Enter Daedalus: The DSA Left and the Necessity for AOC 2028

by J. Ryder

Jacob Peter Gowry, ‘The Flight of Icarus’ (c. 1635-1637)

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force of world history.

Mao Zedong, ‘On Coalition Government’, (1945)

In ‘The Paradox of Icarus’, a careful analogy was drawn, conceptualizing the ongoing and constantly evolving dynamic between the Democratic Party and the tasks of organized socialism. Like Icarus’ wax wings, which carried him in his flight towards the sun only to sabotage his ascent due to the fragility of their component parts, socialism could be the force necessary to force a similar turn of fate onto the Democrats. Relatively comfortable in their duopolistic relationship with the Republican Party, a politically and electorally interventionist left is required to push the political energy otherwise co-opted by the Democratic Party into a totalizing hegemonic victory. But this process will not happen on its own; it requires decisive action. What was remiss from the analogy of the paradox was our Daedalus. Daedalus, Icarus’ father in the age-old folk tale, gives Icarus his wings, yet, in doing so, warns his son not to fly too close to the sun. A tale of naive ambition, Daedalus and Icarus ends with the latter’s refusal to follow his father’s advice, ultimately falling to his death.

What a surface-level interpretation of the classic myth risks, however, is interpreting Daedalus as a purely conservative figure; a voice of caution whose role is simply to restrain Icarus’ excess. However, this flattens the myth at the very moment we need its sharper edge. Daedalus is not just the one who warns; he is the one who makes flight possible in the first place. Without him, there is no ascent, no proximity to the sun—no crisis to speak of at all. The danger does not emerge in spite of his intervention, but because of it.

This is where the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and, particularly, its internal ‘left’ faction come into view in a different light. Despite its self-conception as a purely intransigent tendency, the true purpose of the radical left lies in its potential to overhaul the existing political dynamics–if it's willing to engage tactically. The left is embedded enough within the broader Democratic Socialist project to help scale it, give it coherence, and push Democratic Socialism’s national representatives, figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, into positions where they can increasingly claim the support of the masses; support currently captured by reactionary establishment forces. At the same time, the left cannot succeed in this if it remains purely ‘conservative’ and abstentionist: we must retain our critical yet participatory analysis that gestures beyond the immediate project, even if that analysis remains, for now, devoid of a substantial social base.

In other words, the DSA left is already functioning as a kind of Daedalus, whether it recognizes it or not. It is helping construct the ‘wings’ that will carry the Democratic Party to implosion through its participation in the Democratic Socialist project. The left not only grants the socialists radical legitimacy, but also bolsters them organizationally, ideologically, and electorally. The irony is that, similarly to the conservative reading of the role of Daedalus, the left often balks at the idea that it plays this constructive role. The elements of compromise traditionally associated with the DSA right are treated by the left as a problem to be resisted rather than a condition to be strategically navigated. Here lies the fundamental contradiction of the left’s modus operandi: they participate in the DSA project on the correct basis that DSA is the only meaningful left organization with any mass appeal, only to understand the practical implementation of its role in relation to the very mass appeal that draws them to the organization as tantamount to the antagonistic negation of those elements rather than their critical advancement and subsequent abolition. Practically, they understand that aggressive electoralism and compromises are a boon to the organization and the primary reason DSA is the dominant socialist formation in the current period. Politically, however, the left does not internalize and advance on this fact, but is frustrated by it and often even seeks to deny it.

But if the aim is to move beyond Democratic Socialism in any meaningful sense, then active participation in the full spectrum of political work is not a betrayal—it is indispensable for this task. The expansion and consolidation of the Democratic Socialist pole must not be understood as a mandate for opportunism, but rather as the practical and simultaneous destruction of that pole, opening the door for consequent and genuinely new political divisions. Without a substantial socialist pole, the left remains a marginal critic of a marginal movement. Without a period in which that current is tested at scale, its limits cannot be collectively registered. The fact of the matter is that socialism has been identified as the ideological form of the aspirations of the progressive sentiment of the working class struggle. To deny such a phenomenon on a purely theoretical basis, while failing to challenge it practically, is to refuse to challenge it at all. However, it can only be seriously challenged when it is no longer merely aspirational, but, in this specific moment, after it has exhausted itself and become more than aspiration. Without this mass political experience, the critiques advanced by the left remain trapped in a kind of anticipatory mode, convincing only those already predisposed to agree: the left subculture, never the millions required to make revolution possible.

