DSA history: Part II
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]
You might be surprised by the fact that, at least measured by official membership, the Democratic Socialists of America is a small group: 95,000 members. And yet in recent years they’ve certainly had a much greater influence on American politics than that would suggest.
The DSA has been around for close to fifty years, however, and before that elements existed that merged in 1982 to become the DSA. Socialists are famous for splitting and splintering, but these groups were able to merge.
By the way, a little digression here for levity’s sake:
Back to the DSA and its history. Note the later prominence of Bernie Sanders, whose leadership around 2015 marked a turning point for the organization:
Given that DSA’s modern rebirth is owed to the two presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, it’s fitting that DSA is directly descended from the Socialist Party of America, the party line on which Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in two of his campaigns for president … DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was a faction led by Michael Harrington that had split off from the Socialist Party of America, and NAM was founded in 1971 as a non-vanguardist socialist-feminist organization. At DSA’s At DSA’s founding convention in Detroit, it had 6,000 members.
Michael Harrington was a well-known professor, author, and leftist activist, and I recall his book on poverty in the US, The Other America, quite well. I was required to read it either in high school or college. No mention whatsoever was made at the time of the fact that he was a socialist. As Democratic Socialists go today, though, he was more mild and old-fashioned. Harrington hated Communism and really did think socialism could be accomplished without all the totalitarianism – or at least, had that hope. He supported Israel, too; how quaint!
But Harrington was responsible for promoting one idea that turns out to have been quite inspired: not to run as socialist (or Socialists), but to run as Democrats:
Although Harrington identified personally with the socialism of Thomas and Eugene Debs, the most consistent thread running through his life and his work was a “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.”
That seed came from the failure of Socialists like Norman Thomas to achieve much at all in elections. Running as Democrats despite actually being socialists was the idea behind the name of the group, with the word “Democratic” coming first. The DSA also did not call itself a party even though it could have done so. It was not going to make Thomas’ mistake; it was going to back candidates but they would not be running as DSA members for the most part, and certainly not as Socialist Party members:
Harrington said that socialists had to go through the Democratic Party to enact their policies, reasoning that the socialist vote had declined from a peak of approximately one million in the years around World War I to a few thousand by the 1950s. He considered running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but decided against it after Senator Ted Kennedy announced his campaign. He later endorsed Kennedy and said, “if Kennedy loses or is driven out of this campaign, it will be a loss for the left”.
Some examples of early DSA members who got elected were the following:
Several elected officials were also members of DSA, like Congressman Major Owens, Congressman Ron Dellums, and NYC Mayor David Dinkins.
Dinkins was the NYC mayor who ran NY into the ground during the early 1990s. Who knew he was a DSA member? Not I. And, going to this Wiki page that purports to list prominent DSA members just from New York, I find – in addition to the obvious, like AOC and Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier – people such as Jerry Nadler, Jamaal Bowman, Linda Sarsour, and actor Wallace Shawn.
During the 1980s, the DSA backed Israel and Zionists. As you might expect, that is certainly no longer the case. They also supported leftist groups in Latin America, such as the Sandinistas.
The 1990s were difficult years for the DSA, due to Harrington’s death in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. A younger group kept the movement alive, but barely – and of course leftism worked its way through academia, preparing the ground. It was during the Obama administration that the DSA had its resurgence (my guess is that there was an influx of money at that point, as well):
This period saw the emergence of several forceful popular movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011, Fight for $15 in 2012, and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Occupy in particular was instrumental in using class-conscious framing (“We are the 99%”) to legitimize social democratic policy demands like taxing the rich. The socialist movement was also gaining steam outside of DSA. Jacobin magazine had just been founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010, which organized local reading groups and helped popularize socialist analysis to the left of DSA’s realignment model. Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, representing the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative and serving as a modern model of a socialist politician-as-organizer.
