[[link removed]]

THE RIFT IN AMERICAN SOCIALISM  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
October 9, 2025
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Realists (Mamdani, AOC) seek immersion in mass politics;
fundamentalists oppose it. _

, Katie Godowski/MediaPunch/IPX/AP Photo

 

As Election Day draws near in New York City, entire genres of
attack-pieces against Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani have
emerged. Today’s _New York Times_
[[link removed]]_, _for
instance, contains a long analysis of just how much some of
Mamdani’s proposals will cost, though equivalent dollar estimates of
how much they will boost the city’s economy are nowhere to be found.
The piece sets the cost of universal child care at an annual $6
billion, to be paid for through a 2 percent increase—roughly, from
11 to 13 percent—on that portion of individual yearly incomes that
exceed $1 million, and a hike to corporate taxes as well. As to the
benefits the city will reap from universal child care—higher labor
force participation from parents of toddlers, the savings those
parents will realize from not having to pay astronomical child care
costs that they can then devote to housing and other necessities, and
the long-term benefits to the prospects (including economic prospects)
of children who receive educational and other head-starts in their
most impressionable years—I’ve barely seen a word.

But the most prevalent genre of Mamdani hit pieces is the attack on
many of the positions taken by the Democratic Socialists of America,
to which Mamdani belongs and whose New York members have been racking
up record levels of door-knocking, precinct walking, and phone banking
in support of his campaign. The stated or implied assumptions in these
pieces is that Mamdani will carry out even the most utopian or
dystopian platform planks that DSA, or some branch of DSA, has
supported.

One such piece was an op-ed
[[link removed]] that
ran in the print edition of today’s _Washington Post_, which linked
Mamdani’s “possible election” to the most outré and sectarian
positions that DSA or some of its subsets have taken. I don’t deny
that some of those positions are surely outré; some of them align
less with democratic socialism than with authoritarian socialism—the
reason why I left the organization last year after nearly
half-a-century of membership, much of it in leadership positions

What such attacks miss is that DSA is well down the road that many
organizations and parties have taken, particularly those organizations
and parties that began with fringe ideologies. (By “fringe,” I
don’t mean implausible; I mean outside the existing belief systems.)
The problem, if problem it be, comes when those beliefs cease to be
fringe, when they gain support within broader sectors of the public.
That’s exactly what happened to Germany’s Greens, who organized
themselves into a fringe political party in the 1980s, only to find
that by the 1990s, their numbers had grown to the point that they
could block the rule of the nation’s more conservative party (the
Christian Democrats) and get some of their own proposals enacted by
entering into coalition governments with the Social Democrats in
various states and, eventually, into the federal government, where
their leader, Joschka Fischer, became the nation’s foreign minister.

All this posed an existential crisis for the Greens. One wing, the
“fundis” (short for fundamentalists), saw such actions as a
sell-out, compelling them to accept Social Democratic positions they
saw as either deficient or wrong. This course of action impeded their
ability to stake out their more purebred positions and counterpose
them not just to those of the Christian Dems, but the Social Dems as
well. Fighting province by province, and eventually nationally, they
refused to support the party’s entry into such positions of
semi-power. Their rival wing, the “realos” (short for realists),
believed that their party’s actual rise to numerical significance
(and the unlikeliness of their rise to dominant majority status)
opened the door to their realizing some actual victories and blocking
some terrible options (as Fischer’s opposition to the 2003 U.S.-U.K
Iraq War compelled Germany to stay out of it).

Just like Germany’s late 20th-century’s Greens, today’s DSA is
very much divided between its realos and fundis. Its growth has opened
the door to its winning elections in cities across the country, though
when those elections have been partisan (some municipal elections are
non-partisan), its victors have virtually always run as Democrats.
Indeed, it was precisely because Bernie Sanders ran for president in
Democratic primaries that the very idea of socialism reached so many
ears that the organization grew nearly ten-fold in the years
immediately following. (Compare and contrast, for instance, the
visibility and audibility of third-party presidential candidate Jill
Stein.) It was precisely because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated
establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in a 2018 Democratic congressional
primary, rather than losing to him as a third-party candidate that
November, that she became the national figure she is today—and also
reached enough ears to boost DSA membership even further.

