How the D.S.A. Learned to Love Elections

In his loft, he counted nine other U.A.W. members on a Zoom call to coördinate the final push for Raman’s endorsement. Among them was Keshav Kundassery, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at U.C.L.A. who had formally introduced the resolution to endorse her. He was on vacation in Spain, but had volunteered to make some last-minute cold calls back to L.A. Jaime tends to speak about the work he is doing in practical terms; Kundassery is more interested in the big picture. “As an organization, we have very, very lofty goals,” he told me. To achieve them, he thought, required not being picky about ideology. “If we want to become the kind of organization that can actually not just elect Nithya, or not just elect Zohran, but become a mass socialist party that is regularly electing people into office while also playing an outsized role in the cultural and political transformation of the United States, we are going to have to shed some of those self-defeating habits and be ready to embrace the messy reality of what it actually means to get involved in politics.”

The endorsement vote, held through an online portal, closed that evening, at 11:59 p.m. By the following afternoon, the results were in: Raman had won sixty-six per cent of the chapter’s vote, and the D.S.A. had a candidate. From Spain, Kundassery expressed an incredible feeling of relief. The margin, he said, “tells me that the membership is ready to start thinking big and thinking at the scale that would actually be required to build democratic socialism in America.” Jaime told me that people talked endlessly about whether Raman was another Mamdani, but that wasn’t the important point. “The point is, we can transform politics in L.A.,” he said. “We have the organization.”

Year Zero in the modern incarnation of the Democratic Socialists of America was 2016, when Bernie Sanders first ran for President. But the organization has a modest prehistory. The D.S.A. was founded, in 1982, following the merger of the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. The group’s most prominent member was the left-wing writer and social critic Michael Harrington, a national co-chair, whose book “The Other America” had helped inspire Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Harrington’s vision for democratic socialism—that it would operate as “the left wing of the possible” within the Democratic Party—reflected an understanding that no class revolution was on the horizon in the U.S., and that a third party was not viable. In practice, socialism operated more as a moral ideal for egalitarian liberals than as a discernible electoral strategy. The former New York mayor David Dinkins was a D.S.A. member, but he also fit comfortably within the post-civil-rights-era Democratic Party. Eric Blanc, a labor scholar at Rutgers, noted that, in 1984, the group declined to endorse Jesse Jackson for President, even though he had campaigned for universal health care, Palestinian statehood, and a federal-jobs program, “because that was seen as too ‘out there.’ ”

Socialists searching for analogues to the D.S.A. often point to the early twentieth century, when left-wing parties drew membership from industrial labor unions. Socialists held the Milwaukee mayor’s office for most of the first half of the twentieth century, and Eugene Debs, running on the Socialist Party ticket, won six per cent of the vote for President in 1912. But, even then, American socialists walked a fine line—they were considered too radical for the mainstream and a mere bourgeois affectation by committed class revolutionaries. In Leon Trotsky’s autobiography, he dismissed the leaders of the American Socialist Party, whose “solidarity of ideas usually serves as a screen for business connections.” He described one Party official as “the ideal socialist leader for successful dentists.”

By 2016, the D.S.A.’s presence in Los Angeles was barely visible at all. “Mostly they set up folding tables explaining socialism at Bernie events,” Tal Levy, a software engineer for a sports-data company who joined the organization around that time, told me. At a new-enrollment event in January, 2017, he recalled, “there were four existing members and one hundred new members.”

At the time, Kundassery was a high-school debater in Fremont, California, where his parents had moved after emigrating from India on H1-B visas. He found in the Sanders campaign a vision of social change which he felt Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party lacked. “He was speaking in terms of the utopian possibility of building the kind of country where everyone feels taken care of,” Kundassery said. During his junior year, he phone-banked for Sanders most days after school. After the election, some debate friends on the East Coast recommended that he check out Marx. “They were, like, If you like Bernie, this is the real deal,” Kundassery said.

“My problem is I see everything in black and white. And sometimes blue, red, and yellow.”

Cartoon by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

In retrospect, the fact that traditional liberals were losing high-school debaters and future M.D.-Ph.D. students—the striving, idealistic children of the Obama era—to what was then still understood to be a grungy left wing ought to have been a giant warning sign for the Democratic Party. By the time Kundassery was an undergraduate, at Vanderbilt, he was reading Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Greek French philosopher Nicos Poulantzas, who theorized how a transition to socialism might be achieved in democratic societies. Kundassery began to attend socialist meetings—first, Vanderbilt for Bernie Sanders, then the Middle Tennessee D.S.A., then, as a graduate student, the Chicago D.S.A. The other attendees, Kundassery said, were generally “people like me, with a lot of degrees and relatively comfortable upbringings who might be facing—I’m not saying this applies to me, but as a class—the sense that our future lives might be a little worse than our parents’ were.”