If you only paid attention to Right-wing media, you’d be forgiven for imagining that the Democratic Socialists of America’s latest biennial convention was the planning committee for Reign of Terror II. The Murdoch press scrutinized the gathering for evidence that the DSA-backed Zohran Mamdani stood ready to summon legions of Marxist cadres, guillotine in tow, to slay the Cuomos in the streets of Queens.
Thanks to the rise of Mamdani and other DSA-adjacent progressive insurgents running for local office across the land, the group is once more being taken seriously as a political force (a sinister one among conservatives). But it shouldn’t be. In truth, the largest socialist organization in America is a paper tiger. The convention that wrapped up in Chicago over the weekend didn’t showcase an ascendant and aggressive Left. Rather, it offered more proof that Leftists remain hopelessly weak and are mostly content to eat each other, rather than the rich.
There’s little scary about DSA conventions on the ground. (These days, it’s the Right’s CPAC gabfests that look more like a freak show, what with Elon Musk prancing around the stage while brandishing a chainsaw.) When I attended a Chicago DSA convention in 2017 — full disclosure: I was a dues-paying member back then — it confirmed Oscar Wilde’s famous quip: “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.”
It’s a lot of meetings with squabbling over arcane rules and procedures broken up by panel discussions and parties, like a mix of an academic conference, a parent-teacher association meeting, and a pep rally. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what DSA didn’t do this time that’s the problem.
For one, the DSA still can’t seem to control its weirdos. There was fighting over the fact that Covid masks were “strongly encouraged,” rather than required like in 2023. For the Left’s Covid dead-enders, the change in policy was tantamount to “eugenics for the disabled.” The convention also hosted a discussion on abolishing marriage and the family, with one panelist saying, “the only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract.” It’s distractingly unserious discourse — so why not keep that cringe locked up in the basement of a hipster bookstore in Portland?
Mamdani’s victory offered a sane blueprint to the DSA: he largely backed away from his maximalist Abolish Everything! stances from the peak-woke era and ran unapologetically on practical economic issues. Since winning the Democratic mayoral primary in the Big Apple, he has remained focused on New Yorkers’ struggle to make ends meet, while taking aim at the the party’s gerontocracy.
A credible DSA would take the hint and rally against President Trump’s attacks on organized labor and his dismantling of parts of the safety net, thus building a counterweight to mainstream Democrats’ do-nothingness. The convention offered some of that, to be sure. But it was overshadowed by grandiose internationalist moralism, especially over Gaza. The delegates voted almost 9-to-1 in favor of “a movement that will be able to fight against genocide and war across the globe.” But how do you fight war when half your members can’t change a tire?
Meanwhile, matters got ugly over a rancorous vote on declaring DSA an explicitly anti-Zionist organization. Online, there was debate over whether to purge the 40% of members who voted against it. “I couldn’t live with myself if I were funding and mingling with so many genocidal Nazi halfwits,” one agitated person tweeted. “You’re living amongst monsters. You do realize that?”
This is not to say the Palestinian cause lacks moral urgency. The situation in Gaza is, to put it mildly, a horror show. But the convention’s treatment of it as the overriding priority in Trump’s America — at a time when the Left has a genuine shot at expanding its small footprint — attested to a deeper pathology. It’s the politics of powerlessness: the belief that if you can’t change an outcome in material terms, you can compensate by making your rhetoric more extreme and obsessing about the topic that you have the least control over.
“These are liberal-arts grads who can’t free their faces from Covid masks, much less free America from capitalism.”
The organizer Bayard Rustin, reflecting on similar Left foolishness in Harper’s in 1970, observed: “Since real victories are thought to be unattainable, issues become important in so far as they can provide symbolic victories. Dramatic confrontations are staged which serve as outlets for radical energy but which in no way further the achievement of radical social goals.” Rustin saw no value in symbolic victories. He called such symbolic achievements a “politics of escape rooted in hopelessness.”
