In the second part of our interview, Ella Teevan, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) National Political Committee, talks with Green Left’s Isaac Nellist about the importance of challenging President Donald Trump’s war drive, imperialist interventions and far-right agenda and whether ecosocialist ideas are gaining traction in the US. Read part one here.
Teevan is a featured speaker at the upcoming Ecosocialism 2026 conference in Magan-djin/Brisbane. To book tickets, visit ecosocialism.org.au.
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Trump’s second presidency has featured an expansion of imperialist interventions, how can socialists challenge this war drive?
It’s a really big and urgent question. Under Trump we have seen a continuation of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, an expansion of the war into Iran and Lebanon, a far more interventionist approach in Latin America and even a challenging of European and Canadian sovereignty.
We also continue to see this bipartisan sabre rattling towards China, in the context of a new “Cold War” of sorts.
Defeating the US war machine is not only a key task of the US left and the workers movement, but it has super majority support amongst regular people in the US.
It is a major contradiction in US politics, there is a fundamental disconnect between popular opinion and government action when it comes to imperialism and government intervention.
And this is in part because the power over foreign policy is concentrated in our imperial presidency, which means it's insulated from popular pressure. It’s also in part due to the massive power of the arms industry, military contractors, surveillance technology companies, mercenary groups, the so-called "foreign policy blob" [the bipatrisan Washington foreign policy establishment] and the Israel lobby.
Finally, I think the disconnect reflects the fundamental democratic deficit in US politics which is maintained by the two-party system, the huge role of money in politics, our totally undemocratic Senate and congresses multi-decade long unwillingness to take responsibility for war powers.
DSA has mobilised in the streets in response to Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan and Cuban sovereignty, as well as against the illegal and immoral war on Iran. Our strongest anti-imperialist work has been against the genocide in Palestine. Our greatest successes have been in the student movement, the labour movement and in electoral politics.
On campuses, YDSA, our youth and student wing has played a really essential role in the encampment movement a couple of years ago. Encampments at schools with strong YDSA chapters were able to build far greater power and were some of the few universities across the US that won substantial gains.
For instance, at San Francisco State University (SFSU), students won divestment of their university's endowment from weapons manufacturing companies, including Caterpillar, Palantir and Lockheed Martin and established a human rights clause in SFSU’s investment policy to ensure they no longer invest in these companies profiting from war and human rights violations.
Another example, at the University of Oregon, students won scholarships and visa sponsorships for students escaping from Gaza, they won a framework to investigate and move towards divestment and a student-controlled cultural centre for Middle Eastern students.
Looking at the labour movement, DSA is building a campaign called Labour for an Arms Embargo, which is focussed on supporting DSA members in unions to organise with their co-workers and pass resolutions in their unions supporting a total arms embargo against Israel, and to activate union members against the genocide and use the political influence of unions against corporate politicians.
During the height of the genocide DSA members helped pass resolutions through a slew of unions throughout the US in support of a ceasefire.
Finally DSA has been able to channel the pro-Palestine movement's energy and sentiment into major electoral wins.
We are certainly not the first to work on Palestine, there are longstanding movements in support of Palestine around the country, but seeing someone like Zohran get elected on a pro-Palestine platform is relatively new.
In all five of our new congressional wins, support for an arms embargo on Israel and a commitment to fight for a free Palestine were defining issues that actually helped our candidates win. This overturns the narrative that you can’t win if you’re pro-Palestine or that the Israel lobby money will defeat you.
This upcoming congressional session will have more people championing Palestine who will continue to raise the issue on a national scale.
Within DSA there are major debates about how we should approach our anti-imperialist work.
On the one hand there is a large tendency of DSA members and on the US and international left more broadly, who feel that it is not our place to criticise governments or parties in other countries that are the victims of US imperialism or who self-identify as left-wing or who are the US’s inter-imperialist rivals.
I will do my best to characterise their arguments and then I will talk about why I disagree.
At best these folks call this form of criticism a form of Western chauvinism and distraction, and perhaps at their most extreme say that criticising these governments actually advances the cause of US imperialism.
I am a member of an internal tendency of DSA called Bread and Roses (B&R), and we, along with various other tendencies, reject this notion. We don’t find it contradictory to say that we oppose US imperialist attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, while recognising that their systems of government are not what we envision within a democratic socialism.
Similarly, we don’t find it contradictory to oppose the US’s war on Iran, while supporting the Iranian people in their domestic struggle for democracy, women’s liberation and secular government.
We also think it is quite possible to reject US warmongering on Russia and China while recognising the two respectively as imperialist and revanchist authoritarian powers that we should loudly oppose.
When we talk to regular people about democratic socialism, we need to be able to say that the world socialists envision is not this repressive, authoritarian society of China or Venezuela, or what they have in their mind about the USSR, but one of expansive democracy and freedom.
And more than that, if we make political support for all governments targeted by US imperialism a litmus test for joining anti-imperialist struggles, we are just going to restrict the ability to grow our movement to the size and power it is going to take to end US imperialism.
So the fundamental tasks of the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement are to grow our student and labour movements in size, power and militancy, win over the labour movement to anti-imperialist politics, elect more anti-imperialists into government and struggle to make our society more democratic, through getting money out of politics, establishing proportional representation, so we can begin to translate what are supermajoritarian positions in US society into actual changes in public policy.
Trump is a figurehead for the global far right, which has seen a resurgence in recent years. What is behind this rise of the far right? Can socialists provide an alternative?
In his campaigns, in 2016 in particular, Trump did offer working people something, or at least he appeared to.
He acknowledged their suffering was real rather than dismissing it like the Democrats did. Regular people are struggling to get by these days. There is a reason why Trump and Mamdani both talk about affordability, although obviously with different explanations and proscriptions for it.
