Democratic Socialists of America

Based on Wikipedia: Democratic Socialists of America

In the summer of 2016, the Democratic Socialists of America had about six thousand members. Most of them were old. The median age was sixty-eight. The organization functioned, in the words of one observer, as a "musty debate club for retired social democrats."

Five years later, membership had exploded to ninety-four thousand. The median age had plummeted to thirty-three. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in Congress. Socialist city councilors were getting elected from Chicago to Los Angeles. The term "democratic socialism" had entered mainstream American political vocabulary for the first time since Eugene Debs ran for president from a prison cell in 1920.

What happened? And what exactly is this organization that went from obscurity to political force in half a decade?

A Marriage of Two Lefts

The DSA exists because of a deliberate attempt to heal one of the deepest wounds in American progressive politics: the rift between the Old Left and the New Left.

The Old Left grew out of the labor movement and the socialist parties of the early twentieth century. These were people who organized unions, fought for the eight-hour workday, and believed in incremental reform through elections and collective bargaining. Many were social democrats who admired the Scandinavian welfare states. They wore suits. They worked with the Democratic Party establishment. They believed in working within the system.

The New Left emerged from the social movements of the 1960s—civil rights, feminism, opposition to the Vietnam War. These activists tended to be younger, more radical, and more suspicious of established institutions. They wanted to challenge not just economic inequality but also racism, sexism, and American imperialism. They were skeptical of the Old Left's cozy relationship with Democratic Party insiders and union bosses.

By the 1970s, these two camps could barely talk to each other.

In 1982, two organizations decided to try anyway. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, led by the public intellectual Michael Harrington, represented the Old Left tradition. The New American Movement, founded by veterans of the student protests of the sixties, represented the New Left. They merged in Detroit to create the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Man Who Made Poverty Visible

To understand the DSA's origins, you need to understand Michael Harrington. In 1962, he published a book called "The Other America" that fundamentally changed how the country thought about poverty.

Before Harrington, many Americans believed that postwar prosperity had solved the poverty problem. The economy was booming. Suburbs were sprouting. The middle class was expanding. Who was poor anymore?

Harrington showed them. He documented the hidden America of Appalachian coal miners with black lung disease, migrant farmworkers living in squalor, urban slums that middle-class commuters never saw from their highways. He estimated that between forty and fifty million Americans—a quarter of the population—lived in poverty, invisible to the comfortable majority.

The book caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy and helped inspire what Lyndon Johnson would later call the War on Poverty. Harrington became perhaps the most influential socialist in America, a paradox in a country where socialism had long been a dirty word.

He founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973 after breaking with the Socialist Party over the Vietnam War. His strategy was what he called "realignment"—the idea that socialists should work within the Democratic Party to push it leftward, eventually driving out its conservative Southern wing and transforming it into something like the social democratic parties of Western Europe.

Harrington wanted to be, as he put it, the "left wing of the possible." Not a revolutionary demanding the impossible, but a pragmatist pushing the boundaries of what American politics could achieve.

The New Left's Other Path

The New American Movement had a different origin story. It grew out of Students for a Democratic Society, the main campus organization of the 1960s protest movements. By the early seventies, SDS had imploded spectacularly, torn apart by factions that ranged from Maoist revolutionaries to the Weather Underground, which embraced political violence.

NAM's founders wanted to salvage what had been good about the early SDS—its idealism, its commitment to participatory democracy, its humanistic vision—while rejecting the authoritarian tendencies that had destroyed it. They built a socialist-feminist organization focused on grassroots organizing around local issues: affordable housing, utility rates, reproductive rights.

One unexpected recruit was Dorothy Healey, who had been a leader of the Communist Party of the United States for decades. She broke with the party after it supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, unable to stomach the authoritarian turn. Her arrival brought organizational experience and a connection to the broader history of American radicalism.

By the early 1980s, both organizations saw what they lacked. The Old Left had connections—to unions, to Democratic politicians, to the mainstream press—but few young activists. The New Left had energy and idealism but lacked institutional power. The merger was a bet that together they could build something neither could achieve alone.

The Wilderness Years

For its first three decades, that bet didn't pay off.

The DSA struggled against historical headwinds. Ronald Reagan crushed the labor movement, with union membership plummeting from a third of private-sector workers to barely ten percent. The Cold War's end in 1989 seemed to discredit socialism entirely. Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party rightward, embracing free trade, welfare reform, and tough-on-crime policies that the DSA opposed.

When Michael Harrington died in 1989, the organization lost not just its most prominent voice but its strategic vision. His final book, "Socialism: Past and Future," was written as he was dying of cancer, a letter to future generations urging them to adapt socialist values to a globalized, post-industrial world.

