Inside the Democratic Socialist uprising

Candidates affiliated with (or sympathetic to) the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) have recently won several Democratic primaries. Although this rise of the left takes a different form, it draws from prior social movements and Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacies. David Purucker has been both a close observer and a participant. He studied how the DSA makes decisions and organizes. Its electoral role draws from its relationship with the labor movement and other liberal causes. He says this year will raise a lot of questions about how the group responds to electoral success and failure. Guests: David Purucker, the University of Oregon Study: Birth of a Movement Party Transcript Matt Grossmann: Inside the Democratic Socialist uprising, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Candidates affiliated with or sympathetic to the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, have recently won Democratic primaries in New York and elsewhere and may be poised to make significant gains this year. The rise of the left is taking a different form but does draw from prior social movements and the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacies. What’s happening inside the DSA, and how will it react to electoral gains and losses? This week, I talked to David Purucker of the University of Oregon about his recently finished doctoral dissertation, Birth of a Movement Party. He’s been both a close observer and a participant of the DSA and studied how it makes decisions and organizes locally and nationally. We talk about its electoral role and its relationship with the labor movement and liberal causes. He thinks a lot of questions may be raised and even some answered this year. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation. Tell us about the findings and the main takeaways from your recently finished dissertation called Birth of a Movement Party. David Purucker: I’ll say at the start that my research is maybe not the kind of empirical political science research that maybe you or your listeners are familiar with. It’s not the kind of thing where I was able to pose a very precise hypothesis and test it. It’s more of an interpretive project drawn from a large number of interviews, participant observation, and a lot of thinking about history, also primary source analysis from within the Democratic Socialist movement, within the Democratic Socialists of America. I should say that I myself, in addition to my grad school training, I’m a DSA member and an organizer. So it’s very much a participant observation thing, and I’m writing from that perspective as well. I would say that the key argument or findings from my research would summarize as membership and movements. I think if we’re thinking about why DSA and democratic socialism has really taken off, especially recently, it’s a combination of the fact that we have this organization that has a strong sense of collective identity and membership socialization. People really feel attached to it, and they’re willing to engage in a lot of volunteer time, a lot of canvassing, and put a lot of effort into the activities of the organization in a way that’s not really very common on the landscape of civil society or political contention in the United States. One other really important thing that DSA and socialists do is they engage in social movements. So in between elections, there’s a constant stream of activity that socialists through DSA are engaged in basically in supporting various kinds of social movements, sometimes really high profile ones, like the Palestine Solidarity Movement and others that are more low key going on in the background with peaks of contention like the labor movement. That kind of continuous involvement in social struggle outside of the rhythm of elections gets people really committed. It trains them in political skills and gives them a sense of credibility perhaps in the community so that when it does come time for elections, we can say, “Oh, that person was there. That DSA activist, I saw them when they fought for me.” Zohran Mamdani did all sorts of movement work before he ran for mayor. That was a really important part of the background. That’s not at all atypical when we’re thinking about democratic socialism. So those are the two key ideas is membership and movement. Matt Grossmann: Help us place the DSA, for folks that might be familiar with parties, internationally and what you mean by this idea of a movement party and thinking of it as an alternative to a party faction or an interest group or a social movement. How does this kind of thing work in a pretty strict two-party system in the US? David Purucker: Yes, a very strict two-party system. The first thing to say is that DSA does not identify itself currently as a party. It would identify itself publicly as a political organization. That’s the typical phrase that is used. However, DSA, unlike past factions within the Democratic Party, is explicitly committed to trying to form some kind of independent left-wing party in the future. How that actually comes about is a subject of considerable debate within the organization. We can get into it. But I think that most DSA-ers probably are of the mind that, “Okay, we need structural reforms to the political system before an independent party project is possible.” So DSA, insofar as