DSA Must Move Decisively To Launch A New Party

The election of Donald Trump has opened up a window of opportunity for DSA: a significant chance to launch a new party and dramatically alter the political scene in the US. But to do this, we will have to fundamentally change our strategy and cohere for the first time a unified, national party-building effort that breaks from the Democrats. A new party won’t just come about, we have to be the catalyst for it. 

Donald Trump and The Crisis of the Democrats 

Despite an election which was close in raw numbers—Kamala Harris was only a few hundred thousand votes from an electoral college victory—the results were a crushing blow to the Democratic Party leadership and their theory of change. Four years of Biden have left the country and world in an even worse crisis and with Trumpism ascendant from a popular vote mandate. 

Now the left is forced to pick up the pieces. The signs on the ground are grim. Nearly every major demographic group shifted right. Republicans surged with young men, cut into Democratic margins with voters of color, and gained ground in urban centers and safe blue states. Whereas in 2016, Trump’s election was perceived as an aberration, sparking a massive fightback, this time there seems to be a mood of widespread exhaustion. The Democratic Party leadership and media apparatus is showing dangerous signs of a further turn right: ominously wavering on immigration and trans rights. 

But this situation also offers substantial opportunity. While The Democratic Party itself has plummeted in popularity, there are numerous signs that this is caused by their own unpopular policies. In Nebraska, Dan Osborne, a union mechanic running as an independent, outperformed Kamala Harris by almost 10 percent. Down-ballot measures for abortion rights and school funding overperformed even in deep red states. Precinct level data and exit polls seems to indicate that Harris’ support for the genocide in Gaza cost her at least Michigan, and possibly other swing states as well. A popular program for left wing policies exists, but not within the Democratic party. 

The Democrats became the party of a brutally unpopular status quo. Inflation, war, the end of COVID safety measures, and a worsening nationwide housing crisis all drove a sense of exhausted malaise punctuated by brief moments of sharp economic pressure. To this list of genuine grievances, the right added wedge issues, on immigration, trans rights, and crime, which they effectively used to divide the Democratic base. Republicans made themselves the popular change alternative, offering equal parts revenge and revanchism for those who felt their lives had gotten worse. The hollow liberalism of Democrats left it easy to link declining standards of living to progressive social reforms, especially when those reforms maximized visibility while offering little in the way of actual redistribution of power and wealth. After 15 years of a steadily rising left, the one-two punch of Biden and Trump threatens to undermine large sections of the liberal, labor, and nonprofit world. The socialist movement, even as we face significant dangers, is the only force positioned to actually present an alternative to the Democrats and the hard right.    

Should Socialists Support a Break from the Democratic Party? 

Socialists must break from the Democrats. Some comrades have described the Democratic Party, variously, as merely a ballot line we can use, or as a partial-party ripe for realignment. But, while The Democrats may be decentralized and in some ways institutionally weak, they are far more than just a ballot line. The Democratic Party is a brand, a political structure, a set of policies and governing legacies, and a cohesive, expansive social institution composed of a vast network of personal and political connections, media representatives, layers of the labor and nonprofit world, fundraisers and donors, and big and small money donation networks. 

To be a “Democrat” and to run as a Democrat is not neutral ground. It is to tie oneself, politically and structurally, to administrations which invariably run aground trying to navigate the contradictions of American liberalism.

DSA’s present strategy is a de-facto realignment strategy. But, organized on purely pragmatic grounds, there has been very little engagement with the tremendous hurdles that would actually have to be overcome to transform the Democrats into a Socialist Party. Such an effort would require the wholesale replacement and purge of officials up and down the party, the establishment of a vast network of committed counter-institutionalists willing to work within the ‘new’ Democratic party yet fully dedicated to its transformation, and a decades-long effort to regain the trust of workers. Realignment, while it may be our de facto approach, is not a serious plan to build the socialist movement. It drags us towards a splintering of our base between career-minded reformers who aim to work within the system, who compromise more and more in the pursuit of power, while casting off a steady stream of disaffected radicals who turn towards hyper-confrontational tactics out of frustration with the failed approach. 

