The Conundrum

“I’m not a Democrat. I’ve never voted in my life for the Democratic Party and I’ll never vote in the Democratic Party. It’s racist and it’s capitalist to the core. This is understood. And I shed my blood for the vote now, I want to make that clear.” — Kwame Ture, 1992 interview

An existential electoral tension grips the largest socialist organization in the United States (one could even say, a specter haunts the Democratic Socialists of America). Since 2018 (and especially over the past year, and especially in the Democratic Party primaries in New York in June 2026), the DSA has powered a number of high-profile campaigns to victory against incumbent establishment Democrats by enlisting veritable armies of highly engaged volunteers to run field operations in competitive Democratic primary campaigns. These victories amplify popular agitation for various social reforms, expose more people to socialism and (hopefully) its theory, and help swell the DSA’s ranks, growing the battalions of canvassers, phonebankers, union and tenant organizers for the next campaign. But the excitement that June’s statewide victories stirred within the hearts of New York’s socialist organizers ought to be paired with an equal sense of impending dread. Every single one of these electoral victories occurred within the Democratic Party, fundamentally a liberal democratic party, a capitalist party, and an imperialist party. Its ruling base of power is its capitalist donors, sympathetic bourgeois press in the ‘mainstream media’, and the professional-managerial class. This base funds and propagandizes for the party, and, in turn, the party leadership dutifully defers to the interests of this social base, both with regard to its own governance, and how it opposes Republican governance (or whether it opposes it at all). Regardless of the success that left insurgents may have in some competitive primaries, the incumbent Democratic Party leadership maintains ideological alignment with the majority of the party’s representatives in government. The Party therefore responds to this left insurgency in its primaries as a threat to be smothered in the cradle and swiftly inoculated from, not as proof positive that an alternative vision can & must be pursued in order to succeed on election night.

While the DSA’s volunteer army possesses maximal leverage on this one specific night, once all of the watch party confetti is cleaned up and the last of the stragglers head home from the bar, the actual practice of legislation and execution for the socialist-in-office on every subsequent night is mediated by pressures from power centers hostile to the left insurgency that delivered the victory. Eventually, the threat of a capital strike, a police riot, a legislative lockout, or a judicial veto outweighs the leverage of the volunteer army. The elected official prioritizes making compromises with hostile political officials necessary to get anything passed, over principally keeping the promises made by and for the volunteer army on the campaign trail. The strategic necessity of keeping the volunteer army happy and onside for reelection night becomes a deferred abstraction, to be worried about on a later date. The canvasser’s surplus political literature collects dust in the corner of her apartment while the bourgeois press blares novel propaganda each and every day.

Of course, these thorny problems of compromise coalitions, opportunisms, capital strikes, judicial overreach, instant recallability, capitalist propaganda and the carceral state have been problems of capitalist ‘democracy’ for centuries, and will persist in some form irrespective of the ballot line that DSA chooses to run on (so long as capitalism persists). For example, even if Zohran Mamdani did not share Kathy Hochul’s ballot line, Hochul would still be able to influence Mamdani, by virtue of being his state’s governor. But the ballot line that DSA does choose to run on shapes how its elected officials subjectively respond to these objective pressures, as the Democratic Party leadership rigorously but informally disciplines them and sets the bounds of their acceptable political action. Worse yet, by being ignorant of this effective party line, the DSA silently allows for its electoral strategy to become something far more insidious and regressive than simply electing junior partners in a coalition with capitalists and imperialists. They become more capitalist and imperialist themselves, with any real independence from the Democratic establishment atrophying under its progressively worsening discipline, dutifully destroying socialist politics regardless of how popular they can be on this or that election night.

Herein lies the dread! How can the DSA celebrate electing 10 of the 104 Democrats in the New York State Assembly, or 4 of the 212 Democrats in the House of Representatives, or even the Democratic mayor of New York City, when any attempt at building mass politics of the working class through the slow agglomeration of these victories is continually undermined by the liquidationist tendencies of the Democratic Party’s capitalist and imperialist discipline?

Against ‘Electoral Entryism’ as a Solution: The Power of the Endorsement

“If you endorse only a few DSA candidates, you will tell thousands of your supporters to sit on the sidelines as oligarchs organize to sabotage your mayoralty and block all attempts to tax the rich. You will tell New Yorkers that there is no mass organization capable of taking on the oligarchy, only individual politicians fighting lonely fights. And you will signal more politics as usual, where workers are sidelined and people grow ever more cynical about the idea of democracy when it is more fragile than at any point in our lifetimes.” — ‘An Open Letter To Mayor Zohran Mamdani from NYC-DSA Members’

One distressingly common response is to simply dismiss the core tension described above, to respond to “the Democratic Party leadership rigorously but informally disciplines its elected officials” with “nuh-uh”. The US does not allow the formal party discipline that most other liberal democracies have. Party committees cannot simply expel members at party conferences or even define requirements for membership; you either win or lose your primary election. Therefore, according to this line of logic, the US has no real party discipline; there is no party line, and the ballot line is merely an administrative formality that the DSA should exploit for access to voter rolls and party-wide campaign funds. In fact, it is a necessary formality, as the US’s first-past-the-post voting system & uniquely restrictive ballot access laws necessarily produce a duopoly on the ballot that we must strategically work within. But it’s OK, it is said, because this duopoly is as ideologically meaningless as it is an unimpeachable fact. The DSA’s electeds are not really ‘Democrats’, with a shared obligation to endorse and vote alongside all other Democrats. The DSA is a party apparatus endorsing electeds who occupy the shell of the Democrats. The goal, one day, is to transform the Democratic Party into the DSA Party by simply dominating an increasing number of its primaries. Because there is no formal structure defining the fundamental character of the Democratic Party, the extent to which the Democratic Party is roughly associated with capitalist and imperialist interests is simply the extent to which capitalists and imperialists win their primaries. In fact, since formal party discipline is a non-factor in the US, there would be no way for the DSA to discipline its own party, even if it had one. The ballot line is truly meaningless! Even if there was a Socialist Party, there would be nothing preventing, say, a pro-police fossil fuel fan from saying that supporting police unions and oil subsidies are socialist policies; if she wins her Socialist Party primary, then she represents the Socialist Party. Don’t waste time wondering why exactly The Powers that Be even bother enforcing the duopoly through winner-takes-all elections and restrictive ballot access laws if the ballot line apparently doesn’t matter for much in the first place. All the DSA has to do, all the DSA can do, all the DSA should do, is win all of its Democratic primaries. Let one hundred Berniecrats bloom.

