Is socialism gaining ground in America—or just getting a rebrand? In this episode, Rafael Mangual, Daniel Di Martino, and Stu Smith examine the shifting perception of socialism in U.S. politics and the growing visibility of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Long seen as a political nonstarter, socialism is finding new support among younger voters and progressive movements. What’s behind this change—and what does it mean for the future of American democracy and the traditional two-party system?

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Rafael Mangual, and I am so happy to be joined by my always brilliant colleagues, Daniel Di Martino and Stu Smith. Welcome to the show, boys.

Daniel Di Martino: Very happy to be here.

Rafael Mangual: It’s great to be with you. Unfortunately, we’re not together in person. I wish we could be. I am in Durham, North Carolina at the moment, which I barely made it to after all the flight delays this past weekend. Where are you guys right now? Daniel, you look like you’re home.

Daniel Di Martino: I’m in Steubenville, Ohio. I’m speaking at Franciscan University tonight. And I actually just took a flight here.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I’m in Durham to speak at Duke later this afternoon. Stu, are you home?

Stu Smith: Yeah, I’m home in Virginia.

Rafael Mangual: Nice, nice.

Daniel Di Martino: By the way, Ralph, was told you spoke recently at one of my friend’s law school. Is that right? With Artem Ilyanok?

Rafael Mangual: Which one? Oh, that’s today.

Daniel Di Martino: He was at NYU when I was at Columbia. Oh, that’s the one that you’re speaking to today. You’re right, Duke. That’s the one. Okay.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, that’s right. Yep. So I’m looking forward to that. Last time I spoke at Duke was not at the law school, but at the main campus. And I was mildly protested. Nothing close to what some of our colleagues have received, but it was entertaining. Nevertheless, even The College Fix picked it up because all the posters of my event were torn down and destroyed. And that made some people upset.

So I wanted to talk to you guys. I mean, we’ve kind of had a few days to decompress post-Mamdani’s election. And I think one of the stories that hasn’t gotten enough attention is the influence of the political apparatus around him, namely the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. Now, when I was coming up politically, the word socialism was very much a dirty word. People didn’t want to be associated with it. It seems like there has been a shift somewhere along the way to the point where it seems like the DSA is growing in influence, in popularity, in mainstream acceptability. And Stu, I know you have been covering radical political movements for a really long time and probably better than anyone else. And so I want to start with you to just kind of give us a little bit of an inside scoop into how the DSA kind of works, how it’s grown over the years, and what you attribute its recent successes to.

Stu Smith: Yes, so an important thing to go back to is back to the Bernie revolution pretty much. Before that the DSA was a group where the average age was probably in the 60s or 70s, and then you have Bernie run for president and the age…

Rafael Mangual: This is 2016, right?

Stu Smith: Yeah, yeah in 2016 and the age lowers to 30-some. Now I imagine post Mamdani, it’s probably somewhere in the high 20s, but that is, you have this youth wing now and the DSA is internally a little bit divided right now because you have a faction that believes that electoral politics is the way forward, and then you have another faction that is all about being on the streets, doing political organizing and they want to be in the bleachers constantly criticizing and mobilizing people to act against mainstream electoral politics. And so I think a whole, and they call this multi-tendency. you have Bernie bros, you have Maoists, you have Marxist-Leninists, you have communists, and they all work together with a lot of infighting, but we are really starting to see these two heads butt when it comes to what is the path forward. Is it electoral politics and winning there, or is it their organizing strength and that?

Rafael Mangual: Well, I mean, as an outsider looking in, it would seem to me to be that the decision’s kind of been made, right? That the electoral political strategy is going to be the one that they pursue, in part just because they’ve had some success, right? I mean, like for the first time in my life, I can think of several names of people that are either endorsed by the DSA or members of the DSA just in my state alone, right? You’ve got people like Zohran Mamdani, obviously, Jabari Brisport, Julia Salazar, you know, Tiffany Caban. You’ve got people all throughout the city council. AOC, know, at the federal level, Rashida Tlaib, right? I don’t think Bernie Sanders was actually ever a DSA member, but I know he got their endorsement and enthusiastic support. So you know, given that they’ve now won one of the most visible local elections in the country, you would think that this is going to be the case. Then again, political movements have been known to step on their own toes. So what’s your read on this? What do you think the DSA is going to do in terms of the direction that they go?

