodge that is just so unspeakable in the American Republic. And it's really our goal to not just try to fight for that at the legislative level, fighting for voting rights, but really to be able to use our pulpit, use our position to talk to regular Americans about hey, this thing doesn't work, right? Oliver, did you have anything to add before what I'm sure will be your favorite part?

SPEAKER_04 30:51

Yeah, uh just some quick reflections. And uh Richie mentioned the 2018 Amendment 4 campaign, of which I was a part working with New Florida Majority and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. Let's inject some hope into this conversation. More than 60% of Floridians, by definition, a cross-partisan majority, elected to restore voting rights to over a million of us. And uh today, the number one issue that is facing our community in poll after poll that we have seen in South Florida is the crisis of democracy. We as democratic socialists have a structural critique of the system. It's why we're talking about proportional representation, ranked choice voting, the abolition of the United States Senate, the abolition of the Electoral College, and overturning Citizens United to have publicly funded campaigns and elections. And these are policies, by the way, that more and more of the average working class American identifies with. We understand and they understand that there is no going back to normal after the past 10, 12, 15 years in this country, that we need to fundamentally reform the systems, the democratic constitution that we aspire to have in order to move our country forward, because it is inextricably tied with the struggle for a working class economy and the political and economic rights that we all deserve, healthcare, housing, education. It is directly tied to reforming the broader system. And we're going to need leaders in Congress that are willing to do the outside strategy, to be a tribune of the people, to speak the hard truths that will not earn you friends in the halls of Washington, D.C., but that speak to the reality that we're confronting in this campaign and in our democratic socialist movement across the United States.

SPEAKER_05 32:44

Thank you. Yes, this will not earn you friends. It will earn you enemies among the right, it will earn you enemies among the capitalists, it will earn you enemies in the ranks of almost all of the legal scholars. Sorry, Aziz. It is what we have to do. Oliver is fighting for DSA members across the country. Whether you are in Florida, whether you are in New York like me, wherever you are in the country, Oliver Larkin is fighting Jared Moskowitz, fighting anti-democracy, and there are going to be millions of dollars spent against him in Florida. So we are the National Electoral Commission. We raise funds for our candidates, and we are wondering if you can send $40 or whatever you're able to send to our good friend Oliver Larkin as he leads the fight for democracy in Florida and beyond. We have opponents who are very crooked. They're taking charter school money, they're taking APAC money, they're taking all of the all of these uh monies from all of these different slush funds, and we can fight back even at a small scale. Thank you for bearing with me as we carry out one of the most important functions of the National Electoral Commission. So I want to go back to Aziz here to really speak about the role of US anti-democracy in suppressing the power of the working class, especially the role of the Constitution and the way it affects black voters specifically. We've been seeing in Louisiana, across the South, we've been seeing how black voting power has been diluted first by um empowering a lot of liberal representatives who did not have necessarily the interests of the working masses in mind, and now, of course, through the disenfranchisement of just about everyone, as these districts are being destroyed, felons are prevented from voting, and all of these other forces. Can you talk about the role of the constitution in this and where black voters are supposed to exist in the system?

