The Democratic establishment is openly calling for the purge of its populist socialist wing — and the party's allies in the press are happy to provide the cover. The stakes for ordinary Americans: when both establishment parties crush their grassroots insurgents, voters get two corporate parties and zero representation for anyone who isn't already inside the racket.
The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial this week with a blunt directive: "Democrats have to shove DSA out of the party." The piece treats the Democratic Socialists of America as a hostile takeover operation, warning that "hardly a week goes by without news that some DSA candidate in some part of the country is pushing out a traditional Democrat." The editorial lists the DSA platform positions — defund police, end private healthcare, open borders, abolish the Senate and the presidency, embrace Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran — and compares the movement directly to the tea party's capture of the GOP.
"Shame on those of us who failed to see how damaging the tea party takeover of the GOP would be," the Morning News editorial board writes. "Now the Democrats are facing their moment."
They're right about the parallel, but not in the way they intend. The tea party started as a genuine populist revolt against GOP establishment spending and bailouts before being co-opted and steered by the same consultant class it opposed. Now the same gatekeepers who smothered that insurgency are cheering as Democratic insiders move against their own grassroots challenge.
The New Yorker offers a more textured look at who these DSA voters actually are. The piece identifies two blocs driving the movement: "Subaru Socialists" — college-educated millennials who expected better careers than they got — and the "Great Disappointed," a younger cohort radicalized by institutional failure during the pandemic and the war in Gaza. Both groups came of age watching the system deliver for everyone except them. As Noam Scheiber documents in his reporting, these are people who "did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse."
The New Yorker acknowledges the obvious contradictions — mostly white college graduates deploying class-solidarity rhetoric — but notes that every voting bloc carries contradictions. Poor non-college voters regularly back candidates who cut taxes for billionaires. The question isn't whether the DSA base is pure; it's whether their grievances are real.
They are. Student debt, housing costs, wage stagnation — these aren't invented problems. But the DSA's answer is to dismantle every American institution and replace it with a cartoon of a classless society, which is where the movement loses the country.
Here's what matters: the Dallas Morning News framed this as a simple party purge — throw the bums out for the good of the establishment. The New Yorker framed it as a sociological curiosity — aren't these gentrifiers something? What neither framing captures is the uniparty dynamic. When the GOP swamp moved against America-first candidates, it was called "defending democracy." Now when Democratic insiders move against their populists, it's called "saving the party." Same playbook, same beneficiaries. The people who actually run both parties always win, and the voters who wanted something different always get shown the door.
The open question is whether the DSA can build a durable coalition outside the Democratic Party — or whether, like the tea party before it, the movement gets absorbed and neutralized by the very machine it tried to break.
