https://dissentmagazine.org/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
Chris MaisanoOctober 29, 2026
This article is the opening essay in a forum with responses by Eric Blanc, Michael Kazin, and Lissy Romanow.
On July 4, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) announced, with great fanfare, that it had passed 120,000 members nationwide. Reaching this milestone made DSA “the largest socialist organization in United States history . . . surpassing the Socialist Party of America under Eugene Debs, which reached its peak dues-paying membership in 1912.” I first joined DSA over twenty-five years ago, when the organization had around 6,000 members. For years, the prospect of doubling or tripling DSA’s size seemed, at least to me, more like a pleasant fantasy than a realistic goal. Attendance at national conventions was comparable to a moderately sized wedding, and meetings of the New York City chapter’s organizing committee could fit comfortably in an office break room. That DSA is now roughly twenty times as large as it was when I first joined is a remarkable achievement, something that I still can’t quite fathom.
Betting on socialism in my teenage years, amid the complacent triumphalism of the End of History nineties, was the longest of long shots. It was also an expression of adolescent rebellion akin to my interest in punk rock or veganism. One of the things I got in my original DSA welcome packet was a bumper sticker with the fist-and-rose logo and a slogan that I thought was very cool at the time: “Think Really Different,” with Really emblazoned in socialist red, to mock the Apple ad campaign. I immediately slapped it on my car to scandalize the good burghers of my heavily Republican Jersey Shore town. A succession of horrors and crises—forever wars, a global economic crash, and the mounting impact of climate change, to name just a few—ensured that I stayed with it, and that others would eventually join our remnant of long-distance runners. Today, democratic socialism isn’t so unique or fringe, but an increasingly common part of the American political landscape. The popular mayor of New York City and a plausible 2028 presidential contender are DSA members, as are a growing number of elected officials at every level around the country. All of this is cause for celebration.
Still, despite DSA’s stunning growth over the last decade, we cannot truly claim to be bigger than the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs. While DSA is nominally larger than the SP ever was, the United States is also nearly four times as large as it was in Debs’s day; relative to population, the DSA of 2026 is significantly smaller than the SP of 1912. For DSA to equal the SP’s 1912 membership as a percentage of the population, it would have to grow to over 400,000 members.
Moreover, the party of Debs had a geographic reach that its successor has yet to match. In his classic book The Decline of Socialism in America 1912–1925, James Weinstein observed that until 1918 “the greatest relative voting strength of the movement lay west of the Mississippi River, in the states where mining, lumbering, and tenant farming prevailed.” The states with the highest proportions of SP voters were Oklahoma, Nevada, Montana, Washington, California, Idaho, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Texas. Oklahoma, Weinstein writes, “had the largest and most complete organization: 12,000 party members in 961 locals, 38,000 subscribers to the Appeal to Reason, 53,000 Socialist voters in the state in 1914.” Chapters in New York and other big cities, by contrast, are the engine of today’s DSA. New York City DSA, with nearly 16,000 members, accounts for more than 10 percent of the organization’s total membership. At the SP’s high-water mark, Weinstein tells us, New York State “placed twenty-ninth and twenty-fourth in the percentage of Socialist votes in 1912 and 1916.” The party was strong in the Big Apple, where Jewish Socialists built institutions like the United Hebrew Trades and the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts and sent Meyer London to Congress from the Lower East Side. But it was also strong in places like provincial Schenectady, where Reverend George Lunn was elected the state’s first Socialist mayor in 1911. DSA members are doing good work throughout the country, but most of its organizational strength and its biggest electoral breakthroughs are concentrated in a relatively small number of metropolitan areas, with New York City at the core.
There is one major way the DSA of today resembles the SP of old: a vigorous diversity that sometimes verges on incoherence. In his book Socialism and America, Irving Howe concluded that the “most remarkable thing” about the SP “is that it ever held together.” Ideological clashes overlapped and reinforced regional differences, and “when overriding national issues had to be confronted,” Howe observed, “this would prove to be a source of grave troubles for the party.” This will sound very familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of DSA’s internal politics today. The National Political Committee’s Wikipedia page illustrates its composition with a parliamentary seating chart; nine different caucuses currently claim at least one seat on the twenty-seven-member body. One could reasonably ask how Marxist-Leninists, libertarian socialists, post-Trotskyists, and more can productively coexist with each other, and they often do not. The ideological cacophony is a product of DSA’s post-2016 growth, which happened so rapidly it overwhelmed the organization’s ability to maintain a greater level of political coherence. The pursuit of ideological strictness is one of the hallmarks of a sect, so DSA’s looseness is among its strengths. At the same time, the internal divisions sometimes make it difficult for DSA to say what it wants and how it plans to get it with clarity and consistency.
