His warning carries particular significance because it comes from someone who spent years operating inside the movement rather than criticizing it solely from the outside.
Altman said his initial interest in the DSA grew out of his involvement in organized labor. He was looking for a political home focused primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, but what he encountered eventually left him deeply concerned.
“I had been involved in my local union and met some people who were far, far to the left, in like, a frightening way,” he described.
“I was looking for a more pragmatic and thoughtful option on the left that was focused on economic policy.”
That expectation, according to Altman, did not last.
As he became more involved, he said the rhetoric and ideology he encountered began resembling the very far-left political movements he had hoped to avoid.
“One of the concerns I had very quickly was that [the] DSA was beginning to sound more and more like those extreme groups on the left that I, you know, certainly didn’t want anything to do with,” he continued.
One early warning sign came from the organization’s approach to Venezuela.
Altman recalled raising concerns in 2019 about defenses of Nicolás Maduro’s government, noting that Venezuelan democratic socialists and social democrats themselves were among Maduro’s political opponents.
“The person disagreed with me and defended, you know, essentially defended the Maduro regime,” Altman described.
For Altman, that dispute represented something larger than a disagreement about one foreign government.
He argues that portions of the modern socialist movement have adopted an increasingly hostile attitude toward the United States while showing considerably more tolerance toward governments opposed to Washington.
“Flash forward to today… you have DSA members saying, ‘Bernie Sanders, AOC, they’re not socialists,’” Altman added.
“They’re willing to fall over themselves apologizing for any regime that opposes the United States, simply because it opposes the United States.”
Altman has characterized the ideological combination he witnessed as a “marriage” between “Marxist utopianism” and “third worldism.”
He described the resulting worldview as “this view that America is a unique evil in the world and that its enemies have a point.”
The criticism comes as the DSA has become increasingly visible in American electoral politics. Altman himself has previously argued that the organization’s evolution is especially important because candidates backed by the socialist movement have won Democratic primaries and expanded the group’s influence beyond activist circles.
The DSA’s own recently published political program also goes substantially beyond conventional liberal economic policy. Among other objectives, it calls for eliminating the presidency and Senate, replacing the Supreme Court, abolishing prisons, closing overseas U.S. military bases, and lifting sanctions on countries including Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.
Supporters of the organization view such proposals as part of a broader democratic-socialist restructuring of American political and economic institutions. Altman sees the movement’s trajectory very differently.
His message to Democrats who remain inside the organization is strikingly simple: “leave.”
“I personally think that just, given the organization and the structure inside, that a lot of dissident voices have been silenced,” he continued.
“A lot of dissident voices have left the organization.”
Altman’s account is ultimately his assessment of a movement he once belonged to, rather than an independent finding about every DSA member. But his nearly decade-long involvement gives his criticism an insider perspective at a moment when democratic socialism is playing a more prominent role in Democratic politics.
For voters wondering how far the socialist movement intends to go, Altman’s warning also points toward something increasingly difficult to dismiss: the debate is no longer simply about expanding government programs or raising taxes.
The fight is increasingly about what kind of political and economic system the American left wants to build — and one former DSA leader says what he witnessed from the inside was enough to make him walk away.
