DSA’s Ella Teevan: ‘Socialism has broken containment in the United States’

Building on the momentum won after Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in the New York City mayoral race last year, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won several primaries, defeating establishment Democrats in the lead-up to the United States midterm elections in November. Isaac Nellist was joined by Ella Teevan, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, its highest leadership body, to discuss the midterms, how DSA can build on its successes, and challenging US imperialism and President Donald Trump’s far-right agenda.

What do DSA’s recent wins in the Democratic primaries reveal about the political situation in the US?

It reveals that socialism has broken containment. This is really exciting and I think the shift happened in the past few months. First, Chris Rabb won in Philadelphia in May, and then DSA candidates swept the primaries in New York City in June, before Melat Kiros won in Colorado in July. This showed the public what we already knew in DSA — that socialism can win everywhere. This is a national phenomenon, it is so much bigger than Zohran Mamdani. DSA is being taken seriously as an electoral force both by regular people and establishment parties and media.

It turns out that socialist ideas are popular. We already knew that after the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns: people are looking for an alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans. Especially when Trump is starting so many foreign wars and interventions, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is kidnapping and killing our neighbours and regular people are feeling the crisis of affordability. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is rolling overhead, and they are similarly responsible for the genocide in Gaza and the extreme levels of wealth and income inequality in the US. So, DSA is here and ready to provide not just different ideas, but also organisation and even hope to those people who believe it is possible to live in a different kind of society.

We have a right-wing news network, Fox News, who post clips trying to paint DSA as scary and extreme by talking about our program, Workers Deserve More. They point to things such as healthcare for all, free Palestine, abolish ICE, changing our voting system to be more democratic. Then you will see people in the comments say: “Oh, this is what socialism is? I guess I’m a socialist”, so that’s really exciting to see.

Of course, this new power comes with new attacks on DSA. The centrist think tank Third Way plans to spend US$13 million on opposition research on us. The New York Times is going back to the old stand of running hit pieces about how all DSA does is fight itself. That might play with the affluent liberals who read the NYT, but to me it says the establishment is scared. So, we are doing something right.

To look ahead, we may have up to seven socialists in Congress, eight if you count Sanders in the Senate — he is not technically a DSA member but has done so much to bring people into DSA, starting in 2016. There are so many possibilities with a true socialist bloc in Congress. It is worth nothing that we had “The Squad” in 2018 — made up of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley — which was more of an informal group that largely became known because of how the media framed it.

We are doing something much more intentional this time, and DSA is much bigger and more like a party. DSA plans to work with these socialists in office to advance the demands of our program. It will be important to work out if we want to pass policy, or think we can, given we are still a small bloc. This would have to happen after 2028, if the Democratic Party re-takes Congress and the Presidency. Another option is to play an agitational role, to call out the total inadequacy of the Democratic Party, and bring more people into the socialist movement.

As for labour struggles, the biggest event on the horizon is May Day 2028. A couple of years ago, the United Autoworkers Union leadership proposed that unions align their contracts to all expire on May 1, 2028 and use it to increase workers’ leverage and put a spotlight on labour struggles. To date only a few unions have done this, but there is still a possibility of using May Day 2028 to bring labour struggles to the fore.

Our vision of electoral work is that it supports labour organising and class struggle. DSA electeds from Congress to City Council could play a role in making May Day a huge show of force and a starting point for an eventual new party.

DSA acts like a party in many ways, even though election laws intentionally make it very difficult to get the legal designation. But eventually we will stop running on the Democratic Party ballot line and form a party of our own — a party of working people to oppose the two parties that represent the interests of billionaires and CEOs. We also support moving the US to a system of proportional representation, because right now, the two-party system effectively keeps anyone but the Democrats and Republicans out of power.

We also need to grow DSA dramatically, while maintaining our socialist character, which is a tricky balance. We recently hit 120,000 members, making us the largest socialist organisation in US history in absolute numbers (it is still smaller as a proportion of population than Eugene Debbs’ Socialist Party). So 120,000 is great, but still more marginal than we would like. You can imagine a DSA of 200,000, 500,000 or 1 million dues paying members, all participating in our organisation’s democracy and organising in their local chapters for socialism.

