Interview With OKC DSA Member

The following interview has been edited for fluidity and coherence.

Like a lot of people, I first become really aware of the Democratic Socialists of America back in 2016 after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency. With that election came shock and dismay, but also the feeling that it was not enough simply to vote, to read Slate, to be, essentially, a run of the mill "lib", but that we (the people) needed to actually DO something, in the here and now. A refrain that I heard a lot around then as to what that something might be was, "join the DSA."

Since then, I've had various levels of involvement with the DSA and DSA related projects (I even went to a meeting). But as is so often the case I found myself drifting away over time, lulled into the usual complacency by the bad, not good, but superficially calm Biden administration.

With Trump returned to the White House, however, I find myself asking a similar question once again. Namely: what in the hell should we even be doing right now?

To see if I could get some ideas, I interviewed Laura B, co-chair of the the DSA Oklahoma City chapter.

Chris: What I wanted to start with is like, what is even going on right now? What is even happening at the moment in the broad stroke of things?

Laura: Oh man. I mean, if you're asking from, from like, an analytic theoretical perspective or....

Chris: Whatever seems appropriate. Whatever comes to mind for that question.

Laura: Okay. I've had to step back from organizing a little bit just over the past couple months, because of moving and personal stuff. So I'm trying to get my mind back in that space. But I think broadly what we're experiencing is just the acceleration of a lot of trends that have been happening for a long time. That are to a degree under the surface and have now just become in your face, impossible to ignore. And much worse than I think a lot of people expected - even the people that were before Trump saying, this is going to be really bad. They've got a plan, this time they're organized. I  think the experience has still been worse than anticipated.

I guess things have kind of settled a little bit in that there's not as much of that - overwhelm and shock and everything from early on where it was, there's a new executive order coming out every day. It's still terrible news on a regular basis, but the reaction feels a little bit more blunted now, which I think helps in some ways because it feels like you're able to analyze the situation a little more. Figure out how to act versus that initial panic.

What are we going to do? We need to do everything at once.

Chris: When I first conceived of this, it was more in the initial stages of the presidency where I was just like, I don't know what the hell is actually going on or what to make of it. I do feel like I am kind of getting at least a sense now. But it's interesting to me because I read a lot of people's takes on the Internet, without myself necessarily knowing which ones to put weight on. Because you see two extremes, which are: Trump is Hitler, he is going to usher in fascism. Or he's just another Republican and they're just going to do the same Republican junk that they always do. Which is bad, but I don't think they're quite the same thing. So when he got elected at first, it was like, oh, shit, he's doing so many things. But then it seems like with half the stuff, is it even turning into anything? It's been so hard to tell.

Laura: For me lot of it is there's such a disconnect between what people are actually doing on the ground or how it matters. It's good to understand and everything. But if you can't then say, OK, what does that mean for us here today and how we're relating to the rest of the movement, then it's not always particularly helpful.  You have a lot of those comparisons that are like, how does this compare to other historical fascist regimes?

But also thinking about, well, like, how is it also different and what do those differences matter for how we're approaching it and what our strategy is? Because I think in some ways it's gotten a little too bogged down in that dynamic that you were talking about. I mean, it's not exactly the same. But in what ways are the parallels useful and in what ways are there  differences? What ways do those matter for the historical period that we're in now?

Chris: So you mentioned the ground game. What are elements of the ground game right now? What are the larger goals? And what are some of the tangible things that are actually happening through the DSA?

Laura: Have you been very tuned into DSA happenings over the past six months to a year?

Chris: I'm not sure. I was going to meetings. At some point I fell out. I'm not sure when exactly that was.

Laura: So when I first got involved in 2023, it was basically at the very beginning of a rebuilding period. The chapter has been around since 2016, but has gone through normal organizing cycles where you have growth and then - people get burnt out, things fall apart, it's not sustainable for whatever reason. The organization sort of collapses on itself. And then a couple of people stick around and the rebuilding period starts. When I got involved, it was at the very beginning of one of those. Not a whole lot of people from previous iterations are still around. There are a couple, so there is still some of that institutional memory. But in a lot of ways, it's a two and a half, maybe three year old organization. And young in terms of a lot of the organizers aren't very old. A lot of them don't have a whole lot of experience coming in. So that's where we were when the election hit. We had been rebuilding for a while and were in a pretty good place. Of course, everyone's sort of in shock. Everyone's trying to figure out, what is it that we do in this situation? We went from, any given month, there's maybe five to 10 new member interests prior to the election, to, I think the new member orientation we held after the election had something like more than 70 people attending. Which at the time, the total chapter membership was less than 100 or had maybe just hit the 100 mark. So a massive amount of growth.