As previously implied, this logic of ‘electoral entryism’^[1] ignores existing informal means of party discipline. It can be challenging to show evidence of this informal party discipline, as it is often impossible to discern the political pressure that manifests specifically as the ideological discipline of Democrats from party leadership as falsifiably distinct from political pressure that manifests irrespective of the electeds’ ballot line. For example, it is possible Zohran Mamdani doesn’t fire Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner because of a compromise agreement with Governor Hochul, a compromise agreement which he makes as a Democrat negotiating with another Democrat. Maybe, if Mamdani had the luxury of winning on another ballot line, as a member of the DSA Party, this sort of compromise would be subject to greater public scrutiny among the DSA Party’s base. After all, it would be a negotiation between ostensibly opposed political parties, not strategic cooperation within a singular party. It is possible this kind of compromise, decided by a delegated representative, would be less acceptable between parties than it is within a party. And so maybe DSA Party-elected Mamdani couldn’t promise Hochul to keep Tisch the way a Democrat-elected Mamdani could. Or, maybe that’s completely wrong, simply a delusion that arises from the fetishization of the party-form. Perhaps Mamdani would have to keep Tisch whether he’s a Democrat or a DSA Party apparatchik. Maybe Mamdani doesn’t fire Jessica Tisch because, really, it would trigger a capital strike and a police riot which Mayor Mamdani wouldn’t risk irrespective of the ballot line he wins on.

One glaring exception to the inseparable tangle of political pressures and their causes is the matter of endorsements. There is no question that, as a Democrat, there are political pressures to endorse other Democrats, or not endorse against incumbent Democrats, that uniquely arise out of formally being a Democrat. Of course, there have always been vote-trading schemes and coalition arrangements between different parties of already elected representatives, but, obviously, an official in one party is uniquely pressured to endorse representatives of that party in forthcoming elections. It is also precisely because formal party discipline is so impossible in the U.S. that popular leading voices and their endorsements play a decisive role in informal party discipline. This occurs across both parties. For example, President Trump has ~70-80% approval ratings among Republican respondents, but the unflinching loyalty of ~95% of elected Republicans. This unquestioned fealty is maintained by Trump’s ability to weaponize his immense national voice by endorsing primary challengers against the few Republicans who dare defy any part of his personal mandate. Even Thomas Massie, a representative popular throughout most of his 14-year tenure in Kentucky, lost his popularity and then his seat after disagreeing with Trump on the narrow matters of the Epstein files and the Iran War. He was swiftly and unceremoniously swept away, with double-digit margins in a midterm year, in great part due to Trump’s endorsement for his primary opponent, a farmer named Ed Gallrein. Naturally, the millions of dollars that pro-Israel lobbying groups spent against Massie helped to secure this outcome. But no one can deny this as one of the dozen times that Trump endorsed against a congressman, state senator, or governor who went on to lose to a primary challenger (if not resign outright). Even in a midterm year, when the man himself is not on the ballot, his voice is decisive in disciplining the Republican Party by determining who represents the Republican Party.

This logic of leveraging popularity for ideological discipline through endorsements extends to the Democratic Party, as well. In 2024, NYC DSA-endorsed Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proudly asserted at the Democratic National Convention (which had just rejected a speaking slot for any Palestinian-American) that the Democratic Presidential administration, which had funded, supported, and partially architected the genocide of Palestinians, was actually “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” in Gaza. Immediately after that speech, the Vice President of the aforementioned administration promised “the most lethal fighting force” in her U.S. military if elected as President. AOC’s endorsement of the Biden-Harris administration had nothing to do with any aspiration for actual change to Middle East policy in exchange for the help on their left flank, as the Biden-Harris administration intransigently pursued total genocide in Gaza despite AOC’s messaging, nationwide campus encampments, and hundreds of thousands of Uncommitted voters throughout the primary race. AOC lied about the administration’s record on Gaza in part because she was angling for the coveted Ranking Member position on the House Oversight Committee, a position chosen by Democratic congresspeople who’d ostensibly appreciate her endorsing their unpopular Presidential candidate. Ultimately, they didn’t appreciate it enough, as she lost the Ranking Member position anyway. Despite her endorsement of Biden-Harris, House Democrats preferred an octogenarian who died of esophageal cancer roughly six months after his appointment. AOC now sits on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, but her endorsement of Harris (and the extraordinary amount of time it took for her to acknowledge that Biden’s chances were obviously more moribund than even his corporeal form was) proves insightful to the analysis of endorsements as a tool of ideological discipline within the Democratic Party.

