DSA Graphic History: Learning From Our Past
If past is prologue, then understanding history is key to understanding the present, charting a course for the future. Raymond Taylor (writer), Noah Van Sciver (illustrator) and Paul Buhle (editor) collaborated on Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History which, in its 24 pages, touches on essential points of DSA’s political evolution. It is particularly relevant as we seek how best to respond to the fascist threat posed by the Trump Administration and emboldened corporate reaction; how we build upon the possibilities afforded by growing mass resistance and an open socialist presence unseen in ages.
Given DSA’s massive growth from its nadir at the start of the new millennium with only a few thousand members to the tens of thousands who have joined since 2015 some people have concluded that it is really a new organization, its past is of little value, an albatross that needs to be sloughed off. DSA is, of course, not the same in 2025 as when founded in 1982; only a moribund organization would remain unchanged over the course of forty plus years. The relevant question is to ask why, amongst all socialist organizations, DSA is the one which has grown so dramatically.
It is a question the Graphic History helps answer. Although constrains of size meant that some areas of DSA’s past received less attention that they should have, those aspects chosen provide a framework to connect the dots between before and now.
Turning Points
Opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, participation in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, support for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2016 are the three movements the Graphic History identifies as laying the basis for DSA’s subsequent growth. Precursors to each – opposition to war and U.S. militarism, grassroots organizing on behalf of economic and social security, independent electoral action primarily through the Democratic Party — show the continuity of “old” and “new” DSA that is too often forgotten.
Iraq: In the face of aggression and injustice, DSA remained steadfast in its commitment to peace, justice and solidarity.
Most of those who founded DSA had been part of the movement against the Vietnam War, a commitment to peace remained central thereafter. One of the first initiatives of DSA’s Youth Section was to organize against selective service registration (which resumed in 1980 after being ended in 1975). DSA members in the 1980s joined local solidarity committees opposed to US funding and arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and the violently repressive governments in El Salvador and Guatemala. DSA unionists challenged AFL-CIO leadership support for U.S. imperial policies in Central America and elsewhere.
By the late 1980s, however, anti-war movements became weaker and new rationalizations for U.S. military actions abroad developed within liberal political circles, academia and the media. With the Cold War ending, there was an attempt to portray U.S. foreign policy as having changed, as being essential to a “rules-based” international order. “Irrational” authoritarian government, by which commentators meant newly independent states in Asia and Africa, especially those majority Arab and/or majority Muslim, were deemed the major threat to world peace (such definitions rested on the false assumption of a supposedly more civilized, democratic “West”).
A test of convictions arrived in 1991 when the first Gulf War was launched after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The invasion and annexation of a neighboring country was clearly illegal and immoral. Most Democratic Party liberals and some former anti-war activists took the position that the U.S. should respond by force of arms. Significant debates took place within DSA as to our position. The result: overwhelming condemnation of the US military invasion. That debate clarified and solidified DSA’s politics, laid the framework for unequivocal opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and for current solidarity with Palestine.
Occupy: Occupy Wall Street erupted as a grassroots protest against the injustices of capitalism. DSA worked alongside organizers, lending support and expertise to help advance the movement’s demand for economic justice and equality.
Occupy began in 2011 as a direct action protest against corporate greed and inequality. DSA, without hesitation, joined in New York and other cities as the spirit of resistance spread. Decentralized, made up of relatively autonomous chapters, DSA had a natural kinship with the movement as a form of organizing reflecting the socialist feminist influence at DSA’s origins.
That was exemplified in the 1990s by DSA’s response to the “feminization of poverty,” itself a consequence of the destruction of jobs and communities by the mass layoffs in the 1970s, intensified by systemic pay inequity between women and men (and further intensified by the even greater wage gap faced by African American and Spanish-speaking women).
