Ossé dead-enderism
A brief response to “Of Course the Left Should Primary Hakeem Jeffries” by Alex Skopic
By Alyaza Birze
Although Chi Ossé has formally ended his bid for New York’s 8th congressional district—and has effectively been out of the race since he was not recommended for endorsement by NYC-DSA in late November—the rancor surrounding his deceased candidacy has, for whatever reason, continued breathlessly without him. Whether organized from a position of identity politics; of hatred for Hakeem Jeffries; of simply wanting socialists to run for something; or something else entirely, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up within parts of the left over the past few weeks to argue that NYC-DSA has, by failing to back his candidacy, snubbed Chi Ossé in some way and missed a golden opportunity to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The most recent (and certainly most formalized) argument in this space comes from Alex Skopic, whose just-published article “Of Course We Should Primary Hakeem Jeffries” in Current Affairs also probably represents the pinnacle of this newly-congealed and somewhat embarrassing dead-enderism. (If this verbiage seems harsh, hopefully it will not seem so by the end of this piece.) Despite being granted nearly four thousand words to present his case, Skopic somehow fails to seriously engage with critics of Ossé at any point, while at the same time rehashing a bundle of unconvincing arguments for endorsing Ossé as though repeating those arguments enough times—and from his platform as an editor of Current Affairs—is a substitute for actually substantiating them. In doing this, he is also effectively misinforming his readership.
A brief list of problems with Skopic’s piece
Lesser-evilism is still not a sufficient reason to endorse
The central premise of the piece (occupying nearly half of its length) is that “[Hakeem] Jeffries is a genuinely horrible House [M]inority [L]eader”; that he is “an ideological enemy of socialism, with a track record of meddling in New York elections to keep DSA candidates out and pro-corporate ones in”; and that this record is so horrible that we must primary him (with Chi Ossé).
But Skopic’s core argument is not only an unsupported logical leap but a leap that, when examined more closely, is effectively the same lesser-evilism argument that Groundwork made in favor of Ossé while leading the charge to endorse him. Needless to say, an argument that has already failed to convince a majority within NYC-DSA is even less convincing when reworded by Skopic after the fact.
There is, to be clear, not a single prominent leftist that I am aware of who thinks Hakeem Jeffries is worth anything besides contempt or is unfamiliar with his lengthy track record of vile, criminal political positions. But Skopic acts as if these traits (shared by the vast majority of Congress) are unto themselves unimpeachable reasons to endorse Ossé, which is simply ridiculous. This is also an argument I have already concisely addressed in my previous article as follows—
We are in the business of electing socialists who are accountable to our membership and extensions of our platform and collective political priorities; we are not in the business of primarying bad Democrats just because they are bad Democrats. Sometimes these may overlap, but here they do not. The fact that Ossé is a member of our organization and would be an improvement over Jeffries by virtually any metric is not an a priori reason for us to endorse him[...]
—and it is an argument that Skopic, in what will become a theme, completely ignores throughout his piece, despite the fact that he literally links to my article against endorsing Ossé, and also clearly read enough of said article to pick out a different argument from it.
Later on in the piece, Skopic attempts to refute a Marxist Unity Group article — “Why We Should Not Endorse Chi Ossé” by Holden T. — that (among other things) questions whether Ossé is actually a socialist and therefore suitable for exposing working people to socialist ideas. Despite clearly acknowledging Holden’s critique that Ossé may be “an opportunist” with “no enduring allegiance or accountability” to DSA—something that, if true, would make Ossé a terrible standard-bearer for socialism—Skopic otherwise fails to engage with Holden’s concerns. He simply reiterates the lesser-evilist argument that Hakeem Jeffries has views “foul enough that even a flawed socialist would be a distinct upgrade.”
