Sometimes a red scare isn’t such a bad thing. Over the past several weeks, Donald Trump has issued forth with five-alarm-fire warnings about the Democratic Socialists of America really being communists, and his opponents have blasted him for McCarthyism. Trump’s rhetoric has been over the top, but the DSA does have a communist problem.
The DSA is a matryoshka doll of subversion — it is attempting to infiltrate and take over the Democratic Party (with some success), while Marxists are infiltrating and taking over the DSA (also with some success). In other words, the most important movement within the Democratic Party is in falling under control of communists. Over the past few years, they have established a majority on the DSA’s National Political Committee, the governing board.
As recent reports in The Atlantic warning about the direction of the DSA have noted, this is not in keeping with the original vision of the organization. The late Michael Harrington was the biggest founding figure of the DSA, and he was a genuinely democratic socialist. (The need for the adjective “democratic” before “socialist” stems from the fact that so many varieties of socialism are undemocratic.)
A 20th-century intellectual and organizer, Harrington came to prominence with his 1962 book on poverty in the United States, “The Other America.” Harrington’s policy prescriptions may have been misbegotten, but he wasn’t a hater with totalitarian tendencies or an opponent of Western civilization obsessed with destroying Israel — in fact, he was pro-Zionism.
Harrington and similarly battle-hardened socialists of his generation had plenty of experience watching social organizations get penetrated and destroyed by Marxist-Leninists. So they wrote a provision into the DSA’s bylaws allowing for the expulsion of anyone “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization.” Now the measure has been repealed.
Pro-Harrington members of the DSA formed a group called the North Star caucus to preserve his vision; the hard leftists countered with the Red Star caucus, which wrote a dispatch a couple of years ago lamenting how the DSA was once upon a time “an anti-communist, Labor Zionist, social democratic organization,” and calling on “all communists in the United States to join us in the democratic struggle within the DSA.”
The orientation of the DSA has changed in recent years. As far as an animating spirit, it’s “Goodbye, Michael Harrington” and “Hello, Hasan Piker,” the left-wing influencer who thinks fondly of Chairman Mao and of anti-Israel terror groups. True to its new posture, the DSA refused to condemn Hamas after Oct. 7, and the New York City chapter promoted a pro-Hamas rally immediately after the attack.
All this should matter. Like it or not, the DSA is not a fringe group with exotic concerns anymore, but a mainstream force nominating Democratic candidates across the country. As such, its internal politics deserve intense scrutiny. Needless to say, if Republican candidates were pledging fealty to a group increasingly subject to the control of self-professed fascists, it would be an enormous story and they would have to disavow their association. That there isn’t such pressure on DSA candidates from the legacy media is testament to how communism — as a supposedly idealistic force — doesn’t carry the same malodor as fascism.
Now, the Democratic Party isn’t about to become a vehicle for communism, but the DSA — the cradle of so many new, attention-getting Democratic candidates — is well on its way.
Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.
