The Stunning Rise of the Democratic Socialists of America

"From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is the Daily. This summer, Democratic Socialists have mounted their biggest and most successful attempt yet to redefine the Democratic Party." "48 hours after Democratic Socialist won in two New York congressional districts, the implications are still being felt and this really could just be the start." By defeating its candidates, in primary after primary, from the East Coast, "Genie's Lewis George has poised to become the first Democratic Socialist mayor in the history of the nation's capital," to the West Coast. "Democratic Socialists scored another primary victory this time in Colorado's first congressional district." To swing states, "Democratic Socialists won several races, notably in Michigan." Chris Rav, the Democratic Party's nominee and the third district of Pennsylvania, is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And finally, to the heart of red America. "Let's talk Florida." "Democratic Socialists, Angie Nixon crushed Alex Vidman." In the process, Americans' views of Democratic Socialists and Socialism itself are changing. "Socialism up like a rocket. Look at this. Two in three Democrats have a favorable view of Socialism." Related to CDS News poll found Democrats' views Socialism more favorably than capitalism. "Democratic Socialists of America, a plus 17-point net-favorably-rangling Democrats, simply put, they are better blind at this point than Democrats in Congress." But as its electoral success grows, the organization at the heart of the movement is confronting big, unresolved questions about what it stands for. Not exactly its relationship to the Democratic Party should be, and what level of compromise is required to become a lasting political force. Today, my colleague, political correspondent Charlie Holmans, on the rise and the limitations of the DSA. It's Wednesday, August 26. Charlie, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. So, by a lot of measures, this has been the summer of the Democratic Socialist. And here on the daily, we have spent a lot of time focused on Democratic Socialist candidates and the races that they are running in, but not on the organization itself that's at the heart of this movement, which is the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA. And so that's where you come in, Charlie, because you have spent the last few weeks reporting on the DSA and how it made this midterm election to a large degree about socialism. That's right. DSA has been around for a long time in various forms, but for all intents and purposes, this group wasn't really on the radar of a lot of people in politics, and I think the general public until this past year, starting when Zaron Mamdani won in New York, and then continuing on through what's been a really pretty remarkable run of congressional Democratic primary wins. So, I was interested in better understanding the organization itself. And I spent weeks talking to anyone who had talked to me in DSA, talking to the candidates, watching them campaigning, and came away feeling that this is a real force, a rising force in Democratic politics, and also that as it's growing, it's footprint in American politics, that it might be its own worst enemy in terms of its future. Hmm. And what do you mean by that exactly? So, you have to understand that DSA is not built as a political party. Exist inside of the Democratic party these days somewhat, but it doesn't work like a party. It's a much more fractious organization, and it has a lot of constituencies with very different ideas about how to pursue their aims in politics. Hmm. And as I explore deeper into the history of the organization and American socialism more generally, I realize that these were really debates that have been happening throughout much of the history of American socialism. And they're happening inside of DSA now in a way that is really going to affect its future as a force in American politics. Well, just explain then that history of American socialism that inevitable big brings us to the DSA and to its inherent fractiousness. So to understand DSA, I think you need to understand the early history of socialism in this country. And that means going back to the early 1900s, which was the previous heyday of socialism here. So this is the period right after the gilded age when you had some Americans making just really enormous amounts of money, these sort of railroad barons, timber barons, coal mining, that kind of thing. At the same time, many Americans are working in these industries or in agriculture. And there's this huge wealth gap between the rich and everybody else. And this creates a lot of inevitable political reactions, people who are trying to envision a way of redistributing the wealth. And one thing that comes out of that eventually is this American form of socialism. And specifically the socialist party of America, which in the early 1900s was the largest and most organized socialist party in the United States. And socialist candidates win a fair amount of elections across the country. You know, they're not a massive movement. And socialist held assembly seats in a lot of states that would surprise you today, places like Oklahoma, Texas, the upper Midwest, socialist mayors in a lot of cities. In New York, California, really all over the place. And they really hit their pinnacle with