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Yeah. The first thing to say is that there's a kind of familiar just so story that many people that grew up in the US, you know, end of the last century, the beginning of this one, would have heard about the relationship between the constitution and racial equality, and in particular the status of black Americans. And that's that the constitution is the thing that safeguards minority rights through Supreme Court decisions like Brown versus Board of Education. And so that the problem is majority tyranny and that the solution is the insulated structures, the counter-majoritarian structures of the constitutional system, especially the Supreme Court as the safeguard. And I think the first thing to say is that to the extent that this had any kind of historical plausibility, it's really a contingent quirk of the post-war period. Frankly, like that era from the 1940s to the 1960s. And that had a lot to do with structural dynamics that are very different than the rest of American history, what preceded it and what followed. It had to do with the way in which the Cold War and the desire for the US to win hearts and minds globally created a kind of consolidated political class around some degree of racial liberalism, ended up reconstructing the terms of who's on the court, led to a set of Supreme Court decisions at a specific moment in time. But if you just zoom out from the quirks of that historical era and just think about the long duray of American history and of the Supreme Court's role within it, really that's a story of the role of the constitutional system time and again in entrenching a version of white authoritarianism. You can see this with the interplay of the undemocratic features of the Constitution, complete with things like the Three Fifths Clause and the role of state-based uh electoral practices, alongside that, in shaping the terms of who's on the court, and then essentially facilitating um power by enslavers, complete with decisions like uh Dred Scott in the years before the Civil War. You can see this in the role of the constitutional system and the Supreme Court in pushing back against really the profound achievements of Reconstruction. You can see this in the role of the constitutional system in facilitating rule by oligarchs and plutocrats during the first Gilded Age, and we can see it at present today. And this is because if we just take a moment, the constitutional system, rather than having the right balance of majoritarianism and counter-majoritarianism, has exactly the wrong balance. If we think about how all of the different institutional veto points operate, and you take them together and you look at it at the national level, what they effectively do is they make it incredibly difficult for a multiracial majority to be able to exercise meaningful authority over the branches of government, over legislative process, over who's in the presidency, over what we might think of as who should be on the court, however, we might reconstruct the Supreme Court, and certainly over the constitutional system because of how incredibly difficult it is to amend the constitution. So funneling all constitutional politics in the court because the constitution as a whole is perhaps the hardest in the world to amend. So the idea of having a multiracial uh majority, the kind of majoritarianism we want, is rendered inoperable effectively by elements of the constitutional order. And then because of the focus on state-based representation, you see precisely what Richie and Oliver were highlighting, which is the kind of majoritarianism that exists is majoritarianism at an incredibly small population level that allows the majority to effectively be a demographic majority. So you can have a white majority construct districts or small sort of electoral groups in which it essentially has a kind of supermajority control to be able to lock out minority, including black voters, from political power. So the majoritarianism ends up being a white majoritarianism, where the counter-majoritarianism is a system that makes it very difficult to have something like multiracial democracy. And the long-standing goal of black radicals and social democrats from and democratic socialists, excuse me, from um Hubert Harrison to W. E. B. Du Bois to Harry Haywood to James Boggs in the 1960s was essentially to flip this, to create conditions whereby you could have local authority that's proportional and represents the interests of all communities, including black communities, and have that link up to a national politics that produces something like a genuinely transformative majority that's class-based, cross-racial, and is organized around representing everybody. And that really has to be the transformative goal, both in reshaping our institutions and thinking about the meaning of democracy. Can you create a democracy in the US that's not organized around these permanent demographic majorities that re-entrench white authoritarianism at the local level and a system of counter-majoritarian power that facilitates rule by capitalist elites and racial minorities, here the minority within the Republican Party's own particular kind of coalition, and instead produce something that's more effectively responsive to the needs and interests of all and is premised again on principles of equal and effective freedom.

SPEAKER_05 40:34

Yeah, thank you. I really think the idea that we had this Supreme Court for a very brief period during Brown versus Board of Education, during Loving Vee, Virginia, that is very well remembered by American liberals and liberal scholars today as an example of the court supposedly carrying out its goal as a check against the majoritarian impulse. But that just it didn't last. It didn't last before, and it didn't, and it didn't last after. And because that era of the Supreme Court granting all of these expansions of rights is the only time this has really ever happened in modern US society. You have an incredibly myopic national memory around what exactly liberty and equality look like. You have lots of people responding to these decisions, holding them up as the pinnacle of, you know, uh, let's say, even positive anti-majoritarian thought, but it leaves us with essentially nothing to work with if we have to rely on Amy Comant Coney Barrett for our rights. Oliver, uh, and and Richie, did you have anything to think about this, especially in terms of the ballot measures and other fights for the working class that you were seeing play out?

SPEAKER_02 41:59

Yeah, uh, I think I just add briefly, one thing got mentioned about uh, you know, the idea that our uh constitution is what's providing, you know, certain rights that we have. And that's something that I've always um felt wasn't quite accurate, and it was ex explained a lot more eloquently than what I'm about to do right now, but it really feels like uh you know what we accept as normal and uh are willing to tolerate is a big part of uh what they're able to get away with. And so when I see uh when I go around you know my community and I see people who are like despondent or despairing or have their head down because of the political situation, uh it's really that's what's most frustrating because I know that that's how people are able to um erode our rights as time goes on, is because people aren't engaging. And so uh it really gives me great hope uh when I see things like uh Oliver running or uh the fact that I was able to get elected in 2021. And these are things that um DSA is is accomplishing. And so uh I just wanted to say that uh it really makes me feel like DSA is uh a big reason in why I get hope when I get up in the morning and uh work on these things, because I think we're one of the only organizations really out here pushing uh for people not to have their head down and not to have their rights taken away from them.

