DSA Endorses AOC … Again
Jason Thiel
The New York City Democratic Socialists of America have voted to endorse NY Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez yet again, with 86 percent of members voting in favor.
Since being elected in 2018, AOC has betrayed working people over and over.
She helped the Biden/Harris administration break a railroad workers strike by forcing a sellout contract on them. She refused to force the vote on Medicare for All during the vote to elect Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in 2021. She voted against cutting $500 million from military aid to Israel in 2025, abstained from a vote on Iron Dome funding, and voted for a resolution that conflates anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.
AOC also gave a primetime stump speech for Kamala Harris in 2024, claiming that Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.” This was categorically false; the Biden/Harris administration cheerfully bankrolled the genocide in Gaza and would have continued if Harris had won.
The role of AOC and all of the DSA and “progressive” Democrats is to keep the Democratic Party on life support. This is exactly what they did for Harris’ presidential campaign. At the same time that Harris was abandoning trans people and immigrants by supporting Trump’s border wall and saying that we should leave trans rights up to the states, AOC was giving speeches about how the Biden/Harris administration was the most progressive one in history.
That is the main problem with this endorsement. AOC’s record is atrocious, but her biggest crime is keeping workers and the socialist movement chained to the capitalist Democratic Party. If she were to miraculously leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent calling for a new party, then it would be correct to support her as a step towards a working-class party, while making our criticisms clear. But she will never do that, because she has been thoroughly enveloped in the Democratic Party machinery, and her record proves that she is no threat to them. In fact, AOC is a critical tool for laundering the Democrats’ reputation.
At the same time that DSA is re-endorsing AOC, the organization in Seattle voted to shut down even having a debate about endorsing an independent socialist running for Congress, Kshama Sawant. Central Indiana DSA is also refusing to support the Indiana Socialist Party that just launched last month and is running multiple independent socialists.
Part of the reason that the DSA leadership gets away with this is that even the caucuses within DSA that supposedly think we need a new party are not putting up any challenge to the strategy of running Democrat after Democrat. Reform and Revolution, a supposedly Marxist caucus in DSA, didn’t even clearly oppose endorsing AOC! They say in their statement that “any DSA support for AOC must incorporate criticism of her political shortcomings.”
DSA has a hundred thousand members nationwide and could launch a new party tomorrow. Instead, it is acting like the left wing of capitalism. We need to split DSA along the dividing line of whether to break from the Democratic Party. The socialist movement will not gain by keeping a cozy relationship with AOC or any other Democrat. It will be built through class struggle independent of the capitalist parties and mass movements in the millions.