Let me begin by laying out my leftist credentials. In second grade, I sided with the Indians over the cowboys. Since middle school, I’ve stood with Palestine, and in high school I protested the invasion of Iraq. I’m a known Green Party apologist, and voted for lunatic presidential spoiler Dr. Jill Stein in 2012, 2016, and 2024. I joined Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 2016 and may very well still be a member from the ocean of emails they send me. I’m probably the only bro on earth who subscribes to the feminist socialist magazine Lux. I’ve helped taqueros hide from ICE. Last May, with friends I threw a massive party for DSA mayoral hopeful Nithya Raman to get LA’s counterculture behind her campaign. Raman is now on the cusp of becoming an Angeleno Zohran.
I share this biography on the eve of what many predict will be a left-wing midterm wave. Democrats are likely to retake the House. Progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed may very well win Michigan. In New York alone, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) set off an “earthquake” in June, winning nine out of their 10 primaries—and most of those candidates will sail into office.
In the run-up to the general election, I set out to write a frothy diary about partying with New York’s DSA faction over five weeks. How an organization parties, when the lights are low and guards are down, sometimes reveals more about its culture than any viral video or manifesto. And with DSA on the verge of breaking into the mainstream thanks to Zohran, AOC’s presidential buzz, and the media’s hysteria about polarizing influencer Hasan Piker, it seems like a good time to find out what these young, cool, and chronically online operators are really like off-duty. But rather than hits of acid or bumps of ketamine, or even a stiff drink, I receive a sobering cold shoulder. What I don’t understand is whether the issue is me or if DSA, New York’s most powerful and organized leftist outfit, simply doesn’t party?
To answer the question, I embark on an odyssey of fundraisers, coffees, canvassing, calls, and parties to meet the city’s DSA faithful. The first hiccup is I’m new to town and don’t know anyone. So I post to my 25K+ mentally unwell IG followers asking if anyone knows anyone in DSA. No replies. In late September, at the launch of the new issue of my conceptual print tabloid On The Rag, I meet a woman who invites me to debate ragebait. Of course, I ask her if she knows anyone in DSA. I’m in luck: my first lead.
In early October, I walk through the East Village to Three Jewels Café. It feels very LA, by which I mean it’s a sad fourth wave coffee shop with a “speakeasy” yoga studio hidden behind a mirror. I order tea and wait for a DSA comrade who I’ll codename “Taylor.” Taylor asks for anonymity because they have a square day job and are “very Nixonian and paranoid.” Also, Taylor’s working a swanky fundraiser for Abdul El-Sayed later that night, and doesn’t want their cover blown.
Taylor arrives, passionate and sharp—and, I discover, attended my On The Rag launch, which is usually a strong indication of, if nothing else, a hedonistic spirit. But when I ask where and who they party with, Taylor grows evasive and reiterates their ask for anonymity before admitting to once having hung around downtown’s literary scenes. Some more twee, others more edgelordy, all—for Taylor—depressingly “apolitical.”
It’s a milieu I know intimately, one that often celebrates crummy autofiction about degrading blowjobs and blowing coke at KGB rather than advocating for a 32-hour work week. “That’s where DSA is distinct from the downtown scene,” Taylor says. “Instead of Catholicism, DSA is giving meaning to people in a pretty hopeless world.” But as the Catholic Church knows well, aesthetics, pomp, and a festive spirit are key to getting people in the door. So my search for the DSA party continues.
After coffee, I head to the Bowery Hotel for the Abdul El-Sayed fundraiser. A line studded with progressive celebrities winds around the block. Former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio waltzes right to the front while writer Molly Crabapple waits with the rest of the plebeians, many dressed Leftist-chic: a gown or suit, but with a New Yorker tote.
I’m not on the list and can’t cough up the $250 for a ticket, but have been around long enough now to know about one of downtown’s best-kept secrets: the Bowery bathroom, which connects the lobby’s bar with the hotel’s scammy Italian trattoria Gemma. Strolling by the hostess, I pass the kitchen hallway, walk past the bathrooms, and find myself inside the hotel’s hushed lobby before a security guard asks me to leave. Womp. Later, I see pics online of AOC and Cynthia Nixon at the event.
I worry if I’ll ever break into any DSA subcultures, but Taylor connects me to Cora Hyatt who works in leadership. Cora texts me that, before speaking, she needs to ensure I’m “cleared.” Her message continues: “For obvious reasons, they’re being a little strict about members speaking with press even for something innocuous.”
Those “obvious reasons” are DSA’s fears of some Free Press or New York Post provocateur punking them, though their anxiety can border on the neurotic. If the Trump era has taught us anything, isn’t it that all press is good press? Shouldn’t a hit piece by America’s favorite rightwing rag be a badge of honor for any proud socialist?