By limiting the ability of the left’s loudest voices to endorse primary challengers riding in on their coattails, Democratic Party leadership successfully defangs the left of a key tool necessary to actually remake the Party in their image. Sure, left-insurgents can win upset victories in some primaries here and there. But they are pulled towards endorsing establishment incumbents on the one hand (the way AOC was pulled towards endorsing Biden-Harris) and restricted from fundamentally changing the makeup of the Party through their own endorsements on the other hand. AOC cannot use her popularity as a force multiplier for her influence on her party’s representatives the way that Trump did in our previous example. Now, one might argue that it is fanciful to imagine that AOC withholding her endorsement would have causally impacted Harris’s nomination, or the possibility of a genuine Presidential primary more broadly. Perhaps. But her potential sway is far more plausible in House elections, where she is one of the Democratic Party’s star voices (committee appointments notwithstanding), and where she often neglects to endorse DSA-backed primary challengers to incumbent Democrats despite herself winning as a DSA-backed primary challenger to an incumbent Democrat. Most notably, pro-Palestine organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier went from Columbia University encampments to Capitol Hill without the help of an AOC endorsement. Chevalier was not the only one. From Kiros in Colorado, to Ruzevich in Illinois, to Vang in California, AOC generally does not endorse primary challengers to incumbent Democrats running for reelection, even when the DSA does.

Even in open races, where the incumbent is leaving, AOC often finds herself still ‘rationing’ endorsements for the left’s campaigns. Last March in IL-08, DSA-endorsed Junaid Ahmed lost against the establishment centrist Melissa Bean by roughly 5 points. Junaid eventually did earn AOC’s (lowkey) endorsement, but only at the last minute, weeks after early voting had already started. In IL-09, ‘progressive’ Evanston mayor Daniel Biss ran against left-ier progressive Kat Abughazelah. Unlike IL-08, the campaign in IL-09 became a national flashpoint, and much of its salience revolved around the one issue that most greatly differentiated Biss from Abughazelah: the US’s relationship with Israel. Biss started the campaign flirting with the right-wing pro-genocide lobby AIPAC, before quickly realizing where the winds were blowing and taking his talents to more liberal pro-genocide lobbies like J Street. Meanwhile, Abughazelah, herself a Palestinian, had promised to cut arms sales to Israel. The DSA did not endorse Abughazelah, who lacked any active relationship with the organization (or even a professed socialist identity), but Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar did endorse her. Nonetheless, AOC, the largest of those voices, sat out the race, and Biss won by 3 points - just under 4,000 votes. At his victory speech, Biss stated, “This victory belongs to J Street”. AOC explained her reasoning to Axios by arguing that Abughazelah just wasn’t ‘rooted’ enough in the district and didn’t have a strong relationship with ‘on-the-ground’ forces (Abughazelah had moved to the district two years before the race).

What confounds even more than AOC’s refusal to endorse certain campaigns are some of the endorsements she does choose to make, even excepting her historic cynicism at the 2024 DNC. For example, in the wake of her silence in Illinois’s 9th this past March, AOC endorsed a random pro-ICE Blue Dog Democrat in Texas’s 35th because his primary challenger (another random moderate) stirred up a wave of social media condemnations by posting that an ICE detention center in her district should be turned ‘into a prison for American Zionists’. More consequentially, just one week after witnessing Darializa win in her city without her endorsement, AOC proudly endorsed House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, an establishment centrist who would like nothing more than to see AOC and her ilk disappear into the dustbin of history. He visited Israel six times in 12 years, most recently to meet with Netanyahu in April of 2025 amidst Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He was picked by House Democrats to be Pelosi’s successor as the leader of the Democrats in the House specifically because of his hostility to the left and his staunch support for Israel. Sure, there wasn’t anyone plausibly challenging him for his seat (or his party leadership position) this past June, but why would AOC go out of her way to publicly support his leadership? Is it OK that Jeffries told AIPAC that “Jerusalem is the sixth borough” of New York City after taking a million dollars from them because he’s really rooted in his own borough?

Why is AOC so reticent to challenge any incumbent Democrat, regardless of their politics? Why does she often wait so long to endorse in open elections? Why is she more hesitant to endorse ‘left-y’ Democrat challengers in open elections if their campaigns come with national attention on controversial tensions between Democrats’ voter base and Democrats’ ruling base of donors? Why is she so openly proud of her party’s leadership as it actively works against her and everything she’s trying to accomplish?

If AOC cannot endorse enough left-leaning challengers to incumbent Democrats (or even enough controversial left-leaning primary campaigns in open seats) because she herself is a Democrat, then a fundamental Catch-22 afflicts the electoral entryist logic. To pursue electoral entryism successfully, you need to refashion a majority of the Democratic Party through its primaries. To refashion a majority of the Democratic Party through its primaries, you need loud left-insurgents who won their own primaries in the past to endorse as many future primary challengers as can feasibly be endorsed. But, as we’ve just assumed, being a Democrat inherently affects your ability to endorse primary challengers. So, left-insurgents need not be Democrats in order for the process of Democratic entryism to succeed.

Often, ‘electoral entryists’ will avoid the crisis of this logic by offering ad-hoc, personalist alternatives: it is not AOC’s ballot line, but rather AOC’s personal timidity which led to a miscalculation about how close Abughazelah was to winning. It is AOC’s personal unwillingness to confront Jeffries that leads her to laud his leadership on national TV. AOC just doesn’t want to risk lending her voice to causes that might lose lest they devalue her endorsement. With AOC, her ‘unforced errors’ are just that, errors, matters of personal reticence and individual failure. But these cop-out answers ignore deeper structural problems, as AOC is not the only leftist Democrat inadequately leveraging her voice in primary campaigns.