SPEAKER_04 43:34

Yeah, and if I could just follow up briefly on what Richie said, this is the reason that DSA is so important right now, because we exist in a two party duopoly system. And in the state of Florida, it is one of the most repressive and one of the most voter suppressed in the entire country, not only because of the poll tax that was implemented after 2018's amendment four, but because Florida has a closed primary system in which you must be a registered Democrat in order to. Participate in elections in an electoral system in which odds are 80% or more of competitive races are decided in party primaries. But if you are a non-party affiliated voter, if you are someone who chooses to not participate in the Republican-Democrat duopoly, you are effectively disenfranchised. And so this is why we need more Democratic Socialists elected within the ranks of the Democratic Party to open the system up and to confront the realities in the United States, where not long after the Constitution was ratified, Marbury versus Madison and judicial review and the activist Supreme Court, it's been regarded because it's been for over 200 years as the matter of course of how uh the judiciary operates in the United States, but it is far from the original intent of when this country was established, as imperfectly as it was, we've gone even further in the direction of minoritarianism and further away from the true principles of democracy that DSA is espousing. And so uh this is really the hinge point for why we need more democratic socialists in office. And we're seeing that it's possible with Chris Rabb last night in Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia, but also with Democratic socialists in Georgia and Kentucky and across the South. As the South is the heart of these attacks on our political and economic rights, it is going to take those of us in the South to assert a new vision and to be bolder than the Milktoast Democratic Party that has rested on its laurels from blue states and from locales where they're not as oppressed as we are, where we're subject to the authoritarianism of a Republican Party and of uh I thought the way that Aziz put it was so apt, uh, a system that prioritizes land and privileges land, not people. Uh, we are the remedy to to this system and to all that ails it. So um I just wanted to add that and and again, um, thank you, Aziz, for kind of grounding this in the constitutional framework, because I think this is what resonates. And and what I've found so often going out to protests, to rallies, going door to door with our team of volunteers is that people are craving, people are hungering for a change, a more fundamental change than just changing who is in control of the House and Senate majorities after November, but who is in control of the levers of power of how our country operates. And it is within our power to change it. And as Aziz was saying, we have perhaps the hardest constitution in the world to amend. But if we're going to enact these changes, we have to start now, and it's going to have to start in states like Florida.

SPEAKER_05 46:37

Thank you so much for these responses. I really think the role of Florida, especially um places as diverse as Broward County, as diverse as St. Petersburg, really are going to show us the way forward for this, right? I think here I'm sitting in Ocean Hill in Brooklyn, just to the east of Bedsty, and really thinking how how atrophied the political culture here has been historically, right? We have these we have these general elections that are essentially uncontested. We have primaries that are terribly, terribly low turnout historically, and we have a Democratic Party apparatus that while has that is very powerful, has a lot of leaders, is not very interested in participation of the working class in politics. There is an idea that the Democratic Party supposedly represents the interests of New Yorkers, especially black New Yorkers, but not really an idea to actually get people to do politics. That's how the anti-majoritarian system works, right? Is that like even if a district or an area is so gerrymandered or simply so densely blue or red, the election's happening in the primary and people are not turning out for it. So the fact that DSA is able to make this type of intervention in the first place is really important to us, right? It shows that we are raising the consciousness of working class people around us as well as ourselves, while trying to essentially develop a new language for how to do politics. And we saw that very powerfully in New York with the election of Zorhan Mamdani, as we sort of blended this affordability agenda with the idea that we were going to need to do a mass mobilization of people to participate in democracy. So I guess my question for Oliver and Richie first, and then um I'll ask a related one to Aziz afterwards, is how do you think DSA has played a role in shaping your voice, shaping your campaigns, shaping the way that you govern, especially as we have to bring together these conversations about democracy and some of the nitty-gritty affordability economic issues that also affect working working class people in Florida and everywhere else. Want to start with Oliver?