I think a lot of people are in a similar position where there's not a strong movement here in the current time, and there are people who are wanting to get involved. They don't have a lot of experience. And we have some of the organizational infrastructure to bring them in, build them up, develop people as organizers and have things for them to do. If people are joining and there's not things that you can say, OK, this is what we're doing and this is our vision.... So it's been kind of a process of developing both of those things at the same time. Trying to figure out, how do we focus and how do we bring these people in who are wanting to do things. And give them something to do without completely spreading ourselves too thin or taking on too many fronts at once.

So I guess in terms of the ground thing, I think the important things are finding that group that you can think with collectively to figure out what the problem is and act together. And just really dig in for the long haul, realizing not all of this is going to be addressed or changed overnight. Even if Trump dies tomorrow, there are still going to be a lot of the same problems. Even if we get a Democratic president or Democrats are able to take back control of the House and Senate.

We've got several different working groups that have different projects. We have two priority campaigns right now. One of those is in support of the minimum wage ballot initiative that's going to be voted on next summer, so July 2026. And then No Appetite for Apartheid, which is led by our Palestine Solidarity Working Group and is working on getting local businesses to basically divest from Israeli products and products that support Israel. Those are the big campaigns that we're focused on, using them to do a lot of things.

One is growing as a movement. That's the sort of DSA theory of change. We're trying to create a mass organization. Wanting to grow and bring in new people, not just for the sake of having new people or not just for the sake of, you know, we want your money (even though we do, we need money to do things.) But knowing that we're not going to make any sort of transformational changes unless we're able to have a truly mass movement of some sort. And so that means working with organizations that don't necessarily call themselves socialists. It means getting out in the community, talking to people who are not socialists about socialism. These two campaigns are really ways to do that. And like I was saying, they are a way to bring people in and give them something to do.

And I think also for our chapter, it is really a big step and big move in expanding our political imagination in terms of what we can actually accomplish. Because we haven't done bigger campaigns before. They've all been smaller projects.

One of the bigger projects previously was the mutual aid grocery distribution. I think in the previous iteration that was kind of the big success. Currently, we have Queer Fight Club, which is a mutual aid project and is going super well. It's had a ton of growth and gotten lots of attention and everything. But when you're doing mutual aid alone, if it's not connected to a larger strategy that's moving towards broader political transformation, it is really kind of limited in the effect that you're going to see. And so these campaigns that have clear goals, I think are going to be really good just from a perspective of organizational learning, building more coalitions. Working with broader groups and, at least for the minimum wage campaign, obviously addressing a real need. I think that's only going to get worse with the new budget bill that just went through, which is obviously going to affect a lot of people.

I've also been seeing  a lot of new organizations crop up. I'm sure you've heard of the 5051. Gosh, what was that other new Oklahoma organization? It's not Indivisible, it's the other national one. I'm blanking. There's another statewide organization. They've been hosting a lot of the protests if you've been out to any of those.

Chris: Yeah. The only one I went to recently was the No Kings, the big one.

Laura: Yeah, the No Kings protest. There are definitely challenges associated with it. But figuring out how our organization relates to those sorts of movements where, you go out and it's sort of unclear what it is they're trying to accomplish. There's not a clear set of demands. There are all sorts of different narratives fighting it out.

And at least my experience of those sorts of protests, especially when, I was just trying to move into the political space and be more active, it's like you go to these and then you're just like, okay, I don't really know what to do next. It was energizing, there were some good speeches and everything, and then at the end, they're like, no, go vote. I don't think it's quite as bad now in terms of that being the only sort of call.

But that's one thing that we've been trying to do, getting out at those. Like, yes, protest. But now here are all these other things that we're actively doing and things that you can get involved with. That will do a lot of the things I was just talking about: provide a group that you're actively involved with and that can continue to bring people in, develop them as organizers, and make it more of a long-term thing than just a one-off protest.

