At the Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention in Chicago this August, over 1,300 delegates and observers gathered for four days, many wearing keffiyehs draped across their shoulders. The atmosphere reflected a new political mood — and it found expression when delegates passed a resolution affirming anti-Zionism, the first in DSA’s history. On paper, it was just a vote. But in the history of U.S. socialism, this moment was not small. For decades, DSA’s relationship to Zionism has been continuous — going back to Michael Harrington, the organization’s founder, who defended Israel and anchored U.S. socialism to a pro-Israel labor bureaucracy. This resolution marked a break with that tradition.
The DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States, now claiming over 80,000 members (up from 64,000 a year earlier) and projected by some to reach 100,000 amid Trump’s second-term offensive and Zohran Mamdani’s rise. That such an organization formally declared itself against Zionism, while U.S.-funded bombs fell on Gaza, gives the decision a resonance far beyond the convention floor.
But to place this rupture in context, we need to understand why this is a significant turn to the left and a break with the overall politics of the DSA. The DSA is a “big tent” organization, but across its many caucuses the dominant strategy remains reformist and structurally tied to the Democratic Party. Concretely, this means endorsing and campaigning for Democrats and operating inside their party structures, rather than building an independent working-class party. To date, the DSA has backed more than 150 candidates — from city council members to Congresspeople — almost all on the Democratic ballot line. At the 2025 convention, the leadership made this orientation explicit once again, declaring Democratic primaries the main road to “socialism.”
This relationship with the Democratic Party also has consequences for the DSA’s involvement in the labor movement. Many rank-and-file DSA members are deeply committed to taking jobs in strategic industries, organizing their coworkers, and fighting hard for unions; but the leadership of the DSA continues to align itself with the members of the union bureaucracy who remain closely linked to the Democrats, and whose very function is to contain and defuse working-class militancy. For example, during the UAW strike wave, DSA leaders echoed union officials who pushed Biden’s “pro-labor” image instead of pointing out how his administration was trying to contain the strike.
And yet, because of its size and contradictions, the DSA has become an important reference point for a new generation radicalizing against capitalism, war, and oppression. That is the paradox of the DSA: it can be a space where tens of thousands of young people discover radical politics — but also a mechanism that channels their energy back into an imperialist party that is complicit with war and genocide. Nowhere was this contradiction sharper than in the “Bowman Affair.” Back in 2021, after Jamaal Bowman voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome, dozens of local chapters demanded his expulsion. The National Political Committee — DSA’s top leadership body — refused, and went further, disciplining its own BDS Working Group in 2022. Membership declined sharply in the aftermath. In fact, the DSA lost approximately 10,000 members in good standing between October 2021 and March 2022, with 5,536 of those departures occurring in October 2021 alone — during the height of the “Bowman Affair.”
At the 2023 convention, leadership again protected Bowman and blocked a resolution that sought to put class independence on the agenda. The message was clear: DSA would not draw red lines against Zionism or against the Democratic Party. That is why the 2025 vote “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” which passed with 56 percent of the vote, affirming the right of return, Jerusalem as the capital, and support for resistance, was a rupture with the DSA’s historical legacy. The resolution also declared that endorsing Zionist positions such as “Israel has a right to defend itself” could be an expellable offense. Delegates also passed a resolution titled “Labor for an Arms Embargo” with over 80 percent support.
At the same time, the convention showed an organization pulled in two directions — responding to the shifts in consciousness around Palestinian liberation, yet being tethered to a strategy that operates within the limits set by the Democratic Party. For instance, the convention voted down a resolution for a single secular Palestinian state, and turned away from formal alignment with BDS — positions that would have placed DSA too openly against the politics of the Democratic Party. Yet in contradiction, they also passed new rules requiring candidates to support BDS and cut ties with Zionist lobbies — an uneasy compromise that captures both the break and its limits.
The convention may have ended in an uneasy compromise, but one thing is undeniable: Gaza has radicalized an entire generation. The genocidal war after October 7 detonated a wave of anti-imperialist consciousness: hundreds of millions now see U.S. complicity with Israel as intolerable and the genocidal nature of Zionism is now practically common sense around the world. That sentiment extends far beyond the ranks of the DSA.
This anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist sensibility was expressed as early as last year by the “Uncommitted” campaign in the United States. But it is also evident in places like Germany where Die Linke is welcoming a wave of new members questioning imperialism, and in the UK where Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are proposing a new party for the millions of people who have been radicalized by and taken to the streets against Isreal’s Genocide. This proposal for a new party in the UK is particularly momentous since it is the first serious effort in an imperialist country to found a new party, and it has been forged directly through the Palestine movement. The real question is whether these openings can consolidate into lasting points of rupture with imperialism — building something independent and durable — or whether they will be absorbed back into the familiar channels of reformism that aim to contain and redirect radicalization.
A Step Against Zionism, a Leap Deeper into the Democrats
Every rupture carries its shadow. In Chicago, the same convention that declared support for anti-Zionism also codified loyalty to the very party arming Israel. Resolution Seven, “Principles for Party-Building,” reaffirmed DSA’s surrogate strategy, stating outright that an independent ballot line “is not the primary goal or an indication of political independence.” Resolution 18, adopted unanimously, pledged a massive push in the 2026 midterms on the Democratic ballot line and even created a committee to explore a DSA-backed campaign for the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries.
This is no longer inertia about the “dirty break” — which is the term used to describe the DSA’s self-evidently “dirty” decision to stay in the Democratic Party for now and break at some undetermined point in the future. What was once presented as a temporary tactic has now, against the wishes of a minority of the DSA, hardened into a deliberate orientation. Resolution 18 marks a strategic choice to remain within the Democrats through 2028. The contradiction could not be sharper: even as the convention voted to strip Zionism from the organization’s politics, the leadership secured resolutions that bound the DSA more tightly to the very party financing genocide. Today, some sectors of the DSA’s leadership wrap themselves in more radical, anti-imperialist rhetoric than in 2023 — but beneath the new language lies the same reformist strategy: to keep the socialist Left tethered to the Democratic Party, one of the main pillars of imperialism.
This debate over strategy isn’t abstract — it’s unfolding through real campaigns and real figures. Nowhere is that clearer than in the phenomenon of Zohran Mamdani. His mayoral campaign in New York electrified millions. For the first time in decades, a Democrat running for high office said “Free Palestine,” called Israel an apartheid state, and endorsed boycotts against Israel. And crucially, his campaign showed that Palestine is not separate from so-called “bread-and-butter” issues. People rallied to him because his campaign has fused the fight against genocide abroad with the fight against skyrocketing rents, precarity, and exploitation at home. The link is not rhetorical but material: the same state that sends billions to fund Israel’s bombs is the one slashing housing, healthcare, and education; the same ruling class that justifies ethnic cleansing abroad enforces austerity, police violence, and xenophobia at home.
Far from being “too radical,” as prominent DSA leaders like Eric Blanc have claimed, Palestine became the bridge issue as many of the sectors radicalized by the genocide are also among the masses who can barely afford rent. After the convention, Blanc wrote on X: “A central divide within DSA is whether we should be primarily orienting to winning over people to our political right or to our left. This convention has so far chosen the latter, and I think that’s a serious mistake in a country where 99 percent of people are to our right.”
Yet the reality points the opposite way. A Data for Progress poll found that 78 percent of New Yorkers said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, 79 percent supported restricting weapons to Israel, and 63 percent supported arresting Netanyahu if he visited the city. One delegate in Chicago put it clearly: “Zohran shows that Palestine is a winning issue.” The real weakness is not Palestine, but a leadership determined to bury one of the most popular and radicalizing issues in U.S. politics.