Sanders and AOC have both made the most of their power, promoting
causes that wouldn’t get as much attention had they not won
elections and caucused with the Democrats. Both, for instance, were
calling for stopping U.S. provision of offensive weapons to Israel for
its Gaza war—a position that has gained major Democratic support
since they initially advanced it.

At the same time, both have incurred the censure of DSA’s fundis.
Many of them still oppose working within the Democratic Party, and
many of them have refused to support them because they haven’t toed
the DSA line on some issues. The DSA’s National Political Committee
(NPC), for instance, refused to endorse AOC for re-election
[[link removed]] in
2024 because she had stated her support for Israel’s right to exist
and defend itself with the Iron Dome anti-missiles.

But the NPC overrepresents DSA’s fundis. The organization’s New
York local, which boasts more than a tenth of the national
organization’s members, enthusiastically supported AOC, just as it
supports Mamdani now, even though, by running on a narrowly drawn
platform of economic issues, he has effectively declined to embrace a
host of DSA’s more sectarian positions. By the process of reaching
out to hundreds of thousands of non-members in the course of
campaigning for Mamdani, the local seems to have realized that Mamdani
will be answerable to a host of constituencies if and when he’s
elected, not just to the DSA. His campaign has been brilliant, both
for his compelling advocacy of social democratic positions, but also
for his resistance to backing positions that may be popular among many
DSA members but have little appeal to the mass of his supporters, much
less swing voters.

(One more split between the organization’s realos and fundis: The
NPC has refused to endorse participation in any of the mass No Kings
Day demonstrations, including the one upcoming on October
18—plainly, they’re ideologically insufficient bourgie
distractions. Many DSA locals, by contrast, have endorsed them, and
will generate large turnouts of their members.)

For all the coverage that Bernie Sanders has received since he first
ran for president, not enough attention has been paid to his
consistent non-membership in DSA, even though it was his efforts that
were responsible for the organization’s renaissance. As a young man,
Sanders belonged to small left sects and third parties; I suspect he
may have since concluded that he’d seen enough of the sectarian
sensibility and believed he could better advance his vision of
democratic socialism absent the confines of purism that some on the
left seek to impose.

The attack on DSA and Mamdani in today’s _Post _notes that the
organization has drifted from the democratic socialism of the
organization’s founder, Michael Harrington. It quotes one DSA
convention delegate crowing that “Michael Harrington’s DSA is
dead.” With that quote, the authors mean that DSA’s vision of
socialism is no longer all that democratic—and if you restrict that
indictment to some (by no means all) DSA leaders and members, then
it’s correct.

But Michael Harrington’s DSA was not only anti-authoritarian; it was
also anti-sectarian. It believed that democratic socialists could win
support of millions of Americans, that their candidates could win
primaries and general elections, particularly if they ran within the
Democratic Party. Founded as it was in the waning years of the broad
prosperity of the postwar years, this was then an article of faith
lacking much confirmation. Today, with economic inequality
skyrocketing and the decades of broadly shared prosperity now a
distant memory, it’s no longer quite so dim a prospect. In that
sense, the tens of thousands of New York DSAers pounding the city’s
sidewalks between now and November 4th are not only Zohran Mamdani’s
socialists; they’re Michael Harrington’s socialists, too.

HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect.

AUTHORITARIAN MOVEMENTS THRIVE ON HOPELESSNESS. They want you to
believe nothing can change, that corruption is inevitable, that truth
doesn’t matter, that democracy is already lost. Cynicism is their
weapon.

AT _THE AMERICAN PROSPECT_, WE BELIEVE HOPE IS THE ANTIDOTE.

Our reporting exposes the forces working to undermine democracy and
highlights the ways ordinary people fight back. Independent journalism
is one of the strongest defenses against authoritarianism and we need
your support to keep it alive. This fall, we set an ambitious
fundraising goal so we can expand our capacity to report on ideas,
politics, and power at a time when it is needed the most. 

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
[[link removed]]

* socialism
[[link removed]]
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]]
* Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]]
* DSA
[[link removed]]
* corporate media
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]