In October of 2025, NYC DSA democratically voted to endorse City Councilwoman Alexa Aviles as the Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives in NY-10. But in those heady days after Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in the June primary, a certain debt was owed. Comptroller Brad Lander had agreed to cross-endorse Mamdani in their mayoral campaigns, a unique opportunity made possible by the ranked-choice voting system in NYC primaries. Mamdani and Lander made cute videos together, riding CitiBikes and talking over each other to say that voters should rank “me first, him second – no, me first, him second!” Many Mamdani supporters felt grateful to Lander for extending the olive branch to Mamdani that Elizabeth Warren never extended to Bernie Sanders in their Presidential campaigns. Before Mamdani’s campaign exploded mere months before the primary election, Lander was the presumptive frontrunner of the ‘left’/‘progressive’ lane, so naturally Lander expected something in return for his sacrificial contribution to Mamdani’s upset victory. At first, he went around telling people that he wished to be the first ‘Deputy Mayor’ in Mamdani’s administration, despite having never been offered any such role. Evidently, Mamdani didn’t actually want Lander anywhere in his administration, as a separate deal was struck: Mamdani would endorse Lander as the Democratic nominee for the House in NY-10. From Mamdani’s perspective, many of NY-10’s most populous neighborhoods (Park Slope, the Village, Carroll Gardens, etc.) are composed, politically, of Brad Lander’s clones, so he was likely going to win the district anyway; endorsing Lander early was just a relatively cost-free means of getting the guy and his ‘deputy mayor’ delusions off of his back. More cute crossover videos ensued, this time with a basketball theme as they aired while the New York Knicks were playing their first game of the NBA Finals.

From the DSA’s perspective, this endorsement should have been a problem for the ‘party-like apparatus’ and its cadre mayor. NYC DSA had already democratically decided to endorse Aviles for the seat. Even if it seems like Lander was poised to win the district anyway, it also seemed like Lander was poised to monopolize the left lane for NYC mayor early on in that race. It’s entirely possible that DSA’s ground game could’ve performed miracles for Aviles the way it did for Mamdani. Even if endorsing Aviles meant risking a knife fight with a liberal ‘progressive’ that had better odds in the district, this should’ve been considered openly during democratic deliberation, not subsequently, in backroom agreements between NYC DSA’s Steering Committee and Mamdani’s administration. Aviles quit her campaign almost immediately after Mamdani endorsed Lander, meaning that DSA’s most popular “cadre” member had effectively killed a DSA-endorsed campaign by endorsing against it, with the explicit approval of NYC DSA leadership.

Aviles’s surreptitiously offered substitution was not a sufficient replacement. While DSA never endorsed Lander, popular reporting often portrays Lander as ‘DSA-adjacent’, partially due to his bromance with Mamdani. In fact, Lander had left the DSA in 2023, explicitly because he found it unacceptable that so many of its members would openly uphold solidarity with Palestinian resistance to occupation in the wake of Al-Aqsa Flood. When those eager to fabricate his credentials on Palestinian solidarity (or attack him for betraying Israel) commended (or accused) him of ‘divesting from Israel’ as comptroller, Lander corrected them: as a self-described “anti-occupation liberal Zionist”, he disavowed the BDS movement. He had only ever allowed the city’s investments in Israeli state bonds to expire because they gave inadequate returns for their associated risk. He found better places to invest pensioners’ money, like Elbit Systems, the Israeli defense contractor. Elbit manufactures 85% of the drones used by the IDF to drop missiles on schools, hospitals and densely populated apartment complexes, to shoot children in the head, to play recordings of crying babies and screaming women to lure and target humanitarian responders, and to tightly surveil every square foot of Gaza. Lander proudly referenced his office’s investments in Elbit to refute claims that he had divested NYC’s pension funds from all of Israel. In April of 2024, as the ‘anti-occupation liberal Zionist’ was throwing New York teachers’ money at Elbit Systems (and, ostensibly, solemnly shaking his head in disapproval of Palestinian resistance), the IDF used an Elbit Hermes 450 drone to launch several missiles against three clearly marked World Central Kitchen vehicles travelling across a route approved by the Israeli army, killing seven aid workers in the process.^[2]

Regardless, when it came to Lander and Aviles, NYC DSA leadership saw fit to quietly allow Mamdani to do what he felt he needed to do, without making a fuss about how their ‘cadre’ rockstar was devaluing and disunifying their democratic endorsement process. When it came to the full slate of DSA-endorsed campaigns for Democratic primaries in New York this past June, a different story played out. Initially, Mamdani had been reluctant to endorse the DSA-backed Congressional and statehouse candidates running against incumbent Democrats. But NYC DSA leadership launched a pressure campaign demanding that Mamdani endorse the full slate, which led to Mamdani and AOC divvying up endorsements among the two of them, so that each member in the DSA-endorsed slate received either Mamdani’s or AOC’s endorsement. This agreement excluded Conrad Blackburn, a DSA-endorsed candidate running for State Assemblyman against incumbent Jordan Wright, the President of Manhattan Young Democrats and the son of Manhattan Democratic Party chair Keith Wright. Picking a fight with local party leadership was too risky for the biggest figures of NYC-DSA, so Blackburn received no endorsement from either Mamdani or AOC. Somehow, some way, despite the ostensible organizational meaninglessness of the ballot line in the U.S., the DSA mayor of NYC found himself shackled to NYC Democratic Party leadership, against the democratic will of the socialist organization of which he is ostensibly a ‘cadre’ member. Blackburn ended up being the one lone unfortunate loss for the DSA in the June 2026 Democratic primaries throughout New York. Still, considering everyone else received some major endorsement and won, this was a damn good night for NYC DSA, especially considering the author’s surprise that the leadership’s pressure campaign on Mamdani happened at all.

