I’ve never been shy about criticizing the Democratic Party. More than most writers with my background, probably.
No party loyalty. Accountability first. That’s the deal here.
And I’ve been saying this for a long time.
In 2008, the party’s establishment lined up behind Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama had to fight his way past the people who were supposed to be neutral, and he won anyway, against odds that should have taught somebody something.
Apparently it didn’t.
Eight years later, after two full terms, the same establishment ran the same candidate. Hillary Clinton again. And along the way, they did what they could to sideline Bernie Sanders, the one candidate actually building an energized base from scratch.
The 2020 field consolidated fast around Joe Biden after South Carolina. Bernie Sanders, again, couldn’t turn grassroots enthusiasm into the nomination.
Then 2024. Democratic voters never got a meaningful opportunity to choose a different nominee. Biden’s withdrawal came after the primary season, not before it.
I called it out loudly in 2016. I called it out loudly in 2024. Nobody in charge was listening either time.
And in that silence, DSA found an opening. Then it started winning.
The Overlap
Here’s what makes this uncomfortable instead of predictable.
Whatever explains DSA-backed primary victories, the results are getting harder for the Democratic establishment to dismiss. On the pieces of its platform that fall within the existing constitutional system, tax reform, Medicare for All, DSA is saying out loud things that have significant support among ordinary voters.
That’s the part the party keeps missing.
If you can’t take these primary wins seriously, and start your own candidates from that same baseline instead of from whatever the donor class prefers, you are not going to have a party left to protect.
The question isn’t whether that’s true.
The question is whether it takes another eighteen years for someone in charge to admit it.
That’s not an endorsement of everything the DSA wants. It’s a warning about what happens to a party that keeps handing its voters candidates nobody asked for.
Because a primary is supposed to be the one place voters get to say plainly what they want. And a party that keeps overriding that signal shouldn’t be surprised when voters start looking somewhere else for it.
So look at where the overlap actually is. Not the full end state. Not the classless society, not the abolished Senate. Just the reforms DSA argues can be pursued within the current system.
That’s the start line, if the party wants to survive this.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though. Because “achievable right now” and “the actual end state” are two very different things. And much of the coverage stops at the platform instead of asking what the destination requires.
The Question Nobody Asks
What would happen if the Democratic Socialists of America got everything they say they want?
Not the individual planks. Not Medicare for All. Not rent control.
The whole thing.
Every debate about DSA gets stuck on the same two questions.
Is DSA good?
Is DSA bad?
Both questions are useless. They tell you about the person answering, not about the platform.
There’s a better question. A harder one.
Can the United States actually get from here to there?
What They Actually Say They Want
I went to the source. Not a summary. Not a meme. DSA’s own 2025-26 program, and its newly launched “Workers Deserve More” platform for 2026.
The goal isn’t a policy list.
It’s an end state.
A classless society. Workers governing through a new democratic constitution. A democratic socialist republic.
That doesn’t mean every DSA member agrees on every detail of that destination. It’s a broad organization, and its members disagree plenty about strategy, priorities, and what socialism should ultimately look like.
But the national organization has put a formal program on the table. That’s the document being evaluated here.
And DSA’s own National Electoral Commission is blunt about what that program is for. The stated objective isn’t simply electing legislators to administer the existing system. DSA describes electoral work as part of a larger struggle to build working-class state power and win socialism.
DSA is honest about the distance involved, too. Its own program draws a line between reforms it thinks it can win inside the current system, and what it calls “complete victory,” building a new society from the ground up.
That line is the whole point I'm making.
Mapping the End State
Set aside the rhetoric for a moment, and the destination has hard edges. Here’s what DSA’s stated program actually calls for, and what each piece would require to become real.
Workers govern. DSA connects working-class political power directly to a new political system and a new constitution. How that mechanism actually works is one of the questions this piece is asking.
A classless society. The end of capitalist class relations. Requires rebuilding ownership, labor, and wealth from the ground up.
A democratic socialist economy. Major economic decisions made democratically instead of through private capital. Requires an enormous transfer of governance and ownership.
Public ownership of major industries. Government control of essential sectors and major corporations. Requires nationalization and administrative capacity the government doesn’t currently have.
One legislature. The Senate, abolished. Requires a constitutional amendment.
