Reform’s Plans to Import Trump’s Authoritarian ‘Project 2025’ Blueprint to the UK

By Nafeez Ahmed

February 26, 2026

Source: Byline Times

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Far from defending British independence, Reform and its by-election candidate Matt Goodwin are taking blueprints – and cash – from a global network of American hardliners.

“It’s not enough actually to win an election; you also need to completely rewire the system.”

Those are the words of Matt Goodwin – Reform UK’s parliamentary candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election – as spoken to Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025.

Project 2025, conceived and convened by Heritage under Roberts’ leadership is the 900-page authoritarian blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency. It offered a comprehensive plan – now being implemented – to centralise Trump’s executive power, purge independent civil servants, eliminate civil rights including gender equality, impose evangelical Christian nationalism, and transform agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into instruments of mass surveillance and deportation.

In a podcast interview with Roberts recorded in September 2024, Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin laid out the case for importing that model – which has seen President Donald Trump attack democratic checks and balances – into Britain.

“How can we learn about things that I know Heritage has worked on”, he urged, specifically calling for “what has worked in places like Florida and Texas” to be replicated in the UK.

“What does it mean to take back parts of the state or to reform parts of the state?” he asked.

The answer, he made clear, lay in the Heritage Foundation’s model of centralised state capture.

In both Florida and Texas, new laws installed by Republicans in 2024 made it harder to vote, leading to a sharp decline in mail-in ballots. Florida hindered voter registration by imposing heavy fines on outreach groups, while Texas introduced criminal penalties for poll workers and those assisting voters with disabilities. By redrawing districts to favour their own party and limiting ballot initiatives, pro-Trump leaders concentrated power and effectively silenced the voices of many average US citizens, particularly within minority communities.

Running ‘the Trump Playbook’

In his interview with the architect of Project 2025, Goodwin laid out his analysis of British politics as being a derivative of the American conservative project:

“We’ve had this global political realignment that 2016 really gave expression to… Trump was one of the only people really that recognised it. I think Nigel Farage recognised that. I think the Brexit campaign – people like Boris Johnson for a while – recognised that.”

He described Farage – “an ally of Donald Trump” – as running “the sort of Trump playbook”, and argued that British conservatism was “five to seven years behind” the American right. The policy agenda he prescribed was explicit: “We’re not hearing the arguments that JD Vance is making, right… We’re certainly not hearing the tough talk on woke ideology.”

Goodwin’s channelling of JD Vance, now Trump’s Vice President, is significant given his ties to an anti-democratic movement spearheaded by his chief benefactor Palantir co-founder billionaire Peter Thiel and blogger Curtis Yarvin, whom Vance has publicly praised and cited as a major intellectual influence. Often called the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ this ideology argues that American democracy is a failed system that should be replaced by a ‘techno-monarchy’ – unchecked corporate-style government led by a singular, powerful executive.

Two months after his conversation with Kevin Roberts, on 27 November 2024, Goodwin published a Substack post entitled ‘How to Take Back a Country’, in which he praised “Team Trump” for pursuing a strategy to “take back the bureaucracy of the state” by “establishing a ‘counter-elite’”.

He praised his “friend” Kevin Roberts – whom he had met in person in London that month – and claimed that Heritage had been “vindicated by the 2024 election result, and will play a key role in Trump 2, but deserve to be heard because, ultimately, I think their vision is about to go global, including here in Britain.”

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Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation’s Blueprint

Heritage’s Project 2025 blueprint proposed that thousands of ideological Trump loyalists be placed into politically appointed positions across the US federal government, systematically replacing independent civil servants. Roberts declared that this “Second American Revolution” would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. He has also called for a “long, controlled burn” of American institutions.

Project 2025 further called for centralising executive power around the presidency, dismantling regulatory agencies, ending civil rights protections including gender equality provisions, and expanding the unilateral enforcement powers of agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Within four days of Trump’s second inauguration, nearly two-thirds of his executive actions mirrored or partially mirrored proposals from the Heritage blueprint.

