In 2017, the Brooklyn chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) got behind the city council campaign of Jabari Brisport, a public school teacher who was running on the Green Party line against incumbent Laurie Cumbo, a favorite of the Brooklyn establishment.
Brisport got 29 per cent of the vote. The race hardly merited much attention, but if political observers were paying attention they would have seen that a new force had come into being.
“Our goal is to build a mass movement of people in communities all over the country, organized in their neighborhoods and their workplaces and in the political arena to force landlords and bosses to stop exploiting people.”
“You are running a grassroots campaign, you’re looking for anybody who’s willing to endorse [you] outside of the current political system. And that’s the thing DSA had going for it,” said group member Vigie Ramos Rios. “It wasn’t a big powerhouse, especially in Queens, and especially in the Bronx, but it was a group of people, some of whom actually lived in her district, who were willing to buck the state Democratic Party, the Queens and Bronx Democratic Parties, that weren’t afraid of getting their asses handed to them.”
Like many others, Ramos Rios joined DSA after Trump’s election, but she was in her forties, a generation older than most of the new members, and she had a marketing career in the financial services and insurance industries. She was politically interested but not engaged, and then she got sick and had to declare bankruptcy in order to qualify for Medicaid.
“I was always on the leading edge of technology,” she said. “I worked in customer service in the banking system. And on the phone, I’m on the Internet, and I’m crying because I need Medicaid and I can’t figure out how to make it happen. And that moment crystallized something for me: if this is what I am experiencing, what is this like for people with less time, less resources, less education?”
"The AOC Generation: How Millennials Are Seizing Power and Rewriting the Rules of American Politics" by David Freedlander
Ramos Rios heard about Bernie Sanders not from a twenty-something, but from her seventy-something mother, who was familiar with Sanders’s work on veterans affairs in Vermont. She started volunteering for the campaign, and it turned out that she was an organizing wizard, eventually becoming a Sanders delegate. She joined DSA after the Trump election because senior members of the New York DSA asked her to; there was suddenly a lot of interest in the group, and someone with Ramos Rios’s skills could make the group cohere.
The experience of Aaron Taube and the DSA is more typical. He grew to be a key component in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, but he didn’t even identify as a socialist or a democratic socialist before joining the group.
“Trump’s election was a traumatic event for so many people, and all I could think of was that things are going to get really bad,” Taube said. “There was this far-right, fascist force gaining power in the country and where was the Democratic Party? They were nowhere.”
And so Taube showed up to his first DSA meeting the day after Trump had been elected. There had been efforts by groups affiliated with the local Democratic Party to get young people—Taube was twenty-seven at the time—to join them but those efforts were ad hoc and seemed limited to election season. Taube was struck upon entering a DSA meeting in late 2016 by how well-organized the group was.
After his very first meeting, there was an orientation session that spelled out the fundamental precepts of democratic socialism; the meeting ended with everyone banding together and singing “Solidarity Forever.”
“There was this sense, from the start, that you are in this, [and this] is what we are about and that [we] are in this thing together,” he said.
A few months later, Taube and a few other members of the Queens DSA were invited to a small get-together for Ocasio-Cortez in a Jackson Heights apartment.
There are nearly one hundred DSA members elected to local offices all over the country.
“I couldn’t believe just what an incredible candidate she was,” Taube remembers. “She had this way of explaining the intersectional nature of racism and of classism, and she communicated just a real frustration with the way things are and a belief that things could be better.”
Once he left, it seemed obvious: “This was a person who was very, very good at this. She is going to steamroll this guy. You have this dynamic young person with great politics and a great vision, and she is up against this mediocre long-term elected official? She is going to be the first socialist elected to Congress, the youngest woman elected, easy.”
Taube and some other members went to meet with members of the Brooklyn chapter of the DSA, members who had been around longer and who had more experience in electoral politics. They told Taube and the Queens members that they absolutely should try to get Ocasio-Cortez the DSA endorsement, but that they should also know that her chance of victory was nil. Taube remembers them saying:
“Go ahead, this is going to be a great exercise for Queens DSA. You are going to learn how to do an election. You are going to learn how to run a canvass. You are going to build new leaders. But just so you know, Joe Crowley is going to have the support of every local elected official in the district, he’s going to have a ton of money, and this is worth doing because you are going to make the county machine easier to beat in the future, and it is going to be great to talk about the failings of the Democratic Party in Queens, but just know that you are going to lose.”
Despite Ocasio-Cortez’s poor chances of winning, Taube went about attempting to secure the DSA’s endorsement of her, which was no easy task. The difficulty he faced speaks to one of the challenges DSA has if it hopes to become a political force.
AOC had wanted DSA’s help to gather signatures to get on the ballot. She had noticed that the group always seemed to be present at events around the district, including rallies and community organizing meetings. The group, however, wasn’t prepared to help with petitioning, so a few members volunteered their time, making it clear they were on their own and not as a part of DSA.
Getting their endorsement amounted to a Sisyphean task for Taube and the campaign. He had to win not just one DSA endorsement, but three: the Upper Manhattan Bronx branch, the Queens branch, and NYC DSA.
There was skepticism. Some of it was that DSA would waste whatever momentum it had had from the losing Brisport city council race the year before, especially considering AOC was such a long shot. There were concerns that she wasn’t officially calling herself a socialist or a democratic socialist, that she wasn’t sufficiently supportive of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that pressured Israel to comply with international law.
“We are going to get our asses kicked, really bad, and we don’t want to put in our members’ time for something that isn’t going to work,” Kang remembers thinking. “We are trying to fight for socialism. That takes a lot of time.”
