Unlike my generation, for whom the overriding issue of the late 1960s was opposition to the war in Vietnam, most of DSA’s new members were attracted to the organization by its proposals for substantial, vital, and above all
realizable domestic reforms (Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, student debt relief, tenants’ rights, etc). As a result, between 2016 and 2020 DSA’s membership expanded from 6,000 to 90,000-plus, while dropping the average age of members from 60-something to 20-something. Scores of new chapters opened up, including many located in cities and states that haven’t seen an active socialist presence since the era of Eugene Debs, if ever. And those young, energetic recruits proved remarkably politically savvy and successful in the field of electoral politics, not only elevating four members to Congress, but also sending nearly 200 others to state legislatures, city councils, and other offices, almost always as Democrats.
All well and good—except for the
return of the entryists. Suddenly, in the eyes of revolutionary purists in a host of small competing sects, DSA was no longer to be sneered at as just a reformist swamp. “Why rob banks?” career criminal Willie Sutton was once allegedly asked by a reporter. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied. The exchange is apocryphal, but substitute warm bodies for cold cash, and it offers a concise explanation for DSA’s sudden attractiveness to sectarian strategists. Unknown numbers—hundreds, perhaps more—started joining in 2016, some of them former members of defunct Marxist-Leninist groups, others (in violation of DSA bylaws) still belonging to and carrying out the agendas of such groups. They proceeded to quarrel and compete among themselves, splitting and recombining under various banners like “Red Star,” “Marxist Unity Group,” and even the “Communist Caucus.” But they remained united in one overarching shared aim—to take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating “the left wing of the possible,” and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.
