Socialists are trying to take hold of the Democratic Party

It’s the “democratic” socialist moment.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) engineered the primary victories of three winning candidates in New York’s recent congressional races. A week later, DSA-backed Melat Kiros toppled a 30-year incumbent in Colorado’s 1st congressional district, sailing to victory. “You are the proof that the power of organized people beats the power of organized money,” Kiros told supporters. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) appeared onscreen at a Zohran Mamdani victory party in New York, the crowd chanted, “You’re next, you’re next, you’re next.”

The socialists aim to take over the Democratic Party, and some members of the old guard are making nice.

“I can disagree with some of the positions or statements of some of the incoming members of Congress but still welcome them. We are a big tent party,” Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D–Md.) told CNN. Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) agrees: “I’m not a democratic socialist. But I do believe the Democratic Party has been, historically, way too timid in taking on corporate power. I think our party should have bigger ideas.”

Others are wary of these “bigger ideas” and see a hard leftward turn as a losing strategy.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) argues that “socialists aren’t Democrats. They’re socialists.” Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) warns of a “dangerous” agenda that amounts to “expressing support for communism…for open borders, defunding the police.” Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) is blunter still: “Our party’s becoming an orgy of socialism.” And veteran Democratic strategist James Carville says it’s time to talk “the S-word, schism.”

But so far, the rise of the DSA is looking less like a schism and more like a hostile takeover. Some DSA members have been honest about their radical ambitions.

DSA National Political Committee member David Jenkins declares that “our goal is communism”; National Political Committee member Hazel Williams argues that “U.S. imperialism is not a thing that can be reformed away. It has to be overthrown through revolutionary struggle.”

Socialism never took hold in America. But those who believe the DSA can’t win outside of progressive cities may be underestimating its reach.

In Colorado, Kiros sailed to victory promising that “the only way we get Medicare for All passed is by getting rid of the Democrats that are actively standing in that way.” In Los Angeles, socialist Nithya Raman may unseat the incumbent Democratic mayor; she credits the DSA as “the only place where people were really talking about tenants’ rights and renters’ rights in the context of a political movement.” Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib is also a DSA member. The DSA recruited Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who once posted on Reddit that he became a “communist” as he got older. Platner has since dropped out of his race amid rape allegations against him.

As mayor, Mamdani hasn’t had time to transform New York into either a workers’ paradise or a communist hellhole. But he has begun to transform the political landscape by skillfully leveraging his platform to promote the ideals of socialism at every turn. After signing the largest budget in New York City history—one that, among other things, delayed pension contributions so he could avoid making substantive cuts—Mamdani proclaimed that socialism had triumphed over capitalism.

“If these past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles,” he said.

Mamdani is fulfilling a promise he made early in his political career: to remain an uncompromising promoter of doctrinaire socialism.

“We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism,” he told a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021. His new role as kingmaker has put Jeffries in a bind. Asked whether Mamdani was making enemies on Capitol Hill by endorsing against incumbents, Jeffries demurred: “The mayor and I agreed to strongly disagree about some of his endorsements, and he’s got work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”

In the early 1980s, the left-wing British Labour Party was infiltrated by a socialist group called the Militant tendency. The group organized around the Trotskyist newspaper Militant and pursued a strategy known as “entryism,” with the goal of, as one study of the group put it, “finding a pool of new members to recruit” to radical Marxism.

A disillusioned former Militant member described it plainly at the time: “They’re gradually infiltrating, you know, hedge-hopping from ward to ward, taking over wards,” he told the British program TV Eye in 1981.

“We have a majority support, probably, [among] the Labour Party’s young socialists,” Militant organizers told TV Eye.

The aim, the historian Kenneth O. Morgan later observed, was “capturing the Labour Party for the cause of revolutionary socialism.” Labour leaders worried Militant was anticipating a revolutionary moment in which it could abolish parliamentary procedure and overthrow Britain’s constitutional monarchy—as one Militant organizer put it on camera, “on the basis of that majority, abolishing the monarchy, abolishing the House of Lords.” After Militant captured the Liverpool City Council and three parliamentary seats, Labour expelled the group for violating its charter by creating a “party within a party.”

One member of the DSA has suggested that Mamdani’s team should “study the Marxist-led Liverpool City Council” with the goal of transforming “the mayor’s office into an organizing center to build a mass movement,” ultimately “with international repercussions.”

That seems to be exactly what they’re planning.

Today’s Marxist revolutionaries can be found not in the newsroom of The Daily Worker or gathered in the City College of New York cafeteria, but in the Twitch streams of socialist influencers such as Hasan Piker.

Like many socialists, Piker tactically downplays his radicalism by claiming all he’s really after is affordable healthcare.

