In 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was born out of a merger of two older groups, including one led by Michael Harrington, the preeminent socialist of his time and the author of The Other America, which helped shape President Lyndon Johnson's “War on Poverty.” At its start the DSA had about 8,000 members, a mixture of public intellectuals, unionists, and students. Notable, perhaps, but nothing like the heyday of American socialism in the decades before World War I, when the Socialist Party of America had more than 100,000 members and its leader, Eugene V. Debs, ran for president five times. In his final campaign in 1920, he won 913,700 votes while serving a 10-year prison sentence for giving a speech against the war, considered an act of sedition according to the draconian anti-free speech laws of that time. In Ulster County, he won 301 votes, barely 1 percent of the total, but in urban areas socialism was a mass movement of trade unionists and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. At their peak they elected more than 1,000 officials to office, including the mayor of Schenectady, a congressman from Manhattan, and 10 members to the New York State Assembly in 1918. It has taken more than a century to top that number with 11 DSA members due to join the Assembly next year.

As popular as these early socialists were, they were also loathed. The Russian Revolution of 1917 sent a shock wave through the country. So did massive strikes in 1919 when 4 million workers walked out, roughly a fifth of our industrial workforce. We had a “Red Scare,” bolstered by the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918. The post office stopped delivering radical magazines. At the Justice Department, a young J. Edgar Hoover led the Palmer Raids (named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) to arrest upwards of 10,000 radicals, including Emma Goldman, who was deported to Russia along with 200 others on a boat dubbed the "Soviet Ark." In Albany in 1920, the state legislature expelled the five socialists elected to the Assembly. When all five won again in special elections, three were expelled once again, so the remaining two resigned in solidarity.

You could argue, of course, that the Socialist Party may have failed, but many of its ambitions were absorbed into Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and now seem as American as, well, Labor Day. The eight-hour work week, the ban on child labor, the minimum wage, old-age pensions (now known as Social Security), the graduated income tax – all were there in the 1912 Socialist Party platform. But socialism as a label and an ideology remained toxic through the Cold War. We had a second Red Scare in the late 1940s and 1950s, which included the Peekskill Riots of 1949. For several decades the area had hosted summer camps for socialists, communists, anarchists and other leftists from New York City. In 1949 Paul Robeson headlined a concert that also featured Pete Seeger attended by 20,000 people. Afterwards they were attacked by rock-throwing mobs along the exit roads while the police stood by.

The 1960s brought great political ferment – civil rights, the anti-war movement, feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation – but not a revival of socialism, not a return to class-based politics. If anything, the “New Left” rejected the “Old Left” for its rigid Marxist orthodoxies. The Port Huron Statement of 1962 written by Tom Hayden and other founders of Students for a Democratic Society called for "participatory democracy." Not until 1982, really, did the New Left and Old Left reunite with the founding of the DSA, some 8,000 inheritors of once-mighty movements.

A dozen years later, Peter Frase came of age in Minneapolis. He was the son of a professor in the prosperous middle class, but also a public high school student getting a first-hand education in the rank inequalities of American life. In the library he read about socialism. On weekends he played in bands in a punk/hardcore scene infused with an anarchistic DIY spirit. At the University of Chicago he joined a DSA chapter in 1998 and has been paying his dues ever since. After college, he moved to New York City to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology, but burned out on academia and took up blogging. A precocious 20-year-old publisher recruited him to convert a blog post into an article for the inaugural issue of Jacobin, which would grow into a leading socialist magazine after being boosted by the Occupy Movement. (That youngster is now president of The Nation.)

Frase expanded another Jacobin piece into a book, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, which combined two of his passions, Marxism and science fiction. He lived in Brooklyn with his partner, also a journalist, but got chased around by the ever increasing rents. In 2014, blessed with an inheritance (not enough for Brooklyn but enough for upstate), he bought a house in Newburgh, a city he liked even if The New York Times periodically dubbed it the murder capital of New York State.

At first, he found exactly one fellow comrade in the area, Jonathan Bix, also a son of a professor, who'd helped lead Occupy Vassar and would go on to found what has become For the Many, a tenants organization and ally of DSA on many fronts. During the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, Frase joined with a neighbor in door knocking, but still felt like a lonely upstate socialist. All around him, though, the world was changing. Sanders himself never joined the DSA, but his insurgent challenge followed by Trump's improbable victory inspired the first surge of enthusiasm for socialism in a century. In two years DSA's membership grew from 8,500-plus to 55,000 – a youthquake. Frase, who at 36 had felt like an upstart in an organization of 65-year-olds, now became the old-timer amidst millennials in their 20s and younger 30s. A friend at the national DSA office sent him contact info for sign-ups in the Hudson Valley.

In its formative stages, the group met most often in Peekskill, a central location for those traveling from Westchester or Rockland County or farther reaches of upstate. Unlike New York City where DSA thrives in a dense social environment – there is a DSA choir and soccer league – a defining feature of DSA upstate is more likely to be the 30 minute drive, maybe an hour, to find a dozen comrades. At their very first meeting in a Peekskill coffee house in the winter of 2017, a dozen people used the DSA's own constitution as a model to draft bylaws for their own Hudson Valley chapter. Frase then sent e-mail invitations to the new members list to meetups in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, or Peekskill. His first question at the gathering was, What brought you here? Then they discussed what socialism meant to them. Goal one was to get to know each other.

