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DSA GRAPHIC HISTORY: LEARNING FROM OUR PAST  
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Kurt Stand
October 12, 2025
The Stansbury Forum
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_ Why, amongst all socialist organizations, DSA is the one which has
grown so dramatically? _

, Noah Van Sciver

 

If past is prologue, then understanding history is key to
understanding the present, charting a course for the
future.  Raymond Taylor (writer), Noah Van Sciver (illustrator) and
Paul Buhle (editor) collaborated on DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA:
A GRAPHIC HISTORY which, in its 24 pages, touches on essential points
of DSA’s political evolution.  It is particularly relevant as we
seek how best to respond to the fascist threat posed by the Trump
Administration and emboldened corporate reaction; how we build upon
the possibilities afforded by growing mass resistance and an open
socialist presence unseen in ages.

Given DSA’s massive growth from its nadir at the start of the new
millennium with only a few thousand members to the tens of thousands
who have joined since 2015 some people have concluded that it is
really a new organization, its past is of little value, an albatross
that needs to be sloughed off.  DSA is, of course, not the same in
2025 as when founded in 1982; only a moribund organization would
remain unchanged over the course of forty plus years. The relevant
question is to ask why, amongst all socialist organizations, DSA is
the one which has grown so dramatically.  

It is a question the GRAPHIC HISTORY helps answer. Although
constrains of size meant that some areas of DSA’s past received less
attention that they should have, those aspects chosen provide a
framework to connect the dots between before and now.

TURNING POINTS

Opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, participation in Occupy
Wall Street in 2011, support for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign
in 2016 are the three movements the GRAPHIC HISTORY identifies as
laying the basis for DSA’s subsequent growth.  Precursors to each
– opposition to war and U.S. militarism, grassroots organizing on
behalf of economic and social security, independent electoral action
primarily through the Democratic Party — show the continuity of
“old” and “new” DSA that is too often forgotten.

IRAQ: _In the face of aggression and injustice, DSA remained
steadfast in its commitment to peace, justice and solidarity_. 

Most of those who founded DSA had been part of the movement against
the Vietnam War, a commitment to peace remained central
thereafter.  One of the first initiatives of DSA’s Youth Section
was to organize against selective service registration (which resumed
in 1980 after being ended in 1975).  DSA members in the 1980s joined
local solidarity committees opposed to US funding and arming of the
Contras in Nicaragua and the violently repressive governments in El
Salvador and Guatemala.  DSA unionists challenged AFL-CIO leadership
support for U.S. imperial policies in Central America and
elsewhere.  

By the late 1980s, however, anti-war movements became weaker and new
rationalizations for U.S. military actions abroad developed within
liberal political circles, academia and the media.  With the Cold
War ending, there was an attempt to portray U.S. foreign policy as
having changed, as being essential to a “rules-based”
international order. “Irrational” authoritarian government, by
which commentators meant newly independent states in Asia and Africa,
especially those majority Arab and/or majority Muslim, were deemed the
major threat to world peace (such definitions rested on the false
assumption of a supposedly more civilized, democratic “West”).  

A test of convictions arrived in 1991 when the first Gulf War was
launched after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The invasion and
annexation of a neighboring country was clearly illegal and
immoral.  Most Democratic Party liberals and some former anti-war
activists took the position that the U.S. should respond by force of
arms. Significant debates took place within DSA as to our
position.  The result: overwhelming condemnation of the US military
invasion.  That debate clarified and solidified DSA’s politics,
laid the framework for unequivocal opposition to the 2003 invasion of
Iraq and for current solidarity with Palestine.

OCCUPY:  _Occupy Wall Street erupted as a grassroots protest against
the injustices of capitalism.  DSA worked alongside organizers,
lending support and expertise to help advance the movement’s demand
for economic justice and equality._

Occupy began in 2011 as a direct action protest against corporate
greed and inequality. DSA, without hesitation, joined in New York and
other cities as the spirit of resistance spread. Decentralized, made
up of relatively autonomous chapters, DSA had a natural kinship with
the movement as a form of organizing reflecting the socialist feminist
influence at DSA’s origins.

That was exemplified in the 1990s by DSA’s response to the
“feminization of poverty,” itself a consequence of the destruction
of jobs and communities by the mass layoffs in the 1970s, intensified
by systemic pay inequity between women and men (and further
intensified by the even greater wage gap faced by African American and
Spanish-speaking women).  

