The DSA Traded Its Soul for Ideology

How a democratic socialist movement once defined by its defense of Jewish self-determination became captured by the very antisemitism its founders fought.

In October 1975, when the United Nations passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism, Michael Harrington, the theorist and national voice of America's democratic socialist movement, was furious. "If one preposterously charges that Zionism is racism," he wrote, "then so are all nationalisms which joined to condemn it at the U.N. And that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning."

Harrington had spent the prior eight years as an unwavering ally of Israel. When Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran in 1967, threatening to strangle Israel's economy, Harrington moved against the blockade. During the Six-Day War and then the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he rallied socialists to Israel's cause. He spent his credibility on a single proposition: Israel was a democracy surrounded by autocratic states that had sworn its destruction, and any person claiming to believe in self-determination had to defend its right to exist.

His closest colleague, Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader and national co-chair of the Socialist Party of America, had a more direct formulation. "Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction," Rustin declared, "those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel's existence." In 1970, Rustin organized a bipartisan campaign to supply Israel with fighter jets. In 1976, he traveled to San Francisco to speak at a Zionist Organization of America dinner. A decade later, when Jewish students at Case Western University faced antisemitic attacks, he flew to Cleveland at his own expense to stand with them.

These were not sentimental gestures. Harrington and Rustin were socialists who believed in national self-determination for oppressed peoples. The Jewish people had been oppressed for two millennia. A Jewish state, they argued, was the only mechanism by which Jews could exercise the right that socialism itself promised. To deny that right to Jews alone was to hollow out socialism's core principle.

By 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, had made opposition to Israel among its central tenets. In the weeks after October 7, DSA leaders nationwide blamed Israel for Hamas' massacre. They described Israel as an "apartheid state." The moral collapse was complete.

What happened in between is a case study in how ideology corrupts institutions from within.

Three forces converged in the mid-2010s to erase what Harrington and Rustin had built. The first was demographic. At its founding in 1982, the DSA had 5,000 members. By 2016, it had 25,000. The Bernie Sanders campaign doubled the membership in two years. By 2021, the group reported nearly 95,000 members. These new members, mostly in their twenties and thirties, were seventy years removed from the Holocaust. They had no memory of Israel as a struggling nation fighting for survival. They had no institutional memory at all.

The second force was the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Beginning around 2014, BDS spread rapidly through American universities. It did something that previous anti-Israel movements had not done so effectively: it packaged Israel opposition as a moral imperative. BDS equated Israeli treatment of Palestinians with apartheid South Africa. This was not a geopolitical argument. It was a moral absolute. At the DSA convention in August 2017, the organization passed a resolution declaring "solidarity with Palestinian civil society's nonviolent struggle against apartheid, colonialism and military occupation." Longtime socialists, disturbed by the shift, left the organization. The new members embraced BDS as a badge of progressive authenticity.

The third force was more insidious: the doctrines of intersectionality and decolonization. These frameworks, gaining traction in universities at the same time as BDS, systematically linked opposition to Israel with opposition to all hierarchies and colonial structures. In this schema, one cannot oppose racism against African Americans without opposing what intersectionality describes as Israel's racism against Palestinians. One cannot be a "true progressive" without fighting Israel's supposed racism. Opposition to Israel became not a position but a requirement of moral coherence.

These three forces did not emerge from democratic socialist principle. They were imported from the universities, packaged by activists, and absorbed by an organization with no institutional memory to resist them. The DSA did not debate whether socialism required defending Jewish self-determination. It never had to. The debate was over before it began.

The result is the organization we see today. Since October 7, even Dissent magazine, the leading voice of democratic socialism since the 1950s, has followed the DSA line in blaming Israel. Joshua Leifer and Gabriel Winant, both Dissent editorial board members, published pieces in the magazine arguing that Israel bears responsibility for Hamas' actions. Winant questioned whether dead Israelis should be publicly grieved, describing Israeli "grief" as an ideological machine that serves to justify aggression.

This is not disagreement. This is the abandonment of foundational principles. Harrington and Rustin did not lose an argument. They were erased by an organization that no longer remembers what it stands for.

In Ignazio Silone's 1936 novel Bread and Wine, the protagonist Don Paolo struggles with theories learned in university classrooms that bear no relation to the actual lives of the people he encounters. To serve others, he must break free from ideology and see reality as it is. The DSA has moved in the opposite direction. It has bound itself to ideology so completely that it cannot see Jews except through an ideological lens that renders them guilty by definition.

Since October 7, something else has begun. Jewish liberals in California who spent years turning a blind eye to antisemitism on the left have started to wake up. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, liberal Jews who once sympathized with progressive causes are alarmed by "Death to Israel" and "From the River to the Sea" at marches organized by the DSA. They are listening now. They see who is speaking, and they are making a choice.

The DSA will not recover its principles through debate or internal reform. It would need to break free from intersectionality and BDS, the ideologies that now define it. Until its members understand that Harrington was right, that national self-determination must apply to all peoples or none at all, it will remain what it has become: a vehicle for antisemitism dressed in the language of social justice.

Bernick's original essay, "America's Democratic Socialists Loved Israel," appeared in Tablet Magazine on October 24, 2023. It chronicles the moral history the DSA has forgotten.

Source: Michael Bernick, "America's Democratic Socialists Loved Israel," Tablet Magazine, October 24, 2023