[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.