The general idea that Democratic Party loyalists seem to have about members of the Democratic Socialists of America is that they’re a lot like Democrats, but perhaps a bit more passionate. Voters in New York City are “not afraid of the term democratic socialism,” Joy Behar recently said on The View, to applause. “Social Security is democratic socialism. Partly, unemployment insurance is. The people who pick up your garbage, the people who take the fire out at your house—all of these things are democratic socialism.”
It’s true that the DSA has areas of ideological overlap with the Democratic Party, and would at least directionally support classic Democratic policies such as a higher minimum wage, defending social spending, and opposing the Trump administration. But the DSA’s version of democratic socialism goes far beyond routine public functions such as garbage collection and Social Security (which most Republicans, not to mention Democrats, support), or even aspirational policies such as Medicare for All.
The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a state House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.
The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.
These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone “woke” era. They are a byproduct of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.
A tragic irony of history is that the Democratic Socialists of America was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.
The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.
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A decade ago, the excitement generated by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign on the left and the frightening rise of Donald Trump spurred an influx of tens of thousands of young members. Some of the new recruits were Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw the DSA’s growing membership as fertile ground.
Sectarian conflict broke out among rival factions vying to steer the group’s suddenly growing membership. In 2018, some of the DSA’s older activists formed the North Star caucus, an internal group to defend Harrington’s antiauthoritarian principles from its newer authoritarian-minded entrants. “Principles of liberty and equality are indispensable to the self-government of a free people,” the new caucus proclaimed. “Denial of them renders a government a tyranny. While authoritarians on the Left dismiss this foundation of democracy as bourgeois, we defend it.” The North Star socialists grasped that the organization was in danger of surrendering its commitment to democratic principles. In 2021, eight founding DSA members similarly warned that far-left factions were attempting to gain control of the group.
The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world. Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the DSA opposed the invasion but blamed it on “the expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations,” and opposed any military aid to allow Ukraine to defend itself.
The break point occurred after October 7, 2023. Many pro-Palestine student-activist groups endorsed the Hamas attacks, and the DSA’s International Committee as well as multiple local chapters followed suit. On the day after the attacks, the New York City chapter of the DSA affirmed the Palestinian “right to resist” and joined a rally to celebrate them.
The DSA’s posture toward terrorism, which ranged from equivocation to outright support, drove away many of the organization’s remaining advocates of liberal democracy. Two dozen prominent old-line members announced their resignation the next month, conceding that “today’s DSA has driven itself beyond redemption” and had become “entirely wanting in its dedication to the moral principles that are the foundation of democratic socialism.”
Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left. In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.
The DSA’s Red Star caucus was formed the year after the North Star caucus, in an apparent rebuke. It writes that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.”
These left-wing factions have realigned the organization in firm opposition to liberal democracy. In 2021, the DSA joined the São Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network—a move that would, one DSA member protested at the time, “support authoritarian governments who systematically violate the basic tenets of democratic socialism.” It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world’s most despotic regimes.
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The organization is still called democratic socialists, of course, but the term does not necessarily mean “liberal democracy” as Americans have traditionally defined it. Many socialist thinkers define what they call “true democracy” as a system in which capitalism has been overturned and the proletarian classes have seized political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves “democratic.”
This is not, obviously, how the group sells itself to the broader universe of left-leaning, mostly Democratic voters it is trying to attract. During the New Deal era, Stalinist organizers pitched themselves as “liberals in a hurry.” The Progressive Party, which ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948, was secretly run by Communist Party loyalists, but it appealed to standard liberals by touting themes such as civil rights, economic justice, and an end to the Cold War.
The DSA employs a similar formula, drawing voters in by denouncing oligarchy and genocide and promising to expand health insurance. Chevalier’s campaign, like those of other DSA candidates, has focused on affordability, fighting corporate greed, and similar progressive themes. When she was asked by MS NOW if she is a communist, she replied, “I’m not. I’m a democratic socialist,” and called questions about her adherence to totalitarian ideologies “a distraction.”
Hassan Piker—who, as one of the DSA’s most influential advocates, has campaigned for several of the candidates it has endorsed—said recently at an event, “I wish they’d stop calling me a radical. None of these people,” he said, gesturing to the crowd off-screen, “are radical. They just want health care. They want to end American militarism. They want to spend money on roads, on infrastructure, on schooling, on health care, rather than bombs overseas.”
Yet Piker himself has followed the DSA’s militant line, repeatedly praising authoritarian regimes such as China’s, Cuba’s, and Russia’s, as well as terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. He has said that his closest existing model for an ideal society is China—which does not have progressive social values or an especially generous welfare state but does have a Communist ruling party.
The DSA’s long-term strategy is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the “dirty break,” a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.
