Inside DSA, An All Too Typical Leftist Faction Fight Over AOC
One of the great running jokes in the 1979 comedy Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the absurd factionalism among the revolutionaries fighting Roman rule.
There’s the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front, and the Popular Front (which is just one guy). They supposedly share the same cause, but they reserve their fiercest contempt for one another, denouncing rival factions as “splitters” and even fighting each other when they show up for the same mission.
The joke is simple: They all hate the Romans. They just hate the people who almost completely agree with them even more.
Enter the Democratic Socialists of America.
They certainly hate President Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican Party. But, in the grand tradition of the People’s Front of Judea, they often seem to reserve their most visceral contempt for the Democrats with whom they ostensibly share far more common ground … and for themselves.
We’ve examined this dynamic before, with the DSA excommunicating their biggest success story, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2025, while detractors vandalized her district offices in the Bronx.
And now AOC’s potential 2028 presidential campaign has become the latest front in DSA’s internal wars, as detailed by an Axios report.
Her home chapter, New York City DSA, is broadly supportive of her. But hard-line factions remain deeply hostile. DSA’s Liberation Caucus, which describes itself as “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” has rejected efforts to make her the socialist movement’s 2028 standard-bearer, accusing her of a “consistent pattern of opportunism.”
The fight has spilled into DSA’s endorsement process, with national leadership asserting control over any 2028 presidential endorsement and NYC-DSA leaders accusing it of overturning the organization’s convention—all in a bid to keep any of its factions or chapters from backing AOC.
AOC, meanwhile, has spent years navigating this minefield—at times distancing herself from national DSA and its more radical positions, even as she recently renewed her national membership.
That in itself may not be the smartest political move.
In July, DSA released a “Workers Deserve More” manifesto, envisioning “a day without capitalism” and promising a life without bills or mortgages, or “dreading going back to work” after the weekend. It also called for abolishing the Senate and working toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.”
AOC, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib all declined to tell USA Today whether they supported the platform. AOC has separately rejected the idea of abolishing the Senate and emphasized her affiliation with NYC-DSA when questioned about national DSA’s positions.
That reluctance isn’t hard to understand. Even as many leftist Democrats have moved away from some of the “Woke 1.0” activist politics that damaged the party’s brand, national DSA is doubling down on fringe positions that give Republicans ample ammunition to paint the entire left as soft on crime and wildly out of step with the political mainstream.
Yet DSA also lauds the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as a role model, despite Castro presiding over both a robust prison system and a large military. And he wasn’t shy about using that military abroad either: Cuba sent forces to ideological conflicts in Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Syria, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Liberation Caucus, in rejecting AOC as its standard-bearer, wrote: “Instead of holding their elected accountable, the rightist clique in NYC-DSA leadership has chosen instead to defend and shield her on multiple occasions, even going so far as to hint as splitting away from the national organization when they do not get their way. This is not the behavior of socialist cadres.”
Ah yes. NYC-DSA is the right wing now. The People’s Judea Liberation Front is in the house, y’all.
There is literally nothing more socialist than internal fracturing and windmill-tilting.
We’re not in a book club anymore,” one strategist who works with DSA told Axios. “You could be growing this organization by pointing to AOC, Bernie [Sanders], [Zohran] Mamdani — and instead they are going on cable news talking about abolishing the Senate, Fidel Castro, and other weird stuff. It’s a blown opportunity.”
Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