Eugene V. Debs, who was the most famous socialist politician of this time period. "Penal workers and Congress, the socialist movement is as wide as the world. And it's mission is to win the world, the whole world." Debs was a union organizer and a democratic assemblyman from Indiana, who became the perennial candidate for the socialist party of America in five presidential elections. Wow. And really works to try to convince all these disparate groups of working class people in the United States to see themselves as a class and to see themselves with a sense of solidarity with each other. And how does Debs actually do in all these presidential elections that he runs up? So Debs topped out at 6% of the vote in 1912, which was not a lot, but was enough to make him part of the political conversation and to make socialism really part of the political conversation in the country at that time. And what did that look like exactly? How was socialism in that moment being defined in America? At the time it was defined pretty clearly as public control of the workings of the economy for the benefit of the workers. And in Debs era, the socialist kind of saw this as the beginning of a real ascent into the mainstream of American politics, but that's not what happened. What happened instead? So the socialist ran a foul of the government of Woodrow Wilson, specifically over World War One. The socialists were very opposed to US involvement in the war. Debs encouraged young men to avoid the draft. And this ended up getting him prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Wow. So by the time he runs for president in 1920, he's doing it from prison. Never a great situation. The socialists also ran into a lot of other problems kind of of their own making. They split into a number of factions in this period. They lost a lot of ground in American politics. And they were kind of a spent force really coming out of the 1920s. But another problem for them really was that actually a lot of socialist ideas that were pretty popular were advanced by non-socialist politicians in this period. Most importantly, FDR, who borrowed a lot of what was thought of as democratic socialist economic policy as part of his new deal to help America out of the Great Depression. This is another moment, again, when there's a huge wealth cap in the US. Farmers find no markets for their produce, and the savings of many years and thousands of families are gone. And people see capitalism as really a broken system. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work in part by direct recruiting by the government itself. And so FDR pushes through things like federal employment programs, big public works projects, social security. This social security measure gives at least some protection against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age. These are ideas that were very similar to what socialists had been at. advocating for, and it really kind of stole a lot of the fire from American socialism to have these enacted by a progressive democratic presidency. I'm curious if FDR saw what he was doing as any form of socialism and if anyone else in American politics at that time called it socialism. FDR saw himself as a reformer of capitalism, so he was happy to borrow a lot of these ideas that again we would in another context consider socialist, but as a way of correcting the capitalist system rather than replacing it. A few timid people who fear progress will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. And in fact, he pushed back against the idea that this was socialist. Sometimes they will call it fascism, and sometimes communist, and sometimes socialist. But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and feel radical, something that is really very simple and very practical. And the reason FDR is careful not to call the socialism is because of what's happening around the world at this time. The Russian revolution has happened. The Soviet Union has been born. This is the first country that embraces communism. Now communism is a much more radical and in the Soviet Union, undemocratic system evolving from socialism, one that many American socialists reject. But this has led to all these ideologies being seen in the United States as foreign and threatening in a way that they weren't necessarily before. But as we saw with FDR, some socialist ideas can still find their way into the mainstream if they're packaged right. And so I think the new deal sets up what really becomes the central question that socialists confront in this country throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Which is, are you content seeing ideas that you broadly support that emerge from your politics, being enacted at a large scale, even if they fall short of an actual socialist transformation in the United States? Right. Are they okay with basically the democratic party co-opting their ideas? So with that in mind, where does this movement go after the new deal ends up to a degree stealing a lot of socialist's thunder? So by the 1950s, the socialists have at least tacitly acknowledged that they are probably not going to win elections anytime soon. And have really resorted more to trying to influence policy through the democratic party, through union leaders, through politicians who are sympathetic to them. And the guy who really embodies this idea is Michael Harrington. We're trying to bring socialist up from