Beyond the realm of electoral and party politics, the Socialists had a base in the labor movement that DSA’s labor organizers, as dedicated and talented as they are, can only dream of. The SP and the Industrial Workers of the World shared many early leaders, including Debs and Big Bill Haywood, until a bitter split over syndicalism and sabotage pushed the Wobblies out of the party. Socialists became leaders in American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions like the Machinists, Ladies’ Garment Workers, Typographers, and Brewery Workers. One of them, the Cleveland typographer Max Hayes, challenged Samuel Gompers for the AFL presidency in 1912 and won a third of the vote. In the places where the SP put down its most durable roots, like Milwaukee and Reading, Pennsylvania, it was a labor party in miniature. The unjustly forgotten James Maurer, a skilled tradesman who cut his political teeth on the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement, came out of Reading’s Socialist stronghold to lead the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor for nearly twenty years. The working class has been remade many times over since Debs’s day, so it shouldn’t be surprising that today’s socialist movement has more teachers than tradesmen in it. That the left has become the “party of baristas,” as Gabriel Winant recently put it in Dissent, is less a mark of shame or betrayal than an index of proletarianization. Still, for all DSA’s talk about building a working-class movement, its presence, let alone its leadership, in the collective organizations of the working class remains quite limited.
Given the fragmentation of our hyperpolitical time, perhaps a small but highly organized group can overcome these limitations and punch above its weight until it wins power. The hollowing out of official Democratic Party institutions, the machines that once ruled local politics through patronage and precinct captains, is arguably the key enabling condition of the DSA insurgency. This is certainly the case in New York, where establishment Democrats wring their hands over the need for an electoral counterweight to DSA but cannot seem to conjure one into existence. They’ve lost their organizing muscles, and volunteers won’t wear out their shoes for candidates who embody the classic Simpsons parody of the Democrats, with campaign banners that declare “We Hate Life and Ourselves” and “We Can’t Govern!” They will almost always have more money than the left, but even money can have diminishing returns. Despite a nearly $3 million deluge of anti-DSA super PAC spending in this spring’s New York state legislative primaries, nine of ten NYC-DSA-backed candidates won their races. So did NYC-DSA-backed congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the latter of whom overcame $7 million in super PAC spending against her. It may be that a group whose national membership currently constitutes a mere 0.03 percent of the population could, through sheer voluntarism and the disorganization of its opponents, continue upending American politics.
That is the optimistic scenario for DSA. Other, less pleasant scenarios can just as easily be projected. Allow me to take a page out of my comrade Peter Frase’s book Four Futures and briefly outline four potential paths for DSA and the socialist movement. These are, of course, ideal types. The real path of DSA’s development may well contain elements of each, and there are things this small exercise will simply fail to anticipate or account for. Nevertheless, I think each one has a ring of plausibility, given DSA’s organizational dynamics and the political moment.
DSA Blows Up (Good Version)
DSA’s decade of renewal simply would not have happened if Bernie Sanders did not run for president in 2016 and 2020. His campaigns brought democratic socialism into the mainstream of American politics and demonstrated that running in Democratic Party primaries is a far more effective strategy than third-party and independent campaigns. Though he didn’t win, he pointed people toward democratic socialism and inspired a new generation of candidates to run for office in every state and at every level. It stands to reason that a new presidential campaign from the left could fuel a second decade of DSA growth, one that takes it to a much higher level quantitatively and qualitatively. The future of DSA is, to a significant extent, in the hands of the U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th Congressional District: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
While Sanders has been a democratic socialist for longer than many of his supporters have been alive, he never joined DSA. He didn’t directly steer people toward DSA during or after 2016; instead, he set up Our Revolution, which does not identify as socialist and has, unfortunately, struggled to gain much traction. AOC, on the other hand, has been a DSA member since she first entered politics and is closely associated with the organization. If she does decide to run for the White House, DSA would be among her earliest supporters and endorsers. It is not difficult to envision candidate AOC praising DSA and encouraging an audience of millions to join it on national TV and in viral video clips. This could transform DSA by bringing many new members into the organization, allowing it to truly claim that it has surpassed the size and social weight of the old SP.
A massive influx of new members would, of course, create its own problems. As the post-2016 DSA learned, it can be very difficult to absorb new cohorts whose experience with any political organization may be nil. If AOC does become the next president, much would depend on the effectiveness and popularity of her administration. But if a President AOC moves an agenda that even partially succeeds in reversing the Trump administration’s worst abuses, lifting up the working class, and reconstructing democracy in America, she would dramatically boost DSA and the left in general. The Democratic Party would begin to be transformed in her image, raising the prospect of a new realignment in American politics. In such a world, a DSA surpassing half a million or more members—one that is largely consolidated behind the mission of pushing that realignment forward—could become a reality.
DSA Blows Up (Bad Version)
It’s no secret that DSA can be a deeply fractious organization. While there were internal debates and disagreements before 2016, these occurred within the framework of a commonly held democratic socialist tradition. Moreover, the leaders who drove the organization mostly knew each other and often had personal and political relationships going back many years. There was, therefore, little or no prospect of splits based on ideology, program, or personality (the stakes, it must be conceded, were also far lower). Today, however, factions and caucuses running the gamut from democratic socialism to Marxism-Leninism battle for organizational advantage and political leadership. It’s something of a minor miracle that DSA has not yet disintegrated under the pressures of factionalism and incoherence. Nothing succeeds like success, however, and the steady growth of DSA’s membership and electoral strength has helped to keep all the various tendencies committed to the institution.
