It’s Still DSA!
Bernie Sanders’ 2019 rally in New York City (courtesy of Yana Paskova, Reuters)
DSA has been the most exciting experiment in the U.S. Left in living memory. DSA exploded in size a decade ago, found a plateau, and has had stunning victories, embarrassing own-goals, and a constant battle over what the organization represents. DSA has won more power than any other socialist organization in a century because it became, finally, the place where the average person who agrees with the common sense of policies like Medicare for All could find a political home alongside left-wing political veterans who have been holding the line as union organizers, community mobilizers, and political activists.
These people often don’t see the value of joining a socialist group because of the often sorry state of political infighting, bloviating, and backstabbing in these organizations, and their aversion to wasting time on book clubs and endless meetings when there are real fights with real stakes that the Left often sits out of, due to either incompetence or indifference. If you are one of these, who might have either walked away from DSA or never given it a chance, I’m writing this to make a direct appeal:
Now is the time to join DSA (or, for many of you, rejoin DSA); bolster the forces within the organization who are trying to push us toward mass politics by joining Socialist Majority; and stake out your political home and the political weapon that we need now to fight back against fascism on the march. It's still the best answer we have. It’s still DSA.
In the last few years in DSA circles, I’ve seen a startling trend. As internal factions have begun to solidify and cohere, they have also begun to recreate the relations and orientations of the pre-2015 Left, and sometimes openly profess nostalgia for that period.
To be totally clear here: there was nothing good about being a U.S. leftist before 2015. It was a fucking nightmare, actually! It was a dreadful and hopeless period when the U.S. Left had no penetration into American political life. Leftists were defined by their totally inscrutable internal political conflicts and a self-destructive focus on political purity over power-building. The U.S. Left had all of the maladies of any small and insular subculture: enormous infighting over slight differences, big personalities that sought to be micro-celebrities and kings of their molehills, and almost no appeal to anyone who wasn’t already part of the club.
The main sites of leftist congregations in the U.S. were brutally toxic online discussion forums and Facebook groups, but anyone who went to a convening of the U.S. Social Forum or the Left Forum, or a protest of the Democratic or Republican conventions, saw this playing out. Each small faction had its own bitterly defended line and corresponding newspaper. The “organizing” focus of these groups was usually directed exclusively at each other, laboring in a cyclical pattern to establish their group as the U.S. leftist organization, ready to gobble up the others, if only they could arrive at the correct line with the correct enthusiasm.
“Despite what anybody tells you, the current iteration of the U.S. Left started on April 30, 2015, when Bernie Sanders announced his bid for the presidency.”
Periodically an organizing breakthrough or movement moment would occur—the Republic Windows and Doors occupation, the 2011 Wisconsin protests against public-sector union-busting, Occupy Wall Street, the 2013 Black Lives Matter uprising, etc.—and in each, left organizations would flood into the breach to participate in an “organic” moment that we did not create, only to see the enthusiasm for left politics subside as the moment passed. In the realm of electoral politics, the general feeling of the time was that the Left could not run and win a campaign as open socialists—and that we could choose to either reject bourgeois elections entirely, or search desperately for evidence that an otherwise uninspiring Democrat might have some secret leftist leanings (Obama was friends with Bill Ayers!). The strategy broadly, when doing outward-facing work (which was itself a rare event), was that we should say all the socialist things but rarely call ourselves socialist because our politics was irretrievably maligned in the US.
Despite what anybody tells you, the current iteration of the U.S. Left started on April 30, 2015, when Bernie Sanders announced his bid for the presidency to a small group of cameras and onlookers in front of the Capitol in DC. We are just past the ten year anniversary of this event, and veteran socialist organizers who were around the Left pre-2015 know full well the seismic shift that has occurred. I was already at that time a seasoned organizer who had been part of a handful of socialist organizations across the spectrum, but like many others, I had become disenchanted with the U.S. Left. As a good socialist, I knew that my politics could only really be achieved by building an organization, but the U.S. Left was a small and insular community that had almost no real power anywhere in the country.
The first Sanders presidential campaign opened up a whole new orientation toward leftist politics and a whole new way forward—one of those solutions that is completely simple and obvious only after you hear it. Bernie demonstrated that leftists in the US could contest and win elections as open socialists who argue unapologetically for realistic and achievable demands that benefit the 99%. We could call ourselves socialists, we could make demands in plain language on issues that are widely and deeply felt, and we could engage in formal politics: asking for what we actually want. Beyond this, we could also build our own institutions, knowledge base, and lists that would allow us to compete in the US political system without consultants or the blessings of democratic political machines—and, in fact, in spite of them!.
For me and tens of thousands of others, this answer led us to DSA. I joined up at the 2015 NYC-DSA holiday party, a fun mixer with a few dozen people. I would bartend the 2016 holiday party the next year, a rager in Brooklyn with more than 500 people cramming into a smoky loft and drinking away Trump’s victory. DSA had an exuberance to it from 2015 to 2018. There was finally an organization that felt fresh and promising and not like another reconfiguration or rehash of the last 100 years of leftist ideas. “What, you mean there is a leftist group that doesn’t only talk like that?” “You mean I won’t be lectured about Lenin and Trotsky?” “There’s an actual campaign I can join, and we might actually win?!”
