'Straightest Crooked Line in American Politics' by Steve

In geometry, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. In politics, it is a crayon scribble drawn by a caffeinated toddler connecting dots that refuse to sit still. Just look at a gerrymander map to see. Can we draw a direct line from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist-hunting fever dreams, to California allegedly banning communism, to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), to today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) supposedly piloting the Democratic Party like Bernie Sanders is its admiral? Using only verifiable content, this line is about to get very wobbly.
Our journey begins on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, where Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin delivered a Lincoln Day speech claiming he possessed a list of 205 communists working in the State Department. The number was curiously fluid: the next day he said 57; later it was 81; eventually, he simply waved a piece of paper that may have been a laundry list for all anyone knew. The Senate, after four years of televised hearings, blacklists, and ruined careers, finally censured McCarthy in 1954 for conduct that tended “to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.” Communists did exist in American life—history verified the presence of Soviet spies and American communists—but McCarthy’s specific claims were about as stable as a three-legged barstool. He was familiar with those too. Still, the era cemented anti-communism as America’s national pastime, second only to baseball and slightly ahead of overreaction.
We now follow the thread west, where California made communism illegal. Here is where our straight line develops its first kink. California never actually made communism itself illegal; doing so would violate the First Amendment, even state legislators understood that you cannot outlaw an ideology without a constitutional fight. What California did do was pass the Levering Act in 1950, requiring all public employees to sign loyalty oaths swearing they were not communists. Refuse to sign? Congratulations, your teaching career at UC Berkeley was now compost. The state also maintained the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities—better known as the Tenney Committee—which investigated suspected radicals with the subtlety of a brass band at a funeral. Communism remained theoretically legal for private citizens; the state simply made it employment poison. So California did not ban communism. It just made it as welcome in state employment as a porcupine in a balloon factory. Still on the books today.
Next stop: the Communist Party USA, founded in 1919. The federal government, not to be outdone by California, passed the Smith Act in 1940 and the Communist Control Act of 1954, the latter declaring that the CPUSA should be stripped of legal rights as a party, though enforcement was so anemic the party basically kept its stapler and continued meeting. At its height during World War II, CPUSA boasted roughly 80,000 members—impressive until you realize that is fewer people than attend a minor league baseball game on “free foam finger” night. After decades of infiltration, factional splits, and the general appeal of literally any other political hobby, the CPUSA shrank to the size of a book club that only reads ‘Das Kapital’. They still exist. They still run candidates. They still meet in rooms above co-ops. If they have taken over anything, it is perhaps a very small section of a Brooklyn podiatrist’s waiting room.
Now we arrive at our modern era 100 years on, where the Democratic Socialists of America allegedly command the Democratic Party like pirates commandeering a cruise ship. The DSA was formed in 1982 from the merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New American Movement. They explicitly rejected Soviet-style communism, adopting instead the thrilling position that socialism should arrive via elections, legislation, and extremely long meetings about Robert’s Rules of Order. With approximately 100,000 members at its recent peak, the DSA is not a vanguard party preparing to seize the means of production; it is an organization whose most radical act is usually endorsing a candidate who supports rent control.

The DSA has managed to elect a handful of members to Congress—most famously Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—along with some state legislators and city council members. If this is a “takeover” of the Democratic Party, it is the most polite coup in human history. The Democratic Party currently holds roughly 260 seats in Congress; the DSA caucus could fit comfortably in a minivan, albeit a very ideologically pure one.
 
Which brings us to Bernie Sanders. Bernie is a self-described democratic socialist, the longest-serving independent in congressional history, and a man who has never technically joined the Democratic Party. He caucuses with the Democrats, runs in their presidential primaries (2016, 2020), and then, like a cat that wanders into your house, eats your free food, and refuses to be owned, returns to the Senate as an Independent. He is currently not the chair of the Democratic National Committee, not the Senate Majority Leader, not the Speaker of the House, and not the captain of any vessel larger than a Subaru. Calling Bernie Sanders the leader of the Democratic Party is like calling the guy who brings artisanal sourdough to the Super Bowl party the quarterback. He is influential, yes; he has pulled the party leftward on issues like healthcare and tuition; but he is not steering the ship. He is more like a very loud navigator who keeps suggesting they turn toward Scandinavia. They blocked him twice for president and gave us Hilary and Biden as moderate alternatives.
So, is there a straight line from McCarthy to the Levering Act to the CPUSA to the DSA to Bernie Sanders? Only if you agree that a spaghetti noodle qualifies as straight. What actually exists is a far more American story: a century of panicked overreaction to leftism, followed by the legal neutralization of actual communists, followed by the rise of a milder, electoral left that uses words like “solidarity” instead of “comrade” and proposes tax increases for free stuff rather than gulags. The DSA is not the CPUSA in a hipster disguise, and Bernie Sanders is not McCarthy’s fever dream made flesh. They are the product of a different tradition—one that thinks the revolution will be won not by barricades, but by getting five percent more of the vote in a Milwaukee suburb. And if that isn’t funny, nothing in politics is.

Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer