Jonathan Chait Doesn't Understand the Socialists He's Attacking

Jonathan Chait has an essay in the Atlantic warning that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has become the very thing it was founded to oppose. There is nothing wrong with a liberal writer in a liberal publication taking aim at the socialist left. If anything, it is a good sign.

The socialist movement in the United States is growing. Its ranks again include mayors and members of Congress, and I would be more confused if liberals were happy about this development.

The problem is the grounds on which Chait criticizes DSA.

I have been a member of the organization for most of my life, going on two decades now. I joined as a teenager, pulled in by DSA's opposition to the Iraq War and by my own reading in Marxism and democratic socialism, including the work of figures like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. The DSA I walked into in the summer of 2007 was full of people much older than me, politicized by the long history of the twentieth century. Some had been in the civil rights movement, while some had come out of the antiwar and feminist struggles of the Vietnam years. Many belonged to a Third Camp milieu that had spent the Cold War opposing both Washington and Moscow. There were live arguments in the organization, but there was also no getting around the fact that we were stuck at five or six thousand members and serving at best as a tiny partner in a wider progressive coalition.

Today DSA is capturing media attention across the country, winning prominent races, and has over 15,000 members in New York City alone. Looking at these developments, Chait claims that "a tragic irony of history is that the Democratic Socialists of America was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become." But what I've seen over the years is hardly an organization that has been taken over by radicals and extremists.

Take Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Chait puts at the center of his case. I'm not going to litigate her old tweets line by line. I agree with some of them and disagree with others. But I'm far more interested in the campaign she actually ran, which was about affordability and was rooted in the lives of the people she will represent, Uptown and in the Bronx. There is nothing in the substance of that race that a Harrington or a Howe would have failed to recognize as democratic socialist, including her plank "Babies, Not Bombs," a call to divert military spending into domestic social programs.

Let's start with democracy, the most important piece of Chait's indictment. DSA remains committed to it, in its internal life and in the world it wants to build. The thousands of people who have joined from every corner of the existing left did not dilute that commitment. The fact that they're active in a membership-driven organization like DSA as opposed to more sectarian or fringe groups is evidence of the hegemony of democratic socialist theory and practice on the Left right now, not proof of their collapse.

On foreign policy, Chait does note some real shifts in DSA over the years. But they are the shifts you would expect from an organization with roots in the New Left and the groupings that followed it, people who watched what US imperialism did in Vietnam, in Central America, and across the "war on terror." (And what the Shachtmanite position on the Vietnam War did to the socialist movement in the United States.)

When Russia invaded Ukraine, much of the organization emphasized the factors it had domestic leverage over: NATO and the real errors of US foreign policy. While agreeing with those criticisms, I thought at the time, and still do, that there should have been greater emphasis on denouncing the invasion and expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But as someone engaged in these debates within the organization, I can say that the notion that DSA is some font of sympathy for Moscow is absurd. In fact, DSA's original calls for a negotiated settlement are a growing consensus across the political spectrum as the war drags on.

On Palestine, there has been a real and lasting change since DSA was founded in the 1980s. Given the last two years and the destruction of Gaza, it is hard to construct the argument that the American socialist movement's error is that it is insufficiently Zionist. What Chait reads as ideological capture by campus radicals is something simpler: a generational turn, inside the Democratic coalition and well beyond it, away from the defense of an apartheid state and toward the view that Israel as currently constituted is a barrier to peace for everyone in the region, Jews included.

Part of Chait's narrative of ideological capture is the idea, pushed erroneously by some former members of DSA, that we've been captured by radicals. In their telling, "the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists" were dismantled.

This is a strange way to describe what actually happened. These guardrails came from the New American Movement, not Harrington's side in the merger that created DSA in 1982. More critically, the rule was not for communists per se but for people under the discipline of democratic-centralist organizations seeking to change DSA from within. DSA still retains the ability to expel members. The reason you don't hear about it being used is that it hasn't come up. We are not being infiltrated by disciplined cadre. We are being flooded by people new to the left, new to organized politics of any kind. And the old DSA never purged its rolls either. Our organization even declined to expel a member who had been arrested and convicted years earlier as an East German spy, on the grounds that the man had become, by the end of his life, a committed democratic socialist.

That last detail gets at something Chait's whole framework misses: that the borders between "communist," "socialist," and "social democrat" have never been as clean as he claims. All were part of the same movement before World War I and split over key issues. But in recent years, there has indeed been a convergence of postcommunist, post-Trotskyist, and left–social democratic milieus in the same organizations across the world. To me, this is a triumph of democratic socialism as a survivor of the trials of the twentieth century, not a mark against our movement.

