The DSA Threat to America

Radicalism in America - A mirror image of 1917 Russia

by Michael J Badagliacco, "MJB"

The real threat to America is not hidden. It is written in plain language by the Democratic Socialists of America in their official program,
“Workers Deserve More,” drafted between April and June 2026 and released publicly in July.

What the Platform Declares

DSA states its mission without ambiguity: “We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The group further declares that “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up” and that its program aims at “ending capitalist oligarchy and creating a real democracy.”

These are not vague aspirations. They are concrete institutional demands.

Replacing the Constitutional Order

Under the section titled “Working-Class Democracy,” the platform calls to “abolish the Senate". It then demands that the country “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress". The Electoral College would also be abolished. In their place would stand a single federal legislature based on proportional representation, with an expanded House of Representatives operating as a multi-party body.

These proposals strike at the core of the republican form of government that the Constitution guarantees to every state under Article IV, Section 4. The Founders designed separation of powers, an independent judiciary, a bicameral legislature, and a separately elected executive to prevent the concentration of power and to protect against pure majoritarian rule. DSA’s model of a single legislature, with the executive and courts made subordinate to Congress, removes those checks. What remains is a structure far closer to parliamentary supremacy than to the system ratified in 1788.

The parallel to 1917 is striking. After the Bolsheviks seized power in October, they did not simply reform the existing provisional government or wait for the elected Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. When that Assembly met in January 1918 and refused to rubber-stamp Bolshevik control, Lenin dissolved it by force. Power was concentrated in the Soviets, which the Bolshevik Party dominated.

The executive (Sovnarkom) and the judiciary were made instruments of the ruling political authority rather than independent checks upon it. The 1918 Soviet Constitution formalized a system in which the legislature, executive functions, and courts all answered to the same concentrated political center. DSA’s call to subordinate the president and Supreme Court to a single legislature, abolish the Senate, and scrap the Electoral College follows the same logic of removing institutional barriers that stand between temporary majorities and total political control.

Public Ownership of Industry

The economic demands are equally explicit. Under “Economic Democracy,” DSA states: “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people". That language means government control over major private enterprises.

History has a clear name for systems in which the state takes ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. Americans spent more than half a century in a Cold War opposing exactly that model because it concentrates economic power in the hands of political authorities and reduces individual economic liberty. Public ownership of the largest corporations is not a modest regulatory proposal.

It is a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizens and the means of production.

Again the 1917 parallel is direct. Within weeks of taking power the Bolsheviks issued decrees nationalizing the banks. Over the following months and years they extended state ownership to large-scale industry, transportation, and trade. The stated purpose was identical to DSA’s language today: democratic control by the working class and an end to capitalist oligarchy. In practice, ownership transferred from private hands to the political apparatus that claimed to speak for the workers. The result was not worker self-management but centralized state direction of the economy. DSA’s demand for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries is the same structural transfer, presented under the same rhetorical banner of democratic accountability.

The Broader Implications

This is not a routine policy disagreement over tax rates or the size of a social program. It is an open call to replace the existing Constitution with a new one and to restructure both the political system and the ownership of the economy. The American experiment of limited government, private property, and separated powers is treated as a failed arrangement that must be superseded.

The implications for individual rights follow from the structure itself. The Bill of Rights exists because independent institutions, courts not subordinate to the legislature, an executive with its own base of authority, and a Senate that can check the House, stand between temporary majorities and the individual.

When those institutions are abolished or subordinated, the formal listing of rights becomes dependent on the will of the single remaining power center. Freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, the right of peaceful assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, and protections against arbitrary prosecution all rely on institutional barriers that DSA proposes to remove.

There is a deeper irony. The very activists who enjoy the freedoms of the current system would operate under a framework in which the ultimate arbiter of those freedoms is the legislature they seek to empower. The speech, assembly, and association rights that allow them to organize and advocate today would rest on the continued goodwill of a concentrated political authority rather than on independent constitutional structures.

The 1917 experience illustrates the danger with unusual clarity. The Bolsheviks also promised a higher form of democracy, soviet democracy and workers’ democracy, while systematically eliminating every independent institution that could constrain them. Once the Constituent Assembly was gone, once the judiciary answered to the party, and once the economy answered to the state, the formal rights listed in the Soviet constitutions proved worthless against the will of those who held concentrated power. The sequence is not accidental: first the demand for a new constitutional order and public ownership of the commanding heights, then the practical elimination of competing centers of authority.

Why the Distinction Matters

DSA and its defenders describe their vision as “democratic socialism.” They distinguish it from the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet the core demand for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, combined with the elimination of independent branches of government, tracks the historical pattern of socialist programs that concentrated both political and economic authority. The Cold War was fought in part because those concentrations repeatedly produced the opposite of the freedom and equality they promised.

The 1917 Russian Revolution remains the clearest early example of that pattern. The Bolsheviks did not begin by announcing a one-party dictatorship. They began with the language of workers’ power, democratic transformation, a new constitution, and the end of capitalist exploitation, the same categories DSA uses today. The structural moves that followed, dissolving or subordinating independent legislatures and courts, nationalizing the largest economic enterprises, and concentrating authority in a single political center, produced the opposite of the liberation that had been promised. The distance between the rhetoric of “democratic socialism” and the reality of concentrated power was measured in the suppression of every competing voice.

The United States remains a Constitutional Republic. Change is possible through the amendment process in Article V or through the election of representatives who share a different vision. What is not compatible with the existing order is the open advocacy of its wholesale replacement.

Americans who value the structure that has secured ordered liberty for more than two centuries should take the DSA program at its word. The organization has stated what it wants. The only remaining question is whether the country will treat that statement with the seriousness it deserves.