The Socialists Want the DNC to Sign Its Own Death Warrant

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

The institutional Democratic Party is awake to its peril, but the hour is late.

 

One-third of all Democrats now identify as socialists. The party’s most popular figures are Democratic Socialists themselves. Three out of four Democratic voters say they are willing to support a socialist candidate for the presidency (despite most of the general electorate’s opposition to socialism and its champions).

 

The press has covered the socialists’ rise as though their candidates have finally discovered how to speak to average voters about pocketbook concerns. But “affordability” isn’t a campaign theme that sprang fully formed from Zohran Mamdani’s forehead. Rather, what the socialist left has done is wed a road-worn affordability message predicated primarily on access to taxpayer-funded services to toxic class consciousness.

 

Your financial burdens are not a consequence of your own actions or lamentable happenstance, the socialists contend. Something has been done to you.

 

CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere’s dispatch from this past weekend’s DSA conference in Chicago tells the tale. There, socialist activists hocked left-wing tracts: “Palestinian poetry collections, Black Panthers histories, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ and a children’s book called ‘Prisons Must Fall.’” They called “one another comrades,” circulated literature that forecast “a future without capitalism” and the abolition of police and “the prison system.” The term “‘Zionists’ was used interchangeably with ‘billionaire class,’” which suggests the DSA’s myopic fixation with Israel is tethered to some degree to antisemitic assumptions about the pernicious influence of Jewish money.

 

If the DSA is all the rage in Democratic political circles, it stands to reason that their class envy is, too. The Democratic Party’s institutionalists are taking welcome, albeit tentative, steps to stall the socialists’ advance. If they’re serious about that effort, pushing back against this fashionable but embittering classist ideology must be step one. Yet, if the New York Times has its way, that project will fail.

 

It is strongly implied throughout Times reporter Shane Goldmacher’s exposé that the DNC did something untoward when it struck from its long-delayed and embarrassingly incomplete “autopsy” on the 2024 race a digression that didn’t belong in the report in the first place.

 

According to its jilted author, Paul Rivera, the text in question “raised the concern that most senior Democratic strategists in 2024 were ‘financially secure’ and thus removed from the challenges facing many Americans,” Goldmacher’s dispatch read. One fraught sentence that was left on the cutting-room floor speculates that it is “therefore possible the people ‘in the room’ at the highest levels of 2024 decision-making misunderstood the mood and practicalities facing everyday America.” Another line hypothesized that Democratic political professionals are somehow financially invested in the party’s failures. Some unnamed figures had become “generationally wealthy” as a result of their participation in this process, after all, which is perhaps why the activists “keep banging their heads up against a system proven to be inflexible and self-enriching.”

 

“There’s a very comfortable ecosystem that will profit mightily from no change,” Rivera told the Times. We are thus presented with a conspiracy theory layered atop a conspiracy theory: Not only is the very reality that billionaires exist the font from which all your troubles spring, but a cabal of nefarious actors who pretend to oppose this assumed fact of modern life are secretly in league with your tormentors.

 

The remainder of the report is stacked with populist demagoguery and mortifyingly unpersuasive denials from DNC Chairman Ken Martin about his participation in this allegedly censorial act. But the DNC’s timidity is unwarranted. These lines should have been cut.

 

If there is evidence substantiating the claim that Democratic political professionals were corrupted by their own wealth or their proximity to it, the Times report does not provide it. If the individuals who are guilty of sabotaging the Democratic Party, either actively or as a consequence of their rarefied economic remove, are known to Rivera, he does not name them. If the outcomes of 2024’s electoral contests could have been altered by Democrats having access to an earthier class of consultants, the report does not say as much.

 

What we’re left to conclude is that the DNC was presented with a bit of paranoia that would serve only to flatter the conspiratorial pretensions of the socialist activist class. It is the sort of thing that allows the affluent, educated, white activists who form the core DSA constituency to claim that they alone speak for the interests of blue-collar laborers. The Democratic Party is under no obligation to pander to the DSA’s delusional self-conception — certainly not if that compels the party to imply that it is shot through with class enemies.

 

The process that resulted in the DNC autopsy’s composition and release was hopelessly flawed. It was arguably better to scrap the whole project than to release the dog’s breakfast presented to the DNC. But the DNC was under no obligation to draft its own death warrant. That is what the activists are after here: an admission from the party that its own origin myths are lies and that it has become too corrupt to justify its own existence. No party with a commitment to its own self-preservation should or would consent to that.

 

And yet, despite this and other modest displays of defiance, the DNC lacks the self-confidence that its DSA critics evidence in spades. The activists will keep trying. That’s for sure. Whether the DNC will retain its will to resist is, however, an open question.