The Daily - The Stunning Rise of the Democratic Socialists of America

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

This summer, the Democratic Socialists of America have mounted their biggest and most successful attempt yet to redefine the Democratic Party. They have defeated its candidates in primary after primary from coast to coast. As its electoral success grows, the organization is confronting big, unresolved questions about what it stands for and what level of compromise is required to become a lasting political force. Charles Homans, who talked to more than 30 D.S.A. candidates, organizers, members and volunteers across the countries, discusses the rise and limitations of the D.S.A.  Guest: Charles Homans writes about national politics for The New York Times and The Times Magazine. Background reading:  Moderates see socialists as a threat to the Democratic Party. Socialists agree. Photo: Dave Sanders and Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times; Joe Raedle/Getty Images For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a daily. This summer, Democratic Socialists have mounted their biggest and most successful attempt yet to redefine the Democratic Party. 48 hours after Democratic Socialists won in two New York congressional districts, the implications are still being felt, and this really could just be the start. By defeating its candidates in primary after primary, from the East Coast, Janice Lewis George is poised to become the first Democratic Socialist mayor in the history of the nation's capital.

To the West Coast. Democratic Socialists scored another primary victory this time in Colorado's first congressional district. To swing states. Democrat Socialists won several races, notably in Michigan. Chris Rab, the Democratic Party's nominee in the third district of Pennsylvania, is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And finally, to the heart of Red America. Let's talk Florida.

Democratic socialist Angie Nixon crushed Alex Vidman. In the process, Americans' views of Democratic Socialists and socialism itself are changing. Socialism up like a rocket. Look at this. Two in three Democrats have a favorable view of socialism. The latest CBS News poll found Democrats view socialism more favorably than capitalism. Democratic Socialists of America, a plus 17 point net favorability rating among Democrats. Simply put, they are a better brand at this point than Democrats in Congress.

But as its electoral success grows, the organization at the heart of the movement is confronting big, unresolved questions about what it stands for, what exactly its relationship to the Democratic Party should be, and what level of compromise is required to become a lasting political force. Today, my colleague, political correspondent Charlie Hohman's on the rise and the limitations of the DSA. It's Wednesday, August 26th. Charlie, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. So by a lot of measures, this has been the summer of the Democratic socialist. And here on the Daily, we have spent a lot of time focused on Democratic Socialist candidates and the races that they are running in, but not on the organization itself that's at the heart of this movement, which is the Democratic Socialist of America, the DSA. And so that's where you come in, Charlie, because you have spent the last few weeks reporting on the DSA and how it made this midterm election to a large degree about socialism. That's right.

DSA has been around for a long time in various forms. But for all intents and purposes, this group wasn't really on the radar of a lot of people in politics. And I think the general public until this past year, starting when Zeran Mamdani won in New York, and then continuing on through what's been a really pretty remarkable run of congressional Democratic primary wins. So I was interested in better understanding the organization itself. And I spent weeks talking to anyone who would talk to me in DSA, talking to the candidates, watching them campaigning, and came away feeling that this is a real force, a rising force in democratic politics. And also that as it's growing its footprint in American politics, that it might be its own worst enemy in terms of its future. Hmm. And what do you mean by that exactly? So you have to understand that DSA is not built as a political party.

It exists inside of the Democratic Party these days. somewhat, but it doesn't work like a party. It's a much more fractious organization, and it has a lot of constituencies with very different ideas about how to pursue their aims in politics. And as I explore deeper into the history of the organization and American socialism more generally, I realized that these were really debates that have been happening throughout much of the history of American socialism. And they're happening inside of DSA now in a way that is really going to affect the two. future as a force in American politics. Well, just explain then that history of American socialism that inevitably brings us to the

DSA and to its inherent fractiousness. So to understand DSA, I think you need to understand the early history of socialism in this country. And that means going back to the early 1900s, which was the previous heyday of socialism here. You know, this is the period right after the Gilded Age when you had some Americans making just really enormous amounts of money, these sort of railroad barons, timber barons, coal mining, that kind of thing. At the same time, many Americans are working in these industries or in agriculture, and there's this huge wealth gap between the rich and everybody else. And this creates a lot of inevitable political reactions. People who are trying to envision a way of redistributing the world. wealth. And, you know, one thing that comes out of that eventually is this American form of

socialism and specifically the Socialist Party of America, which in the early 1900s was the largest and most organized Socialist Party in the United States. And socialist candidates win a fair amount of elections across the country. You know, they're not a massive movement, but socialists held assembly seats in a lot of states that would surprise you today, places like, places, like Oklahoma, Texas, the Upper Midwest, socialist mayors in a lot of cities, in New York, California, really all over the place. Mm-hmm.

