The Democratic Socialists of America Platform
· Reason
The Democratic Socialists of America ("DSA") have won an unprecedented number of Democratic primaries, and their candidates are on the ballot now in many places. Even those Democrats who are not members will follow much of their platform because that is what activists in the Democratic Party want to see done. DSA members may well elect the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, who will be second in line for the presidency.
Among the Democratic Socialists of America who have been nominated for seats in Congress in this year's midterm elections are:
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U.S. Senate Nominations
- Angie Nixon (Florida): The state representative won a major upset for the Democratic Senate nomination in Florida, marking a notable statewide milestone for a democratic socialist candidate.
U.S. House Nominations
- Claire Valdez (New York, NY-7): Won the nomination in the district of retiring Rep. Nidia Velázquez.
- Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York, NY-13): Defeated sitting incumbent and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat.
- Brad Lander (New York, NY-10): Won the nomination over incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman (though note he left the DSA following its response to the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks).
- Melat Kiros (Colorado, CO-1): Unseated long-serving incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver.
- Chris Rabb (Pennsylvania): Secured the Democratic nomination for a Philadelphia-area House seat.
- Donavan McKinney (Michigan): Won the nomination in a Detroit-area House district.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York, NY-14): Won renomination in her congressional district (endorsed by her local DSA chapter).
Because of the Democratic Socialists of America's rise to power, I wanted to know more about what they stood for. I googled their Platform, which is titled "Workers Deserve More," and I will quote from it below in bold face and respond in ordinary type. Much of what I will quote comes from a section of the Platform that describes "What We Fight For." Here are just a few key elements of the DSA's platform.
[1.] Demilitarize police departments … and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor. Treat drug addiction and mental illness as health issues, not crimes.
There were 14,085 murders in the U.S. last year according to the FBI, 1,119,768 other violent crimes, 168,927 robberies, and 5,245,768 other property crimes. And that was without abolishing the police and prisons. Imagine how many murders, violent crimes, robberies, and property crimes there would be if we abolished the police and the prison system.
Legalizing all drug use, and treating it as a health issue, will cause the use of dangerous drugs to spread rampantly. Lives and families will be destroyed as a result.
The DSA's obsession with abolishing the police and prisons is a bizarre over-reaction to the abuses of power committed by some police officers. The problem is admittedly a serious one, and I, like most Americans, have been shocked by incidents of police brutality in making arrests, especially of Black men. But the solution to this problem is to eliminate police unions, which protect bad cops from getting fired when they themselves behave unlawfully. Another useful step would be legislation, both federal and state, that would abrogate judicially created immunities from civil suits over police and prosecutorial misconduct.
We do need to reform the police and prisons. We should not abolish them as the Democratic Socialists of America are calling for.
[2.] End ICE detentions and deportations …. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.
As with police brutality, the solution here is reform, not abolition. ICE has often arrested and deported immigrants in a shockingly brutal way, outraging a sizable number of Americans including me. This has to stop. I would support firing the ICE agents who are committing wrongdoing and then hiring new ICE agents who understand that illegal immigrants are people and that they need to be treated with dignity and respect when they are deported. We should also stop deporting people to third countries, other than the country they are citizens of, unless that country refuses to take them back. I support reforming ICE by legislation if necessary.
But I cannot support the Democratic Socialist of America's call for actually abolishing ICE. Open borders would flood our country with poor immigrants from Latin America, who would take jobs away from low-income Americans, which would especially hurt Black Americans and Latinos who are legally in the U.S. This would change American culture permanently, threaten the status of English as our national language, and turn the United States into a third-world country. There is a limit to how many immigrants the U.S. can absorb without our national culture changing.
We also should not reward immigrants who came here illegally by giving them citizenship. This is a bad idea, as Americans saw when the Biden Administration opened our borders. First, illegal immigrants jump the queue by crossing the Mexican border to the detriment of people (from Mexico itself and also from India, the Philippines, and other countries) who have waited for decades for permission to come to the United States legally. Second, there is a limit to how many immigrants the U.S. can absorb at once so that our famous U.S. national melting pot will turn them into U.S. citizens. We are perilously close to that maximum number now, even though there are many foreign high-tech workers, engineers, and medical doctors whom I think we should admit.