Some of this work was national in scope – such as DSA’s opposition to the Clinton Administration’s destruction of existing welfare programs. Most of the work, however, was locally-based mutual support engagement and metropolitan-wide public policy initiatives alongside workshops and forums highlighting the reality of increased poverty women and children faced. DSA unionists backed AFSCME’s campaign for “comparable worth” (i.e. raising the wages of women-dominated occupations to the equivalent of better-paid male-dominated jobs).
DSA chapters organized for low-income housing, rent control, expanded mass transit, public education, low-cost childcare while opposing the burgeoning war on drugs and pro-developer urban budgets/tax policies. The other side of such work was a response to the New Right’s assault on women’s rights. DSA members were active in abortion clinic defense mobilizations to protect patients and staff from “Operation Rescue’s” harassment and violence, supported ACT UP’s protests to change federal policy of neglect/hostility toward victims of AIDS. Similarly, diverse forms of local organizing characterized DSA’s approach to labor solidarity, public health, environmental protection.
Member-initiated campaigns against the array of social and political forms of injustice flowing from inequality anticipated DSA’s embrace of Occupy and its growth in its aftermath.
Sanders: In 2015, DSA’s Run Bernie project helped convince Bernie to run for president. In the modern era, it was the first time people seriously talked about democratic socialism.
DSA had long supported Sanders, including an independent initiative to support his first Senatorial campaign in 2006. As the 2016 presidential election took shape, it became clear that political change was in the wind. Donald Trump, with his demagoguery and racist rhetoric spoke to anger without hope, while Sanders spoke to hope and anger rooted in social solidarity. DSA as the socialist organization whose political perspective most closely mirrored his, benefitted by an upsurge in membership.
DSA had prior experience in supporting that kind of popular insurgency when backing Jesse Jackson’s second presidential campaign in 1988 and developing a close working relationship with the associated Rainbow Coalition.
Some members supported Jackson and the Rainbow during his first campaign in 1984, but DSA did not endorse him. Working within the Democratic Party was initially conceived as building coalitions with mainstream labor, civil rights, women’s, environmental and other social justice organizations. Jackson challenged that by organizing on those same issues from the bottom up with an expansive agenda rather than a least common denominator program. The Rainbow Coalition brought those elements together in an on-going movement beyond election cycles – opposing corporate anti-union, anti-egalitarian policies espoused by the Reagan Administration, a politics mainstream Democrats failed to sufficiently combat.
Some in DSA feared that supporting such a campaign would alienate potential allies, some in DSA were concerned about Jackson not being sufficiently socialist. Jackson’s explicit anti-racism was central to his working-class agenda, a connection which some members believed would weaken a focus on universal economic issues. Moreover, affirmation of Palestinian rights, rejection of anti-Communism as an ideology, and overall challenge to US imperial foreign policy was not supported by all in DSA.
A lengthy and protracted debate ensued concluded by 1986 in a Convention decision to endorse Jackson and make work with the Rainbow a national priority. A full-time organizer was hired to implement the decision. Those politics came to the fore again during Sanders’ presidential runs.
Multiple Voices, Multiple Tendencies
Many left organizations similarly opposed the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq, engaged in community-based organizing and helped spread Occupy, supported Jackson and the Rainbow then supported Sanders. But DSA is the organization which survived fully intact, in position to expand to its current strength. Significantly, debates over the first Gulf War, the Jackson campaigns, or other issues did not lead to splits, to people leaving or being forced out.
Key, as the Graphic History notes, was DSA’s founding based on a shared vision for a multi-tendency left in recognition that programmatic unity could emerge out of disagreement. Members and leaders of DSA at its birth had different world views, political histories, political priorities – the Graphic History mentions Dorothy Healey, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington, Rep. Ron Dellums and Harry Britt as reflective of that diversity. A common program and orientation emerged without any expectation of ideological conformity. That flexibility, however, was based on several principals: support for peace, equality, unionism, democratic participation and accountability.
