"Now or Never": DSA & Justice Democrats on Changing the Democratic Party, Mamdani, Gaza & More

Guests - Ashik Siddiqueco-chair of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America. - Alexandra Rojasexecutive director of Justice Democrats. As a rose-tinted wave of progressives and democratic socialists win Democratic primaries across the United States, we take a look at two of the organizations behind this recent slate of successful electoral campaigns: the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats. From Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York to Melat Kiros in Colorado to Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., major victories from self-described democratic socialists and DSA-backed candidates show that “socialism is losing its scare factor.” Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the DSA’s National Political Committee, explains that DSA’s “goal is to reframe politics around class lines in the United States, which is what the ruling class has been doing forever. We want to transfer power from the 1% to the working class, and to replace capitalism with socialism, which means expanding democracy in every part of our lives.” By equipping progressives with alternatives to the traditional money streams relied upon by establishment Democrats, like the pro-Israel lobby or Big Tech, DSA and the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats hope to propel genuine advocates for the working class, unbought by corporate funding, into the halls of Congress. “We went into this cycle viewing it as an existential one,” says Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, which recruited candidates like Avila Chevalier and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey. “We see fascism here at our doorstep, and this is a now-or-never moment for our party.” Transcript AMY GOODMAN: While much of the media conversation about the future of the Democratic Party in recent days has centered around Graham Platner, we turn now to what is fueling the progressive insurgency in primaries across the country — not necessarily the candidates themselves, but the platforms and issues they’re championing without apology. These include opposition to military support for Israel, support for universal healthcare and more. The political action committee Justice Democrats has endorsed 15 candidates this cycle in congressional races. Six of them have won their races so far. Dozens of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, have won or advanced in their races. Progressive wins have sent shock waves through the Democratic establishment. Over the past decade, the DSA has grown from about 5,000 members to over 120,000 members in 200 chapters across the United States. And whereas two years ago the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, spent millions of dollars to defeat two outspoken critics of Israel — Missouri’s Congressmember Cori Bush and Congressmember Jamaal Bowman of New York — the Justice Democrats have quickly emerged as a powerful force backing progressive candidates across races nationwide ahead of the midterms. Their victories this cycle come in spite of $35 million in outside spending being spent against all of their candidates. DSA- and Justice Democrats-backed candidates have prevailed in key local and congressional races in Oregon, in California, Colorado, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maine, Washington, D.C., and New York. In Colorado, 29-year-old attorney Melat Kiros unseated 15-term Congressmember Diana DeGette. Here in New York, Afro-Latina organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier beat five-term Congressmember Adriano Espaillat, and New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso to fill the seat long held by Congressmember Nydia Velázquez. In Pennsylvania, progressive legislator Chris Rabb beat out machine candidates to win a congressional primary in Pennsylvania. And in New Jersey, the Justice Democrat-backed surgeon and Army veteran Adam Hamawy won the primary to replace the seat held by Congressmember Bonnie Coleman. For more on the insurgency in the Democratic Party, we’re joined now by two guests. Ashik Siddique is co-chair of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, and Alexandra Rojas is executive director of Justice Democrats. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Before we get into any particular race, Ashik Siddique, I wanted you to define the platforms of the Democratic Socialists of America, how it came to be, and this string of victories across the country, and what this means for the DSA and for the country. ASHIK SIDDIQUE: Thank you so much for having me. So, DSA’s platform starts with the idea that workers deserve more in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We stand for universal healthcare, free college, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the wealthiest people, on the billionaire class. And these things are very popular with working people. We want to redirect massive resources from militarism and things like ICE expanding militarized immigration enforcement. These are things that people don’t want in this country, when so many people are struggling to get by. So, we now have over 120,000 members across the country, and we’re united by a commitment to organizing around the values of a politics and policies that resonate with working-class people in the United States. