Today’s Wall Street Journal carries Jamie Kirchick’s long column on the Democratic Socialists of America. New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a member — the vile Zohran Mamdani. Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh is a member — the ideologically fetid Omar Fateh. What’s it all about? You won’t find out from Deena Winter’s pathetic Star Tribune backgrounder — no surprise there. Kirchick explains (behind the Journal paywall, links omitted):
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What does today’s DSA stand for? In 2021 it issued a detailed national platform supporting “extension of voting rights to non-citizens”; “nationalization of railroads, utilities, critical manufacturing, technology companies, institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate and finance”; abolition of police, prisons and border enforcement; “a four-day, 32-hour work week”; “social ownership” of media and internet companies, socialized agriculture and government funding of “gender-affirming surgeries” for minors without parental consent.
On foreign policy, the DSA wants to “close all U.S. foreign military bases”; “immediately withdraw from NATO”; stop military aid to Ukraine; normalize relations with Cuba, Iran and Venezuela; and abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and Voice of America.
The 2021 platform also called for “a second constitutional convention to write the founding documents of a new socialist democracy.”…
At its national convention in Chicago the same month, the DSA voted to replace the 2021 platform with what it calls the “Workers Deserve More” program, which is much shorter, simpler and humbler. The 2021 platform no longer appears on the DSA website….
Mr. Mamdani shares the DSA’s fascination with the revolutionary potential of political Islam, a seemingly oxymoronic ideological tendency the French call Islamo-gauchisme, or Islamo-leftism. The Times reports that it was Mr. Mamdani’s “interest in B.D.S.,” the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, “that brought him to D.S.A.,” and that ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state is “the biggest issue on which he has not budged.”
After Hamas’s massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, he showed no sign even of circumspection. In an Oct. 8 statement, Mr. Mamdani denounced “Netanyahu’s declaration of war” and asserted that “the path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.” He made no mention of Hamas or the hostages it had taken. The DSA had issued a similar statement on Oct. 7, “expressing our solidarity with Palestine.”
On Oct. 8, the New York City DSA chapter promoted a rally in Midtown Manhattan where speakers giddily celebrated the massacre. In Seattle, the group circulated a document stating: “Resistance comes in all forms—armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.” In Connecticut, members hailed the launch of “an unprecedented anticolonial struggle.”…
Harrington’s DSA was pro-Israel as well as anticommunist. Mr. Mamdani’s DSA is a very different organization. In 2017 the DSA broke with the ardent socialist Zionism of its founders and endorsed the BDS movement to chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It also left the Socialist International, an organization of social-democratic parties, and applied to join the São Paulo Forum, which includes Nicolás Maduro’s United Socialist Party, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Cuban Communist Party.
At the DSA’s August 2025 convention, delegates gave a standing ovation to Cuba’s deputy foreign affairs minister. Like the Cold War-era “friendship delegations” of American leftists to communist countries, DSA members have traveled to Venezuela and Cuba for cordial meetings with Mr. Maduro and Miguel Díaz-Canel, successor to Fidel and Raúl Castro….
The emergence of the DSA as a bastion of support for anti-American despots, communists and terrorists would have horrified Harrington. And while his DSA had a highly critical but ultimately cooperative relationship with the Democratic Party, today’s has a parasitic one. “They see themselves as developing a revolutionary organization, Marxist-Leninist in some variety or another, that would replace the Democratic Party,” Leo Casey, a founding (former) DSA member and longtime teachers union activist, says in an interview….
Read the whole thing here.
