The Handful of Democrats Fighting Back Against the DSA Takeover

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Democratic senators variously insist that the DSA is where the energy is, that the party needs to be a “big tent,” or that the voters’ verdicts are sacrosanct and cannot be questioned or even criticized. Others reassure the public (or perhaps themselves) that the DSA’s figureheads have abandoned the communist beliefs they held in their youth – assertions that are unsupported by any independently verifiable evidence.

 

But there are some Democrats who have nobly resisted the hostile takeover of their party.

 

“Capitalism has helped make America the most innovative and prosperous nation in the world,” Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi wrote for the Wall Street Journal, in an implicit rebuke of his comrades. He has his criticisms of the capitalist enterprise, but the solution is not to “tear capitalism down.”

 

That op-ed strikes notes that harmonize with a pledge Suozzi signed with his colleague, California Democratic Congressman Adam Gray, in which both describe themselves as “capitalist, not socialist.”

 

In the Washington Post’s amusing write-up of the pledge, its reporters imply that “Democratic leaders” agree with its banal pronouncements – among them, the notion that an “orderly immigration system” is desirable and the axiomatic truism that lawmakers should discourage “lawlessness.” And yet, the document “could be polarizing on the left.” How? By contending that Democratic officials should be “proud, not ashamed of America.”

 

These intrepid Democrats can count on the support of some outside groups. In a praiseworthy op-ed, the leaders of the moderate PAC Third Way declared war on the DSA. The socialists’ “radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased,” they wrote, “it is a movement to be opposed.”

 

The op-ed’s authors make a moral case against the DSA, but also an instrumentalist one. After all, the movement’s “ideas are electoral poison,” they wrote. The gun control activist Shannon Watts concurs. So, too, does Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden. “DSA makes claims for speaking for the working class, but Democratic candidates who do the best with working-class voters are pretty anti-DSA,” she wrote, citing Maine candidate Graham Platner’s fading prospects.

 

Still other DSA skeptics on the left make the case that the DSA’s cast of overwhelmingly white, downwardly mobile degree-holders is not only unrepresentative of the constituencies for whom they claim to speak — but that they’re also unbelievably condescending.

 

Manhattan Democrats Vice Chair Mariama James went so far as to accuse the DSA of a “mindset” that shares the paternalism she associates with “white supremacy.” Its members, she contends, “are racist, anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-East Asian.” Perhaps worst of all, they’re “non-Democrats” who are beholden to Bernie Sanders – “a registered Independent who’s never passed any legislation and is the senator of the literal Whitest state in the union.”

 

They may be waging a losing fight against the DSA’s ascension, but theirs is a venerable mission nevertheless.