On a Saturday afternoon in late November, around 30 people gather in an old storefront in lower Manhattan. The narrow space looks like it once housed a cozy coffee shop but is now crammed with office equipment, protest signs and mismatched folding chairs. It’s the headquarters of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, or NYC-DSA — the organization’s largest chapter in the country.
As people stream in, they are greeted by a loud “Welcome!” from Stylianos Karolidis, an organizer for NYC-DSA who is leading an event called “DSA-101.” Its goal is to provide a basic rundown of the organization to new members, or simply anyone who is “socialist-curious.”
“We were a little nervous because we had too many people signed up,” Karolidis says. Although at this point, he’s used to it. Earlier that month, over 400 people RSVP’d for the first DSA-101 after the 2024 election. To accommodate them, NYC-DSA rented out a space in the Church of the Village. “We had to turn people away just because we were at capacity,” he says. Since then, almost every DSA-101 event has been overflowing.
This isn’t the first time that voters, disillusioned by the Democratic Party and fearful of a Trump presidency, have flocked to DSA. After the 2016 presidential election, a surge of membership known as the “Trump bump” helped turn the fringe movement into a burgeoning political force that promised to transform the American left.
Now, with a Democratic party significantly weaker than it was eight years ago, many in DSA hope to parlay this latest “Trump bump” into a national movement, and maybe even launch a viable alternative party. But the organization also faces serious challenges — both ideological and practical — that may hinder its ability to capitalize on the moment, and possibly threaten its very existence.
Karolidis kicks off the DSA-101 session with a song: three repetitions of the trade union anthem “Solidarity Forever,” written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin, a poet and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. At first, only Karolidis and his co-hosts sing while the rest mutter along. By the end, though, everyone has joined the chorus, chanting:
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the union makes us strong.
Next, Karolidis asks everyone to share their names, their pronouns and why they are here. Almost invariably, the answers are the election and/or Gaza.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Karolidis asks all union members to raise their hands. Of the 30 or so attendees, there are only two. Karolidis, visibly surprised, chuckles. “Well, I guess that makes sense. Only 10% of American workers are unionized,” he says, before moving on to the next item on the agenda: “What is Socialism?”
Today, American socialism sounds like an oxymoron. But for the first half of the 20th century it was a real thing, complete with a political party (the Socialist Party of America), a charismatic leader (Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president five times between 1900 and 1920, when he campaigned from a prison cell), a substantial voter base (Debs won 6% of the vote in 1912) and even celebrity supporters (W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Woody Guthrie among them). It also helped to mainstream once far-fetched ideas like the minimum wage, women’s suffrage and Medicare.
What early American socialists lacked were members elected to federal office. Debs lost all of his five bids for president, and according to historian Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of “What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party” and “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation,” although many socialists held local offices, only two reached as high as the House of Representatives.
Then came the Cold War and, with it, the second Red Scare — a campaign led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy that persecuted and blacklisted American socialists, accusing them of being Soviet agents (the vast majority were not). Although this campaign would eventually lose credibility and be publicly denounced, it successfully cast socialists as un-American (think “House Un-American Activities Committee”). This was followed by the steady rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, punctuated by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 — proof to many that socialism as a concept was flawed. By the end of the 20th century, support for American socialism was at an all-time low.
But the cause was not dead. In 1982, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee — a group of anti-war activists and trade unionists — and the New American Movement — a socialist-feminist organization — merged to create the Democratic Socialists of America. The chief architect of the merger was the writer and activist Michael Harrington, who was best known for his influential 1962 book “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” which inspired the administration of John F. Kennedy to launch the War on Poverty. With DSA, Harrington and company wanted to build a strong leftist coalition that would resist the rightward shift under President Reagan with a strategy called “realignment.”
The basic idea was this: Instead of competing against the Democratic Party in elections, DSA would endorse candidates and policies within the party that it deemed socialist “enough,” nudging the Democrats further and further to the left until they eventually became — in effect if not in name — socialist. In other words, they wanted to transform the Democratic Party from within.
Over its first three decades, DSA successfully elevated a handful of U.S. representatives, but with little effect on the Democratic Party. Plus, the organization’s membership stagnated. When it was formed in 1982, it had around 6,000 members. By 2012, it had only gained 500.