DSA’s politics developed out of the work of the membership, rather than as a set of prescriptions emerging out of a pre-developed analysis. Working people don’t inherently look at the world through the same lens, activists in unions, churches, community groups, tenant, peace and environmental organizations frequently differ amongst themselves and between each other yet can come to a shared perspective, shared engagement, shared goals. DSA’s commitment to function as a multi-tendency organization mirrors this process. Class consciousness or socialist understanding can’t be imposed; such awareness develops in the context of experience in political/social struggles and education through organization.
Solidarity, at the core of working-class strength, similarly, emerges when discovering points of commonality and building structures that reinforce that understanding. This is always fraught – mutual support is what sustains an ability to overcome the centrifugal forces of class society and systemic forms of racial and gendered oppression.
An organization that encourages different forms of engagement coinciding with different prior experiences and outlooks proved welcoming as it provided room to join others across a wide spectrum of issues and varying levels of commitment. Sustaining that unity lay with recognizing the connection between base-building grass-roots initiatives on one hand with institutional leadership (elected public officials, union officers, leaders of large membership or funded organizations) on the other, without attempting to conflate them. Organizing on the ground creates possibilities otherwise lacking, while organizing through institutions create frameworks within which systemic challenges to power relationships can take shape. The two are interdependent albeit with different impulses.
The Graphic History underscores what this means in practice – images abound on its pages, “Protect Our Schools,” “Power to the Tenants,” “My Body My Choice,” “Youth Autonomy,” “No One is Illegal,” “Trans Rights is Human Rights,” “Planet Before Profits,” “Healthcare not Warfare,” each signifying issues where DSA members are organizing. So too, DSA’s support for Starbucks unionizing and teacher strikes, pro-labor legislative initiatives for one fair wage, union rights and other forms of worker solidarity are highlighted. Those slogans and campaigns speak to our times. Insecurity and uncertainty, debt, precarity, assaults on personal liberty and collective rights, are realities which have given birth to wider streams of political radicalism and form the social base behind DSA’s membership rise.
Activists are motivated by some combination of personal experience, moral outrage, strategic analysis. That often leads to different emphasis or approach as does the community being engaged – outreach in an election campaign or a union organizing drive will differ, so too will work to defund police, to force action on climate change, build solidarity with migrants, stop evictions. Socialists will, or should, seek to bring these together (and bring together those mobilized within each) but that is only possible by recognizing and working to resolve the contradictions that can emerge within them.
The openness to ideas rooted in different streams of political engagement – and rooted in the social base of people impacted by the economic and spiritual crisis of contemporary society – has been the basis of DSA’s electoral successes. The Graphic History highlights three:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whose election in 2020 helped ignite DSA’s growth; her participation in anti-Oligarchy tours with Bernie Sanders has brought the fight against Trump, for environmental justice and economic equality to millions. AOC’s politics are embodied in her Green New Deal Legislation, support for Medicare for all, call to defund ICE.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American women elected to Congress is a powerful advocate for Palestinian lives and opposition to U.S. support for Israeli apartheid. She co-introduced the Breathe Act to divest from discriminatory and brutal policing and reinvest in alternative means to ensure community safety. Tlaib has worked to promote racial justice, immigrant rights, worker rights, full equality for all.
Rep. Cori Bush, a nurse, played a leading role in the protest movement in Ferguson, MO after a police officer wasn’t charged for the murder of an unarmed teenager. Her focus in Congress was on housing justice, healthcare reform, and criminal justice reform – including introducing the People’s Response Act (supported by Black Lives Matter) that would fund an inclusive, health-centered approach to public safety.
Each of them has been subjected to vicious misogynistic and racist attacks, been in conflict with mainstream corporate Democratic leadership; each has combined legislative and community outreach with support of mass mobilizations. Yet differences have emerged amongst them, in particular over how to oppose US military support for Israel (though there are far more points of convergence than divergence). Although those differences have divided DSA members, each retains the strong support of the DSA locals where they live and the support of working-class communities they represent in Congress.
