Tierney L Cross/Sipa USA via AP Images
DSA member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez forcefully condemned Hamas, unlike DSA’s leaders.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s initial reaction to Hamas’s murders of more than 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, has brought a torrent of entirely merited criticism down upon the group. Liberals and leftists who have long championed Palestinian statehood and Israel’s total withdrawal from the West Bank, and who now oppose the obliteration of Gaza that Israel is threatening, found DSA’s promotion of what was effectively a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square to be outrageous. They found the initial failure of DSA’s national political committee to condemn Hamas correspondingly repugnant.
That’s also been the reaction of many DSA members, too. A number of them have been debating publicly leaving the organization—largely, older members, many of whom belonged to one of DSA’s two predecessor organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). Some have belonged to one of those groups and then DSA for a full half-century.
I’m one of them.
The current tumult reflects a larger division that besets DSA. In one camp, there are members who believe the Democratic Party is an arena in which, given the limits of the American electoral system, socialists must be active, that socialists should work in coalition with other progressive groups and constituencies, and that DSA members in public office should have the same freedom of action as other elected progressives. The fact that DSA grew tenfold only when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran in Democratic primaries, and have thrived in office while promoting socialist programs but also while taking positions at odds with DSA’s leadership (both explicitly and forcefully condemned Hamas), bolsters this camp’s case.
The other camp has a more sectarian outlook. It contains some longtime members of small, largely defunct left groups who only joined DSA because it had suddenly grown larger than any socialist grouping since the days of Gene Debs (ironically, because of the anti-sectarian campaigns of Bernie and AOC). A few years ago, some of these sectarians actually sought to expel one DSA member of Congress, New York’s Jamaal Bowman, from the organization for his failure to toe their line on Palestine, though they did not succeed.
The vast majority of DSA members are many decades too young to have come to the organization from either its founding groups or one of those now-defunct sects. Most are fresh off America’s college campuses. They bring to DSA both the blessings and curses of youth: boundless energy and discomfort with complication and nuance. Many have done heroic work on behalf of tenants and striking workers; many also seem impervious to the tactical necessities that DSA’s elected officials heed, or to the strategic importance of campaigning for non-DSA progressives, or even to the moral and political necessity of linking ends with means (which led to American Communists’ support for Stalin and some current DSAers’ knee-jerk refusal to condemn Hamas).
Within DSA’s non-sectarian camp, the revulsion at the organization’s initial silence on Hamas has spurred two distinct responses. Most younger members appear to be staying in the organization, determined to fight it out with the sectarians and persuade their equally young comrades that the more DSA cocoons itself in sectarian righteousness, the sooner it will shrivel back to the margins of American politics where socialism has commonly resided. Many older members, however, don’t believe that they’re in a position to sway the organization away from its growing insularity, which has already led to a decline in national membership from roughly 90,000 to roughly 70,000. They cite the structural insularity of its leadership and the limits on their own activism that comes with their geezerhood.
As we geezers debate the stay-or-go question, some have argued that leavers would be re-enacting the fissiparous tendencies of the Trotskyists, who habitually split over the narcissism of small differences. I think leaving would be more like the longtime Communists who left the party in reaction to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, when the U.S. party, following Moscow, suddenly said the main battle wasn’t against surging fascism but rather against, say, British imperialism. I mean, not that British imperialism wasn’t horrific, but c’mon—at least, that’s what the resigning members believed, and rightly so.
It’s not that Israel’s refusal to permit the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and its treatment of Palestinians there, isn’t horrific, but not condemning Hamas? C’mon. And the outrageous positions of 1939 and 2023 caught both general memberships (Communist and DSA) unawares, which reflected deeper flaws in both organizations. I’m not equating today’s DSA with the Stalinist-era CP, of course. DSA members have a lot more voice than CP members ever did, but many who belonged to one of those two organizations concluded, or are now concluding, that the exit option is the one that better comports with their strategic and moral beliefs.
That’s the conclusion many of my geezer comrades have felt compelled to reach. Reluctantly, I’m with them.