nothing to something. We're at a beginning. Who is, becomes the head of what's left of the socialist party in 1968. Harrington before that was this actually quite prominent public intellectual and left-wing activists. So long as private corporations dominate the economy, just so long the political structure have to divert the private corporation. And he really pursued this idea of trying to just shift the democratic party to the left through his own personal influence. Liberalism is inherently condemned to frustration because its excellent ideals cannot be realized unless one is willing to attack systemic power, corporate power. But Harrington is kind of chasing diminishing influence across the decade until in the early 80s, which is really the absolute nadir of his own influence, he decides to form a new socialist organization called Democratic Socialists of America. The modern incarnation of socialism, the group that's entire episode is about. Right. And it's really a quicksotic time to start a socialist organization in the United States. The idea has probably never been less popular. The country is becoming more conservative. Reagan is on the march. The socialists themselves have probably never had less influence. And this is the moment when DSA gets started. And the DSA really for the first 30-some years of its existence is not much of a political organization. And some of its members even describe it as basically kind of a book club in these years. It was very much a sort of intellectual society. A lot of the members and leaders were writers and academics. Really not capable of affecting any sort of political change in this country at all. Until. Today I am proud to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America. Bernie Sanders comes along. So Bernie Sanders was never a member of DSA. But he self-identifies as a democratic socialist. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States? Well we're going to win because first we're going to explain what democratic socialism is. And he becomes this really pivotal figure in the modern evolution of this organization. And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is a moral and wrong that the top one tenth of one percent in this country own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And he also sort of points this movement forward towards the real policy focuses that will continue to define DSA going forward. We should have health care for every man, woman, and child as a right. We should raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. You know he runs on Medicare for all and a $15 minimum wage mandated by the government. You don't consider yourself a capitalist though. Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which wall street greed and recklessness wreck this economy? No I don't. I believe. He's really drafting off of this populist anger that comes out of the financial crisis. What this campaign is about is whether we can mobilize our people to take back our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant democracy we can and should have. And overall this message that the establishment has rigged the system against working people and working people need to take their power back. Right it feels like the Bernie Sanders appeal in this post 2008 financial crisis moment very much harkens back to the two previous moments Charlie that you describe the post-guilded age era and the Great Depression both times when the wealth gap in the country was enormous and working Americans feel abandoned and betrayed by the capitalist system. That's right and obviously people on the left are really drawing those connections at the time you know pointing to the resonances with the gilded age, the Great Depression. But for the socialists what Bernie did that was really important was show that self identified socialists could actually do quite well in a democratic primary. You have to remember that before this point socialism was really like a very taboo word in American politics and had been for quite a long time. And Bernie kind of reclaimed this word as something that you could actually run on as a left-wing candidate and said yeah I am a socialist and really embraced this label very directly in a way that people prior to 2016 I think would have assumed would have been absolute poison in even a democratic primary. And what Bernie did was show that that wasn't actually true at all. And his candidacy is becomes this real movement and draws all these people to his cause. And after the election all these people are kind of out there asking what do we do with this energy and these ideas. And one of the big answers they come up with is let's join the DSA. The membership which prior to this point is 6,000 members basically jumps to 30,000 members over the course of 2017. So this is a massive increase in not just the size of the organization but the demographics of it. You know this had been a much kind of old, tweety group of people for the most part before this moment. And by their own statistics the median age of a DSA member after 2016 drops from 68 to 33. Wow. And so these people do a lot of things inside of DSA. They start new chapters in cities on college campuses, places where there had not been DSA chapters before. And they start organizing campaigns and they start running for office themselves. And in 2018 we launched this campaign because no one was clearly and authentically talking about issues like the corrupting role of money and politics. