Bolshevik Russia and the DSA’s Democrat Party Project, Part II - Ignoring the similarities at our collective peril.

This is the second part of a two-part analysis that examines a specific historical claim: that the decades-long push of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) inside the Democrat Party follows the same “boring from within” logic the Bolsheviks used against the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in 1917—a small, disciplined vanguard using a broader coalition’s legitimacy and infrastructure to gain position, growing more candid about maximalist goals as it consolidates power, with no intention of remaining merely one faction among many.

Part I examined the Bolshevik precedent, the DSA parallel, and what is genuinely similar between the two. This part discusses what is genuinely different (especially tactics), the possibilities for DSA success or failure, and speculation on whether the DSA endgame will ultimately end in Bolshevik-style violence and revolution rather than produce a clean electoral outcome.

This is where the analogy needs real qualification and where a fair-minded version of the premise should be explicit about limits, because the differences are as significant as the similarities:

No armed seizure of the state. The Bolsheviks took power through an actual coup executed by armed Red Guards against a sitting government, followed by suppression of a competing, popularly elected body (the Constituent Assembly) by force. The DSA’s entire strategy, to date, runs through primary elections, ballot access, and legislative votes—it is winning inside the constitutional system, not overthrowing it. Whether its stated end-state (subordinating the courts and the executive to Congress and abolishing the Senate) is compatible with the constitutional order is a fair question to raise, but the method of pursuit is categorically different from 1917.

No single-party terminus (yet). Bolshevik Russia moved to formal one-party rule and criminalized rival socialist parties within about four years. Nothing analogous exists in the DSA project—it operates as a faction contesting Democrat primaries, and multiple other factions (Third Way-style moderates, the Working Families Party, Justice Democrats) continue to compete openly for the same terrain, sometimes against each other rather than in lockstep with the DSA. The Washington Monthly‘s reporting on the 2026 primary results specifically notes that DSA-aligned insurgents have had less success knocking off true Democrat moderates in primaries to date. In other words, the “capture” is real but partial and contested, not consolidated.

Media and information environment. Organizing in 1917 took place through pamphlets, party newspapers (Pravda), and physical agitation in barracks and factories. The 2026 version runs through an entirely different tactical stack: social-media-native candidates (Mamdani’s campaign was heavily short-form-video driven); live streamers with large followings functioning as movement media (e.g., socialist streamer Hasan Piker weighing in on primary strategy in real time); small-dollar digital fundraising (ActBlue) replacing the need for a mass-membership newspaper; and data-driven low-turnout primary targeting that lets a relatively small organized bloc flip a seat that a mass movement would have needed far more bodies to contest in 1917.

Legal/institutional channel work replaces street seizure. The 1917 model culminated in physical control of ministries, telegraph offices, and rail stations. The DSA model culminates in winning mayoralties, state legislative seats, and congressional primaries—and then using those offices to reshape policy from within (e.g., reported pressure from the DSA on Mamdani’s NYPD staffing plans). Power is being acquired seat by seat under existing electoral law, not through a rupture. But the race has not yet been run.

Funding structure is diffuse and largely legal philanthropy, not a foreign state-backed party apparatus. The Bolsheviks received documented German funding to destabilize wartime Russia. The DSA-adjacent funding ecosystem (Soros-linked foundations, Tides, Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund, donor-advised funds) is domestic and works through the 501(c)(3)/(c)(4) tax code—legally gray in specific instances (the Stop Cop City indictment being the sharpest example) but structurally different from a foreign intelligence subsidy. It’s accurate to call this network deliberately opaque; it’s not accurate, on current public evidence, to call it a unified top-down command structure the way the Bolshevik party was. That said, the Soros ecosystem could be considered the “first among equals.”

The “prisons less necessary” vs. Gulag question. The DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique’s public position is explicitly non-carceral and abolitionist-adjacent, the rhetorical opposite of Bolshevik state terror. Whether that stated position would survive contact with actual state power is a legitimate speculative question—but as of today it should be labeled speculation, not documented fact. Note: The one characteristic that all Marxists share is their ability to lie with impunity and then change positions to advance their political agenda at the drop of a hat.

This section is, of course, purely conjecture. That said, the possibilities are real.

Continued low-turnout primary targeting against aging or complacent incumbents (the model that worked against DeGette, Goldman, Espaillat).

Building a genuine bench through the “farm system”—school board and city council wins converting into state legislative and congressional power over the next two cycles.

A charismatic, media-fluent standard-bearer (Mamdani nationally, in the mold of AOC in 2018) who normalizes the brand faster than opposition research can define it negatively.

Democrat establishment paralysis—leadership vacuum post-Pelosi, as well as the “big tent” framing from figures like Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, suggests the party has not settled on a strategy to contain the faction.

