Socialism in America has a long, troubled history. The movement began in 1901, when union organizer Eugene Debs helped found the American Socialist Party.
For most of their first 80 years, the American Socialist Party tried to convince voters that they weren't Communists. Then, in 1982, Michael Harrington, a soft-spoken leftist and former president of the American Socialist Party, realized that socialism wouldn't amount to anything in America unless they were able to slough off their association with Communists and chart an independent course.
Thus, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was born. Anti-Communist and pro-Israel, the party was able to attract left-wing intellectuals and radical unionists who became the driving force behind the party.
Harrington died in 1989, and with him died the DSA's doctrine of anti-Communism. While Harrington believed in what he called “the left of the possible," he "opened the doors of the DSA to Leninists, Marxists, Trotskyists, and various other aging radicals," writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.
Under Harrington, the DSA's agenda was almost indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party. After he died, the DSA made a significant turn to the left.
In New York City, they partnered with the radical Working Families Party, leading to their placement on the ballot and a growing presence in city politics.
The 2025 version of the DSA is a far cry from the DSA founded by Harrington.
Today the DSA is run by activists enamored with the authoritarian left. Its comrades attend talks at the Cuban mission to the United Nations to hear from the regime’s deputy foreign minister. Its national program calls for a new constitution that replaces the House and Senate with a single federal legislature and places “workers in charge of the government.” The DSA supports prison abolition and police defunding. The DSA’s international committee has taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling on Russian troops to leave while opposing any U.S. or NATO aid to Ukraine. Last year, the DSA signed on to an open letter respecting the rigged election in Venezuela, even after several independent observers and Latin American governments said its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, had stolen it.
“It’s very clear that these Trotskyist groups, these Marxist-Leninist groups, these Maoist groups, they’re a voting bloc in the national organization,” historian and former DSA member Jake Altman told Eli Lake. Eli interviewed Altman for the latest episode of Breaking History.
They control a majority of the votes and so there’s this real tension between the people who have more pragmatic means and the people who are these purists who believe that they’re going to start a vanguard party and have a revolution. This tension between the politics of the possible and the dreams of revolution has haunted the American left for more than a century. But usually, the revolutionaries spoil the political chances for the pragmatists. This time around, the DSA is about to win the biggest election in its history at the very moment that the party itself has been hijacked by illiberal revolutionaries who display hammers and sickles in their social media profiles the way edgelord white nationalists bear swastikas.
Back in the day, we called these people "gimlet-eyed radicals" for their piercing stares and doll's eyes. They were so focused on their politics and effecting revolution that nothing and no one else mattered.
Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Castro were all singularly focused on "The Cause" to the exclusion of all else. Zohran Mamdani isn't one of them. He's a puppet who will be manipulated, pulled, bent, and broken by revolutionaries whose singular goal is power.
Former DSA member Maurice Isserman, who left the party in 2023 after they failed to condemn the Hamas atrocites on October 7, wrote an essay in the radical left The Nation.
The radicals, Isserman wrote, “believed that DSA members elected to public office were, first and foremost, obliged to follow the positions adopted by the organization, rather than their constituents or their own conscience, as if they were already subordinate to the dictates of an old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist central committee.”
Mamdani will not be an independent actor. Far more than any Republican or Democrat, he will be beholden to a political party with truly un-American ideas, no respect for the Constitution, and no stake in the nation as it now is.
Expect anything when Mamdani takes office.
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