As we near the end of 2022, nobody really wants to talk about 2015. But one 2015 topic has piqued my interest as of late: the decision of the Old Guard of the DSA to ride the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign to membership growth. As the Old Guard reflects back on it – if it reflects back on it – I suspect it has mixed feelings about how it all went down.
The DSA Before 2015
Younger readers might not even know the DSA existed before 2015. Well, it did! In fact, the DSA formed way back in 1983 – the year I was born! And, for most of that history, the DSA was entirely irrelevant to U.S. politics.
Why? Before the 2015 surge, the DSA had only a few thousand members. That’s why so many younger people assumed the org formed after Sanders lost the 2016 nomination. But it’s not just that the DSA was small. Some smaller orgs punch well above their weight. That often happens due to their structure or their strategic pockets of influence.
The DSA, however, did not punch above its weight. Not even close. If anything, the DSA punched below its weight. It didn’t have an active membership, even among the few thousand members. It really didn’t do much of anything beyond publish a newsletter and function as a kind of progressive debate club. Electorally, it was notorious for doing things like endorsing John Kerry in 2004.
So, before 2015, the DSA functioned as merely one org among a smorgasbord of options for U.S. leftists. Specifically for leftists who didn’t like sectarian orgs and basically wanted to push Democrats to the left. Here we find in particular the influence of Michael Harrington, a founding member.
DSA in 2015
In 2015, the DSA went all-in on Bernie Sanders for President. It wanted to boost the Sanders campaign, of course, but it also wanted to use Sanders to grow. And the strategy wasn’t subtle. The org stated it openly, and the press covered it. The Sanders campaign did far better than anyone expected, and the DSA grew far more than even it expected.
That is to say, it worked! It worked very, very well, in terms of member numbers. The DSA grew from maybe 4-6k members in 2015 to 50k after the campaign (and eventually up to about 95k by 2021).
Why Chasing Sanders Worked for DSA (But Not Other Socialist Orgs)
But why did it work for DSA, in particular? Why this small, largely irrelevant socialist org rather than the dozens of other small, largely irrelevant socialist orgs? True, the DSA endorsed Sanders earlier than other socialist orgs and worked harder for him. But that only goes so far. The DSA had neither the size nor the influence to account for the successes of the Sanders campaign.
Beyond that, I think we can point to several features of the DSA that helped it grow far more than sectarian leftist orgs. The biggest factor, in my view, is the DSA’s big tent structure. The org welcomes almost any kind of socialist, and it’s even open to curious progressives and social democrats looking to organize with leftists. This is all anathema to sectarian leftist orgs and their basic theory of how to build a party. Sectarian orgs want to get the ideology and doctrine right first, and then recruit people to the movement. The DSA big tent theory works much better at building members than the sectarian theory.
Related to this, a person can join DSA without already holding a deep knowledge of leftist terminology and history. And they can join DSA without having that stuff shoveled at them on the website or at their first meeting.
Finally, for all its faults, the DSA works more effectively with other groups than the sectarian left ever did. The sectarian left likes to ‘collaborate’ with other orgs by sponsoring an event, inviting other groups, and then preaching at them. It doesn’t work. It never worked. By contrast, some DSA chapters build more organic relationships with other groups. Far from all DSA chapters do this. But also far from none.
The Coalition DSA Wanted vs. The One It Got
It’s worth recalling, again, that in 2015 the DSA sat well to the right of most socialist orgs. Or well to the left of most progressive orgs, if you want to put it in that bucket. My point is that it’s hard to tell whether the 2015 DSA is happy with what happened in the last 7 years.
Certain remnants of the DSA Old Guard – notably the North Star caucus and some folks who post on the org message board – sometimes write a bit about it.
The story? In short, it seems like the DSA Old Guard wanted to build a broad coalition of progressives. The coalition would include everyone from socialists and social democrats to disaffected liberals. This group would push Democrats to the left on domestic policy, perhaps up to and including Medicare for All. In short, they wanted to fulfill the vision of Michael Harrington and those in the DSA who sat a bit to Harrington’s right.
It’s a great story. The only problem is that the DSA created no such coalition after 2015. It created a coalition, but not that one. Instead, the DSA saw a flood of new members from disaffected working-class college students and graduates. As well as a flood of people who accepted the aesthetics (and sometimes even the politics) of the actual socialist left. Not the ‘liberals and progressives and social democrats’ coalition it expected.
Be Careful What You Wish For?
I don’t think the DSA’s Old Guard ever prepared for that. It expected to find a market out there for some kind of ‘broad progressive’ political formation. Nor was it alone in these expectations. It’s what the Sanders campaign thought it could build in 2016. Warren thought she could build it in 2020. Sanders tried to build it in a different way in 2020. Our Revolution built around it. And it’s the base for groups like the Sunrise Movement or Justice Democrats. Some even seem to advocate for going back and trying again!
But it’s no longer the base for the DSA. Starting with the 2017 DSA Convention, the org moved well to the left of its Old Guard. The Old Guard, simply put, lost control of the movement it created. And they’ve never regained it. Some caucuses and tendencies inside DSA – North Star, of course, but also Socialist Majority – seem sympathetic to some Old Guard views. But even Socialist Majority sits well to the left of the pre-2015 DSA.
And so, quite by accident, the DSA’s Old Guard created a mass-based, socialist org in the U.S. for the first time in decades. Who’d have guessed it?
