The DSA Is More Radical Than Any Mainstream Left Party in the Western World

The danger is growing - yet the media seems to condone it

I previously wrote about the contradiction between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and their oath of office to defend the Constitution.

The problem runs deeper. The DSA’s goals are more anti-American, more illiberal, and more against the principles of the Democratic Party itself than the media tells you.

The DSA’s current platform describes these goals:

Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics.

Reading this carefully, there is a glaring contradiction. The DSA program says that they would provide “civil, political, and democratic rights for all,” but the only people allowed to be in charge of the government are “workers.” This means that anyone who is not a worker under socialist theory — the McDonald’s worker who just got promoted to assistant manager, the immigrant who scraped together money to open a bodega in Brooklyn and who hires a local teen to make deliveries, the hotdog pushcart vendor, the project manager at a high-tech company, the middle-class 401(k) holder who invests in the stock market and is therefore a partial owner of large corporations — is ineligible to be in the government. These non-workers do not have the right to participate in governing.

The socialists support rights, but not equal rights for all. Some 30% of the American workforce do not qualify as “workers” under the DSA definition because they are self-employed, managers, small business owners or supervisors. About 60% own equities through investments which means that they are partial owners of major corporations. Saying that a large portion of Americans cannot join the government is not only anti-American — it goes against everything the Western liberal world has stood for over the past two centuries: unalienable rights and the dignity of all humans.

The DSA can no longer be dismissed as a mere fringe group. DSA’s membership grew from roughly 50,000 in October 2024 to over 90,000 by December 2025, nearly doubling in just over a year — fueled first by Trump’s reelection and then by Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. Over 250 DSA members now hold elected office across 40 states, with 90% of them elected after 2019 — including 96 city councilors and county commissioners, eight mayors or county executives, and significant council blocs in Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. At the federal level it holds two House seats. And its most prominent recent success is Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City.

The media has largely covered this as a sign of democratic vitality — an energized grassroots left finding its voice. What the media has declined to cover with equal energy is what DSA actually says it wants to do with that power, in its own words, in its own publications, discussed openly at its own conventions.

This next passage from the same platform makes the internal logic explicit:

“With a government by, for, and of the working class and with powerful labor unions and social movements organizing in every city and town, we hope to build a socialist society...”

This is a deliberate rewriting of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, where he said “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The DSA wants that government to perish. It has replaced “the people” — all of them — with “the working class,” a category DSA itself defines and controls.

This is not only an anti-American platform that cynically rewrites one of America’s most important speeches — a speech that genuinely did champion equal rights for all people. It is a platform more extreme than anything found in the major parties of Europe. Even the Green parties, the most radical formations operating in mainstream Western parliaments — the ones willing to block traffic, disrupt fossil fuel infrastructure, and push the outer limits of acceptable political action — ground themselves explicitly in universal rights. The European Green Party states that its belief in democracy is “founded upon the mutual recognition of all individuals as equals” and explicitly invokes “inalienable rights” as the foundation of its politics. The British Greens are characterized by political scientists as holding “libertarian-universalistic values” — left, libertarian, and committed to universal rights without class qualification.

DSA’s own platform acknowledges that its vision “pushes further than historic social democracy.” This is accurate, and DSA means it as a boast. What the boast reveals is that DSA has stepped outside the liberal framework that every mainstream left party in the democratic world — Labour, the SPD, the Scandinavian social democrats, the Greens — operates within. Those parties argue about what the state owes its citizens. DSA is arguing about which citizens the state is for.

The DSA Is Not Part of the Democratic Party. It Says So Itself.

The media’s framing of DSA as the Democratic Party’s progressive wing isn’t just imprecise — it inverts the reality. DSA doesn’t consider itself part of the Democratic Party. Its own documents, conventions, and internal debates make this explicit.

Start with policy. The 2024 Democratic Party platform supports the existing Constitution, backs Israel as a key ally, calls for secure borders alongside expanded legal immigration, and supports funding accountable policing. DSA’s platform calls for replacing the Constitution entirely, opposes any legitimacy for Israel, opposes all border enforcement as racist and anti-working-class, and treats policing as a capitalist tool of class control. These are not differences of degree. They are direct contradictions on foundational questions.

Then there is the strategy. DSA’s dominant electoral approach — endorsed at its 2025 National Convention without serious dissent — is called the “dirty break.” The concept is straightforward: run socialist candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line because third-party runs fail under America’s winner-take-all electoral system, use those campaigns to build an independent organizational infrastructure, then abandon the Democratic Party entirely once DSA has accumulated enough power to survive on its own. The Democratic ballot line is a ladder. The plan has always been to kick it away.