Goodwin’s relationship with this apparatus is longstanding. Months before urging Britain to adopt Heritage Foundation’s Trumpian blueprint, he had in July 2024 been hosted at an online event on the subject of “Popular Sovereignty: The US-UK Special Relationship in the Age of Trump, Farage and the Reform Party”.

The Declared ‘Trans-Atlantic Hub’

Goodwin’s advice is not simply theoretical – he is part of an institutional vehicle for this transatlantic project in the form of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS) at the University of Buckingham, where he is a visiting professor.

CHSS states that it seeks to serve as an “institutional hub for a new trans-Atlantic or global network” of aligned organisations.

In its ‘Our Network’ section naming “mission-aligned” groups with whom it is attempting to build active relationships, CHSS names several organisations at the core of the American Republican infrastructure: the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Federalist Society, and Hillsdale College’s DC Graduate School of Government.

These are the organisations that built Project 2025, captured the US judiciary, staffed Trump’s second administration, and are now networked – through CHSS – with a university centre in Buckinghamshire.

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The Network

The Claremont Institute, named on the ‘Our Network’ page of Goodwin’s CHSS, sits on the advisory board of Project 2025. It provided the intellectual architecture for Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election: Claremont senior fellow John Eastman was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors and urged then Vice President Mike Pence to block Congressional certification. The institute’s former president, Larry Arnn, co-founded the Claremont Institute, went on to become president of Hillsdale College, and sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation – binding all three organisations through a single individual.

Another CHSS network name, Hillsdale College, also sits on the Project 2025 advisory board. In 2020, Trump appointed its president, Larry Arnn, to chair his 1776 Commission, which produced a nationalist history curriculum designed to counter progressive education. Hillsdale’s former fellow Michael Anton, who wrote the infamous ‘Flight 93 Election’ essay comparing a Hillary Clinton presidency to a terrorist attack (justifying passengers seizing the cockpit by force) now serves as director of policy planning at the State Department in Trump’s second administration.

In September 2025, Reform leader Nigel Farage was a featured speaker at Hillsdale’s Constitution Day celebration in Washington, DC. The event included panels on “DOGE and the Constitution” and “The Conservative Legal Movement” alongside speakers linked to Heritage and The Federalist. Farage told the audience: “Everything that we value is based on our Judeo-Christian culture and traditions.”

The Federalist Society, another CHSS network partner, is the legal organisation that has over four decades systematically reshaped the American judiciary. It hand-selected all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices are current or former members. During Trump’s first term, 80% of his appellate court appointments were affiliated with the Society. The co-chairman of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Leonard Leo, helped finance and coordinate what has been described as the far-right takeover of the Supreme Court.

Both Goodwin and Farage have appeared on the Federalist Society’s platform. In February 2020, the Society hosted Farage for a teleforum billed as “World Politics After Brexit: A Conversation with Nigel Farage”. In September 2019, Goodwin spoke at a Federalist Society New York chapter event on “No Deal Brexit: Populism & British Politics”.

The Manhattan Institute, also listed on the CHSS network page, was founded by former CIA Director William Casey and has had significant influence on conservative policymaking since the Reagan era. In 2025, Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon publicly endorsed the Manhattan Institute’s ‘Manhattan Statement’ – a programme to impose ideological conditions on federal university funding that mirrors the approach to institutional capture Goodwin has praised.

The pattern across these organisations is consistent: they are not independent think tanks operating at arm’s length from one another. They share board members, they co-produced Project 2025, they placed personnel in Trump’s administration, and they are now collectively listed as the network partners of a British university centre at which a Reform parliamentary candidate holds a visiting professorship.

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Russian Oil Profits and the Orbán Pipeline

Goodwin alluded to the forces behind this network in his interview with Roberts. “I was in Hungary recently,” he said, “and I was talking with Christopher Rufo from the US. And then I came back to the UK and it was Eric Kaufmann who was setting up a new research centre at Buckingham – he’s creating a heterodox centre for social science.”

The picture he drew was of an international pipeline linking Budapest, Washington and British academic institutions.

