Each year, the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) elects new co-chairs, who also serve on the organization’s National Political Committee. During the first weekend of August, as the DSA held its Socialists Summit, YDSA delegates gathered for their National Convention, where they adopted new resolutions, elected a new National Political Committee, and chose James Hernández and Mae Bracelin as the organization’s new co-chairs.
Neither Hernández (who goes by “any/all” pronouns) nor Bracelin, two “femmes” from DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus, are sold on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and would endorse her for president only “conditionally.” Their election reflects a broader pattern within DSA of elevating organizers who embrace increasingly militant tactics and a more confrontational approach to political organizing. Hernández has taken his organizing into international socialist circles, attending an antifascist conference in Brazil and being hosted by Mexican socialist organizations, while Bracelin built her profile through militant student-worker organizing at the University of Oregon. Both are now helping advance a YDSA strategy that looks well beyond campus politics and toward a nationwide general strike in May 2028.
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Hernández’s early activism was largely based around LGBTQ organizing as he volunteered with the National LGBTQ Task Force, was a receptionist for TransCon, and canvassed around Miami as part of the SAVE LGBT team. This work eventually brought him into student leadership at Florida International University, where he served as vice president for the Pride Student Union in 2023. By 2024, he was part of the socialist slate running for student government with YDSA and was part of YDSA’s National Coordinating Committee by fall 2025. Both Hernández and Bracelin were hailed as part of “America’s Next Generation of Socialist Organizers” in a 2026 Jacobin piece.
Despite being a younger member of the DSA, Hernández has been trusted with some of the organization’s most legally sensitive work, including conversations with international leftist political actors. Not only was he present at the Antifascist Conference in Brazil, but he also delivered a presentation to several far-left Mexican political organizations. Also noteworthy, in 2025, Hernández participated in the Cúpula dos Povos, a radical climate-justice summit where Brazil’s eco-socialist Juntos! played a prominent role.
While in Brazil earlier this year, Hernández was particularly candid about the DSA’s internal struggles, explaining how some DSA elected officials had either been purged from or were in the process of being pushed out of the Democratic Party, citing examples from Indiana and Kentucky. He also described Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a “DSA militant” and argued that the DSA, rather than the Democratic Party, held revolutionary potential. Hernández ended on a somewhat ominous note, acknowledging that this kind of organizing required sacrificing “the best years of our youth.”
Not everything about the antifascist conference was particularly open, though much can be gleaned from the guest list. While the alignment was more clearly on the Communist front, the gathering takes on added significance given the Trump administration’s designation of multiple European antifascist groups as foreign terrorist organizations. There is therefore cause for concern when Cem Yoldas, a spokesman for the now-outlawed Jeune Garde Antifasciste, which was ordered dissolved by the French interior minister, was part of the conference’s organizing committee.
Others on the committee included Neville Roy Singham associate Vijay Prashad, who heads Singham’s Tricontinental Institute. Singham and the organizations that he funds have faced growing scrutiny, including congressional demands for records on Tricontinental’s funding and ties to Singham. The conference brought together representatives of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST); the Communist parties of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Portugal; France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party and La France Insoumise; Colombia’s Pacto Histórico and the Polisario Front; among other groups.
Hernández was also a guest of the Mexican organizations Movimiento Socialista del Poder Popular (MSP) and Coordinadora Nacional de Usuarios en Resistencia (CONUR). His remarks largely focused on international labor organizing, preparations for a general strike on May Day 2028, and the role that international coordination could play in such efforts. He argued that “capitalism is a global system, and the United States empire has no limits. Therefore, the workers movement cannot manifest itself in isolation in different countries.” He then posed the question: “Which are the most strategic sectors where your militants can organize? What has the power to paralyze society?”
Once again, Hernández was more candid abroad than DSA leaders typically are in the United States. He argued that Republicans and Democrats are “the two right-wing parties,” and that they “terrorize immigrant people in this country, giving more and more money every year to that project of terror.” According to Hernández, the DSA project boils down to the question: “How does DSA recruit those people [voters] and turn them into militants?”