Chris: You mentioned how the organization at this point is basically a different set of people than it was two or three years ago, which is when I was most involved in it. I remember doing the mutual aid grocery stuff and helping out with that. And then I do remember going to some DSA stuff after that. And many of those people were gone by that point. I don't know, what do you do? That seems somewhat inevitable, but what do you do with that? Is there a way to have people stick around longer or to avoid that kind of burnout?

Laura: Yeah, it's hard. Right before the election, I was getting a little bit nervous because it felt like we were at a point where it could go either way. The DSA recently had leadership elections. Now is the first time in I don't know how long, maybe ever, that all of the elected officer positions are actually filled. There's still quite a few people who have multiple leadership roles. But it is a much bigger core now than it was.

So yeah, at that point of leading up to the election it felt like a lot of the working groups had lost leadership at the same time, and were not as stable as we wanted them to be. And it felt like there were a lot of people who seemed to be taking on too much and too much of it was falling on a small group. And so I was kind of nervous.

I was like, it feels like we might be at that point that things are about to kind of collapse again. I guess, if there's any upside to the election, it's energizing the DSA and bringing in new people. It definitely did that.

It's a common problem. It's definitely not just our chapter. When we'll be on district calls, and talking about challenges that different chapters are experiencing this is a common one that you hear over and over again. I definitely don't have the solution, if there is one solution.

But the things that we've been trying to do are... I mean, first, having the organizational infrastructure, getting people trained up, having different systems in place and spreading the knowledge and the skills of how to use those.

I think a lot of it is easy things like making sure things are located in a space that people know where to go. I think we've gotten a little bit better at trying to create a culture of: if you have too much going on, if you can't do this thing, don't just ghost. Tell us instead and we'll say it's okay.

And the other thing that I think has been hard for the chapter that, again, I think is something that we're getting better at, is there's not a strong social aspect to it. Or at least previously, there was less of that sort of community. People were there to do the political organizing. Less of the sort of friendship bonds. Not everyone needs to be friends. But I think it helps if you like each other and you hang out and you do things that don't just feel like work all the time. So I think we've gotten better about that.

Going back to trying to create a mass organization, it's the same thing with new people joining the chapter where a lot of it is people who are self-selecting into it. We don't have a core of workers who are organizing together at the workplace or who live by each other and go to church together. So they don't have ties outside of the chapter either.

And I think when you have that and you don't have that sense of personal accountability, if you stop going to meetings, no one really notices. Or they might notice, but you don't feel like, oh, well my best friend is also a member. And they're going to be like, hey, where you been recently? So I think without that separate community based organization and bonds to some degree, that also contributes to the constant churning.

Chris: The DSA is very decentralized in terms of organization, right? How independent are the chapters?

Laura: There's no one telling us what to do. I'm sure there's things that you could do as a chapter that DSA would say, hey, you're going to lose your charter or something like that. But yeah, chapters more or less operate independently.

Right now the chapter really doesn't have a lot of connections either to the national organization or to other chapters. I think that could help make it feel like you're part of a broader movement and learning from other chapters and the things happening in other places.

At the national level, they have parallel working groups, as you see in a lot of the chapters. There's a national electoral commission, a national labor commission committee. Different ones like that.

I haven't been deeply involved with a lot of these to know what the internal dynamics are, but some of the things that those organizations provide is they'll vote on campaigns, and then basically hand you a campaign in a box that you can participate in if you want. So all the chapters can participate in a common campaign.

When I first got involved, it was with the strike support for UPS. I'm blanking on what they called the campaign. But you're basically able to open up this document and it's got all these options for how you can go about approaching this campaign. What are the steps, social media graphics that you can use, here's who to contact to get training. All that kind of stuff.

It makes it really useful, especially when you're getting out and maybe you've got a working group, but you're not quite sure what to do. You're able to plug into this national level campaign. That's what's the No Appetite for Apartheid campaign is. There's multiple other chapters who are doing the same thing within their cities and areas.

Other than that, there's a DSA national convention that happens every two years. This is a convention year where delegates from all of the chapters get together and they decide on priorities, and decide what campaigns or what projects will continue to be supported.

I think that's the biggest thing that you get from nationals, as well as a lot of organizational infrastructure and training. It gives you campaigns that you're able to plug into, which is really helpful.

