A Socialist Steps to the Microphone
Megan Romer did not come to the New Yorker Radio Hour to soften edges. As co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, she arrived with a specific argument: that the D.S.A.’s most controversial positions are not liabilities but selling points, and that the American public – far from being repelled by left-wing boldness – is actively hungry for it. Whether you find that reading of the political moment persuasive or delusional probably says more about your own zip code than about the D.S.A.’s actual standing in the country.
The organization has spent years accumulating critics from both the right and the center-left, fielding accusations that its platform is too radical to win general elections, too internally fractious to govern, and too ideologically rigid to adapt.
Romer’s answer to most of that is essentially: wrong.
What “Bold” Means When You’re on the Left
The phrase Romer used on air was direct and worth sitting with: “I think people like us being rather bold.” It is a claim about political psychology as much as policy. Her argument is not that the D.S.A.’s specific platform positions poll at sixty percent – she did not make that case – but that the posture of conviction, the willingness to name what you want and fight for it without hedging, registers with voters who are exhausted by triangulation. The Democratic Party spent the better part of two decades running candidates who believed the path to power was narrowing the target profile. That strategy has a complicated record.
Her second line – “People want a fighter” – lands in a cultural moment when that word is being claimed from every direction on the political spectrum. It was deployed constantly during the 2024 cycle, often without any particular ideological content attached to it. What Romer is doing, by contrast, is attaching it specifically to a socialist framework: the fighter, in her telling, is fighting for something concrete, not just performing combativeness for its own sake. That distinction is worth noting even if you reject the underlying politics.
The D.S.A. has always occupied a peculiar position in American political life – formally independent of the Democratic Party but deeply enmeshed with it through candidate endorsements, electoral organizing, and the careers of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who rose through D.S.A. networks before becoming a nationally recognized political force. Romer’s defense of the organization’s controversial positions does not resolve that structural tension, and she did not pretend otherwise. What she offered instead was a temperamental argument: that timidity is the real electoral risk, not ambition.
Controversy as a Feature, Not a Bug
The specific “controversial positions” Romer was defending were not itemized in granular detail during the interview, but the D.S.A.’s public platform includes support for Medicare for All, abolition of student debt, significant cuts to defense spending, and positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have drawn sharp criticism from centrist Democrats and cost the organization relationships with several elected officials. These are not fringe talking points within left-wing organizing circles, but they sit well outside the median of what the Democratic Party has been willing to campaign on in competitive districts.
Romer’s framing inverts the conventional strategic wisdom. Where most political consultants would advise moving toward the center as a path to broader coalition-building, she is arguing that the center itself is not as moderate as it looks from inside the Beltway – that working-class voters across demographic lines hold positions on healthcare costs, housing, and corporate power that align more naturally with the D.S.A. than with, say, a third-way Democrat running on fiscal responsibility. It is a theory of the electorate that has been debated intensely since 2016 and has not been conclusively settled in either direction.
What makes Romer’s appearance on the New Yorker Radio Hour notable is not that she broke new ideological ground but that the platform forced a certain kind of accountability. The New Yorker audience skews educated and urban, reliably left-leaning but not necessarily socialist, and often skeptical of political organizations that prioritize ideological purity over electoral pragmatism. Making the case for the D.S.A. to that particular room requires something different from rallying a base – it requires explaining, without retreating, why the organization’s most contested stances are worth defending at all.
The Fighter and the Organization Behind Her
Romer’s role as co-chair puts her in the position of defending not just a policy agenda but an internal culture that has generated its share of public disputes. The D.S.A. has faced criticism over its chapter structures, its handling of internal conflicts, and the gap between the energy it generates in organizing spaces and the legislative results it has been able to deliver. None of that is unique to the D.S.A. – most political organizations of any scale carry similar contradictions – but it matters when you are making an argument grounded in the claim that boldness works. Boldness that does not produce outcomes is, eventually, just noise.
Still, the co-chair’s argument is not without evidence. The political figures who have moved through D.S.A.-adjacent networks have demonstrated genuine electoral viability in certain geographies. The ideas the organization has championed, dismissed as non-starters a decade ago, have migrated into mainstream Democratic debate even when the D.S.A. itself doesn’t get the credit. Medicare for All exists as a reference point in every healthcare policy conversation now. That is not nothing, even if it is not yet law.
What Romer did not address – and what the interview format perhaps did not press her on – is the specific mechanism by which being bold translates into being effective. “People want a fighter” is a compelling rally cry. It is less clear as a governing theory.
The D.S.A. co-chair walked out of that conversation having defended her organization’s positions without softening a single one, which is either political courage or political stubbornness depending on what happens in the next election cycle – and possibly both at the same time, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that tends to make or break political movements long before anyone has the numbers to prove it either way. Whether the American appetite for boldness Romer is counting on actually shows up at the ballot box, or whether it stays exactly where political appetite so often does – loudly expressed and quietly absent when it counts – is the question her entire argument rests on.
