The Sane NYC DSA vs the Crazy National DSA- A Guide for the Perplexed

If you are confused about what DSA is, the answer is that it is two very different organizations that I don't think can coexist for much longer

For anyone thrilled by the Democratic Socialists of America right now, and there’s plenty to be thrilled about, or for those horrified by its rise, the organization can be hard to recognize from one story to the next.

In one telling, DSA is the most effective left electoral operation in the country. It helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York last year, the first candidate for the office to clear a million votes since 1969. And this past month its New York candidates ran the table: three Mamdani-backed congressional insurgents won their primaries, two of them by knocking off sitting Democratic incumbents. Brad Lander buried two-term Rep. Dan Goldman in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn with two-thirds of the vote, Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat uptown, and Claire Valdez, a former union organizer, took an open Brooklyn-Queens seat. Down the ballot, DSA-backed candidates picked up seats in the state legislature too. (Lander was endorsed by Mamdani but was not officially endorsed by DSA, although many DSAers no doubt supported his campaign.)

In the other telling, the one that fills profiles in the national press, DSA is a sect so consumed by purity tests that it seeks to destroy the Democratic party while issuing foreign-policy manifestos that read like dispatches from a 1970s Marxist splinter group. Jonathan Chait wrote a screed for The Atlantic yesterday that described DSA as an “illiberal” and immoral force that is a cancer in the Democratic Party.

It’s almost hard to believe they’re the same organization.

They aren’t, really. The pragmatic politics of the New York City chapter, with its broad neighborhood alliances and its block-by-block canvassing and its willingness to back candidates who can actually win and then govern, is radically at odds with the national leadership of DSA, which is dominated by sectarian ideologues and has at points actively worked to undermine the very approach that makes New York succeed.

How AOC Illustrates the National-Local Split in DSA

Nothing shows the gap better than New York’s other star socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).

AOC largely wrote the script that Lander, Valdez, and Avila Chevalier ran last month. In 2018 she walked into a primary nobody was contesting and knocked off Joseph Crowley, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus and a man widely tipped as a future Speaker. It was the biggest upset of that cycle, and it taught a whole movement that the machine could be beaten.

You’d think AOC is DSA’s flagship endorsement. Nationally, she isn’t. While New York City chapter continues to endorse her, in 2024, the national leadership stripped its endorsement from her. The reason given was that she was too soft on Israel, and even, horrors, took part in a forum on antisemitism.

So the national DSA decided that AOC, one of the strongest voices in the House for Palestinian rights and a member who has spent more political capital on that cause than almost anyone in Congress, was too much of a Zionist ally to back. That judgment basically summarizes how insanely sectarian the majority of DSA national leadership is at this point compared to the pragmatic, sane politics of NYC’s chapter.

As Does the Bowman Purge

The same logic, in a more destructive form, played out with Jamaal Bowman.

In 2020 Bowman ran on an unapologetic defense of Palestinian rights and knocked off Eliot Engel, the sixteen-term chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of Israel’s most reliable allies in Congress. He was exactly the kind of win DSA exists to produce.

Then Bowman cast a few votes the sectarian wing of DSA couldn’t abide, most prominently for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile system, and he took a trip to Israel with the liberal Jewish group J Street. That set off a campaign to throw him out. Beginning with the Madison, Wisconsin chapter in October 2021, a reported 28 city and regional chapters, plus 11 campus YDSA chapters, demanded Bowman be censured or expelled from DSA. For most of 2021 and 2022 it’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the national organization was consumed by the question of whether to throw one of its only members of Congress out the door.

The leadership declined to expel him in the end, but it refused to re-endorse him. Two years later Bowman lost his primary to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who rode roughly $15 million in AIPAC-aligned super PAC money through the most expensive House primary in American history. So the net result of the left’s two-year inquisition was to help replace one of the House’s strongest voices for Palestinian rights with a dependable vote for Israel. New York DSA did endorse Bowman in 2024, but late, and without the machine it would throw behind the Mamdani slate two years later. The contrast was the whole story: base-building in New York, self-immolation at the national level.