Not all DSA officials agree on the dirty break. Some still cling to Harrington’s vision of pushing the Democrats leftward. Others favor an immediate split into a third party (a “clean break”). But as Peter Sterne, a onetime DSA member who now reports on New York politics, has written, “The DSA’s current strategy is a ‘dirty break’: gradually build up the necessary partylike infrastructure to eventually break away from the Democrats entirely, while still running candidates in Democratic primaries for now.”
In the meantime, the organization has displayed patience. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the movement’s most valuable political asset, has moved cautiously in office and avoided dramatic policy changes, building political support that he has spent on backing DSA challenges to mainstream Democrats.
In the face of this threat, the Democratic Party’s establishment has wrung its hands. Yet its main concern appears to be that DSA challengers are threatening the jobs of loyal party regulars and dividing the base against itself. “Instead of us making sure we put all of our resources to fight Republicans and to fight Donald Trump, we’re using it to fight each other. It just doesn’t make common sense to me,” Representative Gregory Meeks complained to CNN. New York Attorney General Letitia James told CNN, “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.”
DSA supporters see internal division not as a risk but as a historic opportunity to seize power. As Ross Barkan, a writer and former candidate whose state Senate campaign Mamdani managed in 2018, wrote, “The establishment Democrats who revile Mamdani so much should understand 2028 is going to look like 2026. There will be more races to be run, more incumbents to replace. For a century, since successive Red Scares squelched socialism in this country, the left has been in a defensive crouch. Only now can the socialists hit back.”
The conflict is asymmetrical. One side is concerned with taking control of the Democratic Party, while the other just wants everybody within it to get along.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, recently appeared on MS-NOW, a favorite network for normie liberals, where she blamed Democratic members of Congress for discord with new left-wing nominees. “You,” she said, addressing her incumbent colleagues, “are creating the antagonistic dynamic that we do not need. These are two young, talented, intelligent women that got elected against all odds, against millions of dollars. Perhaps there is something we can learn from them.”
The norm that AOC is trying to create is a ratchet that pushes the Democratic Party ever leftward. The DSA is permitted to excoriate the party, but non-socialist Democrats cannot respond in kind. Moderate Democrats are permitted to exist, at least for now, but the ideological pressure runs in one direction.
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At the most superficial level, the DSA influx has associated Democrats with a series of kooky beliefs and statements. Although Democratic voters approve of the DSA, voters as a whole do not. A national poll found the group’s approval at 21 percent, and 48 percent disapproved. (The same poll had 36 percent approval of the Democrats.) Its specific platform components are if anything less popular. The DSA’s leadership has approved a platform, set to be ratified at its convention next month, calling for “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” opening borders, moving to public ownership for the largest corporations, establishing a 32-hour workweek, and defunding the Pentagon.
The DSA’s disproportionate strength in New York City, the headquarters of the national media, means that its positions will have outsize weight in the national debate. Republicans will also, obviously, do everything they can to magnify them.
The DSA has little incentive to minimize this collateral damage. To the contrary, the smaller the Democratic Party, the more power the DSA wing can wield inside it. And it probably hasn’t escaped the movement’s attention that it has enjoyed its strongest growth during periods of Republican rule, but that its membership stagnated during the four-year Biden interregnum.
Under Republican presidencies, the DSA thrives on frustrated Democratic voters feeling that their party’s leaders aren’t fighting hard enough. During Democratic presidencies, which the DSA mostly spends denouncing the occupant of the Oval Office as a sellout, Democratic loyalists have less patience for factional complaints. Perversely, if the DSA’s slew of police-abolitionist, Hamas-apologizing candidates were to cost Democrats Congress in 2026 or the presidency in 2028, the group’s goal of discrediting and replacing the Democratic Party’s leadership would get easier, not harder. One can easily imagine a feedback loop in which DSA influence makes it harder for Democrats to win back moderate and Republican-leaning voters, causing the party to lose, causing its base to grow more distrustful of the party’s leaders, thus making them more likely to nominate DSA candidates.
But even to conceive of the DSA’s entry to the party as mainly an electoral setback, as some glum liberals appear to be doing, is to miss the deeper significance of the group’s influence. The costs of an alliance with the DSA are moral as well as political. The Democratic Party is waging an existential struggle to save democracy, the rule of law, and liberal norms. The DSA’s vanguard does not merely believe that its defense has faltered. It holds those values themselves in contempt as resistance-wine-mom frivolity.
What the DSA demands of the Democrats is not merely to advocate more generous social policies, or more cautious foreign affairs, but to welcome, or at least accept, authoritarians as their coalition partners. Democrats are likely to face the same kind of pressure that Republicans confronted with MAGA’s hostile takeover: first to ignore their allies’ sinister goals, and then to rationalize and eventually justify them.
As authoritarian elements gain strength, they become more essential to the success of a political coalition, and the price of confronting them rises. The Republican Party has long since passed the point of no return. The easiest time to draw clear moral lines against the encroachment of illiberalism within one’s own camp is at the beginning.
The post The DSA’s Communist Revolution appeared first on The Atlantic.