Based on their principled stances and relationship to their constituents both AOC and Tlaib have survived attempts to defeat them and emerged with greater support than ever in their Bronx/Queens, and Detroit home communities.
Cori Bush, despite serving with a militancy long absent in her St. Louis district was defeated in 2024 – the combination of corporate Democratic opposition, right-wing attacks, pro-Israeli money proved decisive. That fit a pattern. For decades, African American elected representatives who refuse to be coopted by establishment politics have been targeted. DSA member India Walton was similarly defeated when Democratic officials joined Republicans to defeat her campaign to become mayor of Buffalo after winning the Democratic primary. So too, Representative Jamal Bowman (criticized by some for his voting record on Israel for reasons similar to criticisms of AOC) lost his reelection bid, facing the same enemies. Bush, Walton, Bowman, have all stood in support of each other.
DSA’s history (and the history of labor and socialism) underscores the importance of supporting DSA identified public figures, notwithstanding disagreements, for transformative politics depends on multiple streams of resistance and advocacy reinforcing each other. Solidarity internally is a sign of class and societal solidarity, each dependent on mutual support and mutual respect across lines of difference. Such questions become of greater importance as the number of DSA members holding public office increase, and as the possibility of winning executive office looms – most promisingly with Zohran Mandami’s mayoral campaign in New York City and Omar Fateh’s in Minneapolis.
From prison abolition to mutual aid, from housing justice to environmental sustainability, immigrant rights, and reproductive justice and DSA’s trans rights and bodily autonomy campaign, DSA members are actively involved in a variety of working groups, each dedicated to advancing socialist principles and building socialism from the ground up.
Moving Forward
Past may be prologue, but the future is unwritten. There is no guarantee that, like other left organizations, DSA won’t split, dwindle in size and influence. That danger is intensified by assaults on democratic and constitutional rights, urban military deployments, ICE raids, union-busting and budgetary policies that will increase inequality and poverty.
Sharp debate on organizational issues at DSA’s Convention this past August revealed cleavages within the membership, while an underlying unity was reflected in near unanimous support for political resolutions. DSA’s divided leadership now faces a challenge – building upon the organization’s roots as a multi-tendency organization or retreat into a sectarian posture by jettisoning presumed “reformist” or “ultra-left” tendencies. DSA’s future depends upon a shared commitment to the organization while sustaining connections to the communities members come from, are part of, are organizing within.
Bearing this in mind, three final thoughts make explicit what is implicit in the Graphic History as needs facing tomorrow.
Alliances: DSA’s strength as a multi-tendency organization lies not only in how we organize ourselves, it lies with how we relate and connect with others around us. Other socialist and left organizations with a different conception of how organize for systemic change have their own validity. So too do larger, broader liberal and progressive organizations and associations, so do unions, tenant associations, churches and a whole panoply of networks and groups all of which form part of the wider world seeking social change.
DSA needs to retain the flexibility to work with the whole range of political organizations – be they liberal be they further left, be they mainstream or on the margins – where it connects with organizational priorities and the work of our diverse membership. That doesn’t mean accepting others positions as our own; programmatic not ideological unity is central in coalition as it is amongst members. Being part of varied alliance – just as being part of varied neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and regions — is how we oppose hatreds which divide, how we build toward a socialism that is democratic in fact, not just word.
Facing Fascism: The fascist threat today is real; it is a threat embodied by Trump but ought not be reduced to him. The transformation of the Republican Party reflects the authoritarian danger within our political culture; as is the rise of openly racist, openly fascistic organizations. So too, Agenda 2025 reflects a long-standing drive of key sections of capital to weaken formal democratic rights to “free” corporations from regulatory limitations, “free” U.S. imperial power from all constraints, “free” capital from worker demands and societal obligations.
This means being cognizant of, and opposed to the anti-unionism, anti-labor aspect of Administration policy – it’s assaults on immigrant workers, on federal workers, on workplace DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs are an opening wedge to an assault on all union rights. It means resisting the intensified racism of “anti-crime” rhetoric and policies, the racism of the celebration of amoral military violence by the Trump Administration – fighting the violence of fascism means opposing the celebration of war and violence abroad of a U.S. foreign policy of long-standing bi-partisan support.