To recognize the Left as our ‘Daedalus’, then, is to acknowledge that the path out of marginality is only possible if we’re willing to destroy the Democratic Party and replace it, but that, simultaneously, this destruction must first necessarily run through a phase of construction. The task is not to simply stand outside the flight and issue warnings, but to participate in pushing it forward and shaping it in such a way that its contradictions become legible, and ultimately unavoidably confronted. Only on that basis can what follows cease to be a matter of internal dispute between marginal sub-tendencies and become a rupture that registers at the level of mass politics.

What the contemporary left must now confront is not necessarily some essential weakness of its critique, but rather the absence of the historical conditions that would make that critique actionable to anyone beyond its own circles. Its critiques of latent reformism, opportunism, cooptation, imperial complicity, etc., are not wrong in the abstract; they are simply unproven in nationally lived political practice. And for a mass politics which learns through experience rather than theory, this is a fatal limitation. The betrayal of AOC when it comes to Israel, for example, is purely memetic in this form. It is a rhetorical phrase distributed within the radical left with the purpose of aligning us against moderate social democracy. It has succeeded in doing so. But, for the average person, AOC remains the embodiment of a militant fighter against Zionism and the most far-left member of Congress. If she represents a political formation in mass politics, it is not of a more moderate left against a more radical left, but simply the radical left. The mass element and perspective must be recentered in our analysis here.

This is what Lenin means when he says:

Revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone. [my emphasis]

Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

The paradox is straightforward: the more correct the critique appears in advance, the less persuasive it becomes in practice when it is not anchored to widely shared practical experience. The left milieus of DSA (as well as the broader left subculture) find themselves in exactly this position; they speak in rather anticipatory terms about the limits of Democratic Socialism, but the masses have not yet encountered those limits as a concrete reality. Without that encounter, the critique reads not as clarity, but as sectarianism. It is dead on arrival. 

This is where the fixation on figures like AOC or Zohran becomes revealing. Much of the energy on the DSA left is spent denouncing them—cataloging their compromises and predicting their betrayals and entanglements with the Democratic Party establishment. It’s not that these critiques are objectively incorrect, but rather that these denunciations operate in a vacuum; they presume a disillusionment that has not yet occurred at scale, and yet still demand that the masses arrive at conclusions they have not yet had the opportunity to test. Its premises are oriented internally towards the activists, not externally towards the masses. In this sense, the marginality of the DSA left is not merely organizational; it is epistemological. It asks people to know something they have not yet experienced.

The left believes it has already seen the future and therefore must warn others away from it. But the task of a politician is to make abstract ideals and clever critiques intelligible for the masses and substantial in their actual lives and political views. The politician who predicts the future without shaping it is useless; he is a mystic or an academic. There is no other purpose for a politician. The masses do not learn from direct disquisition, however inflammatory or passionate it may be: they learn from experience. And the future promised by figures like AOC and Zohran is, for them, not foregone but uncertain; they are not ready to move beyond the current phase of socialist politics, but in fact are wary of what they see as its uninhibited radicalism. The warning from the left subsequently lands as obstructive and infantile pedantry rather than advanced socialist politics. 

Here, it becomes clear that we must move from a theory of the war of maneuver into the war of position in order to unleash the capability to practically engage the war of maneuver on genuine terms, on a mass political scale. Doing so does not lie in sharpening the critique alone, nor in intensifying the scale of purely internal struggles within DSA. It lies in actively intervening on and transforming the terrain on which that critique can become bound up with mass political experience. That requires a strategic inversion that many on the left instinctively resist: the active hegemonization of the Democratic Socialist wing of American politics on every electoral front, in every cultural and political facet.

This is why the current discourse around an “AOC 2028” moment matters more than its immediate content may convey. It signals the possibility of a shift from progressive insurgency to progressive hegemony within the Democratic Party. AOC could transform from an isolated dissident to a genuine establishment politician in her own right; in a sense, she would proliferate and become the status quo. For the DSA left, the response to this should not be to attempt to avoid contradictions through an organizational refocusing on apolitical economic organizing, but to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the momentum of Democratic Socialism to consolidate a genuinely radical line. The rise of Democratic Socialism to hegemonic status is not the defeat of the radical project; it is the precondition for its meaningful emergence because only under those conditions does the opportunity for us to open an organic break occur.

