“We’re really working together to make sure there’s comradely debate.”

Coverage of socialism’s resurgence has tended to focus on generational and ideological divides, and the fact that young people are voting in droves for old leftists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Intellectually, the bedrock faith in capitalism as the global economy’s organizing principle has rarely been so shaky. But fledgling activists on the left are as excited to actually practice politics as they are to talk about politics. They want a movement that can organize, that is willing to engage in civil disobedience to stop Trump’s agenda, and that wants to field socialists for elected office. Because it offers the opportunity to do all three, many see DSA as a natural alternative to both Trump and establishment Democrats.

“As a bottom-up democratic organization, our members all want to have a voice in everything that happens. We want to foster that,” said Maria Svart, DSA’s national director. “We’re really working together to make sure there’s comradely debate.”



The result of a 35-year old merger between the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New America Movement (NAM), DSA existed for years in relative obscurity before Bernie Sanders’s 2016 bid for the Democratic nomination as a democratic socialist. Following Hillary Clinton’s concession to Trump in the early hours of November 9, membership shot up almost instantly, earning the group write-ups in publications ranging from Vox to Rolling Stone.

Yet despite DSA’s heightened profile, there were no big-name speakers or cocktail parties aimed at courting big donors at the convention—a near inverse of the Democratic National Convention’s pomp and circumstance last summer. The bulk of the agenda was devoted instead to deciding the group’s leadership, structure, and political priorities. This was accomplished via hours-long, Robert’s Rules-structured discussions between well over 700 elected delegates from around the country, who voted on scores of motions and resolutions drafted in the last months. Punctuating debates were caucus meetings and regional break-outs, plus meetings and parties outside the convention schedule.