Progressivism Belongs to Democrats, Not the DSA!
I am tired of hearing the Democratic Socialists of America described as “the progressive left.”
I am equally tired of hearing MAGA call them the “extreme left,” as though the DSA is simply the outer edge of the Democratic Party.
It is not.
The DSA has become very good at taking causes Democrats have fought for generations and presenting them to younger Americans as though socialism discovered them.
It did not.
I turned 70 this year. This past week, I went for a 21 mile bike ride.
I have been involved in Democratic politics since I was a high school congressional intern in the spring of 1973.
Strong unions. Better wages. Universal healthcare. Civil rights. Environmental protection. Progressive taxation. Campaign finance reform. Getting big money out of politics. Building a strong middle class.
I have heard Democrats fighting for those things for more than half a century.
After Watergate and Nixon, Democrats did not merely complain about corruption. They drove major reforms intended to curb the influence of big money, require disclosure and restore trust in government. The backlash against Watergate was so strong that many Republicans joined them.
Over the decades, Republicans repeatedly worked to undo those reforms while Democrats fought to preserve and strengthen them. Supreme Court decisions opened ever larger channels for wealthy individuals, corporations and political organizations to pour money into American elections.
Republicans spent decades attacking those reforms while Democrats defended them, and Supreme Court decisions gutted much of what the post Watergate reformers were trying to accomplish. MAGA has embraced and accelerated a political system dominated by enormous private wealth.
And that connects directly to an even larger problem.
America does not have a wealth creation problem. America has a wealth distribution problem.
Our economy creates astonishing wealth.
Corporate valuations rise by billions. The stock market creates enormous fortunes. Major shareholders can watch their net worth rise by amounts that would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago.
Somebody does the work.
Harvests the crops.
Cuts the trees and mills the lumber.
Mines the ores.
Pumps the oil and natural gas from the ground.
Nearly every physical product begins with something harvested, mined or pumped from the earth. Petroleum itself becomes far more than energy. It becomes plastics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and thousands of products essential to modern life.
Labor is involved throughout the process.
People do the work.
Extract the materials.
Transport them.
Process them.
Build the houses.
Stock the stores.
Write the software.
Staff the hospitals.
Drive the trucks.
Teach our children.
Keep factories, warehouses, offices and the service economy operating.
People go to work and create the goods and services from which wealth is generated.
Workers deserve a much larger share of that prosperity.
America can thrive with an affluent working and middle class. Consumer spending would boom because ordinary people spend money in their communities.
A good factory job after World War II could buy a house, support a family, provide benefits, take a family on vacation and send children to college while one spouse stayed home.
In many households, one income did it.
Today, two incomes often do not.
People work multiple jobs. Young adults graduate from college carrying debt that can resemble a mortgage payment before they have bought a house. Healthcare can trap someone in a job because a spouse or child has a chronic illness and losing employment could mean losing affordable medical coverage.
When I graduated from Rutgers in 1979, I remember tuition costing a little more than $700 a semester.
For comparison, in 1977 to 1978, average in state tuition and required fees at an American public four year college were about $645 for the entire academic year.
For 2025 to 2026, the average is about $11,950 a year.
That does not include room, board and other expenses.
Something is badly out of balance.
I believe in capitalism.
But I believe in well regulated capitalism.
Entrepreneurship matters. Risk matters. Investment matters. Innovation matters.
The Democratic Party has always embraced the entrepreneurial spirit that helped build America.
But capitalism needs rules.
If a corporation can create billions of dollars in additional value for its owners, it can afford to pay the people creating that value wages and benefits that produce an affluent working middle class.
It can also afford to pay its share of taxes to the society in which it thrives.
That is the Democratic objective.
The DSA looks at many of the same problems and concludes that capitalism itself should be replaced.
I reject that cure.
America does not need to abolish capitalism. America needs to fix capitalism from what Republicans have done to it.
It needs well regulated capitalism where entrepreneurship flourishes, people can become wealthy, businesses can grow and workers participate substantially in the prosperity they create.
Democrats have repeatedly fought for those rules while Republicans have repeatedly pushed deregulation.
The DSA frequently portrays the Democratic Party as complacent.
I reject that too.
Democrats have spent decades fighting Republicans over labor rights, healthcare, environmental standards, taxation, financial regulation, voting rights, campaign finance and the social safety net.
Losing political battles is not the same thing as never fighting them.
And here is perhaps the greatest irony in the DSA worldview.
One of the countries it spends so much energy falsely attacking is one of the countries it should be emulating.
Israel.
Israel began with a much more socialist economy than it has today. Beginning under Menachem Begin and continuing under later governments, Israel deliberately introduced more competition, private enterprise and market economics.
But Israel did not abandon its social responsibilities.
Israel preserved universal healthcare.
Israel maintained substantial social insurance and retirement protections.
Israel provides subsidized daycare for younger children and free compulsory preschool beginning at age three.
Israel encouraged private investment.
Israel built a thriving entrepreneurial culture.
Today, Israel possesses one of the world’s most dynamic technology and innovation sectors.
That is not merely something American Democrats should study.
That is something the DSA should understand.
Israel demonstrates that a nation can encourage entrepreneurship, innovation, investment and private wealth while guaranteeing healthcare and maintaining meaningful social responsibilities.
The DSA has wrapped itself in so much hostility toward Israel, built on false accusations, that it attacks what it should be emulating.
And hostility toward Israel is completely unnecessary to building a stronger American middle class.
What is this plank doing here?
It has nothing to do with its economic reforms.
Yet Israel repeatedly becomes one of the DSA’s defining political obsessions.
I also reject its distorted presentation of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
Israel has repeatedly pursued negotiated peace with its neighbors and Palestinian Arab leadership. Israelis want what most people want: to live safely beside neighbors who accept their existence.
I went into that history in detail in my June 21 article, “If You Make Peace With Israel, Israel Makes Peace With You.”
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/if-you-make-peace-with-israel-israel-makes-peace-with-you/
But reducing an extraordinarily complicated conflict to false slogans about colonialism, apartheid and genocide is not serious analysis.
Nor are those accusations true.
And there is a darker danger.
Antisemitism has been used throughout history as a political weapon to gather popular support. Frustrated people are given someone to blame. Jews have filled that role far too many times over the last two thousand years.
We should recognize that pattern when it appears again.
A movement supposedly centered on American economic reform does not need to demonize the Jewish state to fight inequality in America.
The DSA has wrapped itself in too much hate and too much hostility toward Israel, directing political energy at an issue that has nothing to do with fixing wages, healthcare, housing, campaign finance or the American middle class.
Progressivism belongs to Democrats, not the DSA.
The DSA has embraced too much that is not progressive at all.
Progressivism should be about expanding opportunity, protecting individual rights and freedoms, strengthening workers, improving people’s lives and building a fairer society.
Hate is not progressive.
Antisemitism is not progressive.
Demonizing Israel is not progressive.
Replacing reform with ideological destruction is not progressive.
I want a post MAGA reform era.
I want Democrats rebuilding the safeguards Republicans and the courts dismantled.
I want big money driven back out of politics.
I want universal healthcare.
I want workers receiving a larger share of the wealth they create.
I want an affluent working middle class again.
And I want entrepreneurship and innovation flourishing alongside all of it.
Those are progressive Democratic goals.
The DSA did not invent them.
The DSA does not own them.
The DSA now wants to replace capitalism.
Look at its program for yourself.
I want Democrats to build a well regulated capitalism that works for the people who actually do the work.
That is the progressive future worth fighting for.
