Summary: The Democratic Socialists of America, an activist group, has no intention of becoming a full-fledged political party. There is no need. The socialist candidates it backs are winning elections, and it is already well-represented among sitting members of the U.S. Congress. One of its endorsed candidates recently defeated the fourth-highest-ranking member of the Democratic Party’s leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives, a development that led the media to shower the DSA with flattering publicity.
A radical leftist upstart’s unexpected trouncing of a key member of the House Democratic leadership in a primary is sending shockwaves through the Democratic Party establishment.
I refer to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and first-time candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at the time a 28-year-old of Puerto Rican ancestry, who crushed longtime U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley, a 56-year-old Irish-American Catholic, in the June 26 primary election for the 14th congressional district in New York, covering parts of the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. Crowley chairs the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest leadership position among House Democrats, and he was a leading contender to become House Speaker, if Democrats regained control of that chamber.
Ocasio-Cortez’s victory made her an instant star in leftist circles. Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Tom Perez promptly hailed her as “the future of our party.”
Ocasio-Cortez won by running on a far-left platform of abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, socializing health care by forcing everyone into Medicare, providing free college education, guaranteeing jobs for all, as well as passing a $15 per hour federal minimum wage. Ocasio-Cortez, who previously worked as an organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, garnered 57.5 percent of the vote, compared Crowley’s 42.5 percent.
Although Ocasio-Cortez bested Crowley almost everywhere in the district, Steven Romalewski, director of the Mapping Service at the City University of New York’s Center for Urban Research, found that upwardly-mobile voters were largely responsible for her victory. Her strongest support “came from areas like Astoria in Queens and Sunnyside in Queens and parts of Jackson Heights that, number one, were not predominantly Hispanic, so they’re a more mixed population, and are areas where—this is kind of a term of art—are in the process of being gentrified, where newer people are moving in,” he said in The Intercept.
Ocasio-Cortez may be determined and passionate, but she’s a political novice who often puts her foot in her mouth. In one media interview, the newly anointed leftist folk hero seemed to confuse ICE with the CIA. ICE’s “extrajudicial nature is baked into the structure of the agency and that is why they are able to get away with black sites at our border with the separation of our children,” she said on CNN June 27.
Ocasio-Cortez attacks more moderate Democrats for trying to impose any kind of restraint on federal spending, accusing them of pushing the notion that “we’re going to austerity our way into prosperity.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise win bears more than a passing resemblance to now-U.S. Rep. Dave Brat’s (R) unexpected primary victory over then-U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor in Virginia’s 7th district in 2014. At the time, Cantor was House majority leader, outranked only by then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio). Conservative and Tea Party revulsion at the GOP congressional leadership helped get the no-nonsense conservative economics professor over the finish line and helped to move House Republicans to the political right.
What Is the DSA?
This electoral upset has thrown a national spotlight on the DSA, an up-till-now fairly obscure leftist group that wields significant influence over the Left and the Democratic Party. As a group, the DSA aspires to overthrow the socioeconomic foundations of the United States. The Marxist DSA may be considered a small-c communist group. Its members seek the abolition, not the mere tempering or regulation, of capitalism.
“As a DSA chapter co-chair I just wanna set the record straight for a minute: communism is good,” Portland DSA co-chair Olivia Katbi Smith wrote June 30. The chair of DSA in Charlottesville, V.A., quoted Smith’s tweet, adding, “as a DSA chapter co-chair, I would like to cosign this pro-communist statement.” As The Daily Caller reported, DSA chairs in Seattle and Hudson County, N.J., also provided public statements of support.
Soon-to-be Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was only slightly less resolute than her DSA comrades. She comes close to saying she supports abolishing the free enterprise system and the precious economic freedoms on which it is based, which have made America wealthy beyond its founders’ wildest dreams.
Ocasio-Cortez breezily dismissed the current strength of the U.S. economy, claiming that the unemployment rate is low “only because Americans are working two jobs,” demonstrating profound ignorance of even basic economic principles. (The unemployment rate is the number of people in the job market who want to find employment and cannot find employment. The number of jobs people have has no bearing on the unemployment rate.) Capitalism is a fleeting phenomenon, she told PBS in an astounding display of historical ignorance.
I do think that right now, when we have this no-holds-barred Wild West hypercapitalism, what that means is profit at any cost. Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world. When this country started, we did not operate on a capitalist economy.