And they really hit their pinnacle with Eugene V. Debs, who was the most famous socialist politician of this time period. Fellow workers and comrades, the socialist movement is as wide as the world, and its mission is to win the world, the whole world, Debs was a union organizer and a Democratic Assemblyman from Indiana who became the perennial candidate for the Socialist Party of America in five presidential elections. Wow.

The working classes must be made to gear the public call of solidarity, economic solidarity and political solidarity. And really works to try to convince all these disparate groups of working class people in the United States. the United States to see themselves as a class and to see themselves with a sense of solidarity with each other. Main control, the people, for the first time in all history, men at last will be free. And how does Debs actually do in all these presidential elections that he runs in? So Debs topped out at 6% of the vote in 1912, which was not a lot, but was enough to make him part of the political conversation and to make socialism really part of the political

conversation in the country at that time. And what did that look like exactly? How was socialism in that moment being defined in America? At the time, it was defined pretty clearly as public control of the workings of the economy for the benefit of the workers. And in the Debs era, the socialists kind of saw this as the beginning of a real assent into the mainstream of American politics. But that's not what happened. What happened instead? So the socialist ran afoul of the government of Woodrow Wilson, specifically over World War I. The socialists were very opposed to U.S. involvement in the war.

Debs encouraged young men to avoid the draft. And this ended up getting him prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Wow. And so by the time he runs for president in 1920, he's doing it from prison. Never a great situation. Never a great situation. The socialists also ran into a lot of other problems kind of of their own making. They split into a number of factions in this period.

They lost a lot of ground in American politics. And they were kind of a spent force, really, coming out of the 1920s. But another problem for them really was that actually a lot of socialist ideas that were pretty popular were advanced by non-socialist politicians in this period. Most importantly, FDR. I pledged myself for the American people. Who borrowed a lot of what was thought of as Democratic Socialist, Economist. policy as part of his new deal to help America out of the Great Depression. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

This is another moment, again, when there's a huge wealth gap in the U.S. Farmers find no markets for their produce, and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. And people see capitalism as really a broken system. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work in, by direct recruiting by the government itself. And so FDR pushes through things like federal employment programs, big public works projects, social security. This social security measure gives at least some protection against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age. These were ideas that were very similar to what socialists had been advocating for.

And it really kind of stole a lot of the fire from American. to have these enacted by a progressive Democratic presidency. I'm curious if FDR saw what he was doing as any form of socialism, and if anyone else in American politics at that time called it socialism. FDR saw himself as a reformer of capitalism. So he was happy to borrow a lot of these ideas that, again, we would, in another context, consider socialist, but as a way of correcting the capitalization. system rather than replacing it. A few timid people who fear progress will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing.

And in fact, he pushed back against the idea that this was socialist. Sometimes they will call it fascism, and sometimes communist, sometimes socialist. But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical, something that is really very simple and very practical. And the reason FDR is careful not to call the socialism is because of what's happening around the world at this time. You know, the Russian Revolution has happened. The Soviet Union's been born.