See, NYC DSA leadership has always been exceedingly reticent to criticize any aspect of Mamdani’s governance (or any DSA-endorsed elected official, given that many on the NYC DSA Steering Committee are employees of these elected officials). In fact, in the wake of Mamdani’s victory, NYC DSA passed a resolution calling to deprioritize criticism of Mamdani so that the org could focus on supporting his ‘affordability agenda’. Over the months, NYC DSA leadership generally held to this ‘focus’, until Mamdani’s refusal to endorse the whole slate. That’s when the leadership sprang into action, calling on hundreds of members to sign an open letter telling Mamdani: you need these people in office to keep your promises, and your voice can help get them there. And they were right! After all, between capital and the cops, there are many power centers that pressure Mamdani to govern as a reactionary, and the remedy for this must include leftist electeds across federal and state-level legislative chambers providing pressure in the opposite direction. If any error in Mamdani’s governance arises out of his need for more people in his corner, it becomes more imperative that Mamdani do everything in his power to help those people get there in the first place. On this, NYC DSA leadership and I agree: endorsements from popular voices clearly do play a role in ideologically disciplining representatives of the Democratic Party & shifting the potential of what those representatives can accomplish.

What the NYC DSA leadership fails to consider is why this pressure campaign had to exist in the first place. Did Mamdani not realize that he’d have an easier time passing bills and getting things done if the whole DSA-endorsed slate won their primaries? Did he not realize what impact his voice would have on them winning their primaries? Why did Mamdani have to see a pressure campaign from his own organization in order to endorse everyone that they endorsed? Even then, why did he have to ‘split’ the endorsements with AOC; why didn’t they just endorse everyone together? Why was Blackburn excluded from this agreement? Why didn’t Mamdani give Aviles the same fighting chance against Lander in NY-10 that he himself won against Lander in the mayoral race? Why does Mamdani endorse Kathy Hochul, and what does that have to do with the historic rapidity with which he’s plugged up the city’s $12-billion fiscal hole? Between Mamdani and AOC, how many times will the most popular ‘socialists-in-office’ pull up the ladder behind them where they need to be bringing people in on their coattails?

At the end of the day, popular leftist electeds are often reluctant to endorse challengers to Democrat incumbents because they are reliant on working with many of those incumbents in order to whip votes, pass budgets, and earn committee appointments. Even if these leftist electeds had won on a separate ballot line, many of these pressures to engage in vote-trading and compromise coalitions with incumbent Democrats would still exist. But they would have to manifest differently: primary endorsements would be out of the question. Obviously, if you are representing a certain party on the ballot, you will endorse representatives of that party in subsequent elections wherever possible. If a leftist elected on the DSA’s ballot line rejected a candidate endorsed by the DSA Party’s leadership (or if she crosses any other red line, like being a pro-cop fossil fuel fan), she would lose her own endorsement from the DSA Party’s leadership and her access to DSA’s ground game and would thereby probably lose in the next DSA Party primary. Not only would the DSA’s most prominent elected officials not be elected as Democrats and thus unburden themselves from the expectation to endorse (or abstain from endorsing against) other incumbent Democrats, they would have a freer hand to enforce their own ideological discipline in their own party via the use of endorsements.

Because socialists and liberals share a ballot line, compromises between socialists and liberals manifest as socialists participating in the maintenance of the dominant liberal and imperialist ideology of the Democratic Party through the endorsement trade. If they didn’t share ballot lines, compromises between socialists and liberals would manifest as agreements between clearly independent representatives accountable to their own party’s means of ideological discipline: their own party leadership’s endorsements. By running its candidates as Democrats, the DSA avoids criticizing the governance of its electeds, since the pressures of forming a coalition with Democrats cause the DSA to self-censor any criticism of its electeds’ actual governance. But the DSA finds itself in uphill battles trying to get its electeds to just endorse the candidates that have to win for all of them to govern better in the first place. DSA’s discipline of endorsements becomes structurally subordinate to the Democratic Party leadership’s discipline of endorsements insofar as its loudest voices and elected representatives are all Democrats. If the DSA had its own party, that playing field would look much different; electeds endorsing the party’s representatives would come as a natural assumption and a structural expectation of the DSA as a highly capable organization. DSA Party leadership could therefore leverage its own endorsement pressure as its own means of informal ideological discipline far more effectively than it can rely on Democrats in office to do so themselves as junior members of a broader Democratic Party coalition.

Against the Subservience to Spontaneity: The Unique Opportunity at Hand

“Every question runs in a ‘vicious circle’ because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.” — Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