Asked if democratic socialism, the system to which Ocasio-Cortez claims allegiance, “calls for an end to capitalism,” the candidate said: “Ultimately, we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree, and it’s hard to say what direction that that takes …”
The interviewer interjected: “It sounds like you are skeptical that capitalism is going to continue to be the right answer.”
“Yeah, I think it’s, um, I think it’s, I think it’s at least a question,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think it’s absolutely a question.”
According to a Vox profile, DSA favors getting rid of capitalism “in favor of an economy run either by ‘the workers’ or the state—though the exact specifics of ‘abolishing capitalism’ are fiercely debated by socialists.”
Marxist academic-activist Frances Fox Piven, who used to be a member of DSA’s board, explained to Vox, “The academic debates about socialism’s ‘meaning’ are huge and arcane and rife with disagreements, but what all definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment.”
The Vox article stated that DSA’s August 2017 gathering in Chicago was the organization’s largest-ever convention, attracting 697 delegates from 49 states.
DSA began making inroads into the Democratic Party decades ago but failed to accomplish much in the electoral realm.
“Since it was founded in 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America has played virtually no role in the country’s elections,” Clint Hendler wrote in Mother Jones. “That’s begun to change, fueled by the organization’s 2016 endorsement of Bernie Sanders and a growth spurt led by the activists and organizers he inspired.”
“There’s a lot of fear in the establishment wing of the party, because this is a movement they cannot control,” Hendler quoted Jim Burn, former chairman of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s Democratic committee. “The fearmongers on the other side are taking a page from the Trump playbook and trying to bash them and label them, because they see their power slipping away.”
Origins
Here is how the group describes itself on its website:
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. We are a political and activist organization, not a party; through campus and community-based chapters, DSA members use a variety of tactics, from legislative to direct action, to fight for reforms that empower working people.
DSA was created in 1982 by the merger of the anti-Vietnam War group, Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), and the smaller New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was founded by socialist activist Michael Harrington (pictured above) in 1973. NAM grew out of the ashes of the rowdy antiwar group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which collapsed at the end of the 1960s, giving birth to the terrorist Weather Underground Organization of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
Harrington reportedly got his start in left-wing activism with Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker group in New York City. Probably the most prominent American socialist since Eugene V. Debs, Harrington wrote the seminal 1962 book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which had a dramatic influence on American social policy. Some credit it with inspiring President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Harrington also provided commentaries on National Public Radio in the 1980s, which allowed him to reach a fair-sized audience.
According to David Walls in The Activist’s Almanac, published in 1993 by Fireside,
Harrington argued a majority progressive movement could be built within the Democratic party by uniting the constituencies of the “three Georges”—George McGovern (middle-class liberals), George Meany (blue-collar, predominantly northern and urban unionists), and George Wallace (blue-collar, predominantly southern and non-union populists).
In-Your-Face Tactics
But there is a possibility that the activism of DSA members may spur a backlash and bring DSA’s influence on the Democratic Party to an abrupt end. For example, DSA activists use Saul Alinsky-approved tactics to get in the faces of their enemies.
DSA members harassed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen into abandoning her June 19th dinner at Washington’s MXDC Cocina Mexicana restaurant. (DHS is ICE’s parent agency.) The disrupters shouted “shame!” and “end family separation!” at Nielsen, who left the eatery without acknowledging the demonstrators.
“How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you’re deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people who come here seeking asylum in the United States?” a DSA member yelled at Nielsen. “We call on you to end family separation and abolish ICE.” DSAers also chanted, “Kirstjen Nielsen, you’re a villain, locking up immigrant children.”
The Washington, D.C., chapter of DSA broadcasted video of the protest on social media.
One of the disrupters has been identified as Allison B. Hrabar, a paralegal who works in the Technology and Financial Services Section of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. DOJ is reportedly investigating the incident but at time of writing hasn’t taken action against Hrabar, who studied at Swarthmore College.
“Oppressed people have never been given their rights by asking politely,” Hrabar said. “Kirstjen Nielsen is not going to be convinced by us politely saying ‘could you maybe not separate children from their families? Could you maybe stop detaining and deporting migrants who have done nothing wrong?’”
No party? No problem
While the DSA may not be a political party, it still aims to elect socialists, as its national director Maria Svart acknowledged to CNN earlier this year.
