The DSA Is a Menace
The movement is small but gaining influence.
Over the last months, candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won 35 primary races, including seven in the House of Representatives, sometimes beating heavily-favored Democratic incumbents. They appear poised to win a gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, and DSA-adjacent candidate Abdul El-Sayed has just been declared the winner in the Michigan Senate primary. What does this mean for the future of the Democratic Party? Garry Kasparov argues that the DSA, if still small, must not be underestimated.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Next Move, the publication of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
Whenever I write about the far left, the comments pile on quickly. And, look, I mostly talk about Donald Trump and how bad he is, because the president is the most powerful and potent threat to American democracy. Unlike the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which regarded Kamala Harris and Trump as two sides of the same evil coin, I don’t play the false equivalence game. I do, however, care about strategy, and as Americans approach the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, the DSA is in position to exert a growing influence on the Democratic Party and reshape the electoral playing field.
To have an intelligent conversation about this, it’s important to establish some basic facts about the DSA and the American far left generally. You can agree or disagree with my conclusions, but we need to be operating off of the same set of facts.
Here are five things you should know about the DSA:
1. We can’t ignore the DSA and its influential boosters. I get that the DSA has only 100,000 members and may be in the domain of a “sideshow.” With ICE agents continuing on their unrestrained rampage and a new Watergate breaking practically every day, self-reflection feels difficult for many in the anti-Trump camp. But blindness is a recipe for disaster.
Simple statistics like the number of card-carrying members belie the DSA’s growing sway in the Democratic Party. Who is involved matters much more than how many formally pay dues to the organization.
That “who” includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is likely to be a viable candidate in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of America’s largest city. This is no fringe leftist book club.
Hasan Piker, the man who addressed a College Democrats National Convention (not some classroom meeting for a no-name campus chapter) dressed up as murderous dictator Mao Zedong, is a real problem. (He has also praised Mao as a “great leader.”) Closing your eyes, clamping your hands over your ears, and repeating “he’s not real, he’s not real” won’t make him go away. Piker boasts millions of followers, has hosted interviews with multiple current and aspiring members of Congress, has intervened in Democratic primaries for DSA candidates, and, now, addressed a national gathering of young Democratic Party leaders.
2. The DSA’s founder, Michael Harrington, was a relative moderate compared with today’s American socialists. Harrington started the DSA after breaking with other socialists who withheld support for Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Harrington favored backing a major party nominee to challenge the incumbent Republican president, Richard Nixon. In other words: Harrington embraced a pragmatic approach to participating in American democracy.
3. Conversely, the modern DSA refused to support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. It’s a morbid historical irony that during the 2024 presidential election, the DSA, the organization Harrington founded in the spirit of political pragmatism, refused to support Kamala Harris. On the eve of the most consequential presidential election since the Civil War, the DSA released a shameful statement casting a false equivalence between Harris and Donald Trump. As the specter of a second Trump term loomed, Zohran Mamdani, one of the most prominent DSA officeholders, encouraged voters to reject Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Despite a long list of disagreements with Harris and the Biden administration, I endorsed the vice president in my personal capacity because I recognized the threat posed by a vengeful Trump. The events of the past year and a half leave me feeling sadly vindicated in my decision. As someone who comes from a country lacking free and fair elections, I’m deeply angry with self-indulgent factions like the DSA that fell back on the luxury of being uncommitted.
4. The DSA has moved from a principled pro-democracy stand on world affairs to tankie turpitude. Today’s DSA includes explicitly communist factions. Yet Harrington rejected the brutality of Soviet and Chinese communism and his icons were real social democrats. In 1980, the DSA founder organized a conference attended by West Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and future French President François Mitterrand.
In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins (the first DSA-member to serve as mayor of New York—not Zohran Mamdani) hosted Brandt, who was by then president of the Socialist International (an alliance of mainstream social democratic parties), at City Hall.
Today’s DSA would regard those men as insufficiently socialist; in 2017 the group derided European social democrats who “sound the retreat and accommodate capitalist forces.” Instead, the group’s sympathies lie with regimes like China that Harrington rightly rejected. The DSA rejects aid to democracies like Taiwan and Japan in the face of aggression from Beijing, while engaging in shameless victim-blaming on Ukraine.
As the DSA shifted, its international allegiances changed too. Most major social democratic parties—think of the factions that have governed countries like Germany, France, Sweden, the UK, and Israel—were once members of the Socialist International. In the past decade, the organization has split, with the German Social Democratic Party leading an exodus of other social democratic parties to a new Progressive Alliance to stave off the ascent of the far left.
The DSA went in the other direction. The DSA was a member of the Socialist International until 2017. In 2023, it joined up with another new coalition—the Progressive International, launched by Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis. It’s an explicitly anti-Western organization whose answer to the war in Ukraine was a call to dismantle NATO. As they say, tell me who your friends are.
5. I’m not the only one raising the alarm. Ten Democratic members of Congress and a number of candidates have signed a pledge, the Promise to America, declaring “we are capitalist, not socialist.”
Meanwhile, prominent former members of the DSA have deserted the organization over its extremism. Several founding members quit in an open letter published in The New Republic after the DSA issued a mealy-mouthed statement that largely justified the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel.
Maurice Isserman, biographer of DSA founder Michael Harrington, also left the organization after October 7. “An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on,” he wrote, “has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist.”
In his resignation from the DSA, Maurice Isserman warned of “tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members.”
Isserman was speaking about the internal politics of the DSA, but he could just as well have been speaking about what the DSA is doing to the Democratic Party. What we are witnessing is an aggressive attempt at a hostile takeover of an American institution. There is still time to stop it.
Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion, is the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and chairperson of the Human Rights Foundation. He is a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors.
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We can debate economic and social policies all day long, but we cannot tolerate the overt hateful bigotry and endorsement of violence and terror that these people espouse and sanitize. We must make this hate TABOO again, ostracizing it out of polite society and our mainstream politics, just as we did to marginalize and defeat the KKK.
If we don't create these moral guardrails, the hate and illiberalism will normalize and spiral into violence and anarchy that we won't be able to stop without immense bloodshed.
We must hold the line and #MakeTaboosTabooAgain!