CHICAGO—To US political pundits, a spectre is haunting the Democratic Party. That is, of course, the spectre of “socialism” as embodied in Democratic primary victories for progressives, some of them affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The balance sheet for the “socialist” wave won’t be known until the November mid-term elections. But there is a good chance that DSA members could add Los Angeles and Washington, DC, to New York on the roster of US cities with “democratic socialist” mayors. Democratic primary victories in New York, Philadelphia and Denver could add three to four more DSA members to Congress. And DSA-adjacent progressives like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed could boost liberal Democrats in the next US Congress.
Also, Florida state Representative Angie Nixon recently defeated a “resistance” celebrity, former Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, to become the state’s Democratic nominee for the federal Senate. Nixon reported joining the DSA a few weeks before the election. She won despite being outspent sixteen to one.
All of this has caused Democratic establishment figures and long-time DC players like the American Israel Political Action Committee to sound the alarm. Dinosaurs like Bill Clinton adviser James Carville have threatened to leave the party if it doesn’t do something to stop the progressive tide. A “centrist” Democratic donor group composed primarily of investment bankers has announced its intention to spend millions to conduct what amounts to a McCarthyite smear campaign against the DSA and the candidates it supports.
Everyone on the left should oppose these right-wing efforts to smear the DSA, just as we should oppose government snooping and criminalisation of the left, labour unions and liberal non-government organisations.
But the disdain that highly engaged Democratic “base” voters are showing towards the party leaders isn’t ideological, apart from a shift among Democratic voters against automatic support for Israel. What’s really driving the support for progressives is the same thing that is driving support for candidates who (rhetorically at least) say they want to “fight” Trump. That’s the assessment among a significant section of Democratic voters that their “leaders” aren’t up to the task of opposing Trump’s destruction of everything they support.
That so many of those leaders have been in Congress for decades opens the door for younger politicians making the running on a “generational transition” appeal. This is also a non-ideological way of running for “change” in the Democratic Party. In fact, billionaire Democrat donor Stephen Mandel is devoting his resources to promote a new generation of “moderates” and “centrists” against the progressives.
Whether the progressives and “fighters” have a strategy to defeat Trumpism is a topic for another article. In the current anti-incumbent climate, with Trump’s unpopularity trending towards that of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, aspiring Democratic politicians have a low bar to clear to win support. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a moderate who voted for the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act, has excited liberals with his well-curated trolling of Trump despite his conventional policy stances.
The main Democratic watchword during this election season has been “affordability”. That’s hardly a brilliant stroke given that inflation is eroding people’s living standards and polls show that the cost of living is the chief voter concern. But it wasn’t until Zohran Mamdani—campaigning on making New York affordable again—won the 2025 mayor’s race that the Democratic political class took note.
That fact should be a tell on just how threatening to the Democrats the socialist wave is. As Jacobin and Nation publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, responding to anti-left pundit Jonathan Chait, explained:
“[W]e lead with affordability, with rent and health care and the demands that look most winnable. Of course we do. If you cannot assemble enough political power to bring down rents or win universal health care, you are certainly not going to socialise the economy.”
In reality, what the democratic socialists are promoting isn’t “socialism” understood as workers’ control of society. It’s barely even social democracy as practised in Scandinavia for a century. It’s much more akin to the reformed capitalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society.
Michael Greenberg, writing in the New York Review of Books, criticised the short-sightedness of Democratic leaders who want to stiff-arm the DSA candidates:
“They would do better to welcome socialists into the party and to adopt some of their ideas, which are no more radical than Social Security was during the New Deal. Our two major parties have moved so far to the right since 1980 that common-sense proposals to rebalance the economy are met with terror, as if they will turn the US into a twenty-first-century version of the Soviet Union. But Democrats currently have no path to becoming the majority party without making room for an outspoken and unambiguous left flank.”
Amid all the heated rhetoric, an overall perspective must be kept in mind. Despite high-profile wins by DSA-backed candidates, the Democrats are not about to fall to the socialists. Most Democrats being selected in the primaries are mainstream liberals, even “establishment” Democrats.
At best, the democratic socialists and other progressives can form a caucus in an expected Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives. Given that Trump will still be in the White House, it’s possible that they might advance, say, a bill to support a “Medicare for All” universal healthcare system, or a bill curtailing Trump’s immigration thugs. Knowing that Trump would veto it would be a “free vote” on a political messaging bill.
But progressives, including well-known supporters such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have proven themselves to cave under pressure: abandoning their positions for the sake of “party unity”, especially when there is a Democratic administration. That was a recurring theme under the Biden administration. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent comments distancing herself from early 2020s “woke” politics are a portent of surrenders to come.
It’s tempting to explain away Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on “woke” as personal political positioning for higher office. It may be that. But social democratic commentators invested in Democratic Party electoral politics view AOC’s move as a savvy, even necessary, shift to reach a mass audience. That’s the case for DSA members Eric Blanc and Paul Heidemann.
Heidemann has taken these positions a step further. Not only does he, like Mayor Mamdani, eschew the slogan “defund the police”, but he also justifies spending on prisons and cops as support for lower-income people, as revolutionary socialist Keith Rosenthal points out.
It’s important to keep this in mind as progressives and “democratic socialists” celebrate their victories in Democratic primaries, and the Democratic establishment plots to stymie them. The Democratic Party electoral road isn’t leading to “socialism”. It’s leading socialists away from it.