Christopher Rufo, who has been bankrolled by the financier behind the relaunch of a Nazi eugenics front (Aporia, which is also part of Goodwin’s CHSS network), is the leading inspiration behind Trump’s assault on fundamental civil rights for minorities. But he is also a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, which researchers have exposed is a foreign influence front for the pro-Putin anti-EU government of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The Danube Institute has received over a million dollars from the Orbán Government to pay foreign collaborators, one of which is the Heritage Foundation – whose president Kevin Roberts signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute in 2022. Leaked Project 2025 training videos have revealed that key personnel involved in the Heritage Foundation programme had ties to Orban-linked groups.

Matt Goodwin himself has appeared on the Danube Institute’s podcast show several times, including one in 2025 titled “European Civil War?” He also has financial ties to a well-known Hungary state-backed foreign influence outfit, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – a Budapest-based institution with close ties to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In March 2025, the MCC published a policy document called ‘The Great Reset’, which proposed breaking up the European Union – citing issues such as abortion laws as a reason for the proposed reforms. 

As the Good Law Project revealed, Matt Goodwin received a salary of up to €10,000 per month as a visiting fellow at MCC, which holds an endowment of more than €1 billion from the Hungarian state, including a 10% stake in MOL Group, the energy giant that refines oil sourced largely from Russia. Goodwin’s salary, in other words, was downstream from Russian oil profits.  The University of Buckingham also has a partnership agreement with MCC.

Goodwin is not the only Reform figure tied to this funding stream. As Byline Times previously reported, Professor James Orr – appointed in October 2025 as Nigel Farage’s senior advisor in charge of developing policy for a future Reform Government – is a director of the UK arm of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF).

The Good Law Project found that RSLF has received £512,500 since 2023 from MCC – more than 90% of its total funding. Orr has publicly praised Hungary’s pro-Putin foreign policy, telling an MCC event in August 2025 that he salutes “the Hungarian approach” to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Hungary has systematically blocked EU military aid to Ukraine and delayed sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

Reform UK and Matt Goodwin were contacted for comment.

Hope Beats Hate: Green Party Defeats Reform and Labour in Huge Gorton and Denton By-Election Victory

A concerted political and media campaign to scare voters about a “Green Menace” winning this by-election failed

By Adam Bienkov

February 27, 2026

Source: Byline Times

Source: Green Party Website

TODAY

In the end it wasn’t even close. Hannah Spencer and the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election by a whopping 41% of the vote – pushing Reform and Labour into a distant second and third place.

The result followed polling by Byline Times which showed the race to be neck and neck, but which crucially suggested that Labour voters were much more likely to switch to the Greens if they believed it would defeat Nigel Farage’s party. This was reiterated by online tactical voting campaigns.

That’s exactly what happened. Throughout the day Green canvassers picked up signs of former Labour voters switching en masse to the Greens, in a bid to keep Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin out.

Their victory came despite a concerted campaign by the Green’s opponents to paint them as extreme. The Labour campaign focused on the party’s drugs liberalisation policies, with the Prime Minister suggesting they would turn playgrounds into “crack dens”, while Reform accused them of a “sectarian” bid to win the votes of the local Muslim population.

The media too played their part. The day before voters went to the polls the Daily Mail, whose owner’s wife recently donated £50,000 to Reform, splashed on a front page branding Zack Polanski’s party the “Green Menace” and suggesting they would hand “illegal migrants[a] free house”.

Spencer too became a target. In an interview with Byline Times she spoke about the sexist attacks on her appearance and personal relationships by pro-Reform sections of the media.

“A lot of it has got quite a misogynistic angle to it,” she said.

“I’ve faced a lot of criticism for my appearance, for my hair, for my relationship status, like, all those things that I just haven’t seen about people like Matt Goodwin.”

None of it worked. In the run up to polling day, Spencer and her party leader Zack Polanski openly embraced the attacks, branding themselves “Green menaces” and urging voters to join them in rejecting this form of politics.

Although optimistic of success, the scale of the Green’s victory caught even the most hopeful figures in Green HQ by surprise, suggesting that the result was not just a rejection of the negative politics of Reform and Labour, but an embrace of the positive campaign Spencer and her party had run.