Hopefully, I’ve demonstrated sufficient evidence to prove that ballot lines are ideologically meaningful, and therefore the DSA should ideally have its own. A common refrain, at this point, is to say: okay, you’re right, the Democratic Party is fundamentally a capitalist and imperialist party; its leadership possesses informal levers of discipline to ensure that a sufficient majority of its representatives remain that way, and for even the remaining insurgent stragglers not to change that math through aggressive endorsements. Still, it is said, we have no choice but to contest Democratic primaries. Every prior attempt at building third-party institutions has failed to produce lasting results; even DSA’s own attempts haven’t netted any success (such as when Jabari Brisport ran on the Green Party ticket in 2018 and lost, before winning as a Democrat in 2020). The underlying material conditions are simply not there for a party break. US voters are still generally more right-wing than European voters; the US suffers from a structurally unfair Electoral College, an inherently obstructionist Senate, and a gerrymandered House. Beyond all of that, the United States has first-past-the-post elections, where the winner takes all and parties that don’t get the most votes get nothing, and this is even if these third parties can get past the US’s uniquely restrictive ballot access laws in the first place. Since there are so many hurdles to building a successful third party, and many more opportunities for agents of reaction to tilt the playing field back to the duopoly’s favor, there are not many benefits that await any forthcoming break with the Democrats. There is only the risk - the risk that we form a third party which is far more principally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist than the Democratic Party, but practically useless, as it earns no votes, no victories, no members, and no connection to the working class masses. If we test purity on our very ballot line, there is only the risk that we throw away every victory we’ve built on this path by splitting all of our power away. For now, all we can do is meet the masses where they are and contest the playing field set up by the duopoly. The goal is to help engender the material conditions to one day split from the capitalist and imperialist Democrats by agitating for socialism through Democratic Party primaries. After all, even many of those principled radicals who would scoff at this convenient-sounding strategy were themselves radicalized by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign within the Democratic Party, no? As counterintuitive as it seems, by working to get more Bernies elected through Democratic Party primaries, we can shine a light on the agreed futility of working within the Democratic Party and radicalize more and more people against it, until one day there is a critical mass sufficient to split from the party. But this day is not yet here, and so we must soldier on, building pyrrhic ‘victory’ after agitational ‘victory’ after strategically accelerationist ‘victory’ within the Democratic Party primary system.

I appreciate this argument far more than I appreciate the other one about the U.S. not having real parties. There’s a lot of truth within it, but there’s also a lot that it misses. Firstly, yes, many existing anti-entryists were themselves radicalized by Democratic Party campaigns like Sanders’s or Mamdani’s. But Sanders 2016 was ten years ago. If running agitational Democratic Party primaries was at all conducive to breaking from the Democratic Party, we should have seen some progress on that front by now. Instead, the growing American socialist movement only seems more and more reliant on running on the Democratic Party ballot. The problem with this argument is that it leaves the readiness of the party split to the spontaneous, objective ‘material conditions’, rather than the influence of our own organized, subjective political work. We run in Democratic primaries, people get radicalized when that inevitably fails, something unprecedented happens, and then the new party emerges from this underlying shift in the groundswell of ‘material conditions’. In this scenario, socialist organizers’ tactics follow the process of shifting popular opinion. As such, it is assumed that party formations and the organization of their social bases will emerge spontaneously from the radicalization of the masses, and that the subjectivity of political leadership to split from the Democrats is constrained until this spontaneous self-organization occurs. But political parties have to be founded and led. Even if the ‘material conditions’ are already ready for a party split, socialist leadership won’t know it until they do it. If the party’s current lack of existence motivates the assessment that you aren’t ready for a split (because of the ‘material conditions’), then there will never be a split, and the party will never exist.

Care still must be taken to determine when you actually are ready for a split, because it is also true that purity-splitting leads to powerlessness. By preferring unimpeachable ideals to the arenas where the masses can be actively engaged, you isolate yourself from any possible social base which could enforce said ideals. But overeager compromise also leads to powerlessness through its ensuing self-censorship. If you are confident that your unimpeachable ideals are currently incapable of winning solid majorities among the working class, but you really want to ally yourself with whoever is ideologically close enough and can win solid majorities among the working class, then you will naturally self-censor your differences in order to work alongside them, even if those differences sometimes include things that actually can be accomplished. This self-censorship will lead to a different type of powerlessness in achieving certain goals because you will be incapable of even acknowledging their existence.

Consider the aforementioned tendency for NYC DSA leadership to shy from fair criticism of Mamdani’s governance. Besides the pressure campaign to endorse the full DSA slate, NYC DSA leadership has only once expressed disapproval of Mamdani’s governance. In late May, Commissioner Tisch announced an increase of 580 police officers to staff a new command in the majority-Black and brown borough of the Bronx, breaking Mamdani’s oft-repeated campaign promise of freezing NYPD headcounts. This promise was itself a compromise, as NYC DSA leadership has consistently demanded at least major cuts to the NYPD’s gargantuan budgets since 2020. So when Mamdani humiliated himself on The Brian Lehrer Show by arguing that while you might think that the NYPD maintains a racist carceral state totally unaccountable to the citizens it abuses and kidnaps, he “was informed” that the Bronx actually needs 600 more cops for “ongoing training”, even the NYC DSA co-chairs had to publicly implore Mamdani to explore alternatives. Eventually, Mamdani reversed course, and the city’s budget passed with the same NYPD headcount as last year’s budget, proving that the NYC DSA leadership can pressure the mayor if it chooses to do so. But this saga was the culmination of several instances of Mamdani breaking or stalling on key campaign promises and NYC DSA leadership responding by sitting on their hands and whistling into the air to the sweet, dulcet tunes of ‘affordability’.

For example, NYC DSA leadership doesn’t make a peep as Mamdani walks back his pledge to dismantle the racist NYPD ‘gang database’, a campaign promise that can be kept with a simple stroke of his pen. Mamdani refused to endorse the No More 24 Bill in City Council (which would abolish 24-hour shifts for domestic aid workers) despite promising to support it on the campaign trail, and NYC DSA leadership still doesn’t make a peep.^[3] Mamdani directed the NYPD to conduct sweeps of homeless encampments over the winter despite promising to stop the practice on the campaign trail. While the NYPD destroyed what little possessions these people had, NYC DSA leadership did make a peep: co-chair Gustavo Gordillo humiliated himself on the Brian Lehrer Show by publicly defending the sweeps. Mamdani also hasn’t indicated any real interest in his campaign promise to empower NYC’s civilian review board to hold abusive police officers to account, probably because this will be impossible to accomplish while Mamdani keeps Zionist billionaire-faildaughter Jessica Tisch as his NYPD commissioner. But NYC DSA leadership doesn’t make a peep about either of those decisions.