The solution to criminal misbehavior by ICE agents is to fire and prosecute the agents who behave criminally, which too many have done. Maybe we should even rename ICE as part of an effort to change its culture. But actually abolishing ICE and opening our borders is a gross overreaction to such misbehavior—an overreaction that the American people would quickly come to hate, even more than Americans came to hate the failure to enforce immigration law during the Biden Administration.
[3.] Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases…. End immunity for U.S. war criminals and support the International Criminal Court's mandate to prosecute war crimes.
Russia has over 2,000 nuclear missiles with multiple warheads aimed at the United States, China has 620 such missiles with a third of them deployed on operational forces, and North Korea has 60 such missiles. If we defund the Department of War, we might all get killed by foreign nuclear attacks or, more likely, be coerced into giving up our precious rights and freedoms. Our NATO allies might be overrun by the Russian dictatorship, and Japan, the Philippines, and Australia might be overrun by the Chinese dictatorship. This would end the global move toward democracy, which the United States started in 1776, and which is our greatest gift to the world.
Most Americans want to live free. They do not want to be Russian or Chinese slaves. Nor do they want to be nuked, or threatened to be nuked, by those countries.
As to prosecuting Americans who have defended this country, or Israelis, before a predominantly Third World International Criminal Court (ICC), that would be the epitome of injustice. I have friends and family members who support the ICC because they want to see murderous despots and drug dealers punished. I would like to see them punished too in American courts, with life tenured judges and the right to trial by jury. Congress could criminalize any global drug-dealing or human rights abuses committed by foreigners, which substantially in the aggregate affect U.S. commerce with foreign nations. Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005).
The key is to have a just trial before U.S. judges and juries, and not show trials before people drawn from the community of international human rights lawyers, which tends, among other things, to be disproportionately instance anti-Semitic and protective of Islamic terrorists.
[4.] Recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right to resist military occupation, and the right to self determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and it is the only country to recognize the full equality of women and of LGBTQ+ citizens. It is also the only country in the Middle East with broad freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Americans have much more in common with the Israeli democracy than we do with the Palestinians.
President Bill Clinton at the end of his second term proposed a two-state solution for Palestine, which is obviously what is needed, and Israel agreed but the Palestinian Liberation Organization's then-President Yasser Arafat declined to endorse it. In the 59 years since Israel won the 1967 six-day war, it has not annexed the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians should accept this land as their homeland, and some Israeli settlements in the West Bank should be removed. Jerusalem should be a shared capital city for Israel and Palestine.
It is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have been blocking a two-state solution. U.S. policy should be to insist on such a solution (though we should also all hope that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a demagogue intent on staying in power, loses the October Israeli elections).
The Palestinians have chosen as their leaders a criminal, terrorist group—Hamas—which murders innocent Israeli people. Why should the U.S. side with a terrorist group against the Middle East's only constitutional democracy?
[5.] Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in elections, and abolish the Senate.
There are a lot of quite radical reforms packed into this platform plank, and I will address them one at a time starting with the most fundamental ones.
The Democratic Socialists of America propose to abolish the Senate, which is a cornerstone of our 237-year-old Constitution. The Senate has more power than the House of Representatives because it has the power to confirm, or not, executive branch and judicial nominees and the power to ratify, or not, treaties. The Senate's filibuster rule requires a vote of 60 out of 100 senators to pass almost all legislation.
Most neutral observers of politics in Washington, D.C. over my lifetime have concluded that the Senate is much more functional than the House of Representative in part because it has many fewer Members, in part because Senators serve a long six-year term, and in part because only one-third of its membership turns over every two years, unlike the House of Representatives. The Democratic Socialists of America would throw all that out the window, along with the benefits of having a bicameral legislature thus wrecking institutions that are now working very well.
I consider the Senate, as it is currently constituted, along with bicameralism, to be the most important parts of the U.S. constitutional system because together they slow down lawmaking and change, which reduces the risk factor in investment, vastly increases American wealth and income, and augments liberty. The long-term certainty created by the Senate, bicameralism, and the presidential veto explains, in my opinion, why U.S. GDP per capita is $94,430, while the GDP per capita of the European Union is only $51,030, and the GDP per capita of China is only $14,870, according to International Monetary Fund estimates.
