(Self-disclosure: I was a member of DSA for thirty years, from March of 1996 until I resigned in March 2026 in protest of DSA not being as it had once been, an organization devoted to socialist democracy. Ever since 2016 it had become increasingly ultraleft and pro-Stalinist, and I could no longer be a member in good conscience--GF)
Hamilton Nolan, one of the chief
labor writers for In These Times, a now pro-DSA far left socialist
newsmagazine that used to be social-democratic (and was arguably better when it
was), has an article in the August-September 2026 issue, “Unions Should Hop on
the DSA Train,”[1] on
why today’s U.S. trade unions should enthusiastically support DSA and support
its “extremely pro-union” (Nolan’s words and emphasis) candidates and
program. Nolan goes on to add that U.S.
unions, notably in New York City, which is the geographical focus of his
article, “are not really ‘progressive’ as much as they are full members of the
Democratic Party power structure,”[2]
which he sees as a mixed bag—conferring real benefits, to be sure, but also
tying labor unions to the Democratic Party Establishment. Which Nolan feels should be broken up by the
left, and that unions should unite with DSA to do precisely that.
Nolan focuses primarily on leftist Democratic
candidate Claire Valdez, who had been a UAW organizer prior to becoming a House
of Representatives candidate, even as he concedes that her defeated opponent in
the Democratic primary, Antonio Reynoso, was “a strong progressive himself, and
would have likely been as pro-labor as anyone in Congress.” Valdez is the only one of the three famous
New York City Democratic primary candidates who had the endorsement of Mayor
Zohran Mamdani and won that Nolan focuses on—perhaps because, not only does she
have a prior union background, she also does not carry the excessively
ultraleft political baggage Avilla Chevalier carried from her earlier social
media posts (where she said “fuck Kamala Harris,” questioned the validity of
interracial relationships, and urged seizure of the “means of production,”
among other things); and Valdez is also a member of DSA, where the third
candidate, Brad Lander, is not. But what
Nolan leaves out is that all of these “progressive” candidates were running not
against Democratic Party centrists, but against fellow progressives, all of
them; and it wasn’t labor or economic issues that propelled the three to
victory, it was accusing their opponents of being pro-Israel and accepting
money from AIPAC. In other words, the
three left candidates made their campaigns a referendum on Israel’s war against
Hamas, and garnered their strongest support from the white, college-educated
youth living in gentrified neighborhoods and working as members of the PMC, the
Professional-Managerial Class. The more
traditional working-class voters and nonwhite racial minorities tended to vote
for their opponents, according to the voting records of the neighborhoods the
candidates carried.[3]
So, the Democratic Party primary
races didn’t pit socialist-minded progressives against centrists or DINOs
(Democrats in Name Only) as much as they did the further left against the
already-substantially-left. It was not a
gain of new left faces so much as a shuffling of those already progressive in
the first place—with Valdez, Lander, and Avilla Chevalier only somewhat further
to the left in actual stated politics aside from Israel than their already-left
opponents.
Nolan also touts another reason for
his enthusiasm for Valdez: that she
wants to introduce legislation “for the federal government to fund union
organizing.” He notes this bill “has
little real momentum in the Democratic Party,” but that, somehow, if labor
unions would get behind it, it could most likely become law, even if other
pieces of pro-labor legislation, such as the PRO Act, don’t. Of course, what’s to prevent
counter-legislation to Valdez’s proposal to “level the playing field” by providing
a role for the federal government to fund organizing of employers’ associations
or chambers of commerce?! Hamilton Nolan
doesn’t say, just as he doesn’t address the Constitutional challenges that
might well arise. But then, DSA is
remarkably silent on Constitutional questions in any serious way, even as it
cavalierly advocates scrapping the U.S. Constitution (including the Bill of
Rights?), abolishing the Senate, and greatly expanding the House of
Representatives, as it states in its program as adopted at its last Convention
in 2025.
DSA supports far, far more than
standard progressive issues such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and
heavily taxing the rich. It also
supports a raft of programmatic proposals that are bound to be controversial,
to say the least, among ordinary working-class voters, unionized or not (and
the vast majority are not unionized at present, of course). These include abolishing both police and
prisons, fully open borders for the U.S., abolition of ICE, and no deportations
for any reason. Not reforming the police
or providing social workers and mental health professionals to help defuse police-citizen
confrontations, not making prisons more humane and enabling them to be better
rehabilitators, not reforming ICE and correcting its abuses, not better
immigration policies and border safeguard procedures, but outright abolition
across the board—that is DSA’s fully stated position, which even many
socialists would regard as ridiculously ultraleft and unworkable.
Certainly I would, as a democratic
socialist, a “mere” social democrat who looks for inspiration for the kind of
socialism I want to the New Deal and the Scandinavian countries, as well as the
welfarism of Europe; and not to the authoritarian “socialisms” of the former
U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, or Cuba; and certainly not to North
Korea, which DSA’s International Committee says we should be allowed to visit
as tourists—and see first-hand the North Korean Potemkin Villages on the
official guided tours??
But back to workers, who may often
be economically populist (hence, supportive of measures today such as Social
Security and Medicare, and who could be supportive, thus, of Medicare for All,
and even the Green New Deal, as it would deliver lower energy prices); but they
are also often socially and culturally conservative, and yes, oftentimes even
given to racism and an attitude of “as long as it doesn’t happen to me, I don’t
object to it.”