Some of this work was national in scope – such as DSA’s opposition
to the Clinton Administration’s destruction of existing welfare
programs.  Most of the work, however, was locally-based mutual
support engagement and metropolitan-wide public policy initiatives
alongside workshops and forums highlighting the reality of increased
poverty women and children faced.  DSA unionists backed AFSCME’s
campaign for “comparable worth” (i.e. raising the wages of
women-dominated occupations to the equivalent of better-paid
male-dominated jobs).

DSA chapters organized for low-income housing, rent control, expanded
mass transit, public education, low-cost childcare while opposing the
burgeoning war on drugs and pro-developer urban budgets/tax
policies.  The other side of such work was a response to the New
Right’s assault on women’s rights.  DSA members were active in
abortion clinic defense mobilizations to protect patients and staff
from “Operation Rescue’s” harassment and violence, supported ACT
UP’s protests to change federal policy of neglect/hostility toward
victims of AIDS.  Similarly, diverse forms of local organizing
characterized DSA’s approach to labor solidarity, public health,
environmental protection.

Member-initiated campaigns against the array of social and political
forms of injustice flowing from inequality anticipated DSA’s embrace
of Occupy and its growth in its aftermath.

SANDERS: _In 2015, DSA’s Run Bernie project helped convince Bernie
to run for president.  In the modern era, it was the first time
people seriously talked about democratic socialism. _ 

DSA had long supported Sanders, including an independent initiative to
support his first Senatorial campaign in 2006.  As the 2016
presidential election took shape, it became clear that political
change was in the wind. Donald Trump, with his demagoguery and racist
rhetoric spoke to anger without hope, while Sanders spoke to hope and
anger rooted in social solidarity. DSA as the socialist organization
whose political perspective most closely mirrored his, benefitted by
an upsurge in membership.

DSA had prior experience in supporting that kind of popular insurgency
when backing Jesse Jackson’s second presidential campaign in 1988
and developing a close working relationship with the associated
Rainbow Coalition.

Some members supported Jackson and the Rainbow during his first
campaign in 1984, but DSA did not endorse him.  Working within the
Democratic Party was initially conceived as building coalitions with
mainstream labor, civil rights, women’s, environmental and other
social justice organizations.  Jackson challenged that by organizing
on those same issues from the bottom up with an expansive agenda
rather than a least common denominator program.  The Rainbow
Coalition brought those elements together in an on-going movement
beyond election cycles – opposing corporate anti-union,
anti-egalitarian policies espoused by the Reagan Administration, a
politics mainstream Democrats failed to sufficiently combat.

Some in DSA feared that supporting such a campaign would alienate
potential allies, some in DSA were concerned about Jackson not being
sufficiently socialist.  Jackson’s explicit anti-racism was
central to his working-class agenda, a connection which some members
believed would weaken a focus on universal economic
issues.  Moreover, affirmation of Palestinian rights, rejection of
anti-Communism as an ideology, and overall challenge to US imperial
foreign policy was not supported by all in DSA. 

A lengthy and protracted debate ensued concluded by 1986 in a
Convention decision to endorse Jackson and make work with the Rainbow
a national priority.  A full-time organizer was hired to implement
the decision. Those politics came to the fore again during Sanders’
presidential runs.

MULTIPLE VOICES, MULTIPLE TENDENCIES

Many left organizations similarly opposed the 1991 and 2003 wars
against Iraq, engaged in community-based organizing and helped spread
Occupy, supported Jackson and the Rainbow then supported
Sanders.  But DSA is the organization which survived fully intact,
in position to expand to its current strength.  Significantly,
debates over the first Gulf War, the Jackson campaigns, or other
issues did not lead to splits, to people leaving or being forced out.

Key, as the GRAPHIC HISTORY notes, was DSA’s founding based on
a _shared vision for a multi-tendency left _in recognition that
programmatic unity could emerge out of disagreement.  Members and
leaders of DSA at its birth had different world views, political
histories, political priorities – the GRAPHIC HISTORY mentions
Dorothy Healey, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington, Rep. Ron
Dellums and Harry Britt as reflective of that diversity. A common
program and orientation emerged without any expectation of ideological
conformity. That flexibility, however, was based on several
principals: support for peace, equality, unionism, democratic
participation and accountability. 