Asked to explain the fundamental difference between the politics of DSA and those of Bernie Sanders, she said:
Well, we have one foot inside the Democratic Party and one foot outside the Democratic Party in the same way we have one foot inside electoral politics and one foot outside. Our vision is to build a mass, multi-racial, working-class movement that brings people together across our differences and demands that our society and our economy be run democratically. Most of us believe that this will not work under capitalism. Our north star is totally transforming the system, even though our immediate vision and our immediate political program is similar to Bernie Sanders’. What’s different is we want to democratize everything, ultimately. That’s the goal.
It is easier to advance socialism by not making the DSA a full-fledged political party because there are “institutional barriers” for any new party, Svart said.
But we also want to maintain the flexibility of being within the left wing of the Democratic Party, but also being outside of it. We see our role now as shifting the Overton window—shifting the acceptable discourse, while also organizing people and building concrete power with a politically aware grassroots base that understands who the enemy is and is willing to hold politicians accountable. But that flexibility is important.
Structure
The DSA has two nonprofit arms. One is a social welfare/lobbying organization; the other is an educational organization. Its youth wing is called Young Democratic Socialists. DSA’s quarterly journal is called Democratic Left. It also publishes Religious Socialism, which the group describes as “a publication dedicated to people of faith and socialism.”
Democratic Socialists of America Inc. is DSA’s New York-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit. It describes its mission as “public education about democratic socialism,” according to its most recent publicly available IRS filing from 2016.
DSA runs on a shoestring. In 2016, it only spent $479,962. Its total revenue was $861,265, including $376,946 in member dues and $475,835 in “[a]ll other contributions, gifts, grants, and similar amounts not included above.” The group, like all 501(c)(4) nonprofits, is not required to publicly disclose the identities of its donors.
In this reporting period, it had six employees, 600 volunteers, and net assets of $557,596 at the end of the year. Maria Svart is listed as the group’s national director, drawing an annual salary of $68,338.
DSA is governed by a 16-person board of directors known as the National Political Committee (NPC) that is elected every two years by delegates at DSA’s National Convention. “The DSA Constitution requires that eight slots of the NPC be reserved for women, and that at least five of the NPC slots be reserved for people of color,” the group’s website states.
DSA’s 501(c)(3) sister organization is Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Inc. On its most recent publicly available IRS filing from 2016, the group stated that its “primary exempt purpose” was to “promote understanding of democratic soci[alism].” Svart was identified as its executive director but no salary was provided for her position. The 501(c)(3) disclosed a 2016 budget of $75,502 and net assets of $90,633 at year’s end.
DSA has a handful of small political action committees at the national and local levels. Democratic Socialists of America, Inc. PAC reported having just $659.01 on hand as of Jan. 1, 2018. It reported independent expenditures of $87,266 to the Federal Election Commission in a disclosure document from Dec. 31, 2016. Unsurprisingly, almost all of the money ($86,660) was spent to support Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy.
In the Keystone State, there is something called the Political Action Committee of the Pittsburgh Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, known as Pittsburgh DSA PAC. According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, the PAC raised $2,884 and spent $1,919.84 this year, which includes trivial sums spent to support DSA-endorsed candidates for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato.
There is also a Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America Solidarity PAC, known as MDC DSA Solidarity PAC. According to the Maryland State Board of Elections, as of June 15, the PAC had a bank account balance of $1,113.55. It reported taking in $720 in contributions, along with $1,000 from non-federal out-of-state committees. It was unclear from the legal filings what expenditures the PAC made.
On the Rise
DSA is on the rise because it is riding a wave of leftist discontent against the Trump administration and perhaps because Bernie Sanders popularized the “democratic socialist” label during his 2016 presidential run. (Perhaps our government-run K-12 schools and institutions of higher education also bear some responsibility for failing to teach the dangers of socialist principles or the history of the United States.) Barack Obama’s election helped to reduce some of the stigma traditionally associated with socialism, a development reflected in popular culture in the famous “We’re all socialists now” Newsweek cover story from early 2009. More recently, the Left’s hatred of President Trump has pushed DSA membership nationwide to a reported 45,000.
DSA may be growing, but it is still comparatively small in the world of left-activism. For example, the National Education Association (NEA) has 2.7 million members, and the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is strongly associated with Barack Obama, has 1.9 million members.
What is happening now is that DSAers from outside the formal party structure are causing huge ripples in the media ecology by tossing out Democrat office-holders in insurgent primary campaigns. DSAers have been succeeding at the state and local level, but they haven’t been knocking off Democrat office-holders in large numbers at the national level.
