The Democratic Socialists of America began in a very different moral and political universe. Its principal founder, Michael Harrington, defended Israel’s existence on explicitly socialist grounds.

Harrington’s democratic socialism joined economic equality to political freedom. He opposed American capitalism and communist tyranny. In 1975, he identified three essential concerns in the Middle East: Israel’s survival, Palestinian national rights, and democratic development throughout the Arab world. He understood Zionism as the Jewish national liberation movement and believed Jews and Palestinians had equal rights to self-determination.

The old democratic Left could recognize competing rights and work within political reality. Today’s DSA has repudiated that inheritance.

This transformation largely occurred through generational replacement. DSA had around 6,000 members in 2015 after decades on the political margins. Bernie Sanders made socialism attractive to millions of younger Americans, and Donald Trump’s election made organizing seem urgent. By July 2017, DSA’s membership had quadrupled.

These new members brought their own ideology. Many came out of campus anti-imperialism, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the culture of revolutionary “resistance.” They understood the world through a handful of fixed roles: colonizer and colonized, white and nonwhite, oppressor and oppressed.

Israel gradually disappeared as a real society. Its millions of human beings, competing political movements, and profound internal conflicts became irrelevant. Israel was now an imperial abstraction.

In 2017, DSA endorsed BDS and withdrew from the Socialist International. In 2019, it established a national BDS working group. Palestine soon became a test of ideological reliability.

Representative Jamaal Bowman faced demands for his expulsion after visiting Israel and voting to fund Iron Dome. The national leadership kept him in the organization while withholding future endorsement until he demonstrated the required “solidarity with Palestine.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez later lost DSA’s national endorsement partly because she supported a resolution stating that denial of Israel’s right to exist can constitute antisemitism. DSA demanded opposition to all Israeli funding, including Iron Dome, along with support for BDS and distance from organizations it considered insufficiently anti-Zionist.

Then came October 7. DSA’s immediate statement blamed Israel’s “apartheid regime,” declared the attack “not unprovoked,” and never named or specifically condemned Hamas, although it condemned the killing of civilians generally. Maurice Isserman, a founding member and historian of American communism, resigned after 41 years. He called the response morally bankrupt.

The transformation became official in 2025. DSA’s national convention adopted “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA.” The resolution affirmed Palestinian “resistance,” refugee return “from the river to the sea,” and ideological standards for members and endorsed candidates. Support for Jewish national self-determination became disqualifying for DSA endorsement.

We are watching the return of the Neo-Soviet Left.

Late-Soviet anti-Zionism reduced Israel to an outpost of Western imperialism. Its democracy carried no weight. Its citizens’ wishes carried no weight. Armed movements aligned against the West became liberation forces, and their atrocities became the understandable reactions of the oppressed. Progressive Jews could remain in the coalition by renouncing Jewish collective power.

DSA has rebuilt that worldview in contemporary American language.

The program is easy to follow. Delegitimize Israel. End the assistance that allows it to defend itself. Support the movement seeking to replace it. Affirm that movement’s right to “resistance.” Discipline socialists who interfere.

DSA usually presents its destination as one “democratic secular state.” Seven million Israeli Jews would have to surrender their country to get there. They will refuse. DSA offers no account of what follows that refusal. War, coercion, dispossession, and killing vanish behind the comforting image of the imaginary democracy that will somehow emerge afterward.

Abroad, DSA thinks like the late Soviet Union. Israel becomes an imperial construct, and those fighting it receive the moral privileges of “resistance.”

At home, DSA increasingly resembles a Bolshevik party. Ideological caucuses seek control of the institution. Members monitor deviations, discipline elected officials, and push out dissenters. Influential factions openly identify as Marxist-Leninist or advocate democratic centralism and the construction of a disciplined “party surrogate.”

Michael Harrington would have recognized this politics. He founded DSA to oppose it.

Is DSA Really Doing Well?

DSA’s defenders point to recent electoral victories. Those victories matter. They also come mainly from heavily Democratic constituencies and tell us little about the durability of DSA’s appeal nationwide. We are about to learn whether its politics can travel outside its activist cocoon.

Israel gives the clearest view of the organization’s Neo-Soviet character, though the rot extends far beyond Israel. The American Left once understood that freedom could never grow from totalitarian methods, ideological fantasy, and the destruction of existing peoples. Today’s DSA has forgotten these basics in the name of revolutionary purity.

J. Edgar Hoover dreamed of a Left this fractured, paranoid, and politically incapacitated. The Neo-Soviet Left is doing his work for him, and congratulating itself on its success.