Will the DSA Turn America Against Itself?
The real question is whether America will turn against itself.
By Juliana Geran Pilon, MAS Board of Directors
(Originally published on August 26, 2026, in Civitas Outlook)
What accounts for the meteoric rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? The punditry is at wit’s end. The group’s size alone would relegate it to irrelevance: the membership of over 120,000, its highest ever (up from only a few thousand not long ago), still represents no more than .003 percent of the total population. And the bizarre Bolshevist platform that Wall Street Journal columnist calls “mostly fertilizer for the feeble-minded.” Yet his colleague warns that “Socialists May Prove Surprisingly Strong in November.”
Maybe that’s just the point: the DSA was meant to surprise.
This Trojan horse, self-labeled a registered 501 (c)4 nonprofit “movement,” is a politically ingenious cog in a wider machine modeled on early twentieth century prototypes. Designed to adapt as circumstances evolve, it grows by accessing a variety of funding sources, both domestic and foreign. Over the years, DSA and its partners-in-subversion have trained a wide cadre of activists, who in turn learned how to mobilize and coordinate disparate constituencies. These have both increased and diversified in recent years in a far more militant, violent direction.
DSA’s very name is a decoy. To paraphrase Voltaire’s (1756) about the Holy Roman Empire being neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire, DSA is as “Democratic” as North Korea, and “of” America refers to its target, not its spirit. Only “Socialists” reveals what the Union of Socialist Republics shared with Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party: a cadre in charge of a centrally controlled economy and thought. Read
Established in 1982 under the leadership of radical historian Michael Harrington, DSA’s first big event, sponsored by its City University of New York chapter, was a Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC) held in October 1983, marking the centennial of Karl Marx’s death. In attendance was a young Columbia University student who had just transferred from Occidental College in Los Angeles named Barack Hussein Obama. The experience proved life-changing in ways that were understood only two decades later.
The unlikely sleuth was a Harvard anthropologist of religion, Stanley Kurtz. Through painstaking archival research, Kurtz discovered that the SSC’s workshops exposed Obama to the tactic of combining different community groups into one national movement. Dr. Peter Dreier, who explained their unifying goal as “democratize control of major social, economic and political institutions,” was then a major strategist for one of those groups, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In 2008, Dreier became an adviser to Senator Barack Obama.
Kurtz exposed the connection at the time, but few paid attention. The well-networked, charismatic candidate easily won the Presidency, despite a nearly blank voting record, on the promise: “Change you can believe in.” He meant expanding the welfare state. By the time Kurtz published his stunning, potentially headline-grabbing expose in 2010, the president’s actions might have spoken for themselves, were it not for a mendacious, fawning media. Conservatives who did were too few.
Among those was, who accused the Obama administration of precipitating the Democrats’ significantly more positive view of socialism than of capitalism. The ratio was an astounding 66 percent vs. 42 percent. “As recently as 2012, those numbers were reversed,” observes Podhoretz. But don’t misunderstand: “This shift is not the DSA’s doing. Rather, the DSA has been working already cultivated ground—ground that had been seeded and watered and carefully tended since the Carter administration.”
To be fair to the peanut farmer from Georgia, he was applying fertilizer only to the batch planted during the Kennedy-Johnson era, which followed the original Progressives’ first seeding. Where Carter did surpass them all was in his unabashed embrace of the socialism of fools, Werner Zombart’s redundant definition of antisemitism.
Though discrimination against Jews had never been entirely absent in America, during the late Sixties and Seventies it flared up inside the Democratic Party’s radical wing. Rev. Jesse Jackson’s close friendship with Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan was a major impetus. By 1984, “Farrakhan was not only a Jackson campaign surrogate,” writes Podhoretz. Indeed, “his private militia, the Fruit of Islam, with free security. When asked by Reuters if he would denounce Farrakhan, , ‘It’s not necessary.’” He was wrong.
In 2008, reported that Farrakhan was “emerging once again as a prominent factor in the political arena, causing trouble not only for Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama but also for a number of other political candidates.” At that time, Obama had denied ties with NIS and his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Kurtz’s proof that he lied was met with shrugs. Two decades later, the ex-president has been less coy, having endorsed James Talarico as Senator for Texas, who has Israel of having “committed genocide.” The “unifying cause” he shares with others in the “movement” not only allows but requires flexibility. Tactics are only tools toward a strategic goal.