The point is that the organization’s two halves run on entirely different logics. Notably, Chait in his Atlantic piece did not once discuss these tensions, did not mention the existence of Jamaal Bowman, and barely mentioned AOC’s role.

But these differences aren’t exclusive to New York City. Another clear parallel is DSA House member Rashida Tlaib, elected the same year as AOC, who works with a Metro Detroit chapter built on the same patient, coalition-minded organizing, and which was, tellingly, not among the chapters demanding Bowman’s head. A few chapters like New York and Metro Detroit have real roots in their communities and can carry candidates into local office and, now and then, into Congress. Outside New York City, we just saw this spring additional DSA members, Chris Rabb of Philadelphia and Melat Kiros in Colorado, winning primaries on the same model.

The Sectarian Principles in National DSA Leadership

This is in contrast to the multiple DSA chapters that practice a narrow sectarian politics and supported delegates to national leadership that have promoted the embarrassing political pronouncements that reporters now regularly repeat. The sectarianism shows most plainly in foreign policy. The national DSA office opposed military aid to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and called for the United States to pull out of NATO. Its platform has in the past called for abolishing USAID, which lands it, awkwardly, on the same side as Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s wrecking ball. And back when Maduro still ran Venezuela, the national organization sent a delegation to Caracas that handed the regime exactly the legitimacy it was looking for- and then in 2024 condemned the Venezuelan opposition and the media for criticizing the validity of the elections.

When Russia was getting ready to invade Ukraine in January 2022, the national DSA International Committee blamed NATO and the US in a statement titled “DSA IC opposes US militarization and interventionism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and calls for an end to NATO expansionism.” After the Russian invasion, I detailed in this piece why defending Ukraine should be a core commitment of the global left and in a followup piece on why Ukraine was a class war against Putin’s white oligarchic petrocapitalism- issues that national DSA largely ignored. What is striking about the DSA national analysis is how locked into Cold War nostrums on Russia as an opponent of US imperialism, almost as if Putin still embodied some kind of socialist alternative to US hegemony.

Gaza was of course the issue where sectarian politics burst out in national headlines, as a faction of the far left, primarily led by what is known as the ANSWER coalition - itself a front group for the Party of Socialism & Liberation (PSL), would regularly praise Hamas and embarrass the rest of the pro-Palestinian movement. Yet national DSA would continue to cosponsor national marches and national actions with ANSWER (see here and here).

While NYC DSA notoriously promoted on twitter (although did not formally endorse) an ANSWER rally on October 8th, where Hamas’ actions were praised, the local leadership quickly apologized for its promotion of the rally— and AOC, Jamaal Bowman and other prominent DSA members condemned it as well. Going forward NYC DSA did not cosponsor any rallies with ANSWER! and instead allied with other groups in events with Jewish Voice for Peace NYC and with local labor unions opposed to Israel’s war.

This strategic pluralistic approach by NYC DSA in opposition to Israeli brutality is in sharp contrast to national DSA’s ongoing embrace of ANSWER which extends to cosponsoring rallies with them this year against the Iran war.

So who is ANSWER/PSL and Why is National DSA Allied with Them?

I did a deep dive on the history and politics of PSL/ANSWER soon after the Oct 8th rally in this piece, but the summary is that they are a tendency whose roots go back to 1956 by leftists who felt other leftists were insufficiently supportive of Soviet tanks killing protesters in Hungary. They would go on to become the primary defenders of Stalinist regimes around the world— and to this day tend to praise North Korea as the embodiment of the socialist ideal.

They view the United States as a violent oppressive regime that causes mass murder around the world — a view I like many leftists share (see my Case for Hating America) — but what distinguishes PSL/ANSWER is they translate this into defending any regime that opposes the U.S., no matter how heinous that regime’s own crimes. Thus, their defense of every nasty regime ranging from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Putin’s Russia. (If interested, you can read more about the organization by a top leader of PSL in this public resignation letter, where he denounces its corruption and sectarian approach.)