To be a “Democrat” and to run as a Democrat is not neutral ground. It is to tie oneself, politically and structurally, to administrations which invariably run aground trying to navigate the contradictions of American liberalism. The persistent co-optation of movements, the endless string of administrations derailed by imperial wars, and the habitual turn to the right—all of these are structural dynamics within a party caught between its desire to tap into, lead, and direct the forces of social change on the one hand, and its ideological, material and organizational commitments to the capitalist system on the other. To be a Democrat is therefore, simultaneously, to place oneself at the mercy of a party dedicated to the defeat of socialism, and also to tie oneself to the brand, identity, and reputation of failed administrations like Biden and Obama—even as they personally condemn us. 

Building our own party is the only viable future for socialism in the US. If we put forward a plan to launch a new party by the end of the Trump administration we can grow and we can dramatically increase our influence in US politics over the medium term. 

The Next 10 Wins Vs. The Next 10 Years

The most common justification for continued support of de-facto realignment is that the strategy has “worked in the past.” This is not entirely untrue. DSA’s strategy of running as Democrats has helped us to present ourselves as a credible opposition, distinct from third parties and leftists sects in that we actually contest for power and win. The Sanders campaigns provided a major upsurge for the left, and the elections of AOC, and other members of the squad helped grow DSA.

But the strategy of repeating this approach for the foreseeable future is deeply flawed. Entering into positions of power within the Democratic Party is not a neutral thing. The pressure of lobbyists, conservative party leaders and media is immense. Without a clear plan for a break, DSA endangers the very oppositional status that made our electoral credibility so vital. This is why the strategy has not actually been working over the previous 4 years. DSA has shrunk in size, while our disorganized electoral strategy has compounded the inevitable opportunist decisions made by politicians, and our lack of a clear political line left us wholly unable to present a nuanced criticism of figures who were simultaneously to the left of the rest of congress and yet clearly betraying vital socialist principles. The result is that short term gains quickly became short term problems because they were not attached to long term strategies. 

Donald Trump’s second election has created a unique political opportunity for the left. The whole Democratic Party social structure has failed to deliver even on its lowest mandate, to be the lesser of two evils and block out the extreme right. The uninspired agenda of Biden and Harris were a drag not only on their own prospects, but of all those who associated with them. This is what being tied to the Democratic Party establishment results in. Even leaders with independent profiles and class-struggle orientations had their reputations compromised, and for little effect, with AOC and Bernie defending Joe Biden to the end, only for Trump to win anyway. 

The uninspired tailing of the Biden/Harris regime by these progressive politicians is only the logical conclusion of the overall strategy of realignment. And the “proximity” of AOC and Bernie was not able to divert Biden/Harris from material support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the ongoing inter-imperialist conflict in Ukraine, and was able to win only marginal improvements on progressive policies, almost all of which will immediately be reversed by Trump.  . 

Even as these opportunist pressures showed the inevitable dangers of the realignment strategy, the AIPAC funded purge of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman showed the untenability of proximity as a strategy. Caught between compromise and principle, Bush and Bowman struggled to achieve either. The pressure employed to kick them from the party is a mere fraction of the kind of pressure we can expect if we seriously grow a socialist bloc to a size where it can meaningfully contest for power. 

Why has realignment triumphed, if its strategy is so riven with faults? The approach has existed in a vacuum, as the only practiced strategy in DSA. The revolutionary wing of the organization has so far failed to put forward serious evidence of the viability of an alternative approach, let alone a systematic plan to implement such an approach. This has been the single biggest failure of the current National Political Committee (NPC), and it is the urgent responsibility of DSA’s left caucuses to put forward a clear plan and timeline for a break. 

Sleepwalking into realignment 

The greatest success of the last four years for DSA has been that we survived, with our numbers, political principles, and status as a leading force on the left relatively intact. During that time, partyist forces within DSA have begun to experiment and cohere. But despite that, the last four years have been a series of missteps and missed opportunities for DSA. Four years on from Bernie’s second loss, we are no more meaningfully closer to a party than when the Biden administration began. 

From 2021 to 2023, the comrades from SMC and the predecessors of Groundwork set out to navigate the Biden era through technocratic fixes, increases in the staffing budget, and heavy handed bureaucratic maneuvers against groups like the BDS Working Group. But the central crisis in DSA was not a matter of strategy, messaging, experience or discipline. It was a political crisis. We lacked a clear reason for our existence as a political force under Biden. Caught between work-within-the-system reform pushes and militant minority agitation, the organization ended up in a crisis of finances, democracy, and participation. 