Meanwhile, especially in the Biden era, all of these Democratic pundits were saying that the economy was really strong. When I listen to the Financial Times podcast to hear what the capitalists are saying to each other this is what I hear.
They were using the term “vibecession” in the Biden era to say that there was a gap between the strength of the economy and people’s perception of it, in other words that regular people’s struggles were all in their heads. So it’s no wonder that people were turned off by that.
But the far right’s explanation for why people are suffering involves scapegoating the most vulnerable — most often immigrants, but also these days, trans[gender] people.
They claim that there is competition for resources and immigrants are taking them from the people who “deserve” the resources.
Under capitalism we do live in a competition for resources, but it's between the working class and the ruling class — and the working class has been getting less and less for the past 50 years.
The rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s meant union busting, tax cuts, deregulation, bringing everything under market control and defunding public services. This is especially pronounced in the US where we have seen waves of gutting the welfare state and the ability of the government to actually do something for people.
It happened in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and most recently when Trump slashed funding for everything from food aid, to research, to education, to library and museum services — I work in libraries so that’s a personal one for me.
But even the European social democracies that had strong labour parties in the 20th century have been moving to privatise social services over the past few decades, leaving people's lives much more threadbare. Of course you see this in Australia, too.
In the ’90s there was the claim that we had reached the “end of history” and that we had reached this enlightened liberalism, or perhaps neoliberalism, and that social and economic relations were just going to stay that way forever.
Of course, they didn’t. Neoliberalism and the market just stripped more and more of people's lives away. It created this opening for the far right to say: “Look, you don’t have enough, but if we just take your share back from immigrants, you can have the life that your parents or grandparents had.”
Can socialism provide an alternative? I think so.
We as socialists also have an explanation for why people don’t have enough and feel so powerless in their own lives. But the explanation that we offer is not punching down, but punching up.
Who’s hoarding all the resources? Who is making all the decisions that shape everything from how we get to work, to how many hours we work, to what kind of books we read, to just how underfunded our kids' schools are?
It’s the capitalist class.
In my experience, people are really feeling the anti-billionaire sentiment right now, regardless of who they have voted for in the past, or even if they have tuned out of politics.
Someone in my life, who grew up working class and voted for Trump three times, recently told me they are a socialist and think that our society should be run totally differently.
That means there are real stakes for what DSA and our electeds do publicly, because for so many people it will be their first exposure to whether socialists can actually change their material conditions and offer them some power in their lives.
Are ecosocialist ideas gaining traction on the left in the US? How can socialists challenge Trump’s push to undo climate protections and relate to the immense challenge of the ecological crisis more generally?
These are the hard hitting questions, and I know that climate anxiety keeps a lot of people up at night.
I don’t know if I would confidently say that ecosocialist ideas are gaining traction in the US writ large, but I would confidently say that there is a significant ecosocialist current in DSA and the left.
The theory of change behind the DSA’s Ecosocialists [also known as the Green New Deal Campaign Committee] is very strong. I want to quote a few points from their Theory of Power document, [where] they say they are going to “win non-reformist or structural reforms that increase public sector capacity”, “build core elements of a party apparatus”, “win class struggle elections” and “prioritise labour solidarity and class struggle as workers”.
I think this gets so much right about ecosocialism.
We have had some very inspiring campaigns in various local DSA chapters. In the transit [public transport] arena, Louisville DSA in Kentucky has been fighting alongside local unions to fully fund the local transit authority. Metro Detroit DSA is campaigning to bring back rail transit and to fully fund its totally underfunded transit system.
In Texas, which has had climate disasters in the past couple of years, Corpus Christi DSA has been fighting against polluters on various fronts and recently has been opposing a desalination plant.
Public[ly-owned] power is another huge question for ecosocialism.
New York City DSA had a really high profile victory in 2023 when they passed the Build Public Renewables Act, that directs the publicly-owned New York Power Authority to build public wind and solar using union labour to hit 100% decarbonisation of the electric sector by 2040 — a really ambitious goal and a good first step towards something like a Green New Deal.
Recently, we have seen a tonne of interest in fighting against artificial intelligence data centres, which is of course at the intersection of ecosocialism and fighting big tech.
I do want to say that some strategies and theories of change on the left writ large have some serious limitations that we have to reckon with if we are going to build a mass movement that includes lots of regular working people for the climate.
I owe a lot of my ideas on this issue to Matt Huber who is a fellow DSA member and professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University. I would highly recommend his book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.
A lot of climate activism follows the values of the professional class. So it centres things like science, awareness and knowledge rather than building the organised class power it is going to take to challenge capitalism.
In mainstream and even left climate activism there can be this prevalent politics of offering people less, or telling them that when we win a sustainable world they will have to live with less. This can look like degrowth, which is an active debate on the left, or telling people that their consumer and lifestyle choices aren’t climate friendly enough and that their decadent lifestyle in the imperial core is part of the problem.
I just don’t think that is going to build the organised popular power that we need. Instead, again coming from Huber, we need a planetary working-class solidarity and an anti-austerity climate politics that actually offers working people something.
For example, robust public transit — which has been a popular part of Zohran’s campaign — green public housing and cheaper public energy for everybody.
Tragically, in recent years climate activism has been on the wane and the Green New Deal has all but disappeared from the popular discourse in the US. It used to be on everyone’s lips, especially with Bernie Sanders elevating that demand.
I think socialists have a special responsibility to fight against fatalism and use this resurgence to fight for climate demands based on public ownership, public investment into infrastructure, regulating corporations and rapidly decarbonising.
This is one of the most exciting possibilities for the new bloc of socialists in Congress.
[Read part one here.]