Such is hardly likely to bring
ordinary working people to embrace DSA, which, by its own internal polling, has
a membership that is both overwhelmingly white and college-educated, far more
likely to be PMC rather than traditional working class (only 4% of DSA’s
membership was blue-collar in 2021), and while its members identify strongly as
“working class,” are not likely to be working-class themselves, except in the
broad sense of being employees, oftentimes in the arts, the non-profits, and
the professions, and in jobs that require a college degree.[4]
So, it’s a socialism that DSA has built around the frustrated ambitions of the
PMC. Which is not to say these
frustrations aren’t legitimate, and don’t thwart people, and even cause harm
(look, e.g., at adjunct faculty, Ph.D. holders barely eking out a living by
onerously having to teach multiple college courses, sometimes at multiple
schools; or liberal arts college graduates who are delivery drivers, and thus
part of the precariat). But this is a
different appeal than the bread-and-butter socialism of traditional socialist
movements, which were overwhelmingly working class in composition, and were
usually shunned by the college educated.
Then there is the matter of
Stalinism within DSA, which complements its ultraleftism. Currently, DSA is taking its political
strategy from the Popular Front era of the Communist Party in the late 1930s
and the 1940s, when the CP tried to present itself as just impatient,
thoroughgoing liberals who worked actively in the Democratic Party of FDR. DSA emphasizes running now as Democrats and
left-wing challengers in the Democratic primaries, while also simultaneously
wishing to eventually form a third party of the left; however, that is off into
the indefinite future. But DSA’s
political program, as we’ve shown above, is ultraleft, so that currently DSA is
using a Popular Front policy to advance a political program more akin to the
ultraleft period of the CP, Third Period Communism of the early 1930s, when the
Comintern directed a hard left turn by world Communists, and declared
infamously, “Fascism and social democracy are twins.” William Z. Foster, a prominent CPer back then
obligingly contributed a book outlining Third Period Communism’s aims, Toward
Soviet America. In it, he wrote, in
Chapter V, “Under the dictatorship [of the proletariat established by the
Communist Party] all the capitalist parties—Republican, Democratic,
Progressive, Socialist, etc.—will be liquidated, the Communist party
functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise, will be
dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois
rule, including chambers of commerce, employers’ associations, rotary clubs,
American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd
Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc.” (Found in William Z. Foster, Marxists
Internet Archive, marxists.org)
Certainly then, no electoral democracy or freedom of association as
we’d understand the terms!
But the overwhelmingly young DSAers
of today (73% of its members are Millennials or younger as of 2021, according
to the North Star survey) have no sense of left history, and know little, if
anything, about the various permutations of the Communist Party, and are often
enamored with Marxist-Leninist or Leninist-Trotskyist “vanguardism.” Consider that the caucus representing the
majority of members of DSA’s National Committee (DSA’s leading body between
conventions), the Red Star caucus, a Maoist/Marxist-Leninist tendency (but all
the leading caucuses in DSA nowadays are essentially Marxist-Leninist or
Leninist-Trotskyist), states boldly and publicly, “We do not condemn Hamas, and
neither should you.”[5] In fact, one of DSA’s Co-Chairs, Megan Romer,
is a member of the Red Star caucus! This
is indeed a far cry from the DSA of yesteryear, which was much smaller, but
undoubtedly more politically astute, and was committed to a social-democratic version
of democratic socialism, what DSA founder Michael Harrington called the “left
wing of the feasible.” The feasible, in
the here-and-now. Not ultraleft
programmatic measures and postures, not rampant Israel-phobia, not a
pro-Hamas posture, not uncritical support given to repressive regimes
that call themselves “socialist” or allege “anti-imperialism,” not a
blind Third Worldism and automatic support extended to the Global South; in
short, not much of anything in DSA politics today, This is, in summary, why the left and the
labor movement today, or at least its saner sections, should not automatically
endorse DSA or jump on the DSA
bandwagon.
[1] Online at https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-unions-dsa-democratic-socialists-of-america
[2] Unless otherwise attributed, all
quoted passages are from Nolan’s August-September 2026 In These Times article.
[3] From the Substack column, “The
Lamppost,” of Anton Alterman, a democratic socialist professor in New York City,
this from his June 30, 2026, column, “Genocide again: Goldman, Poetica,
Anti-Semitism “: “Chevalier, a
Columbia-educated black professional of Dominican heritage, lost significantly in majority black, majority
Hispanic and majority low-income areas; she won overwhelmingly in young,
college-educated, higher-income areas. Brad Lander won an overwhelming victory
with every constituency except working class neighborhoods like
the Lower East Side, though Goldman [his primary opponent] also prevailed in
higher income Wall Street areas (he is, after all, one of them, the heir of a
Levi Strauss fortune). Claire Valdez won handily with everyone except poor and black voters; Antonio Reynoso outpolled her by
a full 51 percentage points among black voters. This is the constituency for
DSA ideologues who run primarily on anti-Israel platforms: white, disaffected
college grads.”. lamppost@substack.com
[4] Taken from the DSA membership
survey of 2021, as provided by the North Star Caucus within DSA, https://www.dsanorthstar.org/uploads/1/1/8/2/118222942/2021_member_survey_gdc_report.pdf
[5] Organizational statement of the Red
Star caucus. The quote is the title of
the statement. https://redstarcaucus.org/we-do-not-condemn-hamas/