Proportional representation. A multi-party legislature rather than the current winner-take-all structure. DSA’s full proposal pairs this with abolishing the Senate, which means major changes to federal election law and, eventually, the Constitution itself.
No Electoral College. The president chosen a different way. Requires a constitutional amendment.
A different presidency and a different Supreme Court. DSA’s own language calls for replacing the existing presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, Congress. What does that do to separation of powers? Requires rewriting the core of the Constitution.
Money out of politics. Public financing, private influence curtailed. Requires new law, and the enforcement muscle to back it up.
An abolitionist vision. Policing and incarceration, dramatically reduced, eventually phased out. Requires transforming the entire criminal justice system.
Universal public services. Healthcare, housing, and infrastructure, increasingly socialized. Requires a fiscal and administrative expansion with few precedents.
International transformation. Capitalism challenged beyond U.S. borders. Requires a level of international cooperation no single country can command.
Read that list twice.
At its full extent, this isn’t merely a policy agenda.
It’s a proposed redesign of the American constitutional order.
That deserves to be taken seriously. Not mocked. Not waved off. Taken seriously, the way you’d take seriously any plan to rebuild a bridge while cars are still driving over it.
The Six Tests
Here’s the framework. Not a socialism test. The same six questions I’d run against any ideological end state, left or right, and you learn more than a hundred hot takes will tell you.
Constitutional feasibility. Can it happen under the Constitution we have?
Legislative feasibility. Could Congress actually pass it?
Economic feasibility. What does it cost? What happens to investment, employment, markets, taxation, and the government’s own capacity to function?
Administrative feasibility. Could the federal government actually run this, at national scale, without collapsing under its own weight?
Political feasibility. Could enough Americans be persuaded to approve it, and stay persuaded long enough to sustain it?
And then the one most platforms try to skip.
Second-order consequences. Not what happens if the plan works exactly as written. What happens when politicians, bureaucrats, corporations, unions, and ordinary self-interested people respond to the incentives the new system creates.
That’s where every ideology gets interesting. And where most of them get honest.
The Uncomfortable Question
Every revolution promises the same thing. Power, returned to the people.
Every revolution eventually has to answer the same question. Who actually ends up holding the power?
DSA wants to replace concentrated capitalist power with distributed worker power. Fine. Show the mechanism. Show me the road from a Senate to no Senate. Show me the bill. Show me the constitutional authority. Show me what happens when the plan meets people who don’t want to give up what they have.
And show me the part every one of these movements struggles to answer.
Who controls the public enterprises. Who appoints the people running them. Who removes them. Who audits them.
What happens when workers disagree with each other. What happens when workers disagree with the institution exercising authority over them. What happens when a minority rejects what the majority just voted for.
Who controls the courts. Who controls the military. Who controls the bureaucracy. What stops any of these new institutions from turning into permanent centers of power on their own.
What stops the people running the new system from becoming the new ruling class?
That’s not a gotcha. It’s the oldest problem in political theory. Concentrated power has a way of finding new hands, wearing a new name, and calling itself something else.
DSA’s real challenge was never proving capitalism is replaceable.
It’s proving that whatever replaces it doesn’t just rebuild the hierarchy under new management.
Where This Leaves Us
This isn’t an argument that DSA is right or wrong.
It’s an argument that if you’re going to evaluate an end state, you have to actually look at the end state. Not the slogan version. Not the strawman version, either.
The real one. The one they wrote down.
Show me the destination. Show me the road. Show me the bill. Show me the constitutional authority. Show me what happens when it doesn’t work.
And show me what stops the new boss from looking exactly like the old one.
Here’s the asymmetry that actually matters.
DSA has done something the Democratic Party increasingly struggles to do: tell people what it believes, where it wants to go, and what kind of political system it ultimately wants to build.
You can disagree with that destination. You can think the road is impossible. You can think the destination itself is dangerous.
But there’s a destination.
The Democratic Party’s problem runs the other way. It keeps asking voters to defend a system it barely explains, while treating its own primaries as something to manage instead of something to listen to.
That’s why this was never really about whether DSA is good or bad.
It’s about whether anyone is willing to take a political movement seriously enough to examine the destination, the road, and the machinery it would take to get there.
DSA put its map on the table.
Now somebody needs to read it.
