The DSA Platform Would Destroy American Democracy

The next campaign finance report from the Republican National Committee may need to report an in-kind contribution from the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Over the weekend, DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer went on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream to tout the group’s “Workers Deserve More” platform. Asked calmly and non-confrontationally about some of the most radical planks—including “replace the Presidency and the Supreme Court” and “abolish prisons”—Romer cheerfully agreed so pithily that she greatly simplified the job of the GOP’s 30-second ad-makers.  

It’s not true that every politician who is associated with the DSA agrees with every plank of the DSA platform, just as Democratic and Republican candidates don’t always agree with parts of their party platforms. For example, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—the most prominent politician in the country backed by a DSA chapter —recently shied away from embracing the DSA call to abolish the Senate. 

But even if the DSA platform could once be ignored as a meaningless document, that’s going to be much harder now following Romer’s star turn. It will be fair game for the media to put Democratic candidates on the spot and ask if they agree with the DSA platform. Regardless of the answers, Republicans won’t hesitate to insinuate that they do. 

To call the DSA platform antithetical to the U.S Constitution is not hyperbole, or an insult to the platform’s authors. The DSA preamble states plainly that the end goal is to “draft a new constitution” to “create a democratic socialist republic.” Such a new U.S. constitution, the DSA envisions, would “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” which would be unicameral after abolishing the Senate. 

That last bit about the Senate may sound appealing. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait called it DSA’s “best idea” since the Senate’s structure gives disproportionate power to voters in less populated states in ratios likely unimagined by the Founders. But it can’t be viewed in isolation from the broader DSA program, which is an obliteration of the Constitution’s system of checks-and-balances among three equal branches of government.  

In the DSA view, the Constitution’s diffusion of power is “anti-democratic” and an inherent obstacle to a “democratic society of the working class.” America’s “political and economic system [is] built on private ownership and profit at all costs,” and DSA warns that “as capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism.”  

But what DSA fails to recognize is that the Constitution’s diffusion of power is what has prevented Donald Trump and his MAGA minions from permanently installing right-wing authoritarianism. Even though Trump has pushed the Supreme Court far to the right, the Court’s inherent independence has stopped Trump from unleashing the military on cities and abrogating birthright citizenship. While the Republican Congress has been largely supine to Trump, the Senate—during both of Trump’s terms—has resisted presidential pressure to junk the filibuster. This time around, by refusing Trump’s demands the Senate has stymied his beloved voter suppression bill. In other words, because of the legislative branch’s independence, we do not have a presidential takeover of the electoral apparatus that would spell the end of democracy. 

The DSA is not the first group of democratic socialists who have dreamed of unchecked governmental power. For example, the socialist founders of Israel held the same view, and largely implemented it. The Times of Israel recounted the debate Israel had less than two years after declaring independence about whether to have a constitution: 

In January 1950, as the Knesset considered the question, David Ben-Gurion offered an impassioned defense of unrestrained majority rule.  

“Would our people agree,” he wondered, “to a situation in which seven judges … can cancel laws that the people desire? Only the nation determines the constitution; that is, a constitution is what the people want and decide after an open inquiry and a vote.”  

A lifelong socialist, Ben-Gurion was certain that the future was progressive. Hard-to-amend constitutions and powerful courts, he believed, served elites and reactionaries and preserved inequalities … The Israeli left would never end up writing that constitution, never limit the powers of the Knesset, never take seriously the problem of majority rule—until, of course, it suddenly found itself in the minority. 

Ben-Gurion, who would serve as Israel’s Prime Minister for 13 of the nation’s first 15 years, gave a similar speech to the Knesset in July 1949 during which he cautioned against emulating the U.S. Constitution: 

The American constitution has turned into a conservative, reactionary institution that stands against the will of the people … This, in our country, would lead to revolution. For the people will say: we will do what we want … We chose a parliamentary form of government. The nation decides on the laws, and their representatives implement them. I don’t think it’s possible to delegate authority to the court to decide whether the laws are kosher or not kosher. 

And so Israel did not enact a Constitution, giving its unicameral parliament nearly complete control over its government. Israel does have a Supreme Court, which was in place before Israel declared independence. But without a Constitution, the Court’s power is more tenuous than in America. In fact, as Israel’s government has become increasingly right-wing, it has sought to constrain judicial power, sparking huge divisions among the Israeli electorate. The ruling coalition has backed away from some of its more incendiary proposals, such as trying to give the Knesset the power to overturn judicial rulings but just last year the Knesset passed legislation giving its political appointees increased power to control who is on the Supreme Court. 

Ben-Gurion saw a conservative U.S. Supreme Court that had once sought to block President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and wanted to avoid similar obstruction. But he failed to foresee Israel’s lurch to the right. Today’s DSA betrays a similar myopic cockiness: eliminate checks and balances (on top of enacting various election reforms), and supposedly a worker-controlled democratic socialist government will follow. Perhaps DSA members have enough faith in the “democratic” part of their name that they are not worried about a charismatic left-wing authoritarian rising from the ranks and seizing excessive power. But considering what we are experiencing at present, they should be chilled at the prospect of another aspiring right-wing authoritarian taking advantage of any revamped system without our current constitutional guardrails.  

Of course, any political movement with ambitious policy goals will chafe at operating within systems that force securing broad-based support and clearing constitutional hurdles to enact legislation. Many Democrats of all ideological stripes were profoundly frustrated at how both the Supreme Court and the Senate filibuster limited how much the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations could accomplish. But much of what they did accomplish by running the legislative gauntlet, more so than by executive fiat, has remained in place. Trump, in contrast, is allergic to such spadework and will leave a scant legislative legacy. 

The lesson of the last four-plus presidential terms is not that we need fewer guardrails and procedural hurdles, but that those distinctive features are why America is the only country with 200 years of continually functioning democracy. By rejecting a crude tyranny of the majority and granting powers to minority views and factions, we have created a durable democracy that gives all parties and factions a reason to participate even when they lose elections.  

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