The Scouting Trap: How DSA Trains Without Transforming
The Democratic Socialists of America, especially in major urban chapters like NYC-DSA, has become a formidable presence. It has helped elect socialist-aligned candidates, mobilized around labor and tenant struggles, and consistently shown up at pivotal demonstrations. Its members are often among the most principled, capable, and hardworking organizers in left-wing spaces today. And yet, despite all this activity, DSA remains more formative than transformative.
To put it provocatively: DSA functions less like a revolutionary political organization and more like an adult, socialist scouting movement. It fosters solidarity, builds competencies, and cultivates a kind of ethical-political citizenship. But its structure and strategic habits suggest that it prepares its members for a world that never arrives. It produces scouts without a campaign, comrades without a horizon.
This isn't a dismissal. The scouting analogy is not meant as a slight. Scouting organizations are, in many ways, admirable: they emphasize practical skills, moral development, mutual support, and local leadership. But they do so within a largely unchallenged framework. They teach people to navigate a world, not to remake it. And DSA, at its best, has excelled at helping people navigate a hostile, alienating, and unjust society—building moral stamina and organizing competence. But the question remains: toward what end?
The organization’s activities—electoral campaigns, tenant organizing, strike support, protest mobilization—are laudable in themselves. DSA also pursues concrete policy goals that, at first glance, seem to edge closer to the kind of envisioning we claim is lacking—for example, the BPRA proposal for public renewable energy. But these efforts, too, are often carried out in parallel rather than in integration. Mutual aid efforts do not necessarily feed into electoral education. Campaign infrastructure is rarely redeployed for building durable communal life. Even DSA’s most successful chapters seem to lack a unifying strategic theory beyond the moral imperative to act. The result is a vast, talented body of organizers whose efforts rarely cohere into cumulative, systemic counter-power.
This fragmentation is not simply a matter of strategy. It is also a matter of political psychology. DSA, like many left movements, has grown rapidly by gathering together people disillusioned with capitalism but not necessarily aligned around a shared vision of what comes next. In this way, DSA is structurally incentivized to keep its future blurry. Too much specificity could prompt rupture. A detailed vision might cause as many members to leave as it inspires to stay. So the organization remains safely capacious, organized around shared grievances and ethical sensibilities more than strategic clarity.
But vagueness comes at a cost. Without a shared horizon, it's nearly impossible to accumulate power across time and scale. The competencies DSA cultivates do not feed into a post-capitalist infrastructure—they circulate within the organization, forming a kind of ethical holding pattern. The result is a paradox: a movement that builds capacity but not trajectory. It gathers strength but doesn't translate that strength into a transformative counter-system.
This is the scouting trap. DSA builds up the best of us, but does not yet build beyond us. It creates refuge, not rupture. Formation, not transition. Without a different kind of vision—a riskier, more integrative one—it may keep developing socialist scouts long after the campfire of capitalism has burned through the forest.