The scale of support shows that Palestine is not a liability but a weapon. The problem isn’t the issue itself, but the political framework that seeks to contain it. Mamdani’s campaign concentrates this contradiction: it reveals at once the power of linking Palestine to struggles over rents, precarity, and exploitation, while at the same time revealing the absurdity of running on such a platform within the imperialist Democratic Party. To remain viable inside the party of empire, Mamdani has already begun to moderate his views on Israel and Palestine — signaling to business leaders and party officials like Obama that he would not cross their red lines. His concession that “Israel has the right to exist” was not incidental, but the price of staying within the framework of the Democratic Party’s and the entire ruling class’s political vision for the region. The real test will come in November. If Mamdani adapts further to party red lines, the contradiction between rank-and-file anti-Zionism and Democratic Party discipline will explode into sharper relief.
This is the contradiction of the U.S. Left today. Thousands are radicalizing against genocide and exploitation, but their energy is funneled into campaigns that cannot break free of the Democrats. The Zohran phenomenon makes this clear: it shows the power of linking imperialism abroad with oppression at home, but it also shows the hard ceiling of doing so inside a capitalist, imperialist party. Inevitably, they will hit the wall of the Democrats and will begin to look for answers.
Beyond the Democrats’ Dead End
While the Democratic Party has been the ceiling on radicalization, that ceiling is caving in under the weight of its own crisis. The New York Timeshas had to report on all the ways the party is bleeding support due to its ongoing identification with the neoliberal and imperialist status quo. Palestine has become the sharpest expression of this crisis: it has shattered the Democrats’ claim to represent progressive values while exposing how hollow the DSA’s strategy is of tying its future to a party complicit in genocide. Figures once hailed as insurgents, from Sanders to AOC, have adapted so completely that they now push Palestine protesters out of their rallies and vote against resolutions to stop military aid to Israel.
The same tension was visible at the DSA convention. AOC was rebuked for backing “defensive” weapons to Israel and now faces additional censure from within the DSA even though she was already “unendorsed” by the DSA last year for voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome. Rashida Tlaib, by contrast, delivered the keynote, thundering that “a weapon is a weapon” — a direct rebuke to those who justify arming Israel under any label. Yet even Rashida herself was censured by her own party for opposing Israel’s war. The Democrats discipline their most outspoken members, proving the problem is not individuals but the party itself.
That is why Rashida’s words, however sharp, will remain empty unless we organize independently to stop the bombs and deportations that the Far Right under Trump and Netanyahu only want to double down on. And the basis for this already exists — in the millions who rallied behind Mamdani, the thousands who voted at the DSA convention, and the activists, workers, and students rising up from LA to New York to resist Trump’s attacks.
The anger that filled the encampments, the strikes of recent years, and massive anti-Trump protests on the streets cannot be reduced to another election cycle. It needs forms of power to act now: defense committees to stand against repression and authoritarianism, rank-and-file committees in workplaces that refuse complicity with genocide, neighborhood assemblies that fight evictions and raids. These are not distant dreams. We’ve seen glimpses already — from the struggle to free Mahmoud Khalil, to the rank-and-file assembly that organized a strike at the CCNY encampment, to the neighborhood self-defense of immigrants in LA. The task is to make these flashes into an organized force tying the fight against the latest escalation in Gaza to the struggle to survive rent hikes and repression at home — both confrontations with the same bipartisan regime.
Yet history shows that without a political organization capable of unifying these struggles and orienting them against the state, even the most militant movements are contained so that it never actually threatens capitalist rule. Breaking this cycle means building a party of our own — one that doesn’t just ask the Democrats to listen, but organizes activists to fight. A party of combat rooted in the people who make society run — workers, immigrants, youth — by stopping landlords from driving us out, defending our friends from deportation, and refusing to fuel the bombs falling on Gaza. That means a new kind of party. Not another campaign machine for the Democrats, but a working-class party that fights for socialism, one that refuses to give cover to imperialism in any way, shape or form.
Our generation faces a choice: either our anger props up the party of genocide, or it becomes the force that finally takes U.S. imperialism head-on. The DSA convention shows which way we have the potential to go if the break with Zionism becomes a break with the Democratic Party. The task now is to turn that potential into an organization that doesn’t stop at resolutions and elections but actually fights for us, not for them: against genocide abroad, repression at home, and the bosses that profit from both.