Early new DSA was a place with seemingly infinite growth and equally huge aspirations. We ran big campaigns for local and state office, we built the organization and chartered new chapters at breakneck speed, we broke into the mass media and sent members to Congress. It seemed like we could assume an ambient state of growth exponentially through Bernie’s second run in 2020. Internal friction and caucus warring were features of this era of DSA, but much of the internal battle lines had not yet cohered, and members could still participate meaningfully if they were blissfully un-caucused.
“The individualism and liberalism baked into American social life have a strong gravitational pull toward these doomed forms for the Left.”
The 2020-2024 era saw some evolution and setbacks for the organization. The collapse of Bernie 2020, the global pandemic, along with its depressive force on all social organizing, and four years of Biden, along with his wars, were a blow to the organization. During these years, some brutal hopelessness set in, and many effective and experienced organizers moved on from DSA into more immediately organized and directly impactful activities like union organizing, tenant organizing, or local electoral campaigns.
DSA’s brain drain has been deeply felt. The main characteristic of our membership trend through this period has been absurdly high turnover. People who left didn’t feel like DSA was their political home. People who left didn’t feel like they could effectively be a part of a project for political change through DSA. People who remained have been drawn more and more toward replicating shopworn leftist organizing forms that brought us to utter failure and obscurity before the current era.
We’ve seen a noxious internal culture of distrust and backbiting develop—don’t post anything in a group chat that you don’t want to see screencapped on Twitter! We’ve seen the proliferation of time-suck meetings, rapid-fire group chats, and online message boards. And we’ve seen retrenchment of our electoral project in many places, with notable exceptions like NYC-DSA, where we’ve kept the dream of 2016 alive. More and more, the internal life of DSA just looks like political life on the broad U.S. Left pre-2015 within one organization. The individualism and liberalism baked into American social life have a strong gravitational pull toward these doomed forms for the Left.
DSA is still worth it!
Trump 2.0 is quickly blowing through all of our worst fears. Domestically, we are in the midst of the complete fascist overhaul of our society. Internationally, fascists are winning power, while the post-WWII “rules-based order” is being demolished in the service of supporting Israel’s genocide at all costs. Corporate power has run out of things to ask for and now seems to have shifted its focus to strip-mining any remaining public institutions. I can’t be the only one who can see a clear and horrifying line leading from the current political moment to the mass arrest and disappearing of domestic dissidents to torture prisons in El Salvador.
At this moment, DSA is still our best vehicle to fight back. We can’t let the U.S. Left fall back into sectarianism, individualism, and obscurity. We can still overhaul and build on our project to make democratic socialism a dominant force in American political life. Now’s the time to make some moves if the following applies to you:
Do you think we need more people like AOC, Bernie, Jamaal Bowman, and Rashida Tlaib in public office, and that the focus of leftists shouldn’t be sitting on the sidelines and attacking the best progressive voices in formal power, even if we admit that they can and do disappoint?
Do you think that a serious democratic socialist electoral project in your city could win if we could get a disciplined and serious group together to run such a campaign, as DSA chapters have successfully done across the country?
Do you want an organization that will take a strong stand resisting fascism, rather than failing to meet the moment due to fear that an anti-Trump coalition would contaminate our political line?
Are you a veteran organizer who has kept DSA and other leftist organizations at arms-length because of their tendency to be unserious, messy, and ineffective at engaging directly in important and effective political work?
Are you a Bernie supporter who flirted with DSA membership but drifted away?
Do you want to see an organization that is trying something new and pushing forward the most effective leftist political party-building project in living memory, rather than another leftist formation endlessly condemning bourgeois elections while offering no viable alternative?
If this is you, here are my asks:
Join (or rejoin) DSA. It’s the best political vehicle we have and our best hope for a political revolution. Socialists build organizations. If you aren’t a part of one and attempting to build one, you are foreclosing on hope for socialist change in the US.
Join Socialist Majority Caucus. Our caucus has remained steadfastly adherent to a vision of a big, coherent, disciplined DSA that values political and organizing expertise and seeks to engage in mass politics as open socialists who come to win. We count among our members talented and seasoned organizers, people who have led and won real campaigns for real power. We are veterans of the socialist movement, and we are proven political king killers who have battled with capitalist political machines and won. You can apply to join Socialist Majority here.
Run to be a 2025 national convention delegate. Our caucus will send members to this year's national convention to pull DSA toward a mass politics orientation and away from doctrinaire and sectarian tendencies. We need you. Many National Convention delegate seats are uncontested. You can run and you can win; and if you make it to the 2025 convention, you’ll have a team ready to plug into.
No one should be utterly committed to a single strategy, political form, or organization. We should all constantly be assessing, reassessing, evolving, taking what works, and leaving things behind. There might come a time when the political instrument that we need for the moment is no longer DSA, but for now, in order to continue making progress and avoid sliding backwards, we still have the best answer to building the Left in the U.S. that we have had in decades. It’s still DSA!