Democratic Socialists of America

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA. DSA is one of the few Left organizations in the United States born of a merger rather than from a split. When the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM]) completed merger negotiations in 1982, DSOC had some 5,000 members and NAM some 1500, about one third of whom did not join the new organization. DSA therefore began with about 6,000 members. Although leaders of both organizations hoped for a speedy escalation in DSA membership, based on expectations about a fresh beginning, growth turned out to be painfully slow.

Internal and external difficulties resulted in disappointment. Ambitious plans for a national tour to recruit new members had to be cut back because of an unexpectedly large financial deficit carried over from DSOC. Hopes of maintaining offices in both Chicago and San Francisco, with the former staff from NAM retained, also proved financially unrealistic.

The political environment was unpromising. The civil rights and antiwar movements that had fueled the rapid growth of the SDS over a decade earlier had demobilized, offering few new recruits to any sector of the Left. Following the recession of the early 1980s, the economy started on a Keynesian recovery based on a military buildup and deficit spending under the increasingly popular Reagan administration. The 1984 presidential election, which placed forty-nine states in Reagan’s victory camp, further diminished the DSA’s prospects for serious growth.

The disarray of liberals and the Democratic Party compelled DSA to wage mainly defensive struggles within various domestic coalitions. An overwhelmingly white organization, DSA alienated some of its few African American militants when it endorsed centrist Walter Mondale over the decidedly leftwing Jesse Jackson in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries. Another opportunity wasted by the parent organization—if not by its Youth Section— was the failure to become involved organizationally in the growing anti-intervention movement in Central America. By the mid-1980s, some former NAM activists drifted away, in the belief that DSA was simply the former DSOC, still too closely tied to a few leaders of progressive national unions and other political notables.

Despite the adverse environment, DSA managed to increase its national membership slightly. Some locals and some campus chapters became active in the anti-apartheid and anti-intervention movements. In the fall of 1987, a DSA-inspired coalition, Justice for All, held outreach events around the country, commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Michael Harrington’s famed study of poverty, The Other America. In 1988 DSA endorsed the Rainbow Coalition and the Jesse Jackson campaign. DSA’s national office, in New York, maintained a small but lively magazine, Democratic Left, and a spiritual-minded newsletter, Religious Socialism, that eventually became a web-based publication. By virtue of a functioning national office, by holding conventions and by maintaining the membership base, DSA outlived many leftwing organizations of the time that were reduced to a handful of faithful members but managed somehow to put out a publication.

The 1990s proved, however, to be yet another decade of uphill struggle. The death of Michael Harrington in 1989 deprived DSA of its best-known spokesperson. Co-chairs Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West attracted lively audiences, especially on campuses, but could not recruit members as effectively as Harrington. DSA decided in the early 1990s to make the struggle for a universal health care system its major national priority, prefiguring its 2017 Convention decision to focus on Medicare for All. DSA also conducted direct mail campaigns that boosted its membership from 7,000 to 10,000.

Its locals organized against President Clinton’s so-called “welfare reforms,” while the Youth Section (rebranding itself in 1997 as Young Democratic Socialists, or YDSA) formed a “Prison Moratorium Project” to combat mass incarceration. Perhaps DSA’s greatest achievement during the 1990s was its work with the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the global justice movements to successfully block the Multilateral Agreement on Investments intended to expand NAFTA to a global scale. Especially but not only on campuses, the AFL-CIO “Palace Revolution” of December, 1995, overturning the conservative leadership, brought sympathetic labor figures together in lively dialogue with young and not-so-young radicals. Interest in the project seemed to fade within the newer AFL leadership, which withheld hoped-for resources. The moment of opportunity passed.

DSA also struggled during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The “war on terror” chilled mass protests, excepting the energetic but short-lived movement against US intervention in Iraq. The most successful DSA project in the mid-2000s was the Economic Justice Agenda (EJA), through which many DSA chapters publicized local Congressional and state legislative hearings. The EJA proposed a truly progressive tax system, expanded universal social welfare programs, and large-scale public investment to create jobs in transit systems and alternative energy. But the EJA mainly served as one of several forces blocking the “Great Compromise” between the Bush administration and Wall Street Democrats who would have shrunk Social Security and Medicare to fund further tax cuts for the rich and reduce budget deficits at the expense of social (but not military) programs.

