Is the DSA a Threat to the Democratic Party (with Jake Altman)?

All of a sudden, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) seem to be a potent force within American politics, winning high profile mayoral and congressional races in blue cities across the country. In so doing they have grown from a fringe but scrappy activist group into a national political movement to be reckoned with, challenging the teetering establishment consensus within the Democratic Party. 

But is the DSA a welcome reformist movement that brings new and more youthful energy and vitality and vision to a big tent Democratic Party still trying to find its way back to political relevance from the crushing defeats of 2024? Or is it the revolutionary vanguard of an extremist takeover of the Democratic Party that seeks to overthrow the party’s longstanding liberal beliefs and norms in favor of a radical Marxist-Leninist rigidly authoritarian vision that has no room to accommodate the party’s traditionally broad ideological diversity?

Our guest in this episode is former DSA member Jake Altman, who believes the latter. Altman, the author of Socialism Before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism (2019), has turned into a sharp critic of the organization since leaving its ranks in 2022. 

In our conversation, Altman traces his path into the DSA through his union organizing in the early 2010s. And then his growing disillusionment as DSA evolved away from a small collegial organization of mostly older believers in social democracy, who emphasized labor organizing, coalition building, and progressive reform. As an influx of hard left newcomers flooded the organization, they increasingly demanded ideological fealty to revolutionary and Leninist traditions and advocated luxury belief cultural positions like abolishing police and prisons that most working class voters opposed. 

In so doing, Altman argues they have forgotten the lesson American socialists had learned almost a century ago in the New Deal era about the limits of human perfectability and the pragmatic value of working to regulate and temper, rather than abolish, capitalism. While Altman credits the 2016 Sanders presidential campaign for dramatically expanding the DSA and building its capacity for sophisticated electoral organizing, he says it also accelerated its internal factional conflicts. And those conflicts often resolved with the hardest line, most disciplined and centrally controlled factional caucuses exerting disproportionate influence over DSA conventions and elections. 

Altman contends that now the DSA has become a threat to the Democratic Party and its electoral fortunes, as it threatens to consume its progressive wing. “"I watched the DSA go from being the left wing of the possible to becoming something much more ideological,” he says. "They want to have the big tent. They just want to be the dictator in the big tent."

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OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jake Altman, “I Watched the DSA Go Crazy. The Democrats May Be Next,” City Journal, July 9. 2026. 

Jake Altman, “Will Unions Stick with Democrats in Michigan?” City Journal, April 29, 2026.

Jake Altman, “Labor Unions vs. Working People,” Tablet, Dec. 2, 2024.

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