If Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, wins this fall’s election, he will occupy the most powerful executive position of any American socialist. At the moment, the closest contenders are two mayors in California and a county executive in Maryland. No wonder, then, that American socialists have begun to dream big.
Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, held its biannual convention in Chicago, attended by 1,500 members. There, the organization pledged to “build a broad left-labor coalition” and “draft a socialist candidate” to run for president in 2028.
Why shouldn’t they? Mamdani’s primary campaign in New York showed that an appealing socialist candidate with a strong economic message could generate voter enthusiasm. Nor is Mamdani the first: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain popular with the Democratic base, and just this year they brought out tens of thousands of supporters with their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. According to a recent poll, 67 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of all Americans under 30 years old view socialism favorably. And with 85,000 members, the DSA is already the country’s biggest leftist organization, larger even than the Communist Party during its heyday in the 1940s.
But such numbers don’t add up to much political power in a country of 340 million. DSA counts only three representatives in Congress and no senators (Sanders is sympathetic but has never been a member). For the average voter, even 10 years after Sanders’s historic presidential run, American socialists are simply not a distinct, recognizable political force. And the reasons for this failure were entirely manifest at the meeting in Chicago: A significant part of the organization doesn’t share its traditional concept of an electoral path to socialism.
Little about this convention suggested a mass political movement intent on winning elections and coming to power. Mamdani, AOC, and Sanders were absent, and so was their welcoming, practical political style. In fact, DSA’s national leadership has voted not to endorse AOC, and many in the organization are now actively hostile to her. Some even put forward a resolution at the convention to formally censure her for her “tacit support of Zionism,” on the grounds that she had supported the funding of defensive Iron Dome weapons for Israel, said that Israel had a right to self-defense, and “failed to support Palestinian resistance” in a media interview. (The resolution never reached a vote.) The mostly young and white crowd hardly discussed Donald Trump’s presidency (a motion that urged such discussion was voted down early on) and seemed to consist of a consortium of activists, many of them focused on single issues. Some were preoccupied with protesting the convention’s lack of a masking mandate.
Many of the resolutions passed at the convention would have been nonstarters for national politicians such as Sanders or AOC. One pledged for the DSA to be a “fighting anti-Zionist” organization that would endorse only candidates who supported the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement against Israel. (This would disqualify Sanders.) The resolution further called for any DSA member opposing BDS or affiliated with the liberal Jewish organization J Street to be expelled, along with anybody who believes that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Moreover, some incidents at the convention cast serious doubt on DSA’s commitment to the “democratic” part of its title. For example, the convention rejected an amendment to a resolution declaring that DSA stood “against all governments that engage in the repression of democratic rights.”
These were not the politics of DSA’s visionary founder, Michael Harrington. A Marxist who died in 1989, Harrington called for solidarity with leftist movements around the world but also staunchly opposed authoritarianism. Many in today’s DSA don’t have time for him. In response to a post on X affirming Harrington’s opposition to Stalin and Mao, DSA’s chapter in Worcester, Massachusetts, posted a video of an attendee at the convention shouting, “Fuck you, Mike Harrington!” The Worcester chapter celebrated that the organization had put “more communists in leadership,” making it the “largest org of socialists, antizionists, and commies.”
This is not rhetoric or politics that could win elections in America. But to understand the discrepancy between the politics on the DSA convention floor and that of America’s most popular socialist politicians requires a brief history. Harrington founded DSA in 1982 on the ashes of the Socialist Party of America, which had imploded a decade earlier, and the new party drew on the remnants of the youth- and student-led New Left of the 1960s. Unlike other American socialists, who would spend decades trying to establish an alternative to the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans, Harrington’s DSA was lodged within the Democratic Party and sought to build a base for the left inside of it. The strategy of the far-leftists produced little more than an alphabet soup of avowedly socialist organizations that rarely surpassed a few hundred members. DSA, too, was a tiny organization of little political account for many decades. But when American socialism finally got its lucky break in 2016, it did so because Sanders ran in the Democratic Party primary, not because socialists launched another quixotic third-party campaign. A surge of popularity for democratic socialism took DSA, within a year or two, from an organization of roughly 6,000 people, with an average age of about 67, to one with more than 30,000 members, and an average age of 33.