Through the 1990s, DSA chapters often functioned as little more than reading groups for, as one member described them, "scattered, stubborn types holding out against the 1990s." Membership hovered around six or seven thousand, sometimes less. The youth wing, the Young Democratic Socialists, kept the organization on life support.

But the DSA never stopped fighting. It opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when Bill Clinton championed it. It opposed the 1994 crime bill that helped fuel mass incarceration. It opposed welfare reform. It made single-payer healthcare a priority long before it became mainstream progressive policy, sponsoring tours by Canadian health advocates to explain how their system worked.

These were lonely battles. But they laid groundwork for what came later.

The Bernie Effect

In 2015, Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president.

Sanders had been in Congress since 1991, first as the House member from Vermont, then as a senator. He was a democratic socialist who had never joined the Democratic Party, caucusing with Democrats while maintaining his independence. He was seventy-four years old, rumpled, and irascible. He had no money, no organization, and no chance.

He almost won anyway.

The DSA had been encouraging Sanders to run for years. They endorsed him in December 2014, becoming one of the only major progressive organizations to back him before his campaign began. Their members became some of his most dedicated volunteers.

Sanders lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, but something had shifted. Millions of Americans, especially young ones, had voted for an avowed socialist. The word itself had lost some of its Cold War stigma. When Donald Trump won the general election in November 2016, something broke loose.

The day after Trump's election, a thousand new members joined the DSA.

By the summer of 2017, membership had quadrupled to twenty-four thousand. By 2018, it had doubled again to fifty-five thousand. The median age dropped from sixty-eight to thirty-three. Chapters that had been moribund suddenly had hundreds of active members.

What Democratic Socialists Actually Believe

It's worth pausing to explain what "democratic socialism" actually means, because the term confuses people.

Democratic socialists believe that the economy should be democratically controlled by the people who work in it and the communities it affects, rather than by private owners pursuing profit. This distinguishes them from both capitalists, who believe private ownership is efficient and just, and from authoritarian socialists like the Soviets, who believed in state ownership controlled by a vanguard party.

Think of it this way: In a capitalist firm, owners make the decisions and workers follow orders. In a democratic socialist vision, workers would have meaningful say over what their company does, how profits are distributed, and what conditions they work under. This could take many forms—worker cooperatives, public ownership of key industries, strong unions with real bargaining power, or some combination.

The "democratic" part is crucial. Democratic socialists reject the idea that a revolutionary elite should seize power and impose socialism from above, as happened in Russia and China. They believe socialism must be built through democratic participation, persuasion, and elections.

This creates obvious tensions. If you're committed to democracy, what do you do when the majority doesn't want socialism? Do you compromise your goals or keep fighting for them? This question runs through the DSA's entire history.

The DSA's Policy Agenda

In practical terms, the DSA today advocates for policies that would be mainstream in most European democracies but remain controversial in America:

• Medicare for All, a single-payer healthcare system that would replace private insurance with universal government coverage
• A Green New Deal, a massive public investment program to address climate change while creating good jobs
• Free public college and trade school education
• Strong labor rights, including making it easier to form unions
• Significant cuts to military spending and a non-interventionist foreign policy

The organization has also taken strong positions on international issues, particularly in support of Palestinian rights. In 2017, the national convention voted to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, a position that had been controversial within the organization just a few years earlier. The DSA describes itself as anti-Zionist—opposing the ideology that there should be a Jewish state in historic Palestine—though individual members hold a range of views.

Building Electoral Power

What distinguishes the post-2016 DSA from its predecessors is its approach to electoral politics.

The old DSA, following Michael Harrington's realignment strategy, worked within the Democratic Party establishment, supporting progressive candidates and trying to push the party leftward from inside. The new DSA has a different approach, sometimes called the "dirty break."

The idea is this: Use the Democratic Party's ballot line and primary elections to run openly socialist candidates, but build an independent organization that isn't beholden to the party establishment. These candidates answer to DSA and its membership, not to Democratic Party leadership. Eventually, the theory goes, this could lead to a genuine independent party of the left.

This strategy produced its first breakthrough in June 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York's 14th Congressional District. Crowley had been in Congress for twenty years. He was the fourth-ranking House Democrat, widely seen as a future Speaker. Ocasio-Cortez was a twenty-eight-year-old bartender and community organizer.

Her upset victory made national news. She became instantly famous. DSA membership surged again.

That same year, Rashida Tlaib won a primary for a congressional seat in Detroit. Both won their general elections in November, becoming the first DSA members in Congress since the organization's founding.

