This article is a modified version of an essay that appears in the new book, A User’s Guide to DSA (Labor Power Publications, 2025).
Few members of DSA know much about the history of our organization, but many of us understand how special it is. There is no single other group in the entire country, even including unions, that has a large base of participants with an internal democracy capable of seriously contemplating major political issues and then devising a plan to organize working people to fight for their own interests as a class. Yet even though it is theoretically possible for us to do so in DSA, the American socialist movement is still small and politically immature.
Historically speaking, there are fundamentally two DSAs: pre-Bernie DSA (1982-2014) and post-Bernie DSA (2015-present). Only a tiny portion of DSA members were organized socialists before the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign revitalized the idea of “democratic socialism” in 2015 (myself included), and many active members now only became socialists in the last few years or months. But why did people join DSA instead of any other socialist or “left” organization? What was DSA like before it was flooded with newly-radicalized young people? And how did those new members mold the organization into the DSA we know now?
The Before Times (1982-2011)
Given that DSA’s modern rebirth is owed to the two presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, it’s fitting that DSA is directly descended from the Socialist Party of America, the party line on which Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in two of his campaigns for president (even while he was in prison for opposing World War I!). DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was a faction led by Michael Harrington that had split off from the Socialist Party of America, and NAM was founded in 1971 as a non-vanguardist socialist-feminist organization. At DSA’s founding convention in Detroit, it had 6,000 members.
Michael Harrington was the chairman and figurehead of DSA from its inception until his death in 1989. He is known for being a prolific public speaker and touring the country to promote his vision of socialism. Marxist feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich served as co-chair, as did some other high-profile leftists like professor and author Cornel West. Several elected officials were also members of DSA, like Congressman Major Owens, Congressman Ron Dellums, and NYC Mayor David Dinkins (another fitting historical parallel, given Zohran Mamdani’s recent campaign).
What were DSA’s politics at the time? “Democratic socialism” was presented in contrast to communist groups that had strict internal discipline, many of which defended the authoritarian practices of the Soviet Union. DSA was also home to many “labor Zionists” who advocated for a social democratic state of Israel, but at the expense of the rights of Palestinians. Throughout the ‘80s, DSA was heavily involved in solidarity campaigns with Sandinistas in Nicaragua and leftist rebels in El Salvador, and the youth wing was active in the movement against apartheid in South Africa.
Crucially, DSA favored the electoral strategy of “realignment,” meaning using the Democratic Party as a vehicle for working-class power and reforming it from within. This approach stood in contrast to that of Bernie Sanders — who won his race for Congress in 1990 as an Independent and at that time was openly critical of DSA from the left — as well as that of the socialists who formed and led the US Labor Party from 1996-2001. DSA was friendly to prominent labor movement figures and avoided being perceived as intervening in internal union disputes. Although DSA didn’t back Jesse Jackson for president in 1984, DSA was part of the Rainbow Coalition that supported Jackson’s second campaign in ‘88.
The collapse of the Soviet Union culminating in 1991 was a world historic setback that brought on an era of desolation for the international socialist movement. Many socialist and communist groups dissolved or, like DSA, barely stayed above water throughout the ‘90s and 2000s. Although DSA grew to 10,000 paper members, it was not functional in most of the country, particularly due to the loss of a strong, charismatic leader like Harrington. It was the Young Democratic Socialists (DSA’s youth wing, now called YDSA) who were active in many cities and worked with allied groups like Jobs with Justice. From about 2001-2014, YDSA had a skeleton crew who kept the lights on and developed comrades who went on to lead DSA.
Pre-Rebirth (2011-2015)
One of those leaders from YDSA was Maria Svart, who served as YDSA Co-Chair and then was a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC), the highest decision-making body in between conventions. She was hired as National Director in 2011 and was in charge of DSA through the rebirth era.
This period saw the emergence of several forceful popular movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011, Fight for $15 in 2012, and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Occupy in particular was instrumental in using class-conscious framing (“We are the 99%”) to legitimize social democratic policy demands like taxing the rich. The socialist movement was also gaining steam outside of DSA. Jacobin magazine had just been founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010, which organized local reading groups and helped popularize socialist analysis to the left of DSA’s realignment model. Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, representing the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative and serving as a modern model of a socialist politician-as-organizer.
The formation of the Left Caucus in 2014 created the space for more left-wing ideas that challenged some of DSA’s longstanding assumptions. The Left Caucus was an internal group of DSA members who advocated for running candidates as explicit socialists, adhering to a standard program, and leaving the neoliberal Socialist International. They were also friendly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but explicit anti-Zionism was at that point still difficult to talk about in DSA.
In early 2015, DSA began a campaign to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President called “Run, Bernie, Run.” Across several cities, small groups of DSA members tabled outside events where Bernie spoke and flyered the crowd.