And the radicals are flying high, as proven by the Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who lost by only one percent despite claiming that Israel committed genocide and demonizing the Jewish lobby AIPAC. Jonathan Tobin has denounced such views as “a flimsy cover for stands that seek… to remove Jews from the American public square.” Meanwhile, El-Sayed has no trouble taking money from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas front.
Those radical views are a symptom of what extremism expert Tirza Shorr has “campism,” which pits an “imperialist” bloc led by the U.S. against “anti-imperialist” governments and movements who “occupy the camp of liberation.” An excellent example is the DSA’s China Working Group, which promotes a “multipolar world” in precisely the same way, justifications used by Russia and Iran.
Fortunately, the extent of Chinese support for the candidates endorsed by DSA is beginning to be seriously investigated by the U.S. government. On June 30, 2026, the Ways and Means Committee that subpoenas had been issued as part of a Justice Department investigation into Neville Roy Singham, who “operates a large network of U.S.-based tax-exempt organizations.” In addition to PF and PLS, these include the ANSWER Coalition, which is allied not only with DSA but also with Black Alliance for Peace and Code Pink.
But Singham’s identity had already been revealed in 2023 by The New York Times. “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul” reported that around July 16, 2017, the Shanghai-based mogul sold his business in America. And then: “According to reports in and the , Singham moved the funds through shell companies and other opaque entities advancing his brand of leftist politics while pushing pro-Beijing messaging.” The founder of Code Pink, Jodie Evans, is Singham’s wife.
Rolling in money and victorious in many cases at the ballot box, DSA is basking in its recent primary wins, effectively obliterating the Democratic Party, thereby unwittingly energizing Republicans who think they can win by default in November. That optimism, however, may be premature. As revealed by a , a whopping three-quarters of the state legislative candidates endorsed by national or local DSA chapters and two-thirds at the local level won races in 2026.
But even were Republicans to prevail this November, an outcome hardly guaranteed, would that amount to a win for the American idea, for conservative classical-liberal pluralism, for free markets minimally regulated and moral clarity? A July 2026 Fox News poll indicates that those who feel strongly favorable toward capitalism have fallen from 54 percent in 2019 to 41 percent. And a 2025 found that two-thirds of Americans aged 18–29 report holding a “favorable view” of socialism; one-third say the same of communism. But there is something to build on, as an Echelon Insights asked respondents about their views on free enterprise, and the response is much more positive for both left and right. Capitalism, Jonah Goldberg, seems to be a placeholder for all the things people don’t like about the current economy. There is much to dislike.
Conservatives who bemoan the decline of education, brainwashing, censorship, and radicalization as proof of “the decline of the West,” at once self-pitying and condescending, must start counting their blessings. Our constitution is still the best in the world, its metastasizing forays into unconstitutional territory gradually being reversed. If not in remission, the cancer of anti-American, anti-Semitic poison, once diagnosed, will be addressed if the body politic is still resilient enough. That must begin with education, which is an entirely different animal from indoctrination.
Stanley Kurtz did. His disappointment at the indifference that met his expose of Obama only added to his determination, effectively taking a page from the DSA playbook and turning to practical action. His strategy, published by the National Association of Scholars in a 2020 report, was to recovern. After hitting a few walls, he turned to working with state legislatures, with encouraging results: some “have already begun to insist on traditional American history, civics, and Western civilization courses as graduation requirements,” he on May 18, 2026.
A parallel effort is ongoing, for is beyond the scope of existing institutions and will require building new ones. In his forthcoming book of that title, Peter Berkowitz urges “all who seek to preserve the American idea of liberty to pick a front and start fighting, whether that means building new institutions, civic thought programs, or something else entirely.” Among the most successful are the University of Austin and, most emphatically, UTAX.
No one denies that the hour is late; Jason Riley is right to worry. How can we not ask: Will the DSA turn America against itself? The answer may well be yes, if we continue ignoring the cancer gnawing at America’s core. Both socialism and antisemitism have started infecting the Republican Party. Blaming Democrats and specifically the DSA misses the point. The real question is whether America will turn against itself.
Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She is the author of several books, including The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom (2019) and her newest book is An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left (2023).
