You Have to Understand What You Hate

On Jonathan Chait, DSA, and my advice to young writers

If I had to dispense any advice to a young writer or someone who aspires to an intellectual life, I would tell them they have to know their enemy. It is striking, in the current age, how few people do. The left and right are equally guilty, equally ignorant. The right-wing argues against an idea of the left, failing to comprehend the nuances and the gradations, how Bernie Sanders and Hakeem Jeffries might be different people. The left often lumps all conservatives, all Republicans, into a single blob, failing even to understand differences among various Trump supporters. Standpoint epistemology was all the rage in the 2010s—I am X, therefore my views are valid and correct—and this bled into an inability, among practically all factions, to comprehend why someone who thought entirely different from them approaching an issue in a certain manner. This is where, I believe, my fiction career has come in handy. A good novelist is constantly inhabiting the consciousnesses of characters unlike their own. This is imagination. And it’s not all that different in the realm of nonfiction and policy debate—if you’re doing your job well, you’re imagining how another person might perceive an issue since you are, ultimately, trapped in your own body. Imagination works hand-in-hand with analysis. One of the worst things any public thinker can do is simplify the opposition, caricature it. This is intellectual laziness and it’s common enough, especially in the upper echelons of partisan media. Enemies get identified, and they are frozen in amber.

These days, there are few schisms more bitter than those between leftists and centrist, establishment-aligned Democrats. This goes beyond the primaries themselves, which the democratic socialists (and non-socialist progressives) have been winning with greater and greater frequency. It extends into the pundit class and prestige media, which tends to be far more populated with centrist Democrats than proud socialists. To this day, it’s very hard to find an open socialist who is also a working columnist for the New York Times, a regular contributor to the Atlantic, or a talking head at CNN. The journalists themselves, in a bid for objectivity or neutrality, default to the political center. Rather than an explicitly liberal or left bias, American media has a bias to the status quo. A Times columnist or editor can be equally skeptical of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Political “extremes” are suspect. The middle is the only sensible place to be. As voters have shown themselves to be far more open to both democratic socialism and MAGA-style politics than any political mandarin would have predicted—both, certainly, have endured a long time—the media races to catch up, creating some awkward dynamics. Trumpism, at last, is something the establishment media does understand, having reckoned with the man’s two presidential victories, but democratic socialism continues to befuddle. Even non-socialist progressives can be tough to digest. Dana Bash’s recent interview with Brad Lander, the progressive who just unseated Dan Goldman in a contentious New York House race, illustrated this reality. Bash, a CNN veteran, seemed to struggle mightily over the concept that Lander, who is Jewish, might describe himself as a “liberal Zionist” while condemning the Jewish State for its brutal occupation of the West Bank and the immiseration of the Palestinians in Gaza. Bash didn’t sound, in that moment, all that different than an AIPAC press secretary.

The idea that Israel’s war in Gaza could produce a generational cleavage on the level of the Vietnam War—something I’ve to be evident for several years now—is still difficult to understand for many centrists, particularly that shrinking pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party. There are few columnists and pundits who embody this dynamic more than Jonathan Chait, the Atlantic writer who also spent many years at New York Magazine. Chait is a particular kind of liberal that was once dominant in the Democratic Party: pro-Israel, pro-charter school, a proud internationalist, and a general skeptic of economic populism. Throughout his career, he’s been both prescient and foolhardy. He was one of the early pundits to diagnose the woke turn in the 2010s, and once argued, in 2016, that liberals should root for Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee because he “would almost certainly lose” and could, if he won, morph into an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like moderate. For a columnist like Chait, the MAGA right and the socialist left are both to be scorned. In a new Atlantic piece, he argues the Democratic Socialists of America, who have helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor and are set to swell their ranks in Congress, represent an “encroachment of illiberalism.” DSA, for Chait, is a leftist MAGA that wants to swallow the Democratic Party whole or destroy it entirely; it is, in his view, in an “asymmetrical conflict.” “One side is concerned with taking control of the Democratic Party,” he writes, “while the other just wants everybody within it to get along.” DSA is villainous because there are members of the organization who are outright communists and supporters, in various forms, of authoritarian regimes in China, Cuba, and Venezuela. He points, in particular, to DSA’s Red Star caucus, which is openly communist. DSA is not for liberal democracy, he believes, since their members want capitalism overturned and “the proletarian classes” seizing “political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves ‘democratic.’” One of Chait’s main contentions, which is echoed by the disillusioned elderly members of DSA who have either criticized the post-2016 itineration of the group or loudly departed it altogether, is that it is now a rebuke of Michael Harrington’s founding vision. Harrington’s DSA, founded in the early 1980s, was anti-communist and also pro-Israel. “Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive,” Chait writes, pointing to a statement released by DSA after Russia invaded Ukraine that put blame on “expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations.”

There aren’t any bare facts in Chait’s Atlantic piece that are wrong. There are proud communists in DSA, there are DSA members who hold very unpopular views, and there are plenty who advocate for the so-called “dirty break” which would amount to DSA running Democratic candidates for a period before breaking away to form a third party when the Democrats are properly enervated. Many in DSA are, indeed, hostile to the Democratic Party. The trouble with Chait’s argument, with its well-marshaled facts, is that it misses the actual context of DSA in 2026. Like many opponents of the American socialist left, Chait fails to really understand them. This is not great sin—most commentators don’t—and Chait should get credit, even in bad faith, for doing some research. As a former DSA member—I joined in 2017 and remained in the group for about a year while running for State Senate and getting to know the future mayor of New York—and someone who has been writing about them, off and on, for more than half a decade, I do think deeply about their present and future. I am both sympathetic and a critic. There are DSA members who read me and like me and those who are suspicious of what I argue. I did not leave the organization for any ideological reasons; I simply departed when I was no longer running for office and returning to journalism. I do vote in Democratic primaries, but otherwise do not participate in politics. I don’t donate to candidates and I don’t knock on doors. Keeping a remove, I do believe, strengthens my analysis.

