Where are the Democratic Socialists of America going? |
The following was first published in Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. Click here to subscribe today for just $20 to get the new issue and full access to our back catalog. The history of the American left is marked by imposing peaks and valleys. Over the last century and a half, organizations have sprung up and, often within a decade of their founding, become major institutions of US politics. They have typically declined nearly as quickly, with few sustaining their positions in American society longer than a decade or so. The Populist Party emerged in the early 1890s, won nearly 10 percent of the vote in the 1892 presidential election, and had largely disappeared by 1900. The Communist Party, founded in 1919, reached about seventy-five thousand members in the mid-1940s, only to collapse, through repression and its own mistakes, to under ten thousand by the end of the 1950s. The trajectories of the Knights of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Students for a Democratic Society, despite their different structures and purposes, are all strikingly similar. In the last decade, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has formed a new peak in this landscape. Growing rapidly since 2016, the group jumped from about 6,500 members in 2014 (with a median age of sixty-eight) to over one hundred thousand members (with a median age of about thirty-three) in 2026. At the same time, the group has elected hundreds of members and endorsed candidates to offices from county boards to US Congress. In its size and impact, it now sits with the most significant institutions of the American left. What accounts for this ascent, and what does it portend? Answering these questions requires resisting two temptations that have shaped much of the commentary on DSA. The first is triumphalism, the assumption that the organization’s growth is the leading edge of an irreversible socialist revival and that its trajectory can only continue upward. The second is the mirror image of this, a declinism that reads each of the group’s many internal crises as the beginning of the end. Both err in the same way: they mistake the story of a single organization for that of a whole political conjuncture. |
