The DSA Wants to Overthrow Our Constitutional System

A spectre haunts the darkest corners of the Democratic Party — the spectre of Democratic Socialism. All the powers of common sense have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. The Democratic Socialists of America has recently released its “program” as a sort of party platform, enclosed in a document they have titled “Workers Deserve More!” The document has already drawn much talk and criticism, but most treat their ideas as something new, when it is the same old Marxist tripe we have seen for more than a century … a blood-soaked century.

The very top of the DSA’s “program” bears a red fisted salute, a small demonstration of its Marxist heritage. Immediately the reader is greeted with a graphic of a happy cartoon person taking a nap with the headline “Imagine Taking a Day Off from Work in a Future Without Capitalism.” How appropriate. In the explanatory paragraph alongside it, as the DSA describes the America it intends to create, in bold is the following statement: “You work as much as you are able and no more than needed.” This is obviously a rephrasing of Marx’s declaration “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Later in its “program,” the DSA makes the claim that “The billionaire class is dividing workers against each other, and it’s making us desperate and miserable.” This represents the heart of Marxism: that society can be divided into Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, and that capitalism will immiserate the worker until we all stand up to shake off our chains. This type of class struggle rhetoric is blatantly Marxist and is deeply entrenched in both the “Workers Deserve More” document as well as the DSA’s organizational constitution. The program states “Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital.” This harkens back to the traditional Marxist stance on class warfare. It also dispels any illusions that the DSA is promoting anything less than a global socialist revolution. The DSA’s fundamentally Marxist view of social class is on display inside the organization’s constitution as well: “[T]he class structure of American society … means that there is a basic conflict of interest between those sectors with enormous economic power and the vast majority of the population.” This is a textbook view of Marxist class conflict.

The DSA’s constitution (that word should turn to ashes in their mouth) explicitly endorses “popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution.” In other words, seizure of the means of production, a centrally planned economy, and the redistribution of wealth. Similarly, the DSA’s program states that it wants to establish “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.” In case you missed it, “public ownership” means government ownership. What do they consider to be essential industries? Their program lays it out for us: food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation “aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.” Putting all of these industries under government control affects huge sectors of the economy and implies the seizure of a whole lot of private property, and a whole lot of private property that does not belong just to evil billionaires (who evidently are not entitled to their property simply by virtue of having too much of it). They also claim that housing is a basic human right. Keep in mind that when socialists say that housing is a right, they mean they want a right to your house.

The program winds on, stating that “The Democratic Socialists of America is building a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class.” This sounds suspiciously like a dictatorship of the proletariat. Hopefully we can count on it withering away. Later in the same paragraph, the DSA claims that “We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” This is astonishing; they are openly calling for a worker’s revolution, the overthrow of our constitutional system, and a socialist republic.

The DSA uses the words “democracy” and “democratic” quite a bit throughout the document. They make a distinction between themselves and traditional Marxists: their revolution will be brought about by voting rather than violence. To give the devil his due, the DSA claims that they want a multi-party system. They also claim they want to “abolish the Senate” and vest the power of appointing the executive and judicial branches in one legislature. This type of governing structure does have historical precedents. It is called Unity of State Power and it has been a prominent feature in the governments of the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea, as well as communist-era Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. It is the Marxist opposite of the Madisonian separation of powers. This idea is not an accidental feature of communist countries; it is deliberate Marxist-Leninist constitutional theory and is also one of the defining concepts of the People’s Republic of China’s constitution.

The DSA has spent years presenting its project as socialism for the 21st century. They claim their version will be free of all the bugs (mass internment and surveillance, secret police, lots of starvation) of 20th-century socialism. What it will not be free of, however, are all the terrible ideas that generated the massive totalitarian state that they claim is not a part of their program. By their own admission, they are promoting central economic planning by the state, seizure of the means of production, class warfare, seizure of private property, a worker’s revolution, the destruction of the American constitutional system, and the destruction of the global system of capital. These ideas have been tried. They did not fail because Stalin and Mao were bad guys They failed because the underlying ideology is not compatible with human nature, free society, or dissent. If the DSA is allowed to implement its program in America, we can assume that starvation, counter-revolutionary persecution, and a unity of state power will follow.