DSA's Hostile Takeover

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. >> It's the Democratic Socialist moment. The DSA engineered the victories of three candidates in New York's recent congressional primaries. >> This is hopefully going to sweep [music] the entire country. >> And then a week later the DSA backed Melat Kiros toppled a 30-year incumbent in Colorado. >> You are the proof that the power of organized people beats the power of organized money. >> When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on screen at a victory party in New York, the crowd vowed to take him down. The socialists want to take over the Democratic Party. And some members of the old guard are making nice. >> I can disagree with some of the positions or statements of some of the incoming members of Congress, but still welcome them. We are a big tent party. >> I'm not a Democratic Socialist, but I do believe that the Democratic Party has been historically way too timid in taking on corporate power. >> [music] >> Um, I think our party should have bigger ideas. >> Others are wary of these bigger ideas and see a hard leftward turn as a losing strategy for the party. >> Socialists aren't Democrats, they're socialists. >> Expressing support for communism and and expressing support for open borders, [music] defunding the police, a fundamental attack on America itself and the premises [music] behind it. And so it's dangerous. >> Our party's becoming an orgy of socialism. >> Mandhanni is a job killing socialist and he's not a Democrat. >> It's time for Democrats to talk the S word, schism. There's just some [ __ ] that I can't be in the same camp with. >> It's less like a schism and more like a hostile takeover. >> The only way we get Medicare for all passed is by getting rid of the Democrats that are actively standing in that way. >> Some DSA members have been honest about their radical ambitions. >> Our goal is communism. [music] >> US imperialism is not a thing that can be reformed away. It It has to be uh overthrown through revolutionary struggle. >> Socialism never took hold in America, but those who believe that the DSA can't win outside progressive cities may be underestimating their reach. >> I was told that [music] you could only be a Democratic Socialist in Northwest Queens. Then I became the mayor. Now, the next question is the state. [music] Then it'll be the next question will be the country. I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because frankly, there is only one majority in this country. That's the working class. >> I worry that our antibodies to this ideological virus are losing their efficacy. >> We will govern without shame and insecurity, making no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a Democratic Socialist, and I will govern as a Democratic Socialist. >> New York mayor Zohran Mamdani is the smiling face of 21st century American socialism. We've met grinning socialists [music] before. His improbable ascent to the executive office of America's largest city has energized young progressives, and Mamdani is now a proven kingmaker, elevating the candidacies of Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Daria Lisa Aviles Chevalier, whose social media feed was full of enthusiasm for Marxist literature, calls for seizing the means of production, and woke criticisms of interracial relationships. >> Get out and vote. This is the team. This is our year. >> In Colorado, Quiros, who vowed to get rid of Democrats who opposed the socialist agenda, sailed to victory. >> We need to make sure [music] that people's basic needs are protected, and those That's only through programs that would be socialist. >> In Los Angeles, socialist Nithya Raman may unseat the incumbent Democratic mayor. >> Here in Los Angeles, the DSA was the only place where people were really talking about tenants' rights and renters' rights in the context of a political movement. [music] >> Michigan's Rashida Tlaib is also a member of the DSA, which recruited Maine Senate candidate Graham Plathner, who once posted on Reddit that he became a communist as he got older. Plathner has dropped out amidst rape allegations against him. Mondani hasn't had time to transform New York into either a workers' paradise or a communist hellhole, but he has begun to transform the political landscape by skillfully leveraging his platform to promote the ideals of socialism at every turn. [music] >> Do you still believe in democratic socialism? Do you still think it can be effective? >> I believe in it even more than I did the day before, and that's because of the fact that it is focused on the needs of working people. >> After signing the largest budget in New York City history, that among other things delayed pension contributions so that he could avoid making substantive cuts, Mondani proclaimed that socialism had triumphed over capitalism. >> These past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles. >> Mondani's fulfilling a promise he made early in his political career to remain an uncompromising promoter of doctrinaire socialism. >> We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism. We will run the campaign challenging [music] the current status quo and showcasing it through our critique how this is an issue of capitalism. >> Mondani's new role as kingmaker has put Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a bind. >> Mondani! Mondani! >> Mondani making enemies on Capitol Hill >> by endorsing against incumbent Senator Cantwell? >> Listen, the mayor and I agreed to strongly disagree. >> No more to the Democrats who compromise, who conciliate, and who betray us. We don't need those Democrats anymore. >> This kind of socialist infiltration has happened before. >> They're gradually infiltrating, you know, hedgehopping from ward to ward, um taking over [music] wards. >> In the early 1980s, the left-wing British Labour Party was infiltrated by a socialist group called the Militant Tendency. >> Militant is the voice of the Marxist left of the Labour