Why Democrats should spurn and revile the DSA

I’ve watched with alarm the increase in the number of members and political candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose membership has swelled from 6,000 members in 1982 to 110,000 members this year. I don’t know anybody affiliated with that party, but the positions espoused by their candidates are so extreme that they often come close to lunacy, as in the case of Darializa Avila Chevaler, likely to be elecetd a Congresswoman come fall. They favor open borders, an end to incarceration and most policing, and, to a man and woman, they are strongly anti-Israel. These stands, which come close to antisemitism, used to bar candidates from election, but now are de rigueur for DSAers. 

DSA candidates are “progressive,” but in an authoritarian way, and in that respect they are no advance over classic liberals or the “mainstream” Democratic Party—if there still is one!  Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of NYC and a DSA member, has been dubbed a “kingmaker”, as the candidates he’s endorsed have won by substantial margins in the primaries. My only consolation is that these are primaries in blue states, though an apparently loony DSAer, Melat Kiros, won a House primary in Colorado a light-blue state.  In all of these cases, the DSA candidate is predicted to defeat the Republican in November.

Will this invidious party spread? We already have DSAers in Congress: Rashida Tlaib and AOC, both of whom I detest. Bernie Sanders, though not a member of DSA, is affiliated with them.  That’s a small number, but it is going to get larger: DSAers in Congress will at least double next year.

In a new article in The Atlantic, staff writer Jonathan Chait describes the principles and history of the DSA, both of which should scare the bejeezus out of any liberal or mainstream Democrat. Click below to read the article for free:

Some quotes;

The general idea that Democratic Party loyalists seem to have about members of the Democratic Socialists of America is that they’re a lot like Democrats, but perhaps a bit more passionate. Voters in New York City are “not afraid of the term democratic socialism,” Joy Behar recently said on The View, to applause. “Social Security is democratic socialism. Partly, unemployment insurance is. The people who pick up your garbage, the people who take the fire out at your house—all of these things are democratic socialism.”

It’s true that the DSA has areas of ideological overlap with the Democratic Party, and would at least directionally support classic Democratic policies such as a higher minimum wage, defending social spending, and opposing the Trump administration. But the DSA’s version of democratic socialism goes far beyond routine public functions such as garbage collection and Social Security (which most Republicans, not to mention Democrats, support), or even aspirational policies such as Medicare for All.

The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.

The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.

These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone “woke” era. They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.

The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.

As Chait describes, the DSA fractured after October 7, 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel.  Now the organization is pretty much anti-Israel and even sides with terrorists groups (and no, its Jew hatred is based on more than Netanyahu—it’s anti-Zionism, equivalent to antisemitism):

In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.

Now, Chait says, more that half of DSA members openly identify as communists, which means that they want authoritarian power (the dictatorship of the proletariat), though some like Mamdani or Tlaib disguise their antidemocratic aims well, supporting uncontroversial ideas like public health care and transportation. But that’s just the veneer:

In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.

And do you know about the “dirty break”?

The DSA’s long-term strategy is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the “dirty break,” a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.

Not all DSA officials agree on the dirty break. Some still cling to Harrington’s vision of pushing the Democrats leftward. Others favor an immediate split into a third party (a “clean break”). But as Peter Sterne, a onetime DSA member who now reports on New York politics, has written, “The DSA’s current strategy is a ‘dirty break’: gradually build up the necessary partylike infrastructure to eventually break away from the Democrats entirely, while still running candidates in Democratic primaries for now.”

In the meantime, the organization has displayed patience. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the movement’s most valuable political asset, has moved cautiously in office and avoided dramatic policy changes, building political support that he has spent on backing DSA challenges to mainstream Democrats.

. . .Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, recently appeared on MS NOW, a favorite network for normie liberals, where she blamed Democratic members of Congress for discord with new left-wing nominees. “You,” she said, addressing her incumbent colleagues, “are creating the antagonistic dynamic that we do not need. These are two young, talented, intelligent women that got elected against all odds, against millions of dollars. Perhaps there is something we can learn from them.”

The norm that AOC is trying to create is a ratchet that pushes the Democratic Party ever leftward. The DSA is permitted to excoriate the party, but non-socialist Democrats cannot respond in kind. Moderate Democrats are permitted to exist, at least for now, but the ideological pressure runs in one direction.

Now the last bit might be an exaggeration (I love how AOC slots herself in the group of desirables), but it doesn’t seem far from the truth. Thankfully, at present Democrats as a whole are not behind the DSA:

At the most superficial level, the DSA influx has associated Democrats with a series of kooky beliefs and statements. Although Democratic voters approve of the DSA, voters as a whole do not. A national poll found the group’s approval at 21 percent, and 48 percent disapproved. (The same poll had 36 percent approval of the Democrats.) Its specific platform components are if anything less popular. The DSA’s leadership has approved a platform, set to be ratified at its convention next month, calling for “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” opening borders, moving to public ownership for the largest corporations, establishing a 32-hour workweek, and defunding the Pentagon.

So why should we be scared? For two reasons. First, those of us who sympathize with Israel have watched with despair as antisemitism (excuse me: “anti-Zionism”) has seeped into the mainstream Democratic Party, and that’s partly the result of the DSA. More important, the DSA is antidemocratic and antiliberal, and woe to us if they get elected. Even so-called mainstream Democrats, like Kamala “Coconut Tree” Harris, are schmoozing with Democratic Socialists, trying to inject some pro-Palestinian notes and more progressivism into their campaigns. Click, read and weep: here’s an article from the Jerusalem Post:

I don’t think Harris has a snowball’s chance in hell of even being a Presidential/VP candidate in 2028, but who knows what will happen in the next two years?  After all, Democrats embraced her candidacy in the last election, and then what happened? Here’s Chait’s conclusion about the DSA, and why we should fear it:

What the DSA demands of the Democrats is not merely to advocate more generous social policies, or more cautious foreign affairs, but to welcome, or at least accept, authoritarians as their coalition partners. Democrats are likely to face the same kind of pressure that Republicans confronted with MAGA’s hostile takeover: first to ignore their allies’ sinister goals, and then to rationalize and eventually justify them.

As authoritarian elements gain strength, they become more essential to the success of a political coalition, and the price of confronting them rises. The Republican Party has long since passed the point of no return. The easiest time to draw clear moral lines against the encroachment of illiberalism within one’s own camp is at the beginning.

Never will I vote for one of these jokers.

h/t Callum