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ashik, how do you respond to those who say that DSA stands for the greater power and development among the working class, but it’s largely a youth movement and also more middle-class and educated youth? ASHIK SIDDIQUE: The results we’re showing in elections across the country show that we’re not just young, white, college-educated people. It’s not just in New York and Los Angeles, where we’ve had a base for years, but in communities across the country, where we’re winning support nationwide, including in the South and the Midwest. And in states like Georgia, Kentucky and Michigan, we’re electing people. And it’s more than just about electing people. Our members include workers, healthcare workers, electricians, teachers, postal workers, UPS drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, who are organizing in their workplaces to expand democracy in our workplace, along with in elections. And our candidates in office are more and more reflecting that. And the results in places like Washington, D.C., are totally upending that kind of logic. Janeese Lewis George, who just won the Democratic primary for mayor in Washington, D.C., won pretty much every district except the wealthy white districts of homeowners. So, more and more, we’re uniting people across differences of race, of identity, around shared economic goals, around class politics. Our goal is to reframe politics around class lines in the United States, which is what the ruling class has been doing forever. We want to transfer power from the 1% to the working class, and to replace capitalism with socialism, which means expanding democracy in every part of our lives. And that’s how we’re organizing people together. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you describe how DSA works as an organization, how it operates and how it is distinct from the Democratic Party or other traditional parties? ASHIK SIDDIQUE: Yes. So, we’re a member-funded organization, and the member democracy is really important. It’s a core function of how we operate. We’re not just about electing people on good platforms, although the values and principles of our platform are critical to what we expect of people in office, but we’re run by and for members. So, all the people who are joining DSA mostly don’t have backgrounds in formal politics. They got politicized through our lives, through our experiences at work, through our life experience. And that’s what we’re based on. So, most of the work happening in the organization is happening at the local chapter level, where ordinary people are getting together to make decisions about how to organize, and the electoral work is really an outcome of that. It’s an outcome of the work people are already doing in their workplaces to organize unions, to organize tenant unions for power against their landlords, for community issues, for protest movements on the streets. So, people make decisions together about what to spend their time on and what to spend the resources from member dues on. And that’s where we’re able to punch way above our weight, versus organizations that might depend on private funding or just wealthy donors, from nonprofits or very consultant-driven politics. Like, the Democratic Party itself is, more than anything, a massive funding network. Kamala Harris’s campaign for president in 2024 had $1 billion, that was mostly coming from major donors, from corporate and very wealthy individuals. So, DSA’s dues base, coming from just whatever people can afford, basically, month by month or year to year, that allows us to make decisions together about how we organize. AMY GOODMAN: Ashik? ASHIK SIDDIQUE: And we — yeah. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about President Trump’s talking a lot about communism lately. According to Mother Jones magazine, he’s brought up communism at least 80 times in the last two weeks. And it’s — he’s made it clear he’s talking about democratic socialists. This is Trump in the last few weeks. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “We’re social democrats,” they say. They’re not social; they’re communists. They want to destroy our country. We’re not going to let that happen. … Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil. … They haven’t got a chance, not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country. AMY GOODMAN: So, Ashik Siddique, you’re co-chair of the National Political Committee of Democratic Socialists of America. Your response? ASHIK SIDDIQUE: Well, at this point in the United States, socialism is losing its scare factor. We had so many decades of red scares and Cold War propaganda, that set in before most people who are politically active today were even born. I’m in my thirties now, and I fully came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union and all of that. And for us today, socialism is about expanding democracy over all parts of our lives, in elections and in our workplaces, and eventually over how our economy works. So, we really want to revive the history of socialism in the United States, where all the major social and economic gains for ordinary people the past century, things like civil rights, environmental gains, the gains of the New Deal, all of these things were attacked as communist at the time, but they also were won with organized workers, with socialists in the past. Somebody like Martin Luther King Jr., who’s now revered as a religious and civil rights leader, was a democratic socialist himself. He was very concerned about economic rights for everybody. We want to revive the history of the sewer socialists in Milwaukee, who were elected to govern municipally for decades because they expanded the quality of life for so many people and created things like Social Security, which are now taken for granted. So, these are all things that were possible because of the history of socialism in the United States. And that’s a history we’re proud of, and that’s why we’re now very proud to have just passed the historic peak membership of the Socialist Party in 1912, which we actually just hit on the Fourth of July, a few weeks ago, on America’s 250th anniversary. So, there’s a reason I think Trump is scared by this. But so much fearmongering against socialism and communism for decades is really falling flat at this point, when we’re in such an unequal society and people want a better vision of the world. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, into the conversation. Alexandra, welcome to Democracy Now! Could you talk to us about Justice Democrats, how you differ, let’s say, from DSA in your political organizing and your election work? ALEXANDRA ROJAS: Yeah, of course. Well, where I’ll start is where we align, which is we are ruthlessly focused on building power for working people. At Justice Democrats, we are a federal political action committee. We’re a small but mighty team of 10 folks that punch above our weight, that have been doing this for almost 10 years, particularly leveraging congressional federal primaries challenging specifically Democratic incumbents or establishment candidates in these open seats, where the core base of our party are Black, are Brown, are white, are working-class union households, the bedrock of our party are. We believe that, you know, especially with the mandate that our victories have shown, that the Democratic Party establishment has broken absolute trust. We went into this cycle viewing it as an existential one. For decades we have seen the corporate takeover of our country. We see fascism here at our doorstep, and this is a now-or-never moment for our party. We can either choose to be a party that fights like hell for working people, or we can surrender our country to white supremacists and fascists. And so, for us, it is not only about, you know, the platform that we fight for alongside our comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America. It is also about how we do politics differently. And so, what we do at Justice Democrats is we find and recruit working-class people to ascend to our highest levels of power, specifically the House of Representatives, where, combined with the power and expertise of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapters, combined with our expertise now of running up against tens of millions of dollars in these specific type of federal congressional primary races, recruiting, you know, these types of local community candidates, working out to run underdog campaigns with smart budgets, good communication field programs, all of that, we’ve been able to see the power of when our movements mature and come together. And we believe the Democratic voters have answered. This is the primaries, right? We still have to wait to get to the general, and we know and already are seeing what Democratic consultants in the establishment are doing. And the reality is, is these districts are the core of our volunteers, are the core of our voting base, and we have to take what they say seriously, which is they want to abolish ICE, they want Medicare for — they want Medicare for All, they want a Green New Deal, they want to root out the corruption of corporate money in our politics, and they want people to articulate a vision on how we’re going to leave nobody behind. AMY GOODMAN: The Democratic National Committee in May released a post-election autopsy criticizing the failed 2024 presidential campaign. The release of the long-awaited, almost 200-page document followed a monthslong pressure campaign by party activists who protested DNC Chair Ken Martin’s decision to keep the report secret. Martin had said he hoped to prevent a distraction ahead of the midterms. After it was finally released, critics slammed the report as woefully incomplete and unsubstantiated. It makes no mention of President Biden’s decision to seek reelection or how Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee without having to compete in primaries, also makes no reference to the Biden administration’s support for Israel. Alexandra Rojas, I wanted to ask you about the latest facts and figures around Israel. It is really quite astounding. AP just did a poll of, I think it was, over a thousand Jewish Americans, and Zohran Mamdani trumped, if you will, Benjamin Netanyahu. Among the more than a thousand Jewish American voters, Zohran Mamdani had a favorable rating of 44%; Josh Shapiro — right? — in Pennsylvania, 41%; Donald Trump, 29%; Benjamin Netanyahu, 32%. Mamdani was by far the most popular, who proudly ran on a DSA platform. If you can talk about the significance of this? You also have Rahm Emanuel, top aide to President Obama, mayor of Chicago, big supporter, known in the past, of Israel, now giving a speech at the University of Tel Aviv talking about Israel as a pariah state and about the genocide in Gaza. Talk about how the landscape is changing. ALEXANDRA ROJAS: Yes. I mean, we’re in the middle, and we have seen it, a generational shift on Israel and Palestine, not just within the electorate, that has overshadowed this primary scene. And we’ve seen it with the tens of millions of dollars being spent through shell PACs by AIPAC, because they know they can’t win on their issue. We have seen — you know, Zohran has said this: What is the Democratic Party if not its voters? And we can see that there has just been an absolute mandate from coast to coast at this point amongst our core base of electorate that they want to see us hold Israel accountable. They want to see more and more politicians like Zohran Mamdani, not just in New York, but in every part of our country, and refuse