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenges Joe Crowley, this very deeply rooted incumbent in a New York City house district. Despite the fact that we didn't have the money, despite the fact that I'm working class, despite all those things, we won. And beat him in the Democratic primary. And this incredible upset. Right. AOC was somebody who had recently joined DSA around the time she was running for Congress. And that same year, I am Congresswoman elector Shita Tleib, who's also DSA, wins a Congressional seat from Michigan. 2020 they pick up a couple more Congressional seats. It will be our job to hold every elected official accountable that is not fighting for the poor and is now fighting for the working class in our country. Jamal Bowman, Cory Bush, the every person who lost a job or hope or health care or hope I'm here. Along the way they're winning city council races in a lot of cities all over the country. And they have state assembly seats, things like that at the local level. And then in 2025, they have this real breakthrough. Thank you my friends. When Zoran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City. The sun may have set over our city this evening. But as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity. And who does he cite in his speech after winning the election? Eugene Debs, the socialist presidential candidate from the early 20th century. Right. And very importantly, Mamdani within the first year of being mayor of New York City turns around and uses his popularity to endorse fellow DSA candidates in democratic primaries around New York and several of them win. They take out more establishment Democrats and that brings us to this summer of democratic socialism where in race after race after race, DSA candidates or DSA adjacent candidates are winning these primaries. Right. And the fact of DSA's success has really shown a spotlight on the organization this year, which remember is not actually a political party. They have this kind of interesting, I think, unstable relationship with the democratic party, where they're really mostly operating inside of that party at this point. But the DSA is not taking out Republicans. They're taking out other Democrats and they're increasingly taking out not just moderate establishment Democrats, but actually pretty progressive Democrats in some cases. And so for the rest of the democratic party, they're looking at the success and wondering, you know, what is this costing us? Right. And all that has raised some really existential questions, I think, about the DSA in this moment, both in terms of its relationship to the democratic party, but also questions about the organization itself and how it should move forward. Democrats and democratic socialists are looking at each other right now and asking, are we on the same team? Do we share the same goals? Does the democratic party want the DSA inside of it? And does the DSA really even want to become a wing of the democratic party? We'll be right back. Charlie, let's now really turn to the tension between the DSA and the democratic party and how the structure of the DSA itself contributes to those tensions and how overall the DSA may be, as you said, at the very start of this conversation and obstacle onto itself. Well, let's start with what DSA officially believes. And it's worth bracketing this. You know, there's a national DSA organization. There are individual chapters all over the country and then there are DSA candidates. The national DSA does not necessarily hold all the same views as DSA candidates and it doesn't necessarily hold all the same views even as individual DSA chapters. This is a very diffuse horizontal organization, but they do have a national platform, which has a pretty straightforward program of what they want, which ranges from things that are fairly familiar to things that are really much further out there on the radical spectrum of what we talk about in American politics. Like what? So, on the familiar side of the ledger, you have ideas from sort of the Bernie Weng of American politics. You know, this is healthcare for all, housing for all, a green new deal. You know, we've heard of this stuff, right? On foreign policy, there's a huge emphasis on Israel Palestine and support for the Palestinian people. This is really the central foreign policy issue at this point for a DSA. They believe in the right to return. They believe in the right of the Palestinian people to resist military occupation. The end of all US military and economic aid to Israel and prosecuting US and Israeli leaders responsible for the war in Gaza. And then there's also, you know, filling out the foreign policy, there's a more kind of general skepticism of American entanglement in other countries. So they believe, for instance, that we should not be in NATO, we should not be army Ukraine. And back home in the US, there's a lot of things they want to abolish. They want to abolish the police, but also abolish prisons and they want to abolish the US Senate. What is the logic of that last proposal you mentioned abolishing the Senate because that does stand out as not especially practical, given that many candidates, DSA candidates want to be in the United States Senate? Well, they frame it as part of a broader commitment to what they call working class democracy, by which they basically