As to PSL’s influence in DSA, that stems from the upsurge in DSA membership following Bernie’s run for President in 2016. While many Bernie activists just were looking for a new activist home after the campaign, a number of sectarian groups saw that surge as an opportunity to join DSA and try to take it over. In established chapters like NYC, the new membership pushed the chapter’s politics leftward but were offset by existing members and many sane political newcomers.

But on top of 30-40 existing DSA chapters, there was an explosion of roughly 160-170 completely new chapters chartered in those years. Many of those chapters were especially easy for sectarian individuals and groups to commandeer and in national conventions, there was suddenly a deluge of delegates that promoted PSL-like viewpoints. Whether they were secret PSL members or just sympathetic to their viewpoint, official factions with names like the Marxist Unity Group and Red Star began electing leaders to DSA’s national body.

None have majority control unto themselves, but they have built a working alliance of sectarians willing to ally with ANSWER! among their other projects.

Red Star in particular is well organized — and one of the two DSA national co-chairs, Megan Romer, is from Red Star and the faction’s view of foreign policy lines up perfectly with PSL, summed up in this part of their Points of Unity:

Red Star strives to weaken and ultimately dismantle US empire. We acknowledge that while no political project is perfect, to publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the US State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine. There is no such thing as a third camp; one is either working to support American imperialism or to oppose it.

So if the US is supporting Ukraine, Red Star supports Russia. If the US criticizes China for cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, Red Star sides with China. And so on.

That a Red Star member is co-chair of national DSA explains many of the insane and politically toxic statements that the press finds to quote.

The other part of this sectarianism is that Red Star and its allies in national DSA leadership would prefer a third party completely separate from the Democrats and, at best, see running candidates on the Democratic Party line as purely tactical. They hate that AOC supported Biden and Harris, describing this as “capitulation to the Democratic Party establishment” and they see candidates like AOC as preventing DSA from being able to “detach ourselves from the Democratic Party apparatus.”

So this is the source of the ideological insanity we see coming from national DSA.

Why Tension Between National DSA and Locals like NYC will Blow Up the Organization

At some point, this divergence is going to cause a split in the organization.

While DSA has 100,000 paid members, most don’t vote in delegate elections to DSA’s national convention— and those that do vote tend to have the most extreme viewpoints, particularly in the smaller chapters that were often created by sectarian activists who discourage “paper members” from even voting. So a well-organized set of super-active ideologues is able to commandeer the national leadership.

But in successful local chapters, especially those which are winning elected offices, the dynamic is the exact opposite. To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.

And it’s not just Mamdani winning in New York, but notably the two recent victories by DSA chapters in Philadelphia and Colorado that illustrate this dynamic. Both Chris Rabb in Philadelphia and Melat Kiros in Colorado, while militant defenders of Palestinian rights, have publicly rejected the foreign policy line of the Red Star-style DSA leadership in explicitly supporting Ukraine. Rabb in a local opinion piece directly compared “Russia’s bloodthirsty conquest of the Ukraine” to the “slaughter of more than 70,000 Palestinians in an ongoing genocide”, while Colorado’s Kiros explicitly repudiated key national DSA positions on pulling out of NATO and a number of other national DSA positions.

As the DSA contingent in Congress grows, DSA elected leaders along with the chapters that support them are going to be in inevitable conflict with a national leadership issuing embarrassing pronouncements that will fail to build effective electoral campaigns.

At some point the elected leaders will either leave DSA or help lead a split in the organization. There is plenty of precedent for this.

Back in 1936, much of the New York City chapter of the Socialist Party seceded to form the American Labor Party, a ballot line designed so socialists could vote for FDR against the wishes of the then-leadership of the Socialist Party. Today’s Working Families Party in NYC and in other states — notably Pennsylvania where they were another key organization supporting Rabb — sees the American Labor Party as its own model.