“I wish they’d stop calling me a radical. None of these people are radical. They just want healthcare,” he said at a DSA victory party. In other contexts, though, he’s fantasized about killing landlords—”let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude”—and praised China’s former dictator Mao Zedong, whose policies like the Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions to starve to death, as “one of the great leaders of this world.”

Before she won her New York primary, socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier was tweeting about “seiz[ing] the means of production.” Asked how she’d respond to Republican ads branding her a communist, she said only that it’s a framing she’s “very proud” not to respond to.

In the public eye, democratic socialists tend to avoid Marxist rhetoric, especially when running for office, but they won’t criticize a comrade for being too far left. Before he was mayor, Mamdani explicitly outlined for young DSA members a strategy of emphasizing less radical policies while never losing sight of the ultimate goal, to paraphrase Marx, of expropriating the expropriators.

“If we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” he said. “But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in…[like] the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment….It is critical that we do not leave any one issue for the other.”

What seems to be happening is that DSA members are pushing the Democratic Party toward democratic socialism at the same time that committed Marxists are pushing the democratic socialists toward full-blown communism.

The Red Star caucus is the DSA’s communist caucus, and one of its members is now a national co-chair. Red Star members published an argument for including communists in the DSA in 2024, noting that “for decades, DSA was an anti-communist…organization.” The DSA’s founders had explained in a labor journal that they’d inserted language into the founding charter banning members “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization.”

“Democratic centralism” is the concept that lets communists say they permit democracy even as they impose a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Vladimir Lenin explained that democratic centralism “rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.”

That’s freedom of speech, in other words, as long as it doesn’t contradict the party line.

Perhaps that’s why the DSA’s Red Star caucus supports democracy only “in our present conditions,” where “democratic struggle outweighs the benefits of ideological homogeneity.” Lenin himself once advised that until revolutionaries have the “strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments…you must work within them.” The DSA recently lifted its ban on members affiliated with democratic centralist groups.

How much does it matter if a single caucus within a marginal political party wants to bring communism to America? Republicans see it as a political opportunity. During a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, President Donald Trump declared, “We’re not going to lose an election for 100 years. The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

But the entire Democratic Party isn’t on the verge of Maoism.

American exceptionalism includes an exceptional resistance to the kind of socialism that swept Europe from the 19th century onward. In their book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks identified “Americanism,” a culturally unique ideology of “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism,” as the animating ideology in the late 19th and early 20th century United States.

The socialist scholar Leon Samson believed “Americanism has thus served as a substitute for socialism.” Samson and other socialist scholars of the 1920s and ’30s believed their movement struggled in America, even during the Great Depression, because the working class already believed it lived in a society with a high degree of social mobility. In Europe, by contrast, guilds and rigid class structures meant men were far more likely to follow their fathers into the same profession and social station. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky believed American workers were simply too prosperous to fully embrace Marxist class conflict; New York’s material conveniences, he observed, “completely won” over his own two young sons when his family lived there in exile during the winter of 1917.

Life in America’s preeminent capitalist city is a lot more opulent today, and the country isn’t in a depression. So why are there still so many socialists?

For one thing, in the mayoral election, most New Yorkers weren’t voting for socialism. They were voting against a washed-up former governor with a checkered personal history, and for a charismatic young candidate who vowed to stand up to Trump. Support for democratic socialist candidates also skews heavily toward the young and college-educated, not the lower-income laborers who are supposed to constitute the revolutionary “proletariat.” That’s because the democratic socialists are promising to deliver these young, credentialed urban professionals what they really crave: upward mobility, the American Dream.

Is America no longer upwardly mobile? It is. In most parts of the country, young people are still on track to end up wealthier than their parents were. But there are troubling trends in cities where socialists such as Mamdani are getting elected.

Under-40 city dwellers voting for socialists have accumulated record amounts of student loan debt and feel boxed out of the real estate market. Left-wing views are correlated with high education paired with relatively low income; the statistician Nate Silver has found that the Americans most likely to identify as “very liberal” are postgraduates making less than $60,000 a year.

Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, no fan of socialism, predicted something like this: “There’s a generational problem where it’s difficult for young people to acquire capital….If you start your life in debt that’s impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, it’ll be harder to accumulate capital, and you might be less friendly to capitalism.”

But there are ways to make city life more affordable that don’t involve creating expensive and inefficient government programs, looting wealth, or fomenting revolutionary struggle. Thiel suggests internalizing the costs onto the universities themselves and rewriting bankruptcy law so student debt can be discharged: “It’s the college that gives you the bad education that gets stuck with the bill.”