The DSA of today reflects this internally, even if many of its members don't explicitly acknowledge it. Ideologically it represents a fusion of socialist and liberal ideas: the belief in the permanence of politics, not a pursuit of its abolition; the belief in pluralism as a good in itself; the recognition that no revolution abolishes disagreement and the need for civil mediation of differences. Those commitments are not treated as heresy in the DSA I am still active in. They are closer to common sense than Chait imagines.

But Chait is right in one key respect. We are members of an organization that has, by the standards of 2026 America, quite revolutionary goals. DSA does aim for a deeper and more radical form of democracy than we have now. What Chait does not seem to know is that this ambition runs straight through Michael Harrington and every other founder of the organization. In his popular books, Harrington argued for the expropriation of the capitalist class, for a democracy that reached into the economy, for workers' control of the means of production.

What separated him from the rest of the far left was not this goal. It was his means, which were democratic to the core, and his insistence on pluralism — on what Irving Howe, in a 1977 essay in Dissent, called the reconciliation of philosophical liberalism and socialism. Howe's argument was that socialists should hold on to what liberalism got right, its defense of civil liberties and free speech and social pluralism, while rejecting liberalism's defense of capitalist property. That's a tradition that I still see in today's DSA.

Chait is also right that we lead with affordability, with rent and health care and the demands that look most winnable. Of course we do. If you cannot assemble enough political power to bring down rents or win universal health care, you are certainly not going to socialize the economy.

But this socialization of the economy, the abolition of class divisions that have existed in most places since the Neolithic Revolution, has been a goal of DSA since its founding. This appeal was one of the things that drew me to my first meeting in the summer of 2007. There was no other reason to join a socialist organization when the broader left was as weak as it was; no other reason to spend years in the political wilderness, except that seemingly eccentric commitment to a world beyond capitalism.

To be fair, many of Chait's concerns revolve around the party question and what DSA plans to do with the party he is himself committed to, the Democratic Party. In his account, while in Harrington's day democratic socialists were dedicated to building and shifting the Democrats, today's DSA takes a far more instrumental approach. I think this flattens a more interesting history.

For most of DSA's existence, there was a broad theoretical consensus around "realignment," the idea that the Democratic Party could be pushed and reshaped into an actual vehicle for the center left. That consensus grew out of experience: the New Politics insurgencies of the 1970s and the fact that the party had, within living memory, been realigned once already, purged of its Dixiecrat wing, turned toward civil rights, pushed figures like Ted Kennedy toward measures like the Humphrey–Hawkins full employment bill, an effort that the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (a Harrington-founded precursor to DSA) and then DSA helped convene. It was also, as Chait surely understands, overdetermined by the American political structure itself, with its weak parties and its punishing ballot-access laws.

In theory, plenty of DSA people reject realignment. I am one of them. In practice, the organization is running the Harringtonite playbook in its most ambitious form: open socialists on the Democratic line, tethered to a democratic membership organization. Beyond that, you still find DSA members also running and winning internal Democratic Party positions in both blue and red states, even if it is not part of the official national strategy. But you do not find their efforts, no more legitimate than caucus statements, highlighted in polemics against DSA because it would be too inconvenient.

Harrington wanted exactly that kind of organization, one with genuine internal democracy and enough looseness to make mistakes, up to and including allowing in the occasional East German spy. A man who wanted socialists to dissolve quietly into liberalism would not have spent his life founding and defending a socialist organization.

However, until we have democratized the American system enough to make a multiparty democracy possible, with fair elections and open ballots, it would be a mistake to avoid using one of the two lines that actually reach voters. Whether the socialist label helps or hurts the Democratic Party is a separate question, and a fair one. But being a socialist is something Harrington embraced, and something New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and a rising generation of officeholders embrace, for the simple reason that they are socialists. They wanted, and want, something more than a humane welfare state.

The Chaits of the world should continue to criticize our program, our rhetoric, and even our tweets. All of it is fair game. What would be incorrect, though, is to call this budding authoritarianism, or to look at the socialist movement of the last thirty or forty years and see more rupture than continuity. The thread from Harrington's DSA to this one is not hard to find.

In every way, the DSA of 2026 is a better organization than the one I joined in 2007. But my real worry is one that's almost the opposite of the one Chait has. He is afraid the old democratic socialism is being strangled by a cabal of ultraleftists. My fear runs the other way. The likeliest outcome of electing this many socialists is not a lurch into authoritarian communism, but a new wave of reformers who govern competently, who create some good jobs and enshrine health care as a right, but who have no path to, or even desire for, a society free of capitalist exploitation and domination.

Chait is worried that we are too radical to be trusted with power. I am worried that once we have it, we will not be radical enough to finish what Harrington started.