Don’t Stop Agitating: A Treatise on the Left.
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Don’t Stop Agitating. You don’t have to belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). You don’t have to know anyone who is a part of it. You don’t even have to know anything about it for it to impact our politics. But we should all understand its role in this political moment.
DSA is the socialist organization of record today, but it has deep intellectual roots in socialist movements of the past. More importantly, it represents a path forward that incorporates modern challenges. Justice issues related to gender, race and climate are infused into the DSA platform, broadening its scope beyond labor and class. This multi-tendency approach is both a strength and a weakness, and it’s important to grapple with this tension lest we allow the opposition to define the movement.
Now for the hard part. Defining the opposition.
Republicans and right-wingers of all stripes are ideologically opposed to what DSA represents. It’s where we’re going to focus today. The bigger oppositional threat is among Democrats and self-proclaimed liberals who are filled with anger at the growing movement to their left. Focusing on how the right wing is approaching DSA actually sheds light on the liberals. I’ll make that make sense as we go along.
The afterbirth of Clintonism, signified by the likes of James Carville and Neera Tanden, likes to cackle and snort at the true left. These are the neoliberals and war hawks who are pro-police, pro-Israel and pro-status quo. They’ve made fortunes in the liberal establishment, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to be displaced by a bunch of commie-Muslim brats from Portland and Queens. If you want a nuanced take on the rise of DSA, you’d do better to look further right. All the way right, in fact.
As I’ve often said, we don’t have to speculate on the right-wing agenda. They write it all down. The upside of a movement that begins in think tanks is that we have great visibility into the way they think. Their white papers become op-eds that turn to talking points that become legislative agendas. And right now, they’re thinking a lot about DSA.
Let’s go through some highlights to see what we can glean. I’ve pulled commentary from three reliably right-wing sources—the Manhattan Institute (TMI), Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Before we dig in, it’s important to sit in discomfort. Understand that these people are practiced in the art of deception, but their critiques are often founded in uncomfortable truths. So listen closely and critically while resisting the urge to rage. Remember, they’re not rage-baiting. This is their internal dialogue.
Our first entry comes from a vice president at TMI:
“The DSA attracts people who have benefited from capitalism but feel cheated by it. It provides them with a moral vocabulary that gives them room to reinterpret personal disappointment as systemic injustice. And, most important, it gives them somewhere to go on a lonely Tuesday night, just as, for thousands of years, religion provided a social basis for Mormons on a Monday, Muslims on a Friday, Jews on a Saturday, and Christians on a Sunday.
“More than merely an organization with a platform, the DSA is an entire social world, just as a faith tradition is. It supplies friends, status, identity, rituals, instruction, practical obligations, and a story that situates the individual inside a world-historical struggle. For young people whose jobs feel precarious or pointless, or whose expensive educations have not produced the lives they expected, or whose families and religious institutions no longer provide a thick sense of belonging—or a combination of two or all three—the DSA is the answer to a prayer.”
Okay, pause.
The author is making a correct assertion on a false diagnosis. For our purposes I’m going beyond just DSA and expanding it to include those who are morally and spiritually aligned with its cause. Think of all those who are elated over Mamdani but who never thought once about joining a socialist organization. The assertion here is that the movement is fostering a sense of belonging akin to a sort of religious affiliation. I think that’s fair. But the claim is rooted in a sense of displacement attributed to the capitalist system. Partially fair.
Buried in the claim is a more precise accusation that recurs in the other passages we’ll analyze. This idea of disillusionment. Young people with expensive educations who believed they were following the rules, only to learn that the system no longer rewards their elitism. DSA is for those who were born on first base but thrown out trying to steal second. These aren’t the gritty labor socialists of yesteryear, but a cheap imitation that cannot reconcile their working-class status.
A senior fellow from AEI puts it more plainly:
“It is the feckless utopianism and anti-imperialist posturing of the dorm lounge and the Brooklyn brewpub — the politics of young, college-educated, downwardly mobile urbanites looking for a cause to organize their grievances. And it is a boutique passion: The group’s membership, even after a burst of growth in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York, is only about 120,000.”