To get cleared, I share a pic of me posing with LA’s DSA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman as well as links to Instagram posts documenting the party I helped throw. To Cora, I reply: “I’m but a lowly culture journalist whose beat is books, art, and bohemia.”
She responds: “That’s what they all say…”
A week later, with no word from Cora, I head to midtown on a stormy Sunday night for a “Socialist Saloon.” Read: a queer line dancing party to fundraise for David Orkin and Aber Kawas, DSA candidates running for New York State Assembly and Senate seats. I expect a boozy, sexy queer rager à la Buck Wild, but it’s more like a chaste church social: a teacher onstage chaperones a handful of geriatric millennials through the choreography while some Zoomers mingle off the dance floor.
At the bar, I meet Orkin volunteer Taryn Green, who tells me she makes friends through DSA because “we share a similar vision for the world.” We small talk for a while, and I ever so gently ask if any of her DSA comrades drink or do drugs—like seemingly everyone else I meet in New York. Taryn clams up: “I’m not in the party scene. I don’t drink.” The awkward interaction triggers my adolescent PTSD. Suddenly, I’m at a summer cookout and offer weed or shrooms or contraband beers to my fellow teenagers, only for them to rat me out to their parents. And this time, I didn’t even offer!
Eventually, Aber, in a hijab and flannel shirt, approaches. Like any good politician, Aber exudes charisma and a bright, warm energy. “I was terrible at line dancing,” she jokes. She brings me to meet David, to whom I mention that I’m writing about the intersection of activism and nightlife. He lights up.
“I’m basically the mayor of Ridgewood,” David jokes. I’ve found my in. But no sooner do we start talking than David comes to his senses and backtracks, insisting that it was “off record.” I explain to both candidates that it doesn’t work that way, you can’t retroactively place a comment off the record. The two grow far more judicious.
“I didn’t grow up partying,” says Aber, whose Palestinian refugee parents raised her in New York. “For me, the social aspect manifests within Yemenite coffee shops. At 2 a.m., you’ll find people hanging out and having coffee. Different culture, same kind of thing.”
What about David, “a professional gay guy” living in New York’s clubbing epicenter? “I roll with techno people who plan events at Paragon, Nowadays, and Trans-Pecos to support DSA candidates and causes,” David says, cautiously. “People wanna bring their whole selves into the project.”
Could New York’s most zeitgeisty leftist crew really be this earnest? In a city—and, increasingly, a country—full of berserk cynics, can this brand of respectability survive in our post-decency, post-truth world? As a leftist, I naturally loathe the right’s racist and fascistic politics, but this level of prudishness makes even me nostalgic for the wild parties the psychopath incels used to throw at Sovereign House.
The next week I weave between knock-offs on Canal Street and head upstairs to experimental event space Woodbine. The elevators spit me out into the launch party for Shawn Gude’s new book, American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs. NYC-DSA co-sponsors the event with Jacobin, probably the biggest socialist magazine on earth, but with a knack for pissing off the left and right with equal vigor. I should know; I’m a longtime subscriber.
I sit amongst the sleepy crowd as Gude, a former Jacobin editor, and current Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht discuss how Debs transformed America’s socialist movement. (Some people are literally sleeping.) During a post-talk chat with Micah, I discover he moonlights as a DJ, and I think I’ve found another portal into the DSA underworld. But Micah quickly shoots me down. He prefers to keep his nocturnal DJing habit separate from his political commitments.
Fair enough, though in today’s toxic online landscape, separating one’s politics from their creative output is an untenable position for many. Just ask Ed Sheeran! Micah makes the mistake of giving me his business card and I text him repeatedly that I’d love to talk more. He never responds.
On my birthday, rather than blacking out in the back of Clandestino with my gang of art and literary hooligans, I head to Bed-Stuy. I’m there to check out the Ecological Socialist 101, a meet-and-greet intro to the group. On IG, I brag that I’m going, and soon receive a message from a DSA activist: “Going to ecosoc 101… they’re virgins don’t put them into your article.”
I attend the 101 and the activist is right: It is pretty virginal, even the drinks afterwards. Member Nathan Nisenson tells me about attending fundraisers at the nightclubs Nowadays (dubbed Zohran’s Mar-a-Lago) and House of Yes, but “they were a little buttoned up,” he admits. “Maybe I’m not invited to the crazy ketamine ragers.”