it is a party, is very different than groups like the Green Party or third parties that people might be familiar with. It’s pretty misleading to call DSA a third party because, with very few exceptions, it doesn’t try to get its own ballot line. Instead, DSA leaders, cadre have an analysis that that attempt to form an independent left-wing party with its own ballot access imposes all sorts of structural barriers in the setup of our electoral system that is very, very unlikely to succeed. There’s a long, long track record going back more than a century of independent left third parties trying that strategy and failing. So DSA has made the calculation that it’s best to contest within Democratic Party primaries, depending on constituency. Then, in some places, there’s an exploration of independent party politics. But that’s the main idea for thinking about why DSA would deserve to be called a party. Matt Grossmann: Then what about compared to other movements? Listeners will be familiar with the Occupy Movement that had some crossover in messaging, Black Lives Matter being one of the more successful recent movements on the left, but that has had both ups and downs, and then it has also recently been compared to the Tea Party movement on the right. Where does it fit within and in comparison to other movements? David Purucker: Well, I mean, strictly speaking, it’s kind of an apples and oranges comparison. Because when we’re talking about those three examples you listed, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Tea Party, all are typically tagged as social movements, which are these broad challenges within civil society against the political system that include very large numbers of people, multiple organizations, networks, streams of culture and discourse. DSA, it’s a lot more narrow. It is a formal organization. It exists within ecosystems of movements, it seeks to build social movements, but it’s probably incorrect to see it as a movement. I think it’s an open question whether or not democratic socialism per se could be seen as a social movement, and you can make arguments one way or another. If we’re thinking about the differences between what DSA-ers are doing and what some of those other movements that you listed, what they entailed, DSA, it emerged chronologically in time after the first waves of Occupy and BLM, and so there’s a learning process there. Many DSA members who came into the organization around 2016, ’17, ’18 had direct personal participation in those other social movements. So there’s a sense like, “Okay, we saw that Occupy and Black Lives Matter were tremendously influential, massive mobilizations but for a relatively short amount of time,” and there was a sense that they weren’t able to achieve stable political structures through those movements. So we want to be able to form something that’s a bit more durable while still retaining the positive lessons from those experiences. Then the Tea Party comparison, I think, is really interesting because we are finally now seeing a lot of primary challenges taking place within the Democratic Party with DSA, of course, in New York and in Colorado playing a quite important role in that. So there’s a sense in which there’s now this insurgency within the Democratic Party. That’s only, I think, become possible now in the last couple of years because of changes in the base of the Democratic Party electorate that didn’t pertain before 2024, basically, and we can get into that. But, yes, there’s a sense in which DSA is leading that much broader radical movement within the Democratic Party. Matt Grossmann: This is also a movement that’s closely tied to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. Although there were DSA organizations before, the people seem to have seen quite a change in the wake of those campaigns. There have been not quite analogous things, but Howard Dean’s campaign was often credited with creating the net roots, the first online liberal movement. There were organizations created by other presidential campaigns afterwards to try to carry on their legacy, but they haven’t had the kind of impact and organizational stability of this. So what would you say …? Even today, Bernie and AOC and allied politicians are not quite doing things completely in alignment but often organized around the same primary campaigns and with the same activists involved. So how should we think about the relationship there and how much that matters to what the DSA looks like? David Purucker: The story of the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015 and ’16 is extremely important for understanding the rise of mass democratic socialist politics and the DSA specifically. The DSA as an organization predates the Sanders campaigns by decades. It actually has a lineage going back into the early 20th century in the Socialist Party of America. DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of two smaller socialist organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New American Movement, but it was pretty marginal through especially the 1990s and early 2000s. Bernie Sanders has a history that’s completely separate from that tendency. He has never been a DSA member. He’s spoken at some DSA events here and there, but he’s always been an independent. He’s an independent both from the Democratic Party but also from the organized socialist movement, such as it existed in the ’80s and ’90s. DSA itself in 2015, ’16 actually endorsed Sanders quite early on. They were active. There was a young rising layer of people in DSA going back to the early 2010s around the Occupy movement that was attempting to make an intervention within the broader campaign. So DSA and this emerging ecosystem of socialist publications, like Jacobin Magazine was really important in this, had a message that could appeal to, I think, the left wing and the younger wing of the Sanders campaign activist layer. Then when Sanders dropped out, DSA was there to catch at least some of those people. Then after Trump won is when we really see DSA’s membership explode. There was an awareness of DSA through that campaign, but it was only when Clinton and the Democratic Party lost that election in 2016 that a lot of people decided to, “Okay, I have to pull the trigger and get involved and become a card carrying socialist,” so to speak. Matt Grossmann: Let’s dig into that a little bit more about how the organization has responded to, I guess electoral success and failure. Obviously, Bernie ran again and had some success. 2018 was an election where there was a success in a few places and the organization of a squad in Congress that was kind of associated with this wing of the party, but even AOC has had her troubles, or distancing from the local DSA folks. And, as you said, Mamdani is now having to switch into governing mode and that might mean making decisions that local DSA folks are less happy with. So how have they responded to those successes and failures? David Purucker: Yes. This a constant source of debate and tension within DSA is how to relate to our elected officials once they get into office, and can we hold them accountable? That’s a keyword that people use. Broadly, we’re in an era where political leaders are not trusted. There’s kind of a collapse in trust for institutional leaders across society. And so DSAers really want to see people that they know that they work with ending up in these positions. And AOC is probably the most important democratic socialist politician in the country, of course. She’s probably going to run for president next year. She is a DSA member, but she is not what DSAers would consider a cadre candidate, is the jargon that they use. So a cadre refers to a person who has come up through the organization, spends a lot of time working kind of on the ground, and organizing, canvassing, being part of social movements. AOC did join DSA in New York City, actually, relatively early in her campaign in DSA, this is sometimes written out of stories of that campaign, but DSA played a really important role in the ground game for her campaign against Joe Crowley in summer of 2018. But once she went to Washington, her DSA staffers, that network, did not travel with her. She went with Justice Democrats people, and then eventually it didn’t take too long. She formed her own staff and became relatively independent of DSA and pursued kind of her own strategy. And that’s led to some tension certainly between AOC and national leaders in DSA. The big questions have come down to her positioning on foreign policy questions, especially on Israel and Palestine. There’s a perception among many activists in DSA that AOC is insufficiently kind of committed to Palestine solidarity, that she’s equivocated at some moments over the last couple of years, especially since fall of 2023. And there are certainly still kind of hard feelings and distrust from some in DSA about AOC, that’s actually playing out right now. The New York Times, you might have seen the story earlier this week. There’s a lot of debate in the national organization about how to structure the endorsement process for a presidential candidate next year. That candidate is likely to be AOC. And there’s kind of a proxy war going on between different factions about how to structure that process. And some people think that process might be structured in a way that could favor AOC or not favor her if there’s a lot of in-person deliberation. It might give some in the organization a chance to argue against that endorsement. So it remains a very contested question within the org. Matt Grossmann: So you, of course, have been able to accumulate this kind of on the ground account. So give us a little more flavor of what happens in these meetings, and this organization, and what kind of being a part of it, and trying to systematize your observations gives you that people who haven’t been at these meetings might not see. David Purucker: Yeah. So a lot of my participant observation came from the Portland, Oregon chapter. I’m based out in Portland. That was back in 2018 to the early 2020s. But DSA chapters continue to function this way. It’s regular meetings of any person who is a member of the organization, and membership in DSA is a very low barrier to entry, certainly compared to past socialist party organizations. You can just fill out a membership form online. You don’t have to do an interview. You don’t have to pass any sort of test. The dues are on a sliding scale and they’re relatively low. So it’s quite common actually for somebody who is interested in DSA to show up to a meeting. They’re not a member. And then through that meeting, they just pull up their phone and you become a member during the meeting itself or immediately after. That’s not at all uncommon. So low barrier to entry. There’s a