DSA’s politics developed out of the work of the membership, rather
than as a set of prescriptions emerging out of a pre-developed
analysis. Working people don’t inherently look at the world through
the same lens, activists in unions, churches, community groups,
tenant, peace and environmental organizations frequently differ
amongst themselves and between each other yet can come to a shared
perspective, shared engagement, shared goals. DSA’s commitment to
function as a multi-tendency organization mirrors this
process.  Class consciousness or socialist understanding can’t be
imposed; such awareness develops in the context of experience in
political/social struggles and education through organization. 

Solidarity, at the core of working-class strength, similarly, emerges
when discovering points of commonality and building structures that
reinforce that understanding.  This is always fraught – mutual
support is what sustains an ability to overcome the centrifugal forces
of class society and systemic forms of racial and gendered oppression.

An organization that encourages different forms of engagement
coinciding with different prior experiences and outlooks proved
welcoming as it provided room to join others across a wide spectrum of
issues and varying levels of commitment.  Sustaining that unity lay
with recognizing the connection between base-building grass-roots
initiatives on one hand with institutional leadership (elected public
officials, union officers, leaders of large membership or funded
organizations) on the other, without attempting to conflate
them.  Organizing on the ground creates possibilities otherwise
lacking, while organizing through institutions create frameworks
within which systemic challenges to power relationships can take
shape.  The two are interdependent albeit with different impulses. 

The GRAPHIC HISTory underscores what this means in practice –
images abound on its pages, “Protect Our Schools,” “Power to the
Tenants,” “My Body My Choice,” “Youth Autonomy,” “No One
is Illegal,” “Trans Rights is Human Rights,” “Planet Before
Profits,” “Healthcare not Warfare,” each signifying issues where
DSA members are organizing.  So too, DSA’s support for Starbucks
unionizing and teacher strikes, pro-labor legislative initiatives for
one fair wage, union rights and other forms of worker solidarity are
highlighted. Those slogans and campaigns speak to our times.
Insecurity and uncertainty, debt, precarity, assaults on personal
liberty and collective rights, are realities which have given birth to
wider streams of political radicalism and form the social base behind
DSA’s membership rise.

Activists are motivated by some combination of personal experience,
moral outrage, strategic analysis. That often leads to different
emphasis or approach as does the community being engaged – outreach
in an election campaign or a union organizing drive will differ, so
too will work to defund police, to force action on climate change,
build solidarity with migrants, stop evictions. Socialists will, or
should, seek to bring these together (and bring together those
mobilized within each) but that is only possible by recognizing and
working to resolve the contradictions that can emerge within them.

The openness to ideas rooted in different streams of political
engagement – and rooted in the social base of people impacted by the
economic and spiritual crisis of contemporary society – has been the
basis of DSA’s electoral successes.  The GRAPHIC
HISTORY highlights three:

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ whose election in 2020 helped ignite
DSA’s growth; her participation in anti-Oligarchy tours with Bernie
Sanders has brought the fight against Trump, for environmental justice
and economic equality to millions. AOC’s politics are embodied in
her Green New Deal Legislation, support for Medicare for all, call to
defund ICE.

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB, the first Palestinian American women elected to
Congress is a powerful advocate for Palestinian lives and opposition
to U.S. support for Israeli apartheid.  She co-introduced the
Breathe Act to divest from discriminatory and brutal policing and
reinvest in alternative means to ensure community safety.  Tlaib has
worked to promote racial justice, immigrant rights, worker rights,
full equality for all.

REP. CORI BUSH, a nurse, played a leading role in the protest movement
in Ferguson, MO after a police officer wasn’t charged for the murder
of an unarmed teenager.  Her focus in Congress was on housing
justice, healthcare reform, and criminal justice reform – including
introducing the People’s Response Act (supported by Black Lives
Matter) that would fund an inclusive, health-centered approach to
public safety.

Each of them has been subjected to vicious misogynistic and racist
attacks, been in conflict with mainstream corporate Democratic
leadership; each has combined legislative and community outreach with
support of mass mobilizations. Yet differences have emerged amongst
them, in particular over how to oppose US military support for Israel
(though there are far more points of convergence than
divergence).  Although those differences have divided DSA members,
each retains the strong support of the DSA locals where they live and
the support of working-class communities they represent in
Congress.  

