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Phones rise across the room as Chris Rabb steps to the front. It is the second day of the national summit for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Chicago, and Rabb is fresh off an upset that launched the movement’s summer winning streak, defeating party-backed rivals in a Democratic congressional primary outside Philadelphia.

Activists in red shirts move closer to take selfies. Some wear DSA’s rose insignia; others have slogans about ICE or Gaza stretched across their chests. “All right, comrades,” Rabb says, using the group’s preferred form of address with a satisfied grin. He asks whether anyone is actually from his district. A few hands go up. For everyone else, Rabb explains, he intends to be their “bonus rep”: another vote and voice for the causes they have spent years trying to push from the margins of Democratic politics to the center of the national debate.

Then Rabb, who at 56 is among the oldest people at the summit, tells the room what he thinks is happening. “As someone who’s been around the block a few times, I’ve never, ever felt this level of electricity,” Rabb says. “Do not take this for granted. Do not let people try to gaslight you and tell you you do not have power.” The room erupts.

There is plenty feeding the confidence. By the time DSA members gather in Chicago in early August, Republicans are gleefully calling it the “Summer of Socialism.” The organization’s membership has surged past 120,000. Its candidates and allies have toppled establishment-backed Democrats in Congressional primaries from New York to Colorado to Florida. Zohran Mamdani, a longtime DSA member, is running New York City. Socialists have captured or are poised to win mayoralties in Seattle and Washington, D.C., while Nithya Raman is headed for a November runoff in Los Angeles. DSA could enter the next Congress with its largest contingent ever. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary with the backing of prominent socialists and a platform that mostly mirrors DSA’s, though he told TIME he doesn’t claim the movement’s mantle. DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a way-too-early favorite in the notional 2028 Democratic presidential primary, according to prediction markets. “This feels like seeds that were planted years ago are now bearing fruit,” Ashik Siddique, DSA’s 38-year-old national co-chair, tells me from a sofa tucked beside the meeting rooms where about 600 democratic socialists gathered for the weekend.

For a movement that counted only a few thousand members a decade ago, the transformation is remarkable. Bernie Sanders made democratic socialism legible to millions of Americans; AOC gave it a younger national face; Mamdani demonstrated that a socialist could defeat the Democratic establishment, govern a major city, and then help elect more socialists behind him. But with the midterms looming, the question is now how far the model travels.

Less than two weeks after the summit, the swing state of Wisconsin supplied an answer DSA members did not want: Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist state legislator, narrowly lost the Democratic primary for governor to Milwaukee County executive David Crowley, who had briefly dropped out of the race just weeks before Election Day. The primary’s finish was dominated by scrutiny of Hong’s since-renounced positions on everything from abolishing the police to canceling Thanksgiving. To establishment Democrats, the outcome suggests DSA’s popularity remains limited to areas where Democrats already dominate. “We aren’t seeing DSA win in places that are core to winning the majority,” former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison tells me after Hong’s loss. “Their platform is not the top agenda for the folks who live in those communities.” A week later, an upset in a red state challenged that thinking, as DSA member Angie Nixon defeated establishment favorite Alex Vindman for the Democratic Senate primary in Florida, despite being outraised more than 16 to 1. Republicans, meanwhile, are eager to  paint the entire party with a far-left brush in hopes of stemming the blue wave both sides see forming on the horizon this November.

Yet DSA is ascendant inside a Democratic Party that needs what the movement is producing: volunteers, enthusiasm, disciplined organizing, and a message that connects with the economic anxieties of young voters. A third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters now identify as democratic socialists, according to a CNN poll released July 30.

But DSA carries liabilities of its own. Its national platform goes far beyond what successful candidates typically advertise: the group favors abolishing the Senate, eliminating police and prisons, dismantling ICE, closing overseas military bases, and bringing large corporations under public ownership. Republicans are eager to attach those positions to every Democrat in the country. Some Democrats are just as eager to keep their distance. “There are candidates who have won primaries and call themselves communists,” says Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, which is preparing a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism ahead of 2028. “It’s much harder to push back when there’s a grain of truth to the charge.”

