Hue and cry over the DSA

To U.S. political pundits, a specter is haunting the Democratic Party. That is, of course, the specter of “socialism” as embodied in Democratic primary victories for progressives, some of them affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The balance sheet for the “socialist” wave won’t be known until November. But there is a good chance that DSA members could add Los Angeles and Washington, DC to New York on the roster of U.S. cities with “democratic socialist” mayors. Democratic primary victories in New York, Philadelphia and Denver could add three to four more DSA members to Congress. And DSA-adjacent progressives like Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed could boost liberal Democrats in the next U.S. Congress.

At the time of writing, Florida state representative Angie Nixon defeated “resistance” celebrity, former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, to become the Democratic nominee for U.S. senate from Florida. Nixon reported joining the DSA a few weeks before the election. She won despite being outspent 16-1.

All of this has caused Democratic establishment figures and long-time DC players like the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) to sound the alarm. Dinosaurs like Bill Clinton adviser James Carville have threatened to leave the party if it doesn’t do something to stop the progressive tide. A “centrist” Democratic PAC, composed primarily of investment bankers, has announced its intention to spend millions to conduct what amounts to a McCarthyite smear campaign against the DSA and the candidates it supports.

Everyone on the left should oppose these right-wing efforts to smear the DSA, just as we should oppose government snooping and criminalization of the left, labor unions and liberal non-governmental organizations.

But the disdain that highly engaged Democratic “base” voters are showing towards the party leaders isn’t ideological, apart from a shift among Democratic voters against automatic support for Israel. What’s really driving the support for progressives is the same thing that is driving support for candidates who (rhetorically at least) say they want to “fight” Trump. That’s the assessment among a significant section of Democratic voters that their “leaders” aren’t up to the task of opposing Trump’s destruction of everything they support.

And the fact that so many of those leaders have been in Congress for decades opens the door for younger politicians making the running on a “generational transition” appeal. This is also a non-ideological way of running for “change” in the Democratic Party. In fact, billionaire Democrat donor Stephen Mandel is devoting his resources to promote a new generation of “moderates” and “centrists” against the progressives.

Whether the progressives and “fighters” have a strategy to defeat Trumpism is a topic for another article. In the current anti-incumbent climate with Trump’s unpopularity trending towards Nixon’s and Carter’s, aspiring Democratic politicians have a low bar to clear to win support. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, a moderate who voted for the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act, has excited liberals with his well-curated trolling of Trump despite his conventional policy stances.

The main Democratic watchword during this election season has been “affordability.” That’s hardly a brilliant stroke given that inflation is eroding peoples’ living standards and pollsters show that the cost of living is the chief voter concern. But it wasn’t until Zohran Mamdani—campaigning on making New York affordable again—won the 2025 mayor’s race that the Democratic political class took note.

That fact should be a tell on just how threatening to the Democrats the socialist wave is. As Jacobin and Nation publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, responding to anti-left pundit Jonathan Chait, explained: “. . . we lead with affordability, with rent and health care and the demands that look most winnable. Of course we do. If you cannot assemble enough political power to bring down rents or win universal health care, you are certainly not going to socialize the economy.”

In reality, what the democratic socialists are promoting isn’t “socialism” understood as workers control of society. It’s barely even social democracy as practiced in Scandinavia for a century. It’s much more akin to the reformed capitalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society.

Michael Greenberg, writing in the New York Review of Books, criticized the short-sightedness of Democratic leaders who want to stiff-arm the DSA candidates:

They would do better to welcome socialists into the party and to adopt some of their ideas, which are no more radical than Social Security was during the New Deal. Our two major parties have moved so far to the right since 1980 that common-sense proposals to rebalance the economy are met with terror, as if they will turn the US into a twenty-first-century version of the Soviet Union. But Democrats currently have no path to becoming the majority party without making room for an outspoken and unambiguous left flank.

Amidst all the heated rhetoric, an overall perspective must be kept in mind. Despite high profile wins by DSA-backed candidates, the Democrats are not about to fall to the socialists. Most Democrats being selected in the primaries are mainstream liberals, even “establishment” Democrats.

At best, the democratic socialists and other progressives can form a caucus in an expected Democratic majority in the U.S. House. Given that Trump will still be in the White House, it’s possible that they might advance, say, a bill to support a “Medicare for All” universal health care system, or a bill curtailing Trump’s immigration thugs. Knowing that Trump would veto it would be a “free vote” on a political messaging bill.

But progressives, including such well-known supporters as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have proven themselves to cave to pressure: to abandon their positions for the sake of “party unity,” especially when there is a Democratic administration. That was a recurring theme under the Biden administration. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent comments have distanced herself from early 2020s “woke” politics is a portent of surrenders to come—including the widespread demands to “defund the police” during the mass protests after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.

It’s tempting to explain away Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on “woke” as personal political positioning for higher office. It may be that. But it is also part of a growing trend. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repudiated his onetime support for defunding the police, statin, ““Sometimes what you can believe in can change. I know there are, for some, for whom they still have a belief in that. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with police departments, along with many other partners.”

Social democratic commentators invested in Democratic Party electoral politics see AOC’s and Mamdani’s moves as a savvy, even necessary, shift to reach a mass audience. See the examples from Eric Blanc (here) and Paul Heideman (here).

Heideman has even taken these positions a step further. Not only does he, like Mamdani, eschew the slogan “defund the police,” he justifies spending on prisons and cops as support for lower income people, as revolutionary socialist Keith Rosenthal points out:

Heideman states that socialists ought to support more funding for police and prisons as a reformist measure. The logic is sound on the reformist grounds of someone who is fully wedded to the perpetuity of the capitalist system…

We need more police, he argues, because the presence of more police stops crime. This is the logic of the overseer, who is thinking about how to manage the slave system. (This, incidentally, is also why the “democratic-socialist” experiment in running capitalist metropolises, e.g., Mamdani’s NYC, is so corrosive, and trains “socialists” — especially the more sycophantic ones like Heideman — into thinking less about how to end oppression than simply how to manage, or administer, it).

It’s important to keep this in mind as progressives and “democratic socialists” celebrate their victories in Democratic primaries, and the Democratic establishment plots to stymie them. The Democratic Party electoral road isn’t leading to “socialism.” It’s leading socialists away from it.