Based on their principled stances and relationship to their
constituents both AOC and Tlaib have survived attempts to defeat them
and emerged with greater support than ever in their Bronx/Queens, and
Detroit home communities.  

Cori Bush, despite serving with a militancy long absent in her St.
Louis district was defeated in 2024 – the combination of corporate
Democratic opposition, right-wing attacks, pro-Israeli money proved
decisive. That fit a pattern. For decades, African American elected
representatives who refuse to be coopted by establishment politics
have been targeted.  DSA member India Walton was similarly defeated
when Democratic officials joined Republicans to defeat her campaign to
become mayor of Buffalo after winning the Democratic primary. So too,
Representative Jamal Bowman (criticized by some for his voting record
on Israel for reasons similar to criticisms of AOC) lost his
reelection bid, facing the same enemies. Bush, Walton, Bowman, have
all stood in support of each other.

DSA’s history (and the history of labor and socialism) underscores
the importance of supporting DSA identified public figures,
notwithstanding disagreements, for transformative politics depends on
multiple streams of resistance and advocacy reinforcing each
other.  Solidarity internally is a sign of class and societal
solidarity, each dependent on mutual support and mutual respect across
lines of difference.  Such questions become of greater importance as
the number of DSA members holding public office increase, and as the
possibility of winning executive office looms – most promisingly
with Zohran Mandami’s mayoral campaign in New York City and Omar
Fateh’s in Minneapolis.  

_From prison abolition to mutual aid, from housing justice to
environmental sustainability, immigrant rights, and reproductive
justice and DSA’s trans rights and bodily autonomy campaign, DSA
members are actively involved in a variety of working groups, each
dedicated to advancing socialist principles and building socialism
from the ground up._

MOVING FORWARD

Past may be prologue, but the future is unwritten. There is no
guarantee that, like other left organizations, DSA won’t split,
dwindle in size and influence. That danger is intensified by assaults
on democratic and constitutional rights, urban military deployments,
ICE raids, union-busting and budgetary policies that will increase
inequality and poverty.

Sharp debate on organizational issues at DSA’s Convention this past
August revealed cleavages within the membership, while an underlying
unity was reflected in near unanimous support for political
resolutions. DSA’s divided leadership now faces a challenge –
building upon the organization’s roots as a multi-tendency
organization or retreat into a sectarian posture by jettisoning
presumed “reformist” or “ultra-left” tendencies.  DSA’s
future depends upon a shared commitment to the organization while
sustaining connections to the communities members come from, are part
of, are organizing within.

Bearing this in mind, three final thoughts make explicit what is
implicit in the GRAPHIC HISTORY as needs facing tomorrow.

ALLIANCES: DSA’s strength as a multi-tendency organization lies not
only in how we organize ourselves, it lies with how we relate and
connect with others around us. Other socialist and left organizations
with a different conception of how organize for systemic change have
their own validity.  So too do larger, broader liberal and
progressive organizations and associations, so do unions, tenant
associations, churches and a whole panoply of networks and groups all
of which form part of the wider world seeking social change. 

DSA needs to retain the flexibility to work with the whole range of
political organizations – be they liberal be they further left, be
they mainstream or on the margins – where it connects with
organizational priorities and the work of our diverse
membership.  That doesn’t mean accepting others positions as our
own; programmatic not ideological unity is central in coalition as it
is amongst members.  Being part of varied alliance – just as being
part of varied neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and regions — is
how we oppose hatreds which divide, how we build toward a socialism
that is democratic in fact, not just word.

FACING FASCISM: The fascist threat today is real; it is a threat
embodied by Trump but ought not be reduced to him.  The
transformation of the Republican Party reflects the authoritarian
danger within our political culture; as is the rise of openly racist,
openly fascistic organizations.  So too, Agenda 2025 reflects a
long-standing drive of key sections of capital to weaken formal
democratic rights to “free” corporations from regulatory
limitations, “free” U.S. imperial power from all constraints,
“free” capital from worker demands and societal obligations.

This means being cognizant of, and opposed to the anti-unionism,
anti-labor aspect of Administration policy – it’s assaults on
immigrant workers, on federal workers, on workplace DEI (diversity,
equity, inclusion) programs are an opening wedge to an assault on all
union rights.  It means resisting the intensified racism of
“anti-crime” rhetoric and policies, the racism of the celebration
of amoral military violence by the Trump Administration – fighting
the violence of fascism means opposing the celebration of war and
violence abroad of a U.S. foreign policy of long-standing bi-partisan
support.

