Commies are taking over the Democrat party! You might think that was a charge leveled by some rightwing reactionary who somehow confused socialism with communism. Instead it was the morbid fear expressed by longtime liberal Jonathan Chait in Wednesday's Atlantic magazine, "There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists." So panicked was Chait at the specter of communism taking over his beloved Democrat party that he did not just mention it in passing. In fact, the C-word was invoked eleven times in Chait's article in which he accuses the Democratic Socialists of America of being the parasitic pathway for injecting communism into its host party. The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists. So how did that attempt to somehow keep communism out of a socialist party work out? Not well as could have been expected. The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world. Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the DSA opposed the invasion but blamed it on “the expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations,” and opposed any military aid to allow Ukraine to defend itself. Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left. In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated. ...The DSA’s Red Star caucus was formed the year after the North Star caucus, in an apparent rebuke. It writes that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.” Almost half of the DSA's leadership are "openly" communist so that should make that leadership mostly communist when you factor in the secret communists. And now that party with its mostly communist leadership is in the process of taking over the Democrat party: ...During the New Deal era, Stalinist organizers pitched themselves as “liberals in a hurry.” The Progressive Party, which ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948, was secretly run by Communist Party loyalists, but it appealed to standard liberals by touting themes such as civil rights, economic justice, and an end to the Cold War. The DSA employs a similar formula, drawing voters in by denouncing oligarchy and genocide and promising to expand health insurance. Chevalier’s campaign, like those of other DSA candidates, has focused on affordability, fighting corporate greed, and similar progressive themes. When she was asked by MS NOW if she is a communist, she replied, “I’m not. I’m a democratic socialist,” and called questions about her adherence to totalitarian ideologies “a distraction.” ...The DSA’s long-term strategy is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the “dirty break,” a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin. A bit of faulty logic on the part of Chait here. Why would the commies who take over the Democrat party need to "break off to form its own party" if they already control the Democrats as we now see happening with little pushback from the current Democrat leaders? Finally, almost by TDS muscle memory force of habit, Chait makes sure to take the obligatory shot at Orange Man Bad by absurdly associating communists with MAGA: "Democrats are likely to face the same kind of pressure that Republicans confronted with MAGA’s hostile takeover: first to ignore their allies’ sinister goals, and then to rationalize and eventually justify them."