The Boston DSA chapter, for example, organized a large-scale public hearing that involved many progressive organizations and political figures and helped consolidate an informal coalition of mass organizations and unions, several of these staffed then or later by Boston DSA members. The organizational energy of Boston DSA itself, however, languished after the event.

DSA was not, however, dying, but lacked dynamism. In 2012, DSA had 6,500 members, organized into about ten viable chapters and about as many YDS chapters. The median age of members nation-wide, revealed by a thorough membership survey conducted in 2014, had reached sixty-eight.

During the first half of the 2010s, DSA nationally took a series of steps, more or less wittingly, that prepared the organization for the period of unprecedented growth that followed. Most importantly, it put its finances in order, creating a new accounting system while aggressively soliciting membership funding for both DSA’s core organization and for its tax exempt political education fund.

At every convention, National Secretary Joseph Schwartz solicited attendees who had the financial means to contribute monthly sustaining contributions. At the direction of the National Political Committee, newly-available resources were directed to youth organizing. YDS, with this assistance, began to revive in 2006. Many of its campus chapter leaders became in later years the leaders of chapters within the parent organization. Other young people of this small, but significant generational cohort became national DSA leaders. A former YDS leader, Maria Svart, helped bridge the gap, generational and political, between DSA and YDS. Hired as DSA’s National Director in June 2011, she remained so in 2020. Together with other YDS organizers such as David Duhalde, later hired as Deputy Director, she provided capable organizational commitment and sustained effort in multiple roles.

DSA, child of DSOC and NAM, thus managed to keep the democratic socialist tradition alive for three decades as a seed healthy and vigorous enough to sprout and grow in the fertile ground of 2015 and later. The moment emerged mainly through the two presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders in 2015-2016 and 2019-2020

Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, coeval of the NAM cohort but never a member of DSA or either of its predecessor organizations, had meanwhile pursued his own separate but parallel track. A civil rights activist in his university days, Sanders resettled from Brooklyn to Burlington, Vermont, during the 1970s. Beginning as a political Independent running unsuccessfully in third-party statewide campaigns, Sanders inched toward the mainstream and was narrowly elected as mayor of Burlington in the non-partisan election of 1981. He proved an effective and popular mayor over three terms and later ran successfully as an Independent for US House and Senate seats in Vermont. A sentimental devotee of Eugene V. Debs, Sanders regularly proclaimed his socialist sentiments, encouraging DSA members without directly saying so.

In 2006 DSA locals in several cities conducted fund-raising events for Sanders’ first Senatorial campaign. The Metro Atlanta DSA chapter [MADSA] was established in 2006 with its first major activity holding a successful fundraising party for Sanders in June. MADSA then hosted the biennial DSA convention in November 2007. As part of the convention program Sanders delivered the keynote speech at the first of the annual Douglass-Debs dinner organized by MADSA. According to chairperson Milt Tambor, Sanders’ address focusing on economic inequality and calling for single-payer health care, prefigured Occupy Wall Street and Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. MADSA continued as one of the most viable DSA locals, with strong education programs and political organizing that made it a key node in Atlanta’s progressive coalitions.

By late 2014, DSA decided to make support for Bernie Sanders its number one priority. DSA’s campaign, labelled “We Need Bernie,” was a unique venture. By contrast to an earlier petition campaign launched by the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), DSA’s petition did not specify a run for the presidential nomination by Sanders in Democratic primaries. Indeed, some members of DSA declared that they could not support Sanders if he did run in the Democratic primaries. The DSA petition nevertheless gathered thousands of signatures, supplementing the 11,000 who had already signed the PDA petition. Sanders now believed that he had enough initial support to launch his campaign and fatefully chose to run in the Democratic primaries.

Ironically, although PDA had done the heavier lifting to convince Sanders to run, DSA reaped the overwhelming benefit in terms of organizational growth spurred by his campaigns. Early on, John Nichols of The Nation interviewed Sanders on his version of “democratic socialism.” Sanders affirmed the designation. From that point forward, Bernie supporters and more causal enthusiasts googling “democratic socialism” found the website of the Democratic Socialists of America. Thousands joined as a result.

DSA reached 8,500 members before Donald J. Trump’s election in November 2016; by July 2017, another 13,000, mainly young people aged eighteen to thirty-five, had joined DSA. Some of the Bernie supporters had participated in DSA’s “Political Revolution 101” webinars. More than one hundred new DSA chapters formed.