Party. And we've got growing support in all wings [music] of the party. We have a majority support probably in the Labour Party Young Socialists. >> The group organized around the Trotskyite newspaper called Militant and pursued a strategy known as entryism with the goal of finding a pool of new members to recruit to radical Marxism, as one study of the group described it. The aim was capturing the Labour Party for the cause of revolutionary socialism, observed the Labour historian Kenneth O. Morgan. [music] >> And now give you books to read. All Marxist classics and [music] um militant pamphlets and back copies of the Militant newspaper. And you'll be expected [music] to discuss those with the person who's trying to recruit you into the Militant. >> Labour [music] Party leaders worried that the Militant Tendency was anticipating a revolutionary moment in which it could abolish parliamentary procedures and overthrow Britain's constitutional monarchy. >> We stand for Labour Party getting [music] a majority in Parliament. And then on the basis of that majority, abolishing the monarchy, abolishing the House of Lords. >> Frank Field, the left-wing Labour MP for Birkenhead, has grave doubts about Militant's long-term faith in parliamentary democracy. This is the rub. Is Militant using democracy as a tactic or do they believe it? >> After the Militant captured the Liverpool [music] City Council and three Parliament seats, the Labour Party expelled them for violating their charter by creating a party within a party. One member of the Democratic Socialists of America has suggested that Mondani's team should study the Marxist-led Liverpool City Council with the goal of transforming the mayor's office into an organizing center to build a mass movement, ultimately with international repercussions. That seems to be exactly what they're planning. >> We're not here to make the [music] Democrats a little bit better. We're not here to like get the little crumbs. We're here to actually enact socialism. >> Today's Marxist revolutionaries can be found not in the newsrooms of Militant or the Daily Worker or gathered in the City College of [music] New York's cafeteria, but in the Twitch streams of socialist influencers like Hasan [ __ ] >> Rapid-fire, do you support repealing Act [music] 10? >> Yes. >> Universal child care? >> Yes. >> Free school meals? >> Yes. >> Guaranteed paid leave? >> Yes. >> Abolishing ICE? >> Yes. >> A 1-year data center moratorium? >> Yes. >> Breaking up uh big ag? >> Yes. >> Uh public grocery stores? >> Yes. >> Like many socialists, [ __ ] [music] will tactically downplay his radicalism by claiming all he's really after is more affordable health care. >> I wish they'd stop calling me a radical. None of these people are radical. They just want health care. >> In other contexts, he's fantasized about killing landlords. >> Kill them. Kill those [ __ ] And murder those [ __ ] in the street. Let the streets Let the streets soak in their [ __ ] red capitalist bloods. >> And he's praised to China's [music] former communist dictator Mao Zedong, whose policies like the Great Leap Forward [music] caused tens of millions to starve to death. >> Mao Zedong is a is a uh one of the great leaders of of this world, okay? A man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet. [music] The People's Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong. >> Before she won in her New York primary, socialist Daria Lisa Abila Shabalier was tweeting about seizing the means of production. >> You're going to appear in all sorts of people's ads, all sorts of Republicans ads to say, [music] "This is what you're going to get if you vote for the Democrats, a communist." >> You know, I think [music] that is that framing is one that I've been very proud to be able to say I don't respond to. >> In the public eye, democratic socialists tend not to use Marxist rhetoric, especially when running for office. But, they won't ever criticize a comrade for being too leftist. Before he was mayor, Mamdani explicitly outlined for his DSA comrades the strategy of emphasizing less radical policies, while never losing [music] sight of the ultimate goal, to paraphrase Marx, of expropriating [music] the expropriators. >> And if we're talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we're talking about [music] Medicare for all, you know, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country. But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in. Whether it's BDS, right? Or whether it is the the end goal of of seizing the means of production, um where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment. And what I want to say is that it is critical that in the way that we organize, in the way that we set up our, you know, set up our work and our priorities, that we do not leave any one issue for the other. That we do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for. >> What seems to be happening is that DSA members are pushing the Democratic Party towards democratic socialism at the same time that committed Marxists are pushing the Democratic socialists towards full-blown communism. The Red Star Caucus is the DSA's communist caucus, and one of their members is now a national co-chair. Red Star's members published an argument for including communists in the DSA in 2024, noting that for decades, DSA was an anti-communist organization. DSA's founders explained in a labor journal that they inserted language in the founding charter banning members who are under the discipline of any self-defined >> [music] >> democratic centralist organization. Democratic centralism is the concept that allows communists [music] to say they're permitting democracy even as they impose a dictatorship of the proletariat. [music] Vladimir Lenin explained that democratic centralism rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the party. [music] Freedom of speech, as long as it doesn't contradict the party line. Maybe this explains why DSA's Red Star Caucus supports democracy