DSA: Vanguard of the Radical Professionals

The Democratic Party’s road back to the working class is only getting longer.

There was a brief, shining moment right after the 2024 election when it seemed like the Democratic Party might move closer to the views and values of the working-class voters it was so obviously losing. But that trend quickly dissipated as #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects mounted stiff resistance to any revision of policy positions, and momentum shifted to the energized progressive Left.

That trend continues today, as exemplified by the remarkable success of the Democratic Socialists of America. First there was DSA member Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral race, which was followed this year by a surge of DSA triumphs. Mamdani and the DSA backed three Democratic primary candidates in New York City House districts—Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez—all of whom won. Notably, these wins came not against moderates but against firmly progressive Democrats, including Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat, who Chevalier ousted.

Other high-profile DSA victories include Chris Rabb securing the Democratic nomination for a Philadelphia House seat and Milat Kiros winning the Democratic nomination for a Denver House seat (ousting a 30-year incumbent in the process). Rabb will run unopposed in November, and Kiros is almost certain to win as well. In addition, DSA members Donavan McKinney of Michigan (Detroit/Wayne County) and Cori Bush of Missouri (St. Louis) are favored to garner Democratic nominations for heavily Democratic House seats and are also likely to swell the DSA Congressional delegation.

And it’s not just the House! DSA member Francesca Hong is mounting a strong campaign for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and DSA-backed Abdul El-Sayed is favored to grab the Michigan Democratic nomination for Senate. If nominated, both stand an excellent chance of winning the general election. DSA member Janeese Lewis George recently secured the Democratic nomination for Washington, D.C. mayor, and DSA member Nithya Raman has advanced to a runoff against incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Does all of this mean the DSA is about to “take over” the Democratic Party? I don’t think so. But it does mean a big hit on the party’s potential to de-Brahminize and become more attractive to working-class voters.

The DSA has had significant success and recently hit 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist membership organization in American history. But it’s a big country! As Kyle Saunders points out, to match the per capita membership of the Eugene Debs-era Socialist Party, the DSA would need more like 400,000 members.

Furthermore, DSA wins have been confined to very blue, urban areas of the country where securing the Democratic nomination is equivalent to winning the general election (we’ll see what happens in the statewide Michigan and Wisconsin contests). Today’s Democratic Party, despite these trends, includes many, many politicians and voters who do not hail from intensely blue areas and who are far less likely to succumb to the DSA’s blandishments.

Rather than taking over, the best way to think about the DSA is that it represents the vanguard of the radical professionals. In that sense it is the continuation of a longstanding Democratic Party trend. Democrats have become increasingly hegemonized by the professional class, and professionals themselves have become more radical, especially in the Donald Trump era.

Thus, when polls suggest that 66% of Democrats are favorable toward socialism but only 42% support capitalism, it does not mean that two-thirds of Democrats are about to join the DSA or, indeed, that they have any idea what they mean by favoring “socialism.” It means instead that professionals are being further radicalized by their fervent opposition to Trump and Trumpism, and are willing to pick a “brand” that expresses maximum opposition. This radicalization provides fertile ground for the DSA, even if the overwhelming majority think socialism only means vague principles like “be kind” or “the government should do stuff.”

The DSA’s appeal is particularly strong among younger professionals, many of whom struggle to afford life in the high-cost metropolitan areas in which they reside. Their upward mobility is frustrated and, in their view, unjustly so. This bleeds into extreme dislike of Trump and contempt for a Democratic establishment they believe has failed to stand up to the president and the billionaire capitalists who enable him.

The more political among these radicalized young professionals are naturally drawn to the DSA. They see it as their organization, one that crystallizes their grievances and functions as the leading edge—the vanguard, if you will—of their priorities, both economic and cultural.

Of course, the DSA’s conceit is also that it’s a working-class organization. Its rhetoric and program uses the phrase “working class” over and over again, as if repeating that phrase magically makes its members working class. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t.

As anyone even vaguely familiar with the real-life DSA knows, blue collar workers are as scarce as hen’s teeth among actual members. DSA members are overwhelmingly college-educated and hold professional jobs, unless they’re over-educated “skidders” who’ve wound up in low-level retail gigs or are slumming it to organize the proletariat. The organization’s culture is such that a typical non-college-educated worker who wandered into a DSA meeting would run screaming in the other direction, bewildered by the language and frightened by the radical policy positions.