Rebirth (2015-2018)
In April 2015, Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president in the Democratic primary, challenging the presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton. It was widely considered a long-shot campaign. No one knew just how earth-shattering this race would be — including Bernie himself, who first made the announcement with no fanfare to a small audience of journalists, which was comically dull in retrospect.
That summer, Bernie’s popularity skyrocketed, and DSA membership began to grow steadily. Over the next two years, Jacobin reading groups turned into DSA chapters. Online leftist figures like the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast (which started in March 2016), Twitter personality “Larry Website,” and Jacobin writers encouraged their followers to join DSA.
As we watched Bernie dare to speak the truth about the billionaire class and then suffer lies and slander from the liberal power-brokers, many left-leaning millennials like me underwent a total paradigm shift. His platform — particularly Medicare for All, free college, and opposition to the finance, war, and fossil fuel industries — raised expectations where Obama had brought them to the floor. Politics became fundamentally re-polarized: it was Bernie against the wealthy elite, and we knew what side we were on.
When Bernie lost, we were devastated, but it seemed like a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. Extremely few people in the left-liberal political universe seriously worried that Trump would win. And then he did.
People were panicked and sick with grief. Protests broke out around the country on election night. DSA membership exploded immediately, growing from 8,500 on Election Day to 21,000 by May 2017. I joined in January after I saw a mainstream news article saying all the Bernie supporters were flooding into DSA. For the vast majority of us, this was our first socialist organization. New members had a wide diversity of ideological leanings, from progressive activists and Democratic Party refugees to more hard-left inclinations like anarchists, Maoists, and Leninists, some of whom came from other groups like the International Socialist Organization.
People quickly realized that we were inheriting a loose, decentralized organization where you could mostly just take initiative and do what you wanted. Some people wanted to change that, but there were (and still are) very few DSA members who had been educated in a more centralist model and had the political development or leadership skills to carry it out. Horizontalism was also a particularly popular perspective from both the Occupy Wall Street legacy, as well as a reaction to bad experiences with hard-left democratic centralist groups. This trend fit well with people’s existing inclinations towards individualism that are hegemonic in our liberal culture. Debates arose about what collective discipline we should expect from each other versus the “big tent” nature and member autonomy. At the national level, these debates were heavily influenced by fears among staff and established members that the new wave of members could drive DSA too far off course or even destroy it.
The Trump administration started off with a bang: the “Muslim ban,” which was quickly thwarted by protests at airports and a taxi driver union strike. This proved the potential for popular left-wing resistance to Trump’s agenda, despite the emergence of right-wing groups like QAnon and the Proud Boys.
At the 2017 DSA Convention, the new generation of members officially took over. Delegates passed three proposals that defined DSA as distinct from the liberal #Resistance:
- enshrining DSA’s support for BDS,
- leaving the Socialist International, and
- launching a Medicare for All campaign, which was the first organizing project of the new DSA that coordinated members across chapters.
Echoes of Rebirth (2018-2020)
As we got our footing as a movement reborn, the overwhelming sentiment at the time was “anything is possible.” We had just lived through the utter upheaval of political norms, and we saw new breakthroughs all around us. The clearest example of this was in June 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a millennial Bernie-supporting barista calling herself a democratic socialist, ousted the second most powerful Democrat in Congress, Joe Crowley, in a massive upset victory. (The day she won still holds the record for most new DSA members in a single day.) A few months later, she joined youth activists in the Sunrise Movement who were occupying the office of top Democrat Nancy Pelosi. Bernie supporter Rashida Tlaib also won her primary that year and became the first Palestinian American, and one of the two first Muslim women, along with Ilhan Omar, to ever be elected to Congress. AOC, Rashida, Ilhan, and Representative Ayanna Pressley formed “The Squad,” which, despite its hesitancy to directly confront party leadership, many DSA members respected as the first recognizable left opposition to the Democratic Party establishment in our lifetimes.
Although AOC and Rashida were members of DSA, as an organization we didn’t have any serious claim of ownership or contribution to what The Squad did. AOC and Rashida weren’t active DSA participants, and their victories weren’t really DSA campaigns. The first major truly home-grown DSA electoral victory was Julia Salazar, who won the Democratic primary for New York State Senate in September 2018 (and then won the seat in November). Then in 2019, Chicago DSA ran and won a slate of six democratic socialist Alderpersons on the Chicago City Council. In 2020, New York City DSA ran and won a slate of seven democratic socialists for New York State Assembly (including Zohran Mamdani). Chapters around the country built their electoral programs, passing ballot measures and electing our own members to local office.
This period also saw the historic wave of educators’ strikes set off by the West Virginia illegal wildcat strike in 2018. Oklahoma and Arizona teachers struck in 2018, and teachers in Virginia, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago struck in 2019, inspiring other #RedForEd educator workplace action around the country. Many of the people organizing and leading these strikes were DSA members or Bernie supporters. Like the new electoral victories, we weren’t just cheering from the sidelines – we were major actors in the site of struggle, both as rank-and-file militants and as active supporters in the DSA-coordinated solidarity campaigns.
