About this book:

**How did a small band of socialist organizers become one of the most influential forces in American politics?**

This is the definitive history of the Democratic Socialists of America—a story that stretches from the labor militancy and radical dreams of the early twentieth century through the movement's near-collapse, and then its stunning resurgence in the age of Bernie Sanders and the Squad. It is a narrative of炬beration and reinvention, of bitter internal debates over identity, strategy, and what "democratic socialism" even means, and of ordinary people organizing to challenge the most powerful forces in American life.

Drawing on decades of archival research, interviews with key participants, and internal documents never before made public, this book takes readers inside the convention halls, campaign offices, campus chapters, and protest lines where the DSA's history was made. It refuses to flatten the organization's contradictions, instead showing how the tensions between revolution and reform, youth and old guard, electoral ambition and grassroots militancy, repeatedly threatened to tear it apart—and repeatedly gave it new direction and energy.

For anyone trying to understand the resurgence of socialist politics in America, this book is essential reading. It does not offer easy answers or a triumphant narrative of linear progress, but something more valuable: a richly detailed account of what it actually takes to build a radical movement in a country that has long treated the word itself as suspect.