This is the first country that embraces communism. Now, communism is a much more radical and in the Soviet Union, undemocratic system evolving from socialism, one that many American socialists reject. But this has led to all these ideologies being seen in the United States as foreign and threatening in a way that they weren't necessarily before. But as we saw with FDR, some socialist ideas can still find their way into the mainstream if they're packaged right. And so I think the New Deal sets up what really becomes the central question that socialists

confront in this country throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century, which is, are you content seeing ideas that you broadly support that emerge from your politics, being enacted at a large scale, even if they fall short of an actual socialist, transformation in the United States. Right. Are they okay with basically the Democratic Party co-opting their ideas? So with that in mind, where does this movement go after the New Deal ends up, to a degree, stealing a lot of socialists thunder? So by the 1950s, the socialists have at least tacitly acknowledged that they are probably not going to win elections anytime soon and have really resorted more to trying to

influence policy through the Democratic Party, through union leaders, through politicians who are sympathetic to them. And the guy who really embodies this idea is Michael Harrington. We're trying to bring socialism from nothing to something. We're at a beginning. Who is, becomes the head of what's left of the socialist party in 1968. Harrington before that was this actually quite prominent public intellectual and left-wing activist. So long as private corporations dominate the economy, just so long will the political structure have to defer the private corporations. And he really pursued this idea of trying to just shift the Democratic Party to the left through his own personal influence.

Liberalism is inherently condemned to frustration because its excellent ideals cannot be realized. unless one is willing to attack systemic power, corporate power. But Harrington is kind of chasing, diminishing influence across the decade until in the early 80s, which is really the absolute nadir of his own influence, he decides to form a new socialist organization called Democratic Socialists of America. The modern incarnation of socialism, the group this entire episode is about. Right. And it's really a quixotic time to start a socialist.

socialist organization in the United States. The idea has probably never been less popular. The country is becoming more conservative. Reagan is on the march. The socialists themselves have probably never had less influence. And this is the moment when DSA gets started. And the DSA, really, for the first 30-some years of its existence, is not much of a political organization. You know, some of its members even describe it as basically kind of a book club in these years. It was very much a sort of intellectual society. A lot of the members and leaders were writers and academics, really not capable of affecting any sort of political change in this country at all until... Today, I am proud to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America.

Bernie Sanders comes along. Mm-hmm. So Bernie Sanders was never a member of DSA. But he self-identifies as a Democratic Socialist. You call yourself a Democratic Socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States? Well, we're going to win because first we're going to explain what Democratic socialism is. And he becomes this really pivotal figure in the modern evolution of this organization.

And what Democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost as much wealth. as the bottom 90%. And he also sort of points this movement forward towards the real policy focuses that will continue to define DSA going forward. We should have health care, for every man, woman, and child as a right.

We should raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. You know, he runs on Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage mandated by the government. You don't consider yourself a capitalist, though. Do I consider myself part? of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which Wall Street greed and recklessness, wreck this economy?

No, I don't. He's really drafting off of this populist anger that comes out of the financial crisis. What this campaign is about is whether we can mobilize our people to take back our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant democracy we can and should have. And overall, this message that the establishment has rigged the system

against working people and working people need to take their power back. Right, it feels like the Bernie Sanders appeal in this post-2008 financial crisis moment very much harkens back to the two previous moments, Charlie, that you describe the post-guided age era and the Great Depression, both times when the wealth gap in the country was enormous, and working Americans feel abandoned and betrayed by the capitalist system.

That's right. And obviously, people on the left are really drawing those connections at the time, pointing to the resonances with the Gilded Age, Great Depression. But for the Socialists, what Bernie did that was really important was show that self-identified socialist could actually do quite well in a Democratic primary. You have to remember that before this point, socialism was really like a very taboo word in American politics and had been for quite a long time.

And Bernie kind of reclaimed this word as something that you could actually run on as a left-wing candidate and said, yeah, I am a socialist. And really embraced this label very directly in a way that people prior to 2016 I think would have assumed would have been absolute poison

in even a Democratic primary. And what Bernie did was show that that wasn't actually true at all. Mm-hmm. And his candidacy is, becomes this real movement and draws all these people to his cause. And after the election, all these people are kind of out there, you know, asking, what do we do with this energy and these ideas? And one of the big answers they come up with is, let's join the DSA. Hmm.

The membership, which prior to this point is 6,000 members, basically, jumps to 30,000 members over the course of 2017. So this is a massive increase in not just the size of the organization, but the demographics of it. You know, this had been a much kind of old tweety group of people for the most part before this moment. And by their own statistics, the median age of a DSA member after 2016 drops from 68 to 33. Wow. And so these people do a lot of things inside of DSA. They start new chapters in cities on college campuses, places where there had not been DSA. say chapters before. And they start organizing campaigns and they start running for office themselves.

