They favor demands that would immediately benefit the entire “multiracial working class” (a favored term of theirs) in a way that most members of the working class can already understand, like Medicare for All they refer to this as “mass action.” They’ve adopted the Bernie Sanders campaign as the centerpiece of their political strategy and are currently attempting to centralize DSA’s efforts behind it. B&R is something of a synthesis, but if I had to approximate its politics, I’d say they’re labor Trotskyists (with less of an emphasis on permanent revolution) who are largely influenced by Karl Kautsky and Vivek Chibber’s parliamentary road to socialism. Since 2017, Momentum has seen a number of splits and rebrandings as it has transformed from a slate into a caucus: Spring, and now, Bread and Roses, which wisely purged the most vulgar class-reductionist elements from its midst. (They also elected someone who turned out to be a sometime police union organizer to the NPC, causing an embarrassing scandal which kicked off a longstanding alliance of the old guard and Momentum against Praxis.) Delegates voted overwhelmingly to endorse BDS (a campaign promoting boycotts against Israel), advocate for reparations for the descendants of slaves, and leave the increasingly neoliberal Socialist International. (The North Star caucus would soon be born out of this Harringtonite grouping.) The resulting National Political Committee (NPC) was split roughly between the three factions: 5 spots went to Praxis, 7 to Momentum, and 4 to the old guard. At the last convention, Momentum, a millennial-heavy slate for NPC with ties to Jacobin, as well as Praxis, a group oriented toward grassroots organizing, organized effectively against the DSA’s old guard, influenced by Michael Harrington, who wanted to preserve DSA’s status as a pressure group within the Democratic Party. The proceedings occurred atop a factional topography that’s changed significantly from that of the 2017 convention, the first since 2016’s massive influx of new blood in the wake of Trump and Bernie that spiked membership from five thousand to forty thousand in under two years. How are sixty thousand people, drawn disproportionately from the downwardly mobile children of the middle class, going to defeat both fascism and the left wing of neoliberalism in a country of 327 million sitting atop a crumbling global empire? Yet there we were, wearing lanyards. We have a little more than a decade until global climate catastrophe irreversibly accelerates, according to a recent UN IPCC report. In certain moments, this convergence of DSA’s big tent - stitched together from frequently clashing groups of everything from social democrats and “democratic socialists” (I’m yet to be convinced there’s a difference) to anarchists and communists, and yet more who reject even such approximate labels as these - felt like a dinghy paddling in the shadow of a tsunami. As if to hammer home the moment’s urgency, two mass shootings happened that weekend, one with clear white supremacist underpinnings. Other possibilities include a rising tide of reactionary violence, the reawakening or final death rattles of organized labor, and a financial crisis that will make the crash of 2008 look like a skinned knee. Most were keenly aware of the stakes: the two years between conventions will see the conclusion of Donald Trump’s presidential term and potential election to a second, the confinement of thousands more migrants in concentration camps, and what will likely be the final verdict on Bernie Sanders. In Atlanta the first weekend of August, over one thousand delegates representing nearly sixty thousand members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convened over the course of three days to set priorities and allocate resources for the largest socialist organization this country has seen since the Vietnam era. An on-the-ground report from the DSA National Convention.