Mamdani’s response to the use of NYC synagogues to host auctions of stolen land in the West Bank constituted a microcosm of both his own betrayals & NYC DSA’s reluctance to criticize him. Following a protest outside such an auction, City Council tried and failed to pass a bill mandating 100-ft barriers around synagogues to protect parishioners’ right to host illegal land sales unimpeached by the horrific threat of protests occurring in too close proximity. The bill passed, but only after it was watered down from a buffer zone mandate (that likely wouldn’t have survived a First Amendment legal challenge) to a simpler demand that the NYPD simply document whatever their current chosen practices are. This watering down ostensibly should have been a win for Mamdani and NYC DSA, except that Commissioner Tisch saw City Council’s inability to mandate 100-ft buffer zones and riposted with her own 300-ft buffer zone outside the Park Ave Synagogue as it hosted its own West Bank settlement auction. Mamdani defended Tisch’s decision as protecting the right to ‘safely enter or exit any house of worship’,^[4] and NYC DSA leadership didn’t make a peep. Mamdani refuses to disband the Strategic Response Group (SRG), the NYPD unit primarily responsible for assaulting and harassing demonstrators at these protests (another campaign promise that can be kept with the stroke of a pen), and still NYC DSA leadership doesn’t make a peep.

Surrounding all of this is the unaddressed elephant-in-the-room of Not On Our Dime (NOOD), the NY State Assembly bill which would strip non-profit status from all institutions funding illegal land sales in the West Bank. Mamdani not only promised to agitate for this bill during his mayoral campaign,^[5] he himself also introduced it as a State Assemblyman in 2023. Had he expressed a genuine sense of urgency around this crucial bill with a singular ounce of his powerful voice, perhaps more people in the Palestine solidarity movement would be willing to forgive the Buffer Zone Zohran for his aforementioned Tischgressions (he’s shrewdly avoiding a potential police riot, an unwinnable political battle, so on and so forth). Instead, he’s generally been silent about NOOD since taking office in January of 2026. When State Assemblywoman Diana Moreno (who currently occupies the seat Zohran sat in) held a press conference to reintroduce the bill for the 2026 session, Mamdani elected to sit it out, instead contributing only a vaguely supportive quote that furtively recognized his own role in initially introducing the bill in 2023. The bill died in committee before it could be held for a vote in the 2026 legislative session, the same fate that befell it in the 2023 session before its chief sponsor became the mayor & attained his bully pulpit. Perhaps Mamdani may see fit to pursue the bill more aggressively in the 2027 session, perhaps not; either way, it clearly is not enough of a priority for NYC DSA leadership to pressure him on at all.

Each and every instance of NYC DSA leadership’s silence in the face of Mamdani’s betrayals is precisely a case of the organization self-censoring the difference between its democratically determined policy goals and its popular leadership’s political strategy. This self-censorship leads to a loss of power in every area where the organization cannot articulate or agitate for popular goals that are incompatible with current electeds’ stratagem, because it inherently strips you of any independent political identity necessary to call power your own. If every time an endorsed elected does something bad, you simply stop yourself from saying that something bad has happened, then you really have no political expression that exists independently of that endorsed elected, nor any means for agitating that bad things should not happen when your endorsed elected does them. The whole point of attaining power is to wield it for certain goals, beliefs, or social bases, or to defer to representatives that can credibly wield power on behalf of those goals. If your chosen representative cannot credibly wield power on behalf of your chosen goals, if you have no means of clearly enforcing an imperative on your representatives, and if you cannot even publicly express what those goals are or why your chosen representative isn’t meeting them, then you haven’t really won or wielded any power at all. You are simply cheering for a team. At best, you’ve attached your own social status & sense of accomplishment to the endorsed official of your choosing, like a craven guppy or a careerist plankton, but you still really don’t have any power in terms of an organization with the democratic agency to pursue political ends. Since self-censorship dissolves your independent political identity and leverage, it renders you powerless by destroying the very notion of a political ‘you’. ‘You’ becomes simply a stenographer for another leader’s decisions, so there is no subjective ‘you’ to wield any power in the first place.

So opportunistic compromise leads to self-censorship, which leads to powerlessness, but overly ambitious purity-splitting leads to irrelevance, which also leads to powerlessness. Where does that leave us with regard to the Democratic Party? Does running in Democratic Party primaries (with all the ideological discipline that brings) count as an example of excessively opportunistic compromise, which engenders the sort of self-censorship we currently see in NYC DSA leadership? Or would breaking from the Democratic Party now be a clear example of purity splitting into irrelevance, thanks to the broader context of first-past-the-post voting and the entrenched duopoly? In which direction should we steer to be less powerless?