If I were a member of the DSA left (for whom I have far more personal sympathy and identification with than any of those within the ‘DSA right’ who seriously retain hope for the Democratic Party machinery’s ability to carry out socialism), I would be the first in line to vote towards the endorsement of AOC for president in 2028, and I would do so precisely because of my skepticism towards her and not in spite of it. If I thought that AOC was an opportunist, that hope in her campaign was overly optimistic, that her presidency would give rise to the rapid growth of potential opportunities to expose elements of Zionism, reformism, capitulationism, you name it–that would not detract from my cause, but exceedingly bolster it. For the first time, the left’s prophecies would be proven correct, and the opportunity would open up for an actually meaningful intervention from this perspective, to reclaim socialism from her opportunism through the gauntlet of the mass political experience. Until the ideology of AOC has run through such a gauntlet of governance and hegemony, there should be no reason for us to expect her progressive working-class base to become disillusioned and seek a radical alternative. Her opportunism (or potential of it) has yet to be tested at scale, and her governance can only represent a specter of prospective hope, a space that we would otherwise fill ourselves.

It is precisely this mass faith in the Democratic Socialists’ promises that displaces and immobilizes the left’s critiques, but this should not be a reason to disengage. As Marxists, we know the subject of mass faith cannot be avoided, and must be confronted, engaged, and radicalized beyond what is politically compatible with the bourgeois parties. The task, rather, is to carry this opportunism to its natural conclusions: state power and hegemony. If the left is correct in these allegations of opportunism (which it very well may be), that an AOC presidency will seek to continue to give state support for American imperialism, that it will continue to suppress mass will for the displacement of reactionary institutions, this subsequently will make clear the insufficiency of ‘rightist’ Democratic Socialism on a mass scale. This, and only this phenomenon, will create an opening for the critique made from the left flank to become structurally accessible at the level of society, and subsequently facilitate a new and truly independent Marxist pole for the first time in American history.

True rupture is not a matter of ideological differentiation on paper; it is grounded in making a concrete political intervention. Without that, what now passes for “splits” are little more than petty internal disputes, obsessed over by their participants and yet infantile to the outside observer; easily dismissed. Why should the masses ditch what they now feel to be awe-inspiring hope given by the rise of Zohran, AOC, and the Democratic Socialist movement when that movement has hitherto only served to fight for those people against the fascist GOP and the reactionary establishment of the Democratic Party? If we truly believe that these people are incapable of totally representing the fundamental goals of the working class, we must put them in an uncomfortable dynamic in which the limits of their ability to do so will be impossible to paper over.

To those who are now exclaiming, “But such a presidential campaign will split our precious DSA!” I say good! Then we will finally have experienced perhaps the first organic split, the first organic faction in the history of DSA and American socialism. It’s ironic because many of these same people will be the first to make splits and generate division over their various marginal caucuses and working groups. Now this same person fears a split on the level of mass politics? Perhaps it is precisely because of the organic and politically concrete character of this hypothetical split that scares this sort of leftist. It’s all fun and games when caucuses and factions are constructed on the basis of who your favorite 20th-century Marxist is, which caucus has the best color or aesthetic, which group your friends are in, etc.  Things become much more serious when the stakes are whether or not Democratic Socialism will remain as a hipster subculture or whether it will transcend it, whether it will remain the property of the intellectuals or genuinely be handed to the masses. But perhaps this type of split has no interest for this sort of DSA member.

But to those on the left who are serious, who are looking to forge a real political pole, who want a genuinely ‘independent party’ for which there have only been so many farcical historical attempts: why do you resist a project like AOC 2028? Is this not the course you hoped DSA would take? Was it not you who hoped and prayed for an opportunity in practice to expose the opportunism of the right, of the electeds who betray their promises? To be able to create a meaningful split from DSA to create a robust communist party-form? Why, then, do you continue to resist the opening for such construction? Why do you advocate for it in theory and work against it in practice?

