Are the Democratic Socialists of America corny or based?

Courtesy of DSA Seattle

A few years ago, I had a call with WA State Representative Shaun Scott who, at the time, had recently lost his bid for Seattle City Council by only four points – a pretty remarkable feat, considering he ran as a socialist in a deeply NIMBY district. We didn’t know each other beyond exchanging a few brief messages on Twitter and, on two occasions a few months prior, he knocked on my front door to ask for my vote during his campaign. Disappointed by the election result,  I asked if he intended to challenge the centrist who beat him: Alex Pedersen. “Ha! No, I am not going to run for that position again, but you should,” he said. \

I am not really inclined to seek public office for a lot of reasons, but among them include the fact that I would never pass the respectability test. Often purple haired with a nose ring and lots of tattoos, I’m a bisexual commie with a mouth like a sailor. It doesn’t really take much self-awareness to see that my overall aesthetic is the stuff of right wing ANTIFA memes, and that would be a hurdle – especially in a district that had just rejected a socialist far more respectable than I. Despite my apprehensions, I heard Scott out.

“First of all,” Scott probed, “are you a member of DSA?” I grimaced a little before insisting that I tend to run in circles a lot further left than the Democratic Socialists of America (or so I thought). But over the course of 45 minutes, Scott laid out a firm case that DSA is an essential element to local lefty victories. Their organizing infrastructure, their people power, and their ability to push real, material change made them indispensable in a city where elections are usually bought by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. “At the very least,” Scott explained, “you have to have them on your side.” As soon as we wrapped up our conversation, I went to the DSA website and became a member right then and there. Several years later, I’ve all but dropped my initial leftier-than-thou attitude toward the DSA and have concluded that the organization deserves the left’s support.

I started out as a dues-paying-but-otherwise-absentee member of DSA. I felt good contributing a small lefty tithe to support a variety of local grassroots campaigns, but I won’t deny the fact that I remained a bit of a hater — after all,  DSA National consistently promotes milquetoast-at-best, counter-revolutionary at worst messaging and their endorsed electeds, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, bend to the establishment rather than holding the line for the left in the face of rising fascism. I have not been alone in feeling disillusioned by this, either. Among certain leftist factions, DSA is viewed as a complete joke. But I would soon learn that while lefties may get a few laughs out of the antics of DSA National, our local chapter is no joke.

That realization started with a year-long whirlwind romance that found me married to a DSA member. The one thorn in the side of an otherwise remarkably loving and compatible partnership — my dismissal of the DSA.  I often insisted that I would never be the kind of DSA member who wasted my time on its “bureaucracy,” when I could invest my political energy into meeting material needs, mutual aid, and supporting more revolutionary organizations. I justified my refusal to participate with the old Marxist adage: “by each according to ability, for each according to need.” Since I didn’t really believe in DSA, my abilities were better used elsewhere. 

My husband agreed, affirming that my inclination toward a different kind of activism more closely aligned with my abilities and interests was – as the online left would say – valid. For two years and with sincere support, he left me to my anarchist group chats, until one day the anarchist group chats started talking about social housing. In spite of my reservations, I joined in DSA’s efforts to gather signatures and canvass events for campaigns I already supported, namely I-135 and I-137 to, respectively, establish and fund Seattle’s new social housing developer, a real challenge to capitalism and the private housing market. The measures passed with 73% and 63% approval, high margins that DSA should claim at least some of the credit for. 

Not only did DSA Seattle win real, anti-capitalist victories locally, they supported anti-imperialist movements abroad. The chapter coalesced around Palestinian liberation as other Democrat groups allowed Israel to use the Oct. 7 attack as a pretext to launch their genocide. Through the DSA, I spent nearly every day on the UW campus to support the student movement in whatever ways they needed. In the course of doing this work,  I started to warm up to DSA because it materially supported student activists, while still deferring to them to truly lead the movement. I saw my local DSA chapter, as well as individual members, engage in truly revolutionary solidarity work. And perhaps most satisfying to me personally, last fall, DSA’s ground-game helped get pro-Palestine and the first socialist in over a hundred years elected to the Washington state legislature: Rep. Shaun Scott. 

As with so many things, maintaining my bias required distance. So long as I didn’t participate as an active member, I could continue to roll my eyes and perpetuate the narrative that DSA was corny. However, examples of DSA demonstrating legitimately radical politics in my community continued to mount. Activism related to Palestine solidarity and the campaigns for social housing facilitated the kind of proximity to DSA and its members that I had so often avoided. Over time, I gained more visibility into the organization, and it challenged my somewhat fixed beliefs that DSA focused too much on reformist electoral politics and that it was just full of tech bros simply cosplaying as revolutionaries. 

The inconvenient reality is that if we want to win and change the course of history we need a true political majority. As the largest socialist organization in the country, DSA represents approximately a hundred-thousand people who, at the very least, aren’t afraid of calling themselves socialists. Like Rep. Scott told me years ago, we – the supposedly more radical left – will need them on our side.

Whether we want to admit it or not, building a movement will often come in the form of exhausting conversations with people who disagree with us. It will take shape via a patchwork of organized and spontaneous direct action, solidarity strikes, wheatpasting flyers in our neighborhoods, and forming unlikely coalitions. In the absence of complete ideological alignment – which is probably impossible – leftists will have to learn to tolerate and work with each other in an unavoidable process of recruiting, educating, persuading, and consolidating until we reach relative societal consensus that workers should democratically control the means of production. 

I am the first to admit frustration over the fact that DSA is only as radical as its majority will allow, and that reformist attitudes are still too prevalent. But we no longer have the luxury of wasting our time calling each other libs or tankies. I don’t intend to be alarmist but the threat of climate change is imminent. The United States seems to be careening toward collapse at an accelerating pace. The entire planet is in a period of political destabilization and upheaval. In the next 25 years, we can expect more than one billion climate refugees. At a certain point – and I think that point was yesterday – leftists are going to have to get over themselves. There is a very real risk that, if we fail to establish a unified left, it will be too late to save the planet. If you think DSA is a joke, fine, but it will only remain a joke so long as its members who represent the more revolutionary left languish in obscurity. All the more reason to join, honestly. Help tip the scales toward more radical politics. 

While I don’t think that DSA alone will save us, it is and will become an important part of a necessary consolidation and unification of different factions in the coming years. As leftists, it is our responsibility – our duty – to do the work of raising class consciousness and fostering what Gramsci called “collective will.” This is not something that will just magically materialize. If we intend to win, there is no getting around having to change people’s minds, or embracing and developing new comrades with whom we don’t naturally connect, or reconsidering our own biases and shortcomings. We know that solidarity is not transactional, and that we must offer it unconditionally to fellow workers in the fight for socialism. Workers who belong to DSA are not somehow exempt from this, regardless of whether they are pushing DSA toward radical politics, or are still rooting out reformist beliefs. Ultimately, when we engage in sectarianism, writing-off those who, in reality, might just need resources, support, information, or guidance – and the workers who might actually align with us more than our limiting narratives would have us believe – we are withholding solidarity, shirking our responsibilities, and failing to actually build power. 

Taylor LeGore is a Seattle-based activist and writer. She is a member of both DSA and Workers Strike Back; advocates for the abolition of capitalism and the carceral state; and believes housing, education, and healthcare are all fundamental human rights.