For a movement that talks incessantly about diversity, the Democratic Socialists of America has an awkward problem of its own: it is remarkably white.
According to an internal survey obtained by City & State New York, 60% of respondents in the New York City chapter of the DSA identified as white. Some 63% of the chapter’s 15,600 members completed the optional survey, so this was hardly a small sample.
These results are difficult to square with the organization’s own rhetoric.
In official NYC-DSA materials, the organization has repeatedly spoken of building and organizing a “multiracial working class.”
But if nearly three out of every five respondents to its own membership survey identify as white, just how representative of that multiracial working class is the DSA itself?
New York City itself is extraordinarily diverse.
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According to the Census Bureau, just 33.8% of New Yorkers identify as white alone, and 31% as non-Hispanic white. The DSA survey allowed respondents to choose more than one racial or ethnic identity, so the categories are not directly comparable. Even allowing for that difference, the numbers are hard to ignore.
The DSA has made race, representation, and “equity” central to its politics. If a corporation, university, or conservative organization in New York were to have a membership that looked so different from the city it claimed to represent, one suspects the DSA would have quite a lot to say about it.
And it is not only conservatives who have noticed.
Last month, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, a black Democrat, entered an online debate over the DSA and its relationship with black and Latino communities by posting: “White supremacy comes in all forms.” He then invoked Malcolm X’s famous warning about white liberals.
Malcolm X compared conservatives to wolves, whose hostility was obvious, while describing white liberals as foxes who concealed their intentions behind a friendly smile. He argued that the latter could therefore be even more dangerous because they claimed to be allies while seeking to manipulate those they purported to help.
Richards was making a serious accusation: that a largely white socialist movement claiming to speak for minorities may be guilty of the very paternalism Malcolm X warned about.
That is an extraordinary criticism, and it did not come from the political Right.
But the larger issue goes beyond hypocrisy.
Why does a movement so preoccupied with race and representation have such difficulty attracting the very communities it claims to champion?
The DSA’s own membership data offer a clue.
The organization’s 2021 national member survey painted a revealing picture. More than 80% of members age 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree, while 45% reported household incomes below $60,000.
Those numbers tell a rather different story: a well-educated band of urban activists claiming to speak on behalf of ordinary working people.
Much of the DSA’s rhetoric sounds less like the shop floor than the college campus. Its priorities often reflect the concerns of the activist left rather than those of Americans worried about grocery bills, crime, schools, housing costs, and job security.
Of course, the makeup of the DSA itself is not the same thing as its electoral appeal.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani plainly demonstrated that a socialist candidate can attract support well beyond the organization’s ranks. But voting for a candidate is one thing. Signing on to the DSA’s ideology is another.
And even in heavily Democrat New York, there are clear limits to the DSA’s popularity. A Siena poll released on Aug. 12 found that only 30% of likely New York voters viewed the DSA favorably, while 47% viewed it unfavorably. Among independents, 57% had an unfavorable view.
Nationally, Gallup found last year that just 39% of Americans viewed socialism positively, compared with 57% who viewed it negatively. By contrast, 81% had a positive view of free enterprise.
So, for all its growing political clout, the DSA remains well outside the American mainstream.
The DSA is of course free to advocate whatever policies it chooses, however wrong-headed they might be. But it should stop pretending that its worldview is the natural expression of America’s diverse working class. Its own membership data simply do not bear that out.
Indeed, a movement that constantly demands that everyone else answer for racial disparities should perhaps start by answering for its own.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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