The stakes are about to become more concrete. Along with almost certainly increasing their numbers in Congress, DSA is set to take the reins of the U.S. capital. Critics in both parties will be searching for proof that the winners of these insurgent campaigns are too radical, too idealistic, or simply inept. But to DSA leaders, it’s an unprecedented opportunity to show Democrats, and the country, that its agenda for everything from housing costs and labor protections to immigration and foreign policy is what voters are looking for heading into 2028. “We’re bringing a meaningfully different style and substance to politics,” Siddique says. “We’re proving it works, and it’s raising everyone’s expectations. People look to New York and D.C. or Los Angeles or Minneapolis, and they are increasingly feeling like, wow, we could do what they did here.”

At the opening session in Chicago, Kaitlin Marone asks who in the room was already a member in 2016. A few hands rise. The DSA field organizer moves the date forward to 2020. Nearly half the room raises theirs. Then Marone asks everyone to turn to their comrades and explain why they joined.

The conversations offer clues to DSA’s sudden relevance. Members talk about rent and health care, Donald Trump and immigration enforcement, Israel and Gaza, jobs that do not pay enough and homes they cannot afford. Others describe a Democratic Party they no longer believe is capable of addressing the problems shaping their lives.

There is plenty at the summit to remind visitors that this is an avowedly socialist organization. A bookseller in the hallway sells Marxist literature; The Communist Manifesto sells out by evening. Nearby, organizers decorate a “Free Stuff!” booth with fake bags of money and gold bars. But many of the grievances drawing people toward DSA no longer sound especially fringe. For Katie Sims, DSA’s 28-year-old electoral chair, the revelation came after graduating from Cornell in 2020 and looking at what a job would pay, then what rent and health insurance would cost. “I was like, none of these numbers add up,” Sims says. Polls show younger Americans are increasingly pessimistic about reaching the basic milestones available to their parents: homeownership, financial security, raising a family without amassing crushing debt. But, while Mamdani was elected mayor of New York with 51% of the vote, the people DSA has attracted are disproportionately young, white, urban, and college educated—hardly a representative sample of the working class the organization hopes to organize.

Many DSA members first arrive angry about a landlord, a hospital bill, student debt, or a war overseas. By connecting all of those problems to one larger one—the rapid concentration of wealth and power—DSA has given those frustrations a home and a vocabulary, and, increasingly, a way to organize around them. The movement has been adept at identifying places where Democratic voters are moving before the party establishment does, and then organizing the people who are already there.

Israel has provided another opening. Democratic voters, particularly younger ones, have moved sharply against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, while many elected Democrats have been slower to follow. DSA, which long called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel, was poised for the shift in public opinion. Sara Almosawi, a 24-year-old daughter of working-class parents from Iraq and Indonesia, joined DSA after Sanders ended his 2020 presidential campaign. “My parents immigrated here to follow the American Dream, and I don’t think that really panned out,” she says. In college, she helped lead campus protests against the war in Gaza and is now national co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.

That pipeline is beginning to reach elected office. Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, organized at Columbia before winning a congressional primary this summer with opposition to U.S. support for Israel at the center of her campaign. Other DSA-backed candidates have campaigned on more affordable housing, stronger unions, Medicare for All, and tighter restrictions on data centers—issues where the organization argues Democrats are too cautious or constrained by donors.

Mamdani has emerged as the movement’s most effective translator. His campaign took ideas long associated with DSA, including free public buses, city-run grocery stores, and freezing rent, and framed them around an argument almost anyone could understand: life in New York had become too expensive, and government should make it cheaper. By pairing that affordability message with outspoken opposition to U.S. support for Israel, he turned two forces drawing younger voters toward the socialist left into a coherent political identity. “The mood changed right after Mamdani won,” Sims says. “The answer to ‘could we build it’ is yes.” 

On the first night of the summit, about 50 socialists pack into a dimly lit bar on Chicago’s South Side to discuss the next presidential election. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not there, but her name and face appear on signs and pins scattered around the unofficial “DSA for AOC” gathering, where members squeeze into booths and spill onto the patio. After spending the day talking about labor organizing and how to build a lasting movement, the conversation turns to what might be possible in 2028. “We’re in the moment of the presidential question,” Sims tells the crowd, standing on a chair as comrades cheer.  “Doesn’t it just make sense now?”

Ocasio-Cortez has not ruled out running for President, and DSA leaders I speak with regard an endorsement from the group as close to inevitable if she does. They say no other working politician has her mix of a national following, massive fundraising network, and talent for pressing socialist ideals. A few other names are floated, including progressive Representative Ro Khanna of California and United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain. (Neither is a socialist.) Jeremy Cohan, a longtime New York DSA organizer, argues that AOC alone could merge Obama-style organizing with Sanders-style politics. “It has never really been tried,” he says. “And I think that could change the country.”