SPEAKER_04 49:18

Yeah, I can trace this back in my identification as a democratic socialist to over a decade ago, where after the re-election of Florida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, in 2014, I knew that I had to take a greater role in responsibility for my own political and economic future. And I began seeking out answers. And the answers that I found were from a United States senator and independent who I had uh before then only known as uh some crazy left-winger, but uh I was raised uh not in the tradition of democratic socialism when I actually began to listen to Senator Bernie Sanders speaking about the ills of Citizens United and of the Koch brothers and the influence of money in politics, the fact that the minimum wage has not been raised in this country since legislation passed under the George W. Bush administration. When I was working as a line cook for $7.25 an hour for 40, 50, 60 hours a week over a hot grill and looking at my paycheck at the end of each week and wondering how I was going to pay for my gas, my groceries, and afford to have anything left over, it became clear to me that we have a system that does not truly respond to the material needs of the American people and of the working class. And speaking to those material needs of the need for a $25 minimum wage, of the need for Medicare for all so that you don't have any premiums, deductibles, or co-pays. This is the language that directly speaks to the lived reality of the working class all across the country. When we consider that a $25 minimum wage would give a raise to 86 million Americans, more than who voted for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the 2024 election, we begin to address the root need of the working class in this country that is not spoken to by either political party. But DSA is that vehicle to build a parallel, countervailing force to the two-party system, to engage where appropriate within the Democratic Party, but to also run independent candidates and to challenge the electoral system and to challenge the preconceived notions of this two-party duopoly by building outside power. And that is the strength and the power that I see in the Democratic Socialists of America expanding beyond just electoral politics and our political life, but all of the tremendous needs that we see here in Broward County when we go on immigrant know your rights small business canvassing to speak to immigrant-owned businesses about keeping ICE out from uh targeting and detaining their workers, uh going to uh abortion clinics and distributing uh uh doing abortion clinic defense and and distributing gender-affirming uh clothing for for uh our trans siblings here in in Broward County and across South Florida and across America. This is the political structure that DSA is forming that, yes, engages in politics, engages in elections, but also engages in the class structure in America that we have to address because it is not simply at the ballot box that you live in a democracy. It is having democracy in your workplace, democracy in your immigration system, democracy in how you obtain your housing. These are the core principles that we need to abide by in order to truly realize the American dream that I still believe in as a candidate for United States Congress. But it is why I also believe so fervently in participating in this structure as a democratic socialist and as a federally endorsed DSA candidate, because we have to lead with something new, something that exists outside of the corporate-dominated power structures of the Democratic Party to build a true working-class democracy.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

Yeah, I'll jump in. I agree with everything Oliver just said, and I'll jump in and be a little more uh uh blunt and less polished, is what I would say. You know, DSA is vital in this fight, and I'll tell you why. Because I think we're talking about, you know, the democratic institutions of this country and the country's political system, and all of that uh is arguably downstream from our economic system. Our economic system is a capitalist economic system that puts power in hands of a small minority of people who own capital and gives them say over your workplace, say over how the economy is controlled. And because of that, they feel they need an outside say in how our democracy and our political democracy is controlled. And so uh it's what leads to uh businesses funding candidates uh after Citizens United and billionaires dumping the majority of money into presidential elections or key congressional races and things like that. And so DSA is the organization, I think, in this country that is leading the fight to not just say like we need good progressive things and we need a better political system, but saying, no, we need a fundamental restructuring of our society that puts working people in power, that makes it to where working people's needs are what dictates how the world runs. And so without addressing that, we're not gonna be able to win uh these big changes that we need. And so I think that's what makes DSA so important, uh, really. And then on top of that, I think uh it's the work that we do through all of our uh campaigns, but you know, I'll talk about electoral because that's what we're here to do. When I first ran in 2021, no one believed that a socialist could get elected in this state. We had members of our own chapter, like, are you sure we should even try this? I can't believe you're just gonna openly call yourself a socialist in this state. I wear my DSA shirts around, and I have people say, like, I can't believe you're bold enough to wear that. People on the street who don't even know me say, like, wow, you would wear a shirt that says socialist in here. And I'm like, Yeah, I would. I'm an elected socialist and I'm proud of it. And it's because of DSA having my back that I'm able to go around and do stuff like that. So uh it's really the work that we do in DSA is is very, very, very important uh towards pushing us in this direction. I think without the work that we've done in DSA, the conversation is even darker uh and I even less hope, really. So uh I think we're really crucial, and I want to encourage everybody. I mean, obviously donate, but join your uh electoral formation, uh join the NEC, uh, put in the work that needs to be done for us to get more people like Oliver in Congress. Honestly, donate and volunteer for Oliver as well. Uh, we need more socialists elected in Florida, and we'll really send a message to them, and it's only DSA that's gonna do that.

