How worried should Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America?
As someone who knows the DSA inside out, I can say with authority: They should be very worried indeed.
I was a DSA member for years and served in local leadership.
But today’s DSA — illiberal, dogmatic and hostile to traditional American political norms — is not the organization I once knew.
It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.
As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now — first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals — already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself.
And there’s only one defense: out-organizing it.
For decades, the DSA was mostly composed of a cohort of aging Boomers, remnants from the group’s founding in 1982.
It prioritized open debate and political tolerance.
Following in the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, members viewed the DSA not as a revolutionary vanguard but as a reformist bridge to mainstream labor-liberalism; they prioritized parliamentary process and pluralism.
But in the mid-2010s, the character of the organization began to change.
I was in Boston at the time and witnessed the last days of the “old” DSA.
New, younger members began to enter the organization as Sen. Bernie Sanders and the socialist magazine Jacobin grew their followings.
As the DSA’s cultural power expanded and it began to amass electoral victories, more leftists of varying extremist commitments were drawn in.
This was an explicit strategy called “the big tent,” advanced by the then-DSA Jacobin left.
In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry — a provision that was already a dead letter.
The old DSA’s high-mindedness became its fatal weakness.
Veteran members assumed the younger generation played by the same rules of persuasion, but the newcomers’ goal was not to win arguments — it was to transform the institution and its politics.
As the organization grew, it began to profess more extreme ideas — and to demand that its members do the same.
First came the purity tests of Black Lives Matter and the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, sanctions movement.
Apologia for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and support for Hamas and its atrocities followed.
The new DSA — with the help of hype-man Hasan Piker — advanced these agendas with what American labor leader Walter Reuther called “the communists’ highly developed technique of name-calling and character assassination.”
The old-guard Harringtonites attempted to counter their bad-faith divisiveness, but their efforts came far too late, and many eventually left.
My final attempt to challenge Leninist-Third Worldist dominance within the DSA fell apart amid stiff resistance in April 2025, when I proposed that the DSA’s governing board should demand that Hamas release all hostages in Israel and surrender unconditionally.
But most of my allies among the Harringtonite veterans were dismissive of my proposal’s prospects — and refused to support it.
Long-time DSA insiders like David Duhalde, who has advocated for the “big tent” that brought in communists, don’t dispute that this radicalization process occurred.
But Duhalde maintains that the shift wasn’t a takeover move, but an “unplanned left-wing refoundation”
That claim glosses over the systematic displacement of the organization’s foundational commitments — and rejects the warnings of many in DSA’s founding generation.
In fact, the organization continues to eat its own.
The former radical vanguard clustered around Jacobin has been eclipsed by a coalition of Third Worldists, Trotskyists and doctrinaire Leninists, some of whom openly endorse political violence.
At the same time, condescension and outright hostility toward anti-communism remain: Duhalde, for one, dismisses the anti-communist tradition on the left as “neoconservatism with a union label.”
There are warning signs that the Democratic Party establishment is drifting toward a similar surrender.
It is already teetering on the edge of accommodation — or worse, capture — rather than opposition.
What happened to the DSA can and will happen to the Democratic Party if more moderate Democrats don’t organize against it.
As labor leader Walter Reuther, a man with experience fighting Leninists, wrote in 1948: “You have to show [communism] up in the marketplace of ideas, expose it by honest dealing.”
But the battle is not merely ideological.
Reuther’s victory over the communists in the United Auto Workers union was the result of a clear-eyed strategy of exposing, isolating and driving out those who rejected democratic norms.
He also built a broad anti-communist coalition within his union’s ranks to resist the collectivist push.
Dissident Democrats today would do well to take inspiration from him.
Jake Altman is a former union official and the author of “Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism.” Adapted from City Journal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