The 2019 DSA Convention focused on two core questions:
- Should DSA be a decentralized network of chapters, or is there value in a strong, unified national organization?
- Should DSA orient to people who are already radicalized and the “most marginalized,” or should we orient to the whole working class and those with strategic leverage within it?
By that point, at least seven national caucuses had formed, representing a variety of views across the anti-capitalist left spectrum. Ultimately, the most horizontalist, prefigurative perspectives did not prevail, but many of those same complications and debates persist to this day.
Most of this modern wave of DSA members had only ever engaged with their local chapter rather than the national organization — until we debated the question of endorsing Bernie’s 2020 presidential campaign. Despite his essential role in rebirthing DSA, a sizable minority of members (mainly from the most hard-left and anarchist wings of DSA) balked at the idea of getting involved immediately. Many critics cited process concerns, while some were more upfront about their skepticism of Bernie and his fans’ “reformist” politics or even of electoral campaigns in general. But 76 percent of DSA members in an online membership poll supported embarking on a “DSA for Bernie” campaign. After Bernie launched his second run, from about March 2019 through March 2020, dozens of chapters were participating in the same thrilling national project simultaneously — canvassing, holding debate watch parties, bringing in new recruits, and developing socialist leaders.
Words simply cannot capture the psychedelic high of optimism we felt when Bernie won the Nevada primary in February 2020 — nor the sickening misery and despair that followed it just a week later when he lost South Carolina and then most of the states on Super Tuesday. Many of us had our existential foundation and hope for the future riding on his campaign, and everything we had poured our hearts and souls into all came crashing down so quickly. At the exact same time, public life began shutting down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people were laid off practically overnight. DSA gatherings turned into Zoom calls. Suddenly, we were all alone, despondent, and scared.
COVID Era (2020-2023)
We didn’t have long to mourn Bernie’s loss before a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests completely swept the country in response to the murder of George Floyd. Millions of people marched in the streets for weeks, comprising the largest mass mobilization in US history. This politicized and radicalized many working-class people, but in some DSA chapters it also brought on intense discussions about race and racism, the difficulty of which was exacerbated by anti-social behavior due to isolation and exclusively online interaction during the pandemic. The red skies of the unprecedentedly devastating 2020 wildfires — obviously brought on by accelerating climate change — added to our existing sense of overwhelm and disorientation about the future.
DSA membership continued to grow until it reached a high water mark of 93,000 in early 2021 after a big membership drive. The growth from this drive was difficult to sustain, as it was disconnected from a particular organizing project and lacked dedicated, political onboarding. And now without a high-profile democratic socialist agitating against the liberal establishment, and without the terror of Trump in office, DSA began a nearly four-year bleed of members.
Not long after the 2021 convention — held online-only due to COVID — an internal war was ignited when Representative Jamaal Bowman voted to increase funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. Because Bowman was a DSA member and DSA had endorsed his campaign, some members launched a petition to censure and expel him. Pouring fuel on the fire, the DSA BDS Working Group began to act like an independent external organization putting pressure on DSA, and the NPC disciplined them as a result. Although the NPC released a statement admonishing Bowman (and AOC, who voted “present” on the bill), this incident raised debates that are still ongoing about how to handle it when our politicians act at odds with our policies or principles, how to properly raise dissent within DSA, and how to handle sub-groups of DSA going rogue.
In contrast to those internal struggles, COVID brought on a labor shortage that led to an inspirational upsurge in worker militancy and a renewed interest in labor within DSA. In 2020, DSA and the United Electrical Workers founded the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), an independent project to provide resources and training to everyday people who decide they want to organize where they work. In 2021, YDSA began the “Rank-and-File Pipeline Project” to get young people to work in strategic industries. Dozens of DSA members got jobs at UPS to join the Teamsters and elected the reform slate led by Sean O’Brien against the conservative Hoffa legacy slate. Starbucks organizers and Amazon organizers won their first union elections in major triumphs over the corporate giants. The 2022 Labor Notes Conference was electric, with young energy and hope from thousands of first-time attendees. In 2023, reformers took the leadership of United Auto Workers in a massive upset victory, including Shawn Fain as President. DSA chapters also supported countless local strikes, and nationally we ran “Strike Ready” campaigns to support the anticipated strikes of UPS and the Big Three auto manufacturers. After the history-making Stand Up Strike, UAW President Fain called for unions to prepare for a general strike on May Day 2028.