Finally, there is the question of whether DSA endorses a candidate in the 2028 Presidential primary, and if so, which candidate. This is the most hotly contested debate in DSA right now. I cannot say too much, except that we are in the middle of a democratic process to decide that.

What impact could the upcoming midterms have on domestic politics? Could we see DSA and DSA-backed candidates make further gains?

Looking at the 2026 midterms, I think there is a distinct possibility that popular discontent with the Republican Party might sweep the Democratic Party back into power. That might make a few affluent liberals happy, but I do not think that is going to meaningfully change things for people in the US who are suffering from this crisis of affordability or are watching while the US kills people abroad and sends weapons to Israel.

That is why it is really important what our socialists in office do. As I mentioned, it is likely that the seven DSA-endorsed Congressional candidates will win: Tlaib and Donovan McKinney from Michigan; Kiros from Colorado; Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and AOC from New York; and Rabb from Pennsylvania. The role of these socialists will be agitational, rather than trying to pass reforms, at least until 2028.

It is likely that the Democrats will win in 2028, though we do not know, and even so, a milquetoast Democrat in the White House will not fix all of our problems. But having an agitational role can be really good. You can imagine having a staunchly pro-Palestine bloc in Congress for the first time. Of course, they will be under immense pressure to cave to the Israel lobby and forces behind US foreign policy. Some have stronger records on Palestine than others.

You can imagine seven DSA congresspeople all calling together to end US military funding to Israel and end the devastating economic warfare on places such as Cuba and Iran. You can imagine them putting out the same message about Medicare for all, and how the Democratic Party is on the side of healthcare CEOs and not regular people who are filing for bankruptcy or becoming unhoused because of their medical bills.

These socialists in office have the ability to demonstrate to people that another kind of society and government is possible, the way Sanders and Mamdani have done. But it needs to go beyond viral videos and raising expectations — they should be calling for people to join DSA.

There is also potential for material gains, if socialists use our leverage, particularly in the vote over who is going to be speaker of the house (presuming the Democrats take back the house in 2026). The presumptive nominee is Hakeem Jeffries, who is a centrist Democrat. Socialists in Congress could withhold their votes for him unless he agrees to certain conditions, such as supporting Medicare for all or an arms embargo for Israel. We have seen attempts at this in the past. The Squad tried to do this under [US President] Joe Biden, but they squandered a lot of their bargaining power.

So, this time it is important that DSA electeds work closely with DSA’s federal socialists in office committees to coordinate their votes, and then vote no to a speaker candidate if they do not agree to our demands.

How real are Trump’s threats to ignore or overturn the results?

It is hard to say how real they are, but my guess is that Trump will at least rhetorically challenge the results, that is his modus operandi. What we can say is that the Republican Party knows it cannot secure a majority unless a ton of people are blocked from voting, as they are already a minority. And that is what Trump is trying to do.

We should be alarmed at the erosion of our already sclerotic democracy. The Republican’s Save America Act would dramatically restrict who can vote by requiring the kind of documentation at the polls that many voters just do not have. One estimate said that 12% of registered voters do not have the documentation that would be required to vote.

If Trump and his administration try to overturn the results, I am not sure we yet have the popular organisation and muscle to fight back, although I know a lot of the liberal non-profit organisations and NGOs are thinking about this. For instance, a large motivation for the big “No Kings” protests we have seen over the past couple of years is to get people ready to protest if there was an attempt to overturn the results.

Zohran Mamdani win was an important victory for the left, how would you assess his first seven months in office?

Zohran’s first seven months have been largely positive for the socialist movement, but there are a few important caveats that we should not overlook. I should preface this by saying I am not a New Yorker, so I cannot claim to know what it was like to canvas for him or be at his victory party, though I have heard it was electrifying.

The most important aspect of Zohran’s victory is that it has given people a visible example of what socialism and DSA are, which has led directly to socialism breaking containment as we talked about earlier. So many people that we talk to either know and like DSA because they like Zohran, or they do not yet know DSA and we say that Zohran is one of us and they go: “Oh I like him!”

On a related note, a close comrade of mine recently said to me: “I have to tell you Ella, you were right, I was wrong, Zohran has been good for socialism”. Their fear was that Zohran would be under intense attacks from both parties and the mainstream media, and there would be every incentive for him to turn away from principled socialism. And then, when that compromised vision failed to deliver, all the people who were inspired by him would get the impression that socialism cannot actually do anything for them and they would check out of politics or go back to one of the other parties and DSA and socialism would be severely setback.

