Even a casual observer of America’s political scene can see that the Democratic Socialists of America have become a powerful force in electoral politics, as their candidates are winning one Democratic Party primary after another. This past week saw three more radical leftists winning congressional primaries in New York City, taking down two well-established members of Congress in the process. Love them or hate them, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani have become major political kingmakers in our body politic.
Unlike many of MAGA candidates anointed by President Donald Trump who have won primaries, the DSA-associated Democrats who won this week will almost surely win congressional elections and have excellent chances of prevailing in US Senate races in Texas and Maine and could well flip the Senate to the Democrats. With Trump’s debacles in Iran and at home and his polling numbers at new lows, his political base is declining, and he is a weakened political force.
Furthermore, it is doubtful that the socialist political momentum will abate before the 2028 elections, and it is certain that in the meantime, not only will they gain a presence in Congress and the statehouses, but will also advance their numbers in municipal elections, no matter how successful they may be at governing. Even though Mamdani is unlikely to bring down real rental prices, provide free buses, or create functional government grocery stores, his political support will not wane, and he will be a major political strongman for many years to come.
All hand-wringing aside, how does one assess what is happening and, more importantly, how powerful will the socialists become over the next several years? This question is not trivial, as the DSA recently rebooted its 2024 platform if ever enacted will permanently change the political and economic landscape in this country.
The DSA Platform
In a recent article, I argued that while socialism is present mostly in economic terms, it actually is a political doctrine. That is, its success is always going to be measured in political terms, as we are seeing right now. Given that socialism is a doctrine aimed at maximizing political power for its adherents, one should not be surprised that the new DSA platform seems to find ways to keep socialists in power forever.
Entitled “Workers Deserve More,” the document is divided into four parts:
- Thriving Working-Class Communities
- An Economy for the Working Class
- Working-Class Foreign Policy
- Working Class Democracy
It should be noted that not everything in this platform is bad for our society, but, for the most part, it would be a disaster if ever fully implemented. I look at each section and provide critical interpretations.
Thriving Working-Class Communities
The document calls from the following:
- Universal healthcare with no premiums, co-pays, or deductibles. Guarantees for reproductive and gender-affirming care.
- Treat drug addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one.
- Abolish mandatory minimums and cash bail, and demilitarize police departments.
- Make all public higher education tuition-free with no out-of-pocket cost for room and board and cancel all student loan debt.
- Establish universal rent-control and the guaranteed right to counsel for all tenants. Public investment in building quality multi-income social housing.
- Expansive paid family leave for all workers, and free public universal childcare and pre-K.
As libertarians have long advocated an end to the drug war and for police reforms (at a bare minimum), one could support some of these measures. However, the others are typical socialist fare that have been taken apart on this page and elsewhere.
An Economy for the Working Class
The section demands:
- A 32-hour work week with no reduction in pay or benefits.
- Protect all workers’ rights to strike and form a union, make it easier for workers to join unions, and invest in the National Labor Relations Board.
- Raise taxes on the richest earners, for-profit corporations, large inheritances, and private colleges and universities. Establish a wealth tax for the wealthiest in society.
- Massive public investment to transition away from fossil fuels toward a green and sustainable economy. Guaranteed support for workers in the fossil fuel industry, massive infrastructure and jobs programs, and public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure and natural resources.
None of this is new, except for the up-front call to tax private colleges and universities. No doubt, that policy would also apply to private schools, and one cannot imagine socialists permitting home schooling under any conditions. The failed Green New Deal has been a staple not only of socialists but the Democratic Party overall.
Working-Class Foreign Policy
- An immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to military and economic aid, and weapons sales to Israel, respect of the authority of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, and national sovereignty for the Palestinian people.
- Greatly reduce the US military budget, close overseas bases, and bring troops home.
- End economic sanctions that impact the sovereignty of countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.
- Allow workers to freely migrate between countries to seek employment without restrictive immigration controls. Demilitarize the border, end all immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and provide access to jobs, labor rights, and social services to all immigrants.
Of all planks in the DSA Platform, libertarians could support much of what is here, especially with its emphasis on US nonintervention. Whether a US government under socialist control would hold to these principles is another matter.
Working-Class Democracy
Here is where the socialists would be able to consolidate power:
- Extend full voting rights to people with criminal convictions and non-citizens and establish statehood for Washington, DC.
- Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy through proportional representation elections. Expand the number of seats in the House of Representatives and end the Senate filibuster.
- Replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote for President.
- Limit the Court’s power of judicial review which it uses to effectively create and abolish laws outside the legislative process.
