Can the Democratic Party become Democratic Socialist?

Socialism, DSA, and the Recent Elections

Socialism, once given up for dead as a politics, is having a banner year. After November, the House will have at least six Democrats who call themselves democratic socialists and perhaps eight. New York, Washington DC, Seattle, and perhaps even Los Angeles will be run by socialists. Most of these politicians and scores of local and city officials are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has a hundred thousand members, and has become an election powerhouse in big cities.

These successes have prompted a harsh reaction not just from the Trump White House who warned that “communists” were going to “completely destroy the American way of life,” but also from established Democrats. Former Clinton campaign manager James Carville and former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called for the DSA’s candidates to leave the Democratic Party and form their own party. “Let’s negotiate a terms of schism,” Carville suggested. Rep. Josh Gottenheimer charged that DSA and the left were “using Tea Party tactics and trying to divide up the country and pray to socialist ideals.”

I have some things to say about DSA’s brand of socialism and about the candidates they have promoted, but I want to say something first about the Democratic Party and democratic socialism, which some of the established Democrats believe are incompatible. In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as “democratic socialist” in the same way it is now known widely as “liberal.” My reasoning follows an argument I made in The Socialist Awakening in 2020.

We are in what I’d call a “Polanyi moment” in the United States and globally. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that in the 1920s and 1930s, the West faced a backlash to the capital-dominated political economy that was based on the gold standard internationally and minimal business regulation and the suppression of labor income and power nationally. The United States and Europe responded by reasserting the power of government over the economy -- through creating command economies. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s government moved left to create a New Deal and a new balance between capital and labor. In Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe, including Stalin’s Russia, countries moved right to fascism or totalitarian communism.

The United States and the global economy reached a similar, although not quite as dire, crossroads in the early 21st century, marked off by onset of the Great Recession. The capital-dominated political economy of neo-liberalism failed nationally and internationally provoking a backlash. In the United States, it has taken the form of the re-emergence on the left and right of a politics based on energetic government intervention in the economy. The key event was the election of 2016 and the campaigns on the left of Bernie Sanders and on the right of Donald Trump. I’m not equating Sanders to Roosevelt or Trump to Hitler, but like Roosevelt and Hitler, their politics, and their approach to government and the economy, represented a sharp break with the past.

As I recounted in The Socialist Awakening, Sanders might have preferred his politics to be described as “progressive” rather than “democratic socialist,” but he had been known as a socialist, and when his opponent, Hillary Clinton, attacked him for being a socialist, he did not back down, but tried to define what democratic socialism meant in 21st century America. He initially cited Scandinavian social democracy, but on the advice of several historians, he began describing democratic socialism as an attempt to extend the New Deal and its Four Freedoms.

Some orthodox socialists saw this as an evasion, but Sanders had remedied a glaring flaw in the Marxist concept of socialism, which still prevailed in the nooks and crannies of American academia. Marx’s theory of socialism, heavily influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history, had portrayed economic history as a series of discrete stages punctuated by revolutions. Socialism would replace capitalism by a revolution. Marx’s Hegelian history was, as Karl Lowith argued in Meaning in History, eschatological. But as a succession of theorists had begun to note, just as capitalism had developed in the bowels of late Middle Ages feudalism, socialism was developing inside capitalism. Publicly-controlled institutions were arising alongside or in some cases with authority over private institutions. To advocate for democratic socialism was to advocate for the spread of these public institutions, not necessarily for the obliteration of capitalism, free markets and the capitalist class. That was what Sanders’ attempt to define democratic socialism was about.

I have long expected the United States to develop a politics along these lines, but I did not expect it to be called “democratic socialism.” I was a socialist during the Cold War and spent a decade as an agitator in the late ‘60s and early 70s trying in vain to explain that socialism didn’t mean the Soviet or Chinese variety. I expected that what we would see would be more “progressive” politicians like Elizabeth Warren or Ro Khanna. I would still expect a socialist presidential candidate in the United States to have trouble with voters over fifty and in much of small-town America, but as these recent elections have shown, voters in the great metro areas, and younger voters in particular, no longer fear but even welcome some version of democratic socialism. As the memory of the Cold War fades, the term “socialism” is regaining some of the appeal it had in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when it connoted a society based on cooperation rather than on sink-or-swim individualism. That’s why I say that in ten or fifteen years, “democratic socialist” could replace “liberal” as the term of choice for a leading tendency within the Democratic Party.

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What of DSA and the current “democratic socialist” candidates? I am a grudging member of DSA. I was a founding member of the New America Movement in 1971, the organization that merged in 1982 with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form DSA. But I quit the organized left in 1977 to become a journalist. I joined DSA in 2020 after I had finished The Socialist Awakening. I had hoped it would carry on from Sanders’ campaigns, but when it went whole hog on defund the police and refused to support Joe Biden against Trump in 2020, I let my membership lapse. I rejoined DSA last fall after I witnessed and wrote about the Zohran Mamdani campaign. I was impressed by him and by New York DSA’s electioneering. I still am, but I have misgivings about the group’s understanding of democratic socialism.