A response needs to tackle the immediate danger posed by the Trump
Administration by defending civil liberties and constitutional rights,
and the long-term political threat posed by extreme right-wing
politics becoming mainstream, and the underlying systemic danger of
unmoored financialized capital seeking to impose direct role over
existing national and international representative bodies with all who
stand similarly opposed notwithstanding fundamental disagreement on
program, perspective, goals.

The strength of a socialist organization lies not in enhancing
contradictions amongst working people or within broad popular
movements, but in organizing to find points of concurrence, to build a
broader basis and wider support for structural reforms that challenge
the roots of reaction. Rather than pitting one against the other,
organizing ought to be conceived as unifying various avenues of
resistance and affirmation.

COHESIVENESS AND COHERENCE: DSA, as the GRAPHIC HISTORY amply
demonstrates, has a rich history.  Accounts of DSA in its early
years often bear little resemblance to what members experienced partly
because we wore our public profile lightly – it’s not the least of
its virtues that the GRAPHIC HISTORY in readable and visually
arresting form presents a fuller picture than usually emerges.  

DSA’s past struggles are frequently not recalled because a lack of
cohesiveness all too often meant that the sum of the parts or our
organizing was less than the whole. Cohesiveness is foundational to
centralized organizations; the challenge for DSA is to accomplish this
while maintaining a heterogenous character. Key is for members to
realize that being “correct,” and divided is to undermine the
struggle – part of the premise of being “correct,” is the
ability to achieve agreement (a truism for an organization internally
as it is for social justice organizing).  Unity is needed,
uniformity is not.

Coherence, in turn, means developing a positive conception of
socialism around which to build support for an alternative able to
counter Trump’s incoherent patriarchal militarized white nationalism
that has built support by touching on deeply felt grievances. Elements
of that alternative are already visible in calls for “Abolition
Democracy,” a “Third Reconstruction,” the “Green New Deal”
which each give shape to a vision of mutuality deeply rooted in our
country’s past — yet as something new, something that can engage
people in their work, in their sense of the future.

DSA’s vision ought to combine and build upon these as the basis for
coherence and convergence of a movement fighting for the political
power of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class.   The essence
of democracy lies in the shared striving for peace, workers rights,
equality and freedom. 

_ Even though left-wing organizing has grown, there is a looming
threat.  The far right has grown. We live in a dangerous time with
an uncertain future.  But the spirit of socialist struggle is alive
and well! The only way forward is through collective struggle and
empowering working people.  United in the struggle against
capitalism and all the oppressions it entails, it is working-class
people – you, me, all of us – who today are building the beautiful
future we all deserve._

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA: A GRAPHIC HISTORY, written by
Raymond Tyler, illustrated by Noah Van Sciver, and edited by Paul
Buhle was published by DSA Fund, June 2025.  All _italicized
passages_ are quotes from the (unpaginated) booklet. An on-line copy
is available at DSA POLITICAL EDUCATION
[[link removed]].  For
a print edition, please contact Raymond
Taylor at [email protected]

_KURT STAND was active in the labor movement for over 20 years
including as the elected North American Regional Secretary of the
International Union of Food and Allied Workers until 1997.  He is a
member of the Prince George’s County Branch of Metro DC DSA, and
periodically writes for the Washington Socialist, Socialist Forum, and
other left publications. He serves as a xxxxxx Labor Moderator, and
is active within the reentry community of formerly incarcerated
people. Kurt Stand lives in Greenbelt, MD._

_THE STANSBURY FORUM is a website for discussion by writers, activists
and scholars on the topics that Jeff focused his life on: labor,
politics, immigration, the environment, and world affairs._

_Who is behind The Stansbury Forum?_

_This site is operated by two friends, Peter Olney and Robert Gumpert,
introduced to each other by Jeff Stansbury. We thank the family,
Gretzel Stansbury, Kevin Stansbury and Gwendolyn Stansbury for
allowing us to run the site in his memory._

_Blog writers hold their own copyright. Work is published with their
permission. The ideas expressed are those of the writers and do not
necessarily reflect the ideas or beliefs of those operating the site._

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