I get that the DSA conversation is confusing and exhausting. It feels like unproductive infighting while the far right keeps being an existential threat. There's a lot of talking past each other, and people are fighting over definitions and terms over and over again.

But at its most fundamental level, this is a fight for the future of a leftist movement. This is because there is a small but influential subset of people (most purely represented by Megan Romer or Hasan Piker) who like to call themselves leftists but have views that many see as incompatible with ours.

• They oppose the separation of powers (Democratic Centralism).

• They are as opposed to social democratic parties as they are to conservatives or fascists.

• They want to abolish capitalism.

• They hate the Western multilateral world order. To that end, they will implicitly or explicitly support imperialist aggressor states like Russia or terrorists like the Houthis and Hamas.

If these people aren't loudly denounced but passively legitimized by the left, they will gain support and advance their agenda. Until people like Erik Engheim, Rational Lib and Terentev Valerii recognize this, the underlying tensions will persist. Probably, at some point, the camps will split (you bet the far right will capitalize on that).

The European component of this is that American discourse often infects ours, and many Europeans don't have the terminology to deal with it. Americans have the words “tankie” and “illiberal,” while Europeans can only say “radical left” or “far left,” which implies that the tankies are just more radical versions of leftists. Not to mention the different usage of “socialism,” which is basically interchangeable with “social democracy” in European minds. This confuses a lot of people and further complicates the situation.