It wouldn’t be a DSA Convention without endless rumors and drama! At least one faction has already appealed to made-up shenanigans and conspiracy theory to protest the removal of its (not especially popular) resolution from the conference program.
But enough about that. Here’s what I wanted to say a word about in this post: writing Convention resolutions.
I reviewed the 2023 resolutions in an earlier post. But when I was reading an objection to the ‘expand the NPC’ resolution, I brought a few points together.
Here’s how it goes.
Many resolutions suffer from a similar flaw. A group of very like-minded people get together. They push each other in the same direction until they turn a quite sensible proposal into an unbalanced, extreme, and poorly thought out proposal. In my earlier post, I identified three resolutions that did this. I suspect the one Red Star criticized is a fourth.
So, how do you prevent this from happening?
I’ll leave the reader with some advice. If you’re a DSA member thinking about writing a resolution, include at least one thoughtful and friendly critic on your team of writers. Run it past one of them. They’ll alert you to some of the problems. And you can address those problems before your resolution ends up taking heat for all those problems you ignored at the outset.
Who knows? If you ask nicely enough, I might even be your thoughtful and friendly critic.
