American socialists are convinced that they have a media-training problem.
In the past year, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, have won electoral victories in places such as New York City and Michigan, drawing a spotlight that the group has struggled to handle.
Last month, the DSA’s co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, gave several high-profile interviews that even many of their most fervent supporters agree were disastrous. The two leaders struggled to give straight answers to simple questions, and they defended outlandish policies, such as abolishing prisons and police. They seemed to present socialists exactly the way their opponents caricature them: as extremist, unserious, and unprepared.
In damage-control mode, many of DSA’s defenders on social media are repeating the phrase media training as though it were a mantra. If only the group’s leaders had been better prepared to deal with media outlets, the thinking goes, they would have avoided this train wreck. The DSA’s communications director, Priscilla Yeverino, recently told Axios, “Our leaders aren’t politicians. They’re working-class people and new to doing media.”
The idea that the DSA’s troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse.
[Read: Why do rich kids love socialism?]
This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA’s co-chairs were embarrassing, that’s a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.
A closer look at the interviews confirms this. Romer, who belongs to the sectarian wing, evidently did not know what the 2000 Camp David Summit was and could not say what “taxing the hell out of millionaires,” as she demanded, would look like in practice. When asked about authoritarianism in Cuba, she praised the country’s constitution and suggested that Americans should learn from it.
Maybe media training could have taught Romer what happened at Camp David and what a tax policy might entail. It still wouldn’t have made the pro-authoritarian politics she shares with her faction of the DSA more palatable. In December, Romer’s Red Star caucus, a self-declared Marxist-Leninist faction of the DSA, posted quotes from a speech by Mao in “celebration” of the Chinese Communist leader’s 132nd birthday. Members of the faction study the works of Mao and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as part of their political education. Red Star has declared its unequivocal sympathy for Hamas and praised the “good judgement” of “our socialist siblings” in Palestine for working with the Islamist organization and “external groups like Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah under a principle they call unity of the fields.” In other words, Red Star is an admirer of Iran’s notorious “Axis of Resistance.”
That Romer wouldn’t critique authoritarianism in Cuba is not a lapse but an expression of her faction’s politics. Red Star’s stated policy couldn’t be any clearer about this: “To publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the U.S. State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine.”
In other words, any state or group that opposes the American government should be beyond criticism. Liberation, the DSA’s “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus,” likewise declares the United States to be “not a nation” but a “prison-house of nations, with the Euro-Americans being the jailer.”
Unlike Romer, Siddique belongs to the mainstream wing of the DSA, but he is bound by the group’s statements and broader culture. The sectarian wing currently dominates the DSA: The group’s convention in Chicago last year rejected a resolution opposing “all governments that engage in the repression of democratic rights.” Thus, when asked repeatedly what he thought of Fidel Castro, whom the DSA had praised in an earlier statement, Siddique awkwardly referred to “inequality in the United States” and criticized U.S. policy—deflecting the question and offering sound bites instead of engagement, much as an establishment pol might do.
[David Brooks: Democrats became great by fighting the left]
This pro-left-authoritarian orientation explains why DSA electoral observers shamefully reported no fraud when they were dispatched to monitor the electoral sham organized by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Those results were so bogus that even the left-wing governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay couldn’t accept them. Yet at a DSA session on the subject, a pro-Maduro organization’s assessment that Venezuela’s electoral system was “one of the very best in the world” was presented as fact, as was the false claim that Venezuela’s main opposition candidates were “fascist.”
The two wings of the DSA are committed to wildly different methods. Mamdani governs New York City partly as a technocrat, and AOC has sought to influence the Democratic Party from within. One of the DSA’s sectarian factions, by contrast, recently suggested that socialist lawmakers “should do everything in their power to disrupt any Congressional business that does not benefit the working class or advance the socialist program.” They should, it went on, “creatively abuse their powers to make it difficult to conduct legislative business,” for instance by packing the galleries of Congress with hecklers. This faction seems to view elected lawmakers as “tribunes” for the socialist movement rather than as people who, you know, make laws.
The sectarian wing got the DSA to drop its endorsement of AOC and refuse to support Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Red Star argued against endorsing AOC unless she withdrew her support for Joe Biden (then the Democratic nominee), and it refused to fundraise for the Democratic leadership or central congressional campaign. But ultimately, the DSA dropped AOC on the grounds that she was not sufficiently anti-Israel—a singular obsession of the sectarian wing. (The foreign-policy section of the DSA’s political platform discusses the details of only one country’s politics, and that’s Israel and Palestine, in which it calls for the self-determination of Palestinians without making a similar provision for Israeli Jews.)
For all of the extremist wing’s influence, however, my years of research into the group suggest that the DSA’s members are mostly not members of any caucuses. The average DSA member probably has more in common with AOC than with Mao or Hamas, and the nonsectarians seem especially dominant in the group’s large urban chapters—such as in New York City, where the DSA has more than 15,000 of its approximately 120,000 members. More than 80 percent of DSA members in the Bronx and Queens voted in 2024 to endorse AOC. The sectarian wing came to control much of the organization’s leadership by manipulating internal processes, which is one reason it opposes organizational referenda and other one-member-one-vote procedures.
The DSA’s mainstream wing includes thinkers who are committed to democracy, critical of authoritarianism (including that of socialist regimes, past and present), and who reject some of the signature policies of the sectarian wing, such as police abolition. These figures have been vocal in response to last month’s media fiasco.
Eric Blanc, a labor historian at Rutgers, sharply criticized Romer for “falling into a trap being set by the establishment,” which seeks “to paint DSA as extreme.” Like others in his wing, Blanc advocates for adopting a Nordic-style social democracy as a step toward overcoming capitalism. This position is also shared by the Jacobin founder and former DSA Vice Chair Bhaskar Sunkara, whose 2019 Socialist Manifesto explores Swedish social democracy in envisioning a socialism for the 21st century.
[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]
Reacting to the DSA’s recent media debacles, Ben Burgis, a philosopher and Jacobin writer, opined: “We don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to say anything too negative about left-wing dictatorships targeted by US foreign policy,” especially “if we’re trying to argue that the failures of authoritarian state socialism in the twentieth century shouldn’t mean that capitalism is the best humanity will ever be able to do.” The group has failed to reassure its critics of its commitment to multiparty democracy, Burgis added.
Thinkers in this wing of the DSA take seriously the imperative to reconcile socialist commitments to economic justice with democratic and liberal values. Burgis, Sunkara, and the economist Mike Beggs have co-authored a forthcoming book called The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, which attempts to offer a “realistic model” of a post-capitalist economic system. Drawing on the work of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, as well as detailed economic research, the book takes the Soviet Union to task for a “record of systematic economic failure, not just political repression” and suggests a model that mixes social ownership with a significant role for the market. It also engages the arguments of well-known critics of socialism, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. This work puts the flippancy of Romer’s “taxing the hell out of millionaires” comment to shame.
But if the likes of AOC, Sunkara, Burgis, and Blanc wish for the American public to give their notions of an economically rigorous and democratically committed socialism a chance, they need to break with the fans of Mao and Hamas. So long as they share an organization with the DSA’s sectarians, they can’t complain when the media associates the DSA—and American socialism—with the extreme positions that it formally adopts and that its leaders espouse. No amount of media training can solve that.
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