Inside a loft, a United Auto Workers member named Jaime counted nine colleagues on a Zoom call to coordinate the final push for Raman’s endorsement. Among them was Keshav Kundassery, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at U.C.L.A. who had formally introduced the resolution to endorse her. Kundassery was vacationing in Spain at the time, yet he had volunteered to execute last-minute cold calls back to Los Angeles. While Jaime approached the organizing work through a lens of practical terms, Kundassery viewed the maneuver through a big-picture lens.
Building a Mass Socialist Apparatus in Los Angeles
The strategic calculus behind the endorsement vote required shedding insular political habits. As Kundassery framed the objective to fellow organizers from abroad, the ambition extended far beyond backing individual municipal leaders like Raman or Zohran Mamdani. The ultimate aim involved constructing a mass socialist party capable of regularly winning public office and actively shaping the political and cultural transformation of the United States. Achieving that scale meant confronting the messy reality of electoral engagement rather than maintaining ideological purity tests.
The chapter vote, conducted via an online portal, concluded at 11:59 p.m. By the following afternoon, the ballots revealed a definitive outcome: Raman secured sixty-six per cent of the chapter’s support, and the D.S.A. had a candidate. From Spain, Kundassery described an incredible sense of relief. The margin demonstrated that the membership was prepared to start thinking big and thinking at the scale necessary to build democratic socialism in America. Jaime echoed that sentiment, noting that debates over whether Raman mirrored previous progressive figures missed the broader structural point. The underlying victory lay in organizational capacity and the proven ability to fundamentally alter municipal politics in Los Angeles.
From Bernie Sanders 2016 to the New Guard of Organizers
The modern incarnation of the Democratic Socialists of America traces its baseline to 2016, ignited by Bernie Sanders’s initial presidential run. Before that surge, the organization maintained a modest footprint. Founded in 1982 through the merger of the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, the group counted left-wing writer Michael Harrington as a prominent national co-chair. Harrington, whose seminal book The Other America helped inspire Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, envisioned democratic socialism operating as the left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party. He recognized that a class revolution was not on the horizon in the U.S. and that a third party was not viable.
In practice, socialism functioned more as a moral ideal for egalitarian liberals than as a discernible electoral strategy. Former New York Mayor David Dinkins carried D.S.A. membership while fitting comfortably inside the post-civil-rights-era Democratic Party mainstream. Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc noted that in 1984, the group declined to endorse Jesse Jackson for president despite his campaign advocating for universal health care, Palestinian statehood, and a federal jobs program, dismissing the platform as too out there.
Early twentieth-century analogues paint a similarly complex portrait. Left-wing parties drew significant power from industrial labor unions, successfully holding the Milwaukee mayor’s office for most of the first half of the twentieth century, while Eugene Debs captured six percent of the presidential vote on the Socialist Party ticket in 1912. Yet those early organizers walked a fine line, deemed too radical for the mainstream yet a mere bourgeois affectation by committed class revolutionaries. Leon Trotsky famously dismissed early American socialist leaders in his autobiography, characterizing their ideological solidarity as a screen for business connections.
The Radicalization of the Obama-Era Generation
By 2016, the D.S.A. presence in Los Angeles was barely visible at all. Software engineer Tal Levy, who joined around that period, recalled that local members primarily set up folding tables discussing socialism at Sanders campaign events. At a January 2017 enrollment event, four existing members greeted one hundred newcomers. Among that wave of recruits was Kundassery, who had spent his high school years in Fremont, California, phone-banking for Sanders after emigrating with his parents from India on H-1B visas. The campaign offered a vision of social change which he felt Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party lacked.
That shift among striving, idealistic students and high school debaters represented a profound warning sign for traditional party operatives. By the time Kundassery reached undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University, he was actively reading Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and French philosopher Nicos Poulantzas. Moving through local chapters in Tennessee and later as a graduate student in Chicago, he encountered an emerging demographic: highly educated young adults from comfortable upbringings facing a modern economic reality where their long-term prospects might be a little worse than those of their parents.