“We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other,” Spencer said in her victory speech.

“We can demand better without hating each other. We can do that together. We ran a hopeful campaign backed by 1000s of volunteers and activists. We defeated the parties of billionaire donors. 

“We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other at all, and we did this with the people who live here, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, just as we have always done in this constituency.”

Within minutes of the result, Reform showed exactly why they had been rejected by voters. Taking to X, Nigel Farage channeled Donald Trump, claiming the defeat was a “victory for sectarian voting and cheating” while insisting that Goodwin, who had been wholesale rejected by the people of Gorton and Denton was “a great candidate for us.”

Goodwin himself went even further, posting that “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain.” He later told his employers at GB News: “Now we can have a conversation in this country about sectarianism and what it’s doing to our democracy, or we can pretend it’s not happening.”

In reality the result was not a victory for sectarianism or “cheating” but for the unity of most voters in the Greater Manchester seat to reject the politics of Reform.

Just as in the recent Caerphilly by-election where an expected Reform win ended up as a decisive victory for Plaid Cymru instead, voters are starting to show their determination to work together in order to reject Nigel Farage’s party and the politics it represents.

The truth is that if such tactical voting is replicated across the country at the next general election then current national opinion polls showing a clear lead for Reform would be unlikely to translate into a parliamentary majority.

Farage’s hardline anti-migrant strategy may have succeeded in getting himself onto newspaper front pages, but it would struggle to succeed as a unifying election-winning message across the country at large.

His one remaining hope is that far from uniting against Reform, the Green party’s success last night further splinters the progressive vote in the UK. Faced with a seemingly viable alternative to Labour, it is possible that we will soon see the Greens overtaking Labour in the polls and at the ballot box.

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McSweeney’s Legacy

Wire

The first signs of that could come in May’s upcoming local elections, when voters go to the polls across large parts of the country, including London.

Big gains, or even outright victory for the Greens in Labour’s long-time London stronghold could spell the end not just for Starmer’s leadership, but for the approach for politics taken by his party under his former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney.

This approach, which prioritised Reform-leaning “hero voters” over the views of Labour’s own natural supporters, has succeeded in collapsing support for the party among its own base, while massively boosting helping Farage’s own prospects of a national victory.

This factional approach, which not only presented Labour as not seeking the votes of its own progressive base, but actively rejecting them, has translated this morning into them losing what was one of the previously safest parts of the country for them.

The result will also stand as a massive rebuke to Starmer’s decision to block the party’s Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from standing in the seat.

This decision, which was taken out of fear of Burnham challenging Starmer for the leadership, will now only accelerate the prospect of the Prime Minister’s exit from Downing Street anyway.

As with much that we have seen from Starmer’s Downing Street, a short term tactical decision looks set to come at a long-term political cost.

The timing of Starmer’s departure still remains uncertain. Since McSweeney’s exit, there has been a noticeable switch in Labour’s rhetoric towards Reform, involving a much clearer rejection of the racist politics they represent. As things stand most Labour MPs look set to give their leader one more chance to pursue that approach.

However, what really matters this morning is that an extreme and divisive candidate, with a history of dabbling in racist comments and discredited race science, has been rejected by voters, while a concerted political and media campaign to scare voters about a  “Green Menace”, has failed.

For now at least, in a battle between hope and hate, hope has won.Email

Adam Bienkov

Adam Bienkov is the Political Editor of Byline Times and Online Editor of BylineTimes.com.

New Endings: How Starmer Lost Gorton and Denton

by Binoy Kampmark / February 28th, 2026

Britain’s Labour Prime Minister is an accidental genius. Having won a comprehensive election victory in 2024 for not being a disturbed, sociopathic Tory leader, Sir Keir Starmer is now engineering his party into a position of electoral defeat and obituary-laden oblivion. Sclerotic, static, inert, incapable, his Labour Party government risks suffering a most deserved annihilation at the next general election. What they will be replaced with remains the fat, troubling question.