There it is again. The “downwardly mobile.” More hostile class-adjacent language that explicitly characterizes this as a passing fancy of a generation that should be a bit more grateful or perhaps one that needs to work a bit harder.
Importantly, the author thinks little of the momentum:
“There is something touching in this starry-eyed vision, and it speaks to genuine anxieties. But it is an ideological fairy tale. It can deliver wasteful political theater such as government-run grocery stores. It might win a hearing for Medicare-for-all, at least until Americans learn about the sacrifices it would entail. It can provide a degree of meaning and social connection to a privileged urban cohort determined, in classic fashion, to shock the bourgeoisie.
“But don’t expect the DSA to unite the workers of the world or even to take over the Democratic Party. Americans are disgruntled, but they won’t be duped by cosplaying revolutionaries.”
“Cosplaying revolutionaries.” Don’t be angry, be critical. In these words there is great opportunity for organizers and activists, which I’ll explain in a bit.
TMI refers to the cosplayers as “left-behinders”:
“These left-behinders feel as if the high towers of the academic and cultural elite guaranteed them continued standing that they no longer possess. Their education has furnished them with the language and confidence to challenge the social order, while their frustration gives them the motive. Some become what Turchin calls counter-elites: ambitious organizers who mobilize popular resentment against the system that denied them the standing they believe they’ve earned.”
When it comes to tactics, there are two that surface in these readings. The first is that the right wing isn’t all that concerned with the rise of the DSA. In fact, it’s rather welcoming because it views this as a wound on the left that simply needs a little salt. Continue to portray left-wing voters as disillusioned, young, entitled, highly educated rich kids and let Democrats do the rest.
The second is how the right should position itself against the far-left flank should it gather additional momentum. This is where AFP has some notes:
“The DSA agenda would give government far more power over every day [sic] economic life.
“Government wouldn’t just set the rules. It would own or control more businesses and industries — from energy and housing to health care and major corporations. That means the same government deciding the rules would be the landlord, the health insurer, the energy provider, or the owner of major businesses. America’s constitutional tradition was designed to keep power in check and leave broad space for private enterprise.
“The DSA agenda would put much more power — political and economic — into government hands and leave that power unchecked.”
There’s nothing new here. It’s the classic “states’ rights” argument that has Jeffersonian roots. This is one of the strongest continuums in all of American history. From Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, to the pro-slavery Democratic Party, through to the Dixiecrats and modern-day Republicans, anti-federalism is a time-honored and racist tradition. And it’s been hugely successful.
But it’s also their blind spot.
Republicans are underestimating the growing anger towards corporatism. Think about the assertion that “the same government deciding the rules would be the landlord, the health insurer, the energy provider, or the owner of major businesses.” Their ignorance is showing. They’re so detached from the reality on the ground that they’re unaware of how appealing these ideas are to most people. Rent and mortgage rates are too high everywhere. Health insurance is becoming an unreachable luxury again. Energy prices are through the roof. To suggest that private enterprise can solve the problems it has generated is fairly outrageous. And that’s a good thing for the left.
The conservatives know they’re in a bind. It’s why they talk about “genuine anxieties,” “disgruntled Americans,” and “popular resentment.” The fact that their response to this is to belittle the members of an organization tapping into all of these fears while simultaneously dismissing them is a statement. It tells us that they believe they’ve already won the larger messaging battle because no one could possibly believe these new messengers.
This is why you don’t have to be a DSA member for the DSA to continue racking up victories. The right wing thinks the battle is already won because their liberal counterparts in the establishment will do the heavy lifting. And this is where we need to learn from history.