This led to a vote, at the 2023 National Convention, for a new course. But so far, the current NPC, while avoiding many of the worst mistakes of the previous one, has similarly struggled to present a unified, coherent Partyist vision. Under Trump, DSA will have an opportunity to revitalize our political line. But we must learn the lesson from the last four years: a unified message and strategy that explains the utility of our organization is the only way to reliably grow the socialist movement. 

Fighting the Right, Fighting for an Alternative 

Donald Trump’s second election is a disaster for the working class. His victory has discredited the Democratic party in a less acute, but deeper and more profound way than in 2016. Whereas 8 years ago he was perceived as an aberration, he now has a mandate, a fact that will surely show through in his policies and conduct in office. 

In their failure, the Democratic Party has handed Trump a repressive state perfectly set up to implement right wing politics. Politically and organizationally, fighting the right and breaking from the Democrats are deeply tied together. 

In 2016, huge numbers of people mobilized to popular protests against Trump. While protests are certain and eventual mass mobilizations are almost inevitable, their character and duration will be much more conditional in his second term. The grab-bag of liberal, progressive, anarchist, reformist and sectarian strategies that permeated the protests of the first Trump term will not work in a second, where popular demoralization and a frustrated desire for actual results is likely to undermine dead-end tactics and demobilize protesters quickly. Greater repression, not only from Trump, but from universities, tech companies, and perhaps even Democrats who seem far more amenable to his politics this time around will mean that protests face a much steeper climb in the next four years than in previous ones. And yet his suffocating pressure has the counter-intuitive potential to create explosive eruptions when breakthroughs do occur, as resentment and disenchantment with the government will have longer to build. 

In their failure, the Democratic Party has handed Trump a repressive state perfectly set up to implement right wing politics. Politically and organizationally, fighting the right and breaking from the Democrats are deeply tied together. 

Consequently, socialists need to mobilize to protests with a much stronger strategy and line, and an intention to actually win socialist leadership of popular movements. We can employee the tactics of the United Front, joining wider coalitions with our own, distinct political line, and put forward a Partyist analysis and the dirty break as an alternative both to adventurist, self-marginalizing tactics and a return to the ‘vote blue no matter who’ strategy that got us into this mess. 

Socialists also need to try to equip movements with real, workable demands. In the last years the left was highly susceptible to self destructive ultra-liberal tactics that generally failed to convince broad layers and instead allowed cynical progressive leaders to briefly grab onto movements until their energy had ebbed. Though it has faced its own substantial challenges, the Palestine solidarity movement presents a promising example of a demand more fundamentally polarizing to the political establishment, while still being generally popular. This lesson should be drawn further–we need to try and bring to movements an escalating series of transitional demands, which engage ordinary people in the struggle, and help move them forward to positions that conflict with the fundamental logic of capitalism. Socialists need to combine a capacity for urgent, constant, energetic principled mass work with sustained agitation around a single, consistent line. This is why it is absolutely vital we establish a clear program at the 2025 convention to give us a coherent message we can bring to each struggle we join. 

As we join protests to fight Trump, socialist leaders and especially elected officials will need to become dramatically more confrontational with the state, no matter whether the Democratic Party objects. Socialists should use whatever means they have to block illegal and immoral laws. Politicians should organize for noncompliance by engaging in civil disobedience and legal nullification, trying to mobilize popular protests to prevent enforcement. Such a tactic, deployed at scale, would almost certainly provoke a significant legal crisis. Such a crisis should be welcomed by leftists, as it is the only viable way to stop the coming attacks from Trump. But as we learned under Biden, all these tactics can only have a limited impact in the absence of a single, galvanizing political strategy. To reach the advanced layers in the anti-Trump resistance, DSA needs to offer a credible plan to create the alternative needed to defeat Trump. The dirty break is deeply intertwined with our efforts to win leadership of the anti-Trump resistance. The Democratic party failed. Socialists must offer an answer.

Putting A New Party On A Timeline

It is vital that DSA commit to a dirty break strategy at the 2025 convention.