Predictions in politics are always hazardous, and there is nothing to say that Starmer will not gasp across the finishing line when the time comes, should the Labour Party permit him to do so. But there is something to be said about losing the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, regarded as the 38th safest in the 2024 election not only to the winner, a Green Party candidate, but outmatched by the populist, anti-immigration Reform UK Party. In terms of the by-election figures, Hannah Spencer from the Greens won 14,980 votes (40.7% of the total), with Reform UK gathering 28.7% of the vote with 10,578. Labour limped through to third place with 9,364 votes. The swing against Labour since 2024 was a goggling 25%.

Spencer’s background is worth noting, suggesting a savvy tilt from the Greens. Far from being a chic champagne swilling eco-warrior from urban privilege and trendy sympathies, she trained for blue collar work in a traditional Labour seat. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” she stated. “I am a plumber. I am no different to every single person here in this constituency. I work hard. That is what we do.”

The Greens leader Zack Polanski was admirable in praising Spencer’s individual qualities. She was, he remarked, “really authentic”, “just a woman who got into politics a little bit later, so she’d had real jobs.” But the individual personality of a candidate is not necessarily a significant factor before the cruel, mechanistic forces of political economy. This is not to say that voters are distant or cerebrally soft, merely that most are never politically engaged in the way the cadres of expert commentators, party strategists and bumblers suggest they are. Many do not so much vote for a standing figure as much as against others. (Starmer should know better than most.) They are picked for being different from the dunghill that preceded them.

The British PM presented a target of vulnerability in the Gorton and Denton campaign. His poll ratings are a caricature of horror and were not helped by the ongoing revelations from the Jeffrey Epstein files that deeply implicated his choice of ambassador to Washington, Lord Peter Mandelson. Mandelson, who was appointed despite Starmer’s knowledge of the Labour grandee’s links to the late convicted paedophile, sex trafficker and financier, is currently being investigated by the European Anti-Fraud Office and the Metropolitan Police for disclosing confidential government information to Epstein.

Starmer is also facing rumblings of a challenge within his own party. Labour’s chances were not improved by his blocking of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, another potential contender for the Labour leadership, from standing in the seat. The by-election campaign was also one of desperation, leading to accusations by Polanski that Labour’s approach had debased politics, diplomacy and democracy.

There is also no indication that Starmer is reflecting about his own position and role in the debacle, revealing, yet again, a near absence of political judgment. In a muddled letter to his MPs following the defeat, he vented his spleen at the “divisive, sectarian” politics that the Greens had allegedly taken from George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain. These were “not the harmless environmentalists they pretend to be”. They had such “extreme policies like legalising all drugs and pulling out of NATO that most voters strongly reject”.

Yet, despite not being so harmless, they were harmless enough not to pose a national threat, despite “splitting the progressive vote so that Reform come through the middle.” The Greens were unable to mount a general election campaign, as “they simply do not have the resources, the activist base or the local knowledge to replicate this victory across the country.”

Nothing to worry about then, except that there is. The unions are certainly prodding Labour to acknowledge the electoral reality and the collapse of their vote. “Workers and families are hurting,” stated Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. “We have a cost of living crisis largely being ignored and investment in jobs for the here-and-now being blocked by a Treasury that doesn’t seem to understand the basics of what is needed to build Britain.”

UNISON general secretary Andrea Egan offered a simple explanation for the Greens victory: “Many traditional supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully abandoned.” If the Starmer government wished to survive, it needed, as a matter of urgency, “to stand up for workers and defend our fundamental values.”

To date, the Labour strategy has been one of holding the vote against the dark attractions of Reform UK. Foolishly, the Greens were neglected as a relevant force from the progressive left. Starmer now finds himself adopting the language of extremes, with him the sober, reliable figure in the political centre always ready to, as he periodically likes to state, roll up his sleeves to fix a problem. In assailing the Greens and Reform UK as the “extremes of the left” and “extremes of the right”, the PM is sailing dangerously close into waters the 2016 US Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton found herself when she labelled half of Donald J. Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables”. This approach is a perfect recipe to make you unelectable.