The left has a long history of factionalism. Small groups with rigid ideologies, cult-like at times. The DSA aimed to be a big tent that accepted disagreements. For instance, should the group even be involved with the Democratic Party? (Democratic opinion-monger James Carville has wished they weren't. So have others.) But such debates are held at the DSA national level. At the local level Frase wanted people, especially HVDSA newcomers, to learn how to talk about their beliefs with family, friends, and coworkers. The night before we spoke he'd led a Zoom session with 20 to 25 participants. The following evening he'd have a live event in Beacon. (The pandemic transformed upstate DSA into a Zoom movement. See miles driven above. But the events calendar does offer coffee and cocktail meet-ups in an effort to sit with fellow human beings, not just screens.)

In 2019, as their numbers grew from the dozens into the hundreds, this original HVDSA made an amicable split into a Lower Hudson Valley DSA (Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties) and Mid-Hudson Valley DSA (Ulster, Duchess, Orange, and later Sullivan.) Some 60 to 80 people attended the MHVDSA inaugural general assembly held at a Baptist church in Kingston. In the past few years this group has grown rapidly to 1,000 members.

The MHVDSA website includes a quote from Vladimir Lenin: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement." On this website you'll find what amounts to an impressive college course on socialism. First come definitions for socialism, capitalism, communism, anarchism, also dialectics and historical materialism, and neoliberalism – all the terms I'm a little fuzzy on. Then you can scroll through links to articles and videos to keep you busy for days if you like.

I enjoy talking with Frase because I sense his deep interest in political theory, but I confess I'm resistant to structural thinking and abstract reasoning. Give me stories, metaphors, the tools of the poet's trade. (Not that Marxists can't be poets!) I did impress my teacher by reading The Communist Manifesto in eighth grade. (And what better place to read The Communist Manifesto than at Greenwich County Day School in the 1970s when we wore coats and ties and studied Latin.) Yet Kurt Vonnegut was my favorite author at the time, and I've grown up to live in his darkly comic world. I've been appalled by the wanton slaughter in Gaza, appalled that our country supplies the munitions, but I wouldn't attempt to speak the language of settler colonialism. I do often hear a belief system in what some DSA members say, but at my age in these awful times what I also hear is their passion and determination to build a better world. For that I'm all in.

The website also quotes Karl Marx: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Another way of saying this, what is theory without action but a book club? Those drawn to the DSA have often already been canvassers, activists, participants in other progressive causes. What more can they do? What would be different?

Mutual aid, as I learned, is a term fraught with debate. It's not meant to merely be liberal charity as already practiced by hundreds of capable non-profits that don't really challenge our system of social inequalities. It's meant to empower people to take more control for themselves. Plausible? Feasible? I sense MHVDSA has had mixed results. But maybe this is too big a question. Maybe the point is public outreach. The group has hosted coat drives, food pantries, and brake-light clinics in Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston, and elsewhere. A coat drive in Poughkeepsie early in February offered hamburgers, hot dogs, hot coffee, and "people who care." Another in a snowy parking lot in Newburgh gave away $500 worth of socks and personal hygiene products.

There are benefits to such social gatherings. City & State included among their political power couples for 2025 Leanna Zilles, the co-chair of MHVDSA, and Daniel Atonna, now a Poughkeepsie city council member who never seems to miss a MHVDSA rally and may have been born with a bullhorn in his hand. They first met at a coat drive.

The events that may touch a political nerve are brake-light clinics. The argument is that cops will use a busted brake light as a convenient reason to pull someone over. License plate lights too. If you're poor, that could mean not just a fine but other troubles.

The most dramatic example of this happened in Kingston in 2020. After four fatal shootings, the city police recruited the help of state troopers for a 12-week campaign that made 1,300 vehicle stops, but only found five weapons. As Liz Carey later told Chronogram, she was driving home from a Wednesday Walk for Black Lives when she saw a young Black man pulled over for a brake light, then two days later the same sight. "I am in Kingston all of the time," she said. "I've never been pulled over for a brake light or anything else." The MHVDSA held a brake light clinic – their second in the city – at which they fixed over 30 lights in three hours. They also handed out free bicycle bells because the police had been pulling over bike peddlers as well. Peter Frase, the theorist, had gotten the idea for such a clinic from a DSA chapter in New Orleans. Niklas Moran, more mechanical, replaced the broken bulbs. For years now, he has worked in an Amazon warehouse in an effort to unionize the workers. Theory into action.

But these mutual aid events aren't what has driven MHVDSA's explosive growth. Next week, we'll turn to politics.

(My thanks to Peter Frase, Pete Cavanaugh, Leanna Zilles, Niklas Moran, and Phil Erner for interviews that informed this history. Any mistakes are mine.)