DSA itself is the product of a later split in the Socialist Party over Vietnam, DSA emerged then under the leadership of writer-activist Michael Harrington and a number of US labor leaders after a merger with another group, the New American Movement (NAM) which itself had split off from other sectarian groups in the New Left.

If I had to guess, the sequence of events most likely to lead to a new split is that AOC decides to run for President, the national leadership refuses to endorse her, and a number of larger locals around the country do endorse her— and as volunteers swell the ranks of the endorsing chapters, that leads to those chapters seceding because they don’t feel a need to chain themselves to a national office out-of-touch with their goals.

My Personal Take on DSA at This Point

One of the most irritating things about Chait’s dishonest Atlantic screed is that he describes a North Star caucus of DSA’s traditional members who formed to oppose the national leadership’s drift into sectarianism— and then describes a resignation letter as if that group was repudiating all of DSA’s politics, not just the sectarian leadership’s irresponsible alliance with groups like PSL.

As both a founding member and early leader of North Star and one of the signers of that resignation letter, I can say with full confidence that essentially all of the people Chait is talking about remain fans of AOC and the kind of politics Mamdani is promoting in NYC. All are militantly critical of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians. They just differ with the ideological rhetoric and alliances with dictatorial regimes that the Red Star type factions like. But that’s completely separate from a shared view that the corporate dominance of many parts of the Democratic Party does need to be militantly challenged.

But Chait’s characterization of what NYC DSA is doing as trying to break the Democratic Party is ridiculous. Mamdani has bent over backward to work cooperatively with moderate Dem Governor Kathy Hochul and with moderate Dem City Council Speaker Julie Menin, just this week getting broad consensus agreement on a balanced budget for New York City. While DSA and Mamdani fought in a number of House seats, they specifically decided not to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, because they wanted to help Mamdani build support with the party establishment for concrete improvements in New Yorkers’ lives. That is not the “rule or ruin” organization Chait is trying to describe. Chait’s failure to distinguish between the national DSA leadership and NYC’s local chapter is the only way he was able to play the rhetorical game he did.

All of these tensions are complicated, since there are plenty of anti-sectarian folks fighting in locals across the country to move DSA in a better direction; in fact, most North Star members are still members of DSA doing just that, while there are great folks elected at the national level pushing for more sane national DSA policies.

The reverse is also true that there are plenty of sectarian tendencies in sane chapters like NYC. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani and DSA-endorsed candidate, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Tuesday’s primary, is a case in point. Deleted tweets about Ukraine, Stalin and other topics clearly align her ideologically in the past more with Red Star/PSL style sectarianism than AOC-Mamdani style rhetoric. But she claims to have evolved since then and I assume Mamdani did some vetting on that change before endorsing her.

But here’s the thing. Darializa is now going to be my Congresswoman and I voted for her without hesitation because I know she won’t vote to keep sending bombs to kill Palestinians and won’t vote for corporate corruption, like Espaillat did when he supported pro-crypto legislation. And if she continues to say stupid sectarian things, someone else can challenge her in a primary in two years - because that’s how democracy works. Voters can always vote for someone better, no matter how much the Democratic establishment has heart palpitations when DSA and other progressives challenge incumbents. Notably, Espaillat challenged incumbent Charlie Rangel back in 2014, so there is a lot of hypocrisy by those mad at Mamdani for supporting a primary challenge against Espaillat.

Personally, I want a national left organization to do what NYC DSA and other sane locals are doing all over the country without the idiotic national DSA ideological baggage. I’ve written that I want AOC to run for President less because I think she will win — although I think it’s possible — but because the campaign itself can help build the political infrastructure for that better than any other likely scenario.

If she doesn’t, I still think the tension between New York City along with other sane DSA locals versus the national leadership will come to a head, although the split is likely to be nastier and messier in that case. But that blow up is coming.