And in 2018, we launched this campaign because no one was clearly and authentically talking about issues like the corrupting role of money and politics. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenges Joe Crowley, this very deeply rooted incumbent in a New York City House district. Despite the fact that we didn't have the money, despite the fact that I'm working class, despite all those things, we won. And beats him in the Democratic primary in this incredible upset. Right.

AOC was somebody who had recently joined DSA around the time she was running for Congress. And that same year, I am Congresswoman. Rashida Taleb, who's also DSA, wins a congressional seat from Michigan. 2020, they pick up a couple more congressional seats. It will be our job to hold every elected official accountable that is not fighting for the poor and is not fighting for the working class in our country. Jamal Bowman, Corey Bush. To every person who's lost a job or home or health care or hope, I'm here.

Along the way, they're winning city council races in a lot of cities all over the country and, you know, state assembly seats, things like that at the local level. Mm-hmm. And then in 2025, they have this real breakthrough. Thank you, my friends. When Zoran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City. The sun may have set over our city this evening. But as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity. And who does he cite in his speech after winning the election?

Eugene Debs, the socialist presidential candidate from the early 20th century. Right. And very importantly, Mom Dom-Dani within the first year of being mayor of New York City turns around and uses his popularity to endorse fellow DSA candidates in Democratic primaries around New York, and several of them win. They take out more establishment Democrats, and that brings us to this summer of Democratic socialism, where in race after race after race, DSA candidates or DSA-adjacent. candidates are winning these primaries. Right. And the fact of DSA's success has really shown a spotlight on the organization this year, which, remember, is not actually a political party. They have this

kind of interesting, I think, unstable relationship with the Democratic Party, where they're really mostly operating inside of that party at this point, but the DSA is not taking out Republicans. They're taking out other Democrats, and they're increasingly taking out not just moderate establishment Democrats, but actually pretty progressive Democrats. in some cases. And so for the rest of the Democratic Party, they're looking at the success and wondering, you know, what is this costing us?

Right. And all that has raised some really existential questions, I think, about the DSA in this moment, both in terms of its relationship to the Democratic Party, but also questions about the organization itself and how it should move forward. Democrats and Democratic socialists are looking at each other right now

and asking, are we on the same team? do we share the same goals? Does the Democratic Party want the DSA inside of it? And does the DSA really even want to become a wing of the Democratic Party? We'll be right back. Charlie, let's now really turn to the tension between the DSA and the Democratic Party and how the structure of the DSA itself contributes to those tensions and how overall the DSA may be, as you,

you said at the very start of this conversation, an obstacle unto itself. Well, let's start with what DSA officially believes. And it's worth bracketing this. You know, there's a national DSA organization. There are individual chapters all over the country, and then there are DSA candidates. The national DSA does not necessarily hold all the same views as DSA candidates. And it doesn't necessarily hold all the same views even as individual DSA chapters. This is a very diffuse horizontal organization. But they do have a national platform, which has a pretty straightforward program of what they want, which ranges from things that are fairly familiar to things that are really much further out there on the radical spectrum of what we talk about in American politics. Like what?

So on the familiar side of the ledger, you have ideas from sort of the Bernie wing of American politics. You know, this is health care for all, housing for all, a green new deal. You know, we've heard of this stuff. Right. On foreign policy, there's a huge emphasis on Israel-Palestine support for the Palestinian people. This is really the central foreign policy issue at this point for DSA. They believe in the right to return. They believe in the right of the Palestinian people to resist military occupation, the end of all U.S. military and economic aid to Israel and prosecuting U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible

for the war in Gaza. And then there's also, you know, filling out the foreign policy, there's a more kind of general skepticism of American entanglement in other countries. So they believe, for instance, that we should not be in NATO. We should not be arming Ukraine. And back home in the U.S., there's a lot of things they want to abolish. They want to abolish the police, but also abolish prisons, and they want to abolish the U.S. Senate. What is the logic of that last proposal you mentioned abolishing the Senate? Because that does stand out as not especially practical given that many candidates, DSA candidates, want to be in the United States Senate. Well, they frame it as part of a broader commitment to what they call working class democracy,

by which they basically mean a more responsive representative democracy. And, you know, they view the Senate as a not especially representative institution. Structurally. That's right. And I think it's fair to say that on, you know, most, if not all these points, there is broad agreement among DSA members. Where there's not necessarily agreement is how you go about pursuing this. Meaning what exactly? DSA is a very complicated organization inside, but it's useful to think of it as kind of a Venn diagram with two big overlapping circles.

