DSA Grows, Weighs Who’s An Ally

by Paul Bass

Núñez Garcia Tuesday at WNHH FM. Paul Bass Photo

Democratic Socialists of America call for higher taxes on millionaires. Josh Elliott is running for governor calling for higher taxes on millionaires.

DSA is backing candidates running for office in Connecticut this year. Josh Elliott is not among them.

Therein lies a central question about a fast-growing force in American politics: How do you hold fast to principles when major party candidates increasingly embrace them? How much if at all do you compromise in order to build alliances and govern?

DSA is in the fortunate position of facing that question. Since DSA member Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York’s mayor last year, the organization has grown to an estimated 130,000 members nationally. Candidates it backs have been racking up surprise victories against incumbents and establishment-backed candidates in primaries this year from New York to  D.C. to Colorado. DSA-backed candidates or candidates running on DSA issues like Medicare for All and opposition to Israel are surging in other campaigns, forcing an organizational reckoning about its identity and the size of its “tent.”

Here in Connecticut, DSA membership has risen to 1,300, according to steering committee member Julio Núñez Garcia. The party is backing state legislative candidates like Justin Farmer in New Haven and Maryam Khan in Hartford.

And it is not backing Josh Elliott’s Democratic primary challenge against Gov. Ned Lamont, or for that matter a challenge to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (the latter because it did not see a viable path to victory).

Núñez Garcia, a 29-year-old organizer from Farmington, was asked about the process of deciding which candidates to back during a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.

He noted that Elliott does not identify himself as a democratic socialist. The idea of building a worker-focused democratic socialist movement involves not just advancing policy positions but also keeping public officials “accountable,” he argued.

“Josh Elliott is a very interesting case because I think it makes a case for what separates democratic socialism from an organization that’s simply looking to latch on to a populist wave and disenchantment with establishment politics,” said Núñez Garcia, who arrived at the studio straight from returning from a national DSA summit in Chicago. “Elliott is looking to run an outsiders campaign as an insider. Josh Elliott is at his heart not a democratic socialist. He isn’t pushing hard enough for working-class people for us to justify endorsing him.

“Our politics is not just about backing people that are popular and backing people that speak to the issues … but building power and being accountable to more than just yourself, being accountable to a movement.”

Núñez Garcia offered a similar take on  left-wing Michigan U.S. Senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has surged while sticking to DSA-adjacent positions on Israel/Palestine and health care.

El-Sayed identifies as a capitalist — which is why Núñez Garcia doesn’t support his campaign, either, despite the fact that he “loves” his campaign: “He separated himself from DSA and calls himself a capitalist, right? To me, speaks to a willingness to compromise and speaks to an unwillingness to deeply tackle the fundamental problems.”

Núñez Garcia got involved in state politics the same way Josh Elliott did — through Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential primary campaign. Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, does not belong to DSA.

Núñez Garcia has since soured on Sanders and isn’t sure he’s ready to support a presidential bid by democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Bernie Sanders gave me hope that maybe there was some ground to be had in the electoral sphere, but as things have progressed, my politics have progressed, especially when it comes to the issue of Palestinian liberation, Bernie Sanders has disappointed me. AOC as well. In our organization there is the question around: Should we back a candidate like AOC for president? And overwhelmingly, I think our organization has said no. What we want to do is we want to make sure that somebody not just identifies as a democratic socialist, but governs through democratic socialism.”

Núñez Garcia was asked how Sanders’ resolutions to withdraw U.S. funding for Israel factors in the question.

“Bernie put in the proposal to stop funding Israel, but I think that if you really analyze Bernie Sanders’ politics, at the end of the day, he is a liberal Zionist. And what do I mean by that? That he still believes in the project of building a state of Israel.

“Back last year we passed a resolution that made anti-Zionism a core value within our organization,” he replied. He added that Ocasio-Cortez has not been “strong enough against funding, for example, the Iron Dome. … When it comes to standing firm on opposition to a genocide in Palestine, that is one of the red lines that shows whether or not a politician is truly serious about their values.”

One long-running debate among democratic socialists has centered around whether it makes more sense to support a third party rather than work within the Democratic Party. Núñez Garcia argued that given that “we exist in a two-party duopoly,” it makes the most sense to organize the Democratic base to prevail in steering the party to a more progressive agenda. 

Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with CT DSA Steering Committee member Julio Núñez Garcia.Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.