Then, in late 2014, the organization launched a coordinated “We Need Bernie” campaign that urged Bernie Sanders to run for president, specifically in the Democratic primaries, for maximum exposure and effectiveness, rather than as an independent candidate. At first, it seemed like another long shot. The independent senator from Vermont, who has long openly identified as a democratic socialist, advocated for free universal health care, decried the influence of big money in both major parties and was up against the Democratic Party establishment.
His campaign was shockingly popular. It received a record 2.5 million individual contributions. A whole generation of young voters, still suffering from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, wanted an alternative to the neoliberal policies that caused that calamity. This discontent culminated in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.
Although Sanders would eventually lose the primary to Hillary Clinton, his campaign reenergized the political left and catapulted DSA into the national conversation. Twenty-four hours after Donald Trump was elected, DSA reportedly gained some 2,000 new members, and in 2015, “socialism” became the most searched word on Merriam-Webster.
Over the next four years, that Trump bump would swell into a veritable socialist wave. As membership grew, dozens of new DSA chapters sprouted across the country and put forth candidates. Since 2016, 128 DSA-endorsed candidates have won elections in local, state and federal races, according to DSA’s National Electoral Commission. Also, 31 DSA-endorsed ballot initiatives — concerning housing rights, labor protections and renewable energy — were passed. While most of these wins were in places like New York City, Boston and Washington, they were also seen in St. Louis, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Akron, Ohio.
Notably, two DSA-endorsed candidates were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. Forming a loose left-wing grouping with Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar known as “The Squad,” they brought even more national attention to DSA and its work. In 2019, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (known popularly as AOC) introduced the Green New Deal Resolution, which included drastic and sweeping proposals to fight climate change. Although it failed to pass, it had a significant influence on what became the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, so much so that President Donald Trump still refers to the latter as the “Green New Scam.”
Also around this time, major strikes by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Writers Guild of America, along with the formation of the Amazon Labor Union and Starbucks Workers United, brought labor struggles back to the forefront of national politics. At the local level, places with strong DSA representation also made headlines, like in 2019 when NYC-DSA forced Amazon to cancel the construction of its second headquarters in the city over concerns of gentrification and corporate tax benefits.
By 2021, DSA had nearly 100,000 members nationally. In just a handful of years, the organization became, as Kazin puts it, “the largest organization to call itself socialist in America since the height of the Socialist Party” a century ago.
It seemed as if the realignment of the Democratic Party that Harrington had dreamed of, but never lived to see, was finally underway. But as the organization’s popularity and influence have grown, so have its aspirations.
Back in 2016, Seth Ackerman, one of the editors of Jacobin, wrote an article for the socialist magazine titled “A Blueprint for a New Party.” In it, he argued for a leftist organization that looks and functions like an independent political party but avoids the “third party trap” by running on the Democratic ballot line. While these candidates would technically be labeled as Democrats, it would be in name only, and they would otherwise adhere to a separate socialist platform. In other words, instead of trying to fix the Democratic Party — as Harrington advocated — organizations should use its structure to build their base and further their causes. This strategy is known colloquially within DSA as “dirty stay.” While it was quickly embraced by some within DSA, the organization at that time was more focused on expanding its supporter base and visibility, and so didn’t do much to assert its independence from the Democratic Party.
Fast-forward seven years to DSA’s 2023 national convention, where the organization passed Consensus Resolution Amendment I: Act Like an Independent Party, which states:
DSA wants to be independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties and present a third alternative to both major parties. This is the key to defeating the far right and beating the neoliberal Democratic Party. It is not advisable for us to form an independent political party with its own ballot line at this moment. But there are intermediate steps we can take to assert our independence from the politics of the Democratic Party leadership and build a party-like structure.
These steps include structural changes like “building our own lists of voters and volunteers, our independent fundraising capacity, our own candidate schools, and exploring building our own tech tools.” On the electoral side, it requires all DSA candidates to identify “explicitly and proudly as ‘democratic socialists’” and to adhere to a “common messaging.”
That last point would prove to be the biggest challenge for the organization, especially when it ran up against one of the most sensitive and divisive issues on the left.
One month after the resolution passed, on Oct. 7, Hamas attacked Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. Hours later, DSA released a statement that began: “DSA is steadfast in expressing our solidarity with Palestine. Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime — a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States. End the violence. End the Occupation. Free Palestine. We unequivocally condemn the killing of all civilians. It is imperative for international human rights law to be respected.”