On its website, DSA adopts a somewhat anodyne explanation of democratic socialism that nonetheless hints at the orthodox Marxist meaning of the term. It calls for “replacing” capitalism with socialism and for workers to “collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives.” Own? Regulate? Control? Co-determination? Many of DSA’s active members, including members of its national leadership, are explicitly committed to various versions of Marxist socialism. They belong to caucuses like “Marxist Unity.” Some of the group’s ten caucuses cite Lenin and Marxist-Leninism in explaining their commitment to socialism. Even the most “reformist” of the caucuses, Socialist Majority, is committed to a “socialist revolution.” None of the caucuses embrace what Sanders described as democratic socialism.

In the name of socialism, DSA also enthusiastically endorses the cultural politics of the cosmopolitan metro centers and college towns that is set off from much of small town and small city America. It supports open borders -- a stance that would jeopardize support for the welfare state and undermine labor organizing. (Such a position was anathema to the original American Socialist Party of Eugene Debs but is favored by the Wall Street Journal and Cato Institute.) It supports defunding police departments and eventually abolishing prisons. This, too, would have been indigestible to the older left, which promoted public safety.

In the name of socialism, DSA also imposes litmus tests on its candidates’ foreign policy stances that have nothing to do with socialism but instead reflect a continuing American penchant for projecting our unrealized ideals on other countries. DSA won’t support political candidates unless they renounce “Zionist” organizations like J Street. It’s not enough for its candidates to oppose arms sales to and diplomatic support for Israel and to demand an end to the occupation. They must also support a one-state Palestine that mimics the multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-religious ideal of the United States in a region long dominated by ethno-religious states. It’s not enough, in other words, to back Palestinian self-determination, whether it takes the form of one state or two. That doctrinaire and wrong-headed stance has prevented DSA from backing politicians like Brad Lander, who won the Democratic primary for Congress last week against an opponent who refuses to use the word “occupation.”

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The country’s three most prominent democratic socialists, Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani, when asked what they mean by socialism, describe it as an extension of liberal democracy and social-democracy. Mamdani, when asked, has responded, “When we talk about my politics, I call myself a democratic socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. King from decades ago who said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’”

In a television interview, Denver Democratic Congressional candidate Melat Kiros, who is backed by DSA, was asked what she tells voters about socialism:

For in this race, yeah, well, first I’ll tell them that we already have socialism, right?

It’s in the roads that we drive on, it’s in our fire stations, it’s in the public schools we send our kids to. What I’m calling for is the same security that we have in those institutions to be in our health care, to be in our access to nutritional food, to be in making sure that we have universal childcare and universal elder care. We’re embarking on a new era.

Right now, where AI is going to change the entirety of our labor economy as we know it and we’re not ready, we’re not ready for what it looks like when all these jobs potentially

get taken away and wiped out by machinery and if that happens, we need to make sure that people’s basic needs are protected and that’s only through programs that would be socialist.

That answer is pitch-perfect. And I would hope that she believes it and is not providing a bowdlerized version of what she really believes socialism to be. A division between the private and public articulation of belief has characterized the old Communist left as well as many sectarian movements on the right like the Christian Coalition. It attracts converts who enjoy the arcane private language but eventually dooms a group to irrelevance.

Sanders, AOC, Mamdani and at least some of the current candidates also do not share the extreme cultural positions of DSA. Kiros, for instance, backed away from DSA’s support for open borders. But some of the current candidates do not. A great deal of attention has been given to Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. Chevalier has been widely criticized for her past tweets, which she has deleted. Those tweets concern me less than the positions she currently holds, which as evidenced in a long interview she gave during the campaign, include open borders, opposition to the deportation of violent criminals, voting rights for non-citizens, and the abolition of prisons. She displayed a riveting concern for criminals, whom she sees as the product of a flawed society, and a shocking indifference to the victims of crime and to the cause of public safety. She may moderate her views once she gets to Congress, but at the present, her views represent the worst of DSA’s cultural insularity. Mamdani’s endorsement of her candidacy also raises questions about his political judgment and about what he really believes.

My hope, as expressed here, is that DSA and the left embrace the version of democratic socialism that Sanders promoted in his campaigns and abandon the extremes of our current culture war. It needs to set its sights on a politics that can appeal outside Brooklyn’s “commie corridor.” If it does so, and if it lays asides its fantasies of breaking with the Democratic Party and forming its own “mass socialist party,” it can facilitate the Democratic Party becoming a democratic socialist party. That won’t ensure victory, but it will put socialism on the American agenda in a way that it never has been, and that until recently I never believed it would be.