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.
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.”
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.
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.
As someone more moderate than the DSA on most issues, I’d offer unsolicited advice to the moderates who fear a DSA takeover—fretting over a “hostile takeover” just makes you look weak, and the biggest reason you’re losing to these DSA candidates is not because Dem voters are moving more to the left, but rather because they are frustrated with the establishment that they believe has not delivered and is showing weakness in the face of Republicans. They see DSA types as outsiders willing to fight and deliver, and even if they aren’t as far left as these candidates, they want someone who can actually do something.
So when you post tributes to Trump enablers like Lindsay Graham, when you don’t withhold unanimous consent on every Trump appointee (and even vote for some of them!), when you don’t blow up media appearances at Trump’s MSM handmaidens—these things piss off even moderate Democrats who are ready to say screw it, bring in the outsiders.
If that sounds familiar it’s exactly what happened to the GOP in 2016.
A Blue Wave is predicted for this November, in spite of the current Dem leadership, NOT in spite of the recent DSA wins. If the current Dem leadership would let go of their concern for norms, decorum, bipartisanship, and their fear of being branded a "socialist" or even a "communist," they may actually find their spines and become real servants of the People. If they can do that, November would see a Blue Tsunami.
Nothing wrong with norms, decorum, and bipartisanship, as long as both parties operate in good faith, but the repubs haven't done that in a long time. Yet, Dems weaken their case by insisting upon all three, no matter what the repubs do. As for being branded "socialist" or "communist," repubs are already doing that. Why don't Dems counter with "Republicans are fascists"? Because they are weak! And why do they continue to use repub framing for every single issue? Because they are weak, and possibly stupid as well.
Maybe they are neither stupid nor weak, but their words and actions make them appear to be so. They should fire their paid political consultants, who have given out bad advice to Dems for years. Go talk to We the People instead of the consultants and focus groups. Tim Walz was on to something when he labeled repubs "weird" in 2024, but the Harris Campaign put a stop to that, thanks to the paid political consultants. Sigh.