SPEAKER_05 56:09

I think that idea that it's only DSA is really important for thinking through a lot of this, right? The idea that we are trying to build this alternative society where we can say we are going to make the political decisions ourselves as a collective organization. No one has really done that ever in recent American history, certainly not at the scale of what we do. We are the ones who practice the democracy that we hope to live out in all of our politics. And just even thinking about like being a socialist in public, when I did a door knocking shift a couple weekends ago for Ian Huntley in New York, the pride that I felt when I was walking down the street wearing my DSA sweatshirt was just such an important reminder that like we have such a critical role to play in making sure people around us know there is a different way that we can participate in this world. My question for Aziz here is that we had a lot of discussions around what we can do when we send these leaders to govern to government. These are the things they need to agitate for, these are the things they they need to do. What do you think it takes to bring this conversation out of the halls of the Capitol, out from under the Capitol dome, and into the hearts and minds of regular people? What do you think the role of grassroots organizing is here in terms of actually fighting for democracy? So we're not sort of like committing one of our own follies by just leaving it to the experts.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

Yeah, so I think the the most significant hurdle that in many ways the US has sort of experienced over the last 50 plus years of right-wing and neoliberal assaults upon the basic kind of institutions of American life is that most people experience their kind of day-to-day realities in incredibly hierarchical spaces. Their workplace is incredibly hierarchical, but their relationship to politics is again totally top-down. They have no connection with a political party, it's just something that they have to vote for with this sort of duopoly as the relevant choices. Their schools, if they operate within schools, incredibly hierarchical, their neighborhoods, their relationship to housing is not something that's public in their own, but a product of profound precarity. And what that does is it fractures the organic experience people have in their lives of what solidarity and democracy consists of. Like folks that just don't have that as a day-to-day experience, and they're not situated in institutions, in workplaces, in schools, in neighborhoods that make it feel like it's something that's real. And here I think is where the DSA is such a vital and important institution because it's really about rebuilding a democratic muscle and moving the country from what a historian of the populist movement, late 19th century, late 20th century, Lawrence Goodwin called the received culture to a movement culture, to a culture that's committed to various forms of transformation, so that these ideas are just part of people's daily life. And this is, I think, the centerpiece of what grassroots organizing can do. And it's really, as Oliver and Richine, you have said, like the great achievement, I think, already of DSA. It's a matter of political vision first, which is to say it's one of the few, if perhaps the only institution in American life that is consciously making the connection in the conversation we've seen today between the undemocratic nature of our political and legal institutions and the profoundly undemocratic nature of our economy under conditions of capitalism. That these two things reinforce each other, that they're connected. If you want to transform the nature of our economy, you have to alter the nature of our political system, and vice versa. It's the one of the few, if only, institutions, as a matter of political vision, that's saying the same thing about the relationship between foreign policy and domestic reality, that how we treat people within our community, our communities that are marginalized, whether immigrants or trans persons or advocates on behalf of Palestine, that is directly connected to the forms of violence that we oppose overseas, whether it's in South Lebanon or Iran or Gaza, or through extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean or the Pacific, or through economic forms of warfare against the people of Cuba or Venezuela, that these things are interconnected and have to be addressed as a kind of unified whole. Again, one of the very few places in American life where we see that as a political division. The DSA also is an embodiment of how we can confront the hierarchical features of our day-to-day experience institutionally by being an embodiment of a membership organization that's a member-based party, something that's been essentially extinguished from American life, where we can think of the party as a site for the provision of basic political ends for its own constituents, rather than treating voters and members as just purely outputs to shift around based on who funders say. In this way, the entire political system in class is just an extension of the extreme forms of gerrymandering that we see from the political right in the present. And then finally, it's an example, an embodiment of how you can live even under deeply undemocratic conditions, you know, through institutional practices of democracy. You can inhabit spaces that are disconnected from the other forms that we might see, and that can serve as a basis for then reimagining, well, what would a democratic workplace look like? What would a democratic educational experience look like? And what would it mean to be in community with our neighbors rather than essentially viewing our neighbors as pitted against each other through the precarity of housing and economics? So it's through grassroots that we can learn the tools of what a movement culture consists in, and it's the central set of intermediate meaning-making institutions that's the foundation for any kind of transformed world.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:26

