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Rob Natelson

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Rob Natelson

The Extremism—And Irrelevancy—of the ‘Democratic Socialists’

History shows that feeding the viper is not only misleading but also irresponsible.

This essay first appeared in the September 12, 2026 Epoch Times.

This column may provide you with all you need to know about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This is the fringe group that the media and a relatively small handful of voters have turned into a supposedly significant force.

This column makes two points. The first is that the DSA is an extremist organization. It is not “democratic socialist” in the fashion of the British Labour Party or the German Social Democrats. When pundits label the DSA as communist, they are not far off the mark.

The second point is that the legacy media have covered this tiny group to a grossly disproportionate extent, while leaving far more significant conservative and libertarian organizations in the shadows. As explained below, this is not the first time the media have acted this way.

 

The DSA’s Extremism

According to the DSA website, it rejects authoritarian forms of socialism. Yet the same website celebrates the career of Fidel Castro, the brutal communist dictator who converted Cuba from a prosperous and rather mild dictatorship into a poverty-stricken concentration camp. If you know nothing more about DSA other than its celebration of Castro’s career, that may be sufficient.

Consistent with the celebration of Castro is that the DSA’s website features sound bites from the writings of Karl Marx and from past communist propaganda campaigns. Examples include “World to win” (from Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto), “international struggle,” “socialist solidarity,” “working class,” and so forth.

Moreover, it is apparent from the DSA website that the organization has no commitment to truth. It falsely accuses Israel of genocide, but nowhere acknowledges the genuine attempts at genocide by anti-Israel groups like Hamas. The website does, however, absurdly charge Secretary of State Marco Rubio with “genocide” because he supports an embargo on Cuba.

Clearly, DSA sees words and concepts as mere political tools.

Similar deception surrounds DSA’s promotion of “democracy.” Israel has an overwhelmingly Jewish majority, nearly all of whom, along with local Druze, Christians, and some Arabs, support the State of Israel. “Palestinians”—a word that refers to those Arabs living in the area—represent only about 21 percent of the Israeli population.
Yet DSA calls for the complete “dismantling” of Israel and its replacement with a “Palestinian” state. This would privilege the will of some fraction of the 21 percent over the desires of everyone else. Is that democracy?
Of course, the abolition of Israel would be more than anti-democratic. It also would be unjust: Jews have only their ancestral homeland, while Arabs have conquered and colonized territories from Iraq to Morocco and beyond.

DSA’s domestic political positions include granting the vote to incarcerated criminals. They also include abolishing the Senate and rendering the executive subordinate to the House of Representatives.

Even more alarming, DSA would subordinate the formerly independent judiciary to the legislative power. In other words, it would eradicate both the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.

This raises the question of how a DSA candidate, even if he wins a general election, can qualify for political office. Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution specifies that all federal and state legislators and officers “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” For a DSA member to take such an oath would be perjury.

DSA not only opposes the Constitution. It seems to oppose the United States itself. It would defund the military and abolish all border controls.
DSA’s economic positions envision a society in which there would be little, if any, role for free enterprise. A key goal is “the end of capitalism,” a phrase that suggests that no private enterprise would be permitted at all.
In DSA’s world, “Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.” So DSA would apparently collectivize farms, socialize medicine, and expropriate businesses—all schemes that have proven disastrous wherever tried.

DSA says that food, education, energy, and so forth are “human rights.” Unfortunately, when a government labels a product a “human right,” it must enslave disfavored people to provide the product to favored people.

In the same category of authoritarianism is DSA’s support for the “Green New Deal.” President Donald Trump once said that the Green New Deal program reads like a bad high school term paper. I agree. But for reasons I have outlined elsewhere, it also reads a lot like fascism.
The DSA’s Insignificance

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) won her first Democratic Party primary in 2018, she garnered a total of less than 17,000 votes. In Denver this year, Melat Kiros did somewhat better, winning her congressional primary with a total of 58,000 votes. On the basis of such anemic results, The New York Times, Time Magazine, National Public Radio, Politico, and other legacy outlets made both of them national celebrities.

As an electoral matter, this kind of media attention makes no sense. AOC’s tally amounted to slightly more than one-10,000th of the 154 million votes cast in the 2026 election. In 2000, I won three times as many votes as AOC—and nearly as many as Kiros—when losing a gubernatorial primary in a low-population state.

Another way to put the DSA into perspective is to examine membership numbers. The group claims 120,000 members. The Libertarian Party, by contrast, has 700,000 registered voters, and that’s counting only the 31 states that permit party registration. If all states permitted party registration, the Libertarian count certainly would be much higher. And yet the Libertarian Party receives almost no attention from the legacy media.

There are 45 million to 48 million registered Democrats in the United States and nearly 40 million registered Republicans. Add those to the 700,000 registered Libertarians, and you find that DSA’s membership nationally amounts to somewhat over one-tenth of 1 percent of those registered voters in the three largest parties who reside in only 31 states.
In other words, in electoral terms, DSA is insignificant. No wonder the liberal Brookings Institute recently concluded that “The DSA’s success this summer appears overstated, given its modest win rate and deep-blue base.”

The Media Have Done This Before

The media’s perverse interest in the insignificant has arisen before. Here’s one example:

During the Vietnam War, the largest student political organization in the United States was the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). It had perhaps 80,000 members at a time when the U.S. population was only 60 percent of what it is today. Thus, on a per capita basis, YAF’s membership, although limited to young people, exceeded that of DSA, which is open to all ages.

YAF was conservative and supported the U.S. commitment to Vietnam.

The largest youth organization on the left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), espoused socialism and opposed our commitment in Vietnam.

SDS was only half the size of YAF, but the media lionized it while largely ignoring YAF. This is shown by a Newspapers.com search for the years 1965–1975, roughly the period of the Vietnam War. In American newspapers, the abbreviation “YAF” appeared 24,000 times. By contrast, the abbreviation “SDS” appeared 2.1 million times—an astounding imbalance of 875-to-1 in favor of the smaller, left-wing group.
This sort of bias does not arise by accident. The reason appears to be that mainstreaming a fringe group on the far left, while ignoring larger organizations on the right, helps shift the national discussion to the left. In other words, the media were moving the Overton Window—the universe of acceptable options—to portside.

A Warning

The mainstreaming of DSA serves the agenda of the legacy media that is feeding the viper for their own purposes.

But history shows that feeding the viper is not only misleading but also irresponsible. One reason Adoph Hitler rose to power was that certain establishment figures treated him and his Nazi Party as within the respectable range of options, rather than doing what they should have done: isolate them both.

It is time for the media to stop perseverating on DSA and instead focus on movements more responsible, more significant, and more worthy of public attention.