The formation of the Left Caucus in 2014 created the space for more left-wing ideas that challenged some of DSA’s longstanding assumptions. The Left Caucus was an internal group of DSA members who advocated for running candidates as explicit socialists, adhering to a standard program, and leaving the neoliberal Socialist International. They were also friendly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but explicit anti-Zionism was at that point still difficult to talk about in DSA.
Those were the years when the modern DSA was coming of age. Then, with Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy in 2015-2016, it burst forth from its semi-cocoon. According to the way the DSA tells the story (at least, according to the DSA member writing the piece I’m quoting), it was the DSA pushing Sanders rather than the other way around:
In early 2015, DSA began a campaign to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President called “Run, Bernie, Run.” Across several cities, small groups of DSA members tabled outside events where Bernie spoke and flyered the crowd. …
That summer, Bernie’s popularity skyrocketed, and DSA membership began to grow steadily. Over the next two years, Jacobin reading groups turned into DSA chapters. Online leftist figures like the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast (which started in March 2016), Twitter personality “Larry Website,” and Jacobin writers encouraged their followers to join DSA.
As we watched Bernie dare to speak the truth about the billionaire class and then suffer lies and slander from the liberal power-brokers, many left-leaning millennials like me underwent a total paradigm shift. His platform — particularly Medicare for All, free college, and opposition to the finance, war, and fossil fuel industries — raised expectations where Obama had brought them to the floor. Politics became fundamentally re-polarized: it was Bernie against the wealthy elite, and we knew what side we were on.
I assume you know much of the rest of the story – for example, the election of the Squad, and recent victories such as that of Mamdani (some of that is in Part I). Nearly all these people ran as Democrats, with AOC’s defeat of an entrenched and powerful Democrat incumbent being an especially important turning point moment that showed the DSA the sort of victory that was now possible.
If you want to read the type of propaganda the DSA puts out at its website to woo prospective supporters, see this:
Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.
We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.
We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.
We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.
Join DSA to further the cause of democratic socialism in your town and across the nation.
You can see the appeal.
“You can see the appeal.”
Yes, if I attended US public schools for 12 years and learned very little about history, political philosophy and economics and then went to college learning very little while accumulating massive student debt, I might see the appeal.
It would also help that at 30, I am still living at home and the best job I had was working at a NGO or for Starbucks. I am cisgendered with low testosterone.
On the other hand if I am Juan Hernandez, the Mexican immigrant who worked for Space X from the beginning as a welder @ $28.00 per hour – not so much. Later I was asked to take equity shares in the company when money was tight and take a $3.00 an hour paycut. I look to the future and am not an envious person like a Communist and am an optimist. When Space X went public a few weeks ago, my shares were now worth $1.4 million. My work ethic, understanding of business and free market capitalism paid off.
I like to read on my time off and am reminded of Winston Churchill’s description of Socialism:
The Philosophy of Failure
The Creed of Ignorance
The Gospel of Envy
So do I see any attraction in DSA? None whatsoever. Then again I’m not a college graduate with “White Privelege” and have not made a land acknowledgemnet in my life. Also I am proud to be an American.
Bernie Sanders… As a young man he spent some time in a kibbutz that was infamous for being fans of Joseph Stalin.
I think some of his attraction is that he does a very good job of appearing earnest. So many of these Dems are genuinely terrible actors in front of a camera. Would you buy a used car from one of these mooks? Not I.
Bernie always seems to muster a bit of righteous indignation when he speaks. And usually, he is talking about how we are all victimized by the system, so the tone works.
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neo mentioning the actor Wallace Shawn reminded me of a not very old film that skewers the communist actors and producers in old Hollywood. Hail Caesar! (2016). I’m surprised that George Clooney agreed to star in it. Though perhaps it is more about how screwed up Hollywood was, rather than a commentary on the old communist movement in the US. And Clooney does love the work of Joel and Ethan Coen.
As I recall, Wallace Shawn didn’t become active politically until some years after his breakout role in “My Dinner With Andre” (1981).