strong emphasis on accessibility within DSA. DSA doesn’t want people to feel like it’s hard to get involved. And there’s an emphasis on kind of a regular stream of activities. So there’s all sorts of working groups, and caucuses, and regular meetings in different areas of the organization’s work. Maybe outside observers get the perception that DSA is really focused exclusively on these electoral campaigns. And that’s increasingly important, especially in chapters like NYC, but there’s all sorts of activity going on on a continuous basis with people involved in the labor movement. So DSA activists who are members of their unions or who are trying to get a job to organize a new workplace, they might meet regularly in a labor working group, for example, or DSA members who are interested in environmental activism might meet frequently in an eco-socialist group and discuss that. And then at these general meetings, people are bringing motions, proposals for kind of joint action, to that meeting. The meetings are structured in some kind of a traditional way. They use Robert’s Rules often, formal parliamentary procedure, which is necessary when you’re talking about more than 100 people, or sometimes 2 or 300 in their online meetings as well. Matt Grossmann: Yeah. So there’s a clear desire to be less like an interest group that is driven by money and the national leadership, and more in-person. But there also appears to be some effort to sort of learn from, we don’t want to be the occupy style, we have to reach consensus. We want to operate more like a legislature in some ways. So how important are those kind of process democratic decisions within DSA? And we’ve mentioned there’s already conflict between the national and the largest chapter. There’s conflicts over particular candidates. So I guess how much faith should we have that this isn’t just the start of a cycle that ends in a lot of internal recriminations? David Purucker: The question of internal conflict within a left wing political party, obviously there’s a rather dismal history of left wing parties descending into cycles of recrimination and conflict, and there’s a stereotype that the left always eats itself. But it’s also possible I think to see conflict and potentially even organizational splits. To be clear, I don’t think that a split is a real possibility in the short-term. I think that the New York situation is a bit overblown, but it’s also possible to imagine processes of splitting and separation that emerge in a period of overall growth for the movement. And it could be seen as a process of clarification as much as of one of dissolution. But, overall, I think democracy in DSA is, it’s a really important part of the appeal of it for its most active members. And this is perhaps a contrast with groups like the Working Families Party, which is for better or worse, it has a more top-down structure where rank and file members do not have the same ability to affect policy decisions for the organization as a whole. I think it’s very important for members to be able to feel as if collective decision making that they make at the local level has a difference in, “Okay, that we’re going to endorse this candidate” or, “We’re not going to endorse this one. We’re going to participate in this social movement,” or, “We’re going to prioritize this mutual aid project.” That sense of agency is one of the basic reasons why people can feel so committed to the organization. They feel a sense of ownership over it. But, as I was saying earlier, when you’re talking about electing people into the state, especially positions like the mayor of New York City, there’s autonomous power that comes with those positions. And so this is something that I think people are working out. It’s like, to what degree can our representatives in this state genuinely be accountable to the organization as a whole and to social movements more generally? And how can those be institutionalized in a way? I think a lot of the time, for most of our candidates in DSA, we’re relying on kind of informal ties and trust from, “Okay, we elected this person. We know that there are a comrade,” but it’s not as if we have the autonomous power to call them in if they were to go rogue or to really kind of break from the movement. And this is a big question. We’ll see if people like Mamdani or these other people in Congress, once the going, really gets tough, if they remain kind of committed to the organization’s program, because there’ll be all sorts of pressures that is put on them once you enter into government. Matt Grossmann: So, what is the organization learning from the successes this year? You mentioned that DSA played an important role in AOC initial victory and Mamdani. But this year we had a slate, as you say, affiliated with Mamdani that was successful in three different congressional races. And we had a recent one in Colorado that also seemed to draw a lot of DSA attention. So I know it’s always hard to kind of separate that from, we also have just a whole bunch of people that just consider themselves kind of on the left side of the Democratic Party. We have a series of elected officials now, like Bernie and Mamdani, that have independent power to drive voters. So how does the DSA think about its role in those victories, and what is it learning from them? David Purucker: Yeah. Well, certainly there’s the logistical organizing story, especially