At a New Orleans Hilton along the banks of the Mississippi River this month, rice farmers met to discuss agricultural futures. High school football players roamed the lobby.
On the third floor, the topics turned toward leftist political theory, with people debating ways to tax the rich and holding sessions with names like Socialists and “the Establishment” and Transitioning to Governing Power: Learning From Latin America.
This was a convention for the Democratic Socialists of America, a left-wing political group that is savoring a year of victories, such as Zohran Mamdani’s for mayor of New York City, and plotting its way to more.
For much of its 43-year history, the D.S.A.’s role in American politics was obscure, at best. But since Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for the White House in 2016, the group says, it has grown to more than 90,000 members. The D.S.A. also says it now has 250 Democratic Socialists in elected office across 40 states, a vast majority elected since 2018. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of New York City’s D.S.A. chapter. Mr. Sanders is a democratic socialist — lowercase d and s — but not a D.S.A. member. Many D.S.A. elected officials, like Mr. Mamdani, are members of the Democratic Party.
Compared with the country’s two major political parties, the D.S.A. remains tiny. But as income inequality soars, the group is attracting intense interest, and Mr. Mamdani’s victory in New York showed that for a candidate to be a Democratic Socialist is no longer disqualifying for many voters.
The D.S.A.’s vision for America is a multiracial democracy with an economy that benefits working-class and middle-income people. Members’ views are varied, but fundamentally they believe that American capitalism has been captured by corporate interests. They argue that markets should be strongly regulated or even controlled by democratic governments. Though the modern group was formed in 1982, the organization has roots in the United States dating to the late 19th century and the early socialist leader Eugene Debs.
Some of its policies, even if pursued, may not work. And many in the country’s establishment disagree with its views or consider it zealous. But the D.S.A.’s influence is growing anyway. For some Americans tired of living paycheck to paycheck and determined to stop the rise of the antidemocratic right, that radicalism is exactly the group’s appeal.
Now that Democratic Socialists are getting elected to office and winning power, the pressure is on. In New York City, Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty will be seen as a test of whether socialists can govern. The D.S.A. is fiercely nonhierarchical, with a labyrinthine structure that tends to lend itself to infighting. But the conference in New Orleans by the group’s advocacy arm, the D.S.A. Fund, was highly organized. There were workshops on zoning reform, seminars on the dangers of Big Tech and sessions on the transition from activism to governing.
Much of the D.S.A.’s political activity is focused on raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans — a fight underway in states such as Colorado, Michigan and New York. Delegations from each state shared various strategies. Kate Logan, a Vermont state representative, said she was supporting a proposed property tax increase on people who own second homes. Jessica Newman from Michigan said D.S.A. members there were campaigning for a tax on single filers with annual incomes of more than $500,000 and married joint filers with incomes of more than $1 million to fund public schools. Francesca Hong, a Wisconsin state representative and candidate for governor, said the political environment in the state remained difficult. “A lot of folks still get squeamish around the word ‘socialism,’” she said.
Many eyes were on Grace Mausser, a chair of New York City’s D.S.A., the group’s largest chapter, fresh off the most stunning political upset in the country. Around the table, heads nodded as she said she had come to feel strongly that campaigns to increase taxes on the rich needed to be paired with specific new or existing programs the revenue is intended for. (In New York, Mr. Mamdani has proposed increasing taxes on residents earning over $1 million a year and large corporations to pay for a free child care initiative.) “You guys may have heard of Zohran,” Ms. Mausser told the group. “We’ve had a shift in power. We’re adjusting to it.”
In New Orleans, I met a racially diverse array of Democratic Socialists of many backgrounds. There was a silver-haired councilor from Portland, Maine, fighting for city-owned mixed-income housing and an alderman from Chicago who has braved tear gas to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city. Liz Everhart from Kentucky told me she joined the D.S.A. when she became a mother during the first Trump administration, in 2020. Her young family struggled to pay the bills, and she worried about the kind of world her daughter would grow up in. “A better world needed to come into existence,” she said. Robert Hughes from Indianapolis said he became a Democratic Socialist after experiencing homelessness.
Even in the most diverse group of socialists, incrementalists can be hard to find. Eric McGuire, a social studies teacher from Oregon, sported a tattoo of the radical abolitionist John Brown on his arm. Robert Bell, a middle school English teacher in Louisville, Ky., running for the State House, told me socialism seemed like the pragmatic choice. “In my heart, I’m still an anarchist,” he said with a smile.
As their potential for influence in American politics grows with Mr. Mamdani’s rise, scrutiny of some of the group’s more radical positions, tactics and language is likely to intensify. In one example, though D.S.A. members hold a wide spectrum of views, the group’s policy platform includes positions like working toward the abolition of the police and prisons. In New Orleans the Democratic Socialists sometimes called one another comrade, evoking the language of Communism even though the group is not Communist and is wholly committed to democracy. (“‘Comrade’ is just a politicized term of endearment,” Gabe Tobias, the executive director of the D.S.A. Fund, told me in an email later.)
In one small sign that the group is thinking about how to appeal to a broader audience, the D.S.A. Fund has retained Lauren Hitt, a Democratic strategist who once worked as a spokeswoman for Kamala Harris and, before that, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Ms. Hitt held a workshop for D.S.A. elected officials in New Orleans, using a recent television interview with Mr. Mamdani as an example of effective press strategy. “He drove hard the entire time on affordability,” Ms. Hitt told the group, after playing the video clip. “Thank you, Zohran, for giving that to us.”
As the door to wider influence in American politics swings open, debates are unfolding within the D.S.A. and its allies about how to work with power and when to challenge it. Mr. Sanders addressed D.S.A. members at the conference by speakerphone to offer some friendly advice. “Knock on every door in your district,” he told them, saying there is “a lot more commonality of interests than you might have appreciated.”
There are also tensions within the group about how to govern. Some attendees at the conference told me they were disappointed by Mr. Mamdani’s decision to apologize to New York City’s police officers after calling them racist and anti-queer in 2020. Last year the D.S.A.’s National Political Committee declined to endorse Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, among the highest-profile Democratic Socialists, over her refusal to oppose funding for Israel’s Iron Dome and actions the D.S.A. described as a “betrayal” of the cause of Palestinian freedom.
The Democratic Socialists often address these divisions openly. At the Hilton in December, Mr. Tobias moderated a debate about socialists and the establishment.
He asked people arguing for a friendlier relationship with the establishment to sit on one side of the room and those arguing for a more antagonistic relationship with the establishment on the other. Then he placed four chairs in the center of the room, where members debated the issue. Though only four people debated at a time, anyone who wanted could join in by tapping a comrade on the shoulder to take the person’s seat.
During the debate, John Lewis — a member of the D.S.A.’s leadership, wearing a red shirt that read, “Y’allidarity” — said the D.S.A. should organize Democratic voters, not antagonize them. “Nobody in this room popped out a socialist,” Mr. Lewis, who once worked in the Democratic Party establishment, including for the mayor of Baton Rouge, La., told the room.
But he said conflict with the Democratic Party was unavoidable. “The momentum of the Democratic Party is captured by mass finance capital, people that we call the oligarchs,” he said. “Whether we’re going to realign the Democratic Party, whether we’re making a socialist party, whatever your path is, if you’re going against that momentum, it still is antagonistic.”
Outside a seminar on Saturday afternoon, two hotel employees lingered, then approached me. “What’s a Democratic Socialist?” one asked me. When Mr. Mamdani takes office Jan. 1, eyes will be on the D.S.A., too. It’s a chance for Democratic Socialists to prove they can govern and to introduce themselves to Americans looking for something new.
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