This is not even to say that Skopic’s lesser-evilism is universally wrong—at an individual level, voting for Chi Ossé would be the clear choice. But we are speaking of collective action here, and in a collective context it is as if he has no familiarity with the principles that inform who we endorse and why. Our endorsements ultimately reflect an expectation by an elected official to serve as an extension of the organization and its democratically-decided interests. The inability to trust Ossé to do this was clearly a factor in him failing to receive an endorsement, and it is a factor that Skopic completely ignores in favor of nonsense.
Jeffries cannot be beaten with idealism
Skopic’s style of argumentation is another glaring problem; in many places it is crude or outright pointless sophistry, deftly ignoring any reasoned or principled objection to endorsing Chi Ossé in favor of engaging with what are functionally strawmen. One particularly egregious example of this can be found in how Skopic opts to engage with Socialist Majority Caucus and NYC-DSA member David T.’s article. David observes, among other things, that
Chi Ossé has repeatedly failed to align with NYC-DSA over the years until our endorsement could help propel him to Congress. When given the chance to endorse Eon Huntley for State Assembly in 2024 against an opponent backed by the real estate and pro-Israel lobby, he decided to stay silent. [...] Unlike Emily Gallagher, who ran without NYC-DSA then joined our Socialist in Office Committee, Chi declined to join our SiO.
David is also not ambiguous with the conclusion he thinks follows from these issues: we should not endorse Ossé and there is little value in running “a symbolic effort against a horrible Democrat.” But from the multifaceted argument and straightforward conclusion David presents, Skopic opts only to cherrypick a single minor line—an offhanded but almost certainly still correct assertion from David that “Jeffries remains popular in his district”—and thereafter spends six hundred words attempting to refute it as though this is the crux of (or even has substantial bearing on) David’s point.
Skopic does not even do a good job here, either. He casts doubt on a poll showing Jeffries popular in his district (even though among national Democrats Jeffries has repeatedly been shown to have twice as many Democrats favorable to him as unfavorable to him); handwaves actual evidence and election results in the district as unrepresentative (when basic modelling is more than sufficient to demonstrate the massive uphill climb of contesting the district); and distills Hakeem Jeffries’ strengths down to “money and insider connections” (as though these factors do not absolutely dominate higher-level American politics and the ability to win Congressional elections). In effect his position is complete idealism—he engages with the district he wishes NY-08 was but not the district that it actually is.
DSA has already “demonstrated its power”
Skopic separately attempts to argue against Holden T.’s previously-mentioned article by suggesting even “nearly beating the Democratic House Minority Leader would be a dramatic demonstration of power,” and that therefore we must not let the imperfections of Chi Ossé be the enemy of good.
Even if we ignore the dubious assertion that we might be able to “nearly” beat Hakeem Jeffries, have we not already dramatically demonstrated our political power by electing a socialist mayor in the largest city in the United States over Jeffries’ “principled disagreement”? Zohran Mamdani is now one of the most prominent politicians in the United States and his victory is one of the major news stories of 2025. Before even being sworn in as mayor he met with Donald Trump, the sitting U.S. president, and was widely considered the political victor of said meeting. What is this if not socialist political power in action, and why—beyond a feeling of insecurity with our already substantial list of accomplishments—would we need to immediately turn around and attempt to scare Hakeem Jeffries to demonstrate it further?
I am also not swayed at all by Skopic’s exhortations that “doing nothing [to Hakeem Jeffries] makes [us] look even weaker” and “you can’t allow someone to openly oppose and denounce you, the way Jeffries has repeatedly opposed the DSA, without incurring a penalty for it” and so therefore we must confront Jeffries head-on. This reeks of aimless electoral adventurism. Jeffries has, to reiterate yet another point from my previous article, been wholly unsuccessful at curbing the influence of socialism in New York City. Even when his preferred candidates occasionally win—which they never have against an incumbent of ours to this point—the effect is less a decisive loss and more a delaying action for our politics. Between Jeffries’ elevation to Democratic leadership in 2018 and today, NYC-DSA has gone from electing one Congressperson and one State Senator to electing one Congressperson, three State Senators, five Assemblypersons, two City Council members, and the Mayor of New York City.1 Frankly, Skopic’s problem seems to just be the abstract notion that our existing work is not arbitrarily headline-catching or performatively anti-Jeffries enough. I hope the lack of seriousness behind such a notion goes without saying.