Taube, however, went about whipping votes at DSA meetings across the city to get the group to endorse Ocasio-Cortez. He made a hardball politics pitch, something that would have been familiar to any regular in the Queens County Democratic Party, which is one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the county. At the time, DSA had a reputation as a mostly white, mostly male, mostly privileged group. And yet, here was a Latina from the Bronx, a bartender, who wanted to carry their banner. Win or lose, Taube argued, it would help dispel some of the group’s “Bernie Bro” reputation.
“I would tell them we have this amazing left candidate who would be a great representative of our organization,” Taube said. “The DSA has a reputation of being a bunch of white dudes. It’s getting better, but some of that is fair, and we have this amazing, dynamic Latina running against the worst person in Queens politics. It is exactly the kind of contrast we want as far as what kind of organization we have.”
Plus, Taube said, “We needed a campaign. Queens DSA needed something to rally around to help us get off the ground. I would tell people, ‘You may have concerns about her ideological purity or about whether or not we can win, but that this was going to be very good for the long term health of Queens DSA.’ It’s not like we had very much to lose.”
DSA’s endorsement process couldn’t be more different from that of most labor unions and civic organizations. In most other groups, a small group or even a single individual will typically meet with all the candidates, give (or not give) the organization’s imprimatur for use on palm cards and campaign literature, and maybe afterward provide a few ground troops to go door-knocking.
For DSA, by contrast, the promise of an endorsement meant an engaged group of supporters who would knock on doors, stand on street corners, and pass out palm cards because they believed in the candidate’s cause.
“That is our theory—that a union cannot mobilize the way they used to because these decisions are made in a top-down kind of way,” Taube said. “They endorse candidates for transactional reasons as much as ideological. And DSA members can look at this race and say we have this amazing, inspiring candidate and we participated in the decision to support her every step of the way.”
As Taube whipped votes, he stayed in touch with the campaign, and AOC also went to DSA meetings to make her pitch, exciting members when she came out for abolishing ICE and when she said housing was a human right. It is hard to imagine the hoops she had to go through for a DSA endorsement, as compared to others, but in the end it was worth it.
And, indeed, had there been other options, she may have foregone the whole thing. But even like-minded local political clubs and social service organizations that saw themselves as counter to the Queens Democratic Party wouldn’t endorse her; her chances of winning were so slender that the risks of getting on the wrong side of Crowley, who was likely to be the next speaker of the House, were just too great.
Even DSA members concede that the group’s processes can seem opaque at best and maddening at worst. In the summer of 2019, roughly one thousand DSA delegates gathered in Atlanta for their annual convention. It took most of the first day of the convention for the group to settle on their bylaws going forward—these bylaws were not for the coming years or even the next quarter, but rather for the three days of the convention.
The convention came at a fraught time in the group’s history. Trump was denouncing socialism daily, mainstream Democrats were distancing themselves from the label (even the Georgia Democratic Party had issued a statement asking DSA to stay away), Bernie Sanders was polling near the top of the Democratic field, and Elizabeth Warren was just beginning her surge.
Pro-Trump MAGA protesters were encamped in front of the Westin Peachtree Plaza, one of Atlanta’s few union hotels, where they were waving American flags, holding Trump signs, and warning that socialism—free college, health care for all, and a Green New Deal—would never be allowed in America or in Atlanta.
That weekend, there had been a pair of mass shootings, one in El Paso, which killed twenty-two people, and, that same night, one in Dayton, Ohio, which killed ten. It was hard to escape the feeling that the convention at the Westin, which was guarded by just a single DSA member checking badges, could be a target.
DSA conventions are easily mockable, as a thousand people in a conference room raise their arms and wiggle their fingers to signal agreement, to avoid offending comrades sensitive to sensory overload. In addition, speakers are admonished for using the gendered term “guys” and measures are proposed and seconded only to be voted down by countermeasures, all involving the group’s internal structuring.
It is all in a belief that in order to make the change they want to see in the outside world, DSA must, within its own systems and processes, recreate the world as they would like it to be.
“Our goal is to build a mass movement of people in communities all over the country, organized in their neighborhoods and their workplaces and in the political arena to force landlords and bosses to stop exploiting people,” Maria Svart told me in Atlanta. “[U]ltimately we want to change our entire economy and our society so that we don’t have children going to bed hungry every night. We don’t think that a society that allows that to happen is an egalitarian society.”
The growth of DSA over the last few years has been remarkable.
It isn’t just AOC, or Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, her fellow members of the “Squad” who also call themselves democratic socialists. There are nearly one hundred DSA members elected to local offices all over the country, most notably in Chicago, where a half-dozen alderpersons were serving in 2019 and where they pushed for more housing affordability, increased rent control, and more community oversight of the police. There are democratic socialists in the Maryland legislature and in the city councils of Denver, Philadelphia, and Seattle.
“You may not know this, but we in the South have been waiting for you,” Khalid Kamau told DSA members on the opening day of their 2019 convention. Kamau is a democratic socialist and a city councilman in South Fulton, Georgia, which is 90 percent African American. He stood before the group to tell them that they weren’t just welcome in the South but that they were welcome in communities of color believed to be hostile to them.
Kamau told the group that their problem is an “electability complex,” a belief that the American people shy away from candidates who call themselves democratic socialists.
“The people in this room are going to destroy the electability complex,” he announced. “And let me tell you how: We are going to run candidates. And we are going to win. Today’s fringe is tomorrow’s future. While you are here, I need you to dream your biggest dreams so that we can win the future.”
Excerpted from The AOC Generation: How Millennials Are Seizing Power and Rewriting the Rules of American Politics (Beacon Press 2021), by David Freedlander, publication date March 30, 2021. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.