But Ocasio-Cortez also demonstrates the challenges ahead if the movement aims to mature. The national organization declined to renew its endorsement of her in 2024 after disagreements over her vote defending Israel's right to exist and past support for strengthening the Iron Dome, even as its New York chapter continued supporting her. Some members worry that a presidential campaign would pull her toward the Democratic mainstream; others wonder whether demanding ideological fidelity would squander the influence they spent a decade building. 

Even as they debate rallying behind her, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges that many DSA ideas remain broadly toxic. Asked after Hong’s loss about her past calls to defund the police and other provocative statements from 2020, Ocasio-Cortez (who made some herself) wryly quoted fellow DSA member and New York City councilman Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.”

The dispute reflects a larger question: What exactly does DSA want to do with the power it is accumulating? Even DSA’s leaders disagree over how far to go. At a June meeting in St. Louis, its National Political Committee debated for hours whether to add support for abolishing the Senate to the platform. Advocates argue the upper chamber is a fundamentally undemocratic institution because each state, regardless of population, gets two Senators. “This is not the time to put that demand forward,” someone argued. The proposal passed by one vote. Cliff Connolly, a 31-year-old member of DSA’s Marxist Unity Group who pushed for its inclusion, envisions a system in which the House chooses the executive, eliminating a presidency he believes has accumulated monarchical power. “The person will no longer be the king of America, like Donald Trump is today,” Connolly tells me at the summit, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

The distance between that vision and the campaigns DSA is winning captures the central contradiction of its success. DSA-endorsed candidates have triumphed by running on some of the group’s issues while eschewing others. But if candidates aren’t aligning with core components of DSA’s platform, former DNC chair Harrison asks, “how does that reflect on the DSA, then?”

Some members fear focusing too much on electoral success risks reducing DSA to another faction within the Democratic Party. “Electoral politics will not save us,” Rabb says in Chicago. “It’s only a component of collective liberation. You’re never going to hear me saying voting is all that matters.” Some have called for the DSA to become its own party rather than running on the Democratic ballot. But DSA leaders say the recent streak of wins has strengthened the pragmatists. “Our members want to keep doing what’s working,” Siddique says, “which is just running as Democrats.”

If its nominees win in November, DSA’s tiny congressional presence could become something resembling a bloc. It would still amount to a handful of seats in a 435-member House. But in a chamber governed by narrow margins, a handful can matter. Hakeem Jeffries, who is positioned to become Speaker if the Democrats control the House, could find himself in repeated negotiations with the DSA caucus over close votes on everything from funding for Israel to avoiding a government shutdown.

And then there is 2028. An Ocasio-Cortez campaign could force the organization to face the compromises required to elect a President. Members imagine Ocasio-Cortez building on Mamdani’s momentum and Sanders’ strong showing in two presidential primaries, giving the movement a national vehicle for turning its ideas into power without compromising its overarching goal: a socialist United States. “We need a fighting unified left,” Diana Kingsbury, a 31-year-old community organizer from Santa Rosa, Calif., tells me as light rain begins to fall on the patio of the Chicago bar. “We need to have muscles behind our issues. Otherwise, what are we doing?”

This year, governments and businesses across Europe,North America and parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean have been contending with the impacts of severe drought and wildfires. Every year, drought-induced losses alone cost the global economy an estimated $307 billion. Yet one of the assets that could make economies more resilient remains dangerously underfunded: healthy land.

This week, leaders gathering in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for COP17 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will have an opportunity to change that. What happens on Mongolia’s vast rangelands—and in degraded landscapes around the world—matters far beyond the environment. It is increasingly central to food and water security, supply chains and economic stability. In other words, the soil beneath our feet is essential to protecting livelihoods and economies from growing shocks.

The economic opportunity is significant. The UNCCD estimates that financing land conservation and restoration could generate up to $1.8 trillion annually, driven by strengthened agricultural and supply chain resilience, new revenue opportunities, and mitigated physical risks like drought-related losses. It could also generate employment for an additional 65 million people by 2030, resulting in a net gain of 37 million jobs. Business investment is already responding to this opportunity: the COP Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes reported more than a fourfold increase in business investment between 2023 and 2025. But fragmented and misaligned policies continue to hold investment back.