mean a more responsive representative democracy. And, you know, they view the Senate as a not especially representative institution. Structurally. That's right. And I think it's fair to say that on, you know, most, if not all of these points, there is broad agreement on DSA members, where there's not necessarily agreement is how you go about pursuing this. Meaning what? Exactly. DSA is a very complicated organization inside, but it's useful to think of it as kind of a Venn diagram with two big overlapping circles. On one side, you have people who are more or less like the Bernie AOC wing of DSA. They basically have a lot of those same policy priorities and more importantly, they believe in pursuing power the way that AOC is doing it, for instance, actually contesting elections on the democratic ballot line and winning a seat in Congress, winning a voice in politics. On the other side, in the other circle, you have a much more unruly, fractious array of people who broadly are skeptical of that approach. They don't necessarily oppose running candidates in democratic elections, but they are very skeptical that pursuing power in the democratic party is really going to produce a systemic change in the United States that they are seeking. So what would be the alternative path for them to the change that they would like to see? So DSA spends a lot of time organizing people in labor unions and they believe that labor unions are a pathway to achieving real political power. Others in the organization have this kind of like street politics theory of we should be out there doing direct actions like protesting in the streets and that's the way to get to what we want. This is a very big, it would seem and fundamental disagreement and it would seem to reflect the very diffuse nature of the DSA itself and the fact that there isn't one coherent philosophy or strategy among all its different components. It can't even agree on whether politics is the right path to power. Right. That's right. I mean, there's a real ideological commitment to kind of collective action and collective decision-making in DSA, which has its real upsides. I mean, it has this fairly incredible participatory culture that I think that other democratic organizations would really kill to have, but it also comes with real downsides. I mean, if your commitment is for everybody to have a voice, the problem is that everybody has a voice, right? And not everybody agrees at the end of the day. And like, that comes very much to the fore paradoxically when DSA is doing best and when DSA candidates are doing best because it sort of surfaces these really fairly deep, I think foundational arguments over what DSA is doing. And that's been most true with AOC, who's both one of the biggest figures in DSA politics and also a very polarizing figure inside the DSA. Polarizing how? Well, she kind of lands at this real division of what does it mean to participate in democratic politics? She's been in office since 2019 and has been sort of functioning inside of the Democratic coalition in Congress and that requires making compromises at times, that requires taking positions that are maybe not 100% in line with what DSA has to say about something. And for DSA, that's a bigger deal than it might be in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party where there's a sort of understanding that like different people run on different platforms a little bit to be elected in different places. With DSA, so much of the kind of foundational idea of the post-Bernie DSA was that this was an organization that was going to produce a different kind of left-wing candidate that was really going to be accountable to something outside of their own career interests, outside of the Democratic Party. And so the idea of what they kind of euthanize as candidate discipline, which is really how much does this candidate stick to our line on things, is really central for a lot of factions inside of DSA. And AOC kind of runs a foul of that because she does sort of tack away from DSA on some things. tack away how though, I just want to be really clear on where she falls short because what you seem to be really saying is that the DSA has a clear set of lit mistests and I wonder where someone like AOC is running a foul of this. It's become an issue at times on Israel Palestine, even though she is in general a very pro-Palestinian politician. She hasn't held the line 100% of the time with where DSA is. So, you know, they- her for not being sort of loud enough and unequivocal enough on things like the idea of boycott, divest, and sanctioning Israel. And to a lot of factions of the organization, that makes her just a non-starter in general. And there's real disagreement, even at the top of the national organization, over whether the idea of her running for president is a good thing. I mean, you literally have, you know, there's two chairs of the organization, two co-chairs. One of them is actively involved in an effort to draft AOC to run for president. And the other one doesn't think that it's a good idea. And it's sort of ambiguous about whether she would support AOC if she were the candidate. Wow. And so it's part of why some candidates like AOC who's not backed by the national DSA don't actually seek its endorsement. They kind of work with their own local chapter. In her case, it's the New York chapter, which is very supportive of AOC and is much more on the kind