But this period quickly encountered setbacks. The YDSA jobs pipeline came to a screeching halt after a convention decision failed by one vote. Teamsters within DSA became bitterly divided about the existing reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and its cautious orientation to the disappointing President O’Brien. Unite All Workers for Democracy, the UAW reform caucus that had elected President Fain, struggled to resolve deep internal differences and eventually dissolved in 2025.
A Political Shift (2023-2024)
At the 2023 DSA National Convention, delegates elected an NPC with more representation from “left” tendencies than ever before (including me, a member of the Bread and Roses Caucus) — enough that the more moderate caucuses could not form a governing majority on their own. This seriously disrupted the typical dynamic in which the National Director and other directors were in the driver’s seat, controlling the flow of meetings and the flow of information. Many of us were critical of directors’ more moderate politics and distrusting orientation to members, and we had enough votes to pursue a greater level of transparency and openness in the national office.
Maria Svart resigned as National Director in January 2024. At that time, the NPC was beginning to confront a steep budget shortfall, which raised a massive controversy over staff layoffs and the question of what employees should expect when their employer is a socialist organization (mirroring similar debates in the labor movement). In just one year, 18 out of over 30 staff quit or were laid off, including every single director who had served in their role under Svart, signaling staff-side solidarity between directors and unionized staff against the member-elected NPC. This turnover resulted in some operational dysfunction but also a noticeable culture shift.
This new NPC also bucked expectations of the past by deciding not to unconditionally endorse AOC in June 2024. Many DSA members had grown increasingly frustrated by her fair-weather attitude and proximity to the Democratic Party establishment, but the NYC-DSA chapter was committed to preserving their relationship with AOC. This disagreement ripped open a divide between the NYC chapter and the national organization (rooted primarily in that NYC is dominated by caucuses that are now a minority on the NPC), which led to the NYC-DSA leadership interfering with national DSA having a relationship with Zohran Mamdani in his campaign for mayor a year later.
Although the political divides within DSA remain deep, the NPC has matured into a multi-caucus parliament, and people are consciously aware of this dynamic and lean into it in a healthy way. Assembling a majority bloc is potentially within reach for all tendencies, which incentivizes people to try to meet in the middle and persuade others of their view. This negotiation process is essential because it reinforces the democratic legitimacy of the body, and it makes it difficult for either wing to act impulsively and arrogantly.
Throughout these changes was the seismic shift in popular consciousness about Palestine following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. National DSA struggled to find its niche in a protest movement with an activist layer dominated by sectarian hard-left organizations and Palestinian solidarity groups that were unhappy with DSA for associating with politicians like Bowman. We had difficult debates about how to relate to these groups, how to talk publicly about political violence, and what should be done about DSA members who hold Zionist views. Despite these challenges, chapters were consistently present in the mobilizations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and YDSA was a major presence in protest encampments that sprung up on college campuses around the country, where our members fought hard for principles of democracy within the encampment groups.
Trump’s Second Term (2024-present)
Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, DSA members had intense debates about how to resolve the perennial “lesser evil” contradiction: a Trump presidency would surely bring terror on the world, but how could we in any way condone Biden, the perpetrator of a genocide and an enemy of the working class? The NPC eventually agreed on a statement that amounted to, “This choice sucks; join DSA so we can have a good option someday.”
When Trump won, popular frustration and dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party was palpable almost immediately. And for the first time since 2021, DSA had net positive membership growth – and it’s staying strong still. Down from a low of 64,000 in October 2024, we recently got back up above 80,000. Since November, new members have been filling chapter meetings like nothing we’ve seen since before COVID. Their political inclinations are also noticeably different than the new member waves in the past: on average, they are excited about the prospect of an alternative to the Democratic Party.
As of this writing, Zohran Mamdani has just won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Much will be said elsewhere about what this accomplishment means for our movement, but it will undeniably be the defining event of this period in DSA’s history.
Beyond
For decades, it has been an almost unquestionable fact that the Democrats are the only alternative to the Republicans, but now we socialists are constantly having conversations with regular people who are fed up and hungry for something new. It’s no surprise that the ambition of building a new party for the working class is a central topic of debate right now in DSA.
However, the American working class will struggle to take advantage of the opportunities around us; we are tragically historically disorganized. Decades of red scare drove communists and socialists out of the labor movement, and professional activist non-profit businesses have replaced true grassroots political organizations. Most popular protest movements completely neglect to cohere working-class people into any kind of formation that can persist and grow beyond single-day mobilizations.
That is why, despite all our challenges and limitations, a vibrant, democratic, multi-tendency, and politically independent DSA is so desperately needed to chart a course for the next era of history for the working class.
This article is from the new book A User’s Guide to DSA: 5 Debates That Define the Democratic Socialists ($15, 460 pages, published by Labor Power Publications). A User’s Guide to DSA features original and often conflicting perspectives from the different tendencies on the front lines of building DSA — not as a social media flame war, but as a serious dialogue aimed at sharpening our strategy to build working-class power.