Stu Smith: Yeah, so like a very vocal critic would be like the Liberation Caucus who were releasing all kinds of craziness leading up to Mamdani’s election, condemning Mamdani for being, you know, too much of a moderate. So even after he won, they started to kind of rally behind him and release some comments that were a lot more favorable towards him. So I think you’re right where, you know, they see that electoral politics is a massive place to be, it’s how you get power, but I do think they are very cognizant of the fact that you need internal power within the system and external and how do you deal with, as they put it, governing the capitalist state. So I think they are going to have to kind of figure out what they’re going to do with that, where they’re always going to frame it as the capitalists are preventing them from putting forward their agenda.

I think we see some real obvious kind of, with Hochul and Mamdani and Albany factoring all in together, there’s a lot there where I think there’s going to be a lot of finger pointing. It’s going to be like the Spider-Man meme of them pointing at each other as who’s at fault.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I listen to you talk about this, right? And it sounds like you are describing a dynamic in your own family, which betrays a very close familiarity. How do you acquire that? I know you spend a lot of time kind of sleuthing and sort of getting inside some of these DSA meetings. I mean, what’s that been like? Tell us a little bit about your strategy of like how to learn about this organization, follow it, and do good reporting on it.

Stu Smith: Yeah, so what you have are, you have the national apparatus, and then you have a lot of local chapters, and then you have the various caucuses, and so you can kind of, it’s like Game of Thrones where you have all these different houses with different kind of philosophies.

Rafael Mangual: I like that.

Stu Smith: And so you really do have to map it out of, okay, so this is someone who might be on the National Political Committee, who is also affiliated with a chapter, who is then affiliated with a caucus. And so that really kind of reflects their beliefs on a system. thTherere lots of, like, so like, let’s take the two co-chairs. So with the co-chairs, you have Ashik Siddique who is with the Groundworks Caucus. And that is very much focused on reform, electoral victories. And so one of their stances was, we want to be involved with the no Kings protests. And there are a lot of people in the DSA who did not want to be involved with the no Kings protest because they see that as like resistance libs who are very performative, who will do these big protests and nothing ever comes of it the next day. You know, it’s a flash in a pan and it’s over. The other co-chair is Megan Romer who is in the Red Star Caucus and so that is a Leninist…

Rafael Mangual: Sounds ominous.

Stu Smith: Yeah, and so their philosophy on things is a whole lot different than the Groundworks caucus And so when you have the end with the NPC, I think it’s technically 13 communist caucus members versus 12 of what they would call like more “reform.” Internally, believe it or not, and I hope this doesn’t confuse people, reform-minded, electoral-minded is called DSA right. Which is a crazy concept for us.

Rafael Mangual: Interesting.

Stu Smith: Yeah. But that’s how internal, I mean that’s just how crazy it is internally that if you believe in electoral politics as a DSA member, you are technically on the right.

Rafael Mangual: So wait, so all right, I have so many questions. All right, so how many caucuses are there? Or is this just kind of like one of these unlimited number of breakdowns where one pops up every other week?

Stu Smith: That’s a great question. I can rattle off a few of the major ones. So you have Groundworks Caucus, you have Red Star, you have Socialist Majority Caucus, Marxist Unity, it’s called M.U.G., which is Marxist Unity... You have Springs of Revolution, which is, so the Springs of Revolution Caucus, they don’t want to call themselves a caucus. That’s how revolutionary they are, that they oppose the word caucus, but they act as a caucus in every other capacity. You might have like very smaller ones, like they’re libertarian socialists, technically. And so you have all of these various kind of philosophies coming together.

Rafael Mangual: So I’m listening you describe all of these different points of tension and I’m starting to feel very good about the level of infighting on the right. But I just can’t get past what strikes me as a dynamic that should lead to disorganization, does not seem to have frustrated their political success. And I wonder if you can unpack that. But now that we have Daniel back, I want to get to him on some of the economic questions too. But can you just briefly unpack that a little bit? I mean, how is it that an organization with so many warring factions can win the New York City mayoralty handily?