This is not inferred from DSA’s behavior. It is stated in DSA’s own publications. One DSA-aligned outlet describes the Democratic Party as “the reactionary capitalist graveyard of social movements” and calls on DSA to break from it urgently. Another describes the dirty break strategy plainly: run on the Democratic line “but use their campaigns to build an independent party-like organization capable of eventually becoming strong enough to break from the Democratic Party.” The Metro DC DSA chapter states plainly on its own website that it organizes “as a quasi-political party to build power independent from the corporate and wealthy interests that pull the Democratic Party to the right” — treating the Democratic Party as an obstacle to be worked around, not a home.

This is not a secret. It is debated openly in DSA publications, conventions, and strategy documents. The media’s choice to describe DSA as the Democrats’ left flank, rather than as a self-described Trojan horse using the Democratic ballot line as a temporary vehicle toward goals the Democratic Party itself explicitly rejects, is a failure of basic reporting.

The Leaders Who Don’t Qualify Under Their Own Rules

If DSA’s platform is taken seriously, its most prominent elected officials present a problem the organization has never resolved.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender and waitress before her 2018 election — genuinely working class by almost any definition. She now earns $174,000 a year, employs a large staff, wields significant institutional power, and answers to no employer extracting surplus value from her labor. Rashida Tlaib spent a decade as a Michigan state representative before reaching Congress; her career has been in law and politics, not production. Zohran Mamdani is a former academic and career politician whose only non-political work experience was a stint as a housing counselor, almost certainly for a nonprofit or government agency, meaning he has never worked for an exploitative capitalist by DSA’s own definition of the term.

Under DSA’s Marxist class analysis, none of these people are workers. They are state functionaries and professional-managerial class members — the layer that orthodox Marxist theory regards with suspicion as structurally unreliable representatives of proletarian interests. DSA has built its public face out of people its own framework disqualifies, and has never acknowledged the contradiction, because acknowledging it would require applying the framework honestly.

The problem extends downward. Each of these officials employs a paid staff: schedulers, communications directors, legislative aides, district office workers. Those employees sell their labor to a boss who sets their pay, controls their working conditions, and can terminate them. Under DSA’s own class analysis, AOC and Tlaib and Mamdani are not their staffs’ comrades — they are their staffs’ employers, which is precisely the relationship DSA’s platform identifies as exploitation. The movement to liberate the working class is being led by professional politicians who are, on their own terms, exploiting the workers beneath them. DSA is willing to overlook its own foundational principles whenever the person being promoted is sufficiently well-credentialed and sufficiently useful — which is to say, whenever the principles become inconvenient.

Rights For Some

DSA’s contempt for genuine equal rights doesn’t remain abstract. Its platform endorses Palestinian terrorism as described in the ‘al-Thawabit’ principles set by the Palestinian National Council in 1977, which means treating armed attacks on Israeli civilians as legitimate political action. DSA has made this a near-expulsion issue internally, withdrawing its endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in part over her insufficient support for it.

Once you establish that some civilians’ right to life is contingent on their political context — that Israeli civilians are legitimate targets because of the class or national position DSA assigns them — you have abandoned the premise that rights are universal. You have conceded that rights are political awards, granted to those on the correct side of the correct struggle and withheld from those who are not. Every subsequent guarantee of “rights for all” in DSA’s platform rests on the same logic: rights exist for those whom the workers’ government recognizes as deserving them.

History has seen this before. The Soviet constitution of 1936 — Stalin’s constitution — was praised at the time as one of the most progressive documents ever written. It guaranteed free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the inviolability of the person, for all Soviet citizens. The workers were supposedly in charge of the government. These rights existed on paper. What followed is known. The lesson is not that DSA will necessarily replicate Stalinist terror — it is that “rights for all” under “workers in charge” has a track record and it isn’t good. There is nothing that the DSA, or Marxist theory in general, does to structurally block the system they want to build from becoming worse than what they want to replace.

The United States Constitution was designed precisely to prevent concentrated power, recognizing the potential for abuse. Its architecture of separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights protections exists to ensure that no faction — however righteous its self-description — can accumulate enough power to silence those who disagree with it. The framers understood that the danger to liberty comes not from obvious tyrants but from movements convinced of their own virtue. They built a system that protects minorities, dissenters, and the politically disfavored against majorities who believe they have history on their side.

DSA’s platform contains none of these safeguards. Its new democratic constitution would concentrate power in a single federal legislature, eliminate the Senate’s counter-majoritarian role, gut judicial review, and place governance in the hands of a class defined by DSA itself. The people DSA disagrees with — the bodega owner, the assistant manager, the 401(k) holder, the Zionist — have no structural protection in this vision, only the goodwill of the workers’ government. That goodwill, as the Soviet constitution demonstrated, is not a substitute for rights.

DSA is, in the end, everything it claims to oppose: a movement seeking concentrated power, using the language of liberation to justify removing rights from those it has decided don’t deserve them, hiding an authoritarian logic inside democratic vocabulary. The Constitution it wants to replace was built by people who understood exactly this danger. That is why DSA wants to replace it.