The “Democratic Socialists” of America are already eating each other alive

It’s glorious to behold

We all saw this coming, it’s just happening sooner than expected. The “Democratic Socialists” (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one) of America are turning on each other like the vipers that they are. Actually, scratch that analogy. I’m sure poisonous snakes are more loyal to each other than these people.

The DSA is the political equivalent of a religious fundamentalist group. They brook no dissent and seek to destroy anyone who deviates even slightly from their radical orthodoxy. Nevertheless, during their political ascent over the last decade or so they largely managed to hide who and what they really are, albeit with an enormous assist from the national media. DSA politicians stuck to their talking points about workers’ rights and the Green New Deal.

It couldn’t last forever. With groups like these, it never does. The crazy is always lurking just beneath the surface.

The thing about radicals is that ultimately they can’t help themselves. They can only fake it for so long. The succession of Bernie Sanders (establishment) to Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (palatable radical) to Ilhan Omar (openly bonkers) to Abdul Al-Sayed and his fellow traveler Hassan Piker (dangerous revolutionaries) was inevitable.

There’s another inevitability: political movements based on ideological purity are quickly rent by internal division and dissent. When everyone’s right, everyone else is wrong. 

There have been recent examples of the movement starting to implode. It turns out that without a dictatorship, even socialists have to compromise. It’s easy to scream and yell and bang drums in the street as a candidate. Actual governance is, shall we say, a wee bit more challenging.

In Los Angeles, Nithya Raman ousted a well-liked city council incumbent with the help of the DSA, who threw their full weight behind her candidacy. As a candidate in the long, hot summer of George Floyd in 2020 she supported the defund the police movement. In office, her votes related to law enforcement have been mixed, including votes in favor of budgets that increased police funding. She’s also clashed with the organization over Israel, L.A.’s “mansion tax” and her vote to confirm LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. The New York Times reports that her relationship with DSA-LA is “marked by internal friction and strategic distance as she runs against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.”

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson likewise is facing increasing tension with the Seattle DSA over her administration’s compromises on public safety and her refusal to align with core socialist demands such as public ownership of major corporations and, of course, defunding the Seattle Police Department. Even OG DSA darling Alexandria Occasio-Cortez has largely broken with the group since entering office. Most notably, she recently called the 2020 defund the police movement as an “an embarrassing woke phase,” and rejected woke itself. Again, campaigning easy, governing hard.

Last Wednesday, during a vigil on the third anniversary of the barbaric Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, current DSA darling New York Mayor Zorhan Mamdani was heckled and berated by a frothing pack of antisemitic, pro-Palestinian protesters (these monsters won’t allow Jews even a single day of mourning over the worst slaughter since the Holocaust). While technically separate from the DSA, the latter group has made common cause with the anti-Israel movement since the attacks. At this point they’re indistinguishable. You’ll see plenty of “from the river to the sea” signs at the average DSA rally.

Mamdani, of course, has barely bothered to hide his contempt for the Jewish state. He has a strained-at-best relationship with the nearly one million Jews who call Gotham home. Last week, Bret Stephens at the New York Times condemned his official statement on the anniversary of the attacks as a “moral obscenity” that gave lip service to the Hamas atrocities while focusing on Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Before becoming mayor, Mamdani joined multiple anti-Israel protests. He founded his college’s chapter of Students for Palestine and refused to engage with the campus’s left-leaning Jewish student group.

Mamdani’s learning the hard way that there’s no reasoning with crazy.

None of this is enough for the fundamentalists. On Wednesday, for his own safety Mamdani had to be hustled away by plainclothes NYPD officers while uniformed officers held the line as the screaming mob attempted to surge toward him (remember when he also wanted to defund the police?). The World Socialist Web Site said the protesters denounced Mamdani’s “for his growing accommodation to Zionism,” which is deliriously funny to anyone who’s been paying attention.

Mamdanis is also facing direct pressure from the DSA to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in the wake of a controversial ICE shooting in the Bronx last week. In what the New York Post described as a “scathing online statement,” the group demanded Mamdani to get rid of the city’s top cop and also disband two elite NYPD units.

The group said, “We demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and use every power available to him to drive ICE out of New York City.”

And there it is. The DSA got Mamdani elected, and expects him to do their bidding. In response, Mamdani did his best to equivocate, pledging that he will order a full investigation into the shooting, and to explore “every action the city can take to protect New Yorkers from ICE’s terror.”

Don’t count on the lunatics being placated. Mamdani increasingly sounds like the mainstream Democrats who are attempting to compromise with the DSA as its influence within their party increases. That he is one of them is proof that the movement is starting to come apart. The reason is simple: DSA radicalism simply doesn’t work in the real world. DSA members live in a Marxist fantasy world. It’s the reason Bernie Sanders has never passed a single piece of meaningful legislation in his three decades in Congress and the Senate.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing. And now they’re turning on each other. It’s glorious to behold.

It’s increasingly inaccurate to describe the DSA itself as a unified movement. Within its leadership are numerous distinct, often conflicting blocks. It’s less cyclops and more hydra.

This is what happens when your ideology is based on the premise of universality. Everyone believes they are the keepers of the true flame and everyone else are heretics. For example, two major blocks within the DSA are Red Star, who are hardcore Marxist-Leninist “revolutionaries,” and North Star, who are pragmatists focused on helping Democrats defeat Republicans. They are the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks of the early 20th Century, the Catholics and the Protestants of the 17th Century, the Sunni and the Shia of as long as there have been Sunni and Shia.

Those examples are illustrative, because they point to the three possible ways the DSA’s internal conflicts will play out. The first is total victory by one faction, as happened in the early years of the Soviet Union, when the Bolsheviks seized power, banned the Menshevik Party and imprisoned or murdered its leaders. The second is conflict followed by compromise and coexistence, which is what happened in the decades and centuries after the Thirty Years War in Europe as a result of the Peace of Westphalia. The last is perpetual conflict and hostility, as continues to happen between the Shiites and Sunnis in the Muslim world.

An important distinction between the modern, factionalized DSA and these historic analogues is that the DSA has not devolved into internecine violence — yet. Their struggles are political and philosophical.

It’s also important to bear in mind that, for all the attention the DSA has received since Bernie Sanders bellowed his way onto the national stage in 2016, they remain a marginal group. They claim around 130,000 members and 200 chapters nationwide. That compares to 45.3 million registered Democrats and some 3,200 local Democratic Party chapters, and 41 million registered Republicans with 3,100 chapters.

What’s happening to the socialist movement today in this country has happened twice before, in the 1960s and the 1920s. What seemed for a few years inevitable became historic footnotes. That is the fate toward which the current DSA is hurtling. The only thing normal Americans will have to say is, “good riddance.”

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