The DSA’s own internal fractures are real and documented—the carceral-abolition and “real democracy” (court/Senate abolition) planks passed by narrow or contested margins, and minor non-player character (NPC) members themselves flagged that whole caucuses felt unrepresented in drafting. A “big tent” containing Bernie-style reformists, Maoists, and Marxist Unity Group members is a coalition-management problem, not a monolith.

Electability ceiling: Washington Monthly‘s analysis found DSA-style insurgents have underperformed against genuine moderates outside deep-blue districts; a radicalized platform released just months before the midterms is a gift to Republican messaging (Speaker Johnson has already been reading planks aloud at conservative conferences) and a genuine liability in swing districts, where Republican ads writing themselves from DSA slogans like “abolish the Senate” and “public ownership of the largest corporations” could cost Democrats the House.

A Third Way-style internal countermobilization: a Washington Post piece explicitly calls for the party establishment to organize against the DSA rather than accommodate it—the opposite of the Menshevik/SR failure to take the Bolsheviks seriously as an existential threat until too late.

Historical base-rate skepticism: American third-force/insurgent movements such as the Tea Party movement have repeatedly captured a party’s energy and base without achieving the total, permanent institutional lock-in the Bolsheviks did—the U.S. constitutional and federalist structure, with staggered elections, primaries open to intra-party contestation, and no Soviet-style unicameral national assembly to seize, makes a Bolshevik-style irreversible consolidation structurally much harder, whatever the DSA’s platform aspires to.

The Bolshevik analogy illuminates tactics—patient infiltration, use-and-discard of coalition partners, growing candor about radical goals as power consolidates—better than it predicts outcomes. Russia in 1917 had a collapsing autocracy, a war-exhausted army, and no entrenched two-century constitutional order to work around; America in 2026 has none of those conditions.

The most defensible version of the comparison is that the DSA is running a “boring from within” strategy against the Democrat Party with real, documented success at the primary level and increasing candor about maximalist goals—not that the DSA is on a Bolshevik-style trajectory toward an irreversible, armed, one-party seizure of the American state.

That said, the DSA’s electoral strategy and the Antifa/BLM-network/other street-protest ecosystems plausibly function this way—distinct organizations, overlapping personnel and causes (e.g., Gaza, anti-ICE, anti-police), a shared ultimate horizon (the “post-capitalist” framing common across the space), with the street element providing disruptive pressure from which the electoral element can benefit without formally owning it. Whether that amounts to a coordinated strategy or a loosely correlated ideological milieu that happens to move together is genuinely unresolved.

The risk scenario that must be mentioned. Could all of this end in Bolshevik-style violence and coup/revolution rather than a clean electoral outcome? The honest answer is it’s a live possibility rather than a documented trajectory so far. The conditions that made 1917 escalate to armed seizure—state collapse, war exhaustion, a security vacuum—don’t currently exist in the U.S., which is the strongest reason to discount a literal repeat. But a scenario in which the DSA’s institutional wins are supported by an escalating, foreign-linked, financially opaque street-protest apparatus that normalizes political violence as tactically acceptable is not simply inconceivable based on what has transpired to date. It is, in fact, closer to the actual historical Bolshevik playbook (legal politics plus an extralegal enforcement arm) than a pure, electoralism-only interpretation of the DSA would suggest.

That scenario remains a key risk to monitor at this point. Will most of the American electorate conclude that, left unchecked, the continuing pot-stirring by the DSA and the street activists could morph into something that approaches what happened in 1917? That is precisely the empirical question the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential primary will test.

There is nothing new about the DSA. It is simply one more step along a path that our politics has been going down for decades. No one has been able to explain to me how the massive system of transfer payments that makes up our current Welfare State is different from Socialism. Its a massive transfer of wealth from the producers based on who the government thinks should get it. Couple that with the massive regulation that goes along with it - including rent control and housing regulation, public housing, etc. - and you don’t need the government owning the means of production and private property. The DSA would not be dangerous if a constituency for it had not been building up for decades. The principle of individual autonomy and freedom has been eroded over decades. The voters are willing to trade freedom for “security” and are drawn by the siren song of a government that will “take care of them.” But we all know what “take care of” means - the elderly and vulnerable are offered death panels and suicide.

The Bolsheviks received documented German funding to destabilize wartime Russia. The DSA-adjacent funding ecosystem (Soros-linked foundations, Tides, Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund, donor-advised funds) is domestic and works through the 501(c)(3)/(c)(4) tax code—legally gray in specific instances (the Stop Cop City indictment being the sharpest example) but structurally different from a foreign intelligence subsidy.

If Neville Singham is funding some of the DSA activities and candidates, then it is foreign funded.

fyi

Invited American commies at Obama’s Center opening: From link

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/p/domestic-terrorists-were-obamas-special

“Dig it!” the old woman in the third row of the Obama Presidential Center, had once gloated over the brutal murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

“Kill all the rich people,” the old man wearing the Communist ‘red star’ had defined his radical movement. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (pictured above from 2009), the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases.

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