of pragmatic end of these politics. So there's just all these kind of like unusual layers to DSA politics that really do, I think, affect its ability to kind of operate coherently at a national scale. Well, to that point, how are candidates who run on the DSA label thinking about the divisions that you're describing? And do they consider the possibility that it might just be a heck of a lot easier to take the DSA's ideas rather than necessarily work within the DSA or call themselves DSA and just kind of put some space between them and all this complexity. You know, it's a question that I put to DSA candidates I talk to in recent weeks because it is a really legitimate question. I mean, at this point, a lot of what's in the DSA platform, certainly the stuff that the candidates really emphasize is stuff that you could run on as a progressive Democrat without the socialist label. And the socialist label is still not great when it comes to the general electorate in this country. A minority of Americans have a favorable view of socialism. It's a pretty big minority, but it is a minority. There is like a pretty clear, incredible sense that running as a socialist is a real ceiling in a general election. So if that's the case, if these ideas are important to you, why wouldn't you just run on the ideas and shut up about the socialism part? And I asked a couple of the candidates who I talked to and the answers I got were interesting. A word that came up while I was accountability that they felt like running as a DSA endorsed socialist was an accountability measure for them as candidates and for them in the eyes of their voters. That this was an actual program that they were subscribing to, that they were going to be held to and that they looked forward to being held to. But this is also something that I think makes sense in a democratic primary principally. I think how you navigate that in the general election is a whole other question. Is nominating a socialist outside of a kind of safe blue jurisdiction in a statewide race? Is this just asking for trouble in a race that Democrats would really like to win? Right, but what's not untested is the reality, for instance, in many of these democratic primaries, that some of the key base of the democratic party, especially black voters, are not finding democratic socialist candidates as appealing as traditional democratic candidates. So how do DSA candidates and the organization think about that reality, especially when it comes to general elections, not just primaries, that DSA is not finding a home with some hugely important constituencies for the Democrats? I think that's another thing where this is changing a little bit. How much it's changing is very much up for debate. It is the case that the sort of median DSA voter was a college-educated professional who is probably downwardly, economically mobile, not a picture of the working class, much less the working class of color in this country. That has evolved over time, though. I mean, it's worth noting that, you know, Mamdani won with a bigger map than previous DSA candidates in New York. Donovan McKinney won a plurality black district in Detroit, and you also saw a pretty different pattern of DSA support, at least in the exit polls, from Angie Nixon's primary win in Florida. So there is reason to think that the picture is not quite as as totally fixed as DSA's critics would have it. Interesting. Well, let's now turn from the DSA as a fractures organization to the democratic party itself and how its leaders are thinking about this DSA moment and this DSA insurgency that's taking out some of its members and its preferred candidates. What is the broad feeling among the Democratic party's leadership about whether the DSA is something that they can harness, whether it's something they should embrace or if the DSA is something to be feared? Yeah, I think that's a very live debate in the Democratic party right now. I mean, you see people like Gavin Newsom, who is sort of arguing that DSA should be welcomed into the Democratic coalition, and that the party should really be in the business of addition and not subtraction as he put it. You know, this is an energized constituency that has really tapped an energy and particularly a younger energy that the Democratic party has really struggled to tap. Right. Why would you turn your back on that? Right. Like they have sort of figured out how to appeal to these people who this really kind of broad discontent with the state of the country right now. And this is basically a net positive for the Democratic party. This line of argument goes that if you can figure out how to bring these people in as real coalition partners that this is really to the good of the broader party. But critics of the DSA kind of a mix of some of the reform minded Democrats and also a lot of people who are really just ideological moderates, you know, they argue that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the DSA and its project. This is not an organization that sees itself as part of that coalition. That their relationship with the Democratic party is really not additive. You know, it's actually parasitic. Meaning what? To this point, they have not proven capable of flipping really any seats anywhere in this country. The only places they've won in elections have been very safely blew districts or cities, which they've succeeded in making more lefty than they were