The Democratic Party’s radical new socialist agenda

The socialist takeover of the Democratic Party looks set to continue unabated, as Dr. Abdul el Sayed now holds a solid lead over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the race to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI). An el Sayed win would come on the heels of socialist candidates winning Democratic primaries in New York City, Washington, D.C., and congressional districts from New York to Pennsylvania to Colorado. All are in safe constituencies and so can assume success in the general election.The Democratic Socialists of America is no longer a fringe group within the Democratic coalition. It is now the driving force behind the party, and the organization’s platform ought to be taken seriously, not dismissed as the idle wish list of a handful of campus radicals.Some of the DSA’s platform is unsurprising, considering that its members are, as the name suggests, socialists. The platform calls for “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries,” including housing, healthcare, energy, food production, and communications. The justification is the usual socialist caricature of economic life. The DSA claims America is “built on private ownership and profit at all costs,” as though businesses exist only to enrich cartoon villains in top hats. Its answer is to hand vast sectors of the economy to party leaders under the banner of “democratic control and accountability to the people,” which may sound nice until one reads further into the DSA platform and discovers its plans to remake our nation’s entire constitutional order.Like some more mainstream voices, DSA calls for an expansion of the House of Representatives, which is perfectly constitutional and arguably overdue. But the document then calls for Congress to “abolish the Senate,” thus creating a unicameral legislature based on population and proportional representation rather than the current system, in which every state receives two senators regardless of population.DSA is either unaware — or, more likely, does not care — that our nation’s Founders explicitly rejected such a design for the federal government.In Federalist No. 51, James Madison warned that legislative power naturally tends to dominate republican government and therefore must be divided against itself. A second chamber was not an ornamental concession to tradition but a structural restraint on the passions, ambitions, and temporary majorities of the first. Abolishing the Senate would remove that restraint and concentrate national lawmaking in a single body precisely because DSA does not view constitutional friction as a safeguard against abuse but as an obstacle to the exercise of power.Worse, the DSA platform goes on to call for the elimination of both the presidency and the Supreme Court, which would be replaced by officials chosen by and subordinate to the single chamber of Congress.In short, DSA seeks nothing less than the complete subversion of our nation’s 250-year-old constitutional order. The arrogance of DSA’s effort to dismantle America’s constitutional order is matched only by the irony that many of its leading activists come from countries whose political systems failed in part because they never developed the checks, balances, and institutional restraints that have sustained the American republic.One such leader, New York City DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, was recently asked by Martha MacCallum why his parents left their native Peru for the United States. Gordillo promptly blamed “the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism” for Peru’s economic troubles, adding, “In many cases, that is what brings immigrants to the U.S. from Latin America.”SOCIALISM DOESN’T BUILDThis gets it exactly backward. When Latin American countries have embraced capitalism, they have become stable and prosperous, like Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. It is when Latin American countries have pursued DSA’s socialist vision that they have turned into unstable basket cases, like Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.Americans should believe DSA when it says what it intends to do. Its leaders want not merely higher taxes or welfare programs, but public control of the economy and the destruction of the constitutional restraints that stand in their way. Latin America has already run this experiment, repeatedly and disastrously. Democrats embracing DSA are not offering renewal. They are importing the same failed ideas that millions of immigrants came to America to escape.