Looking Back on Seven DSA Conventions

Thoughts on DSA's 2025 National Convention and how far the organization has come.

Last week, I returned from my seventh national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America. This past week I joined my friend and fellow delegate Chris Maisano on the podcast Left on Red, hosted by NYC-DSA comrades Susan Kang and Stylianos Karolidis. We talked about the main takeaways from the convention and the big debates in the organization today. Chris and I also took a short trip down memory lane to 2015, when we returned from that year’s DSA convention excited about the potential Bernie Sanders’s campaign had to revive the organization. Chris and I hosted a meeting in our living room in Brooklyn where a group of about a dozen comrades decided to refound the New York City chapter of DSA, which had been nonexistent for years.

You can check out the full interview and my thoughts on the convention above (if you prefer Apple for podcasts, that link is here). I won’t summarize it here. But I thought it would be fun to tack on a couple of short reflections on DSA’s other six national conventions that I’ve attended since 2013, since they provide a series of short but revealing snapshots of the organization at different stages of its growth:

2013 in Emeryville, California: Tom Hayden is the keynote speaker, he reminds us all that the future lies in the long struggle to reform the Democratic Party. There are no more than 120 delegates, and that represents virtually the entire active membership of the organization. A meeting of the youth wing of the organization brings together about a dozen people — and that’s everyone under fifty.

2015 in Bolivar, Pennsylvania: My comrades and I lose the fight to pull DSA out of the Socialist International. Also, DSA gets banned for life from an Orthodox Christian retreat center because one comrade tried too aggressively to convince a nun to become an atheist.

2017 in Chicago, Illinois: DSA is back. There are hundreds of delegates, the first seriously competitive national leadership election in a decade at least, and a mostly new slate of fresh faces is elected to lead the organization. It’s not clear where this new DSA is going, but it has real energy again. DSA leaves the Socialist International, endorses the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and makes electoral action a much more central part of its project.

2019 in Atlanta, Georgia: A heated convention. Two years of factional battles are mostly resolved with the defeat of DSA’s “horizontalist” and localist tendency. The various caucuses that made the argument for a stronger national organization prevail. Members are preparing for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign; DSA embraces the “rank-and-file strategy” as its labor orientation. This is the first convention where most of DSA’s largest and longest-lasting caucuses (Bread & Roses, Socialist Majority Caucus, Red Star, North Star) all made appearances.

2021 virtual convention: By far the worst convention I ever “attended.” The in-person event canceled because of the pandemic, hundreds of delegates attempt to do democracy online, with very underwhelming results. I remember very little about this event.

2023 in Chicago, Illinois: My memory of the post-2021 convention period is one of an organization that was relatively dormant nationally, beset by more internal fighting than before, and less productive. The 2023 convention is a useful reset, and I think DSA starts to rebound after this. Most important is the creation of full-time cochair positions, which eventually replaced the unelected national director position as the key leaders of DSA.