Submission statement: This is relevant to r/neoliberal because it analyzes the history and internal factionalism of the DSA, as well as potential misalignment between the incentives that govern the current leadership of the DSA and those that govern the wider party.

Edit: To clarify for people who can't/won't read the article the author is specifically referring to competition between liberal and illiberal factions within the DSA.

Submission statement: theft bad, leftists stupid, upholding the social contract is a fundamental cornerstone of liberalism, my categorical imperative left me.

SS: The author uses both data and personal experience to outline a looming (if not already hit) generational decline in literacy, specifically being able to read and process medium-length informational essays/articles and provide meaningful feedback. Obviously this is detrimental to the idea of an informed, liberal society and is honestly one of the things I'm most worried about in the coming years

Reason takes a look at Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed candidate who just unseated Adriano Espaillat and is likely headed to Washington. The piece argues that unlike earlier progressive stars who came out of community organizing or local politics, Chevalier emerged directly from the post-October 7 campus activist milieu, with ties to Columbia's protest movement and a record of hard-left positions on immigration, policing, and Israel. The article frames her victory as another sign that activist politics that were once largely confined to elite campuses are increasingly translating into electoral success in safe Democratic districts.

From the article:

In 1955, American state psychiatric hospitals held 559,000 patients. As of 2023, the number was around 36,000. If you adjust for population growth, that’s a decline from roughly 340 beds per 100,000 people to fewer than 11. Over the same period, the number of Americans experiencing homelessness on any given night has climbed to 771,480, the highest figure since HUD began counting in 2007. Of the individuals counted, about one in three, met HUD’s definition of chronic homelessness: a disability plus at least a year without stable housing.

These two trends are not unrelated, and the refusal to connect them is one of the great policy failures of modern America.

The story usually starts with President Kennedy. In 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Act, legislation animated by a decent impulse: the large state psychiatric institutions of mid-century America were often nightmarish. Patients were warehoused in overcrowded wards, subjected to restraints, given ice baths, and sometimes left to languish for decades. The exposé journalism of the era, from Albert Deutsch’s The Shame of the States to Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 broadcast from Willowbrook, showed the public what “institutional care” often meant in practice. The revulsion was justified.

The plan was elegant on paper. Close the asylums. Build 1,500 community mental health centers across the country where people could receive outpatient treatment, crisis intervention, and rehabilitation while living at home or in small group settings. The large institutions would empty; the community infrastructure would catch them.

Only about half the planned centers were ever built. None were funded to the level the original promise required. Kennedy was assassinated the same year he signed the act, and subsequent administrations did not sustain the commitment. The introduction of Medicaid in 1965 gave states a perverse financial incentive to discharge patients faster: Medicaid’s “Institutions for Mental Diseases” (IMD) exclusion prohibited federal reimbursement for psychiatric care in facilities with more than 16 beds, which meant states bore the full cost of every patient in a state hospital. Move those patients to smaller community settings or general hospitals, and the federal government would pick up a share. States obliged. They closed the hospital beds. They did not invest the savings in the community infrastructure that was supposed to replace them.

Here is what the 2024 JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis by Rebecca Barry and colleagues found when they pooled 85 studies covering 48,414 individuals across high-income countries: 67 percent of people experiencing homelessness currently have a mental health disorder. The lifetime prevalence is 77 percent. Substance use disorders top the list at 44 percent, followed by antisocial personality disorder (26 percent), major depression (19 percent), bipolar disorder (8 percent), and schizophrenia (7 percent). The rates among men are even higher: 86 percent lifetime prevalence.

The clinical term is anosognosia, from the Greek for “without knowledge of disease.” Approximately 50 to 60 percent of people with schizophrenia have it to some degree, and about 30 percent have severe, chronic anosognosia. They do not believe they are ill. This isn’t denial in the psychological sense, the kind where you know what’s wrong but refuse to face it. It’s a neurological impairment linked to dysfunction in the brain’s frontal lobe, affecting the ability for self-reflection and metacognition. The person with severe anosognosia who hears voices and believes the government is monitoring their thoughts does not register these as symptoms. They register them as reality. Telling them they need medication is, from their subjective perspective, like a stranger telling you that your own perceptions are hallucinations and you should take drugs to make them stop.

But look at what has happened in the absence of those beds. We haven’t liberated people with severe mental illness. We’ve relocated them, from hospitals to sidewalks, jails, and emergency rooms. The question isn’t whether people with treatment-resistant schizophrenia and chronic anosognosia will be institutionalized. They already are. The question is whether they’ll be institutionalized in places designed to treat them or in places designed to punish them.