On one side, you have people who are more or less like the Bernie AOC wing of DSA. They basically have a lot of those same policy priorities, and more importantly, they believe in pursuing power. the way that AOC is doing it, for instance, actually contesting elections on the Democratic ballot line and winning a seat in Congress, winning a voice in politics. On the other side, in the other circle, you have a much more unruly, fractious array of people who broadly are skeptical of that approach. They don't necessarily oppose running candidates in Democratic elections, but they are very skeptical that pursuing power in the Democratic Party is really going to produce a systemic

change in the United States that they are seeking. So what would be the alternative path for them to the change that they would like to see? So DSA spends a lot of time organizing people in labor unions, and they believe that labor unions are a pathway to achieving real political power. Others in the organization have this kind of like street politics theory of we should be out there doing direct actions like protesting the streets. And, you know, that's the way to get to what we want. This is a very big, it would seem, and fundamental disagreement, and it would seem to reflect the very diffuse nature of the DSA itself and the fact that there isn't one coherent philosophy or strategy among all its different components. It can't even agree on whether politics

is the right path to power. Right. That's right. I mean, there's a real ideological commitment to kind of collective action and collective decision making in DSA, which has its real upsides. I mean, it has this fairly incredible participatory culture that I think that other democratic organizations would really kill to have. But it also comes with real downsides. I mean, if your commitment is for everybody to have a voice, the problem is that everybody has a voice and not everybody agrees at the end of the day. And, like, that comes very much to the four, paradoxically, when DSA is doing best and when

DSA candidates are doing best because it sort of surfaces these really fairly deep, I think, foundational arguments over what DSA is doing. And that's been most true with AOC. It's both one of the biggest figures in DSA politics and also a very polarizing figure inside the DSA. Polarizing how? Well, she kind of lands at this real division of what does it mean to participate in democratic politics. She's been in office since 2019 and has been sort of functioning inside of the Democratic coalition in Congress. And that requires making compromises at times. That requires taking positions that are maybe not 100% in line with what DSA has to say about something. And for DSA, that's a bigger deal than it might be in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, where there's

a sort of understanding that, like, different people run on different platforms a little bit to be elected in different places. With DSA, so much of the kind of foundational idea of the post-Bernie DSA was that this was an organization that was going to produce a different kind of left-wing candidate that was really going to be accountable to something outside of their own career interests, outside of the Democratic Party. And so the idea of what they kind of euphemizes as candidate discipline, which is really how much does this candidate stick to our line on things, is really central for a lot of factions inside of DSA.

And AOC kind of runs afoul of that because she does sort of tack away from DSA on some things. Tack away, how, though? I just want to be really clear on where she falls short, because what you seem to be really saying is that the DSA has a clear set of litmus tests, and I wonder where someone like AOC is running afoul of this. Yeah, it's become an issue at times on Israel-Palestine, even though she is in general a very pro-Palestinian politician, she hasn't held the line 100% of the time with where DSA is. So, you know, they fault her for not being sort of loud enough and unequivocal enough on things like the idea of boycott, divest, and sanctioning Israel. And to a lot of factions of the organization, that makes her just a non-starter in general. And there's real disagreement, even at the top of the national organization, over whether the idea of her running for president is a good thing. I mean, you literally have, you know, there's two chairs of the organization, two co-chairs.

One of them is actively involved in an effort to do. draft AOC to run for president. And the other one doesn't think that it's a good idea. And is sort of ambiguous about whether she would support AOC if she were the candidate. Wow. And so it's part of why some candidates like AOC, who's not backed by the national DSA, don't actually seek its endorsement. They kind of work with their own local chapter. In her case, it's the New York chapter, which is very supportive of AOC and is much more on the kind of pragmatic end of these politics. So there's just all these kind of like unusual layers to DSA politics that really do, I think, affect its ability to kind of operate coherently at a national scale. Well, to that point, how are candidates who run on the DSA label thinking about the divisions that you're describing?