The infusion of new blood overwhelmed the organization’s leadership and suggested a need for some overhauling of its earlier mission. Some of the newcomers, including the young contributors and reading clubs gathered around the journal Jacobin, attempted to update Harrington’s Cold War–era socialism. But the wave of new members also included an inchoate collection of activists, and the organization swiftly became a big tent for all manner of leftist tendencies—including many that lacked any commitment to Harrington’s democratic tradition, some even holding that elections were a capitalist-state apparatus that socialists should not use to come to power.
DSA today has about two dozen internal factions (called “caucuses”), but its politics can really be divided into two broad wings. There is a mass-politics wing (grouped in the Socialist Majority and Groundwork caucuses), which seeks to elect socialists as Democrats and build a national organization that connects with the average American. Opposing it is a sectarian wing whose extremist politics have little to do with any notion of democratic socialism. The latter includes Red Star, a self-avowed “Marxist-Leninist caucus” that openly supports Hamas and emphasizes “the role of the vanguard in organizing the revolution.” Whereas the likes of Sanders have long lauded the New Deal, this group condemns that model as “extending concessions to the white working class to secure their loyalty to the capitalist state.” Similarly, it faults the Green New Deal that Sanders and AOC have championed for failing to articulate “a clear commitment to dismantling the settler-colonial and American imperialist projects.” Another caucus, Marxist Unity Group, calls for DSA “to free itself from the Democratic Party” and “fight to overthrow the Constitution,” in an effort to “destroy every institution that denies the people an authentic popular democracy, abolishing the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the independent presidency.”
The differences between these two broad groups are not academic, and they have had real-life consequences. Under the pressure of the sectarian wing, the DSA refused to endorse Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in the past two presidential elections. In November 2023, the sectarians in the DSA leadership argued that a second Biden term would be no different from a second Trump term. A few months later, when the mainstream wing wanted to commit the DSA to “work to defeat Trump in the 2024 election, without endorsing the Democratic nominee,” the sectarians voted even that proposal down.
Most DSA members don’t belong to any caucuses and don’t play an active role in the organization. But since 2023, the organization’s leadership has been effectively controlled by the sectarian wing, which won a majority in that year’s convention. As anybody with experience in politics can tell you, committed sectarian activists who show up to enough meetings can capture leadership positions and convention delegates without necessarily representing the organization’s actual membership. At the 2025 convention, the mainstream wing tried to pass a resolution for the leadership to be elected on the basis of one member, one vote, as opposed to being voted in by delegates to the convention (who are, in turn, elected by DSA’s local chapters). The sectarian wing opposed and defeated the resolution. The Chicago convention elected a 27-member leadership of which the sectarian wing controls about 12 seats. The mainstream wing has about nine seats, and the rest fall somewhere in the middle. The convention also reelected the party’s two co-chairs, one belonging to Groundwork, the other to Red Star.
The two wings are able to share power this way because DSA is extremely decentralized. The organization barely exists as a nationwide project. Instead, each branch does its own thing. By far the largest branch is the one in New York City, which has more than 11,000 members and is controlled by the mainstream wing. More than 80 percent of its membership in the Bronx and Queens voted to endorse AOC. The sectarian wing tends to dominate in smaller cities where it pursues a variety of projects. Such factionalism effectively prevents DSA from adopting any unified strategy.
The problem is not new on the left. Harrington himself once complained about a “vocal, and regularly televised, fringe of confrontationists, exhibitionists, and Vietcong flag wavers who could plausibly be dismissed as freakish, or sinister, or both.” Democratic socialists who seek to run mass campaigns and attain power with elections are now encumbered by sharing an organization with “confrontationists” who hold fundamentally antidemocratic beliefs. If they wish to build a political force capable of coming to power, they must first decide who their allies are.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