The result in Gorton and Denton was appropriate punishment for Starmer’s distant, estranged, incapable leadership, a government that has seemingly not governed where it needed to, and now facing a calamitous reckoning. There is still time, though not much. While by-elections are not necessarily good indicators of future trends, both the Greens and Reform will be glorying in the moment and relishing their chances in other seats. The Labour-Conservative duopoly is collapsing.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

“Organize or Burn”

By David Duhalde

February 24, 2026

Source: Convergence

Image by Cory Doctorow/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 2.0

At the time of this writing, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is about to break 100,000 members, with nearly 14,000 of them in New York City alone. The election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime DSA activist and New York assemblymember, as the city’s mayor brought unprecedented attention to the socialist group. Thousands of socialist activists have played a real and often unseen role in getting DSA to not only elect candidates but win public policy in places like New York.

In Organize or Burn: How New York Socialists Fight for Climate Survival, Fabian Holt breaks from other recent literature on DSA and its aligned movements by focusing on grassroots cadre instead of famous politicians. By doing so, Holt shows DSA’s growth and challenges as part of a global trend of “movement parties” rather than a unique US phenomenon—one that has more staying power, but also weaknesses, that both DSA’s supporters and detractors may miss.

For this research, Holt embedded himself in the New York City chapter of DSA (NYC-DSA), specifically the 2022 state senate campaign of democratic socialist David Alexis in Brooklyn. Participating in the political activity of rank-and-file DSA members around an endorsed candidate and analyzing how that shaped a chapter-level ecosocialist priority for green technology is a departure from recent literature looking at DSA and other new left formations.

Books such as David Freedlander’s The AOC Generation or Bigger Than Bernie by [Jacobin] editors Micah Uetricht and Meagan Day examine the growth of socialist- and social democratic–aligned movements around the rise of popular democratic socialist politicians. Organize or Burn uses a local city’s experience as a lens to understand statewide, national, and international political-sociological trends in movement activism.

Holt breaks from other recent literature on DSA and its aligned movements by focusing on grassroots cadre instead of famous politicians.

This global framework is helpful in understanding why a group like DSA, even after its dramatic growth from 8,000 members in 2016 to 25,000 members in 2017, still did not make environmental activism a priority at that latter year’s national convention, but six years later passed major ecosocialist legislation in New York State.

I was one of the many DSA members Holt interviewed for the book, but I had little clue whether the book would be useful or even accurate. Now that I’ve read it, I think Organize or Burn is the best book on the new Democratic Socialists of America yet.

DSA: A Movement Party, Not a Ballot Line

The specific framework Holt uses to analyze DSA is the “movement party”: a single organization serving as a nexus for activists of different social movements to shape electoral processes and outcomes. DSA organizers like me are wont to explain that DSA is not actually a party but a political nonprofit, a 501(c)(4). Critically, a movement party doesn’t have to be a legal party, as DSA is not. Also, movement parties are not inherently left-wing. The book cites the Tea Party, an insurgent Republican movement of the early 2010s that paved the way for President Donald Trump’s first victory, as another example.

Holt argues that DSA’s past decade of rapid change and growth (and occasional decline) is part of a larger global phenomenon in geopolitics—one he and others directly tie to voters and activists among the Left and Right who both distrust the political establishment and traditional parties and are more educated than the average citizen.

While movement parties arguably have been around since the 1980s, the book points to the research of Italian sociologist and political scientist Donatella della Porta, which contends that by the 2010s, movement parties had become a specific response to the enactment of unpopular austerity policies after decades of neoliberalism had already declined living standards across the world. The fact that older parties of the Left and Right instituted austerity measures eroded their legitimacy, which provided an opening for new movements. Holt writes:

The core argument in much of della Porta’s work throughout the 2010s is that movement parties are relevant to restoring popular political participation and improving the capacity of parties to mediate interests in society. In a sense, the new movement parties are filling a gap left by old parties, which have become estranged from large parts of the constituency.

Holt adds to this the research of political scientist Herbert Kitschelt, which asserts that movement parties are made up of “new classes of educated voters [that] mistrust parties and are ready to defect and switch to competitors if their concerns are not serviced.”