before. And so the argument that is sort of most pointedly made about them is what exactly are you guys doing for us? You talk about revitalizing the Democratic party, but you can't do anything you want to do without winning congressional majorities, Senate majorities that you have zero demonstrated ability to do. So that argument is basically if you're only replacing Democrats in Democratic districts with Democratic Socialists, how are you advancing the cause of winning swing districts? How are you growing the majorities in the House and in the Senate that would actually make it possible for your agenda or any version of the Democratic agenda to be enacted in Congress? That's right. And when you ask DSA leaders about this, they will make an argument that they are advancing popular political ideas. Ideas that if they are actually implemented or embraced by a party will bring out new voters who have not voted before and change the math and politics in a fundamental way. I would say that that is entirely waiting to be proven that there's really no evidence of their ability to do that. I think that it's fair to say that the burden of proof rests with the DSA on that. If these people ever do get in charge, we might as well turn out the lights and make sure the cats are inside and go to bed because it's over. These people are crazy as a bed bug. And in the meantime, Republicans clearly see these same ideas as a massive liability for the Democratic Party. The DSA is calling the shots and what you see is a party that is tilting so far left, they're not just running on different policies. They are running to destroy the country. And they've been pointing to the DSA all summer quite happily and they're saying, look at all these policies they're throwing out there. So if we talk about abolishing prisons then, does that make society better? I mean, is there anybody that should be incarcerated? I mean rapist, child predators, murderers? Yeah, so the long term plan, when we think about most people who are in prison, they are mostly in prison for crimes of poverty. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the really, you know, Fox News has on the co-chairs of the DSA to sort of defend this platform live on the air. Okay, but you do think some people need to be locked away from society. Some people are not able to be functional members of society, that's true. But what does that look like to keep the rest of us safe? We're talking about safety. Yeah, there's a sense that the more out there aspects of what the DSA wants to do is going to be a real liability for not just DSA candidates, but for Democrats more broadly, if this becomes really associated with the party brand. Defunding decriminalizing open borders, we have run that play and gotten our butts kicked. We don't need to do it a second time to see if the movie turns out any different. Hmm. So in that sense, Democratic party leaders do have something to fear here with the DSA, but it strikes me that those Democratic leaders might not really have a choice at this point. The DSA is strong. It's strength is growing. It seems like it's here to stay. And I say that because we have a pretty recent model of this happening, in our politics on the other side of the aisle. And here I'm thinking about the rise of the tea party on the American right back in 2009, 2010. Obviously the tea party stands for something very different than the DSA. It's in the anti-government movement. But it's origins feel quite similar to what we're seeing now. This insurgency that campaigns against and takes out incumbents. And then it's ideals slowly, but surely become the ideology of the entire party, the Republican party in that case. Is that a fair comparison? And is the tea party a potential blueprint for the DSA to follow? That's an interesting question. And I think the two comparisons that are always sort of there to make to DSA, although people on both sides of American politics would no doubt vigorously dispute these is whether it is more like the tea party or more like Maga. You know, the tea party, as you say, was a movement that arose in response to the financial crisis more importantly, to Barack Obama's first presidency and did much better than DSA in terms of seizing ground in Congress very quickly. They won dozens of seats in 2010. And they unquestionably succeeded in pushing the Republican party to the right and establishing themselves as a power center within that party. Along the way, they did not achieve everything that they set out to achieve and were in many respects sort of assimilated into the Republican party. You know, that's one scenario. The other scenario is that DSA is something more like Maga, a movement that sort of initially established on Republicans kind of made fun of and didn't take seriously and then accommodated and then it eventually devoured the party. That was obviously only really possible with the presence of somebody like Donald Trump, who doesn't exist in DSA. Right. At the moment, the DSA does not have that a single unifying national leader who can wrangle all of its factions. In fact, its structure seems to put those factions very much at the center of the organization. And that makes me wonder how does DSA move from insurgency to something more enduring in our politics? Well, the thing about DSA is that in spite of all of its organizational problems, some of its chapters, particularly New York, have succeeded