the case in NYC, that was built up through years of learning and trial and error with all of these campaigns that that chapter ran and other chapters have run in the past. So there’s that kind of just the turnout muscle that’s there that is not there clearly for these establishment candidates. But I would really emphasize the ways in which the Democratic base, including people who have never really even heard of DSA or wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves a socialist, that they are becoming quite open to listening to what democratic socialists have to say. There’s been a collapse in trust and support for the Democratic establishment, and really anybody who’s tied to incumbency within- David Purucker: And really anybody who’s tied to incumbency within the party. So that’s the real story I think of the Democratic Tea Party. It’s not DSA per se. It’s this broad radicalization among what we can call Normie Democrats. And the Democratic establishment should be, I think, very worried about that. So yeah, I think one thing that people are taking away, I think many people even in DSA were shocked at the scale of the margins in NYC and also in Colorado. Kiros won by quite a lot there. There was a DSA connected candidate, Jessica or Jennifer Gonzalez, who had a really kind of strong primary challenge against Hickenlooper in the Senate there and she came close to winning. I think there’s a sense among socialists right now that the sky is the limit for them. And that you can elect even really outsider candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier in Northern Manhattan. Really not at all a conventional candidate, even for DSA, was not a prior elected official. Kind of a grad student activist profile. And she still won against the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus by four points. I think a lot of DSA activists are in talk by that. One other thing I would mention is that these victories are all against people who are nominally progressives. So Diana DeGette in Colorado is considered a progressive. Espaillat actually is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. So was Dan Goldman, who Brad Lander, not a DSA member, but associated with DSA, defeated in his primary challenge. And then Claire Valdez in the Brooklyn race was running against someone who was seen as a kind of a mainline progressive and sort of working families party mold. So there’s also a sense of a civil war within the Democratic Party left between these older, maybe more institutional progressives, and liberals. And then this new sort of anti-establishment populist left that is displacing them. Yeah. And then of course there’s also the story of Mamdani himself and NYC, his influence. He endorsed many, not all of the candidates in Congress and at the state level. But that I think could be overstated. I think one basic takeaway from the midterms or from the primaries last month is that the movement is not just because of Mamdani. It’s something that transcends him, and there’s something much larger going on. So these are I think very, very scary takeaways for the Democratic Party establishment. Matt Grossmann: So as you mentioned, the successes have been against candidates from the left side of the party who are in districts and places where the Democrats are extremely likely to win the general election. And that has produced worry or disdain among the establishment, maybe because of how it changes the vision of the national party or how it makes for attack lines. But not an actual concern that Republicans are going to win the upper Manhattan district in that case. But I’m in Michigan where there’s definitely some chance that candidates from the left side of the party will win in a swing state and in swing US House districts. And so that could create a much more kind of alarmed response from the Democratic Party. So is this something that DSA is ready for? Is there a debate in the organization about whether they should be working in swing districts or districts that might have voted for Trump, for example? And then is there kind of a plan for what the organization will say in response when it becomes more of this open battle in swing places? David Purucker: Well, I think you’re totally right to emphasize the importance of Michigan. I would also add Maine, these are swing states and the basic argument of the more centrist or establishment part of the Democratic Party is that the left broadly defined, whether that’s progressives or socialists, have never been able to win a general election in a swing state. If someone like Abdul El-Sayed were to win in November, it would be an earthquake in the Democratic Party. Because it would destroy the basis of the establishment’s argument that you need to moderate in order to win in these more swingier states. I think that there’s a very good chance that El-Sayed could win in November. I mean, considering the overall democratic lean of these midterms, it’s looking like a big, big wave election comparable to 2018. In some polling against the Republican incumbent shows him to be pretty strong. I think it’s also very possible in Maine where you have, it looks like the candidate isn’t set yet, but it’s likely to be Troy Jackson. Who is another kind of populist left associated candidate, who actually is endorsed by DSA. I should mention that Abdul El-Sayed, to my knowledge, is not endorsed by DSA, which