In recent months, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been elected as mayors in New York City, Seattle, and, last week, Washington D.C. This November, DSA member Nithya Raman will face incumbent Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayoral election.

CNN data analyst Harry Enten notes that the DSA has a net favorability rating of +17 among Democrats, compared with just +4 for congressional Democrats. “They’re a better brand at this point than Democrats in Congress,” he marvels.

Two DSA members are running in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries for congressional seats in New York City, and a former member, ex–New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, is running in another, third district. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has endorsed all three of these candidates, even though two of them are running against Democratic House incumbents. He told a Brooklyn rally last Thursday that the Democratic Party has been “managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people.” Responding to questions about whether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, should run for higher office, Mamdani said: “When does the [presidential] race for 2028 begin? It starts now. It starts on Tuesday.” Should the DSA prevail in this week’s elections, its army of foot soldiers will prove to be one of the most powerful forces in Democratic primaries, capable of intimidating Democratic officeholders into backing many of the DSA’s socialist schemes.

In the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Stu Smith reports that the DSA is “trying to construct a nationwide security apparatus to support its expanding role in street protests and direct-action organizing,” the so-called Red Rabbits Security Commission. The formation of this “community defense” subgroup has come in spite of several internal warnings that “a street-level security force geared toward disruption, confrontation, and resistance to law enforcement” isn’t compatible with the IRS requirement that the DSA must, per its nonprofit status, primarily “further the common good.”

There’s ample evidence of the DSA’s radicalism. Earlier this month, its leadership issued an updated platform that calls for abolishing the U.S. Senate, defunding the Pentagon, offering universal amnesty to illegal immigrants, transferring the ownership of major corporations to the public, and replacing “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” It also includes a demand that police budgets be cut “annually to zero.” Sarah Milner, a member of the DSA’s Reform & Revolution caucus, justified the platform by pointing out that President Woodrow Wilson once called for drastically amending the Constitution. She said the DSA’s proposed changes would advance “a vision of transforming the functions of the American state to allow for the implementation of socialism.” Taken as a whole, the platform enthusiastically embraces illiberal values, which former New York Times columnist Pamela Paul has called “the most troubling characteristic of contemporary progressivism.”

The irony is that all this is antithetical to the group’s origins. The DSA was founded in 1982 with the goal of working within the Democratic Party for social change. Its chairman, from its formation until his death in 1989, was Michael Harrington, the social critic who criticized American capitalism but intended to keep the DSA a patriotic institution.

That’s no longer the case. Last month, for example, the DSA issued a statement against “U.S. imperialism,” claiming that “the U.S. has committed over 800 terrorist attacks against Cuba with hundreds more having occurred against officials and commercial operations outside the country.” The diatribe ended with the words “Long live the Cuban Revolution.” Meanwhile, the National Assembly of People’s Power, Cuba’s supreme institution, just passed a sweeping set of reforms that may set the island on the path to free markets. In Cuba itself, the “revolution” is on life support. To the DSA in the U.S., it remains an inspiration.

Clearly, the DSA is reinventing itself in an uglier form. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who is running for Congress against DSA member Claire Valdez, warns that the group has turned into a “machine,” with Mayor Mamdani as its “boss.” Basil Smikle, former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, told Politico that the DSA is indeed on its way to becoming a full-fledged political machine. The most notorious among such outfits was Tammany Hall, which dominated New York City politics for decades before the Civil War and into the 1930s and was known for its authoritarian bent and corruption. In 1905, one of its leaders, George Washington Plunkitt, described his approach as the pursuit of “honest graft.” He boasted, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

In their drive to become a modern Tammany Hall — one with nationwide reach — the Democratic Socialists of America have taken advantage of the opportunities they’ve been handed by the failure of liberals to govern America’s cities effectively or efficiently. Republicans have also dismally failed to promote their own solutions to urban problems. The result is that socialism, which had never really taken root in America, is now in danger of becoming the secular religion of many voters — especially disillusioned young people.