Stu Smith: So I think what emerges from this kind of chaos is that you do have individual personalities who are exceptional organizers. And so like someone that kind of comes to mind to me is someone on the NPC whose name is Hazel. And so Hazel is like a militant believer in Robert’s Rules of Order and keeps them all organized and on point and focused because of this like incredible devotion to Robert’s Rules and like every DSA meeting and so, but you have these individual people who have like super skills and major talents. And so you have the infighting below but you do have effectively the cream of the crop of organizers go to the top and are effective.

Rafael Mangual: Interesting. Yeah, see that makes sense to me, right? Like the DSA does seem like a good home to a disaffected person who has also been raised in a hyper-organized milieu, right? Like, you know, going to Montessori school and super smart and, you know, engaged parents that programmed their life for, you know, 23 out of the 24 hours in the day. And so process, you know, is something that they can easily become obsessed with and organization is I think probably at the core of their personalities to the extent that they have one. But you know it is interesting because they’re kind of, when I think of the DSA, five years ago, I would have thought almost exclusively about cultural issues. But it does seem like economic questions are really at the core of why they existed in the first place and what has gotten them to their electoral success. So, Daniel, I wonder if you can just unpack for us a little bit about, you know, what are the core economic questions at the center of DSA identity? What are the things that they are frustrated with? What are the ideas that they are really animated by in that space? Why is it so compelling for so many people?

Daniel Di Martino: I think some of the main economic motivations really are, and I think Stu alluded to this, when 10 years ago or so, the whole Occupy Wall Street movement after the Great Recession, that was really what built into the big Democratic Socialist rising in the United States, where you saw a lot of people…

Rafael Mangual: I know it seems like yesterday, but can you just remind everyone what the Occupy Wall Street movement was about?

Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, remember when people went to protest against the rich and how the rich were getting rich and that’s, they were ripping off the American economy and the American worker. And that’s why so many people were struggling post-Great Recession. You know, you have to remember the Great Recession has that name for a reason. It was the most important economic crisis in America since the Great Depression a hundred years ago. So people had a very good reason to feel bad about the state of the economy.

The problem was that they expressed it in a way that blamed the rich for everybody’s problems. And that is really a falsehood, right? But that’s what motivates the DSA types, that the rich are rich because the poor are poor. In a way, it’s a very Marxist message that is present in every single left-wing movement around the world, but that had been absent from the United States in a way that made America, I think, more exceptional.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, you know, I do think that that’s right. I remember the Occupy Wall Street movement. I mean, Zuccotti Park in downtown New York City being taken over. You know, you had, gosh, I forget the name of the park down there on K Street in Washington, D.C., that was taken over. I mean, this was kind of a national thing. And it was funny because it was happening right around the same time that, you know, the right had its reaction in the form of the Tea Party, which had a completely diametrically opposed economic message. But it does, I do think that you’re right. I mean, it does seem to me that, like, at the core of the DSA’s sort of economic messaging is this sort of grievance politics where, you know, everyone subscribes to this idea of the fixed pie and if I don’t have something it’s because somebody else has it. It seems like the thought never really crosses their mind that like actually I can have it too if I just produce enough value and you would think that the recovery from the Great Recession would have kind of told that story at least implicitly, but maybe there’s a failure on the part of people who think a little more like us to send that message and make it clear that actually what allows all ships to rise is rising tides, right? And that means more productivity in general.