The Senate and the whole system of checks and balances and federalism makes the U.S much wealthier than even the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. All that extra wealth could be used to fund a better health care system, but the DSA would cause us not to earn that wealth in the first place by hugely increasing the risk factor in investment.
The biggest objection that most advocates of Senate-reform point to is the unfairness of California having 2 votes in the Senate when it has 39.3 million people while Wyoming has 2 votes in the Senate even though it has 588,750 people. This is a problem, but it is not as big a problem as most Americans think it is.
First, the ten states with the lowest populations are, in order, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, and New Hampshire. Of these low-population states, four are left-wing (and thus in the same political camp as California) and have two Democratic senators: Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. A fifth state, Maine is liberal and has one Independent who votes as a Democrat as Senator and the very liberal Republican Susan Collins who has often voted against President Trump's agenda and who publicly stated that she would not vote for Donald Trump in both the presidential elections of 2016 and 2024.
More importantly, in the last 40 years, control of the House, which is apportioned by population, and the Senate, which isn't, have largely gone hand in hand, so the 2-Senator rule doesn't seem to systematically favor either party. In particular, during 1987-2026 the same party controlled both chambers almost all the time, though in 8 years (2001-03, 2011-15, and 2023-25) the Democrats controlled the Senate while Republicans controlled the House, and in 2 years (2019-21) the Republicans controlled the Senate and the Democrats controlled the House. Given these facts, it's pretty hard to see how Democratics are hurt by the rule that each state can have only two senators.
My friend and co-teacher Akhil Amar doubts whether Vermont's Democratic Senators, if one counts Bernie Sanders as a Democrat, as I do, represent the concerns of California Democrats. He proposes drawing 100 senatorial districts across state boundary lines, which are equal in population. But this would produce huge gerrymandering problems, as happens with U.S. House seats, and it would wreck American federalism. It would also require scrapping the Constitution, which forbids amendments that would deprive each state of its equal representation in the Senate.
What about getting rid of the filibuster? Would not that at least be a good Democratic Socialists of America idea? Not so fast. The first time there was a Republican President, Senate, and House, all of the Democrats' changes would be swept away, just as Democrats would sweep away the Republicans' changes when there was a Democratic President, Senate, and House. That would just create more instability, rather than more democracy. The DSA should be more careful about what it wishes for.
I am opposed to abolition of the Senate, with its current rules of procedure, for all these reasons.
What about replacing our two-party system with proportional representation in the House of Representatives? Proportional representation and a multi-party system is a terrible idea, as is ranked choice voting, which is just a form of proportional representation. Proportional representation has, for instance, led in Israel to extremist groups dominating the government. The Democratic Socialists of America are an extremist group so it comes as no surprise that they would favor proportional representation. In Brazil, proportional representation has so weakened the legislature that the President dominates that country's democracy. The same thing would happen in the United States.
* * *
Now consider the Platform on "Workers Deserve More," which is where the DSA post starts. It describes a Leninist-Maoist world in which student loan debt and mortgages have been cancelled; all private housing has been nationalized; private grocery markets and family farms have been nationalized; energy companies have been nationalized; airlines, buses, trains and automobile factories and maybe even cars have been nationalized (though the platform is vague about private car ownership). Lest the reader think I exaggerate, consider what the Democratic Socialists of America are promising:
[6.] "You have no debt. You don't need health insurance. You don't pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities."
What must happen to create a world without debts or mortgages? Presumably, all student loan debts and mortgage debts would be cancelled, thus penalizing those who have paid off their student loan debt and their mortgages to benefit those who are deadbeats and who have borrowed extravagantly while not paying society back. What is so just about that kind of world? Education, health care, housing, food, energy, medicine, and transportation all cost money to provide. If everyone has a "right" to these things then presumably the government will have to provide them.
The only way the government could do this is by nationalizing all education, health care, housing, food production and distribution, energy production and distribution, and automobile companies. That would mean an immense increase in taxes to pay for all these things.
The government could not afford to pay just compensation for all these nationalized items, so presumably they would be stolen unconstitutionally from the people who have earned them in a revolutionary grab of power and of wealth. The Democratic Socialists of America are proposing something like the Communist Revolutions of 1917 in Marxist-Leninist Russia and of 1949 in Maoist China.