They’re not wrong. The biggest threat to the socialist movement of the early 20th century was unions. Socialists of this era foresaw the evils of capitalism and agitated for a new system. But the unions had the numbers and the organizational capacity to distribute messaging and bring capital to heel through labor actions. But it’s important to remember that unions are designed to exist with the wage labor system. Socialist parties and unions might be aligned against the capital class but the goals are distinct. One seeks to upend the system while the other seeks to gain more from it.
What’s fascinating about DSA is that it organizes like a trade union but with old-school socialist principles. As AEI points out, there are only about 120,000 national members, even though the website claims about 95,000. Compare that to the amount of energy it generates and electoral successes thus far and you have to appreciate just how many weight classes this fighting group has jumped.
Which brings me back to how the conservative critiques shed light on the liberal establishment. They’re dismissive of the movement because they think they’re just ungrateful, mostly young, predominantly people of color—or privileged and disillusioned white kids—from urban areas. If these kids were Republicans, the Republicans would still hate them, so I wouldn’t sweat it. But let them peer down their noses while the momentum gathers. The problem on the left is that these right-wing narratives are taking hold in the establishment. So now you have the Neera Tandens of the world carrying the messaging water for conservatives by saying “these aren’t our people” because they’re against Israel’s right to exist, therefore antisemitic, and they want to defund the police.
People like this are digging their own political grave because they’re out of step with sentiment. Younger voters are engaged and informed enough to know the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And they’re nuanced enough to know that ICE is a very modern construct that needs to be eliminated and that domestic law enforcement needs to be demilitarized. The more conservative Democrats try to impugn this wing of the party, the faster they’ll be relegated to the wastebasket of history.
As for why I say the conservative framing of DSA provides an opportunity for the left, the rationale is implicit in the critique. Cosplaying revolutionaries. Downwardly mobile. The left-behinders. Just a bunch of well-to-do educated kids who can’t believe they have to work for a living. Things are hard, so it must be capitalism’s fault.
Yeah. It is. While they write their op-eds and cast aspersions on young voters, DSA is quietly mobilizing in their hometowns and districts. DSA candidates aren’t just winning in New York City. Moreover, DSA isn’t the only game in town. Working Families. Authentically left Democrats. Social Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed who have rejected the DSA label but who agitate for a new politics of collectivism.
Both Democrats and Republicans are now turning their backs on the heartland and the genuine grievances of the greater American population. The more they join arms to sneer at the organizing efforts of the only movement that both calls out the problem and offers solutions, the more out of step they appear. Republicans get the first half. They know people are disillusioned with capitalism. But they’re the proverbial hammer that sees everything as a nail. Capitalism favors the corporate class and they have only more corporatism to offer. People aren’t buying it.
Democrats, on the other hand, are still offering support for capitalism. It’s a badge of honor among establishment Democrats to suggest that they are pro-capitalism, but a more humanistic version of it. In the same way that conservatives built their agenda around the “othering” of immigrants and academia, DSA is building an agenda that “others” the billionaires and corporations.
Our job is to continue promoting this narrative. And to ground our expectations in what I’ll call “optimistic reality.”
I was listening to a podcast recently where the host and guest were opining over the failures of DSA, left movements, AOC, Mamdani and all things on the left. These are useful discussions because we must always hold power to account. But it also revealed a level of political immaturity. Americans are and have always been inculcated with a false sense of idealism rooted in our founding. The American Revolution was an earth-shattering feat in that it was the realization of Enlightenment theory. This idea that a democratic state could break from monarchical shackles and govern itself is something that we shouldn’t diminish. The greatest European intellectuals of the age marveled at this accomplishment, something we take for granted these days.
But the very same story was also steeped in racism, xenophobia and white Christian elitism. We can hold both thoughts at the same time.
We have never fully lived up to the principles set forth in our founding documents. They have always been aspirational. The ruling class of this country gave us the poetry of liberty but the Constitution grounded us in a different form of aristocracy. Those on the true left who criticize the likes of DSA and political avatars of elected leftists such as AOC and Mamdani seem to think we’re much further ahead in this battle than we are. That’s why it’s important to look to history to locate the inflection points of past failures. Like the misalignment between trade unions and socialists.
