A dangerous breed of leftist politics is on the rise not just in America, but around the world.

From Capital Research Center. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has received much richly deserved criticism since October 2023 and its reprehensible response to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks upon Israel. This has overshadowed some other interesting news about the DSA, which is that the group has been formally admitted to the Progressive International.

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A relatively new coalition, the Progressive International gathers together the radical fringes of global leftism—the ideological outskirts where authoritarian communism is praised, terrorism is justified, Israel’s legitimacy is denied, and the United States is portrayed as the malignant font giving rise to all the world’s evils.

That the DSA would join such a coalition is perhaps unsurprising, given the group’s hard left turn toward radicalism, but it is not the only American activist group affiliated the Progressive International. Notably, its membership includes several nonprofits that are funded by some of the largest and most prominent foundations and other grantmakers in the country. The Progressive International’s leadership also consists of some notable names, both in the United States and globally. This makes the group well worth close examination.

The “Left of the Left” Goes Global

As with many developments on the American far-left over the past decade, the story of the Progressive International begins with … a 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank called the Sanders Institute. In late 2018, the Sanders Institute teamed up with a similarly new European political association called the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) to issue a joint call for all “progressives of the world to unite” in the face of what they claimed was humanity’s greatest collective threat from the ideological right since the 1930s.

From this call was born the Progressive International, which as of January 2024 counts more than 70 organizational members worldwide. …

Couched in language that borders on the apocalyptic, [Progressive International] asserts that “capitalism is the virus” that must be eradicated—alongside white supremacy, which it calls “an organizing principle of the world system.” It supports “revolution” to “transform society and reclaim the state,” while ominously warning that “winning elections is not enough to fulfill our mission.” The Progressive International wants a global “planetary mobilization” and asserts that decolonization “is not a metaphor.” It will be satisfied with nothing less than “full reparations for past crimes and the immediate restoration of land, resources, and sovereignty to all the dispossessed peoples of the world.” …

Also like the DSA, deep and abiding anti-Americanism permeates virtually everything the Progressive International does. The group describes the United States as “the lynchpin” of a malevolent system of imperial capitalism that serves only to perpetuate “psychotic, unconstrained violence” upon the rest of the world. …

On the other hand, entities whose interests are generally perceived to be at odds with those of the United States are praised by the coalition. This extends most strikingly to some of the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes, past and present. For instance, the Progressive International maintains a collection of material on socialist construction called “Building the Future.” The collection’s introductory text lionizes the Russian Revolution of 1917 and quotes multiple prominent Soviet personalities from the era, including Lenin. …

The Progressive International dismisses the possibility of military aggression by China as an “invented narrative” and a product of “anti-China hysteria” in the United States—part of what it characterizes as a long line of fabricated enemies created solely to justify America’s “de facto military occupation of the world.” …

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(Excerpt from Capital Research Center. Photo Credit: Moises Gonzalez on Unsplash)