The House of Representatives passed an updated version of its annual resolution condemning socialism. This year it complained about the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA) in particular. DSA did not take it lying down. A prominent DSA ideologist, Ben Burgis, took to the webpages of Jacobin, DSA’s unofficial magazine, with a fierce protest: DSA is anti- communist!

Burgis begins, “The House just passed a resolution condemning the Democratic Socialists of America and socialism broadly. While it rehearses opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism, the bill’s real preoccupation is with socialists’ advocacy for expanded democracy.”

Burgis is a philosophy teacher and logician. The heart of his rebuttal is this paragraph:

“The resolution’s nominal argument is a mess. The first two ‘whereas’ clauses are claims about the crimes of Stalinist regimes. But democratic socialists have always been critical of such regimes, even then. Condemning democratic socialists with claims about the crimes of Stalinist authoritarianism makes about as much sense as an atheist bringing up the Spanish Inquisition to condemn the Southern Baptists.”