Here, I find it critical to analyze recent shifts in the global electoral terrain to determine the readiness of a break in the US. The UK had its own century-old entrenched duopoly, also reinforced by its own first-past-the-post voting system. Much like in the US, both the Labor and the Tories have spent years upon years trading wildly unpopular administration for wildly unpopular administration. And, recently, this broke the duopoly in the UK. Jeremy Corbyn and his merry band of regrettably incompetent misfits may have bloody well cocked up their historic opportunity at party building, and yet, still, mass hatred of the duopoly has driven two-thirds of the British electorate out of the hands of the duopoly and into other parties, like the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, or the Reform Party. The unprecedented shift in UK voting behavior should completely recontextualize the realm of possibility in our unprecedented times here in the US. The Republican Party has never been more openly fascistic, corrupt, and brutal; the Democratic Party has never been more stubbornly feckless, shameless, and cowardly. The hated duopoly of our slowly decaying empire is aware that they are simply the unpopular janitors of a mismanaged imperial decline, which is why they are simply looting the coffers before their plummeting poll numbers start to matter more and more. Meanwhile, the DSA is growing. Unlike the often rough period between 2019 and 2023, the org is winning more races, tougher races, higher-profile races, and its growing numbers seem like they’re here to stay. The DSA has federal and state-level representatives across New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, and even Nebraska. The organization now has a veritable political machine in the country’s largest city, with an unimpeachable beachhead in the ‘Commie Corridor’. It can summon an ever-growing army of canvassers, phonebankers, and poll site monitors across the country. From the outside looking in, ideological fellow travelers around the world tend to agree - we are ready. Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis sat down to have a chat with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and told him, “What you need to do is to emulate what Bernie did, but with the intention of stepping out [of the Democratic Party].” Around the same time, the DSA International Committee held a meeting with leadership from the Mexican social-democratic party Morena. Morena itself was formed when its popular leader split from his unpopular, neoliberalizing party in 2012. At first, Morena only won a handful of local seats, and had a more negative reputation nationwide due to the perception that Morena had only splintered the Mexican left. By 2018, Morena had won the Presidency. When they sat down with DSA IC in 2025, they still had it, and their first question for DSA was: “When will you break from the Democratic Party?” When are we going to do to the Democratic Party what they had done to the Party of Democratic Revolution?

These people aren’t belligerent, voluntarist, anti-electoralist sectarian idealists, demanding that the US left split into ultraleft irrelevance. They are center-left social democrats with storied histories of electoral success. Nor are they illiterate idiots who simply can not fathom the oft-explained exceptions and oddities of the US’s unique party system. They know that Mexican and Greek political systems are wildly different from the American political system. And yet, when American socialists gave them the whole spiel about the US not having ‘real’ political parties with mechanisms of formal discipline, they replied, “uh huh, uh huh; so when are you going to break with the Democrats?” They are aware of all of the oddities of the US’s electoral terrain, and they are also aware of how to win their own electoral power. And they think we are ready.

Ultimately, I agree with this core point made by those reluctant to split: political leadership can only start a successful third party when the material conditions show that the masses are ready to join it. But that time is now. DSA can endorse local and state-level candidates on an independent ballot line in exceedingly fertile terrain throughout the ‘Commie Corridor’, and many would likely win. We could try doing entryism into the Green Party, or the Working Families Party. This is inherently easier than doing Dem entryism due to their party apparatuses & leadership being far weaker and far less capable of exerting any discipline, and DSA could easily and immediately take over these smaller parties if it chose to do so. Or, we could also try running candidates on our own new ballot line. We’d have to find clever workarounds to restrictive ballot access laws. Maybe we can endorse a candidate, petition to get her on the ballot as a formal ‘independent’ (which is typically easier than getting a formal party line on the ballot), but generally refer to her across all literature and advertising as the party representative. Regardless, the ballot line has to be outside of the duopoly, which is inherently beyond our control. We could patiently build successively larger and more high-profile victories on this ballot line, perhaps even as we simultaneously continue to endorse Democrats among electorates less amenable to our party (a ‘dirty break’). This way, we actually engender the material conditions for a full split with the Democrats by starting to actually split with the Democrats. Over time, we could build loud enough voices within our party that the weight of their endorsement would carry its own ideological discipline totally independent of any influence from Democratic Party leadership. At this point, popular voices within the party would endorse others to victory, and some of those coming in on their coattails would soon become their own popular voices within the party. The party would thus have its own self-sustaining credibility among the masses and a disciplinary apparatus mediated electorally through the judicious use of endorsement pressure. It would have proven that it is possible to break the hated American duopoly and to truly stand for something while doing so.

If we want DSA to be a truly national and programmatically unified organization, and if we want the organization to have a single, democratically chosen voice in its agitation, then regardless of the program or the cause of agitation, we need an independent ballot line for an independent discipline. Otherwise, there will be no means to enforce any kind of program or focus of agitation. For the first time in decades, we have an opportunity to pursue such a split. The only question is: when will we seize it?

1. ‘Electoral entryism’ is defined here to be distinct from ‘formal party entryism’. The former involves winning primary elections to represent the party as an elected representative of the U.S. government; the latter involves overtaking formal deliberative bodies that manage the party’s resources, such as local party chairmanships or the DNCC. The last time DSA tried the latter was in Nevada in 2019, and it didn’t work out well.

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2. One wonders which is worse: to deny a genocide that you are materially and politically supporting, or to accept that a genocide is occurring, but still materially support the defense manufacturers that implement it anyway?

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3. The Groundwork caucus, a notable ‘DSA right’ caucus with many leadership seats on the NYC DSA Steering Committee, actually put out an official article accusing NM24 of being an opportunistic campaign led by a bad-faith liberal on the City Council, before whining about toxic Tweets poisoning the discourse. https://www.groundworkdsa.com/building-up/no-more-24-discourse-in-nyc-dsa

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4. If I start going to Shia mosques and teaching adherents how to make DIY suicide drones to send to Hezbollah, will Mamdani protect my sacred right to safely ‘enter and exit’ houses of worship, unperturbed by either protest or FBI arrest? After all, that would be infinitely more defensible than hosting land sales for stolen homes in the West Bank, as the suicide drones are only ever used to defend Lebanon from Israeli invasion.

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5. Yours truly canvassed for Mamdani in the heavily Arab neighborhoods of Bay Ridge with Arab language literature that actually promoted Mamdani’s support for Not On Our Dime before it promoted his usual landmark campaign promise of freezing the rents.

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