I loved MDWA and was disappointed when Shawn came out so strongly on the left.
They don’t need to go into government to avoid the capitalist. They need to go into business and set up whatever structure they want.
If they can’t save and invest capital, they aren’t going to be able to manage businesses once in government.
I have always said that the entire left magnifies itself through various means, there’s not that.many of them!
Socialists, both int’l communists & nationalist Nazis, are often very good at criticizing the shortcomings & problems of the current system. Then they ignore the tradeoffs needed in reality, & propose unrealistic, yet idealistic & often inspiring solutions. Whenever the egalitarian based solution is implemented, it fails.
Because real socialism always fails, as it’s in contradiction to reality, so only unrealistic, impossible socialism would ever work.
I was a Libertarian in the 80’s, even running for state & national Congress (Silicon valley, 1986, vs winner Tom Campbell-R, & Anna Eshoo, who then won in ‘92, retired in 2025). I now mostly support Rand Paul & the smaller govt faction of the Republican Party.
Wings of one of the two major party coalitions creates more predictability yet also reduces most mistakes rather than the multi-party parliamentary systems of the EU, like Italy or Slovakia, or Israel. Where small, kingmaker parties have too much short term power.
Trump & Republicans need a better-than-Obamacare health plan. Every US state should be building more Med Schools, and training more doctors. Possibly copying the 6 year program many EU countries use for talented high schoolers, like my son the doctor went thru.
Sanders is, ironically, a Jew. An anti-Israel Jew.
@Tom Grey: We need to get politicians away from healthcare. and as a doc I cannot support your healthcare “shoulds”.
Well, no, I don’t see the appeal, myself, but I can see why the uneducated or ill-informed think somehow they can have something for nothing. The entitlement mentality makes it easy to think “the system” is what’s wrong, not personal effort.
In my life I have read oodles of tomes by Marxists & many histories of Marxism both in power and as an ideology (not a surprise, I guess, given my on-line name). When I go to read the websites of groups like the DSA or the Party for Socialism & Liberation what strikes me is they read like they’re written by a public relations firm and not by “socialists”.
The Left has a history. Now, if you’re a Righty, that history is the history of the countries they’ve driven to ruin and the millions they’ve murdered along the way. But, if you’re among the Lefty faithful, that history is also a history of ideas. Without that history of ideas, the position of the Left in the modern world is “formless and void” (to quote Genesis).
I look on these sites for positions on the historical questions such as:
1) Is the proletariat the only class that can manifest true revolutionary consciousness?
This is a hugely important question, as it determines if the “allies” of the cultural Left such as Islamic forces, LGBTQ, feminists, and racial and ethnic minorities are true revolutionary partners or are they distractions from the primacy of class struggle. Indeed, critical race theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw appropriate Marx’s use of the Master & Slave dialectic to argue that blacks have true revolutionary consciousness as opposed to the proletariat. Classical Marxism makes a moral & epistemological claim — only the proletariat sees reality as it is. Well, what is it?
2) Is the political struggle a bottom-up affair or can it be top-down?
In other words, can the struggle be carried out by a Bolshevik-like Vanguard of the Proletariat (Blanquism) or must it be an organic mass movement only?
3) Does the modern Left believe in the Labor Theory of Economic Value?
Because, without the Labor Theory of Value, the moral case against Capitalism disappears. The Capitalist steals the portion of the Worker’s Value that the workers adds to every product, and that theft is what creates the Capitalist’s profit. the only problem is that, even in the Marxists of the late 19th – early 20th C, they start to see that the Labor Theory of Value is basically boo-yah. So, Labor Theory of Value and be an economic retard or what’s the moral case against Capoitalism?
A Left without its history of ideology is like a Christian sect that refuses to come to grips with the Nicene Creed and its history. “Oh, don’t worry about abstruse dogma! Just be good to people!” “Uhhhhhhhhmmmmm, why?