The next day, protesters gathered in Midtown Manhattan in solidarity with Palestine. While NYC-DSA didn’t formally endorse the protest, it promoted it on social media, stating that it was “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and the right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.” But footage showed some protesters making antisemitic statements and brandishing a swastika. Although DSA wasn’t present at the event, the NYC-DSA chapter issued a statement apologizing for the timing of its support and condemning “all hatred and the killing of all civilians.”
A week later, New York Mayor Eric Adams appeared on MSNBC and falsely accused DSA of “carrying swastikas and calling for the extermination of Jewish people,” prompting a wave of condemnation from other Democrats.
DSA identifies itself as an anti-Zionist organization. But the Gaza war has put this stance to the test on the electoral front. For example, in July 2024, DSA’s National Political Committee, the organization’s leadership body, decided to withdraw its endorsement of AOC, arguably its most popular figure nationally, over her support for a House resolution asserting that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.” This decision came after much deliberation between DSA’s main factions. Some, like the radical Red Star caucus, argued that any support for Israel should disqualify a candidate from receiving an endorsement, while others — the Socialist Majority Caucus, for example — consider AOC as vital for maintaining a broad coalition. They eventually settled on a conditional endorsement, which AOC then lost when the committee voted to unendorse her.
AOC’s own chapter, NYC-DSA, defied its national leadership, however, and stood by its endorsement of the representative, who went on to win reelection by a large margin in November.
In contrast, while DSA had threatened to unendorse Rep. Jamaal Bowman over his support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system back in 2021, the member of Congress sharply reversed course following the onset of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza. In a 2024 endorsement interview with DSA, he said: “Now, there’s no way I could support any of that, because there’s a genocide happening in Gaza.” He would go on to use the term “genocide” publicly to describe the war, characterize Israel as a “settler colonial project” and question whether the Oct. 7 attack could be characterized as “unprovoked.” As a result, Bowman began losing support in his New York district, which has a large Jewish contingent.
This got the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which would spend a record $14.5 million in support of Bowman’s primary opponent, George Latimer, a more moderate Democrat. The result: In November, Bowman lost his reelection by 17 points. Cori Bush, another DSA-endorsed representative from Missouri, would also lose her reelection to an AIPAC-supported democrat, Wesley Bell.
Many see these defeats as proof that DSA’s hardline anti-Zionist stance has gone too far. “I know people, mostly older leftists, who left DSA because … they thought that there were people in DSA who were basically cheering on Hamas,” Kazinsays.
One such older leftist is Maurice Isserman, who left after 41 years of membership “to protest the DSA leadership’s politically and morally bankrupt response to the horrific Hamas October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom,” as he wrote in The Nation magazine. Isserman, a biographer of DSA founder Michael Harrington, goes on to blame this response on the organization’s more radical caucuses like Red Star, which published statements like “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You.”
Such groupuscules, Isserman argued, only recently joined the organization to “take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating ‘the left wing of the possible’ [a signature formulation of Harrington’s] and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.”
Others, however, have parted ways with DSA because they viewed it as insufficiently progressive on Palestine. In November 2023, a group of former DSA members announced the formation of the Palestine Solidarity Working Group, which would “broaden our organizing terrain beyond the limitations of DSA,” which the new body saw as “out of step with the Palestinian grassroots,” as its organizers said in a post on X.
DSA’s stance on Russia’s war on Ukraine has also stirred controversy. In the weeks before the full-scale invasion in 2022, DSA’s International Committee called the brewing conflict “a sensationalist Western media blitz.” It went on to describe NATO as “a mechanism for US-led Western imperialist domination” and accused it of “training far-right extremist groups with neo-Nazi sympathies” in Ukraine.
That statement was quickly condemned by many progressives. Writing in the socialist journal New Politics, Stephen R. Shalom, Dan La Botz and Thomas Harrison fulminated against the statement’s “remarkable failure to say a word about Russia’s role in this crisis, consequently creating an incomplete, slanted, and distorted view that makes it impossible to understand what’s actually happening, much less to take a principled position on it.” DSA later condemned Russia’s invasion, but the damage of this early statement had been done. DSA lost several members over the organization’s initial response to the war.
According to Kazin and others on the left, these kinds of divisive stances hinder DSA’s ability to maintain the broad support it needs. He thinks they should be focusing on the bread-and-butter issues that made the group popular in the first place — things like wealth inequality, labor unions and free health care.
