How the Democratic Socialists of America Hijacked the Democratic Party

Between 1970 and 1973, the Socialist Party of America broke in two over the question of whether to continue supporting and espousing Soviet communism. One faction consisted of people who had grown weary of communism’s exhausting epitaph of moral and logistical failure. They denounced the Soviets; and, as price controls, stagflation, and détente made America look more like communist Albania than heaven, some former SPA members even moderated to the point of becoming Reagan Democrats. The other part quadrupled down on belief in orthodox Marxism, and a sub-faction of it eventually evolved in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The past decade has seen the DSA—not well-known in American political discourse until proud socialist Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2015—become one of the more important forces of leftist politics, not to mention one of the most anti-Jewish.

True to its name, it has always defined itself as a movement within the Democratic Party, hoping to pull a political institution which had already been comfortable with big-government socialism since the Wilson administration in an explicitly anti-American, anti-Israel, communist direction.

The irony is that the ideological pulling has been successful, but the elections have not. Today, the Republican Party has emerged as the party of what Marx called the “working class.” The DSA was founded to represent them, yet why are Democrats instead the party of the Ivy League, Beyoncé, and telling Americans that they can afford inflation?

The Takeover of a Party

In 1991, DSA operatives cooperated with Democrat members of Congress to found the House Congressional Progressive Caucus. They also, as of 1998, hosted the CPC’s website—before the CPC created an independent one in response to conservative journalists’ outrage. The Caucus today has 97 members, and it is the second-largest Capitol Hill faction within the party.

A now-deleted FAQ page on the DSA’s website says—in response to the question, “Aren’t you a party that’s in competition with the Democratic Party for votes and support?”—that “…[W]e are not a separate party. Like our friends and allies [elsewhere]… many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

By 2009, the Socialist Party USA—of which the DSA is a subset—could announce that 76 Democratic members of the House and Senate belonged to the DSA, forming a large piece of both the CPC and the powerful Congressional Black Caucus. Many of those still serve in Congress today, including Tammy Baldwin (WI), André Carson (IN), Steve Cohen (TN), Danny Davis (IL), Ed Markey (MA), Jerry Nadler (NY), Bernie Sanders (VT), Jan Schakowsky (IL), and Maxine Waters (CA).

Of these, Carson, Davis, and Waters have had warm relations with Louis Farrakhan, the racist cult leader of the Nation of Islam, and all the others have demanded that Israel submit to a “ceasefire” while Hamas still had notable military capabilities. Carson, too, is tied closely to the Islamic Circle of North America—a major Muslim Brotherhood front-group.

With the help of the DSA, the Democratic Party’s consistent shift from the old “patriotic” socialism of the Roosevelt era to that of Saul Alinksy, Tom Hayden, and Jeremiah Wright began in 2008 with Barack Obama’s primary victory over Hillary Clinton. The DSA passionately supported the Obama campaign, saying a few weeks before the election that “DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda.”

With the help of the DSA, the Democratic Party’s consistent shift from the old “patriotic” socialism of the Roosevelt era to that of Saul Alinksy, Tom Hayden, and Jeremiah Wright began in 2008 with Barack Obama’s primary victory over Hillary Clinton.

Rather than an idyllic world of free change, however, the Obama administration’s signature policy was the so-called “Affordable Care Act,” which mandated that Americans buy health insurance from a small group of large companies at artificially inflated prices within a market without competition.

Though the Obama presidency actively fostered DSA-approved extremism, it seems to have done nothing to promote growth in membership, and, by 2014, nationwide DSA membership had fallen to around 6,500. Everything changed, however, with Bernie Sanders’ infamous 2015 presidential campaign— “sufficiently radical and inspiring,” the DSA called it—and, by Election Day 2016, membership had risen again to about 8,500. In the ensuing few months, the “resistance” against Trump ballooned that figure to 24,000. As of the fall of 2023, membership was estimated between 78,000 and 92,000.

2018 saw the DSA make its way into Congress, famously backing its own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib for House seats, with the anti-Semitic “Squad” growing to include members Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who would put heavy pressure on the Biden administration to punish Israel for fighting Hamas. As of this year, more than 200 members and former members currently serve in state governments across the country. Still—crucially—though most Democrat members of Congress are not officially affiliated with the DSA, their voting patterns are clearly DSA-“compliant.”

Fittingly, though its ideological influence within the Democratic Party and Washington is considerable, the DSA’s unity and stability are not what they were. Both Bush and Bowman were defeated spectacularly in their primaries (for which they blamed the Jews), and the DSA assembly officially revoked its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez for not being anti-Israel enough. Also, in January of this year, Newsweek reported that the party, which—utilizing its youth chapters at Columbia, Berkeley, NYU, Yale, and 102 other campuses—had led anti-Israel protests after October 7, was “bleeding cash,” with projected income roughly $2 million below projected expenses. So, too, a majority of Americans rejected both DSA candidates and DSA policies in the 2024 election.

DSA leaders are ideologues; they won’t take these setbacks lightly. As they redouble their efforts to grow their influence within the Democratic party, the success of the party may well hinge on how it manages to isolate both the ideologues and the elites  and return to its working-class roots.

This is first in a series on the DSA. A follow-up report will cover the effects of DSA at the local levels.

Ben Poser is executive editor of White Rose Magazine and research director for the African Jewish Alliance.