The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organization is making a serious play for control of the Democrat Party, advertising itself as a racially diverse, working-class movement. But a closer look at who actually makes up the DSA reveals not the workers it claims to represent, but affluent, mostly white professionals.
Superficially, the DSA’s diversity talking points seem to be borne out by the most conspicuous DSA politicians—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, et al. But according to its own internal membership surveys, 85 percent of the DSA’s members are white, nine percent are Hispanic, five percent are Asian American, and four percent are Black.
What about the claim that the DSA is a working-class movement? Those same surveys find that fully 58 percent of DSA members are employed in the professional/managerial class. Only a paltry four percent are blue-collar workers. The rest of them are disabled, unemployed, or students.
As Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute describes the DSA: “Its rhetoric and program uses the phrase ‘working class’ over and over again, as if repeating that phrase magically makes its members working class. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t.”
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