Yet the post-Oct. 7 period has only deepened this instinct on the Left. After the collapse of US Left-populism with Bernie Sanders’s loss in 2020 and the drift of The Squad, the DSA suffered. In early 2024, Maria Svart, the organization’s national director, stepped down with a grim parting shot: the DSA was $1 million in the hole and had no realistic plan to climb out. Paid membership cratered by nearly 30 percent nationally, down to just over 52,000, and most chapter meetings drew fewer than 15 people — hardly the socialist mass movement of Sean Hannity’s nightmares.
The Western Left got its groove back by simplifying yet expanding its moral framework to make everything about Gaza. Today, Palestinians aren’t just engaged in a struggle with Israel. They’ve been recast as the tip of the spear in a global war against “the West,” “the Global North,” or “the colonizers” — pick your villain. “The Global South” has displaced the working classes of old as the imagined revolutionary subject, and the antifada has become the new class struggle. It’s as if the messy prism of intersectionality that defined the Left of a few years ago was replaced with something more elemental, almost biblical: a moral universe of pure good and pure evil, where every battle anywhere slots neatly into the same epic. Which is why one panel at the DSA convention was titled — for some reason — “From Mexico to Gaza.”
It’s a seductive framework, because it makes the Left feel powerful in its own mind, as if tweeting about a student protest in London is part of the same chain of resistance as a worker’s strike in Argentina or a Gazan family’s struggle to survive the next eight hours. In the US context, this posture is a political cul-de-sac. It makes the difficult work of coalition building, labor organizing, and contesting elections take a back seat to a permanent foreign-policy morality play.
Inside the DSA, factionalism magnifies the problems. The group is split into what amount to three informal “wings”: the Right (old-school social democrats focused on winning elections); the Left (revolutionary, anarchist, and anti-state types who view electoral politics as a sellout); and the center, which borrows from both but mistrusts compromise. All are far to the left of the median American voter. Yet instead of finding proper common ground, they launch miniature cold wars within the organization. Energy that could go into making more Mamdanis gets burned in procedural fights over who’s “truly” socialist. Fox News and the like may love to bash socialists, but you won’t find many people who despise DSA more than its own members and other Leftists.
Last year, Eric Blanc, a labor-studies scholar at Rutgers University, posted that “DSA is at a crossroads. It can become another marginal far-Left group with a narrow program, rigid formulas, and tight discipline — or it can remain a big tent, flexible, and welcoming organization oriented to mass working-class politics.” Spoiler alert: the group chose the latter. Now the DSA can’t organize a Valentine’s Day dating event without it imploding into a brouhaha over whether trance is a Zionist genre of music (no, really, this happened).
All this is tragic from an authentically socialist perspective. The United States remains a country in decline: its public infrastructure crumbling; its for-profit health system plunges more than half of Americans into medical debt; working-class life expectancy is declining; and real wages remain stagnant for the bottom half. Yet the activist energy that once might have gone toward reviving the labor movement or Medicare for All is now absorbed by an abstracted, performative global struggle; the battlefield is always somewhere else, even as the home front decays.
Meanwhile, just to the south, Mexico shows what disciplined Left-populism can achieve. President Claudia Sheinbaum, the successor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as AMLO), won the presidency with nearly 60% of the vote and delivered her party, Morena, a congressional supermajority. She and AMLO did it by combining populist anti-elite messaging with concrete policy delivery: raising the minimum wage, making it easier to organize workers, expanding social welfare, and investing in neglected regions.
Morena translates slogans into legislation and legislation into tangible improvements in ordinary people’s lives. The party, to be sure, isn’t without its share of problems, internal contradictions, and ideological disputes. But these finally don’t eclipse Morena’s core mission. The Mexican Left treats electoral power as something to be built and wielded; the American DSA treats it as a side hustle to its internal culture wars and moral theater.
Mamdani’s win could have been the start of a similarly successful revamp: proof of concept that disciplined, class-based campaigning still works in America. Instead, the DSA has shown it’s still more comfortable as a subculture than a political force. That makes the conservative scaremongering about the DSA all the more farcical. These are liberal-arts grads who can’t free their faces from Covid masks, much less free America from capitalism.