At the state level, for example, DSA-endorsed social worker Kara Eastman defeated Brad Ashford, a former congressman who was backed by the Democrat establishment, in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district this May. She supports raising taxes, decriminalizing marijuana, and imposing universal background checks on gun purchases. “I’m tired of hearing Democrats don’t have a backbone, that we don’t stand for anything,” she said in a campaign ad. “That changes now!” Eastman faces incumbent U.S. Rep. Don Bacon (R) in November.
By contrast, at the national level, Ocasio-Cortez is the only DSA-endorsed candidate to take out a sitting U.S. congressman. While her victory is important and is clearly helping her shape party policy, it’s not quite the watershed event leftists build it up to be. It is more like an excuse, or permission, from the party’s radical electoral base to become even more radical.
Some might say there is no civil war raging within the Democratic Party. There is no reason to have one. Democrats, in this writer’s view, are already so far to port that there is not much farther they can go. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank observed :
Analyses indicate that first-time Democratic candidates this year tend to be more liberal than incumbents, but the entire party has moved to the left. There is no “civil war” within the party because no one is pushing back against the progressives’ rise—a rise that comes in reaction to Trump but also reflects the growing prominence of women, minorities and young voters in the electorate.
However, some Democrats are hedging their bets. Some longtime Democrat lawmakers have bristled at Ocasio-Cortez’s aggressive rhetoric and distanced themselves from it. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) seemed to urge the newcomer to take a deep breath. He told The Hill, “Meteors fizz out . . . What she will learn in this institution is that it’s glacial to begin with, and therefore no matter how far you rise, that’s just how far you will ultimately get your comeuppance.”
DSA Member and Soviet Spy
Many would say the concept of democratic socialism is a fraud. I’ve long argued that democratic socialism is a profoundly dishonest euphemism calculated to make the horrors of communism more palatable.
Karl Marx thought of socialism as a way station on the road to the supposed utopia of communism. Another way to think about it is socialism as pre- or proto-communism. Socialists and communists all want government or the collective to be master. They are in the same ideological camp and tend to believe that the ends justify the means. In ideological terms, there is no bright line or safe harbor that neatly separates socialism from communism. They overlap and blend into each other.
Communism, according to Marx, was a kind of heaven on earth. He argued that human beings could be changed and made to reject their natural, self-interested, family-oriented impulses. When this happened, everything would supposedly change for the better. People would voluntarily work hard for a society filled with abundance, so there would be no need for governments, taxes, armies, police, courts, and jails. In such a society the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” would prevail.
But before this (impossible) idealized condition can be achieved, there has to be socialism. The government steps in on behalf of the people and imposes what some call “economic democracy,” theoretically giving workers control over their workplaces.
Socialism isn’t “democratic” in the sense Americans understand the term. In normal U.S. parlance, democracy describes the way the governmental sector is governed via free elections. It isn’t a term to describe how private institutions govern themselves. A mother can’t be out-voted by her three children demanding ice cream for breakfast, nor should a businesswoman who hires three workers be outvoted by them when the question of salaries arises. The American idea of democracy, in short, limits government; it doesn’t drag it into every nook and cranny of our lives. By contrast, socialism leads to tyranny, whether it is imposed by a violent mob or by voters in an election.
Yet DSA leaders typically go out of their way to insist that there is a significant difference between old-style Soviet-era socialism and their own brand of what they call “democratic socialism.”
Their own statements suggest they’re being less than forthright on the issue. For example, DSAer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had difficulty explaining the purported difference on ABC’s “The View.”
“Do you think that the future of the Democratic Party is socialism?” co-hostess Meghan McCain asked the candidate.
“First of all, there’s a huge difference between socialism and Democratic socialism,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed. “Democratic socialism, and really what that boils down to me, is the basic belief that . . . I believe that in a moral and wealthy America and a moral and modern America, no person should be too poor to live in this country.”
When McCain pressed, Ocasio-Cortez had difficulty elaborating on the supposed distinctions between socialism and democratic socialism. “That’s what I believe,” she said. “I can understand that there may be some divisions. You know, I don’t think people wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m a capitalist!’”
But not all DSAers are so reluctant to make a distinction.