Luckily, that has not come to pass, and Zohran has been largely committed to representing democratic socialism rhetorically, and to delivering material gains for people, demonstrating that the government can do things to make our lives better, and go after billionaires and tax the rich. He is still vocally pro-Palestine, despite the omnipresence of these bad faith allegations of antisemitism. He said he would like to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to New York. His administration has won US$1.2 billion in state funding for universal childcare, they are building public bathrooms, affordable housing, publicly-owned grocery stores, and the pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million, part of his promise to tax the rich, is currently going forward despite a lot of legal challenges.

There is a question about what it means that Zohran is doing these things “for” New Yorkers, rather than these victories coming out as bottom-up fights that would grow people into socialists, labour militants or organisers. It is going to take a huge amount of popular power to pass his more ambitious plans, such as full, universal free childcare, and it would be a huge missed opportunity if Zohran does not use his significant charisma and communications skills and competency to bring people into DSA or other organisations.

Despite all of these successes, there have been contradictions within the Zohran administration and places where DSA has had to stake out an independent position and even put pressure on his administration. I could get into specifics, but the most important deficiency of his tenure so far has been his hesitance to use his pulpit to go after establishment Democrats, to mobilise supporters in mass struggles to achieve the toughest parts of his agenda, and his use of language around re-aligning the Democratic Party and claiming he is going back to the New Deal era of the Democratic Party. That is not DSA’s policy or outlook on the Democrats, and it is not even really historically honest about the New Deal era.

There was also a moment at the start of his term when he endorsed the sitting governor of New York for re-election at the same time as she was locked in a fight with the city’s nurses union which was on strike. Zohran has been a strong supporter of organised labour in the city, especially delivery and rideshare workers, but the nurses strike incident shows that his attempts to build relations with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party creates tensions with his commitment to socialist politics.

Still, despite these limitations there is no denying what Zohran’s campaign and mayoralty have done to grow DSA and popularise democratic socialism. I never thought when I joined DSA in 2018 that we would have a socialist mayor of New York City and seven DSA electeds in the house.

Trump’s second presidency has featured an expansion of imperialist interventions, how can socialists challenge this war drive?

This is a really big and urgent question. Under Trump we have seen a continuation of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, an expansion of the war into Iran and Lebanon, a far more interventionist approach in Latin America and even a challenging of European and Canadian sovereignty. We also continue to see bipartisan sabre rattling towards China, in the context of a new “Cold War” of sorts.

Defeating the US war machine is not only a key task of the US left and the workers movement, but it has super majority support among regular people in the US. It is a major contradiction in US politics — there is a fundamental disconnect between popular opinion and government action when it comes to imperialism and government intervention.

This is in part because the power over foreign policy is concentrated in our imperial presidency, which means it is insulated from popular pressure. It is also in part due to the huge power of the arms industry, military contractors, surveillance technology companies, mercenary groups, the so-called foreign policy blob and the Israel lobby. Finally, the disconnect reflects the fundamental democratic deficit in US politics, which is maintained by the two-party system, the huge role of money in politics, our totally undemocratic Senate and congresses multi-decade long unwillingness to take responsibility for war powers.

DSA has mobilised in the streets in response to Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan and Cuban sovereignty, as well as against the illegal and immoral war on Iran. Our strongest anti-imperialist work has been against the genocide in Palestine. Our greatest successes have been in the student movement, the labour movement and in electoral politics.

On campuses, our youth and student wing Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) played an essential role in the pro-Palestine encampment movement a couple of years ago. Encampments at schools with strong YDSA chapters were able to build far greater power and were some of the few universities across the US that won substantial gains.

For instance, at San Francisco State University (SFSU), students won divestment of their university's endowment from weapons manufacturing companies, including Caterpillar, Palantir and Lockheed Martin and established a human rights clause in SFSU’s investment policy to ensure they no longer invest in these companies profiting from war and human rights violations. In another example, at the University of Oregon, students won scholarships and visa sponsorships for students escaping from Gaza, and a framework to investigate and move towards divestment and a student-controlled cultural centre for Middle Eastern students.