At present, the only splits that register at a mass level are those between Democrats and Republicans, and increasingly between establishment Democrats and their progressive challengers. These are the fault lines through which political experience is being organized at the level of millions. The left/right distinction within socialism, by contrast, remains largely invisible outside of activist milieus and the left subculture.

The task, then, is not to defeat this insurgent current before it matures, but to push it to its limits, to clarify those limits as they emerge, and to prepare for the moment when a break becomes both necessary and unavoidable. This is where the deeper strategic patience comes in. The formation of a genuinely independent communist party, one capable of commanding mass allegiance, cannot precede this process. It must arise from it. Otherwise, it remains a self-declared vanguard without a following, a solution in search of a problem the masses do not yet care to even perceive.

AOC remains the only currently viable Democratic Socialist candidate for the presidency, with broad national popularity and name recognition. This campaign must start now, and it must be backed by the full extent of forces privy to and supportive of Democratic Socialism without hesitation. To bicker over such a decisive moment is to cede terrain to the establishment Democrats and let them define it on their terms, as they did in previous years before the left was as developed as it currently is. 

In response to the vacillating nature of AOC on issues like Palestine, infantile calls to instead pedantically endorse Rashida Tlaib because she is, allegedly, “more principled” are now arising. The truth is, however, that ‘principality’ versus ‘vacillation’ is not what is on the line for us—this is a schema that is irrelevant for the purposes laid out here and would only serve to push Democratic Socialism back into marginality at this decisive opportunity for intervention. We know AOC would vacillate in office, as would Tlaib. These people are not unthinking robots who fit on a spectrum between opportunism and principle. They are real political actors, humans, who adapt to their conditions and act accordingly. They will bend, because humans bend. They will fail, because humans fail. Our goal is not to find the right people to send into office, it is to use the electoral office as a front. 

In theory, we would love Rashida Tlaib to be the president, as it makes no difference to us who takes on this historical role from the Democratic Socialist camp under such a schema. That would be, except for the fact that she has a fraction of the name recognition and national viability of AOC, who is now leading in recent presidential polls, while Tlaib has not even shown interest in running. If she were to run a viable campaign, we would back it 100%. In the universe where it is instead Tlaib wants to run, is leading the polls, garnering mass support, and running on a ticket to transform American state infrastructure with a potential mandate to govern, it would be correct to hop on the bandwagon immediately. The fact is, however, that this is not the present scenario, and to mistake this imaginary alternative universe as reality to detract from the candidate with more support, who is just as capable (if not more so due to her greater influence) to facilitate this initiative, is complete idealism. This is what makes the present calls for Rashida Tlaib “instead” so impotent and preposterous: it is a misunderstanding of the situation completely. The question is not a matter of personal preference or even perceived principle, but about winning political power and structurally revolutionizing American politics to finally confront the specter of socialism for the first time in a very long time. 

AOC gives us the chance to do that, and we should take it.

The irony is that many on the left already intuit that their approach to electoralism is not currently functioning at some level. This has been demonstrated most predominantly in how far they have come to embracing electoral initiatives in the capacity that they have, even when it results in sublation of their previous strategy in embryo within the way that it grapples with the problems of the electoral struggle. The idea that the ‘left’ would campaign for “the more principled Democratic candidate” versus outright and omnipresent abstentionism from the election entirely is unthinkable even just a few years ago. This concrete evolution of the left’s politics has arisen out of their genuine frustration with marginality, with endless internal debates, and with the inability to scale their politics to a mass level. For such an evolution, we should genuinely applaud and encourage them. The next stage for the left now, however, is not to pull punches, sublating the marginal embers of abstentionist thinking at every step, but rather to embrace this more aggressive and all-encompassing strategy wholeheartedly and to situate it historically.

To redeem the left from marginality, then, is to align its strategy with the actual development of progressive political consciousness in the United States and posit itself as its organic continuation. That means recognizing that Democratic Socialism, in its ascendant form, is not the enemy to be crushed prematurely, but the present terrain to be traversed wholistically. Only by passing through that terrain can the horizon beyond it come into view. Until then, the choice is stark: remain ‘correct’ but irrelevant, or participate in shaping a process whose outcome one ultimately intends to transcend. AOC 2028 gives us that choice, and we should not hesitate in taking a decisive stand at this historical conjuncture.