to accept a politics of division and hate, and want one of hope and of love, and one where we preach what we say, we root out the corruption of our politics, we get corporate money out of politics, we refuse to work with the genociders of Israel or any country that is committing and violating international human rights law. And we want to see — instead of tens of billions of dollars being sent overseas, we want to see that invested in our working people here at home, and have a politics abroad that is responsible for the death and destruction that we’ve seen the United States cause for decades throughout the entire world. So, this is an absolute watershed moment. You know, it’s not surprising to folks like Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America, who see politicians like Zohran Mamdani that are moving the demands of the movement into actual governing and showing what’s possible. And, you know, we predict that favorability amongst democratic socialism and ending the corruption here in the United States, and obviously abroad, will increasingly become popular as the contradictions are heightened within the Democratic Party, and especially against the other side. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to go back to Ashik Siddique for a moment. You mentioned earlier this, socialists getting elected throughout the country and eventually moving to a transition from capitalism to socialism. I have a hard time trying to understand how the elite of the most powerful capitalist country in the world are going to accept a transition from capitalism to socialism. Can you talk a little bit more about that? If you were successful, what example in the world do you have of capitalists relinquishing their power? ASHIK SIDDIQUE: It can’t happen without a lot of struggle and without having millions of people, eventually a majority of the population, who wants these changes, who wants to make choices democratically about how we run our society and how we control our own lives together and make decisions together, instead of the most powerful people in the world making these choices right now for their own profits. So, it’s not just about electing people on a good platform and then hoping for the best. It’s about organizing our collective power together. And that start — elected office is an important part of that, but even more important for us is organizing people in our workplaces to rebuild the labor movement in the United States, which is the backbone of all of the major movement gains over the past century, all of the major expansions of people’s rights, things like Social Security and Medicare, that were won almost a century ago. But in other countries that got more expansive things, like universal healthcare, it happened with class struggle, and that’s with organized workers, with the majorities of the population. Yeah. So, power is not conceded without struggle, and that means people have to organize in our own interests to win these things. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Alexandra, could you talk about your focus on providing infrastructure for Democratic — for progressive Democratic candidates, how important that is? ALEXANDRA ROJAS: Absolutely. It’s critical. And I think one thing that is important to remember, although these victories have been hard fought over the past year to get here, it’s also been a project, you know, for over 10 years in the making. You know, we specifically work with working-class people to run for Congress, the federal level, which is very different from local and state, and from emotional labor to helping them build out their initial email lists, to recruiting them in concert with local organizations on the ground, to making sure that they have a team of local expertise and folks like ourselves that have experience going up against the tens of millions of dollars that AIPAC, crypto, the AI industry have funneled into our elections. People power beats organized money every single time. And also, we have, as a movement, alongside the Democratic Socialists of America and so many others that I could list at the national and local level, have built infrastructure to be able to support from a field, from a staffing level, but also on the independent expenditure level, where even though we can’t compete with tens of millions of dollars, we can put together, you know, our own set of volunteers, donors and organizers who are willing to throw a punch back and not let our candidates be totally left out to dry, like we saw, unfortunately, last cycle. So, the infrastructure that we’re building to compete against over $35 million in opposition spending this cycle, and obviously even more than that over the history of the organization, really, really matters. It matters in moments like these, where elections are tools for our ability to build class consciousness, public consciousness, and organize our communities, win or lose. But they’re critical to laying the groundwork if we want to see more and more victories like this at every level, local and federal. So, supporting the organizations and the organizers that are deep in this work is critical. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, and Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, speaking to us from North Carolina, Alexandra speaking to us from Connecticut. Coming up, a new BBC investigation into how Instagram is running paid ads promoting child sex abuse in India. It’s called The Careless Machine: Exposing Instagram’s Darkest Secret. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: The great Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso performing in New York years ago. Media Options