is a kind of organic support for him. He doesn’t call himself a socialist, neither does Jackson in Maine, but both strong candidates. If they were to lose, I think that the broad left, including Democratic socialists, would certainly be subject to a lot of criticism. But as far as whether or not people in the Democratic socialist world are really worried, I think there’s a lot of confidence actually that we look back at Bernie Sanders’ strength in places in the country like Michigan or like West Virginia back in 2016. And we really want to test that idea that the populous independent candidate can speak to rural and disaffected working class folks. Another place to really watch right now is Wisconsin. There’s a gubernatorial primary playing out right now. And there’s a DSA candidate, actually a cadre candidate, somebody who really comes from the organization named Francesca Hong, a state representative. And she’s in some polls that I’ve seen leading the primary electorate. So she wins that primary, she will definitely be a story to watch. And I’m sure a lot of people will be saying, “Oh, there’s no chance that she could win.” But there’s been some interesting reporting that she has a lot of momentum, even in rural areas that she’s able to speak and have an appeal there. So this is kind of the next frontier. I think democratic socialists would say that in many ways, regular establishment Democrats have given up on rural areas in many parts of this country. And even though democratic socialism largely has this urban, progressive, well-educated base, that’s just a temporary phenomenon. We want to be able to expand and invest and compete everywhere in the country. Because the gamble is that working class politics based on material demands around Medicare for all, around labor rights, affordability. That this kind of message can cut through anywhere in the country. Matt Grossmann: So yes, there is this goal of a class-rooted politics, but at least the internal, to the extent that we can measure it with election returns and polling so far. It’s a pretty regular pattern now that the candidates with support from the left side of the party or DSA members generate relatively greater support, especially with the highest educated parts of the party. But also the wider and even in some cases, higher income parts of the party. So how should we interpret that? Obviously some people’s interpretation is that this is a claim to speak for the working class that’s not justified, because that’s not where these folks are coming from. On the other hand, those are also just sort of correlates of the new Democratic Party in general, as a more educated side. But I think we’re also, as we learn some of the backgrounds of some of the leaders of these candidates and activists, we also… Just like in all other forms of political organization, we find a lot of people come from families with a lot of income or background. And so those ideas that this can’t be a class-based political realignment if it’s really led by this contingent. So how is DSA thinking about that? David Purucker: Yeah. Well, I think what is at stake here really is our definition of working class. And if we want to define that narrowly as it has traditionally been defined in American political culture as meaning essentially blue collar manual workers or employees. Or do we want to define it more broadly as including people who might be in white collar industries that might have a college degree, might be professionals. There’s a history in this country of professionals being organized into unions, and thinking of themselves as working class. So that’s not a new thing per se. I think it’s coming back. So I think DSA would say that, look, these more higher educated, higher income people who are still renters. Who still don’t have control over their position on the labor market or on their job, that they can still be thought of as workers. They can still be organized as such. And we’re going to try out that appeal and see where it goes. And so that is, I think, starting to cut through. Matt Grossmann: So you also have some experience and some research surrounding the student worker organizing, which has been in some ways a rare success story in the American labor movement. Because it’s a smaller part of the economy, and one that’s increasingly dominated by public sector unions. But we have this kind of strange specter where, as a Berkeley graduate student, I was officially in the UAW. UAW membership now has a lot of grad students and they actually played a role in the rise of Shun Fain and changes in that union. But there’s a natural tendency to say, Okay, is that really the UAW or is it really the teacher’s union if it’s running? If that’s where the new base of that is.” So tell us about your involvement and research in this connected space between DSA and student organizing and how you’re thinking about that question of the relationship between the labor movement and this kind of organizing. David Purucker: Yeah. I mean, this takes us back to the theme of the movement party that DSA as a decentralized organization, chapters are doing many different things at once. And one of the basic things that they’re doing is continuously participating and seeking to build social movement, energy around the country. The labor movement is one major sort of field of organizing for DSA members. And within that, it’s totally correct that there’s a lot of energy in the higher ed part of the labor movement. Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of crossover. I think UAW is among all of the unions where DSA has members and tracks union participation. UAW is by far the largest. And a lot of that is due to the higher Ed connections. There’s this particular history there with UAW. It’s not as if grad students are trying to force their way in and take over this venerable auto workers union. I mean, that was a decision made by UAW leadership itself back… David Purucker: That was a decision made by UAW leadership itself back in the 1990s that they wanted to organize knowledge economy workers. And also there’s just kind of limitations for a graduate worker’s ability to shape a union like UAW. You’re only a grad student for a short amount of time and an auto worker might have a career for 30 or 40 years. So it’s not a realistic possibility that grad students themselves could take over the UAW. But you’re right that there has been this alliance between graduate workers and postdocs and a reform current among auto workers within the UAW. And that’s been a really important development within the labor movement. It’s connected to other movements including Palestine Solidarity Movement as well. And also with the DSA electoral story, like Clara Valdez, one of the DSAers elected to… Who just won the congressional primary is herself a UAW organizer, not a grad student, but she was employed in a white collar position at Columbia University. So we’re seeing spillovers between these unions that are trying to organize into white collar knowledge economy and also to expand the notion of working class identity. Matt Grossmann: So part of the argument from this community has been a return to economic policy issue emphasis. And yet the sort of main source of energy recently has been the Palestinian solidarity issue. And obviously it’s an issue on which Democrats in the whole of the population agree with that trend and where events in the Biden and Trump administrations have both sort of made that an open door to push, but you still have this issue of is how do we determine what the issues are that are at the forefront of the movement and how does the organization, an organization that is foregrounding economic policy respond when there’s an issue that’s really driving membership interest? David Purucker: Yeah. I mean, I like how you phrased that question because these issues are playing out at sort of multiple levels. Within DSA, it’s been a learning process of how to frame issues and put forward a program while also holding on to maybe the more polarizing issues that are deeply important to activists or just issues that are much more salient to activists, but aren’t super salient in the electorate as a whole. Like in Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in 2025 I think is the best illustration of this. He had a relentless focus on his affordability agenda and his main policy ideas for making New York City work for working people, but he didn’t back down when pressed on his commitments in other areas, specifically on Palestine. And there was an understanding certainly within DSA, but also within this broader social movement ecosystem around the Palestine question in New York City that Mamdani was very trustworthy on that question, that he himself had been a leader in it. He’s the son of a post-colonial scholar. So he had credibility on that, but it wasn’t as if he was trying to make the campaign about Palestine. It was in fact the democratic establishment that tried to press that issue. And he would answer the question and then pivot right back to his agenda. You can also see this in DSA’s program documents. It’s not as if some of the more controversial or polarizing issues pertaining, for example, to criminal justice reform, police and prison abolitionism or reparations, just to name a few of the more controversial elements of the platform. It’s not as if that’s being hidden, but it’s that you are leading with the issues that we know working people are really focused on right now so that we can actually get some trust and some credibility so that once we’re seen to be fighting for those issues that are really top of mind for the working class, then maybe they’ll be open to hearing about other issues that they haven’t really thought about so much. And then just on the Palestine question, even though it’s not super salient to the broad democratic electorate, it is I think is a really powerful signal of who is willing to take on the most sort of powerful parts of the establishment and really fight for the economic issues that are your priority. I guess the sort of mental process would be like, okay, if this person isn’t willing to call it a genocide in Gaza, how can I trust them really to stand up to the health insurance lobby, for example? There’s that sense of it’s kind of like a litmus test, even if it’s not their number one issue. Matt Grossmann: So you’ve approached this from background of sociology and you’re talking to a lot of political scientists. So tell us what sociology brings to these discussions that is kind of a blind spot for poli sci, and then maybe what you have the parts of political science that have been most useful in your own work. David Purucker: Yeah. I mean, I’ll say that I read the work of political scientists regularly and I really kind of