Arguably, the DSA gaining control of the democrat party is good thing… for us.
Political parties can go extinct, like the Whig Party.
Extremism has a limited shelf life because it ignores real world realities.
The DSA is stampeding the democrats toward the cliff’s edge. That shifty, vacant gaze in Chuck Schumer’s eyes of late is him realizing that he’s “upon the tiger’s back” with no safe way to get off it without being eaten by the monster they have wrought. A ‘monster’ made up of disconnected from reality idealists who in their ideological blindness, venture where angels fear to tread.
@YoungHegelian: When I go to read the websites of groups like the DSA or the Party for Socialism & Liberation what strikes me is they read like they’re written by a public relations firm and not by “socialists”.
Excellent overall comment. I haven’t read as much Marxism as you have, but I gave it a shot. Most “socialists” today have no idea of the history or issues of socialism. It’s all feelz.
There was a time on the left when you had to be booked or at least able to bluff.
Frankly it’s embarrassing. 🙂
Michael Harrington came to my university to speak in the late 70’s. I was also a Leftist who despised Communism and found Harrington to be incredibly moving and inspirational. I still do, but he was also, unfortunately, completely wrong in his solutions. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and Socialism doesn’t work. Never has and never will, as long as human beings are human beings.
@Huxley,
Thank you for taking the time to read my verbose treatise!
A prime example of on-line tl;dr if I say so myself!
Cue “Imagine” by John Lennon.
A now wealthy man Lennon had grand infantile dreams for everyone.
Imagine you’ve no money.
Whatever will you do?
Take it from the weaker
And call it justice too!
You say that I’m a schemer.
But I’m not the only one.
Shot down in Manhatten
By a loonie with a gun.
A good commentary on the biggest problem of socialism: eventually you run out of other people’s money.
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/07/17/start-spreadin-the-news-new-york-losing-billions-as-millionaires-flee-the-big-apple/
YoungHegelian, I also read your “treatise” and found it vey helpful. Thank you. The DSA statements always seem to be a list of “wants” with no foundational structure, other than destroying the U.S. constitutional system so they can take over.
Just as the profligate blue cities and states that count on the US Treasury to bail them out, or earthquake-damaged nations and the tsunami-struck Pacific islands that know the US Navy will deliver tons of relief supplies, Socialism relies on Uncle Sam to be their last resort. Even in the days when the UN pretended to be delivering assistance from many different countries while in truth delivering mostly supplies from the USA, they had to rely on the lift capabilities of the USNavy and USAir Force.
The USA is the essential foundation — both financial and logistical — that Marxists world-wide rely on to bail them out when their own system fails.
This is Cuba’s real complaint: not that we blockaded them, but that we didn’t swoop in to save them from their own bad policies. And the same will be true for California and New York: when financial reality hits home, they’ll call Washington for help. That is just the reality of what people like to call Socialism because even they know its real name has less appeal for historical reasons.
Apparently the DSA thinks they’re on the ascendent right now, and they’re prepared to swing for the fences. Ironically, they are damaging their relationship with the Democratic part in doing so, and (as Neo points out), their numbers are too small to be a real national party. If they swing and miss they will damage not only their own brand, but that of the Democrats too. My question now is, how long will it take Democrats to see this and tell them to get lost, as people like John Fetterman is doing already?
The DSA think (IMO) that with enough murders of political opponents and enough deincarcerated enforcers they can cow the normies. Commies, trannies, Islamists, racists all agree that the normies have to be destroyed/eliminated first, gain effective power, then sort out the other rivals.
Blood and chaos for all, but power!
Orwell had them pegged.
Young Hegelian,
You wrote:
1) “Is the proletariat the only class that can manifest true revolutionary consciousness?”
