My own sense is that there’s more disagreement within the caucuses than those with Manichean views might allow, and that there’s also less disagreement between the central tendencies of the individual caucuses with each other. So, in caricature, Bread and Roses is class-reductionist, and hostile to issues of race, gender, and sexuality. But its platform explicitly addresses these issues as ones that must be confronted explicitly. Fainan Lakha, a member of the tendency, denies the charges, though she insists any conversation about the “identity” issues should be linked to class. You can disagree with their emphasis, and their habit of separating class from the various “oppressions” (for example, race and gender figure pretty heavily in the division of labor and the inheritance of property). But it’s wrong to say they ignore them. And while tendencies like Build, the caucus that is not a caucus, may be caricatured by Bread and Roses types as tainted by the horizontalism bias, in fact members are not opposed to electoral work, even if it isn’t their major passion. The DSA’s forthcoming convention, to be held in Atlanta in August, could clarify these matters. The 2017 gathering was quite contentious, but the organization emerged intact and continued to grow dramatically. We’ll soon see if 2019 sails as smoothly.

So, if taking over the Democratic Party isn’t the long-term strategy, what is? (I should say that some members aren’t convinced there’s much of a long term to think about, because of climate change. Shields told me that explicitly, and in asking around, it became clear that a lot of politicized young people agree.) The Socialist Majority Caucus isn’t all that hot on having a long-term strategy; its interest is largely in piling up concrete victories. But other factions, as well as the unaffiliated, put electoral organizing at the center of their strategy. For some, like the Bread and Roses caucus, the Sanders campaign is seen as doing a lot of work—educating more people about democratic socialism, drawing in new members, and developing DSA’s organizing potential through electioneering, just as it did last time. Sometimes it sounds as if they’re investing Sanders with magical powers, as if he represents a shortcut around a lot of hard organizing. This impression was strongly reinforced in Jacobin’s recent cover package laying out a policy agenda for a Sanders administration—for DSA members mounting local grassroots organizing campaigns, this all-in posture toward Sanders’s candidacy looked like a cult-of-personality in the making.

One promising route for the DSA’s efforts to reach a broader demographic is work with unions—and not just helping out on picket lines, as members did in a recent nurses’ strike. The New York City labor branch is actively encouraging members to get jobs in several targeted industries, like logistics and transportation (where strikes and other actions could seriously disrupt commerce, and thereby build working-class power), health care, education, and municipal government. The idea is both to build DSA and also radicalize the rank and file. Back in the 1970s, groups like the Socialist Workers Party directed members into industrial jobs with similar hopes, but they were mostly in basic industries that were in the early phases of a steep decline. An old Socialist Workers friend who’d been a computer programmer was instructed to get a job at a steel fabrication plant; he didn’t last past lunch on his first day and went back to coding. This time, according to Laura Gabby, a union carpenter and member of the labor branch, DSA wants people “to take jobs they can stay in for the long term”—and the pay will probably be better than what solidarity-minded DSA members would make working for a nonprofit.

Even as such tactical feints toward a majoritarian socialist strategy and messaging campaign struggle to take hold, the right’s long-term strategizing fills me with envy. Going back to the postwar roots of the Goldwater insurgency, the ideologues of the American conservative movement had a clear idea of what kind of society they wanted and how to get there. That kind of rigor and discipline presents problems for the left, which often shies away from ideal models because, as the political scientist Jodi Dean put it, they reek of “dangerous totalizing fantasies that posit an end of history and lead to genocidal adventurism.” And the New Right’s model is profoundly top-down—the opposite of a tendency that dreams of movements rising from the grassroots. Though DSA members frequently speak of collective ownership and control of the economy, none of us—myself included—has a really clear idea of what socialism in the United States would really look like, or how to get there.