That idea of making meanings out of things, I really do believe is one of the most important things that we can take away from this, right? When we say that we are socialists, when we are people who are trying to transform all of society, in order to transform all of society, we need to be telling a story about the future that we need to live in. We are trying to say, no, the things that we are doing. We are not just doing this because we want to mess with tax credits or something like that. No, we are doing this because we believe that DSA, this movement, is going to be the thing that will bring the working class to our own emancipation. And I think that is really important because it allows us to think back through history and examine the times and places where regular people did that. And of course, we mentioned Reconstruction at the beginning of this call. We mentioned the emancipation in Florida and Juneteenth in Texas, which is coming up soon as well. But I think the story that we that is often told about emancipation and reconstruction is that the Union Army came marching into the South, the slaves were freed, and the US government made everything good until the corrupt leaders uh of Reconstruction threw it all away. And that's not really what happened, right? What happened in Reconstruction, the way Reconstruction was lived for the millions and millions of people across the South, was a new rebirth of self-determination for black people, freed slaves across the country, who were working together to decide what type of society they were going to live under as we fought for emancipation both from slavery and then from the sharecropping system and the anti-democratic system that continued to govern us. So, my question for all three of our panelists today, and I'm gonna start with Richie, is that we often say we need to finish Reconstruction. What does that idea of finishing Reconstruction mean to you as we continue this fight for democracy?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

I love it. Thank you so much for letting me get in here on this one. Uh, you know, I don't know that I've ever put words to this before. I I think about uh the historical situation and what went on when you know a real democracy uh began to be formed during Reconstruction and was violently overthrown in most southern states. And I think uh it looks like to me, all the things we discussed around like real democratic reforms that go beyond the current status quo, that allow us to imagine uh a society, a political democracy will start there that is wholly different than what we have right now and and and much more encompassing. And so uh that really empowers the majority because that's what happened during Reconstruction is that a majority, uh imperfect as it was due to its restrictions on voting and whatnot, uh, a majority of people, and in the South, it was often black people had a majority, were actually empowered for the first time. And so to me, it looks like actually empowering the majority of the Majority of working class people for the first time. And that looks like a couple of things. I mean, obviously voting rights, but beyond that, a real democratic choice, I think, is a big thing that I want to harp on for Floridians because Floridians have a problem where the electoral system, it's not just whether or not you're allowed to vote, it's what your options are when voting. And they've made it so difficult for there to be any option other than a corporate Democrat or a corporate Republican that even if we all had universal voting rights tomorrow, many of us would not be motivated to get up off the couch to go do it because our choices would be so bad. And so to me, it looks like not just, you know, a real holistic change in our voting system that actually empowers working people, uh, but it looks like a change that empowers working people not to just go vote, but to actually lead uh political organizations and institutions and parties that actually stand for the working class. And so uh that's off the top of my head putting words to some of my thoughts right away, but I really look forward to hearing what everybody else has to say.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:11

Yes, and thank you for thank you for responding. Aziz, do you want to go next?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:15

Yeah, uh so I I think I'll be relatively sort of briefer on this, which is to say that across American sort of like history, that freedom for some has basically been predicated on the subordination of outsiders. And we can tell this is a story of native expropriation, of the enslavement and then segregation of black people, of the dispossession of workers, of the mistreatment of immigrants today in ways that actually replicate the forms of economic and legal violence that were perpetrated against black people in the South as workers in the late 19th century, in the extraction of assets and economic opportunity through forms of political and military overthrow overseas that facilitates economic largesse here at home. This is a recurrent theme. But there have been moments, really profound moments in American life, where we've had folks here and including people that have benefited from the mistreatment and subordination of others. So we can think of folks like Thaddeus Stevens as like, I think a great hero of American history, that have been committed to the idea about whether or not it's possible to disentangle freedom and slavery, freedom and subordination, the economic benefit of some connected to the imperial dispossession of others, and to imagine the possibility of a country that's genuinely universal and committed to the freedom of all. And so finishing Reconstruction to me is about that. And at the same time, it carries this other element that's also been forever arrested in the US, which is this country has never had a genuine accounting with its past. And we can talk about that in the moment that we're living in, and the forms of violence that are being perpetrated overseas and within our communities against immigrants or against outsiders from like the Middle East to our borders. Or we can tell this as a story of the Cold War and its forms of violence, the war on terror and its forms of violence, the war on drugs and its forms of violence, the history of slavery and segregation, you name it. And so finishing Reconstruction is taking seriously that other element of the Reconstruction Project, which said we could not actually get to a place of freedom for all unless we had a genuine accounting of the forms of violence that had perpetrated a kind of lawlessness, perpetrated uh lawlessness imposed on those that are on the outside and impunity for those that are on the inside. And so finishing Reconstruction requires both of these. Understanding that freedom for all requires is connected essentially to a kind of accounting with what it's meant to enjoy and wield power in the US and to see these two things as joined together.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:05