Since then, the electoral wins have multiplied. Six socialists were elected to the Chicago City Council in 2019. Five won seats in the New York State Legislature in 2020. As of 2025, over 250 DSA members hold elected office across the country—city councilors, state legislators, school board members, mayors. Ninety percent of them were elected after 2019.

Not a Political Party

It's important to understand what the DSA is not: it is not a political party.

The DSA endorses candidates but does not run them on its own ballot line. Endorsed candidates typically run as Democrats, though some run with the Working Families Party, the Green Party, or as independents. The organization works through the primary system, trying to elect socialists who will then appear on the general election ballot as Democrats.

This creates complications. DSA-endorsed candidates often face the Democratic establishment in primaries but must work with that establishment if they win. They vote with Democrats on most issues while pushing a more radical agenda. Some critics see this as principled infiltration; others see it as co-optation waiting to happen.

The organization itself has a decentralized structure. Local chapters operate with significant autonomy, as do ideological caucuses within the national organization. This makes the DSA more of a coalition than a disciplined party—a big tent that contains social democrats who want a Scandinavian-style welfare state, revolutionary socialists who want to abolish capitalism entirely, and everyone in between.

The Peak and After

DSA membership peaked at around ninety-four thousand in 2021. Since then, it has declined somewhat, though the organization remains by far the largest socialist group in the country and larger than at any point in its pre-2016 history.

The decline reflects several factors. The immediate energy of the anti-Trump resistance faded after Biden's election. Bernie Sanders lost his second presidential campaign and seems unlikely to run again. Some members became disillusioned with the slow pace of change or disagreed with the organization's direction on particular issues.

Internal debates continue about strategy. Some members want to focus entirely on electoral politics and winning power within the Democratic Party. Others want to return to labor organizing and community activism. Still others want to build toward a complete break with the Democrats and the creation of an independent socialist party.

The Famous Faces

The DSA has always attracted prominent intellectuals and activists. In its early years, the organization's intellectual wing included the philosopher Richard Rorty, the political theorist Michael Walzer, the sociologist Frances Fox Piven, and the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young. Cornel West, the public intellectual and philosopher, became an honorary chair and developed his distinctive blend of Christianity and radicalism partly in dialogue with DSA traditions. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of "Nickel and Dimed," served as co-chair alongside Harrington.

Today, the famous faces are different: Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib in Congress, Julia Salazar in the New York State Senate, and in 2025, Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York City—the most prominent DSA member ever to hold executive office.

These elected officials maintain varying relationships with the organization. Some, like Mamdani, remain closely aligned with DSA's positions. Others have drifted or broken with the organization over specific issues. This is inevitable in a big-tent organization with a decentralized structure—and it raises questions about what it means to be a DSA politician.

What They're Up Against

The DSA faces opposition from multiple directions.

The Democratic Party establishment often views DSA-backed candidates as threats, primarying incumbents and pushing positions that might hurt the party in general elections. The 2021 Nevada situation illustrated this tension: DSA members won control of the state party's leadership, but staff resigned in protest, and a moderate slate took back control in 2023.

Republicans portray DSA members as dangerous radicals, using the socialist label as an attack line. Some Democratic politicians agree, fearing that association with socialism will cost them votes in competitive districts.

And there are critiques from the left as well. Some radicals think the DSA is too focused on electoral politics and too willing to work within capitalist institutions. Others criticize specific positions, whether on foreign policy, labor strategy, or social issues.

The Road Ahead

The DSA's future is uncertain in the way that all political futures are uncertain. The organization has built real infrastructure: chapters in cities across the country, a pool of experienced organizers, relationships with labor unions, and a track record of winning elections. It has normalized democratic socialist ideas that seemed fringe a decade ago. Medicare for All, once considered radical, polls favorably with the public. The Green New Deal has become a recognized policy framework.

Whether the DSA can translate this into lasting political power remains to be seen. The organization is trying something that has never quite worked in America: building a socialist politics within a two-party system designed to resist third forces.

Maybe the "dirty break" strategy will eventually produce a genuine labor party. Maybe DSA members will be absorbed into the Democratic mainstream, as happened to so many reform movements before them. Maybe something else entirely will happen.

What's clear is that for the first time in decades, American socialism is a living political force rather than a historical curiosity. The debate about what kind of economic system we should have—who should own and control the means of production, in the old Marxist formulation—is back on the table.

The Democratic Socialists of America didn't create that debate by themselves. But they've done more than any other organization to bring it into the mainstream of American politics. Michael Harrington, who spent his life trying to push the "left wing of the possible" as far as it could go, might have been surprised to see how far that turned out to be.