I’m currently reading Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow.” The book is about the sequence of deliberate peasant starvations culminating in the Ukraine Holodomor. Conquest quotes party manifestoes and leaders who utterly distrusted the peasant. By not allowing market pricing, Moscow totally screwed up agriculture and the only answer, time after time, was forced “requisitioning” of grain, in other terms, “You give us all your grain or you get a bullet to the head.”
Prior to WWI Russia was one of the the top 5 exporters of grain – after Communism there were periodoc starvations of millions of peasants and then with teh total collectivaztion of agriculture with State Farms and Collective Farms an overspending on inputs and under production of grain, produce and meat.
Only the industrial worker could be trusted. Only when it was clear that Economic Marxism was a total failure did we get Cultural Marxism of Gramsci and Dutschke and all the “Oppressed Classes” as the true Marxists.
We are always told supposed Properties of socialism — such as no poverty — without ever being given an actual definition. Similarly for capitalism, except that all the supposed Properties are bad. People choose what they are told is niceness over what they are told is cruelty.
The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.
Others are looking at events and thinking about the future: Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
AI Scott Adams this morning has a sobering look at the explosive growth of technology and AI: https://x.com/AIScottAdams
We are faced with hard to believe public and private debt levels.
Major change seems to be almost upon us, but I am optimistic.
IMO, people like Musk, Thiel, Vance, Rubio, Cruz, etc. being in the forefront will be able to invent a postive future as things unfold. DEI is definitely not part of it.
Elizabeth April claims that the Galactic Brotherhood is watching over us https://elizabethapril.com/meet-the-gfl/
I discovered recently that Rachael Haywire somehow survived and is holding forth on Substack. I had lost track of her after Trigger Warning failed to thrive.
Katherine Dee at Default Friend is extolling marriage and motherhood, nursing two babies, and providing endless insights about human culture.
As I approach 86 and look back at experiences as kid from the Heartand, a twenty something tank commander, and years writing tens of thousands of lines of computer code, I am just amazed at what has happened.
All in all, it has been, now is, and will continue to be an amazing time to be a human being.
NYC DSA Co-Chair: Any Private Stores Bankrupted by Government Grocery Stores Maybe Shouldn’t Have Existed.
See the scene in the movie 36 Hours when John Banner (Sergeant Schultz) as a home guard type is taking bribes to help people escape from Germany to Switzerland. He kills a nazi officer and says “you should never try to put a man out of business.”
Trump & Republicans need a better-than-Obamacare health plan. Every US state should be building more Med Schools, and training more doctors.
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IMO, the number of medical and osteopathic schools is sufficient bar, perhaps, in very demographically dynamic areas like Texas and Florida. You can expand the size of freshman classes pari passu with any population growth. What we would benefit from is the destruction of the DEI regime in medical education, BAMN.
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Baccalaureate degrees should be eliminated and (for the most part) be replaced with short preparatory certificates (for professional schools) and short and more focused degree programs (in academic and occupational subjects alike). As preparation for medical school, a 60 credit course of study heavy on physiology might do.
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IMO, we would benefit from replacing Medicaid, Medicare, and employer-paid plans with a set of publicly-financed plans which kick-in over a high deductible. The maximum allocation to finance the plans would be set at about 6% of gross domestic product. People could purchase household plans to cover services outside the ken of the public plans, but these would by law have the same deductible as their public plan. You’d supplement this with mandatory savings accounts for medical care and l/t care; some part of your income is sequestered each year for the accounts, but the accounts have a fill line and anything north of the fill line would be free cash for you to withdraw at your discretion. Below the deductible, you pay out of pocket. The architecture and rubrics of pricing would be subject to regulatory prescription, but the actual prices would be set by providers. For charges assessed when the deductible has been exhausted, the provider would have to accept the insurer’s reimbursement if he has antecedently agreed to accept patients covered by that particular insurer (private companies would bid on blocs of households and receive the premium income collected by state and federal authorities; the bids would be in the form of deductibles they would accept in order to fulfill contracts). Providers might offer services outside the ken of what the publicly financed plans defined as ‘medical care’, which would be invoiced separately and paid out of pocket. Much care deemed ‘medical’ per the public plans would be paid out-of-pocket as well. One would hope you’d see some efficiencies from the re-emergence of actual prices in the service trade operating below the deductibles.