And do they consider the possibility that it might just be a heck of a lot easier to take the DSA's ideas rather than necessarily work within the DSA or call themselves DSA and just kind of put some space between them and all this complexity. You know, it's a question that I put to DSA candidates I talked to in recent weeks, because it is a really legitimate question. I mean, at this point, a lot of what's in the DSA platform, certainly the stuff that the candidates really emphasize is stuff that you could run on as a progressive Democrat without the socialist label. And the socialist label is still not great when it comes to the general electorate in this country. A minority of Americans have a favorable view of socialism. It's a pretty big minority, but it is a minority. There is like a pretty clear,

incredible sense that running as a socialist is a real ceiling in a general election. So if that's the case, if these ideas are important to you, why wouldn't you just run on the ideas and shut up about the socialism part? And I asked a couple of the candidates who I talked to, and the answers I got were interesting. A word that came up a lot was accountability, that they felt. like running as a DSA endorsed socialist was an accountability measure for them as candidates and for them in the eyes of their voters. That this was an actual program that they were subscribing to, that they were going to be held to, and that they looked forward to being held to. But this is also something that I think makes sense in a Democratic primary principally. I think how you navigate

that in the general election is a whole other question. Is nominating a socialist outside of a kind of safe blue jurisdiction in a statewide race, is this just asking for trouble in a race that Democrats would really like to win? Right. But what's not untested is the reality, for instance, in many of these Democratic primaries, that some of the key base of the Democratic Party, especially black voters, are not finding Democratic socialist candidates as appealing as traditional Democratic candidates. So how do DSA candidates and the organization think about that reality, especially when it comes to general elections, not just primaries, that DSA is not finding a home with some hugely important constituencies for the Democrats? I think that's another thing where

this is changing a little bit, how much it's changing is very much up for debate. It is the case that The sort of median DSA voter was a college-educated professional who was probably downwardly economically mobile, not a picture of the working class, much less the working class of color in this country. That has sort of evolved over time, though. I mean, it's worth noting that, you know, Mamdani won with a bigger map than previous DSA candidates in New York. Donovan McKinney won a plurality black district in Detroit. And you also saw a pretty different pattern of DSA support, at least in the exit polls, from Angie Nixon's primary win in Florida. So there is reason to think that the picture is not quite as totally fixed as DSA's critics would have it. Interesting.

Well, let's now turn from the DSA as a fractious organization to the Democratic Party itself and how its leaders are things. about this DSA moment and this DSA insurgency that's taking out some of its members and its preferred candidates. What is the broad feeling among the Democratic Party's leadership about whether the DSA is something that they can harness, whether it's something they should embrace, or if the DSA is something to be feared? Yeah, I think that's a very live debate in the Democratic party right now. I mean, you see people like Gavin Newsom, who is sort of arguing that DSA should be welcomed into the Democratic coalition, and that the party should really be in the business of addition and not subtraction, as he put it. You know, this is an energized constituency that has really tapped an

energy and particularly a younger energy that the Democratic Party has really struggled to tap. Right. Why would you turn your back on that? Right. Like, they have sort of figured out how to appeal to these people who, you know, this really kind of broad. discontent with the state of the country right now. And this is basically a net positive for the Democratic Party, this line of argument goes that if you can figure out how to bring these people in as real coalitional partners, that this is really to the good of the broader party. But critics of the DSA, kind of a mix of some of the reform-minded Democrats and also a lot of people who are really just ideological moderates, you know, they argue that this is a fundamental

misunderstanding of the DSA and its project. That this is not a. an organization that sees itself as part of that coalition, that their relationship with the Democratic Party is really not additive. You know, it's actually parasitic. Meaning what? Well, to this point, they have not proven capable of flipping really any seats anywhere in this country. The only places they've won in elections have been very safely blue districts or cities, which they've succeeded in making more lefty than they were before. And so the argument that is sort of most pointedly made about them is what exactly are you guys? is doing for us. You talk about revitalizing the Democratic Party, but you can't do anything you want to do