in our present [music] conditions, where democratic struggle outweighs the benefits of ideological homogeneity. [music] Lenin once advised that until you have the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments, you must work within them. The DSA recently lifted its ban on members affiliated with such democratic [music] centralist groups. How much does it matter if a single caucus in a marginal political party like the DSA wants to bring communism to America? >> [music] >> Republicans see it as a political opportunity. >> We're not going to lose an election for a hundred years. The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn't want to work. >> But the entire Democratic Party isn't about to go Maoist. American exceptionalism includes an exceptional resistance to the kind of socialism that swept Europe in the late 19th century onward. In their book, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marx credited Americanism, which they defined as a culturally unique ideology characterized by >> [music] >> anti-statism, laissez-faire individualism, populism, and egalitarianism. Socialist scholar Leon Samson believed Americanism served as a substitute for socialism. Samson and other socialist scholars in the '20s and '30s believed their movement struggled in America even during the Great Depression [music] because the working class already believed they were living in a society with a high degree of social mobility, and they were correct. In Europe, by contrast, guilds and rigid class structures meant men were far more likely to follow their fathers into the same profession and social station. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky believed American workers were simply too prosperous to fully embrace Marxist class conflict. [music] New York's material conveniences completely won over Trotsky's two sons, he observed, >> [music] >> when his family lived there in exile in the winter of 1917. Life in America's preeminent capitalist city is a lot more opulent today, and we're not in a Great Depression, so why are there still so many socialists? [music] For one, it's important to note that in the general election, most New Yorkers weren't voting for socialism. They were voting against the washed-up former governor with a checkered personal history and [music] for a charismatic young candidate who vowed to stand up to Trump. Support for democratic socialist candidates skews heavily towards the young and college-educated, not the lower-income laborers who are supposed [music] to constitute the revolutionary proletariat. That's because the democratic socialists are promising to deliver these young credentialed urban professionals what they really crave, >> [music] >> upward mobility, which is, after all, the American dream. So, is America no longer upwardly mobile? It is. [music] In most parts of the country, young people are still on track to end up wealthier than their parents were. But, there are some troubling trends, especially [music] in cities where socialists like Mondani are getting elected. And democratic socialists like Mondani promise to do what the establishment [music] hasn't, and deliver affordable city living using the power of the state to confiscate and spread the wealth around. >> I'll freeze the rent for millions of tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal child care. And before you ask, I'll pay for it by taxing the rich. >> Are we ready to win Medicare for all, housing for all, and unions for all? >> The under-40 city dwellers voting for socialists have accumulated record amounts of student loan debt and feel boxed out of the real estate market. Left-wing views are correlated with high education paired with relatively low income. Statistician Nate Silver found that the Americans most likely to identify as very liberal were postgraduates making less than $60,000 [music] a year. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, no fan of socialism, predicted something like this. >> There's a generational problem where it is difficult for young people to acquire [music] capital. And if you start your life in debt that can never be discharged in bankruptcy, you know, it'll be much harder to accumulate capital and you might be less friendly to capitalism. >> Our role ultimately is to to facilitate our own empire's failure in ways that we [music] can, ultimately to overthrow our own empire. >> Socialism is not just better capitalism, it's overthrowing an entire the entire capitalist state. >> But, there are ways to make city life more affordable that don't involve creating expensive and inefficient government programs, looting wealth, or fomenting revolutionary struggle. Thiel suggests putting the universities on the hook for the debt and ending federal loan subsidies. >> We should internalize the costs onto the universities. We should redo the bankruptcy laws. Yes, you can [music] discharge the student debt, and when you discharge it, it's the college that gave you a bad education that gets uh that gets um stuck with the bill. >> Centrist Democrats have suggested an abundance agenda focused on rolling back zoning and other land use regulations that make housing so expensive in the first place. >> Every time the progressive vote share of a California city increased by 10%, the number of houses permitted [music] in that city declined by 30%. >> This is obviously an embarrassment. >> But this would require more Democrats to stand up against their own coalition of special interest groups. They'd also have to combat false narratives coming from the socialist left within their own party. >> The middle class is collapsing. We have more people living in poverty than almost any time in the history of this country. >> Upper middle class doesn't exist anymore in America. [music] And thanks to the continued deregulation of Wall Street, thanks to the continued um gutting of working and middle-class people. >> The middle class isn't shrinking because Americans are getting poorer on average. It's