Education levels are important to note because despite crafting a popular image of former Democratic-aligned working-class voters switching to the GOP, the Tea Party was largely made up of already conservative middle- and upper-middle-class activists who felt the Republican establishment wasn’t right-wing enough. What Kitschelt identifies about movement parties, which can be found in both DSA and the Tea Party for very different ends, is how they seek to elect their own adherents to office, are groups with low barriers to entry, and possess a strong willingness to use extra-parliamentary activism and disruptive actions to advance their agendas.

For the Tea Party, this type of direct action ranged from taking over congressional town halls around public discussion of Obamacare to the “Restore Honor” march led by then–Fox News host Glenn Beck, which, without any major organizational backing, drew nearly three times the attendance of the heavily labor-endorsed “One Nation Rally” around the same time in 2010.

While the Tea Party was a new political creature when it emerged during the Obama era, DSA has existed since 1982 as the product of a merger of two preexisting socialist groups. Holt’s work does an excellent job of moving beyond the simplistic understanding of the “old DSA” (pre-2016) as “marginal” and of providing a more nuanced explanation of the growth of the “new DSA” (post-2016) that goes beyond a single person such as Bernie Sanders or reasons like Trump’s election.

Early DSA was led by prominent left intellectuals such as anti-poverty activists and social critics  Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich, who both cochaired the group at different times. DSA was, and in some ways arguably still is, better known for its celebrity members than any single action or program. But as the book notes, the most prominent members have shifted from well-known writers to national political figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Also, DSA’s activism and constant media attention to NYC-DSA’s electoral and other movements has shown that the group’s membership is critical in keeping higher-profile individuals in office and enacting social change aligned with the socialist mission.

A peculiar difference between DSA and other left-wing movement parties abroad is that the US group has existed in some form for nearly half a century. The book chronicles how DSA changed its mission and its member demographics without forming a new socialist party. Until 2017, DSA was a member organization in the Socialist International (SI), a global association of traditional socialist and social democratic parties. A major reason cited by members for leaving the SI was that those sister parties had been responsible for implementing austerity measures. In Europe, diverse and younger activists formed new parties like Syriza in Greece that broke from such social democratic parties. But DSA was able to move first symbolically, then materially, toward looking and acting more like a movement party than a traditional party.

However, actions like leaving the SI were not what drove people to DSA. Holt does an excellent job of explaining DSA’s growth not only in relation to historic events that are more commonly known, like Sanders’s first presidential run, but also the politicizing movements a few years earlier and organizational decisions, all of which would play a role in largely young activists picking DSA as their political home.

Through interviews with numerous DSA cadre, specifically millennials who made up the bulk of the first surges in membership, disappointment with Barack Obama’s presidency, and his inadequate recovery efforts during the Great Recession in particular, moved many to later join DSA. The Occupy Wall Street movement and its rhetoric of the 99 percent gave a class-focused language that people could latch onto. Holt credits Jacobin reading groups as a refuge for many who would later join DSA, including future New York state senator Julia Salazar.

Even with the increased profile of democratic socialism thanks to Sanders’s campaign, DSA grew slowly, reaching about 8,000 dues-paying members by 2016, up from 6,000 a few years earlier. But membership ballooned after Trump’s first presidential win. While many activists were pulled toward democratic socialism because of Sanders, the push toward joining DSA and becoming active in the organization was rooted in their lack of faith in existing liberal institutions to stand up to Trump. If there was one thing that grew DSA, it was what has facilitated movement parties everywhere: motivated people’s desire to tackle inequality made worse by neoliberalism.

Ecosocialism: From Afterthought to Priority Campaign

Organize or Burn uses NYC-DSA, specifically Alexis’s race in 2022 and its connection to the Ecosocialist Working Group’s (ESWG) Public Power campaign, as a lens to explore the global dynamics described above—not only through a city-level framework but also by combining it with the issue of climate justice as a driving force in political decisions.

NYC-DSA is the largest DSA chapter by far, representing over 10% of the national membership. It also reflects DSA’s predominantly young demographics. Holt contends that, while the chapter is majority white, it is more ethnically and racially diverse than some of its critics would let on. For instance, Holt observed that by the end of the Alexis campaign, one-third of the volunteers were people of color.