Richard Illyes: Elizabeth April claims that the Galactic Brotherhood is watching over us https://elizabethapril.com/meet-the-gfl/
(Sigh)
The Galactic Brotherhood (GB) has some
” ‘splanin to do”
after the profound evil, death, destruction, and slaughter of the innocent in the 20th century.
Not sure what “watching over us” means to the GB.
om – Things could have been even worse if the Galactic Brotherhood had not protected us from the Reptilian Shape Shifters.
“ Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit”
Capitalism is not a designed system. It’s just a reflection of human nature. You have something that another values, and that person has something that you value. So you two trade on agreeable terms. Viola! Capitalism!
@ rbj1 – What you describe is Free Markets (assuming some local warlord isn’t putting a finger on the scales).
Capitalism is (at its root) the use of “excess funds” (whatever amount the owners feel is not needed for either personal or business operations) by some people to loan to other people to do “business & market things,” who then pay back the loan with interest from their profits, if there are any, because if they didn’t the funds’ owners would just have spent the money on their own desires.
Excess of any commodity (including cash) above what is needed for subsistence living is the foundation of civilization.*
But Socialists complain that Capitalists are “profiting on the labor of others,” who wouldn’t be laboring at anything without the borrowed funds that are financing their operation.
Hence the denouncing of “Decadent Capitalists who don’t produce anything” — totally overlooking the fact that at some time some person produced those Excess Funds by operating some productive Free Market business.
*Also of warlords (who become kings eventually), oligarchies, autocracies, and even socialism: the Socialists have to have some kind of commodities or funds to distribute, but they typically define “excess” as “having more than we think you should” and they go about forcibly extracting money and property from the truly wealthy to the middle-class (kulaks) very quickly.
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capitalism /k?p??-tl-?z??m/
noun
1. An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
2. An economic system based on predominantly private (individual or corporate) investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods and wealth; contrasted with socialism or especially communism, in which the state has the predominant role in the economy. [AF: and usually makes lousy decisions about all of the above activities.]
Similar: capitalist economy
3. A socio-economic system based on private property rights, including the private ownership of resources or capital, with economic decisions made largely through the operation of a market unregulated by the state.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
AesopFan, much of what you describe fits well with a stable value monetary system.
But in our fiat money system, we need to also consider the role of the banks creating money out of thin air for the loans they judge as supporting potential successful borrowers.
Presumably actual savings and investments by savers also contributes to the fractional reserve system behind this “vapor money”.
At the moment I am not entirely sure that the Fed’s asset reserve requirements impose any real restrictions on the amounts that banks’ might choose to lend, beyond their own sense of the merits of an individual borrower’s ideas and prospects for success in a given business environment. Some banks seem to end up being over leveraged and failing, while most of the rest are more circumspect in their growth ambitions.
Way back in the 20th when I was an ignorant college student, I got in an argument with the Socialist Workers Party dipshits. After listening to their stupidity, I told them they would drive Boeing out of state. Their response “what are they going to do? Take the buildings?” Idiots think because it is an airplane factory, it makes airplanes. Magically. Cargo cultists really.
@ Chases Eagles > “Cargo cultists really.”
I think you are onto something here.
Same thinking as “if we make a law it will happen (magically)” and “if we break a law nothing bad will happen (to us) because it was a bad law” and “raising taxes doesn’t change people’s behavior” and so on ad infinitum.
No second-order thinking, and very little first-order thinking.
And a LOT of “taking the buildings” does in fact happen, although at one remove: you shut the old one, and build a new one, moving only the equipment (and personnel) that you need to. This is how off-shoring worked, after all.