The highest minimum wage in the country.
Green energy that cleans our air and lowers our bills.
Protections for tenants from exorbitant rent hikes and evictions.
Universal preschool, free and public for all children, paid for by taxing the rich.
These are just a few of the wildly popular and life-changing policies that members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have, through local grassroots organizing, won for millions of Americans across the country in recent years. And they were largely absent from Vice President Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign.
Yet in recent weeks, many of us are experiencing political deja vu. After a Democratic presidential candidate tacked to the Right, boasted of Republican endorsements, and subsequently lost to former President Donald Trump, the pundits, consultants, and donors behind this strategy are taking to the media to blame "the Left." We are told in OpEd after OpEd and on cable news segments day after day that even our mere association with Democrats repelled voters from candidates we had nothing to do with.
Because none of these pundits, consultants, or donors are organizers, they don't understand what DSA is.
When you join DSA, you become part of a mass organization whose best references are those that fueled the labor and civil rights movements of the 20th century. Whatever your background, you learn not just more about the world of politics, but the skills to become an organizer who can change it for the better.
From electing hundreds of socialists to local, state, and national offices across the country, to passing transformative legislation, from showing up in solidarity with workers on strike against greedy bosses, to organizing massive protests in pursuit of justice, DSA is building a fighting organization.
DSA's goals are laid out in our "Workers Deserve More" platform for 2024-2025—our economic and societal vision for thriving working class communities and universal public services, and a true democracy that works for all of us. And our vision for a just world is the antithesis of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.
Just compare what's on offer on something like health care. On the Right, Project 2025 endangers the future of Medicaid by cutting financing and restricting eligibility in ways that would cause mass suffering. In the center, the Biden-Harris administration has only had tweaks to offer to existing healthcare policy, which does nothing for over 25 million people who still can't get health care. But in DSA, we organize for Medicare for All: free universal healthcare that ensures everyone can get quality treatment.
Too extreme?
How about the dreaded "open borders" that the center and the Right are so afraid of? What does it really mean to have an open border? It means that we believe all people have a right to move freely in hopes of seeking better lives, including Jews fleeing the fascist extermination of the Holocaust; my own family leaving Bangladesh during military dictatorship after a U.S.-enabled genocide in 1971; millions displaced from their homes across the Middle East since 2001 as a result of the U.S. War on Terror; and Mexicans seeking jobs after unfair trade deals like NAFTA decimated their local economies.
As UAW president Shawn Fain has argued, migrants crossing the border are scapegoats for the real threat to the working class: billionaires who profit from a divided labor force.
They accuse us of losing Harris the race with our advocacy for the Palestinians. DSA has been unapologetically organizing for a free Palestine. The fact is that ending the U.S.-funded violence that scholars have widely called a genocide in Gaza is now the majority position of Americans. President Biden's failure to heed the anti-war movement and hold Israel accountable cost his party in a similar way as Lyndon Johnson's did in 1968.
As perhaps the most famous American democratic socialist, Martin Luther King Jr., wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?"
Whether Democrats decide to get behind the kinds of truly life changing programs that motivate ordinary people to get off the couch, or decide to keep running "Republican lite" campaigns for no one, our membership is growing with people who are going to fight for and win what is right. The only thing we won't do is apologize for it.
Ashik Siddique is a co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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