These should be salad days for the Democratic Socialists of America. Virtually the same conditions that propelled it to prominence during the first Trump administration prevail today. And yet, as a profile of the organization in New Lines Magazine indicates, the DSA is experiencing headwinds in this decade that it did not encounter in the last.
The reason for the DSA’s downfall — as evinced by decreasing revenue from dues and a 17 percent decline in membership from 2021 — is simple. In the first Trump administration, the outfit served as a vehicle for stridency. It represented a critique of Democrats as well as Republicans, and it created a space for the most vigorous expressions of anti-Trump zeal – the theatrical resistance-style politics that more prudent Democrats rejected as gauche.
After the October 7 massacre, the DSA evolved from a political instrument for the far left into a home for Israel haters, and it sacrificed its relevance along the way.
The DSA’s monomaniacal anti-Zionism is a bottom-up phenomenon, as the group’s profiler, Patrick Hagan, establishes via anecdote. He describes a DSA orientation session that reads like parody. The group begins with the singing of a 110-year-old socialist ode to labor unions — organizations in which almost no one at the meeting is a member. The attendees were then asked to share their names, preferred pronouns, and why they’re there. “Almost invariably, the answers are the election and/or Gaza,” Hagan wrote.
“The election” — e.g., regret over the last electoral outcome and the hope that the next will produce more agreeable results — isn’t a political program. Israel’s defensive war in Gaza more closely resembles an issue around which a political movement can be based. The problem for the DSA is that their explicitly anti-Israel framework — the organization rejects Israel’s right to exist and encourages chapters to adopt the anti-Zionist language in its founding principles — is a marginal outlook in the United States.
In fact, the DSA has been shedding its longstanding members over its obsessive focus on Israel — including the old socialists with living memory of a time when the Israeli social contract was far more collectivist:
One such older leftist is Maurice Isserman, who left after 41 years of membership “to protest the DSA leadership’s politically and morally bankrupt response to the horrific Hamas October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom,” as he wrote in The Nation magazine. Isserman, a biographer of DSA founder Michael Harrington, goes on to blame this response on the organization’s more radical caucuses like Red Star, which published statements like “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You.”
The Democratic Socialists of America have never had much use for democracy. The organization has supported the Cuban regime and its crackdown on dissidents, backed Nicolás Maduro’s “Venezuela Solidarity” movement, defended North Korea against America’s pursuit of its “imperial interests” on the Korean Peninsula, and alleged that Russia’s expansionist war is the result of NATO’s “imperialist expansionism.” After 10/7, the organization evolved from a bunch of blinkered old communists into an antisemitic hate group.
That has become such a defining feature of the organization that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proved too heterodox for its liking. Last summer, the DSA’s National Political Committee voted to withdraw its endorsement of AOC over failure to oppose a House resolution affirming that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.” AOC won her race for reelection. Likewise, “DSA had threatened to [un-endorse] Rep. Jamaal Bowman over his support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system back in 2021,” Hagan noted. But because Bowman went on to say the 10/7 massacre would not have happened if Hamas had been “unprovoked,” called Israel a “settler colonial project,” and accused it of “genocide,” he managed to win back the respect of the DSA’s endorsers. We’ll never know if Bowman might have won his race for the House because he was defeated in a Democratic primary against an opponent who hung Bowman’s anti-Zionism around his neck.
The DSA’s single-mindedness is clearly genuine. No organization on the cusp of relevance would sacrifice its appeal to the broadest universe of voters otherwise. As Hagan’s profile demonstrates, the DSA still has plenty of well-wishers who want the outfit to focus on “bread-and-butter” issues: “things like wealth inequality, labor unions and free health care,” the author writes. But the organization is still packed with communists, and capital “C” Communism is, at root, a conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories predicated on the notion that a powerful cabal has stolen from you that which is your rightful due, it ends up getting back to the Jews eventually.
We should be grateful that the DSA’s devolution became unavoidably obvious before it managed to secure more power for itself than it already has. But that devolution was inevitable. As the aspirational resolution the organization passed at its 2023 convention declared, the Democratic Socialists of America wanted theirs to be “an anti-Zionist organization in principle and praxis.” Mission accomplished.