Is Israel Actually a Net Negative for DSA?

Thinking through the political implications of the Israel-Hamas War, one month in

Photo: Getty Images

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In the days after Hamas killed 1,200 Israeli civilians, the political consensus in the United States was that the socialist left would suffer mightily because they were unapologetically supportive of the Palestinian cause. Many members of the Democratic Socialists of America are anti-Zionist and backers of BDS. Various pundits and politicians predicted DSA would be rendered toxic, their alleged anti-Semitism now exposed for all to see.

Genres of a certain story, the latest published by Michael Powell of the Atlantic, have since appeared: “sensible” liberals and leftists are deserting a far-left that has, in their view, descended into radicalism. DSA never organized a celebratory New York rally in the wake of the Hamas attacks, but their social media account did, initially, promote it. Since then, DSA chapters throughout the nation have spearheaded numerous pro-Palestinian marches and protests. Fierce condemnation from Democrats in Congress like Ritchie Torres and Brad Sherman has not deterred them. Neither has an AIPAC threat to spend as much as $100 million against members of the Squad next year. DSA’s membership, predominately under the age of 40, is only further emboldened.

DSA itself is several lightyears away from becoming a mass movement organization. There are 80,000-odd dues-paying democratic socialists nationwide, but DSA has lost members over the last few years. Electoral success is still confined to largely urban, Democratic pockets, where younger and college-educated voters congregate. Socialist caucuses don’t make up the majority of any legislature. DSA is still marginal—a volunteer-run organization that is often outnumbered and outgunned, facing down the hostility of establishment Democrats, real estate and finance elites, and an inordinately wealthy and influential Israel lobby.

The caveat here is that DSA today is far more relevant than it ever was in the first 35 years of its existence. Powell’s Atlantic piece acknowledged this, while offering measured paeans for the older DSA generation that is now defecting. “These militant turns by DSA persuaded two dozen prominent socialists to tender resignations in the past few weeks,” Powell wrote. “Their public letters and articles speak to a disaffection with a movement that gave meaning and shape to their political lives.” Noting the electoral victories of DSA after 2016, he added that these “successes, however, came accompanied by that occupational hazard of the left: a profusion of factions, splinterings of factions, and splinterings of splinter factions. There are libertarian socialists and Marxist-Leninists, electoralists and non-electoralists, and a caucus that brands itself the ‘un-caucus.’” Powell quotes approvingly from a noted historian and early DSA member—the organization was founded by Michael Harrington in 1982—who announced his resignation because DSA, unlike Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, failed to release a statement that explicitly condemned Hamas following the October 7th slaughter.

In many respects, DSA has not departed from Harrington’s original vision for democratic socialism in the United States. Harrington, a celebrated historian and activist, believed leftists should work within the Democratic Party to tug it to the left; he rejected the third party campaigns of the old Socialists of the early twentieth century. The DSA of the 1980s and 1990s endorsed Democratic presidential campaigns and welcomed mainstream members, like New York Mayor David Dinkins. DSA was Zionist, as well as anti-Soviet. In Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich, the famed journalist later known for her book Nickel and Dimed, DSA boasted intellectually formidable and recognizable leadership. There is no equivalent in DSA today: the current national director, Maria Svart, is unknown beyond socialist circles, and it’s plausible there are even active DSA members who have never heard of her. DSA intentionally resists top-down organizing and strict hierarchies. Individual chapters in various states are allowed to pursue politics as they see fit, and each have their own flavors of socialism. The Philadelphia chapter, in recent years, has been known as more radical than the New York chapter, and has also found less electoral success than New York. For outsiders, the idea that DSA and its chapters lack singular leaders that can direct messaging and policy—no Shawn Fains or Randi Weingartens—can be somewhat confounding.

But it all works, which is something Powell and the erstwhile DSA members, in their own way, acknowledge. Harrington’s DSA may have been, to a certain set, more noble, but it was ultimately impotent. It was a glorified study group that fluctuated between five and six thousand members for decades on end. This was not all DSA’s fault. The 1980s and 1990s represented a nadir for the old, New Deal-aligned left, with neoliberalism and Third Way politics ascendant. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, there was no appetite for even DSA’s mild social democratic arguments, which were predicated on reforming but not severely disrupting American capitalism. No one within DSA, though, ever generated the enthusiasm required to make the organization a factor in American politics. Either imagination was lacking or the effort was never expended. As recently as the early 2010s, when I first began writing on politics, there was no media consideration given to who DSA might endorse in a given election. It simply did not matter. DSA operated on a fringe beyond even the Green Party—at least mainstream Democrats, after 2000, could take the time to loath the Greens. Critiquing DSA in 1997, 2006, or 2013 would have been like trying to strike up a conversation about the intricacies and mythos of bocce ball.

Elder DSA members, beset by the anti-Zionists, now bemoan “entryism”—the idea of revolutionary purists upsetting the balance in the organization and sowing further division. These usurpers, in their view, will destroy DSA from within, like radicals immolated Students for a Democratic Society and other leftist groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe. But DSA’s post-2016 expansion, driven by the first presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and the alarm generated by the election of Donald Trump, was always going to open the organization up to genuine ideological diversity. This is what growth looks like, after all. The factions within DSA bicker and some, indeed, briefly pursued a wrongheaded expulsion of a prominent congressman, but the organization itself remains stable. The electoral work and activism hums onward.

Israel’s furious retaliation has only aided DSA and their progressive allies in the United States. More than 11,000 Gazans are dead, many of them civilians and children. Israel has rapidly ceded the moral high ground, even as Hamas, autocratic religious fundamentalists, vows to keep battling onward. Two-state and one-state solutions appear equally untenable. All of it is a horror, and there’s fresh evidence Israel hawks here cannot sustain unanimity on the issue any longer. Twenty-four percent of voters now sympathize with the Palestinian cause, up from 13 percent a month ago, according to a Quinnipiac poll released Thursday. Israel has the majority, but it’s no longer so commanding—and the divisions are stark among generations. A majority of voters 18-34 (52 percent) say their sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Assuming Benjamin Netanyahu pursues his indefinite bombardment, invasion, and eventual occupation, the American youth—the future middle-age—will continue to desert Israel. This will, at some point, impact electoral politics, as more Democrats sense they can break with AIPAC and survive just fine. The old guard can try to spend leftists into submission. But the dominance of hearts and minds they once enjoyed will never be known again. DSA, in the interim, might just swell its membership ranks again.