The biggest victory the socialists of the early 20th century chalked up was the election of Theodore Roosevelt and the establishment of the progressive movement. Teddy wasn’t half the reformer Eugene Debs was, but he was a break from the establishment. Progressivism was born not in response to conservatism of the day but to the socialist movement. That’s where we are in this renewed battle because we lost the last one to the Great Depression. Sure, the New Deal was its own revival of left ideals, but any competent socialist will tell you that these were reforms designed to intubate capitalism and mitigate its excesses.
Bernie Sanders is the modern-day Eugene Debs. The man who ran and ran again but didn’t quite make it. Doesn’t mean the experiment failed. Bernie succeeded by giving the Occupy generation the language of class dissent that had evaporated from the activist lexicon. And in typical fashion, the establishment fought back and tried to suppress those urges.
But unlike the Debs era, we have the benefit of a money-printing machine that, for now at least, has the power to prevent another Great Depression. And so the circumstances have fundamentally changed, though the oppositional forces remain the same.
When I hear leftists criticize AOC for funding Israel’s Iron Dome or Zohran for keeping Tisch as the head of police, I get it. But understand that our elected officials are nothing more than a reflection of sentiment. The sentiment in this country is beginning to shift because organizations like the DSA are shaping the narrative by knocking on doors and surfacing candidates who are ready to do the work. The conservatives are shaping the narrative by insisting that private industry can do the job better than the government while private industry continues to fail the masses.
Everyone is doing their job except for the Democratic Party. The reason they’re not funding Angie Nixon’s campaign in Florida is because she’s putting in the work and striking a nerve. The reason they’re shit-talking Abdul El-Sayed is because he’s putting in the work and striking a nerve. And the reason they cannot bring themselves to support Mamdani is because he’s actually doing the work and so far it’s undeniable.
Stop trying to woo conservatives. Either they’ll come over or they won’t. Doesn’t matter. The true battle begins after Democrats take the House, and they will. They might even take the Senate. But for the establishment Democrats, no matter how this is achieved—with DSA candidates or not—they’ll consider this the finish line. Because they’re careerists. Their finish line is our starting line. And the DSA is the organization that has been creating the narrative conditions for future victories. That’s why you don’t need to know who they are or what they do to benefit from their organizational prowess. Our job is to build a pressure campaign of ideas that become so undeniable the establishment has no option but to embrace them.
You can browbeat AOC and Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and even Zohran Mamdani all you want. But to get what you want you have to say what you want. The DSA endgame isn’t radical. Stacking the courts. Nationalizing energy and big tech. Eradicating ICE. Amending the Constitution. FDR threatened to stack the courts. Most industrialized nations have nationalized energy and routinely block, sue and browbeat tech firms. ICE is a modern paramilitary group that upends the notion of posse comitatus. The Constitution is mostly amendments; that’s why they’re called that. None of these are radical notions. But forget radical. They seem impossible. Almost antithetical to…I don’t know…America.
That’s how far we have to go. That’s how badly we’ve lost since the days of Debs.
So let the conservatives think we’re “cosplaying” the revolution. Let the establishment continue to withhold funding from those who are putting in the work. But talk about and actualize the accomplishments of the sewer socialist in Manhattan who’s showing what success looks like. When AEI says we “might win a hearing for Medicare-for-all,” we need to make it more than a hearing.
It took neoliberals 50 years to wholly declare victory over the American political and economic system. It’s only been 15 since Occupy when the language of worker dissent was finally rekindled. The neoliberal movement toiled in obscurity in think tanks, boardrooms and retreats until an economic catastrophe known as stagflation upended the country. And within a few short years Ronald Reagan was elected.
That’s how quickly these things happen when you’re prepared. Don’t let the DSA’s foot soldiers be laid to waste like prior socialist movements by the institutional rot of career Democrats. These are early days. Embrace the change. Change the narrative. |
Other things I’m obsessing over…
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