Looking at the labour movement, DSA is building a campaign called Labour for an Arms Embargo, which is focused on supporting DSA members in unions to organise with their co-workers and pass resolutions in their unions supporting a total arms embargo against Israel, and to activate union members against the genocide and use the political influence of unions against corporate politicians. During the height of the genocide, DSA members helped pass resolutions through a slew of unions throughout the US in support of a ceasefire.

Finally, DSA has been able to channel the pro-Palestine movement's energy and sentiment into major electoral wins. We are certainly not the first to work on Palestine, there are longstanding movements in support of Palestine around the country, but seeing someone like Zohran get elected on a pro-Palestine platform is relatively new.

In all five of our new congressional wins, support for an arms embargo on Israel and a commitment to fight for a free Palestine were defining issues that helped our candidates win. This overturns the narrative that you cannot win if you are pro-Palestine or that the Israel lobby money will defeat you. This upcoming congressional session will have more people championing Palestine who will continue to raise the issue on a national scale.

Is there a unified view on anti-imperialism within DSA?

Within DSA there are major debates about how we should approach our anti-imperialist work. There is a large tendency of DSA members, and on the US and international left more broadly, who feel that it is not our place to criticise governments or parties that are victims of US imperialism or who self-identify as left-wing or who are the US’s inter-imperialist rivals. At best, they call this criticism a form of Western chauvinism and distraction, and at their most extreme say that criticising these governments advances the cause of US imperialism.

I am a member of an internal tendency of DSA called Bread and Roses (B&R). We, along with various other tendencies, reject this notion. We do not find it contradictory to say that we oppose US imperialist attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, while recognising that their systems of government are not what we envision within a democratic socialism. Similarly, we do not find it contradictory to oppose the US’ war on Iran, while supporting the Iranian people in their domestic struggle for democracy, women’s liberation and secular government. We also think it is quite possible to reject US warmongering on Russia and China while recognising the two as imperialist and revanchist authoritarian powers that we should loudly oppose.

When we talk to regular people about democratic socialism, we need to be able to say that the world we envision is not this repressive, authoritarian society of China or Venezuela, or what they have in their mind about the Soviet Union, but one of expansive democracy and freedom. More than that, if we make political support for governments targeted by US imperialism a litmus test for joining anti-imperialist struggles, we restrict the ability to grow our movement to the size and power it is going to take to end US imperialism.

So, the fundamental tasks of the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement are to grow our student and labour movements in size, power and militancy; win over the labour movement to anti-imperialist politics; elect more anti-imperialists into government; and struggle to make our society more democratic, through getting money out of politics and establishing proportional representation, so we can begin to translate what are supermajoritarian positions in US society into actual changes in public policy.

Trump is a figurehead for the global far right, which has seen a resurgence in recent years. What is behind this rise of the far right? Can socialists provide an alternative?

In his campaigns, in 2016 in particular, Trump did offer working people something, or at least he appeared to. He acknowledged their suffering was real rather than dismissing it like the Democrats did. Regular people are struggling to get by these days. There is a reason why Trump and Mamdani both talk about affordability, although obviously with different explanations and proscriptions for it.

Meanwhile, especially in the Biden era, all of these Democratic pundits were saying that the economy was really strong. When I listen to the Financial Times podcast to hear what the capitalists are saying to each other this is what I hear. They were using this cringey term in the Biden era, the “Vibes Session”, to say that there was a gap between the strength of the economy and people’s perception of it, in other words that regular people’s struggles were all in their head. So, it is no wonder that people were turned off by that.

But the far-right’s explanation for why people are suffering involves scapegoating the most vulnerable, most often immigrants, but also these days, trans people. They claim that there is a competition for resources and that immigrants are taking them away from the people who “deserve” the resources.

Of course, under capitalism we do live in a competition for resources, but it is between the working class and the ruling class — and the working class has been getting less and less for the past 50 years with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. That meant union busting, tax cuts, deregulation, bringing everything under market control and defunding public services.

This is especially pronounced in the US where we have seen waves of gutting the welfare state and the ability of the government to actually do something for people. It happened in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and then most recently when Trump got re-elected. He slashed funding for everything from food aid, to research, to education, to library and museum services — I work in libraries so that is a personal one for me. But even the European social democracies that had strong labour parties in the 20th century have been moving to privatise social services over the past few decades, leaving people's lives much more threadbare. Of course you see this in Australia too.

