The Trojan Horse Strategy

How the DSA Is Using Unions as Political Vehicles

There is a long tradition in American labor history of radicals inside unions pushing the movement toward greater ambition: toward industrial unionism, toward racial integration, toward the welfare state. Eugene Debs built it; the CIO organizers of the 1930s carried it forward. But there is an equally long tradition of political factions hijacking union institutions for goals that have nothing to do with the workers those unions are supposed to represent. What the Democratic Socialists of America is doing in American unions today belongs in the second category.

The claim is not inferential or partisan. DSA’s own documents make the strategy explicit. The organization’s foundational stance on labor treats unions not as ends in themselves — institutions whose primary duty is to their members — but as instruments for building a socialist political movement oriented toward collective ownership, anti-capitalism, and electoral realignment. That has direct consequences for the tens of thousands of workers who pay dues expecting representation, not recruitment into a political cause whose aims they may not share.

The Strategy, In Their Own Words

DSA’s rank-and-file strategy, codified at its 2019 national convention and reaffirmed since, calls on members to deliberately seek employment in strategically chosen unionized industries and workplaces. The New York City DSA chapter formalized this tactic, called “salting,” with a resolution encouraging members to “get rank and file jobs” in targeted union sectors, complete with a placement network for members interested in those positions. When this document became public through a Politico story, the backlash from union officials was swift and sharp. NYC-DSA went silent rather than defend the strategy openly. The silence confirmed it: the strategy works only when it isn’t named.

DSA has been explicit about using union political action committees and endorsement processes to advance its Palestine solidarity campaign. DSA's own publications describe the goal as "cohering pro-Palestine activism in unions around electoral activity," using "mass-based institutions we already influence" to bring pressure on electoral targets. The workers who built those institutions over decades of hard bargaining had no say.

DSA’s 2025 national convention passed a resolution requiring anti-Zionism to be a loyalty test for members and for any candidate seeking the organization’s endorsement at every level of government, including local races. The logic flows directly from the rank-and-file strategy: gain influence in unions, redirect union political activity toward DSA’s program, use that program to discipline elected officials. The union becomes a transmission belt for a political movement its members never voted to join.

Portland and Eugene: The Oregon Laboratory

Oregon has become the locus of one of the clearest demonstrations of this strategy in action. Portland DSA’s 2024 city council campaign was a tactical success. Two DSA-endorsed candidates, Tiffany Koyama Lane and Mitch Green, won seats on the newly restructured Portland City Council. Their campaigns collectively knocked more than 26,000 doors and turned out supporters with impressive efficiency. Portland DSA was candid about what this represented: a deliberate shift away from years of “liquidating” themselves into broader coalitions and toward running openly declared socialist campaigns under their own banner.

The organization’s internal endorsement policy reveals the accountability structure underneath this electoral work. Portland DSA created a “Socialists in Office” committee specifically tasked with ensuring that elected officials holding DSA endorsements answer to the chapter’s political standards, not merely to the voters who elected them. When an organization with defined ideological commitments places its “cadre endorsees” in public office and maintains formal oversight of their conduct, the question of who those officials represent becomes uncomfortably live.

The answer arrived quickly. DSA-endorsed Councilor Mitch Green intervened publicly in Portland State University’s internal disciplinary process, threatening to withhold municipal funding for PSU’s performing arts center unless the university dropped conduct violations against pro-Palestinian student protesters. A city councilor using the municipal budget as a cudgel against a university’s internal governance is a coercive act. It aligned precisely with the political priorities DSA has embedded in its union and electoral strategy.

Eugene DSA, meanwhile, has been laying the same groundwork in the Willamette Valley, with active labor organizing that includes strike support, workplace rights trainings, and an electoral working group. Chapter leadership includes members drawn from the University of Oregon graduate students’ union. In Eugene as in Portland, the sequence is the same: enter labor institutions, build political relationships, redirect organizational energy toward the movement’s broader goals.

