Let’s start with the Convention. Going into it, a lot of drama had been stirred up around the election of the National Political Committee. Two far Left slates, DSA Momentum and DSA Praxis, were the conduits of the bickering even if the actual candidates in those slates rarely participated in the infighting themselves. As a few new member said to me, “It doesn’t really seem like there’s a lot of difference between the two.” And in terms of the platform there are only slight differences, which is why initially I had supported both. But where there were differences was that DSA Mom’s candidates came from liberal metropolitan areas and were mostly white, while DSA Praxis drew more from rural and conservative areas and were half people of color. A few sloppy statements by DSA Mom supporters exacerbated a tension that many already felt: that despite all their criticism of Hillary Clinton ignoring “flyover” country, DSA members in places like New York City and San Francisco had no interest in giving their rural counterparts power in the organization.

While it got pretty heated, I think it was ultimately a healthy internal conflict for DSA. Like most democratic organizations, we absorb power dynamics from the society we are within, and it is only through struggle that we can find ways to subvert those dynamics. DSA Mom and Praxis have admirably committed to working together (DSA Mom has a slight lion’s share of the NPC but not a majority), and I doubt they will be the focal point of this tension any time soon. But it is a tension that we need to continue to tease out, and that can hopefully happen through more interactions between chapters rather than a once every two years Conference.

But there is another tension involving the NPC that I want to touch on briefly, which is the election of Danny Fetonte. Fetonte is a prominent DSA organizer in Austin, Texas who ran for the NPC highlighting his impressive resume of union organizing work. What he did not note on his statement was that work included working with a police union called Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT. Like most police unions, it is a right wing organization that spends as much time protecting its members from accountability for their brutality as it does protecting pensions. Even when they talk about their freaking pensions they can’t resist throwing in a random “STOP CALLING US RACISTS.” If you’re not convinced that they’re an awful group, here’s a handful of bills they were instrumental in passing into law:

- SB 923: makes posting information about police officers a crime.

- HB 326: allows sworn affidavits for search warrants to be made over the phone.

- SB 158 amendment: watered down the body cam requirement for police.

Also they have more polo shirts in their merch store than normal, I’m-not-a-fascist t-shirts.

If you’re wondering why I’m being unusually specific on the basic question of “Why are cop unions bad?” it’s because several people, especially in Texas CWA, have come out in support of Fetonte and claim his removal from the NPC would be a “slippery slope” leading to attacks on anyone in a union that represents police like the AFL-CIO. I cover their whole statement in this Twitter thread.

But again, after going through a brief panic attack about it, I realized this incident is overall a healthy development for DSA. During the Convention, we passed a resolution calling for the abolition of policing and prisons. But what does that mean? How do we get to that abolition? Is it just some ideal we aspire to, or does it mean immediate divestment from those systems? These questions need to be answered. And more importantly we need to address how unions have dealt with police and whether that is an acceptable relationship to have. When the purpose of the police is the suppression of working class dissent, especially Black dissent, it creates contradictions for unions that represent police. No matter what happens with Fetonte, these questions will not be fully answered and we must continue to press them.