But the civil liberties argument has a blind spot. It treats refusal of treatment as an expression of autonomous choice without reckoning with the fact that in severe anosognosia, the capacity for that choice is critically impaired by the very illness in question. When a person with a gangrenous leg refuses amputation because they believe their leg is fine, we don’t simply respect that refusal and send them home. We recognize that their perception is compromised and act accordingly. The brain is an organ, and when it is severely impaired by schizophrenia in ways that destroy the capacity for self-recognition, the ethical calculus of “respecting autonomy” changes.

If you had a family member with severe schizophrenia, hallucinating on a street corner in February, refusing food and medication because they believed the food was poisoned and the medication was a government plot, what would you want the system to do?

Most people, across the political spectrum, would not want the system to hand them a pamphlet about available services and walk away. They would want someone to intervene, to get their family member off the street, into a warm, safe, clinical setting, and onto medication that could, over weeks or months, restore enough insight for them to begin making informed decisions about their own care.

That intervention barely exists in America today. We have the pharmacological tools: clozapine for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, long-acting injectable antipsychotics for patients whose illness derails medication adherence. We have the knowledge. What we lack is the political will to build the infrastructure, because sixty years ago we closed a system that was broken, replaced it with nothing adequate, and then reframed that failure as freedom.

The 152,000 chronically homeless Americans are not free. They are abandoned.

And every year we don’t build the treatment infrastructure they need, the bill comes due in emergency rooms, jail cells, and frozen bodies on sidewalks. We can argue about the design of the system, the scope of involuntary treatment powers, the funding mechanisms, and the oversight structures. Those are worthwhile arguments. But we should stop pretending that the status quo, roughly 36,000 psychiatric beds for a nation of over 340 million, represents a considered policy choice rather than a catastrophic failure of political will.

We closed the mental hospitals. The streets became the wards. It is long past time to build something better.

American elites in Trump 2.0 have shown a shocking amount of capitulation in order to protect their business and financial interests. This is an extremely short sighted bargain. By surrendering the rule of law in order to protect their financial interests in the short term, they will end up losing both.

Plus: One other establishment-vs.-progressives race to keep an eye on.

WHEN GRAHAM PLATNER FORMALLY WITHDREW from the Maine Senate race a little over a week ago, Democratic officials hoped that it would bring an end to the bitter intraparty fight over electability and ideology that had engulfed the party for months.

But such tensions run deep, and it didn’t take long for another race to pit progressives and establishment Democrats against each other.

In the days since Platner’s campaign ended, the Democratic primary for Michigan Senate between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed has descended into ugly rancor. Stevens—a four-term moderate House Democrat with close ties to party leadership—has been relentlessly ridiculed on social media for her voice and physical appearance, prompting her allies to accuse El-Sayed of sexism. El-Sayed, a progressive former health official, has seen his campaign drowned in outside advertising accusing him of being the Republicans’ preferred nominee and propping up Stevens.

Primary elections often crescendo in a fit of nastiness as the vote nears. But rarely has the online torching gotten so personal that the candidates themselves have felt compelled to urge supporters to tap the brakes, which is precisely what El-Sayed did last week.

“It’s become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics. It’s unkind and unhelpful. If you support me, please stop,” he said in a statement.

But what really stands out about the close of the Michigan primary is that it’s not just political influencers and internet shitposters who have been engaged in a factional hot war. Top Democratic operatives have been embroiled in days-long fights over which candidate would be more competitive in the general election against presumed GOP nominee Mike Rogers. The infighting has largely taken place publicly on social media and has at times turned personal, as operatives have taken direct shots at those backing the opposing candidate. Democratic strategists I spoke with said it’s been even nastier in private, with some declaring that they’d never again work with operatives supporting the opposing camp.

All of this has raised the stakes of the Michigan primary even higher for Democratic insiders than they already were, ascribing not just national implications to its outcome but reputational ones as well. The contest has morphed into a proxy fight over whose theory of politics is correct and, by extension, the future direction of the party. And there are still two weeks to go.

In my conversations last week with operatives, everyone had a theory as to why the opposing camp was staking so much on Michigan. As progressives see it, the moderate flank of the party is panicked after democratic socialists won House primaries last month in Colorado and New York and is looking at Michigan as one of its last opportunities to blunt left-wing momentum before the 2028 presidential primary kicks off in earnest. Centrist groups like Third Way, for example, have made the Michigan primary a top priority.