Daniel Di Martino: Ralph, and I’ll say to this too, what’s more puzzling now is that I don’t know if you guys saw the latest poll, it just came out today from YouGov on socialism, but it showed a very much a higher rate of favorability for socialism across all groups, but it is higher the favorability of socialism among highly paid Americans, high-income Americans than low-income Americans now. People who make over a hundred thousand dollars a year support socialism at a higher rate than those who make less than 50. So this is really shocking because it’s both by age, young people and highly paid people. So this really means that it’s young, highly paid professionals that are actually, you know, supporting socialism, which is even more impressive, right? Because being highly paid in your twenties is more impressive than being highly paid in your forties. So I think this makes the American socialist movement very different from other socialist movements around the world. It’s true that the leaders of any political movement or revolution are always smart people, but it’s not true that their followers are always highly paid and highly educated young people. And in the case of America, it’s very different from case of my native Venezuela, where it was the poor who supported Chávez, actually. Here in America, it seems to be the upper-middle-class professionals.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, I want to unpack that a little bit because it is a strange dynamic, right? It seems like at the center of the DSA’s momentum are these people who are, you would think of them as upwardly mobile, right? But, you know, in a lot of ways, they’re downwardly mobile in part because they’re coming from wealth and they’re not performing as well as their parents did. But there really does seem to be a kind of sense of entitlement to a certain lifestyle to a certain lifestyle in a certain place. You hear this a lot about the affordability discussion in New York City where it’s like, you know, it does seem like there’s this sense that like, well, if I went to, you know, Columbia or Barnard or Georgetown or whatever, I should graduate and at my, you know, really impressive, as you say, Daniel, $100,000 a year job, you know, working for McKinsey or whatever, I should be able to live, you know, like Sarah Jessica Parker did in Sex and the City, and, you know, not have to worry about money and eat out at fancy restaurants every day, and live in a beautiful brownstone on Central Park West, you know, join a gym that costs $500 a month, and, you the list goes on, and when they realize that they can’t do all that, all of a sudden, they get to become oppressed in the way that, you know, people in your native Venezuela argued that they were oppressed and at least the people of Venezuela had more of a gripe, right? I mean, do you think, just going back to your experience in Venezuela, that the movement would have been able to even get off the ground had it been so patently obvious that the people driving it were relatively wealthy?

Daniel Di Martino: I don’t think so, but at the same time, this is what really puzzles me and I actually, it makes me think that this is really more about the education system than about the material conditions of the people that support it. We have to remember there has been a concerted left-wing strategy to take over the educational institutions of this country, to inculcate to people that they must be guilty of what they are, what they have, what their families built, what they inherited, even guilty of the color of their skin, which is why we saw so much support for socialist candidates among young college-educated whites and especially women, right? You’re oppressed because you’re a woman. You are an oppressor because you’re white. Like this whole oppressor ideology, the whole intersectionality, DEI, this is why they’ve used that strategy in America because pitting just rich against poor in America didn’t work because in America people want to be rich, unlike in other countries, right? And so I think that that’s really the way they did it. It’s about education more than anything. Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: I think you put your finger on something there, right? Because it does, yes, there’s absolutely an economic component to what the DSA argues about, to what they campaign on. But I also think that there is absolutely a sort of cultural aspect here that isn’t fully appreciated. You know, the ideas that a lot of us would associate with a term like wokeness, I do think animate quite a bit of the enthusiasm on the far left in this country, particularly within organizations like the DSA, who don’t just comment on economic issues, but also on a host of social issues, whether it’s trans radicalism or, Daniel, you highlighted some of the racial questions, policing, you know, LGBTQ issues, etc. Like, Stu, I mean, you have, I think, probably a more intimate sense of what drives these people than anyone else. What is your read on that? I mean, how big a role do these kind of, you know, cultural issues play compared to some of the economic grievances?

Stu Smith: That’s a good question. I do think the economic aspect is big with them clearly, and I think a lot of that ties into you know a lot of what we’ve already discussed. I do think they are at, like, ideologically a point where they are kind of post-woke in some ways, where they are, you know, I mean, they are, they’re militant. I mean, they are inherently militant, and so like even when Mamdani won, when they released their statement from the NPC, the National Political Committee, released their statement, you know, it was talking about, know, we still uphold, you know, Palestinian liberation resistance and it was talking about defunding the police, you know, saying we need alternatives to policing. I mean, and within their kind of discussions, it’s very much about these radical positions of, you know, abolition of the police, you know, they don’t want any police and, you know, abolition of crime itself.

Rafael Mangual: What does that have to do…

Daniel Di Martino: But wait a minute, wait a minute, guys. If we don’t have any police, who’s going to take my private property away?

Rafael Mangual: That was funny.

Daniel Di Martino: These people... I honestly, I prefer that kind of socialism over the one in Venezuela because they use the guns to take our things, okay? If they don’t have guns, then good luck implementing Marxism-Leninism.

Stu Smith: Well, that’s why they say alternatives to policing, so get rid of the old one, and then we, oh, by the way, we have this new thing.

Rafael Mangual: Right.