One might think that, given the DSA’s emerging status as an electoral force, it would be tempted to soften some stances to appeal to more voters. But no. Instead it’s becoming more radical. On July 14, the group released its updated national platform, which calls for abolishing the Senate and replacing the President and Supreme Court with “an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress”(!).

According to the DSA, funding for police departments should be diverted to public services along the way to full abolition of both the police and prison system. All illegal immigrants should be amnestied, Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished, and open borders established. Not to mention: reparations for slavery, a Green New Deal, universal rent control, defunding the Pentagon, a 32-hour work week, no restrictions on “gender-affirming care,” and public ownership of the largest corporations. It is difficult to find a radical, impractical, unpopular proposal that is not in this platform.

Of course, DSAers running for elected office frequently soft-pedal their support for these radical ideas, preferring instead to talk about “affordability” and how they’ll stand up to Trump and the billionaire class. Once elected, they may even, as in Mamdani’s case, try to portray themselves as simple problem-solvers providing effective public services—sewer socialists who practice “pothole politics.”

But DSA politicians can’t escape the branding and dictates of DSA’s radical commitments. So instead of hiring more cops, as initially promised, the Mamdani administration is ramping up support for “gender-affirming care,” immigration law services, a new Office of Community Safety, and countless other programs dear to the hearts of radical professionals. That doesn’t have much to do with sewer socialism.

As for making the city more affordable, that is just very hard to do given the morass of bureaucracy, non-government organizations, and municipal unions that must be reckoned with—and that include many of Mamdani’s strongest supporters, who will stoutly resist anything that encroaches on their interests. Far easier are gestures like rent freezes for regulated rental units—already done—which, ironically, are likely antithetical to the larger goal of increased housing supply and affordability.

Expecting the DSA to genuinely appeal to working-class voters is a fool’s errand. Its members are what they are—creatures of a vanguard organization of radical professionals pursuing their own priorities. As such, the DSA should be thought of as an even-more Brahmin Left faction within the broader Brahmin Left of the Democratic Party.

In fact, the DSA will be a force for the continued and intensified Brahminization of the party. Any effort to embrace positions more congenial to the working class will be ferociously resisted by the increasingly well-organized and powerful DSA. This is the real problem with the group: not that it will “take over” but rather that it will prevent the Democrats from undergoing the brand reinvention needed to reconnect with actual working-class voters.

Consider three recommendations from New York Times columnist Tom Edsall in a recent piece helpfully titled, “If the Democrats Actually Want to Win, This Is What They Have to Do.”

First, Edsall recommends Democrats firmly enforce immigration laws, including tough border enforcement and deportation of unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes.

Second, he suggests the Democratic Party support the aggressive prosecution of those accused of violent crime and those who engage in crowdsourced “teen takeovers” of stores, as well as for all forms of child abuse. The party, he writes, should back the restoration of bail requirements in the case of felonies, lifetime sentences for offenders convicted of multiple violent crimes, tough enforcement of child support laws, and the death penalty if supported by the voters in a state and endorsed by a jury.

Third, Edsall says the party should say that there are two sexes: men and women. A man can claim an identity as a woman, and the same is true in reverse. Their claim should be respected and they should be protected from any form of discrimination for their choice.

The claim does not, however, alter their biological sex.

Consequently, it is legitimate in areas such as sports where a transgender person would have a competitive advantage over non-trans people to bar their participation. Similarly, claiming a sexual identity does not give a trans woman the right to be incarcerated in a woman’s prison. Finally, “gender-affirming” surgery and hormone treatments should be banned for those under age 18 due to the potential for irreversible harm.

These recommendations would go some way toward shoring up the weaknesses that tanked the Democrats in 2024. Yet the DSA and its supporters can be counted on to lie down on the railroad tracks to prevent any of them from even being considered.

This is the nub of the problem. The unchecked Brahminization of the Democrats, which has only been accelerated by the #Resistance and by intense negative polarization against Trump, has encouraged the radicalization of the professional class. That in turn has fed the growth of the DSA, the vanguard of the radical professionals, who now stand in the way of serious Democratic course correction such as that recommended by Edsall.

The road back to the working class is likely long and difficult for Democrats. The DSA’s growth just makes it even more difficult. Or perhaps it will knock Democrats off the road entirely. I would not underestimate the peril now facing the party.