The COVID pandemic exposed how vulnerable global supply chains can be. Recent wildfires and droughts have exposed another weakness: the deteriorating natural systems on which those supply chains depend. Healthy land is not simply an environmental asset. It is economic infrastructure. 

For farmers already contending with increased costs of necessities like seeds and fertilizer, land degradation, and increasingly severe drought add another layer of risk. For businesses, these physical risks directly affect the availability, cost, and quality of natural resources on which they depend within and beyond their value chains. And for governments, the consequences arrive as costly crises to manage. The imperative is clear: we need to invest in restoring land and supporting the people who manage it, before the economic and social costs of inaction become even greater. 

The UNCCD estimates the combined cost of land degradation, drought, and desertification to the global economy at $878 billion annually. Governments routinely spend billions responding to and rebuilding after floods, wildfires, droughts, and other disasters—with US Government spending on wildfire suppression only set to grow—yet they invest only a fraction in preventing the degradation that makes economies and communities more vulnerable to these shocks. From an economic perspective, this is a poor allocation of capital. 

When we think about economic infrastructure, ports and power grids loom large. However, what stewards of the land—including farmers, herders, and pastoralists—have understood for generations is that healthy land is infrastructure too. It underpins livelihoods, food production, water security, the production of raw materials, and, by extension, the economy. 

In fact, roughly $44 trillion of global GDP, around half of global output, is moderately to highly dependent on natural capital, including healthy land. Restoring degraded land should therefore be viewed as an investment in economic resilience. An added benefit is that responsible management and restoration of degraded agricultural land can help reduce emissions, including agricultural methane through improved livestock health and feed quality.  

By 2050, three in four people worldwide are projected to be affected by drought, with significant knock-on effects for businesses and supply chains through disrupted production, higher input costs, and increased commodity-price volatility. For developing countries, the challenge is particularly acute. The countries most exposed to drought and land degradation are often those with less financial capacity to invest in resilience. A drought that reduces agricultural output can quickly become a wider economic shock by raising food-import bills, reducing rural incomes, and increasing pressure on public budgets and foreign-exchange reserves. 

This is the context in which COP17 opens in Ulaanbaatar, and rangelands are top of the agenda. They make up more than half of the earth’s land surface, and 70% of host country Mongolia’s territory. They provide 16% of global food supply, 70% of livestock feed, and support the livelihoods of up to 500 million pastoralists—land stewards who sustain the adaptive knowledge and land management practices on which food systems depend. 

Rangelands are part of a much bigger economic story. Land restoration is a long-term investment, and many of its benefits are public goods that cannot easily be captured as private returns. In developing countries, high borrowing costs and constrained public finances make even economically attractive projects difficult to fund. Public and concessional finance therefore has a critical role to play in reducing risk and crowding in private capital where commercial opportunities exist.

A global consultation led by the WBCSD and mandated by the UNCCD Secretariat has called for governments to create a coherent and stable policy environment, develop a long-term investment vision, and strengthen trusted accountability frameworks. These would give businesses greater confidence to invest in shared socioeconomic objectives. 

There are already mechanisms through which this can happen. In 2024, COP16 in Riyadh launched the Riyadh Action Agenda (RAA), bringing public, business, and community actors together around land and drought resilience. Together, it has mobilized more than $2.9 billion for land conservation, restoration, drought and water resilience. For 2026 to 2030, participating initiatives have set mobilization goals of more than $130 billion.

The next step is to make this investment progress more coordinated and measurable. At COP17, the RAA will launch the Land & Soil Breakthroughs: time-bound, measurable milestones designed to aggregate non-state actor commitments, reduce overlap, and make collective progress visible and investable. The RAA will also launch a Community Platform to visualise progress towards conserving and restoring 1.5 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030. 

The investment return could be significant. Globally, every $1 invested in landscape restoration can create between $7 and $30 in economic benefits for local people. 

For too long, healthy land has been treated as an environmental concern rather than the economic asset it is. At a time when governments are under pressure to strengthen economic resilience while managing constrained public finances, and businesses are facing increasing climate shocks, these are the investments we need. 

COP17 is an opportunity to change the narrative on land. The question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in its restoration, but whether we can afford not to.