Daniel Di Martino: But, Stu, one question about that. I think we need to differentiate between the motivations of the supporters of the DSA and the democratic socialists or even the voters of Mamdani and co., and the leaders of these organizations. I think you know very well that the leaders of the DSA are very much people who would feel comfortable doing what Stalin did in the Soviet Union. So, can you tell us more about that since you have been in those spaces anonymously?

Stu Smith: Yeah, and I think a great example of that is this new organization that the DSA made, New York City DSA made, Our Time, which is going to be this kind of the offshoot of Zohran’s volunteer base. So he had this massive volunteer base. He had all these people come out for him, but the DSA saw some growth, but it wasn’t like a one for one growth. It was still closer to like 10 to 20 percent. And so they want to keep that organizing base because I still think honestly you do have masses of people who either a don’t care enough about the DSA to join the DSA but will are willing to vote for Zohran and then just voted for Zohran because they thought he was charming and charismatic. And so, like, I have seen people discuss like in places where they’re like, I just joined the New York City DSA, what do you mean there are Maoists in our organization? So they were like totally aghast that they were, you know, in the same room with Maoists, which is kind of nice to see, but you don’t see like mass flight from that organization.

Daniel Di Martino: Well, but then they get indoctrinated into that is the thing. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of the organization in New York, you are very much tied to it, but the People’s Forum in New York City, the one that’s funded by the Chinese American billionaire, that guy in the bill, they literally had a flag of North Korea in their HQ. Photos of Castro, Mao, of Che Guevara. They’re the ones who organize a lot of the pro-Palestine protests because they just mix everything up together, right? They’re just anti-America, anti-freedom. And I think a lot of people don’t realize the danger that these people pose to our lifestyle, right? So I think we just need to do a much better job at exposing them and even understanding that a lot of this is foreign money, right? And that should be illegal.

Stu Smith: Yeah, no, a thousand percent. And I think there are lots of interesting developments going on with that. And it looks like we’re finally starting to see Congress take an interest and diving deep into these issues and kind of figuring out what exactly is going on with some of these nonprofits that are actively working against America. So hopefully we see some positive results.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, so I got a couple of questions here. One is like, we’re the Manhattan Institute, we have a very unique interest in New York, Zohran Mamdani just won the election. But if we zoom out, how much of this is really a thing outside of New York City and New York State? Is New York really ground zero for this, or is this a viable national movement? Do they have a comparable infrastructure in other parts of the country?

Daniel Di Martino: Ralph, they’re building it. That’s the issue, right? Or sorry, you wanted to say something, Stu.

Stu Smith: I was going to say, it depends. I mean, you have YDSA, which might be on every single college campus in America. So there is that. And you have a YDSA member who’s now the youngest elected DSA official in the nation at Ithaca from Cornell.

Rafael Mangual: In New York, right? Yeah.

Stu Smith: And then you have Portland DSA, which is taking over Portland City Council and saying things like, need to investigate the F-35 and if it’s in all these American cities and calling on other city councils to join them in this. So you have pockets of hyper-concentration is how I would say it.

Daniel Di Martino: I’ll say too, my big concern with Mamdani and these people winning, at least in New York City, is that this is going to spread because it’s going to send a signal that they can win other elections and primaries. And then after that, it’s not that most Americans are going to become Maoist or even a significant share or even in favor of abolishing property, even in any radical way.

But those people will infiltrate the Democratic Party and then those people will reach positions of power. It’s kind of like the same thing as the discussion we’ve had the last couple of weeks about the groypers on the far right, but on the far left. And then they get to implement their policies and destroy the United States. You know, some of these people of the DSA, they have the DSA International Committee. They are the ones that travel to Venezuela and to Cuba. They went to Venezuela and met with the dictator of my country, Maduro, in 2021. They, that one of them, Manolo de los Santos, the president of the People’s Forum in New York City, big Mamdani supporter, supported all these people. They went to Venezuela after the fraudulent election last year and met with Maduro himself to congratulate him on stealing the election. Mamdani himself, 10 years ago, praised Venezuela’s elections as being not so shabby. And so then people say, Daniel, you’re exaggerating. These people just want to be like Norway. Why don’t they go on field trip to Oslo, right? They go on trips to Caracas and Havana. Give me a break.

Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. mean, it

Stu Smith: Yeah. And they just got back from Cuba in October, by the way.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t think the median American voter understands just how radical the DSA is. I think that they probably think that folks like us are just being a little hysterical when we talk about it and sound the alarm about the dangers that these ideas pose to the future of American society. But it does raise an interesting question, right, which is like, well, what is the best way to kind of push back on some of this stuff. I mean, Daniel, you do incredible work going around the country and talking about the importance of free markets and liberty. And I certainly push back a lot on DSA ideas about policing and public safety, but also share your sentiments with regard to economic questions. I grew up reading people like Hayek and Friedman. And they still, you know, those ideas very much, you know, animate how I think about some of these questions. But what do we do in some of these cities where DSA-type organizations, if not the DSA itself, seems to have a growing amount of influence? I don’t know if you saw, but our colleague Charles Lehman had an interesting piece in the City Journal substack today, arguing that New York City needs a centrist part and that that is kind of the most efficient way to push back. So, yeah, I wonder what your read on that is. I mean, is that the kind of right approach to identify some of these particularly vulnerable jurisdictions and create a lot of energy behind some kind of alternative party that speaks to people who are not…

Daniel Di Martino: So, you know, thing is, Ralph, that a lot of people will vote Democrat no matter who in New York and in many places there’s a lot of traditional Democrats. So I think that the best hope is to expel the socialists from the Democrats and win a primary in the Democratic primary. That becomes harder because it’s the primary system in New York, as our great colleague John Ketcham has written many times about, it’s a single party primary system in a closed, so independents can’t vote in the Democrat primary, neither can Republicans, of course. So that is a problem, right? Because not everybody is registered Democrat. Participation in primaries is so low. This is why radicals win in so many parts of the country. Really, this is about participation. Normal people need to vote. Not only do normal people need to vote, but they need to teach their kids better, Ralph and Stu. I know so many people whose kids end up as leftists who they are conservatives or moderates or whatever. So people need to do a better job at home. Sure, you and I can go and speak at places. We can persuade people online. We can engage in one-to-one conversations and in groups. But the best hope to persuade somebody is somebody who loves them and they love them in return. Because you know that they have your best interests at heart. You trust more your parents and your siblings than you trust a stranger, who might have all the qualifications or experience you want. And so parents need to do a better job at home. This was Reagan’s last warning in his farewell address that parents need to do a better job at teaching what America means and that America meant freedom.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, I mean, I do think that there’s something to that. But as you know, and as you pointed out earlier, I mean, you know, parents only spend so much time with their children. Their children are spending eight hours a day in school. They’re doing extracurriculars. They are spending an increasing amount of their time online where they are exposed to all kinds of ideas that seem to all be pushing in one direction. And that makes it seem kind of daunting, right? I mean, I as a parent, I mean, I’m so happy that my kids are small because, you know, they’re not yet at the age where they can be indoctrinated online, you know, I’m lucky enough to live in a place where the schools are very far from woke, but, you know, even if they weren’t, right? I mean, they’re learning basic arithmetic and, you know, how to read and, you know, it’s not quite yet time for, you know, revolutionary Marxist politics. But that is coming, right? I mean, so it’s not like this is just, hey, we need to set a good example and have a few conversations at the dinner table. I mean, there needs to be organization behind whatever the right counter is, which, you know, kind of, I know we’re running short on time, but I mean, where’s the hope in this, Stu? I mean, if I am somebody who is exasperated about this, who is worried about the future of my city or my state or my country as an organization like the DSA’s influence grows, like, what are, what am I, what am I clinging to in terms of what to be hopeful about? I mean, are we just confident that the infighting that we talked about a little earlier is going to end up taking these organizations down or limiting its ability to be effective? Are we confident that, you know, this is really kind of a fad within the mainstream of the electorate and that eventually they will see how radical it is and how little they actually identify with the ideas here? Or, you know, are we in for a real political revolution?

Stu Smith: I’m not sure what to say. will say that I think success could be their downfall. That, you know, Mamdani’s win, you know, is a Pyrrhic victory and that it all comes crashing down as he tries to implement these ideas. And that can come in the form of none of this stuff is able to get passed or he passes it and he creates, you know, dystopia. And so that is something that, you know, people lose in that scenario, but it might awaken people to, okay, we are done with this in America, for sure.