Chris: You mentioned that there are basically two things that the Oklahoma City DSA is focused on at the moment, which makes a lot of sense. Like, OK, let's not do 20 things because there's all sorts of problems right now you could focus on. But focusing on the minimum wage thing, is that basically an electoral campaign that's coming up?

Laura: Basically. We didn't participate in the ballot initiative, but I think "Raise the Wages," the name of the group that did, they got enough signatures to get a $15 minimum wage on a statewide ballot initiative. And then I think the legislator just passed a bill that will make it pretty much impossible to ever have another statewide ballot initiative. And he purposely put this vote off for over a year and it's at a weird time where it's not with any others. The idea is we're going to be out campaigning to get people out to vote. Talk to them about why this is a good idea.

Chris: And then you mentioned No Appetite For Apartheid, which you said is focused on Palestine. You said that it's working with local businesses, basically, to try to divest from ties to Israel.

Laura: Yeah. Asking businesses to become apartheid free zones. And there's different kind of levels of it of like, OK, well, maybe you can't get rid of all your Coke products right now.

Chris: Right. That's a good point. In my head, I was just like, oh, you know, things that are directly imported from Israel. But, yeah, I guess that would actually touch many, many large businesses in the U.S.

Laura: It's so hard. Anytime we're having a gathering, it's like, oh, hey, can people get drinks or pizza? You go down the drink aisle and you can't get any of them. They're all on the list.

Chris Water. Tap water.

I think what I'm going to ask, and this can be my last real question. Well, maybe I'll have one more after that. But really, what I'm looking for is, are there other tangible things? You mentioned a campaign. I know that there's always a question about electoral politics, and I guess that we don't really need to go down that road because I feel like there's differing opinions on that. But that's a thing that you can do.

But beyond that and just sort of nebulous protest, what other tangible things can an organization or individual do?

Laura: Labor is kind of my main area. That was my entry point into organizing. And I know we also have folks who are involved with tenant organizing and that kind of stuff. We're all sort of atomized and isolated.

We've got a join form that people fill out when they're interested in joining the chapter. And one of the questions on there is, what other organizations are you involved in? The interesting thing to me is that probably 90% of people who fill that out say none, I'm not involved in anything else. And I don't know if they're interpreting it to mean just other political organizations. But again, if there's not those community connections, if you don't go to church with people or you're not involved with other community institutions, it makes the organized resistance that much harder because you don't have that strong base that you're building on. And so I think things like tenant organizing and labor organizing and even just like mutual aid projects - they don't have to be big ones, it can just be checking on your neighbor. Especially given that we're going to see very soon the loss of all these other formal support systems. I think building those sorts of connections now, so that when people need help, they have people to turn to, is going to be pretty huge.

The protests... We've been trying to figure out how to relate to them. It feels like they are necessary still, even if it's just like, this is the only thing people really know how to do. I think having that and giving people a space to vent and get out that energy, and feel like they're doing something is still important.

Chris: I absolutely agree with that. I think there is just value in showing like, hey, we're all in agreement on something. Like the No Kings in Oklahoma City. Maybe you work remotely and you only go to the grocery store and you don't know very many people, you might be like, man, everybody else in Oklahoma City is probably a hardcore Trumper. And then going out and seeing something like that, you're like, oh, no they're not. They're regular people. They're mad about some of the same things I am. There's a lot of value in that.

I don't think we should not do that but I do think think that might be the ONLY value. Just being like, okay, cool, there's a bunch of people; we're not all nuts.

Laura: When I started the job that I'm in now, one of the first projects that I was on was a vaccine hesitancy project. I was talking to folks from across Oklahoma about COVID and about vaccines. Most of them rural people. So a lot of Republican voting people. And if you only experienced the past few years, the COVID years through media, I think you misinterpret a lot of what's happening. People weren't even really bringing up politics, even though this was like pretty late in the pandemic. There are all these conspiracies, it's very politically polarized. But just talking to people, you would not recognize them as how people are presented in the media. And I think that's the same for most things. If you've got that image in your brain that anyone who voted for Trump is the enemy and a fascist.... And yes, there are people that it is not worthwhile to engage with. But if you're just entirely dismissive, especially in places like Oklahoma, and the South more broadly... You can't just abandon broad swaths of the state and say, well, they have these beliefs and so they're not worth working with.