Skopic does not understand the nature of our work
Skopic also sometimes seems to just misunderstand—or be delusional about—the internal politics of decisions like whether or not to endorse Chi Ossé.
At one point, for example, Skopic characterizes the case against Ossé as “there’s no point in participating in elections unless you’re certain you’ll win,” and this is clearly not where opposition to Ossé’s campaign came from within NYC-DSA. In fact, a willingness by chapter rank-and-file to support long-shot candidacies becomes evident with even cursory research. Jaslin Kaur was given a chance by the chapter in 2021 despite running for a City Council seat with little history of progressivism before her. Zohran Mamdani received an endorsement months in advance of registering as a serious candidate for Mayor. Most recently, Alexa Avilés received an endorsement for a Congressional run next year that she was never favored to win (even before Brad Lander announced his run for the same seat and pushed Avilés out).
At another point Skopic seems to imply that the most politically powerful chapter of the largest contemporary socialist organization in the United States has somehow—in declining to endorse Ossé—failed to consider that “election campaigns are valuable tools for organizing working people in large numbers, exposing them to socialist ideas, and exposing the fraudulence of your opponents’ ideas on the biggest possible stage.”
How he could arrive at either of these conclusions without being misinformed or being completely disingenuous is beyond me.
Do your homework
I could continue pointing out problems, but I must confess that I find it to be quite a waste of time even responding to work so through-and-through sloppy as Skopic’s is here. Writing even these two thousand or so words has taken approximately one week of workshopping, editing, and revising that would clearly be better put toward other subjects. But Skopic has published this in Current Affairs—an ostensibly rigorous, serious publication which is perhaps second only to Jacobin in its current popularity among the broader American left. He is therefore speaking with authority, from a platform of authority, while simultaneously wading into a subject where he exhibits almost no familiarity with anything he’s talking about. This sucks! The piece has also gotten appreciable positive engagement despite that lack of familiarity, essentially misinforming its readership in doing so. This also sucks!
A better leftist media environment would intervene when Skopic writes paragraphs like “[... Jeffries] just sincerely believes that the left should be suppressed. And there’s an obvious asymmetry at work here, because he feels free to attack New York socialists whenever he likes, but New York socialists like Mamdani and AOC refuse to throw a punch back” as though we are not literally running Eon Huntley against Stefani Zinerman a second time, a clear example of “punching back” against Hakeem Jeffries under whatever definition you’d like to use for that. Or it would intervene when he attempts to defend a Chi Ossé endorsement with a quote from Engels about the value of universal suffrage, which “forc[ed] all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people and, further, it provided our representatives in the Reichstag with a platform from which they could speak to their opponents in parliament, and to the masses outside,” as though when Engels speaks of “representatives” he is not referring to ones from an actual worker’s party, or at least to a workers’ candidate that Ossé does not inarguably exemplify. Or it would have the backbone to just kill a piece that fails to engage with any serious criticism of Chi Ossé, and harps at length about Jeffries’ potential unpopularity while totally ignoring recent polls that show Jeffries to be very popular with the Democratic base.
Whatever the case may be, though, writing for any leftist publication—much less one with the readership of Current Affairs—should demand a level of intellectual rigor that Skopic has simply failed to demonstrate here.
If you’re interested in writing pieces for the Rose Garden, participating in reading discussions, and/or chatting with like-minded folks, make sure to join DSA and fill out the Rose Garden interest form!
Not counting Sarahana Shrestha, a DSA member in the legislature who represents the mid-Hudson Valley and is in the state Socialist Caucus; Jessica González-Rojas, a DSA member in the legislature who does not caucus with the state Socialist Caucus; Shahana Hanif, a DSA member on City Council who does not caucus with the city Socialist Caucus; and of course Chi Ossé himself.