DSA, today, is booming once more. It is in at least its second phase of hyper-growth following the post-Sanders surge in 2016. After a lull during the Joe Biden/pandemic years, DSA has swollen to around 120,000 members nationally. DSA itself is over forty years-old, but it has only been relevant to electoral politics since 2017. This is the first piece of context that must be understood about them. Any older DSA member who is lamenting what the organization has become is, ultimately, asking for the return to a faculty lounge-style debate club that could not impact Democratic politics in a meaningful way. Yes, there were prominent DSA members in office like David Dinkins, the mayor of New York City, but DSA had a limited volunteer base to push its priorities. Harrington’s great insight was to create an organization that advocated for running in Democratic primaries instead of forming a third party, like the old Socialists of the Eugene Debs era. The Socialist Party of the early 20th century was potent—today’s DSA is still only nearing that pre-Red Scare peak—but doomed because the Republican and Democratic machines would team up to crush them. It hurt, too, that the United States has a first-past-the-post presidential system that disincentivizes third party growth. The Democratic Party can pivot left and absorb the Socialists. This is effectively what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who rendered the Socialists more and more irrelevant as his New Deal adopted their economic program. As radical as today’s DSA might seem to Chait and his allies, it is absolutely fulfilling Harrington’s political vision. DSA members of Congress, a DSA New York mayor, and DSA state legislators would all hearten Harrington, who died in 1989.

Any analysis of DSA is faulty if it doesn’t account for how decentralized and democratic the organization remains. This is both a strength and weakness and it is, in every sense, the central feature of DSA. A candidate doesn’t win a DSA endorsement until braving multiple rounds of voting among organization members. It is not top-down like a labor union or the Working Families Party. There is no DSA leader or boss who can determine the next congressional slate. Local chapters take up the cause of candidates. There are open debates. To win an endorsement in a New York City race, a candidate must clear several votes, from a hyper-local chapter to the citywide affiliate. Nationally, there are real schisms, though it’s an open question how much, in the long run, they will really matter. When centrists like Chait lash DSA or conservatives mock some bit of hyper-woke theater, it typically emanates from the national leadership, which is both weaker and more performatively radical. While NYC DSA adores Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the national DSA leadership has been at odds with her for years, attacking her for being insufficiently socialist and even yanking an endorsement. Right now, there’s another fight brewing between the national leadership committee and local chapters over how to conduct a presidential endorsement in 2028. Centrists who yearn for DSA’s destruction may salivate at this infighting, hoping the socialists eat themselves alive like the leftists of the twentieth century. They might—but it’s also important to understand that DSA’s decentralization means the national leadership could cut New York off entirely and it wouldn’t really matter. Big city chapters make up the bulk of membership, collect sizable dues, and make their own political decisions. If anything, the national “needs” New York much more than the reverse. It’s not all that clear to me, as an outsider, what the national committee can offer to the local chapters.

Critics of DSA have been caught flat-footed because it is such a multifarious organization. There are many caucuses, some of them very hard left, and it’s difficult to know how much it matters that DSA entertains tankies, Marxists, and conventional progressive Democrats. Rather than face any takeover from the far left, DSA is probably more at risk of moderating, over time, and becoming indistinguishable from any other left-leaning NGO. This is Bhaskar Sunkara’s argument, and one that resonates more with me. The socialist mayor of New York City is partnering with a right-leaning billionaire police commissioner. This is an alliance that has, so far, served Mamdani, if I am skeptical of its long-term success. If DSA grows more comfortable with the Jessica Tisches of the world, that will dilute the organization’s identity. It is funny that Chait, who is a proud Zionist and undoubtedly approves of Tisch’s tenure as police commissioner, does not mention her at all. Here is DSA governance in action, and it has nothing to do with “police-abolitionist, Hamas-apologizing candidates.” The triumph of Mamdani and AOC’s own quiet repudiation of the Defund movement shows the police abolitionists, within DSA, have lost. Yes, Darializa Avila Chevalier is heading to Congress as a prison abolitionist, but she won’t have any say over police departments or local jails. Were she in Mamdani’s shoes, she’d probably sound more like him. That’s politics. That’s “sewer” socialism.

The growth of DSA has been driven by a newfound interest in socialism and the Democratic voter’s growing hatred of the Democratic Party. Pundits like Chait still seem a bit bewildered by the latter reality. Even the normies aren’t terribly fond of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Mamdani did win the highest turnout mayoral election since 1969, after all; the days when socialist triumphs could be handwaved away as the product of tiny turnout primaries are long gone. The Democratic Party is much more of a shell organization than its reputation would suggest. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, said recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was an absurd statement—not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor any real “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. This is what American politics is, and will always be. If Chait and Harrison want to defeat DSA, they’ll have to run their own candidates, find the volunteers, raise the money, and do the grubby work of electioneering. They’ll have to convince voters DSA is wrong and they are right. Can they? Who really knows. At the minimum, they’ll have to better understand their enemy. Right now, they’re little different than the 2015 Republicans who were hoping and praying that Donald Trump was a fad, a summer fever dream that would be dead in the fall.