What Is All This About A DSA 'Hostile Takeover'?

The secret of their success

There was a predictable pattern among Democrats over the past few decades. Traditional, center-left candidates would win primaries, and the expectation was that far-left candidates and their supporters would “get with the program, jump on the team and come on in for the big win,” like that scene from Full Metal Jacket. Mainstream Democrats reflexively blame any major election loss on the far-left for not showing up in sufficient numbers (even when it’s not entirely true).

Lately, it seems as if this pattern has reversed itself — far-left candidates are actually winning primaries — and many center-left/moderate Democrats are having trouble coping.

Last week, Rep. Josh Gottheimer said, “The DSA are not Democrats. They’re socialist who want to hijack the Democratic Party.” Then, without any apparent self-awareness, he added, “The Democrats have a big tent. That’s our strength. We embrace a range of ideas — but there’s no room for anti-American bomb throwers who oppose our ideas, values, and leaders.”

This is clearly a significant shift from the former “Vote Blue No Matter Who” position, one that embraced literal Republicans who were elevated as heroes simply for drawing a line at violent insurrectionist coups. The Democratic Socialists of America support single-payer healthcare and tuition-free higher education. No DSA member would vote to overturn a free and fair election, as the majority of House Republicans did in 2020.

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Scapegoating Manchin And Sinema Is Convenient But Not Entirely Accurate

When Gottheimer accuses the DSA of trying to “hijack” the party and opposing “our ideas, values, and leaders,” his argument is inherently anti-democratic. There is only room in his party’s “big tent” so long as you don’t challenge its existing leadership. Former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, who presided over a series of party losses, recently complained when DSA candidates won primaries, “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” but as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani correctly observed, “‘What is the Democratic Party if not its voters?’”

That is the existential question to consider whenever mainstream Democrats use terms like “hijack” or “hostile takeover” when discussing DSA primary victories. In an Atlantic article that grossly referred to the DSA as “parasites,” writer James Kirchick lamented, “Democrats appear slow to recognize that ideologues on the left are attempting a hostile takeover of the party.”

Fred Guttenberg Calling Rashida Tlaib A ‘Cancer’ Doesn’t Fight Fascism. It Is Fascism.

So, let’s first discuss the concept of a “hostile takeover,” as it has a real-world definition. In the corporate world, a “hostile takeover” is when a rival company takes over another against the wishes of its management and board of directors. It achieves this by going directly to the shareholders. In an electoral sense, shareholders are a party’s voters. Thus, what the DSA left is doing is completely democratic. Its candidates are winning elections. That’s only a “hostile takeover” if you believe the Democratic Party is “owned” by its current leadership.

This is probably why Democrats don’t describe Never Trump conservatives who’ve entered their “big tent” as “parasites.” They praise them as “country over party” patriots, even when they openly advocate for Democrats to become the country club party that Mitt Romney would find acceptable. However, if Never Trumpers successfully shift the party to the center, that’s done with the approval of Democratic Party leadership.

Of course, moderate centrism has staged their own “hostile takeover” attempts within the Democratic Party. First, in 1972, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority was formed in response to Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election. The CDM’s “manifesto” was titled Come Home, Democrat and declared that after liberal George McGovern’s humiliating loss, “The ‘New Politics’ has failed.” Many members of the CDM would go on to embrace neoconservatism. Later in 1985, after Walter Mondale’s political vivisection, Democratic strategist Al From would form the Democratic Leadership Council with future presidents Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Their stated goal was neutralizing the left’s influence within the party. They failed to nominate a Southern conservative Democrat in 1988, the same year DLC critic and unashamed left-populist Jesse Jackson performed surprisingly well. However, they leveraged Mike Dukakis’s decisive loss to George H.W. Bush as a platform to move public opinion their way. This is actually how a healthy political party operates, rather than forming weird parasocial attachments to politicians.

I first learned about hostile takeovers from the 1987 Michael J. Fox movie, The Secret of My Success. Fox’s Brantley Foster works for the Pemrose Corporation, which is facing a hostile takeover attempt by the Davenport Corporation. If Davenport acquires Pemrose, most of the staff will lose their jobs, but the decision-making executives don’t care what happens to the working people at the company. Their primary objective is preserving their own positions.

At their first big meeting after Davenport acquires Pemrose, CEO Donald Davenport (Fred Gwynne, more monstrous here than he ever was as Herman Munster) tells the feckless executive team that although most of Pemrose’s existing employees will have to go, a handful of upper management “who’ve been so helpful” can stay for as long as they like. Party leaders Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and James Clyburn, along with center-left “strategists” and “consultants” like Jaime Harrison and Neera Tanden, might talk a lot about preserving the voices of rank-and-file voters, but what they truly fear is the DSA replacing them.

Democrats Need Primaries, Maybe Even Gladiatorial Combat

After all, a “hostile takeover” only works when shareholders are willing to sell their stocks to the rival company. This usually happens because the shareholders have lost faith in the company’s direction. Donald Trump first took office almost a decade ago, and the MAGA threat has only escalated. Democratic primary voters are open to new ideas and especially new leaders.

Right now, many Democratic primaries have become what the business world would call a “proxy fight,” a form of “shareholder activism” where stockholders — in this case, the voters — move to replace existing management. Most proxy fights fail as incumbent leadership has significant structural advantages that can resist even modest change. Those structural advantages have weakened over the years. They were insufficient to stop Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary, and most recently were unable to prevent Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor. Both were examples of incumbent leadership becoming so fossilized, they practically defeated themselves. Centrists elevating the corrupt Eric Adams and the even worse Andrew Cuomo certainly made Mamdani seem a more viable option. But that’s the dilemma for the Democrats who are complaining about the DSA’s supposed “hostile takeover” — they are incapable of doing what’s necessary to stop it.