Democratic Socialism, at least recently, is a growth brand. According to The Nation, between 2016 and 2020 membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) grew from 6,000 to over 90,000. And an article at reformandrevolution.org — the website of a “revolutionary Marxist caucus” of the DSA — claimed that after the 2024 presidential election the DSA experienced “a 5-6 times increase in new recruits.”
The group’s political success also impresses. Nationally prominent politicians such as Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani are formal members. Others, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, self-identify as democratic socialists.
Hoping to understand the brand’s cachet, and how long its growth may last, one night I dropped down the DSA rabbit hole to experience it for myself. Several videos from the 2025 national convention, which took place in Chicago in early August, are available on YouTube.
A roundtable discussion titled “The Left and The Family” first caught my eye. Onstage, four women wearing facemasks led the discussion. They seemed despondent at the state of the US under Trump.
“We are in an extremely reactionary moment. We are in a fascist moment,” one said, before introducing the idea of “family abolition.” There followed some soul-searching about what this term means. The panelists were not against familial relationships per se, but rather against the “white patriarchal” nuclear family as a foundation of society.
The conversation wound between ideas both defensible (“it’s a myth that there is one mother to any of us,”) and absurd (child protective services exist to channel children into prison so they can serve as cheap labor for capitalists). Overall, sentiment favored a future in which interpersonal life will have less to do with family and more to do with the collective.
To me, it didn’t sound like a future to relish. And given the DSA’s meteoric rise to relevance, the room overall seemed to be light on joie de vivre. Had newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani been present, his persistently earnest smile might have leavened the vibe a bit.
Or maybe I just needed something more remedial to help get my head around the DSA mindset. An older video offered a slideshow on basic socialism narrated by the DSA’s national co-chair, Megan Romer. It was candid, enlightening, and reasonably upbeat. My first light-bulb moment came when Romer explained how becoming a socialist is not typically an involved intellectual process.
“Most people become socialist because of one issue,” Romer said. “They usually become socialists because of something they specifically got mad about in the news. That is the primary thing that makes people become a socialist.”
It struck me as odd. I don’t recall anger playing a big role in my support for capitalism, other than maybe learning the plight of independent thinkers in places like the Soviet Union or Maoist China.
Being an economics major in college, there was also an intellectual aspect to my worldview. It formed slowly as I gained insight into the beneficial organizing power of free markets. Capitalism may not create social utopias, but at least it generates the greatest level of economic wealth in human history.
The slideshow continued with an explanation of Marxism. The highlight was a slide with a laid-back-looking Karl Marx in a convertible (something capitalist economies have likely produced far better than communist). “Get in loser,” the caption read; “We’re seizing the means of production.”
From there, the presentation bogged down in industrial-age tropes of leisurely, cigar-chomping capitalists, whom Romer termed “bosses,” and their exploited proletariat workforce. Two centuries after Marx, socialism has trouble reckoning with capitalism’s social mobility and its expansion and empowerment of the middle class.
Though I don’t consider myself a proletarian, I’ve had many bosses in my career, some better than others. But the truth is that most worked longer hours than I did. And almost all had more experience than me. This probably explains why their paychecks were bigger than mine. Socialism, however, is a narrative that needs a cartoonish villain, and the capitalist overlord oppressing underlings provides it.
In the end, I came out of the DSA rabbit hole unswayed to socialism. But maybe winning arguments isn’t the group’s main goal. My second lightbulb moment had come when Romer informed the audience that they should not expect socialism to gain power through a contest of ideas.
“Power only cedes itself to a greater degree of power,” she said. “We win by making conditions so intolerable for the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than continue to live with the disturbance we cause, until we are able to fully seize power ourselves.”
There is an old saying that those who are not communist before age 30 have no heart, and those who are still communist after age 30 have no brain. The heart is not only the seat of affection but of anger, something few people had more of than Karl Marx. From what I saw, modern democratic socialists are carrying his legacy forward with hearts that have moved from anger to a desire for control. In the end, seizing the means of production requires control of not only private businesses, natural resources, and factories, but human bodies and minds. It’s a road many nations have gone down with tragic results. Let’s hope the US isn’t next.