Daniel Di Martino: Stu, how much of this could be stopped at the DSA if we simply banned foreign funding for all these nonprofits?

Stu Smith: I’m sure a whole lot, like probably 90 percent.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. That much? I mean, how much do they add? Do we have a sense of like a number of how much of their budget is sort of propped up by foreign money?

Stu Smith: This gets into like a really complicated area and I think the court case that it goes back to with like around FARA, I’m blanking on it right now, but it’s a really high threshold to like prove it. And so, like, like an example of this of the craziness of this is like you can go to Venezuela and Cuba and meet with their leaders and as long as the leader says, the leader can say, you know, if this happened in the United States, we would be very happy and it would make us, it aligns with us and what we want to do, but I can’t tell you to do that. That’s like…

Rafael Mangual: Right.

Daniel Di Martino: Okay, but what I’m trying to get at is, I think, in addition to persuading people against socialism, which is great, we also need a policy agenda to stop it. And I think one of those things is to the very least, we need transparency when it comes to foreign donations to American nonprofits. A hospital won’t have a problem disclosing that a British guy gave them a million dollars to treat child cancer. Okay. That is not the problem. The problem is these other people giving money to communist organizations and we need transparency to the very least, if not prohibitions in many ways. And then on the education side, obviously school choice. I mean, we need to stop the indoctrination of the children. We need, you know, teachers to be fired if they’re communists who hang Che Guevara pictures in their classrooms, which, this is not an exaggeration because I’ve seen it with my own eyes in America, in North Carolina, where you are actually, Ralph. So it’s the education, it’s the nonprofits. It is parties being more responsible and understanding that these people will eat them alive, right? Kathy Hochul, Chuck Schumer will be eaten alive by the socialists. It’s a matter of time.

Rafael Mangual: And it’s not just them who are going to be eaten alive. I mean, this is just something that I really think people need to understand. I mean, the DSA is not just like we said, it’s not just economics that they’re focused on. They have a big component of their sort of platform that is focused on some of the most ridiculous ideas in the world of policing and public safety that I have ever seen. And that is going to lead to the actual deaths of real people, namely low income minorities who are living in high crime pockets of American cities that are going to suffer the brunt of the fact that more criminals are going to be put on the street because of these prison abolitionists pushing decarceration policies, that fewer of those criminals when they’re on the street are going to be caught and arrested for the crimes that they commit because of the de-policing policies that people like Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and the rest of the DSA hacks push. And that’s the thing that, you know, I don’t think people will ever really be able to get past. That’s the bit of hope that I cling to is that ultimately if these people get their way, it’s going to be incredibly dark and incredibly bloody, but it will be an eye-opener. And I think Daniel, you can probably speak to this as well as anybody, right? I mean, here you are in an incredible country that is sort of defined by abundance, but you came here from a place where all of the ideas that these people are promising is the route to utopia created some of the most dismal outcomes that still exist to this day.

Daniel Di Martino: Look, when I think about what happened to Venezuela, I think about the best example of what the democratic socialists of America would do here. Because Venezuela is the only country that was ever destroyed by socialism democratically. Think about it. We had an election free and fair. They took power. They implemented their agenda. Takeover property, price controls, rent control, of course, raising the minimum wage, free things, printing money to pay for them. And now we have the largest refugee crisis in the planet from Venezuela. We went from exporting oil to exporting people. By the way, that is what New York has done and will continue to do. New York is exporting its own people because of socialist ideas that are now going to go on steroids. And I fear that that will happen to America because, and I tell this to students all over the country, if socialism comes to America, it will be by votes, not by bullets. It won’t be a military coup. It will be an election. That then it’s very hard to reverse. So that is why we need, individually, to stop it.

Rafael Mangual: Well, I think that’s a good place to leave the conversation. I wish we could continue it for longer, but I have to go give a talk at Duke, and I know you all have a bunch of things on your plate. I want to thank you all who are listening and watching for tuning in. Please don’t forget to leave us a comment, a like, drop us a note, make sure you subscribe, ring the bell, do all the things for the algorithm. But as always, we really appreciate you all watching. I appreciate you two for joining me. I very much appreciate our producer Isabella Redjai. Thank you all very much and until next time you have been watching the City Journal Podcast.

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