The OEA: A Statewide Pattern

The pattern is not confined to higher education or to Portland. The Oregon Education Association, the statewide K-12 teachers union representing roughly 41,000 educators, shows the same drift at a larger scale.

The most tangible example occurred in Salem. The local DSA chapter held a public “strike school” event inside OEA’s local office, a training open to the public, not just union members, promising a panel of “strike experts” and inviting attendees to join DSA in conversation with union organizers from across Oregon. The union’s physical infrastructure, built over generations by dues-paying educators, became the venue for a DSA recruitment and organizing event.

On the Palestine question, OEA has followed the national pattern. The union’s own issues page now states that the Oregon Education Association has called for “an immediate and permanent ceasefire,” a foreign policy declaration issued on behalf of 41,000 educators who hold every imaginable view on the conflict. OEA’s largest local in Portland, the Portland Association of Teachers, went further. In May 2024, it co-published a “Know Your Rights” guide with Oregon Educators for Palestine, a group formed after October 7, 2023, that advises teachers on bringing anti-Zionist curriculum into classrooms from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Portland DSA publicly defended PAT when a city council candidate criticized the union for using the phrase “from the river to the sea” at an event. The two organizations were, by that point, functioning as parts of the same political project.

OEA’s official equity statement tells the rest of the story. The union has declared itself committed to “dismantling white supremacy” and embedded that language into its core institutional mission, not as a position members voted on, but as a value the organization has assigned to itself and, by extension, to everyone who pays dues. A teacher in Medford or Bend who joined OEA to secure a fair contract and due process rights is now officially a member of an institution whose stated mission includes dismantling social systems she may not believe need dismantling.

This is what mission creep looks like when it is not accidental. It is the predictable result of a strategy in which a political movement treats unions as vehicles rather than as institutions with obligations to their own members.

The PSU-AAUP Problem

The tension this creates is visible at Portland State University. PSU-AAUP represents more than 1,200 instructional faculty and academic professionals. Its stated mission is to defend faculty rights through collective bargaining, grievance procedures, and advocacy for tenure, due process, and academic freedom. Those are the terms under which faculty join and pay dues. They are also the terms under which the union has done important work: filing grievances, resisting illegal layoffs, negotiating contracts that have shielded contingent faculty from the worst of PSU’s budget cuts.

But PSU-AAUP’s Executive Council has also voted to issue formal institutional statements on Israeli military policy, to commit the union to examining and restricting PSU’s academic partnerships with Israeli institutions, and to denounce U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the membership. These are not positions on wages, workload, or academic freedom. They are foreign policy declarations made in the name of a membership that includes faculty of every political persuasion, every religious background, and every national origin — faculty who hold every view on a conflict that spans history, religion, and geopolitics, and faculty who came to the union for contract protection and nothing else. At no point were rank-and-file, dues-paying members polled to determine whether they approved of their union wading into these waters.

The national AAUP has moved in the same direction. In August 2024, it reversed its nearly 20-year categorical opposition to academic boycotts—a reversal, as commentators noted, timed to the war in Gaza. The AAUP president publicly called a sitting U.S. senator a “fascist” during a presidential campaign. These are the actions of a political organization, not a professional association defending the rights of all faculty regardless of ideology.

The result is a union that cannot fully serve its members, because it has committed itself to political positions that divide them. Under the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, unions must represent all workers in the bargaining unit regardless of whether they pay dues, which means even faculty who opt out to protest their union’s political direction remain entitled to contract protections. The union speaks in their name either way. They can withhold their dues, but they cannot withhold their membership in the political project their union has chosen to become part of.

A Principled Objection

Nothing in this argument disputes the value of faculty unions, collective bargaining, or academic freedom. Faculty unions have historically played an important role in defending democratic institutions, opposing censorship, and protecting the conditions under which serious intellectual work can happen. PSU-AAUP’s contract victories on wages and job security are real, and they matter to the people who hold those jobs.