There is the case of former labor union representative Kurt Stand, a DSA member who, in 1998, was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, attempted espionage, and illegally obtaining government documents on behalf of the former German Democratic Republic, also known as communist East Germany, and the former Soviet Union. Stand began spying in the early 1970s after being introduced to Stasi (East German intelligence) officers by his father, a communist sympathizer who fled Nazi Germany years before.
Stand’s father may have introduced young Kurt to communism early, but the son was an avid student of Marx. In his youth he was a member of several radical socialist movements, including the Young Workers Liberation League, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the U.S. (CPUSA). He joined the DSA in 1983, not long after it was formed and served in local and national leadership capacities through 1997, when he was arrested by the FBI for his activity with East Germany and the USSR.
“I did not see the communist movement as an end in itself, capable of answering all questions, but I did feel it provided a way to discuss where all this activity was leading; a way to be not just against, but also for something,” Stand said years later.
From prison in 2008, Stand wrote an essay titled, “Supporting Barack Obama: A Prison-Eye View of the Presidential Campaign.” He expressed some skepticism about Obama’s bona fides but urged his comrades to support the then-Illinois senator’s presidential bid. “In sum, radicals and progressives ought to join those—including those in prison—who have already decided to back Obama, see where the campaign can take us, see what can then be accomplished.”
Despite his track record of domestic subversion on behalf of the nation’s foreign Communist enemies, and without any notable public renunciation of his role in aiding a dictatorship in conflict with this country, DSA’s chapter in Metropolitan Washington, D.C., welcomed Stand back into the group, according to Trevor Loudon’s KeyWiki website.
At the local group’s May 2015 membership meeting, Stand was elected to its steering committee. That same year, Stand canvassed on behalf of DSA member and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
If Metro Washington DSAers aren’t bothered by Stand’s past, then perhaps they, too, don’t see much difference between their brand of “democratic” socialism and the socialism of East Germany and the Soviet Union.
Conclusion
Ocasio-Cortez’s primary triumph has given rise to myths about the DSA that some interpret as evidence that so-called democratic socialism is on the march in America.
The DSA isn’t making Democrats more pro-socialist than they were before. It is merely forcing them to be more honest about what they stand for.
Is this “pushing” Democrats to the left? Some people say it is.
But in this writer’s view, contrary to mainstream media hype, the idea that the DSA is only now “taking over” the Democratic Party is naïve and wrongheaded: it took over the party long ago. The group’s members already largely control the party through various Democrat-related organizations. Quite a few members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), co-founded by the DSA in 1991, are also members of the DSA, according to DiscoverTheNetworks. Even more conspicuous is the fact that the DSA used to list all the members of the CPC on its website, and frequently endorsed these members of Congress in elections. The far-left Progressive Caucus currently has 79 members in the House, about 40 percent of the Democratic Party’s members in that chamber, and one in the Senate (Sanders).
No, DSA is on the rise because the Left, including Democrat activists, grew increasingly radical over the Obama years, and now their disgust at watching President Trump dismantle some of President Obama’s key policy achievements has only added to their rage. They are in revolt against the Trump administration, attending “resistance” rallies and conducting in-your-face actions against Trump supporters. Perhaps Bernie Sanders has also helped to popularize the “democratic socialist” label, taking away some of the stigma traditionally associated with socialism in American society.
On June 27, the day after Ocasio-Cortez unseated Crowley, DSA experienced a one-day membership surge 35 times larger than normal. DSA employee Lawrence Dreyfuss said the group signed up 1,152 new members that day. In the month after President Trump was elected, DSA claims to have had approximately six times more sign-ups than in the preceding month. The group now claims to have 40,000 members nationwide, up from around 5,000 in November 2016.
DSA has made inroads at the state level over the past year. For example, in May, four female DSAers won Democrat primaries for seats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives: Pittsburgh DSA endorsed primary winners Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato, while Philadelphia DSA endorsed primary victors Elizabeth Fiedler and Kristin Seale.
In November, DSA member and self-described socialist Lee J. Carter was elected to represent the 50th district in the Virginia House of Delegates. The Democrat standard-bearer defeated House Majority Whip Jackson Miller (R) in the general election. Other DSAers elected that month were Minneapolis City Council member Ginger Jentzen and Lakewood, Ohio, City Council member Tristan Rader.
It remains unclear whether these newly-minted lawmakers will help push America radically to the left, or if instead their radicalization of the Democratic Party will lead it to be more marginalized than it was after Barack Obama left the White House.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared at the Capital Research Center website on Aug. 27, 2018. It was originally published in four installments.