“The Only way out is through.”

This past August I stood with delegates outside the United Center, holding a banner that read “Arms Embargo Now” as spokespeople of the Uncommitted National Movement (UNM) began what would be a 24-hour sit-in protest of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). This was supposed to be the culminating moment after months of leading New Jersey’s Uncommitted campaign, which won close to 50,000 votes in the Presidential primary, but only a handful of activists and press made it to the finish line.

A cadre of consultants and progressive operatives put together a media-savvy intervention within the most deliberative body of the Democratic Party. Surrounding them were dozens of pro-peace activists, press, and delegates, some of whom were members of the Democratic Socialists of America, who had used the Democratic Party ballot line to present two delegates to stand up against genocide at the coronation of then-VP Harris.

A recent piece from Red Star, a caucus in DSA, claims the UNM, those savvy consultants and operatives, co-opted a grassroots movement. This was in fact the opposite for hundreds of volunteers and organizers across the United States who saw a real chance to heighten contradictions within the Democratic Party – even more than where UNM spokespeople were willing to do. In the end, UNM, fatally, missed cohering outside mass pressure that might have changed the dynamics inside the DNC. In New Jersey, however, where DSA members got Uncommitted on the ballot and for many comrades from Rhode Island to Minnesota and Hawaii, we wound up in Chicago to pull on as many levers as we could to stop an ongoing genocide. At the very least, this process helped hundreds of thousands at home realize that the Democratic Party is not the party that working people can count on to deliver a lasting peace.

Since the writing of this article there has been a ceasefire. Trump has largely taken credit for it, and opponents have been largely silent on that claim. The left should recognize and posit that in the end, Joe Biden had the power to end the destruction unfolding in Gaza, and with his exit, came Trump’s use of the chief executive to pressure Netanyahu into a deal. This then remains a critique of the Democratic Party as we scratch our heads and wonder how they could remain complicit in a genocide for 15 months.

The framing that the UNM is just an “NGO that co-opted a grassroots movement” is backwards. The ballot intervention was an idea borne from the deepest recesses of the Democratic Party and it wound up winning 650,000 votes across the country. From that moment an actual movement was inspired and perhaps up for grabs. To be clear, Layla Elabed, Abbas Alawieh, and other spokespeople from the Listen to Michigan campaign have always held public positions from within the Democratic Party. And strategists like James Zogby have been fighting from within the party for decades to build Palestinian rights into the party platform. It was activists in organizations like DSA who co-opted the intraparty intervention, recognizing that with more independent leadership the campaign had the potential to reach thousands more Democratic voters across the U.S. and take them on a journey in understanding the Democratic Party.

I want to use a metaphor that is apt for New Jerseyans and that lends from the Robert Frost quote that “the only way out is through.” In New Jersey, you cannot make a left turn on a highway. Instead we’ve pioneered what’s called the “Jersey left-turn” and is also referred to as a “jughandle.” It’s safer, reduces travel time for all, but is confusing for out-of-state drivers traversing our roads. People might ask “why would you get in the right lane to make a left turn?”

When DSA members in New Jersey committed to bringing the UNM to the Garden State, we knew we had no intention of realigning the Democratic Party, yet we knew we were going to fully engage in its processes. We utilized the Democratic ballot line purely for strategic purposes, and used a New Jersey specific opportunity to have a slogan on the ballot to literally put Palestine on the ballot. In every step of the campaign, from open letters calling out the state and the Democratic Party to one of our leaders deriding then-Biden delegates in a delegate orientation, we exemplified what we, as a party-building organization mean by the “dirty break.”

You can’t expect to successfully break from the Democrats without a sizable chunk of its base being supportive and taking action. The recent presidential election results show that many working-class voters are done with the Democratic Party, and absent a clear working-class alternative are making a rightward turn. Is DSA a proto-party organization building an alternative? Are we even socialists if we aren’t on the same road as the working class?

Admittedly, throughout the months between the last primaries and the DNC, the UNM suffered many distractions, disappointments, and disagreements between states on strategy. That the campaign was borne from consultants and party-insiders meant the spokespeople, largely from Michigan, did not embrace democratic decision making processes and were often butting heads with other state delegations. It was demoralizing for the DSA-led New Jersey campaign. UNM prioritized media coverage over organizing sympathetic Harris delegates. Despite this, New Jersey had among the highest percentage of Harris delegates who committed to becoming “ceasefire delegates,” a strategic designation that allowed for some level of successful persuasion. 

All that persuasion happened not in the arena, but in the political earthquake happening back home in New Jersey that an insurgent protest vote campaign took advantage of. With New Jersey’s progressives tanking the party-controlled ballot line, socialists were able to not just get on the ballot, but put Palestine front and center on that ballot, creating momentum that tested the ground for an actual pro-peace, left-led electoral movement. There was also great potential in the Not Another Bomb mobilization that hit the streets across the country the weekend before the DNC but that much was too little, whereas protracted demonstrations throughout the summer, escalating toward the DNC would have gotten the press and momentum organizers in the arena needed. These are all the same challenges we face in building a party capable of coordinating with labor and social movements that give the party the leverage to win its demands. UNM never co-opted a grassroots movement. The actual movement simply failed to take the wheel.

The No Votes for Genocide orientation later adopted by a chunk of Uncommitted state campaign organizers and activists was a line drawn in the sand, largely by DSA. To suggest UNM spokespeople like Elabed limped toward capitulation misses what’s more worthy of our analysis here. Without signalling our exit we cannot expect others to follow, without democratic organization and mass pressure we have no engine to continue the trip, without actually switching lanes, without a coordinated driver and vehicle, we were going to crash.

We chose to co-opt this NGO-born movement to give it mass character and socialist principles. We gave the petitions to get on the ballot to anyone who asked, and we built ties with Muslim and Arab-American organizations who could discover the potential not just to win office, but to see their own community’s power. We still have a responsibility to build on that solidarity, and invite those communities to join us in building something new. But we have to continue to build and man the off-ramp that continues to take more of the working class with us.

The framing by Red Star caucus that Uncommitted was a tool of the Democratic Party, and the implication of sheepdogging in the piece’s cover image, ignores the fact that no caucus in DSA presented a positive vision during this political flashpoint, save some revolutionary pessimism. Uncommitted won over 700,000 votes and contributed to condemnations against the genocidal Biden/Harris campaign. Red Star, meanwhile, still outlines using the Democratic ballot line as part of its Points of Unity, continuing its vague gestures to party building with little in the form of specifics. 

If democratic socialists want to build a credible party in the next decade we’ll need to build a jughandle from the two-party system that the working class can take with us on the democratic road to socialism. We do not need to try to signal a hard left turn into oncoming traffic. We need to build the off-ramp toward something workers deserve.