Note that at least this time, the DSA has not called for “packing” the Supreme Court, although Democrats elsewhere have called for such a plan. However, by both endorsing abolishment of the Electoral College and giving the vote to anyone who crosses the border into the US, once in power the socialists would be able to ensure that their candidate would win the presidency. As for expansion of the House of Representatives, one can surmise that most of the new congressional districts would be created in urban areas where the socialist candidates are most successful.
Consolidating Political Power
While the DSA has not called for abolition of all private property, it has made it clear that the state should control—if not take outright ownership of—property, making exceptions for personal property like furniture or appliances. Interestingly, this is the same arrangement as prevailed in the former Soviet Union.
As one can see from the rest of the platform, the DSA believes that all services such as medical services and education should be state-controlled. They would tax private colleges, universities, and schools out of existence (unless they outlawed them first), and while all education would be free to students, one can imagine just how politicized it would be—and would be of the lowest quality. Furthermore, given that socialists have politicized all of life, one can imagine that the system would operate much like it operated in the former USSR, where admission to educational programs depended upon one’s political pedigree and connections. Those without connections would be shut out of educational programs and relegated to lower-level jobs.
If the US were to follow the path of previous socialist nations, one could expect the economy’s capital stock to deteriorate. Even if the DSA were to allow US companies to remain private, a socialist government would raise taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals to ruinous levels and highly-regulate the investment in and accumulation of capital goods. As the process of accruing and using capital becomes increasingly politicized, we would expect to see deterioration in that sector.
Likewise, as the DSA openly called for making it easy for workers to strike, we would see more labor strife and over time, the economy would become less productive. Price controls levied by the socialist government would result in shortages and, ultimately, rationing by the political authorities. Ultimately, the purchase of just about everything from food to medical care to housing would fall under government control.
Given that the voting system that the DSA platform recommends would be guaranteed to keep the socialists in power, one can see the situation as it would unfold over the long term. The irony would be that as the socialists increasingly failed to deliver on their promises, their control over the economy, education, housing, and medical care would ensure that their power would increase, as people would have to kowtow to the socialist authorities just to subsist.
Government is not self-correcting in the way we see a market economy correct itself. The infamous “Curley Effect” shows that when politicians go after the productive people in a society, those politicians become politically stronger—even as the economy weakens due to their actions. One can build a good political career, as the socialists have done, by appealing to people’s resentments and envy of others who may have more than they do. The irony would be that the socialists, thanks to their political and voting “reforms,” would grow stronger even as they destroy the economic infrastructure around them.
By appealing to democracy, the Democratic Socialists actually support measures that would turn a democracy into a dystopian kleptocracy. While legally stuffing the ballot boxes, they would make voting a meaningless exercise, as the results would be pre-determined. As DSA candidates continue to win elections, they will increasingly put themselves into positions where it will be nearly impossible to do away with their “reforms.”
Lest one believe that so-called democratic socialists would never behave like their forebears in the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the intellectuals who supported the Bolsheviks, thinking them to be mere reformers, were in for a terrible shock:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that human beings would be lowered into acid baths; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that ramrods heated over primus stoves would be thrust up their anal canals (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end, because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
This is not to say that the Democratic Socialists are going to gain power in the near future or engage in the murderous tactics of their socialist forebears in the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. But they certainly are aggressively trying to take power, and they look to parlay their municipal and congressional victories into much more.
Furthermore, as Murray Rothbard wrote, the “democratic” moniker is irrelevant:
...since socialism means central planning, any possible scope for “democratic” revisions or checks and balances will be virtually non-existent. For, since the plan is central, this means that no one will be permitted to interfere with the plan once the State and its technocratic “experts” have made their decision. For who are the public or even a legislature to dare to throw monkey wrenches into the State’s carefully chosen plans? The role of the voters, whether at large or in a parliament, will be strictly plebiscitary: they will only be able to vote Ja, to ratify the plan chosen by the central planners.
While the DSA candidates might take power through electoral politics and not through violent means, as was the case with the 20th Century communist regimes, nonetheless, the so-called rules of democracy would not hold once they were able to gain an electoral majority. At that point, once the system was in place, then, as Rothbard pointed out, it could not be removed. At that point, “democracy” means choosing among existing socialists candidates to see who would be in charge of the goods and services socialists control.
Given the utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy of both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, and given that political capitalism has been the dominant strain of political economy in this country since the 1990s, DSA candidates are able to offer something that the others running for office cannot give, and young voters can see that, which is why these candidates are so attractive to voters even though they are running on destructive platforms.
We cannot know if the DSA wing of the Democratic Party will be able to put together a critical mass of elected lawmakers that will be able to seize the power socialists want. But we also know that there is no other political force out there that can stand up to these people when it counts. Like for everything else, we just wait.