A union’s legitimacy rests on its claim to represent all its members: to be the collective instrument of workers who have different views on almost everything except their shared interest in fair wages, secure employment, and protection from administrative abuse. The moment a union substitutes the political program of a faction for that common interest, it has broken faith with the members who do not share that program. It has also handed administrators and legislators a gift: a ready-made argument that the union is not a legitimate representative of its members but an arm of a political movement.

This is worth stating plainly, because the causes DSA advances are not trivial. Racial justice, economic equality, opposition to militarism, solidarity with people living under occupation: these are serious moral commitments. Many union members share them. Some share them passionately. The problem is not the values. The problem is the vehicle and what using it costs.

A union that takes official positions on U.S. foreign policy, police funding, or anti-capitalism is not stronger. It is operating as a faction, not a union — one that still processes grievances, but has decided its political identity matters more than its members’ consent or its founding mission.

DSA understands this tradeoff and has made a conscious choice. Its strategists are frank about the goal: to transform unions from defensive institutions that protect workers into offensive instruments for socialist political change. That choice trades the broad solidarity that gives organized labor its power — the solidarity that can hold together a Jewish teacher and a Palestinian-American teacher, a conservative electrician and a democratic socialist nurse — for the satisfaction of institutional endorsement of a political program. That trade requires using other people’s dues, institutional reputations, infrastructure, and labor histories to advance a program that those people did not sign up for.

If these causes deserve serious political homes, and they do, those homes should be built openly, through organizations whose members have chosen those commitments. They do not belong in labor through institutions whose members signed up to negotiate contracts and file grievances, and whose dues were never meant to fund a political movement, however noble its stated aims may be.

The Cost of Dissent

The strategic use of unions and electoral institutions is only part of the picture. Portland labor officials who have questioned DSA’s influence have faced sustained campaigns of public shaming on social media — labeled “villains” and accused of “covering up fascism” for positions that fall outside DSA’s political worldview. The attacks are not about policy disagreement. They are about loyalty. Anyone who declines to follow the movement’s line on police, Palestine, or electoral endorsements can expect to be named, shamed, and pressured in public forums where the audience is other union members and progressive activists.

These tactics serve the same function that explicit loyalty tests serve in the electoral context. They do not need to succeed in every case to be effective. They need only make the price of independence visible. A union leader who knows that questioning DSA’s agenda may result in being publicly labeled as a fascist collaborator has been given a clear message about the boundaries of acceptable dissent.

A movement doesn’t need to dominate every debate inside an institution it is working to influence. It needs people to know that dissent is noticed, named, and punished. After that, silence does the work.

The Accountability Gap

DSA’s “Socialists in Office” model creates a structural accountability problem that goes beyond the union context. Elected officials who hold DSA endorsements operate within a system of dual accountability: to their constituents on one hand, and to the chapter’s political oversight committee on the other. When those two accountability structures point in different directions, as they will in a city as diverse as Portland, we already know which one wins.

It also creates a transparency problem for voters. When a candidate runs on housing affordability and transit investment, voters are entitled to know whether they are also voting for the political program of the organization that trained, funded, and will continue to closely supervise that candidate. Portland DSA was candid about this in its own publications, but most voters are not reading the chapter’s internal strategy documents.

The labor movement’s greatest historical achievements—the eight-hour workday, the right to organize, and workplace safety protections—were won by unions that represented workers across industries and political lines, including those with conservative politics, religious commitments, and no interest in socialist theory. Those coalitions required hard-won compromises and discipline to keep the union’s focus on its members’ interests. The DSA model works against that discipline, substituting ideological coherence for solidarity.

Educators, union members of other professions, and Portland voters should ask not whether DSA’s political goals are admirable (reasonable people disagree about that), but whether a union hall or a city council seat is the right vehicle for pursuing them. They should sit uncomfortably with the realization that the workers and voters whose institutions were infiltrated in order to pursue these ends were never explicitly asked for their permission.