The first move of DSA in executing the dirty break should be to make a splash with a “pre-party” slate. DSA should run cadre candidates—an ambitious goal would be about 10– for Congress across the country. The sooner DSA can commit to this and announce it the more effective the strategy will be. DSA should tactically run at least a few of these candidates as independents in deep blue or deep red states where there are Dan Osborne-style openings. DSA should also consider, in places where it’s viable, carrying on the campaign into a third party run if we lose the primary. By committing to this approach loudly and openly we would present ourselves as a force with a decisive plan. Running candidates with shared branding, messaging, and advertising would allow us to pool resources and fundraising and put the Democrats on the back foot. The more clearly this slate was committed to building an independent party the more of a dramatic impact it would have. To make such a plan viable DSA would need to pool and cohere our already sizable electoral training material and federal level campaigning experience and begin a deliberate outreach effort to chapters across the country to get commitments for campaigns. 

At the same time as we do this DSA should put forward a priority plan for establishing municipal level parties in every major city that has nonpartisan local elections. In Portland, we’re already trying to lay the foundations for this. Staff should be directed to assist chapters with legal and logistical hurdles to make that happen, whether it’s de facto parties or a genuine new legal municipal formation. DSA should support local chapters to target down-ballot races to run independents such as nonpartisan races, races with a massive Democrat or Republican majority, or races in districts with an unusually high third party vote. 

To achieve this and make it work DSA would have to unify our work in a way we never have before. To start, we need to pass a general national strategy, including a short propaganda program that can give us unity in our messaging and rhetoric in all fields of work, so that from labor to mutual aid we’re emphasizing a shared set of key points. These programmatic points are the political and directional basis for a new party. As part of a new national strategy, we also need to establish basic guidelines and expectations for elected officials, so that their campaigns effectively communicate our program in action, and we must decide collectively what actions to take if DSA campaigns or elections come into conflict with our adopted national approach.

We should be relentlessly agitating with criticisms of the Democrat’s failures, trying to convince frustrated liberals that Harris’ campaign failed because of her underlying politics. We should prepare a pamphlet and town halls across the country to express our strategy and debate the need for independence and the steps forward for the left. Right now; the NPC should commit to a messaging line supporting a break, and direct staff, our comms committee, and our working groups to share it. 

Launching a New Party 

What should all this be building towards? In 2027 we should hold a founding conference of unions and left wing organizations to launch a party. There should be no illusions. Such a task will be enormously difficult. The vast majority of unions, progressive organizations, and voters will not initially listen to us. We will have to fight for endorsements from union locals, smaller and more radical unions, and reform caucuses. 

The dirty break will be dirty–there will be some places where the split happens very fast, and others where the Democratic Party and DSA remain tied for years. But It has to be an actual break: a formal commitment, in word and action, to splintering from the Democrats, radicalizing a chunk of the voting public around socialist politics, and cohering a militant left wing which can then turn its sights towards winning majority support among workers and cohering the institutions of radical proletarian struggle for the crises of capitalism to come. 

But by staking out the line of party-building, we amplify the importance of our gains far more. It is one thing to have a socialist endorsed in a Democratic Primary–it is a reverberating and inspiring vote that will be noticed across the country to have them do so when running on their own line. 

A huge amount will depend on the extent to which our local trails and pre-party candidates make real gains. The party at launch will be, like most historical American left parties, an uneven project with various candidates running on fusion tickets, distinct local ballot lines, as independents, and as Democrats. But we should have a unified political line, brand and internal structure that unifies these disparate socialist campaigns that is consciously distinct from the Democrats. Socialists can look to examples like the anti-Nebraska movement, the Non-Partisan League, and the Populists for inspiration: each group employed tactical and ballot line flexibility while building up its base around clear rallying points and then broke through as it cohered. The dirty break will be dirty–there will be some places where the split happens very fast, and others where the Democratic Party and DSA remain tied for years. But It has to be an actual break: a formal commitment, in word and action, to splintering from the Democrats, radicalizing a chunk of the voting public around socialist politics, and cohering a militant left wing which can then turn its sights towards winning majority support among workers and cohering the institutions of radical proletarian struggle for the crises of capitalism to come. 

We should aim to build up a party as something more than just an electoral vehicle. A strong party is a social institution: it provides a narrative of society, offers political education, mutual aid, labor solidarity, social life, media and news. It also operates as a counter-cultural force to the dominant liberal capitalist political culture. A party has to be something which offers people a coherent shot at a better life. To build for these we have to make DSA party-like. Strong communications, coordinated interventions in public political debates, unified strategies across the country, a clear connection between mass action and electoral strategy, and a program to unify our work. 

The vital task for Marxists in DSA is to lay out a clear plan for a break within the next four years, as quickly as possible, start implementing it on the current NPC, and then pass it at the next convention.