in producing really dynamic successful politicians. They've produced Mamdani. They've produced AOC. And that's why I think people who both want to see the DSA succeed in the national level and people who are very concerned about DSA agree that the real game changer in this and possibly the necessary game changer from DSA's standpoint is a presidential candidacy. A strong contender who comes out of DSA who isn't just a socialist like Bernie Sanders, but is actually a DSA candidate. That is something that I think everybody agrees could really transform the place of DSA and American politics. I think I know why that will transform the DSA and its place in politics, but just explain why it will be so important that a homegrown DSA presidential candidate would be the game changer. I mean, if you look at the arc of American political history, ideas that are coming in from pretty far outside of the mainstream of politics struggle to colonize those politics from the ground up. What is really invaluable is to have ahead of state or even a strong presidential candidate bring those ideas in a very high profile and central way in front of the majority of the American population and sort of acclimatize them to these ideas, normalize these ideas. FDR as president did that with these progressive policy ideas that again, we might in another context have associated with socialism. Ronald Reagan did the same thing with conservatism. Conservatism was a marginal movement in the Republican Party for years, and it was really sort of the concerted efforts of Reagan that really brought that not just into the mainstream of American politics, but made it really the sort of uncomfortable doctrine inside of the Republican Party eventually. Donald Trump in his own way has clearly done that with a lot of ideas that were considered wildly outside of American politics a decade ago. There's really no substitute for a politician at that national level who is able to just sort of center a political program day in and day out. So just game that out. Pretend for a moment that there is a very successful democratic socialist presidential campaign and that candidate, maybe it's AOC, maybe it's somebody else, wins the nomination and suddenly DSA is the national face of a democratic party. I think if you have a democratic socialist running as the democratic nominee in a presidential election, you end up with a referendum on socialism that we have never had in this country. Even one scenario, this normalizes the ideas that socialists have been arguing for in this country for over a century. It's word that is for years had this taboo around it, loses the kind of scariness with even a general electorate that is still by the polls wary of the idea of socialism. The other scenario is that this functionally destroys the democratic party for years and its ability to win an election. It's saddled with this label that remains unpopular and that's what people think of when they think of Democrats. This is a conversation that's very live right now inside of the DSA. What kind of compromises are going to be required to make a democratic socialist candidate tolerable to the majority of Americans and are they willing to make those compromises? Or does all the send-in big public ruptures that take the DSA from this moment of ascendancy to a moment of irrelevance that socialists have experienced throughout most of their history in this country? We don't know and I think we've seen the beginning of this conversation in the midterms, but it's really only the beginning of this conversation. What's wrong? Thank you very much. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Canada made good on its promise to match U.S. tariffs, dollar for dollar, announcing levies as high as 50% on hundreds of American products, including clothing, appliances, and seafood. The tariffs which cover 20 billion dollars of U.S. imports come after Canada's prime minister, Mark Karney, cut off negotiations with the Trump administration, saying it was incapable of offering a fair deal that respected Canada's sovereignty. And Dolly Parton, who ruled country music and much of pop culture for six decades with an outsized personality, down-home wit, and Appalachian twang, has died at the age of 80. Parton was a stunningly prolific songwriter. You have written more than 3,000 songs. I went least. Every drawer, every box, in my basement, in my houses. I got songs stuck everywhere. I pull out a drawer to get some pennies. I pull out a drawer to get some drawers. I'll find a song in there. That's just what I do. Who wrote about growing up poor, about love, jealousy, and empowerment? Nobody's fool. Songs that were performed by the likes of Tina Turner, Nora Jones and Whitney Houston, but were always the most poignant when they were sung by Dolly Parton herself. In everybody's life, there's a special person. A person that you love more than you love anybody else. This is a song about that special person in my life. It's called I will always love you. [Music] Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe and Austa Chawthervady, with help from Lexi D'Al. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Mark George, contains music by Pat McCusker, Marion Luzano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Micah Boboro. See you tomorrow. [Music] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll be right back after this commercial. Thank you.