Why Older Socialists Are Quitting the DSA

Nearly five decades ago, the organization that would become the Democratic Socialists of America united around core principles, including universal health care, workers’ rights, and support for the social-democratic state of Israel. That group included such left-liberal luminaries as California Representative Ron Dellums, the intellectuals Irving Howe and Cornel West, and future New York Mayor David Dinkins.

The writer and activist Michael Harrington, whose Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee was a precursor to the DSA, declared in 1975: “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.” He added that to “preposterously charge” that Zionism is racism—as the United Nations General Assembly asserted in a resolution that year—“is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.”

For Harrington and his comrades to speak that way in today’s unsubtle times would be inconceivable. DSA leaders, their organization into captivity, the DSA, along with much of the organized left, called for members to flood the streets in protest. The object of their anger was not Hamas but Israel. “DSA is steadfast in expressing our solidarity with Palestine,” the DSA proclaimed on X, formerly Twitter, on the day of the massacre. “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime … Free Palestine.”