Oliver, do you want to close us out for this evening?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:08

Absolutely. And uh thank you, uh Richie and Aziz for uh the those really cogent thoughts. And so I just want to build on those with uh reflection that um the American Civil War in many respects, uh rising up against a system of racial domination and enslavement of African Americans can, in some respects, be seen as a labor struggle and as a workers' struggle. That uh the right to earn a wage for your labor, the right to uh have political and economic freedom uh is still a struggle that we are seeing uh strung out today. And uh the work of Reconstruction was in many ways the qualitatively the formation of a new kind of country, uh one that was different and distinct from the one that existed prior to 1865, um, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. And the work of finishing Reconstruction from where I sit in South Florida, which, as uh is sometimes the case, we're seen as uh you have to drive north to get to the South, as if we don't also exist under a system of political and economic domination at the hands of the powers that be in Tallahassee. The work of finishing Reconstruction is, uh, in so many words, overturning a system of capitalism and replacing it with a system of democratic socialism, where we have democratic control not over not only over our political life, but over our economic life as well. The establishment of universal economic rights, um, the uh extension of citizenship to our immigrant neighbors, uh, as was at once the denial of citizenship to enslaved African Americans. We see that same denial of citizenship to new arrivals to the United States and even attacks on the Reconstruction Amendments on the predicate of the uh pejoratives and fear-mongering that the far right uses to deny uh the basic rights of citizenship to new immigrants. Uh, to me, the work of finishing Reconstruction is also uh establishing a system of protecting indigenous sovereignty and understanding that the systems of government that existed on North American soil prior to the arrival of Europeans is something that we have within our power to uphold and to respect and to protect. And so it is layering into the American political system, the indigenous rights, the rights for immigrants, uh, of course, uh reparations for the descendants of enslaved African Americans, as we've seen the uh reparations paid to the owners of slaves, the print plantation holders, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, the extension of PPP loan forgiveness for the capitalist class, for the business owners, and yet working people were being turned out of our apartments, uh, we're seeing our benefits slashed and uh suffering on the brink of our very economic survival. The work of finishing reconstruction is a wholesale reformation of the system in this country that we currently exist under capitalism, and the replacement with one that is democratically controlled and a democratic socialist vision for the United States. And that's what we hope to deliver in the United States Congress, in the St. Petersburg City Council, and in local, municipal, state, and federal offices all across the United States of America, where we have democratic socialists running. And I'm very proud to be part of this movement in solidarity with so many others on this call and across the country who are part of this project. So thank you.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:50

And thank you. Thank you for bringing these words, bringing these messages, not just to Floridians, but to DSA members all across the country who need to hear this, to know that this is happening. That this organization that we invest so much of our time, so much of our money into is leading the way for these fights for democracy. This essentially concludes our event. I am extremely happy that everyone was able to show up and to learn from these three wonderful individuals. As I said, my name is Sid Carlson White. I'm on DSA's National Political Committee. If you have any questions about DSA, especially electoral programs, the work that we're doing to get socialists, to get tribunes of the people elected, please reach out to me. My email, sid at dsacommittees.org, is right there. I will always respond to your emails. That is what DSA members pay me to do. You can also find me on, still unfortunately, on Elon Musk's Twitter at Wellstonism, named, of course, after the legendary Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who led his own fight for democracy, even though he was not a socialist. I am also pleased to announce that this event pushed us over the line for $50,000 raised for all of our candidates across our slates in this country. And remember, we are not talking about massive Senate races in California. We are talking about local races where socialists like you and me are talking to their constituents, talking to people around us about the need for socialism and democracy. $500 can flip a local race. Every single dollar donated to our slates really matters for taking out the APAC trash. It means a lot to us that you were able to join us, that you were able to contribute what you can, and that you were able to keep learning and keep following.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:02

Thanks as always to our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put all this together. Class is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media. But the best way to find out what our committee is up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. If you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. Okay, until next time, Solidarity.