In the ’90s there was the claim that we had reached the “end of history” and that we had reached this enlightened liberalism, or perhaps neoliberalism, and that social and economic relations were just going to stay that way forever. Of course, they did not. Neoliberalism and the market just stripped more and more of people's lives away, and it created this opening for the far right to say: “Look, you don’t have enough, but if we just take your share back from immigrants you can have the life that your parents or grandparents had”.

Can socialism provide an alternative? I think so. The reason socialism can provide a real alternative is that we as socialists also have an explanation for why people do not have enough and feel so powerless in their own lives. But the explanation that we offer is not punching down, but punching up. Who is hoarding all the resources? Who is making all the decisions that shape everything from how we get to work, to how many hours we work, to what kind of books we read, to just how underfunded our kids' schools are? It is the capitalist class.

In my experience, people are really feeling the anti-billionaire sentiment right now, regardless of who they have voted for in the past, or even if they have been tuned out of politics. Someone in my life, who grew up working class and voted for Trump three times, recently told me they are a socialist and thinks that our society should be run totally differently. That means there are real stakes for what DSA and our electeds do publicly, because for so many people it will be their first exposure to whether socialists can change their material conditions and offer them some power in their lives.

Are ecosocialist ideas gaining traction on the left in the US? How can socialists challenge Trump’s push to undo climate protections and relate to the immense challenge of the ecological crisis more generally?

I do not know if I could confidently say that ecosocialist ideas are gaining traction in the US, but I can confidently say that there is a significant ecosocialist current in DSA and the left. I would also say the theory of change behind the DSA’s Ecosocialists [also known as the Green New Deal Campaign Committee] is very strong. Their Theory of Power document says they are going to “win non-reformist or structural reforms that increase public sector capacity”, “build core elements of a party apparatus”, “win class struggle elections” and "prioritise labour solidarity and class struggle as workers”. This gets so much right about ecosocialism.

We have had some inspiring campaigns in various local DSA chapters. In the transit arena, Louisville DSA in Kentucky has been fighting alongside local unions to fully fund the local transit authority. Metro Detroit DSA is campaigning to bring back rail transit and to fully fund its totally underfunded transit system. In Texas, which has had serious climate disasters in the past couple of years, Corpus Christi DSA has been fighting against polluters on various fronts and recently has been opposing a desalination front.

Public power is another huge question for ecosocialism. New York City DSA had a really high profile victory in 2023, when they passed the Build Public Renewables Act, which directs the publicly-owned New York Power Authority to build public wind and solar using union labour to hit 100% decarbonisation of the electric sector by 2040 — a really ambitious goal and a good first step towards something like a Green New Deal. Recently, we have seen a ton of interest in fighting against artificial intelligence data centres, which is at the intersection of ecosocialism and fighting big tech.

I do want to say that some strategies and theories of change on the left have some serious limitations, which we have to reckon with if we are going to build a mass movement that includes lots of regular working people for the climate. I owe a lot of my ideas on this issue to Matt Huber, a fellow DSA member and professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University. I highly recommend his book Climate Change As Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.

To briefly explain, a lot of climate activism follows the values of the professional class. It centres things like science, awareness and knowledge rather than building the organised class power it is going to take to challenge capitalism. In mainstream and even left climate activism, there is a prevalent politics of offering people less, or telling them that when we win the sustainable world they will have to live with less. This can look like degrowth, which is an active debate on the left, or even just telling people that their consumer and lifestyle choices are not climate friendly enough and that their decadent lifestyle in the imperial core is part of the problem.

This is not going to build the organised popular power that we need. Instead, again coming from Huber, we need a planetary working-class solidarity and an anti-austerity climate politics that actually offers working people something. For example, robust public transit (which has been a popular part of Zohran’s campaign), green public housing and cheaper public energy for everybody.

Tragically, in recent years, climate activism is on the wane and the Green New Deal has all but disappeared from popular discourse in the US. It used to be on everyone’s lips, especially with Sanders elevating that demand.Socialists have a special responsibility to fight against fatalism and use this resurgence that we are having to fight for climate demands based on public ownership, public investment into infrastructure, regulating corporations and rapidly decarbonising. This is one of the most exciting possibilities for the new bloc of socialists in Congress.