Going back to the idea that people really don't have a lot of organizing experience or connections to organizing culture or past movements, I think because of that, it gives you a certain idea of what an organizer is, or what an activist is. You imagine the person standing up on a stage at a protest. So you don't have a good idea of all of the things that go into organizing, or feel like you would fit in in that space. So I think just realizing, everyone has skills that can be plugged into this work. Even if they don't have any sort of experience. Things like showing up and taking notes at a meeting, or bringing food for other people.

We're starting a child watch program so that parents can more easily come to general meetings and other events. If you don't fit that stereotypical image, I think it can kind of scare a lot of people off or make them feel like they wouldn't fit there. And I think that's very far from true.

The same thing I was talking about earlier in terms of forming more community bonds and getting involved with more organizations or doing things like workplace organizing. Even if you're not out there doing a union drive at your workplace, you can still be taking smaller actions that are building those connections between coworkers and exercising some degree of collective agency that can carry over into other realms.

So I think anything that's really flexing that political imagination and allowing you to feel like you have some sort of collective political agency in life is really huge in creating organizers who are going to be able to do it for the long run.

Chris: I'll just ask this one weirdly specific question. I always hear, okay, so the DSA supports unions. So a union's on strike. I think you mentioned the UPS one. What does the DSA actually do in that situation?

Laura: I just Googled it, because I was like, this is driving me crazy. Why can't I remember the name of that campaign? So that was "Strike Ready." A lot of it was just showing up on the picket line for different unions that were going on strike. Recently we've worked quite a bit with both Starbucks and Natural Grocers.

A lot of the Natural Grocers in Norman pickets are purely community based because they do not have a contract yet. And there's all sorts of stupid rules that make it risky for the actual workers to be out there. So it's community supporters that are doing it instead. The workers don't actually go out on the picket line, it's people that support it. For Natural Grocers, none of those have actually been strikes. Some of the former workers who'd been fired were out there.

With Starbucks, those have been active strikes, but the only way they're actually able to shut down the store is if there's other people out there supporting them. These are all small stores and if it's only the workers on strike, I don't know how many it would be, but it would be much easier for management to bring in scabs to open up the store without those workers.

I recently stepped back as co-lead of the labor working group because it was kind of too much going on. But the vision that I always had for that was building stronger connections between unions and between community groups. Supporting workplaces where they don't have collective bargaining rights, but want to organize or want to be involved with labor.

To me, it feels like if you're not already in a union or a unionized workplace, there's not a pathway to get involved with the labor movement for a lot of people. So trying to create that space where you at least get more familiarity with like, what is it that people do in a union? How do you go about organizing one? Like for Mayday, we had a union panel where we invited active union organizers from a couple of different unions. We had Starbucks, Natural Grocers, AFT. And then the political director at the Oklahoma AFL-CIO. It had a huge turnout for it. And, you know, they were just talking about what's currently going on in their organizing, how the Trump administration has affected it, what are some of the lessons from organizing a workplace. And that was a really successful event. We were hearing people afterwards feeling so energized and like, okay, I can organize at my workplace. This is something that I can do.

A lot of it is giving that exposure that you don't get otherwise. If you're familiar with EWOC, which is the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, that's a national level organization partnership between DSA and UE - United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers. That's something that started during COVID. They had a lot of people reaching out because, you know, all the stuff that happened during COVID, people being sent back to unsafe workplaces, not having any say, not having enough safety equipment. All that kind of stuff.

They do a couple different things. One of them, it's like a fundamentals of organizing training that they hold every other month. Basically it's an organization where if you want to organize your workplace, you can reach out. They'll pair you with an experienced organizer who will advise you and work with you on how to do it for as long as it takes, every step of the way. If there's just one issue that you're trying to address, you have a piece of shit boss who's sexually harassing people or something, figuring out how do we address that? Or if you want to formally organize and create a union, once you get to the point of affiliate, they'll hand off to whatever union you choose to go with. So that's a national level organization.

Currently, if you're in Oklahoma, and you reach out, you might get paired with an organizer who's in New York. I still would like long term to be able to do this locally. Short term, it doesn't look like we're in a position to be able to, but (eventually) creating this at the local level so that people have more support when they're trying to organize their workplace, and then also have more of a space where organizers can come together and talk about their challenges and learn from each other. Because it's really hard and it's even harder if you're trying to do it alone.