Neither am I, I think, until Cora Hyatt finally gets back to me with an invitation for drinks at Forgtmenot in Dimes Square, which seems like a curious choice. Most DSA supporters reside in the “Commie Corridor,” swaths of rapidly gentrifying Queens and Brooklyn. Dimes Square, by contrast, is the birthplace of the alt-right reactionaries of the early 2020s, though much of that scene has been driven out by NYU cokeheads.
Fellow DSA apparatchik Romke Hoogwaerts joins us and orders a burger and an NA beer while Cora throws back blood-red vodka cranberries that match her reddish hair. “I joke that DSA stands for Drinking Socially Actively,” Cora says. For over an hour, the two enumerate DSA’s stunning successes: skyrocketing membership and the organization’s laser focus on winning elections. As the booze works through our systems, I turn the conversation back to my main interest: Does DSA party?
“You wouldn’t believe who I’ve done lines with,” Cora laughs. “And I will give you no hints.”
“I won’t share who I’ve smoked joints with,” Romke says. “But trust me, I’ve had some incredible conversations outside of a bar over a joint.”
So, maybe I am the problem. But even if DSA won’t party with me, will other leftists?
To find out, I trek to the Bushwick dive 101 Wilson. Dirty Mag co-editor Maia Raymer blasts Def Leppard’s 1987 blockbuster “Pour Some Sugar On Me” in the back room as a handful of off-duty strippers, porn stars, and poets dance around a pool table. I feel right at home. It’s not just the friendly faces of Office Mag’s Izzy Capulong and poet and Hustler cover girl Maddie Vasquez—Dirty’s anarchist, DIY ethos transports me back to my own youth spent at punk shows in abandoned buildings.
“DSA attracts a lot of people who never had to consider sex work or drug dealing,” Maia says over the music. “The world we’ve built around Dirty Mag offers the freedom to express yourself sexually and physically in ways that are seen as taboo elsewhere. We’re all praxis.”
Maddie, who I once curated into a reading inside a hooker’s Ritz-Carlton suite, perhaps puts it best: “Retired party girls never actually retire, sober girls are hot, and everything is political,” she says. “Now, I’m going to Popeyes.”
I can’t remember who invited me, but I have an actual DSA “party” saved on my calendar and find myself on an industrial stretch of Metropolitan Avenue at Mansions. Activists sip cocktails as a DJ plays to an empty dance floor. I stand around awkwardly until legendary whistleblower Chelsea Manning says hello. The conversation veers into film, and Chelsea mentions that she loved You Can See Everything so much that she’d seen the three-hour film twice. “We’re all Nathan Fielder fans around here.”
Uninspiring stump speeches transpire on the dance floor. I film some, but someone stands right in front of me, almost as if she’s intentionally blocking my phone. I move to the left, she moves to the left. I move to the right, she moves to the right. Maybe I’m becoming as paranoid as the DSA activists I’ve interviewed.
Post-speeches, I approach Chelsea, but her warmth has evaporated. Hoping to break the ice, I tell her about On The Rag and that I’d love to give her a copy. Chelsea isn’t impressed. “No,” she says. “I don’t want one.”
On the outdoor patio, I spot the Jacobin editor from the book launch. He was, it turns out, just DJing the event—and isn’t particularly thrilled to see me.
“I definitely wasn’t trying to ignore you,” Micah says.
“Really?” I joke. “You sound like me when I’m ghosting someone.”
New York magazine journalist and Know Your Enemy podcast host Sam Adler-Bell joins in. I complain about the difficulties I’ve had reporting this story. That DSA preaches about how inclusive and “democratic” an organization they are—until a journalist shows up.
“Much of the media paints DSA as unserious or insane. Naturally many members are leery of journalists,” Sam says. “Relax, it’s not personal.”
That makes sense. But my fellow leftists’ pervasive suspicion of me seems riskier than activists blowing illicit powders. Sure, this defensiveness pre-empts criticism that DSA are crazed dope fiends, but it also speaks to a certain weakness. Why should America’s boldest leftists care what anyone—whether fellow believers, rightwing whackjobs, mainstream politicians or bohemians like me—thinks? DSA may not be my fav flavor of bacchanalian subculture—in fact, maybe they’re not really a subculture at all. But they are without a doubt an inspiring movement, one with much promise and power—though they could stand to cultivate some poetry, too.
Over a drink at Peg’s post-canvassing in Ridgewood, on the final afternoon of my leftist partying spree, David Orkin tells me something that might clarify the strangely tepid past five weeks I’ve spent chasing an elusive DSA underworld:
“The purpose of life is to enjoy life—not work. But if I’m honest I like working. I find meaning in it. With your comrades you can change the world by electing your friend mayor,” David says, slowly sipping his one and only drink. “And you can’t do that kind of work hungover.”
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