DSA locals quickly developed successful electoral campaigns for many local, state and even Congressional races. Most of the successful candidates had previously been DSA members or joined DSA during their campaigns. The best known were Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. Ambitious slates of DSA candidates were later elected to local city councils, most famously in Chicago, or to state legislatures. These victories, in turn, engendered publicity that further encouraged recruitment to DSA. The biggest single-day jump in DSA membership came the day after Ocasio-Cortez won her 2018 primary.

The problems caused by DSA’s rapid growth were real, though infinitely preferable to the problems of managing organizational stagnation or decline. A majority of the new DSA members were between twenty-five and thirty-five, mostly with higher education, but also very often members of the “precariat” working in the “gig” economy, struggling to pay back student loans and uncertain of their futures. DSA and YDS staff were stretched trying to provide mentoring and educational materials for the burgeoning new young membership

Having preserved a functioning national office during difficult times, DSA now hummed with activity, from political education webinars and discussion groups to a wide variety of national working groups and commissions such as labor eco-socialist, immigration/refugees, anti-racist, and international. Most DSA locals and YDSA chapters could be accurately described as similarly structured and active, depending on their size and local history. A large city local like New York City DSA, functioning largely through a neighborhood branch structure, likely had more members and certainly more active members in 2020 than the entire national membership of DSA in 2015.

DSA, as a deliberately “big tent” multi-tendency organization, welcomed socialists from many tendencies, including democratic socialists, revolutionary socialists, anarchists and even cautious social democrats. Most seemed loyal to DSA, although a small number entered DSA to recruit for their own sectarian goals and managed to weaken or divide a few chapters. The dissolution of the Leninist-minded International Socialist Organization (ISO) in 2019 heightened anxieties of such tendencies. But divisive efforts at the national level were ineffective, and many of the veterans of other socialist traditions provided valuable experience, skills and energy to DSA.

The labor-oriented members of Solidarity, long associated with the valuable tradition of the Labor Notes publication and conferences, offer an important example of this development. Experienced veterans contributed to DSA’s rank-and-file labor organizing work. Some had quietly been joint members of the two organizations for years. The International Socialist Organization (ISO), long a successful competitor to YDSA on some university campuses, dissolved in 2019, with many of its members joining DSA and contributing to the work of DSA locals and national working groups. Some members of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), which formed after the near-collapse of the Communist Party in 1991, had dual membership with DSA.

Many of veteran members of DSA also returned to active membership or rejoined the rejuvenated DSA. Some were unhappy with social media practices, including “doxing” and ad hominem tweets, that they interpreted as cyber-bullying. But the multiplication of national and local working groups, striving to carry out political work in the real world, improved the tone and content of internal communications within DSA as a whole.

The stresses and strains of forging a much larger DSA organization with a large majority of newer and younger members could easily have resulted in a schism along the fault lines of generational cultures and expectations. Older members who had experienced or knew about the alienation of SDS and the New Left from the Socialist Party were determined not to replay history.

The process by which DSA developed a unified Political Perspective drafted in 2014-15 and adopted unanimously at the 2015 Convention helped meet that test. The drafting committee, made up about equally from members of the “Old Guard” and the “Left Caucus,” reached a consensus. The document itself was not remarkable and was never used, although a summary was posted on the DSA website. However, the 2015 Political Perspective contained elements that expanded the notion of traditional “socialist” concerns, including a new commitment to eco-socialism, while reasserting dedication to democracy and racial and gender inclusion. While various groups or blocs within DSA took different names, the differences helped to define DSA’s “Big Tent” approach.

A variety of caucuses allowed DSA members to promote their political principles within the context of a multi-tendency organization. Most members of DSA did not affiliate with any caucus and became aware of them only when members of the National Political Committee or local executive bodies ran for election and identified their allegiance with specific caucuses.

The 70,000 DSA members represented only a small fraction of the millions of younger Americans who reported favoring socialism over capitalism. Yet DSA, child of DSOC and NAM, more distant successor to the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas successfully kept the democratic socialist tradition alive for three more decades, healthy and vigorous enough to sprout and grow when the new opportunities opened up after 2015.

DSA website https://www.dsausa.org/

Schwartz, Joseph M. A History of Democratic Socialists of America 1971-2017: Bringing Socialism from the Margins to the Mainstream. DSA National Political Committee, July 2017 https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/history/