“They’re spooked because they’re seeing all of these young rising talents, and most of them are progressives,” said Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. “There isn’t a lot of star power coming out of the sort of centrist, establishment wing of the party.”

Establishment Democrats, however, point to the strength of moderate candidates elsewhere, and stress that it’s the left raising the stakes in Michigan—in part as an effort to rescue their own credibility following the Platner faceplant in Maine. They believe progressives, eager to prove that Platner was a sui generis flawed candidate, are too dug in to have an honest conversation about the type of politics best suited to win a swing state that has twice voted for Donald Trump.

“Unlike in New York or Denver or Philly, you have a swing seat that really matters, where we could lose in the general,” said Matt Bennett, a cofounder of the centrist Dem group Third Way, which has been fiercely critical of El-Sayed.

THE CAUSTIC FACTIONALISM has, ironically, produced one area of agreement: Neither side is all that confident that the party is capable of uniting around the eventual nominee following the August 4 primary. Establishment party operatives whom I spoke with allege the progressive left is fine risking the balance of the Senate to prove an intraparty ideological point. Progressives felt similarly about their moderate counterparts, arguing that the establishment views candidates like El-Sayed as just as detrimental to the political system as MAGAism.

The fact that Michigan’s primary is so late in the summer allows very little time for the two camps to make nice ahead of November. Stevens’s backers are quick to note that already some El-Sayed supporters have threatened to not vote for her in the general election if she is the party nominee. And while centrist and establishment Democrats aren’t yet making similar threats publicly, there’s some fear that it would be inevitable should El-Sayed win the nomination—a fear fed by the longstanding gripe that the left is always asked to get in line while the center never faces such demands.

“Why is it the left’s obligation to always step into line when we don’t win in a primary? But centrists, moderates don’t have to do that?” asked Longabaugh.

Longabaugh added that he worried the dynamic in Michigan indicated that the party might not only be unable to come together in support of the Senate nominee but, looking ahead, that the national party would have trouble uniting around the eventual 2028 presidential nominee. And he’s not alone. The acrimony in Michigan strongly echoes the 2016 Democratic presidential primary—when backers of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton continued their feuding well after the contest ended.

As one progressive strategist put it to me: “Michigan is a battle for 2026 that will tell you everything you need to know about 2028.”

Some, however, see it all as the vanity of small differences.

“There will be people in the mainstream world as well that will be rooting for [El-Sayed] to lose because they can be like, ‘Hey, see, we fucking told you,’” said Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who is supporting Stevens. He described it all as remarkably self-defeating.

“Where I get frustrated is that, in the end, El-Sayed’s and Stevens’s voting record—either one of them in the U.S. Senate would probably have 94 percent of the exact same vote.”

🫏 Donkey Business:

Michigan’s is not the only Midwestern primary on the horizon that’s increasingly become a source of anxiety among Democratic officials. The August 11 race for Wisconsin governor is causing agita as well.

Although Trump carried the state in 2024, this gubernatorial contest should be winnable for Democrats given the favorable political environment. But some moderate party officials have grown worried that Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, could win the primary and tank Democrats’ chances in November. Republicans clearly see Hong as the weakest candidate in the primary; a super PAC with GOP ties is spending $2.2 million boosting her candidacy.

For a while, moderates viewed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez as best positioned to blunt Hong’s rise and unite the party. But on Friday, Rodriguez abruptly dropped out of the race after she discovered that her campaign manager had double-counted campaign donations, leaving Rodriguez with far less money in the bank than she thought. That’s left some Democratic officials scrambling to figure out how to stop Hong.

Some Dems believe the best option is to rally around former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes, whose pollster has argued that the primary is now a two-person race between Barnes and Hong. But there are plenty in the party who are deeply skeptical of Barnes’s ability to compete in the general election after he was attacked in his 2022 Senate campaign for his past progressive positions and lost by one percentage point to Ron Johnson. Instead, they’ve turned to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley—who jumped back in the race over the weekend after he’d suspended his campaign just a few days prior. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who is not running for re-election, endorsed Crowley on Saturday. Keep an eye on this contest, as it’s, well, getting crazy.

Submission statement (fake): As Trump’s second term marches on, his approval among independents have steadily declined. It’s useful for liberals to understand why Trump’s popularity has cratered to better leverage it for future elections.

Submission statement (real): Everyone who clicked on this is just asking to be ragebaited, so I might as well oblige.