Groundwork NPC Reflections on One Year: Kareem E.
The National Political Committee of DSA is the organization’s highest political body, elected every other year by delegates at DSA’s convention. 23 at-large members join 2 National Co-Chairs and 2 YDSA Reps to manage DSA’s day to day affairs, direct resources, and set the organization’s political direction. This 27 person body forms the organization’s legal board and is tasked with representing the breadth of political opinion and experience in DSA . Despite this extraordinary responsibility, NPC members are often at a distance from the general membership of the org- their work is frequently behind the scenes or only visible to those members who opt in. Groundwork, who holds the largest bloc on the 2025-27 NPC, tasked our NPC members with providing report backs on the first year of their term, a milestone we hit this August. We will be publishing their responses as a series over the coming days, continuing now with Kareem E. of New York City DSA:
Sports Update:
There is nothing to smile about in American sports. The New York Mets season can only be described as akin to an extended funeral. The Commanders are going to be horrifically disappointing following an off season where Adam Peters appears to have assembled a team exclusively by signing players 30 or older. I have decided to go all in on the Premier League this year to cope. An Arsenal repeat is the only thing I have to look forward to.
Soccer has been a brief but much needed reprieve from the horrors of American sports. Being in NYC for the World Cup was an amazing cultural experience. I will never forget the generational run the Egyptian National Team went on. Even the combined forces of FIFA, Israel, and the Argentine Football Association conspiring to end the match on favorable terms to Messi couldn't dull the shine of the Pharaohs.
Life Update:
I am engaged.
Some stuff about DSA:
I joined the NPC in the sleepier second half of last term. After being reelected, I was interested to see what a newly seated, highly motivated, and more multi-polar body would do and how it would function differently. In a lot of ways, the energy this term has stayed at a higher baseline than the 2023-35 NPC. DSA has stayed relevant in the media and the NPC has had a lot of opportunities to be public facing leaders and speak to the public. We’ve therefore been able to demonstrate more of the party-like structure that has been the engine behind so many of this year's political upsets, and as a result this body is much more comfortable with and sober about public political leadership.
Even still, the throughline from last term to this term has been a tendency to “live and let live” when it comes to true political action, with no one group being able to assemble coherent, lasting majorities to govern the organization. This attitude of generally letting everyone carry out all projects as their fiefs, no matter how different projects interact (or contradict) with each other, cuts against what we need to be building at national scale. The push to develop priorities this term was a good first step, but in execution the prevailing approach was to give the so-called “left” and “right” different buckets of priority work (despite the fact that the actual composition of the priority committees is actually fairly tendency balanced). If this organization is going to continue to be the engine driving worker organization and consciousness in this country, we need a coherent plan to build strike, street, and state power that functions together coherently. That is not possible if our primary consideration is institutionalizing a stale interpretation of our current internal factional politics.
The reason for this level of incoherence is because of the incentive structures the NPC is built upon. Projecting consistent, coherent political leadership is effort intensive, and particularly difficult to do on a body where the cost of good faith collaboration is very high while the cost of blaming each other for failures is very low (i.e. negative reactions to intentional polarization are localized by faction). The incentive structure is not to work together, but rather to rile up different sections of membership in increasingly intense ways. Every group is guilty of this, from Groundwork ahead of the July PEC vote, to Bread & Roses leaking NPC emails to list-build, to SoR and the Bowman affair – no one’s hands are clean. The reason is not because national leadership and caucuses are filled with bad people with bad intentions; it is because our NPC is a reactive body with baked in factional perceptions that is often not under much public scrutiny, and therefore not used to dealing with the spotlight. Any one caucus knows that often their only recourse is to turn on the spotlight and cause other factions the discomfort of publicity. This kind of back and forth is generally draining and cuts against the experience that most of us have had as chapter leaders. Many of us in GW worked across tendency often at the local level to develop strong relationships as we lead campaigns and chapter bodies. But, due to the manner in which we elect the NPC heavily prioritizing internal competition and factional alignment, there is a strong incentive to eschew collaboration in favor of finding security by shoring up one’s position among one's own tendency. And without consistent mediating democratic structures below the NPC between conventions, the only way for us to gauge member attitude is the volume of emails and tweets we receive on any given topic. The most visible consequence of this lack of political coherence is that the NPC, and indeed much of the organization, is functionally walking backwards into the 2028 election.
The point of engaging in presidential politics isn't because it would simply be good to have a democratic socialist as president. The point is to grow DSA to a million members and build our influence institutionally, experientially raising the consciousnesses of the masses as quickly as possible. At the time of writing this, the US is engaged in an unwinnable conflict with Iran, gas prices are shooting up across the country, the United States is transferring the biggest supply of weapons to Israel in recent memory, ICE is disappearing people to concentration camps, and it is the hottest summer on record (a record that will be shattered again next summer). The task is gargantuan. DSA is the only organization that can actually address these problems and build the power needed to stand up to the greatest challenges of our time. It almost feels idealistic to place the role of the NPC in these terms, but it is inescapable that we as the left urgently need effective national leadership in order to meet this moment- and as a member of the national leadership, I can not shake the feeling that we are failing in our role.
It would be a huge missed opportunity to only run an individual presidential candidate over the next two years. In order to be ready for a critical election year, we need the NPC and NEC to spend time identifying the best districts for congressional challenges so we can build our bloc to the greatest degree possible. We need to be supplying those chapters in ripe districts with the resources to run and win campaigns. We need to end the overall reactive approach to national endorsements, and project a long term, durable vision for coherent socialist governance. I think we can do this, but if the process develops as slowly and as factionally as the process to decide a process for a presidential endorsement has, we will not be able to cohere in time- and I shudder at what that would mean for DSA’s future.
This organization has a once in a generation chance to put ourselves on the front lines of the greatest struggles of our time. I am a proud member of this organization because I believe we are the only movement that I’ve seen in my lifetime that could reshape this country and world into one that is kinder, one that reflects the needs of the masses of all working people, not just a wealthy few. This organization is not just a spoils system for which certain caucuses can claim fiefs. It is not a college of rivals that requires self appointed mediators to impose a bastardized consensus that pleases no one. We should instead attempt to satisfy the ultimate contradiction: to create democracy in society by creating it among ourselves and projecting it outward. I look forward to using the remainder of this term to set DSA up for the most successful possible cycle in 2028, and give ourselves the ability to actually demonstrate a better future is possible.