During the call, Hernández openly embraced political coordination across the hemisphere. “I think it is also important to unite the Americas in general, not just North America, not just the Caribbean, not just South America.” He argued that such coordination would be “very strong.” Hernández’s call to unite across the Americas came in the context of planning for a 2028 general strike and a broader discussion of concrete cross-border coordination, including joint actions, solidarity efforts, and even a proposed meeting in Mexico of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist movements. For Hernández, “You will always have a comrade in the United States, in DSA, in YDSA. We are in the struggle together. We are here for anything.”
Mae Bracelin, on the other hand, appears to have long been animated by labor struggles. Her rise through DSA’s youth wing began almost as soon as she arrived at the University of Oregon in the fall of 2022. There, she became involved with the University of Oregon Undergraduate Student Worker Union, even giving a speech that October at the “Ducks Want More Bucks” University of Oregon Student Workers (UOSW) kickoff. Bracelin encouraged workers to walk out, saying, “If dining hall workers, or clerks, or RAs or Rec center workers walked out today, the University would grind to a halt. This institution can only operate at the consent of its workers and students. Don’t let the rich businessmen who think they own us forget that.” The kickoff marked the beginning of a unionization effort that would face a year of contentious negotiations before the state’s Employment Relations Board certified the student workers’ union in November 2023, which the DSA publication The Call described as “the largest union of its kind in the United States.”
Those labor efforts also became a catalyst for the University of Oregon’s YDSA chapter. What began as a group of 15 people has grown into the country’s second-largest YDSA chapter, fueled in part by what Bracelin describes as “pipelines” between the student-worker union and UO YDSA. From there, the chapter “basically fully captured our student government.” While Bracelin is pleased with those victories, she concedes that they have not created “the revolution.” Instead, she sees them as a way of building “the material base for revolution.” To accelerate that process, Bracelin has been exporting the UO model, working with 16 other student-worker campaigns, and helping develop a YDSA curriculum aimed at expanding union organizing. All these efforts feed into Bracelin’s broader goal of building toward a May Day 2028 general strike, an effort she has been preparing for and coordinating on with local unions.
The formal establishment of the union coincided with the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas, which students quickly politicized and used as an opportunity to push for a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) resolution that Bracelin helped author. The BDS effort, along with a campus encampment, eventually led Bracelin to bring Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) into broader labor organizing efforts. While the BDS resolution passed through student government, it was never adopted by the university.
During this period, Bracelin herself came under investigation after using a bullhorn at one protest. What might otherwise appear to be a minor dispute over noise and the university’s time, place, and manner restrictions was, in her telling, part of a much broader strategy. Bracelin has been unusually candid about the tactics the group adopted: “We did a lot of militancy. We did a lot of direct action. We broke a lot of rules. And we won.” Those tactics would soon move from smaller acts of protest to a strike that would put the university under unprecedented pressure.
By April 2025, the UOSW was disrupting multiple university events, some of them private, and launched a 4,000-person student strike. The strike produced concrete gains, including a higher starting wage and a contract running through March 31, 2028. The victory gave UOSW more than a new contract. It set the group up to participate in the general strike it had advocated for so strongly.
The election of Hernández and Bracelin as YDSA co-chairs is more evidence that the DSA itself has no plans to moderate and will continue to push the envelope of acceptability. While the DSA’s radical ceiling is still yet to be reached, its national platform, its Red Rabbits Security Commission, its pro-revolutionary-violence Maoist national leader, and its alignment with hostile regimes from Iran to Cuba all suggest a broader pattern of increasingly extreme positions and tactics.
With YDSA leaders Hernández and Bracelin both elected on a more militant labor-organizing platform in preparation for a general strike in 2028, the DSA is committed to supporting this trajectory. The prospect of a general strike, particularly one coordinated internationally, raises broader questions about the organization’s willingness to engage in forms of collective action that may run up against existing legal restrictions. Bracelin’s suggestion that labor activists should “start breaking the law and getting away with it” further illustrates how far this organizing strategy drifts into deliberate challenges to legal and institutional boundaries.
Taken together, these developments suggest that the DSA’s evolving approach to labor organizing warrants scrutiny not only for its political implications but also for how it squares with the organization’s stated social-good and educational mission.