wish that more political scientists with research and empirical skills that maybe I don’t have would become interested in studying DSA. And I think actually many more people, many social scientists from across the spectrum are now getting interested in this story. Part of my dissertation is actually an attempt to review the academic literature on DSA and on democratic socialism over the last 10 years. And there’s not much at all really from sociologists or from political scientists. There’s very little on DSA specifically. There’s not much on the Sanders campaigns, surprisingly little really. But as far as what sociologists bring to the table, I think sociologists, we have a longer tradition of thinking about social movements as a part of the political system. And we’re a little bit more flexible perhaps in thinking about the interconnections between the social movement field and institutional politics, political party contention on the whole. And so maybe sociologists are a little bit more attuned to those questions. Though that said, I mean, there’s been brilliant political science work about the relationship between movements and parties thinking like the work of Schlozman and Rosenfeld just is one that comes to mind. So yeah, I’m really hoping to see more research from political scientists. There’s also maybe a sense in which the, I don’t know, the discipline of sociology is a bit further from kind of power in the academy and certainly in politics in Washington DC. It’s not as if sociologists are regularly getting a hearing in the halls of power like they were in the ’60s or ’70s. And so there’s a little bit more of that outsider identity that I think comes with being a sociologist and it makes us a little more open to studying these more marginal organizations or groups that seem like they’re marginal than what a political scientist would study. Matt Grossmann: And you are also talking to more people who come from the skeptical of the DSA side of the Democratic Party and some never Trump Republicans and people who come more out of the right. So tell those folks what they should know about the DSA that they may not know that might kind of help them understand or perceive it differently. David Purucker: Yeah. Well, I would hope that there’s space for more serious intellectual engagement between people who might be listening to this podcast and people who are more on the left of the Democratic Party or to the left of the party itself. There’s really serious intellectual work being done around the viable institutions of a Democratic socialist society. There’s attempts to reformulate what market socialism, for example, would look like. There is serious engagement from our side with ideas from the abundance agenda. Like Zohran Mamdani is attempting to really take that seriously and rebuild state capacity and prove that efficiency is not just a value that more pro – capitalist or pro – business politicians value, but it’s actually something that the left really needs to take seriously too for the working class. So there’s I think grounds for serious engagement between our different parts of the political scene. I would also say as far as thinking about the future, it may be like there’s grounds for coordination and even sort of tactical alliance between maybe never Trump Republicans and pro – capitalist liberals on the one hand and democratic socialists. We all share the position that we need to fight fascism. We want to protect our democracy and protect civil liberties certainly. But long term, it probably is the case. As James Carville said recently, it’s not a sustainable thing to be in the same party together. And socialists can agree on that and more pro-capitalist people I think can agree on that too. So what I think is important is why not think about serious party system reform and changes to the electoral laws so that we’re not having these kind of existential fights in a winner take all electoral system within the Democratic Party. Because for a very long time, the left has been kind of locked out and is forced to accept kind of the lesser of two evils in a lot of its elections that it participates in. And now I think some parts of the right of the Democratic Party are experiencing that same thing. And it’s not a good feeling. It’s tough to be locked out that way. So if there can be some common ground on party system reform, so we can have a more transparent multi-party system where we have a socialist party or workers’ party and a more classically liberal party. I think that’d be a great thing for American political culture to see. But yeah, that’s what I would say is we should engage seriously. We should not be reductive. And I hope that people who are more on the right, people who might be listening to this podcast, come at DSA and come at Democratic Socialism with an open mind and try to transcend some of these received stereotypes and cliches about the left that maybe they hold. Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next all linked on our website, how philanthropy diverts social movements, the resistance who is protesting Trump and are they changing public views? How protests change parties in elections? How primary elections enable polarized amateurs and congressional primaries how the parties fight insurgence. Thanks to David Purucker for joining me. Please check out Birth of a Movement Party and then listen in next time.