Centrist Democrats have floated an “abundance” agenda focused on rolling back zoning and other land-use regulations that make housing so expensive in the first place. But that would require more Democrats to stand up against their own coalition of special-interest groups, and to combat false narratives coming from the socialist left within their own party. Contrary to the leftist narrative, the middle class isn’t shrinking because Americans are getting poorer on average; it’s shrinking because more Americans are getting richer and moving into higher income brackets.

If the Democrats seem unable to combat democratic socialism, the democratic socialists seem just as feckless in opposing those pulling them toward outright communism.

When Mamdani praised socialism in his city budget speech, he name-checked Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who critiqued the kind of centralized economic planning that destroyed national economies. “I have been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek: ‘If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists,'” Mamdani said before pivoting to declare that his administration had proven Hayek wrong.

But Hayek was right. Central planning has led to economic ruin and starvation over and over, from the USSR to Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba, and now Venezuela. The socialist hero Hugo Chávez boasted that his social housing project, Hugo Chávez City, would usher in a “new Venezuela, no longer built from scrap.” But at the very moment Mamdani declared socialism victorious in New York, Hugo Chávez City sits in ruins, as does much of Chávez’s “new Venezuela” following a devastating earthquake. International rescue teams say the incompetent Venezuelan state has impeded their access to the hardest-hit areas.

Economic disaster wasn’t Hayek’s only warning. Left unchecked, he argued, socialism—even of the “democratic” variety—leads to tyranny. Hayek’s best-selling book was called The Road to Serfdom. Socialism leads down this road, he argued, because in a planned economy, individual preferences don’t determine what’s produced and sold; instead, a political committee, and ultimately a single leader at its head, must assume the authority to decide “what men should believe and strive for.”

The economic plan outlined in the DSA’s most recent political program is troubling enough on its own: universal rent control, government-owned housing, and nationalizing the food, education, energy, medical, and transportation sectors, all funded by aggressive wealth taxes and a government takeover of America’s largest corporations. Just as Hayek warned, that economic program is paired with an agenda for dismantling America’s constitutional system: The platform calls for a new political system that would abolish the Electoral College, make the president and the Supreme Court subordinate to Congress, and abolish the Senate. Asked directly on C-Span whether the DSA really wants to abolish the Senate, one co-chair didn’t flinch: “That’s part of our platform, and we don’t think that’s extreme.”

Socialists claim the mantle of democracy but somehow always end up with one-party states.

Hayek warned that, despite their democratic pretensions, socialists must eventually abolish democracy too, since it’s the final “obstacle to [the] suppression of freedom” their grand vision requires.

The socialists don’t want a policy debate about healthcare or the optimal size of the welfare state. Their movement aims to restructure the entire American political system, to replace free markets with socialist planning, and to transform a constitutional republic designed to protect individual rights into a so-called democratic collective that can wage permanent class warfare.

The democratic socialists are quite open about all of this. Yet for some establishment Democrats, none of it amounts to a red line. “I’m not afraid of new members or new ideas in the party,” says Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.). Rep. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.) agrees: “It’s important that we welcome them….We have to have a big tent.”

You do need a big tent to survive in a two-party system. But if there’s one thing history has taught us about Marxists, it’s that they’re not good at sharing their tents. If they can’t take them over, they’ll tear them down.

Democratic socialism is concentrated in progressive, coastal cities, for now.

But New York’s DSA co-chair is probably right to be optimistic that by 2028 the movement will widen its reach: “We will be trying to influence the next presidential primary….Many in the organization would be very thrilled if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ended up running.”

America’s immunity to socialism may be waning as the cultural memory of its 20th century failures fades. K-12 schools have largely failed to teach these lessons of history to millennials and Generation Z. Higher-ed liberal arts departments are steeped in Marxist theory. Greedy capitalists remain favorite Hollywood villains. And millennials who watched the 2008 financial collapse as young adults were more likely to hear from the news that it was capitalism run amok than that federal housing policy, Federal Reserve manipulation, or the moral hazard created by quasi-governmental guarantors like Fannie Mae were the root causes.

So confidence in capitalism is falling, and Americans under 35 now view socialism more favorably than capitalism. The “antistatism, laissez-faire,” and “individualism” that Lipset and Marks identified as fundamental to “Americanism” have become less central to American identity.

We’re also in an era when charismatic entertainers can harness the energy of digital crowds to propel themselves to surprising political victories. Trump’s complete takeover and transformation of the Republican Party is proof of that. Democrats must now decide, and quickly, whether they’ll stand up for the liberal order they claim to defend, or whether they’ll succumb to a populist uprising that aims to overturn it.