A response needs to tackle the immediate danger posed by the Trump Administration by defending civil liberties and constitutional rights, and the long-term political threat posed by extreme right-wing politics becoming mainstream, and the underlying systemic danger of unmoored financialized capital seeking to impose direct role over existing national and international representative bodies with all who stand similarly opposed notwithstanding fundamental disagreement on program, perspective, goals.
The strength of a socialist organization lies not in enhancing contradictions amongst working people or within broad popular movements, but in organizing to find points of concurrence, to build a broader basis and wider support for structural reforms that challenge the roots of reaction. Rather than pitting one against the other, organizing ought to be conceived as unifying various avenues of resistance and affirmation.
Cohesiveness and Coherence: DSA, as the Graphic History amply demonstrates, has a rich history. Accounts of DSA in its early years often bear little resemblance to what members experienced partly because we wore our public profile lightly – it’s not the least of its virtues that the Graphic History in readable and visually arresting form presents a fuller picture than usually emerges.
DSA’s past struggles are frequently not recalled because a lack of cohesiveness all too often meant that the sum of the parts or our organizing was less than the whole. Cohesiveness is foundational to centralized organizations; the challenge for DSA is to accomplish this while maintaining a heterogenous character. Key is for members to realize that being “correct,” and divided is to undermine the struggle – part of the premise of being “correct,” is the ability to achieve agreement (a truism for an organization internally as it is for social justice organizing). Unity is needed, uniformity is not.
Coherence, in turn, means developing a positive conception of socialism around which to build support for an alternative able to counter Trump’s incoherent patriarchal militarized white nationalism that has built support by touching on deeply felt grievances. Elements of that alternative are already visible in calls for “Abolition Democracy,” a “Third Reconstruction,” the “Green New Deal” which each give shape to a vision of mutuality deeply rooted in our country’s past — yet as something new, something that can engage people in their work, in their sense of the future.
DSA’s vision ought to combine and build upon these as the basis for coherence and convergence of a movement fighting for the political power of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class. The essence of democracy lies in the shared striving for peace, workers rights, equality and freedom.
Even though left-wing organizing has grown, there is a looming threat. The far right has grown. We live in a dangerous time with an uncertain future. But the spirit of socialist struggle is alive and well! The only way forward is through collective struggle and empowering working people. United in the struggle against capitalism and all the oppressions it entails, it is working-class people – you, me, all of us – who today are building the beautiful future we all deserve.
Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History, written by Raymond Tyler, illustrated by Noah Van Sciver, and edited by Paul Buhle was published by DSA Fund, June 2025. All italicized passages are quotes from the (unpaginated) booklet. An on-line copy is available at DSA Political Education. For a print edition, please contact Raymond Taylor at Raymondtylercomics@gmail.com
Kurt Stand was active in the labor movement for over 20 years including as the elected North American Regional Secretary of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers until 1997. He is a member of the Prince George’s County Branch of Metro DC DSA, and periodically writes for the Washington Socialist, Socialist Forum, and other left publications. He serves as a Portside Labor Moderator, and is active within the reentry community of formerly incarcerated people. Kurt Stand lives in Greenbelt, MD.
The Stansbury Forum is a website for discussion by writers, activists and scholars on the topics that Jeff focused his life on: labor, politics, immigration, the environment, and world affairs.
Who is behind The Stansbury Forum?
This site is operated by two friends, Peter Olney and Robert Gumpert, introduced to each other by Jeff Stansbury. We thank the family, Gretzel Stansbury, Kevin Stansbury and Gwendolyn Stansbury for allowing us to run the site in his memory.
Blog writers hold their own copyright. Work is published with their permission. The ideas expressed are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the ideas or beliefs of those operating the site.