What happens when hard times come and frustrations turn inward? Something like this happened in the early 2020s, when membership declined, electoral wins slowed, and bitter conflicts over former U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman consumed the organization. Fortunately, a new wave of growth and fresh electoral breakthroughs during the second Trump administration brightened the organization’s outlook (while not by any means extinguishing the factionalism). While a successful AOC presidency could raise DSA to previously unimaginable heights, the downside risks of a run at the White House are just as big. If AOC runs a disappointing campaign that weakens her and DSA by association, the recriminations will come fast and furious. If she wins the Democratic nomination but loses to her Republican rival, many Democrats—and not just moderates—would, fairly or unfairly, hold DSA responsible for the disaster. If she wins the White House but presides over a failing administration, DSA would again be left holding the bag. Internal factionalism would be supercharged in any case, and it seems unlikely that DSA would come out on the other side in one piece.
DSA is one of the few socialist organizations that resulted from a merger, not a split. If AOC takes the leap but does not stick the landing, it’s difficult to envision a scenario where DSA as we know it stays together. The various factions and caucuses would fight for control of a greatly diminished organization, and the losers would spin off into a proliferation of new sectarian projects.
DSA Settles In
There are other possibilities besides spectacular success or spectacular failure. If AOC decides not to run for the White House and sets her sights on the U.S. Senate instead, she would likely win. DSA would keep growing in New York and nationally, but not explosively. More socialists would run for and win public office, and the left wing of the Democratic Party would be strengthened against its moderate rivals. DSA’s own factionalism could remain manageable, and perhaps it would find ways to institutionalize and channel it more effectively. No speedrun to the summit of state power, no ignominious fate delivered by its own hand. DSA could very well settle in for a second middle age, where it keeps building and consolidating its current position as the left wing of progressive politics in the nation’s cities and metro areas but does not make the leap to a truly mass movement in national politics.
DSA Fades Away
Political success inevitably leads to institutionalization. This is the only way for movements to extend and consolidate their gains, but it can also sow the seeds of long-term decline. Many on the post–Cold War left reacted to the horrors of Stalinism and the disappointments of social democracy by taking a self-marginalizing anarchist turn. DSA has grown, to a significant extent, because it aims to win governing power through serious participation in electoral and representative struggles. But winning office, as necessary as it is, poses the danger of taking the most effective leaders out of popular organizations and putting them into government without replenishing the grassroots.
DSA has so far managed to avoid this problem, including in New York, where its electoral success has gone the furthest. Key organizers have gone into the Zohran Mamdani administration in various roles, but the NYC-DSA chapter has developed new leaders capable of replacing them. But this may not always be the case, in either New York or elsewhere, if chapters keep electing members who then bring experienced and skilled organizers with them into government faster than they can be replaced. This can happen at the local and state levels, but it could become a particularly pressing concern if an AOC administration in Washington calls a critical mass of DSA’s cadres into the state. Deprived of effective leadership, local chapters could find themselves coping with a chaotic influx of new members and a sudden loss of institutional memory. It is difficult to maintain, let alone grow and develop, an organization under these conditions. DSA could then find itself a victim of its own success, unable to reproduce itself in society as its leaders enter and act through the state.
Whatever happens in the coming years—which might well include the kind of government repression that permanently damaged the old SP—DSA’s decade of renewal has left its mark on the American political landscape. Its emergence as a force in Democratic Party politics has moved the party leftward and toward the working class in meaningful ways. Would “affordability” be on the tip of nearly every Democrat’s tongue if Mamdani hadn’t made it the touchstone of his mayoral win? Would Trump’s White House feel the need to propagandize against DSA’s program if it wasn’t finding traction among a growing number of voters? The impact hasn’t been limited to domestic U.S. politics, either. Left-wing parties around the world have looked to DSA’s rise for inspiration, most recently in Berlin, where Die Linke won an election breakthrough with a campaign explicitly modeled on Mamdani’s. The future of DSA matters, not just to its own members but to the millions of people here and around the world whose fate is linked, for better or worse, to what happens in American politics.
DSA and its leaders therefore bear a tremendous responsibility. Its situation is not unlike what Debs’s party faced at the height of its influence, which Howe described as a “dangerous point.” The SP, he wrote, “was safely past the isolation of the sect, but not quite yet a mass movement. What it needed—and quickly—was to double its membership.” DSA may not be a sect, but it contains sects within it. These are the factions that place “discipline” and “accountability” to the organization above all else, and which are committed to “revolutionary” dogmas that were better left in the twentieth—or, in some cases, the nineteenth—century. DSA simply will not surpass that 400,000-member mark unless it overcomes its sectarian tendencies and fully commits to what makes it effective and successful. It must put mass politics over ideological posturing, work in coalition with democratic movements that are not necessarily socialist, and win governing power despite the difficulties that come with it. It must, in short, commit itself to democratic socialism.
Chris Maisano is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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