because they're getting richer and moving into higher income brackets. [music] And if the Democrats seem unable to combat democratic socialism, the democratic socialists seem just as feckless in opposing those pulling them towards outright communism. >> It is so important that as DSA we are developing organizers who can look at the conditions, figure out what exactly uh is the pressure point. What What is that weak point that we can push on to help start breaking capitalism down. And it's working. >> Ocasio-Cortez defended socialism by name-checking Hayek's critique of the kind of centralized economic planning that destroyed national economies. >> Throughout this process, I've been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists. If these past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles. >> But Hayek was right. Central planning has led to economic ruin and starvation over and over from the USSR to Mao's China, North Korea, Cuba, and now Venezuela. Socialist hero Hugo Chávez boasted that his social housing project, Hugo Chávez City, would usher in a new Venezuela, no longer built with scrap. But at the very moment Mamdani has socialism victorious in New York, Hugo Chávez City sits in ruins, as does much of Chávez's new Venezuela following a devastating earthquake. International rescue teams say the incompetent Venezuelan state has impeded their access to the hardest-hit areas, but economic disaster isn't the only threat. Hayek had another vital warning. Left unchecked, socialism, even of the democratic variety, leads to tyranny. Hayek's best-selling book was called The Road to Serfdom. Socialism leads us down this road because in a planned economy, individual preferences don't determine what's produced and sold. Instead, a political committee, and ultimately a single leader at its head, must assume the authority to decide what men should believe and strive for. The economic plan outlined in the Democratic Socialists of America's most recent political program is troubling enough on its own. Universal rent control, government-owned housing, and nationalizing the food, education, energy, medical, and transportation sectors, all to be funded by aggressive wealth taxes and government takeover of all the largest corporations. But just as Hayek warned, the economic program is paired with an agenda of dismantling our constitutional system. The new DSA platform calls for a new political system that will abolish the Electoral College, make the president and Supreme Court subordinate to Congress, and abolish the Senate. >> Would you like to abolish the Senate? >> That's That's part of our platform, and we don't think that's extreme. We think it's it's a a change that would help make this country more democratic. >> Political structures that I have to work in, that we are surrounded by, was built on slavery and genocide and rape and oppression. Now we're in Congress, and we're every corner of the United States. Look at this room, [ __ ] We ain't going anywhere. >> [cheering] >> For all the talk of Trump representing a threat to the constitutional order, and not entirely without cause, could this be the beginning of a real movement to end it? Socialists claim the mantle of democracy, but somehow always end up with one-party states. Hayek warned that, despite their democratic pretensions, socialists must eventually abolish democracy, too, as it is the final obstacle [music] to the suppression of freedom their grand vision requires. This isn't a policy debate about health care or the optimal size of the welfare state. It's a movement to restructure the American political system. The goal is to replace free markets with socialist planning and transform a constitutional republic designed to protect individual rights into a so-called democratic collective that can wage permanent class warfare. [music] The democratic socialists are quite open about all this. If for some establishment Democrats, these aren't red lines. >> Well, I'm not afraid of new members or new ideas in the party. I welcome it. >> And it's important that we welcome [music] them as part of our caucus. We have to have a big tent. >> You do need a big tent to survive in a two-party system. But if there's one thing history has taught us about Marxists, they're not good at sharing their tents. If they can't take them over, they'll tear them down. Democratic socialism is concentrated in progressive coastal [music] cities for now, but New York's DSA co-chair is probably right to be optimistic that in 2028 they'll widen their reach. >> We will be trying to [music] influence the the next presidential primary. I think that many in the organization would be very thrilled if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ended up running. >> America's immunity to socialism may be waning as the cultural memory of its 20th century failures fades. K-12 schools largely failed to teach these lessons of history to millennials and Gen Z. Higher ed liberal arts are steeped in [music] Marxist theory. Greedy capitalists are a favorite villain of Hollywood. And millennials watching the economic collapse of 2008 as young adults were more likely to hear from the news that this was capitalism run amok than that federal housing policy, Federal Reserve manipulation, or moral hazard created by quasi-government guarantors like Fannie Mae were root causes. So, confidence in capitalism is falling and Americans under 35 now view socialism more favorably than capitalism. The anti-statism, laissez-faire individualism that Lipset and Marks identified as fundamental Americanism has become less central to American identity. We're in an era where charismatic entertainers can harness the energy of digital crowds to propel themselves towards surprising political victories. Trump's complete takeover and transformation of the GOP is proof of that. So, Democrats must decide, and quickly, if they'll stand up for the liberal order they claim to defend or if they'll succumb to a political uprising that aims to overturn it.