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How worried should Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? In the wake of a series of DSA victories in New York City, Jonathan Chait raised the alarm in The Atlantic, writing that as the group has risen in power, it has also grown “more hostile to the [Democratic] party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.” Long-time DSA members, including former staff member and thought leader David Duhalde and socialist magazine publisher Nathan J. Robinson, pushed back, dismissing Chait as someone who doesn’t know or understand the DSA.

Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.

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As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now — first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals — already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself. The only defense is to out-organize it.

For decades, the DSA was mostly composed of a cohort of aging boomers left over from its founding in 1982. It prioritized open debate and political tolerance. Following in the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, members viewed the DSA not as a revolutionary vanguard but as a reformist bridge to mainstream labor-liberalism, and they prioritized parliamentary process and pluralism.

But in the mid-2010s, the character of the organization began to change. I was in Boston at the time and witnessed the last days of the “old” DSA. New, younger members began to enter the organization, while Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the socialist magazine Jacobin grew their followings.

As the DSA’s cultural power expanded and it began to amass electoral victories, more leftists of varying extremist commitments were drawn in. This was an explicit strategy called “the big tent,” advanced by the then-DSA Jacobin Left. In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry. The provision was already a dead letter.

The old DSA’s high-mindedness became its fatal weakness. Veteran members assumed the younger generation played by the same rules of persuasion, but the newcomers’ goal was not to win arguments — it was to transform the institution and its politics.

As the organization grew, it began to profess more extreme ideas — and demand that its members do the same. First, there were the purity tests of Black Lives Matter and BDS, then apologia for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and support for Hamas and its atrocities.

The new DSA — with the help of hype-man Hasan Piker — advanced these agendas with what American labor leader Walter Reuther called “the Communists’ highly developed technique of name-calling and character assassination.” The Harringtonites fought back, but their efforts came far too late, and many prominent members of the older generation eventually left.

My final attempt to challenge Leninist-Third Worldist dominance within the DSA fell apart amid stiff resistance. In April 2025, I proposed that North Star, a caucus including many Harringtonite veterans, call on the DSA’s governing board to demand that Hamas release all hostages in Israel and surrender unconditionally.

Even allies were dismissive of my proposal’s prospects. One member wrote, “Jake’s resolution could not pass. If it passed, we would close our doors the next day and deserve it. We would not deserve to be in DSA, which is perhaps his purpose.”

Long-time DSA insiders like Duhalde, who has advocated for the “big tent” that brought in Communists, do not dispute that this radicalization process occurred. But Duhalde maintains that this was less about “entryism” than an “unplanned left-wing refoundation.” That formulation glosses over the systematic displacement of the organization’s foundational commitments and rejects the warnings of many in DSA’s founding generation.

In fact, the organization continues to eat its own. The former radical vanguard clustered around Jacobin has been eclipsed by a coalition of Third Worldists, Trotskyists, and doctrinaire Leninists, some of whom openly endorse political violence. At the same time, condescension and outright hostility toward anti-Communism remain. One long-time DSA thought leader dismisses the anti-Communist tradition on the Left as “neoconservatism with a union label.”

There are warning signs that the Democratic Party establishment is drifting toward a similar surrender. It is already teetering on the edge of accommodation — or worse, capture — rather than opposition.

What happened to the DSA can and will happen to the Democratic Party if more moderate Democrats don’t organize against it. As Reuther, a man with experience fighting Leninists, wrote in 1948: “You have to show [Communism] up in the marketplace of ideas, expose it by honest dealing.”

But the battle is not merely ideological. Reuther’s victory over the Communists in the United Auto Workers union was the result of a clear-eyed strategy of exposing, isolating, and driving out those who rejected democratic norms. He also built a broad anti-Communist coalition. Dissident Democrats would do well to take inspiration from him.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Jake Altman is a former union official and the author of “Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism.”

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I Was There For DSA’s Radicalization. The Democrats Are Next.