without winning congressional majorities, Senate majorities that you have zero demonstrated ability to do. So that argument is basically, if you're only replacing Democrats in Democratic districts with Democratic Socialists, how are you advancing the cause of winning swing districts? How are you growing the majorities in the House and in the Senate that would actually make it possible for your agenda or any version of the Democratic agenda to be enacted in Congress? That's right. And when you ask DSA leaders about this, they will make an argument that they are advancing popular political ideas, ideas that if they are actually implemented or embraced by a party will bring out new voters who have not voted before and change the math and politics in a fundamental way. I would say that that is entirely waiting to be proven, that there's really no evidence of their ability to do that. I think that it's fair to say the burden of proof rests with the DSA on that. If these people ever do get in charge, we might as well turn out the lights and make sure the cat's inside and go to bed because it's over. These people are crazy as a bed bug.

And in the meantime, Republicans clearly see these same ideas as a massive liability for the Democratic Party. The DSA is calling the shots. And what you see is a party that is. tilting so far left. They're not just running on different policies. They are running to destroy the country. They've been pointing to the DSA all summer quite happily and saying, look at all these policies they're throwing out there. So if we talk about abolishing prisons then, does that make society better? I mean, is there anybody that should be incarcerated? I mean, rapist, child predators, murderers? Yeah, so the long-term plan, when we think about most people who are in prison, they are mostly in prison for crimes of poverty.

But that's no one I'm talking about. I'm talking about the really, you know, like the Mergers. You know, Fox News has on the co-chairs of the DSA to sort of defend this platform live on the air. Okay, but you do think some people need to be locked away from society. Some people are not able to be functional members of society. That's true. But what does that look like to keep the rest of us safe? You know, we're talking about safety.

Yeah, there's a sense that the more out there aspects of what DSA wants to do is going to be a real, liability for not just DSA candidates, but for Democrats more broadly if this becomes really associated with the party brand. Defunding, decriminalizing, open borders, we have run that play and gotten our butts kicked. We don't need to do it a second time to see if the movie turns out any different. Hmm. So in that sense, Democratic party leaders do have something to fear here with the DSA, but it strikes me that those Democratic leaders might not really have a choice at this point. The DSA is strong.

Its strength is growing. It seems like it's here to stay. And I say that because we have a pretty recent model of this happening in our politics on the other side of the aisle. And here I'm thinking about the rise of the Tea Party on the American right back in 2009, 2010. Obviously, the Tea Party stands for something very different. than the DSA, it's an anti-government movement, but its origins feel quite similar to what we're seeing now, this insurgency that campaigns against and takes out incumbents, and then its ideals slowly but surely become the ideology of the entire party,

the Republican Party in that case. Is that a fair comparison? And is the Tea Party a potential blueprint for the DSA to follow? That's an interesting question. And I think the two comparisons that are always sort of there to make to DSA, although people on both sides of American politics would no doubt vigorously dispute these, is whether it is more like the Tea Party or more like MAGA. You know, the Tea Party, as you say, is it was a movement that arose in response to the financial crisis, more importantly to Barack Obama's first presidency and did much better than DSA in terms of seizing ground in Congress very quickly. dozens of seats in 2010. And they unquestionably succeeded in pushing the Republican Party to the right and establishing themselves as a power center within that party.

Along the way, they did not achieve everything that they set out to achieve and were in many respects sort of assimilated into the Republican Party. You know, that's one scenario. The other scenario is that DSA is something more like MAGA, a movement that sort of initially establishment Republicans kind of made fun of and didn't take seriously. and then accommodated, and then it eventually devoured the party. That was obviously only really possible with the presence of somebody like Donald Trump, who doesn't exist in DSA.

Right. At the moment, the DSA does not have that, a single unifying national leader who can wrangle all of its factions. In fact, its structure seems to put those factions very much at the center of the organization. And that makes me wonder, how does DSA move from insurgency to something more enduring in our politics? Well, the thing about DSA is that in spite of all of its organizational problems, some of its chapters, particularly New York, have succeeded in producing really dynamic successful politicians. They've produced Mnodani. They've produced AOC. And that's why I think people who both want to see the DSA succeed in the national level.

