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Why are the Democratic Socialists of America are so successful? | Akin Olla

A lot has been written recently in an effort to understand the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and how we’ve risen to such prominence in a short time.

It is clear that we reflect a growing disillusionment with the Democratic party, and a further radicalization of the American population. But many leftwing social movement organizations, such as Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March, have risen in the last decade or so, and many groups, from MoveOn to the Sunrise Movement, have attempted to absorb large numbers of people, influence the Democratic party and enter the public consciousness with lower levels of success.

It may just be that we happened to be the organization that had the name closest to the ideology of Bernie Sanders, the man arguably most responsible for reintroducing democratic socialism to the popular American lexicon. But name recognition alone can’t explain both our rapid growth and the ability to sustain that growth. Sanders has also talked about the need for a “political revolution” – but his own organization, Our Revolution, is politically irrelevant.

What is missing from the discussion is the DSA’s structure.

Unlike all of the groups I’ve named, it is a thoroughly democratically run organization that allows its members to set its goals, elect its leaders and amend its constitution. None of the other organizations even have constitutions to be altered. Instead, they have corporate bylaws and unelected executive boards to maintain their tax status with the IRS.

While the DSA is primarily operated and funded by its growing membership, the other organizations rely on foundation funding and have a deeper reliance on professional staff. While local chapters of most of these groups have almost no control over the national structure, the DSA functions as a federation in which the national office is beholden to its constituent parts.

The DSA is not succeeding because of a good name. It is growing because it treats its members like adults capable of managing their own affairs and that of the organization, and they reward it with monthly dues and a long commitment that supersedes the natural highs and lows of uprisings.

This idea isn’t new; in fact it is foundational to the success of the American project (well, OK, success is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?). Writing in the early 19th century, the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville described these kinds of membership-driven organizations as the “free schools” of democracy that serve as the bedrock of America’s political system.

They prepare Americans to lead and give them the political vehicles in which they can work with their neighbors to steer the country. This model is dying, but we still see it alive through organizations like the NAACP and the US Student Association, which I was a member of in my youth.

The NAACP is more than a hundred years old and the US Student Association will be 80 next year. While the DSA was created in 1982, it can trace its full history as a faction within larger organizations going back well over a century.

It is doubtful that the conflict-ridden Black Lives Global Network Foundation, the 501(c)3 organization that took the reins of the BLM movement, will survive the decade.

BLM chapters have dissolved, broken away or become relatively dormant across the country. The network helped oversee the largest protest in US history, but it is doubtful that there are more than a handful of chapters functioning in the country. The Minneapolis chapter, arguably its most successful, reconstituted itself as Black Visions, and then sunsetted after years of misalignment and the forcing out of its original leadership.

The Green New Deal-championing Sunrise Movement has fared better, but not by much. It too has faced internal power struggles between leadership, who are paid staff members, and its base.

According to one former member, the organization went from having more than 500 chapters in 2021 to probably fewer than 90 by 2023. It has made efforts to become more democratic but could only muster 700 votes for an internal decision, despite counting more than 80,000 members years prior.

While some of this must be the natural attrition of social movements – the DSA’s membership also ebbs and flows – founders of the Sunrise Movement have publicly recognized the internal conflict built into their model.

And this is why the DSA will continue to succeed where most groups fail. It has clear mechanisms for its membership to change the direction of the organization without engaging in backroom schemes and internal coups. Clashes still happen, but they are facilitated by clear guidelines that allow factions – called caucuses – to vie for power, and leaders have clear term limits.

I joined the US Student Association (USSA) with a desire to learn from it and steal members for my own organization, in the vein of the Québécois student unions. But the USSA was so democratic and full of meaningful deliberation that I realized I could change it from within instead of splintering it.

Over a decade later, I’m a dedicated alumnus who has volunteered dozens of hours out of sheer love for the organization. There is evidence that participating in a thoughtful deliberative process increases satisfaction with the outcomes of a decision and trust of institutions.

I joined the DSA after sitting through one meeting and realizing that my voice actually mattered. I did not need to become a staff member or somehow be appointed to the board of directors. I could make the DSA what I want it to be, while being transformed by it in turn.

I hadn’t experienced that since my days at the USSA’s national student congress. And that is because the new model of social movement organization has long become dominant.

According to the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol, grant-funded, staff-run, low membership participation models became popular in the 1970s. They create an incentive model that I believe is deleterious to long-term social change.

Foundations force organizations to become constant money-chasing machines, applying for annual grant after annual grant, and to adopt a model of centralized control that maximizes efficiency – having tens of thousands of decision-makers can be messy, after all.

This model can still bring in a lot of members, but they tend to be temporary participants, or paper members, like the millions of members of MoveOn, who donate monthly but do little to operate between mobilizations, and have no clear role in determining the future of the organization as a whole.

I supported the development of a new generation of organizations through my work as a trainer with the Momentum Community, but the groups I advised, many of which are named in this article, still suffered from this top-down non-profit model. These groups can absorb thousands of people in moments of public frustration, but they are structurally unable to keep them.

The DSA is growing not only because it reflects frustration over the status quo; it is growing also because it gives people a voice within a vehicle that promises to change that status quo.