Holt’s ethnographic research included embedding himself in the Alexis campaign, observing how DSA members petition for their candidate’s spot on the ballot and engage in electioneering in general. Holt notes that while heavily focused on electing Democratic candidates, NYC-DSA differs from Democratic clubs, which can have a political or ethnic/demographic focus, because they not only solely back socialists but do this electoral work as part of a broader social movement. (Holt did note, however, that these clubs and the Democratic “machine” are in decline, which has provided space for NYC-DSA to succeed by driving high volunteer numbers in ways their rivals in Democratic primaries often cannot.)

DSA sees socialist elected officials as partners in advancing socialist-aligned goals in environmental, labor, and other movements. Within DSA, working groups are facilitators between particular movements and the socialist organization itself. The ESWG is one such example that connects climate justice demands and organizations to DSA’s electoral strategy.

Climate justice is a relatively recent priority for DSA. As a long-time member, I know that although comrades have always cared about the environment, it rarely went beyond a workshop at a pre-2016 conference. The same convention that voted to leave the SI did not make ecosocialism a priority, but the subsequent convention in 2019 did. Through NYC-DSA, we see the downstream effects of this internal shift and its external consequences.

Socialists Win “Public Power”

Holt uses the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) and the ESWG’s role in the legislative success of the act as a guide to show how movement parties like DSA work in practice. In 2019, while national DSA was taking ecosocialism more seriously, the NYC chapter also voted to make Public Power a priority campaign at its local convention. This effort focused on the New York Power Authority (NYPA), a publicly owned entity that they felt was underutilized. The Public Power campaign revolved around passing the BPRA, which would give the NYPA more authority to build renewable energy in the interests of working people.

One tactic of this campaign was backing socialist state legislative candidates who supported the BPRA. DSA won all five of its state assembly and state campaigns in 2020, but it became clear that even these victories would not be enough to pass the BPRA. To actually get the bill passed, the ESWG realized it needed to pressure electeds, especially those tied to the bill, whether they were socialist or not.

One simple way for the group to do this was to push champions like then-congressman Jamaal Bowman to use his large platform to promote Green New Deal–type policy. But a more direct approach, in line with what separates movement parties from Democratic clubs, was to challenge incumbents in primaries while also carrying out disruptive direct actions.

DSA organized public events, including some that could result in arrest, to draw attention to its Public Power campaign and highlight anti-green-energy corporate contributions that nonsocialist incumbents were accepting. While Alexis did not defeat his opponent, the ostensible lead sponsor of BPRA, the winner only got a plurality of the votes. Feeling the pressure from his primary challenge, he then worked with Governor Kathy Hochul to pass the bill by 2023, likely to avoid another primary.

BPRA’s passage resulted in socialists leading a nexus of different parts of civic society: elected office, environmental activism, and street pressure. Such a convergence of different groups can only happen in a movement party like DSA. Holt writes:

NYC-DSA evolved into a movement-based organization with party elements and capacity for long-term organizing. It created the movement party environment in which socialists and climate professionals could develop BPRA. BPRA could not have been developed in the Democratic Party. The six-year process that culminated in the passing of the BPRA shows the organization’s long-term capacity and movement party dynamics.

In Organize or Burn, Holt demonstrates what makes DSA special in US civic society today. DSA is one of the few places—and one that largely younger people have used—to do politics in community and grow as leaders. DSA’s democratic structure and low barriers to entry give rank-and-file members a chance to rise up in leadership on their own merit.

Holt does not idealize DSA chapter activism or leadership. He highlights, as anyone who is heavily involved knows, that there is real turnover and burnout in the organization, especially for those responsible for internal governance. And the demographics of DSA aren’t always as diverse as the group itself wants, even if its demographic skew is sometimes exaggerated by bad-faith critics. But Holt argues that the democratic nature of DSA is preferable to stable but unchallenged leadership. DSA still offers a lot of hope and potential to make a real impact on society, and the book helps us understand why people stay in DSA as much as why they join.