That’s what some progressives are currently doing on the national stage. In February, Sanders, joined by AOC, launched a cross-country “Fighting Oligarchy” speaking tour. Its rallies have drawn massive crowds, some even eclipsing those from Sanders’ 2016 campaign. Yet the talking points are generally the same as they were 10 years ago — growing wealth inequality, the scapegoating of immigrants, and health care as a human right. Like a veteran rock star, Sanders knows what his fans want: the hits.
Though Sanders makes a point of condemning the Israeli government’s handling of the war, he steers clear of the word “genocide.” At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, not long after mentioning the war, two attendees wearing keffiyehs unfurled a Palestinian flag over the American flag behind the podium. As they were escorted out, the crowd began to chant “Free Palestine!” Sanders, visibly annoyed, responded with: “I know that this is a sensitive issue, something that I am leading the effort in Congress. But I do want to say, what we have also got to focus on is the crisis facing not only the people in Gaza, but the crisis facing the working class in this country.”
“The bread-and-butter issues are tied to the big international issues,” says Megan Romer, co-chair of DSA’s National Political Committee. “That’s what socialism is. Who’s running the means of production? Who’s got the power? Who’s using resources? … I cannot imagine a DSA right now that isn’t heavily focused on Palestine.”
However, compared to these “bread-and-butter” causes, anti-Zionism is new for the organization. Many of the original DSA members, including Harrington, identified as Labor Zionists, a group that sought to make Israel a socialist state through collective programs like kibbutzim. It’s a legacy that the current DSA is keen to move on from, as evidenced by another resolution passed at the organization’s 2023 convention, titled “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis.”
In addition to its recent electoral losses, there is another challenge the organization must contend with: money. Unlike the two major parties, DSA is a nonprofit organization that mainly relies on membership dues to operate. Since 2021, that membership has shrunk by 17%.
“The pandemic, most of all, was really destabilizing in a fundamental way,” Romer says. “I think that was the biggest factor that kind of cut off the growth.” Up until then, DSA had relied heavily on in-person events and actions. Suddenly, all chapters had to operate remotely, which made it difficult to organize and develop new leadership.
But despite the restrictions, DSA hoped that the pandemic, coupled with the Black Lives Matter protests, would bring more attention to socialist causes like health care, workers’ rights and policing, resulting in new members. This didn’t pan out. Instead, it appears that the economic pressures of the time led members to stop paying dues, and soon, membership started to shrink and hasn’t stopped.
A few months after the organization’s 2023 national convention, DSA’s longtime national director, Maria Svart, stepped down. In her farewell statement, she warned: “As a nonprofit organization, we cannot print money like the government or take loans like a large corporation. Nor can we make unrealistic predictions about stronger fundraising or recruitment and then spend money we merely hope to raise.” Moving forward, she argued, “will require very hard choices, and longer term, a reckoning with our structure and our definition of democracy.”
Faced with this existential crisis, along with a second Trump presidency, DSA’s current leadership has decided to focus on brass tacks: “We’re going to just be seeing a lot on the ground (actions), doing stuff with your chapter, organizing your community and growing in that way and really developing organizers,” Romer says. “We really need to kind of hone in on the basics.”
This includes local events like DSA-101.
After breaking down DSA’s leadership structure and going through the chapter’s programs and events, Karolidis shares information on how to support DSA’s candidate for New York City’s upcoming mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani. When the 33-year-old, self-proclaimed democratic socialist member of the New York State Assembly (representing Queens) announced his candidacy in October, it was seen as a long shot. Since then, he has raised around $7 million, gained nearly 20,000 individual donors and is ranked in third place behind former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Eric Adams, who is running as an independent.
Mamdani’s campaign, whose slogan is “A New York You Can Afford,” is deftly using social media to promote populist economic policies like rent freezes, free child care and free city buses, to win over the young and working-class voters the Democratic party lost during the 2024 election. He’s prompted a lot of comparisons to Sanders, and many leftists hope that he has a similar catalyzing effect. Then again, Mamdani has publicly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. If Bowman and Bush’s losses are any indication, this may hurt his chances, particularly in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
But for the “socialist-curious” gathered in the cramped office space, it’s a selling point. “The Free Palestine movement really opened my eyes to how unresponsive the Democratic Party as a whole is,” says Kirian Mammen, one of the attendees. “It just became really clear that corporate interests lead politics in general, and so I was looking for a group that was trying to change that.” Asked if he was planning on becoming a member, he flashed his phone: “Yeah, I actually joined already.”
Just how many join in the next few months may determine whether DSA can stay afloat long enough to ride the next socialist wave.
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