And people who are very concerned about DSA agree that the real game changer in this and possibly the necessary game changer from DSA's standpoint is a presidential candidacy. A strong contender who comes out of DSA who isn't just a socialist like Bernie Sanders, but is actually a DSA candidate. You know, that is something that I think everybody agrees could really transform the place of DSA in American politics. I think I know why that will transform the DSA in its place in politics, but just explain why it will be so important that a homegrown DSA presidential candidate would be the game changer. I mean, if you look at the arc of American political history, ideas that are coming in from pretty far outside of the mainstream of politics struggle to colonize those politics from the ground up. What is really invaluable is to have a head of state or even a strong presidential candidate bring those ideas in a very high profile and central way in front of the majority of the American population and sort of acclimatize them to these ideas, normalize these ideas. FDR, as president, did that with these progressive policy ideas that, again, we might in another context have associated with socialism. Right.

Ronald Reagan did the same thing with conservatism. Conservatism was a marginal movement in the Republican Party for years, and it was really sort of the concerted efforts of Reagan that really brought that not just into the mainstream of American politics, but made it really the sort of unconquerable doctrine inside of the Republican Party eventually. Donald Trump, in his own way, has clearly done that with a lot of ideas that were considered wildly outside of American politics a decade ago. There's really no substitute for a politician at that national level who is able to just sort of center a political program day in and day out. So just game that out. Pretend for a moment that there is a very successful democratic, socialist presidential campaign. And that candidate, maybe it's AOC, maybe it's somebody else, wins the nomination. And suddenly, DSA is the national face of a Democratic Party.

I think if you have a Democratic socialist running as the Democratic nominee in a presidential election, you end up with a referendum on socialism that we have never had in this country. In one scenario, this normalizes the ideas that socialists have been arguing for in this country for over a century. This word that has for years had this taboo around it loses the kind of scariness with even a general electorate that is still by the polls wary of the idea of socialism. The other scenario is that this functionally destroys the Democratic Party for years and its ability to win an election. It's saddled with this label that remains unpopular, and that's what people think of when they think of Democrats. And so, you know, this is a conversation that's very live right now inside of the DSA. What kind of compromises are going to be required to make a Democratic socialist candidate tolerable to the majority of Americans? And are they willing to make those compromises? Right. Or does all this end in big public ruptures, you know, that take the DSA from this moment of ascendancy to a moment of irrelevance that socialists have experienced throughout most of their history in this country?

We don't know. And I think, you know, we've seen the beginning of this conversation in the midterms, but it's really only the beginning of this conversation. Well, Charlie, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. On Tuesday, Canada made good on its promise to match U.S. tariffs dollar for dollar, announcing levies as high as 50% on hundreds of American products,

including clothing, appliances, and seafood. The tariffs, which cover $20 billion of U.S. imports, come after Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, cut off negotiations with the Trump administration, saying it was incapable of offering a fair deal that respected Canada's sovereignty. And Dolly Parton. Tung a out of bed and he stumbled to the kitchen for myself a cup of ambit. Who ruled country music and much of pop culture for six decades with an outsized personality,

down-home wit, and Appalachian Twang has died at the age of 80. Parton was a stunningly prolific songwriter. You have written more than 3,000 songs. Oh, at least. Every drawer, every box, every, in my basement, in my houses. I got songs stuck everywhere. I pull out a drawer to get some pannies. I pull out a drawer to get some drawers.

I'll find a song in there. That's just what I do. Who wrote about growing up poor, about love, jealousy, and empowerment. Songs that were performed by the likes of Tina Tiena. Turner, Nora Jones, and Whitney Houston, but were always the most poignant when they were sung by Dolly Parton herself. In everybody's life, there's a special person, a person that you love more than you love anybody else.

There's a song about that special person in my life. It's called I will always love you. Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe and Astha Chautervedi, with help from Lexington. Dio. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Mark George, contains music by Pat McCusker, Marion Lazzano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobaro. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll be right back after this commercial. Thank you.