The "Democratic" Socialists of America are not really calling for democratic, constitutional change. They are calling for unconstitutional, revolutionary change on a massive scale. History teaches that when revolutionary changes take place like those that would be necessary to implement the DSA's platform, freedom of expression and freedom of religion get abandoned; privacy and freedom in general disappear. And Enemies of the People get rapidly imprisoned in what soon becomes a totalitarian state with massive bloodshed and violence taking place.
But let's imagine unrealistically that the "Democratic" Socialists of America could peacefully bring about their unconstitutional redistribution of wealth from those who have worked hard to those who do not work hard. What would it be like to live in a world where there are no private universities or schools, and they are all "common … utilities"? Everything would become conformist. There would be no debate or discussion of ideas. Schools would teach only what the government wants them to teach. Research, experimentation, and technological progress would stop.
Look at the countries today that have gone down this road like Russia, North Korea, and Cuba and ask yourselves what cutting edge technologies and innovations those societies have produced compared to the United States? Even China, the most successful socialist dictatorship, has a plunging birthrate, widespread alienation of all its young people, and crippling debt. (Indeed, to the extent it can boast considerable economic success, it comes from its retreating from socialism and developing a massive, fundamentally capitalist, private sector.) Can anyone reading this op-ed realistically imagine themselves wanting to move from the United States to China, Russia, North Korea, or Cuba?
What would it be like to live in a country where the government ran all the hospitals, and all the doctors worked for the government? Look at the national health services in the United Kingdom Canada, Sweden, or Norway where you must notoriously wait for many months to get health care. Look at the scandal-ridden Veterans Hospitals in the United States, run by the federal government, where the quality of medical care is far below what it is in private and public university hospitals in the very same country. Today, in the United States, anyone who needs cutting edge emergency medical care can walk into a university privately run hospital's emergency room, demand healthcare, and they will get that healthcare without regard to whether they have health insurance or can afford to pay for it. All that would be lost under the Democratic Socialists of America's vision of health care as a public good.
What would it be like to owe no rent and own no home or apartment? No one would have any incentive to maintain, repaint, or repair such a home or apartment, so it would quickly start to rot and fall apart. I went to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991, and I saw how dilapidated the housing stock had become without private ownership of apartments and houses. Go to Cuba or North Korea today and you can see the same dismal thing.
How about a government right to food and to public grocery stores? I went to the fanciest grocery store in Moscow, right off Red Square, in 1991, and all the shelves were bare. The only thing for sale was one jar with an obviously rotten pickle. Admittedly, Soviet grocery stores had canned goods for sale, but they were abysmal by U.S. standards. Meanwhile, there was a four-hour-long line outside the one privately owned McDonalds in Moscow to buy a Big Mac. 98% of the farmland in Russia then was government owned. The 2% that was still privately owned produced one fourth of all the food in Russia. (See Hedrick Smith, The Russians (1976).) When the government owns land and grocery stores people starve. Just ask the North Koreans who have been reduced to eating grass during some famines.
What do members of the Democratic Socialists of America have to say about Second Amendment gun ownership rights? They hate them and want to abolish them. Anyone who wants to own a gun, even just for hunting, is a threat in the eyes of many members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
* * *
That, readers, is the heart of the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA advocates policies that have been tried over the last 100 years in countless communist and socialist countries and that have always failed. This has been true in the Soviet Union, its former Eastern European allies, China, Cuba, and North Korea.
Indeed, two countries—Germany and Korea—with the same ethnic makeup, histories, and cultures were divided in the 20th Century into a communist half and a free market half, and in both cases the communist halves failed abysmally while the free-market halves thrived. Likewise, Taiwan thrived where the People's Republic of China remained extremely poor until it moved towards partial capitalism—and even now, per capita income in Taiwan is three times that in mainland China. Even when some of the DSA's proposed policies have been tried by capitalist but welfare-state countries, such as the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and Norway, they have failed as well.
The Democratic Socialists of America are simply ignorant when it comes to the policy results of the last century. Voters shouldn't trust ignorant politicians who fail to denounce such awful and dangerous ideas.
The post The Democratic Socialists of America Platform appeared first on Reason Magazine.