The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a group that has been giving mainstream American Democrats fits throughout the primary season. The DSA-backed candidates often have little to no experience in government. Yet they have beaten several weathered incumbents in primaries from New York to Colorado to Washington DC for congressional, state and municipal offices.
DSA candidates have not succeeded by out-fundraising their opponents. In many cases, the incumbents have raised far more money and hit their opponents with all manner of negative ads. These have simply glanced off of many primary voters, who cast ballots for the DSA candidates regardless.
Rather, the socialists have succeeded by out-organizing their opposition within the Democratic Party. In some districts around election time, random knocks on people’s doors are now more likely to come from the DSA than from Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In the process, the DSA has helped to shift the center of gravity of the Democratic Party. When candidates on the stump accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza or call for more rent control or for Medicare for All, this is music to DSA organizers’ ears.
Did Workers Deserve This?
The organization did all of that with a very minimal platform. Now it has unveiled a fuller platform, and it is unlike any traditional American party platform in a number of ways.
Titled WORKERS DESERVE MORE!, the program begins with this sentence: “Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism.” And it ends with a description of how it was cobbled together. It was written between April and June by an elected drafting committee in cooperation with the organization’s National Political Committee (NPC), which presents the final product to the public.
The NPC writes that the “website, artwork, print layout, and communications...were 100% made and designed by us and other DSA members from all over the country” and pronounces itself “thrilled to see our collective human labors, born of our comradeship and commitment to our movement ... go out into the world”.
What Socialists Want
“The world” has started to react to the new platform. And what people have had to say has not been uniformly positive. One reason for that is that the organization has revealed itself to be quite radical in its aims.
Some of what it had to say was expected of any organization that calls itself socialist. The DSA wants rent control, national healthcare and “aggressive” wealth taxes, for instance. And it was probably not unexpected that it would demand that the government “[e]stablish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries”.
And anyone who has been paying attention to the DSA’s efforts on behalf of illegal immigrants and Palestinians could see those parts of the platform telegraphed. The DSA wants a “free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital” as well as the prosecution of “U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza”.
The DSA wants to abolish ICE, to “Defund the Department of War” and empower the International Criminal Court. No more “economic blockades” (sanctions) should be leveled against countries “whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran”.
Bye Bye, Constitutional Republic
And then the organization gets to the really controversial parts of the platform.
“Some of these demands”, the DSA acknowledges, “may be won under our current system”, but “complete victory” will require a substantially new system. And it sees the one enacted by America’s Constitutional Convention of 1787 standing in the way.
If the DSA has its way, the Electoral College that elects the president will be abolished, and the presidency in all but name will be abolished as well. The same applies to the US Supreme Court, as the DSA proposes to “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress”.
Also in the grab bag are calls to “Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate”.
Under the DSA proposal, felons could vote, including those who are currently incarcerated.
Non-citizens could vote too. The DSA would extend that right to “all permanent U.S. residents” while at the same time, in the platform’s anti-ICE plank “Legalize[ing] migration, grant[ing] amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provid[ing] a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end[ing] visa caps and quotas”.
The Reactions on the Spectrum
The reactions to this platform can be placed on a spectrum. They run from “yay!” at one end among DSAers and fellow travelers in leftist outlets such as Jacobin to “The DSA Wants to Abolish America” at the other.
The latter was the title of an article in the conservative publication National Review by Charles C. Cooke. He wrote that there is “virtue in calling things by their names, and the appropriate name for the Democratic Socialists of America is ‘red.’ They are communists. They are Jacobins. They are wreckers and despoilers and iconoclasts, who, if left unchecked, would wipe the United States from the face of this earth”.
Cooke issued that red scare on the evidence of an interview with the DSA’s co-chair Megan Romer on Fox News with Shannon Bream. He reproduced part of it so readers could see what he was worked up about:
FOX NEWS: Abolish the Senate?
ROMER: True.
FOX NEWS: Okay, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?
ROMER: Yep.
FOX NEWS: Abolish ICE?
ROMER: Absolutely.
FOX NEWS: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally?
ROMER: As a long-term plan, yep.
FOX NEWS: Defund the Pentagon?
ROMER: Absolutely.
FOX NEWS: Abolish prisons, at least in large part?
ROMER: Yeah, again, as part of a long-term program, yeah?
FOX NEWS: OK, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations?
ROMER: Yeah, absolutely.
In the middle of the spectrum with socialists on one end and a new red scare on the other are Democrats who want to take back control of Congress in this November’s midterm elections.
One such is Dr Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and the Democrats’ nominee for the US Senate from South Carolina. She was running against Lindsey Graham until his unexpected death earlier this month. Now, she will likely face his sister.
Looking at the same interview as Cooke did, Andrews did not mince words. She could not “understand how anyone claiming to fight for working people could hold and promote such ludicrous beliefs”. The ideas did not “reflect American values, and they certainly don’t represent South Carolina”, Andrews wrote on X. She called the group “completely un-American and unhinged”.
If Andrews does manage an upset and wins the Senate seat for her party, she should expect a DSA primary challenger in six years.