Last month, after the New York primaries, I made a simple suggestion: read the Democratic Socialists of America’s own platform. The DSA has apparently concluded the old one was too modest. They are writing a new one.
According to Fox News, citing a source familiar with the organization’s planning, the updated long-term program calls for eliminating the United States Senate and replacing the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary chosen by — and subordinate to — Congress. Add amnesty for all immigrants and defunding the Department of War. This sits atop the existing platform, which already demands an immediate end to all deportations, free migration without border controls, voting rights for noncitizens, universal rent control, and a new constitution built around a “single federal legislature.”
Note what this is not. It is not a housing bill or a healthcare plan. It is a constitutional design: one chamber, holding all power, with the executive and the courts answering to it. The rent freeze gets the leaflet. The Senate gets the memo.
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I have seen this design before. Not in a think tank paper — in a Soviet classroom, where studying it was mandatory, and enthusiasm was graded.
The 1936 Soviet constitution declared the Supreme Soviet “the highest organ of state power.” The government was formed by it and accountable to it. Judges were chosen by the soviets and could be recalled by them. Separation of powers was dismissed as a bourgeois superstition; the approved doctrine was called “unity of power.” On paper, it was the most democratic constitution on Earth, and Western intellectuals said so at the time.
A defender will object that a single supreme legislature is not Soviet at all — it is the Westminster model, Britain or New Zealand, perfectly democratic. But Britain’s Parliament is restrained by centuries of unwritten convention, an independent civil service, and a monarch’s ceremonial brake — the invisible furniture of a political culture America never built. The United States built its liberty into the structure itself: three branches, each checking the others. Remove that structure here, and nothing invisible remains to catch the fall. Whoever controls the single legislature controls everything: the government, the courts, the prosecutors, and, eventually, the question of whether elections are worth the paper. Unity of power always ends the same way — unified.
To its credit, the DSA writes its intentions down. Its candidates run on something else. The campaigns speak of rent, groceries, and buses; the program speaks of abolishing the upper chamber of Congress. When James Carville said House Democrats should refuse to seat Darializa Avila Chevalier — the DSA-backed winner in New York’s 13th District — her allies at Justice Democrats replied that voters “believed in her vision to deliver an affordability agenda.” The affordability agenda is on the doorstep flyer. The abolition of the Senate is in the program. In 1917, the flyers said “Peace, Land, Bread.” Russia got the program.
And who is Avila Chevalier? A self-described prison abolitionist who, in a New York Editorial Board interview, was asked four times whether a convicted murderer should go to prison and four times could not bring herself to say yes. Bill Maher opened a monologue with the exchange: “There is a woke mind virus, and I think we found patient zero.” In November, she is favored to win.
This is no longer a fringe. By Fox News’s count, four DSA-endorsed candidates have unseated sitting Democratic members of Congress in a matter of weeks: Melat Kiros in Colorado, a 29-year-old who ended the fifteen-term career of Rep. Diana DeGette; Avila Chevalier and Adam Hamawy in New York; Donavan McKinney in Michigan. In June, self-professed “democratic socialist” Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, D.C. — and in the capital, the primary is the election — while in Los Angeles, DSA-backed Nithya Raman forced a November runoff against the sitting mayor. The organization now claims more than 100,000 members and reported roughly $6.4 million in annual revenue, funded largely through membership dues — a working machine, not a reading group.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is its most famous member. In January, three weeks into office, he told The View: “I am in support of abolishing ICE.” When ABC’s Jonathan Karl pressed whether a party could really disagree on something as basic as whether prisons should exist, the mayor replied, “There are prisons.” That is an observation, not a position. The leaflet never argues with the program; it changes the subject. Asked in the same interview whether he supports Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, Mamdani said he could not support any state that privileges one religion over another — naming Israel and Saudi Arabia in a single breath, the mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel splitting that difference on Sunday television.
The alarms are coming from the party’s own old guard. Carville demands a “schism,” telling the winners to start their own movement and stop using the Democratic label. Sen. John Fetterman says the party is “drifting firmly into communism.” And Bill Maher, across from Vice President JD Vance in June, said that if this is where the Democratic Party is going, “my vote is in play.” A party can survive losing the Right. It cannot survive losing Maher, because Maher is not the Right. He is the middle.
The numbers explain both the surge and the risk. Pew Research, in a survey released June 30, found that 32% of Democrats like leaders who call themselves “democratic socialists” and only 11% dislike them. The number that matters is the third one: 56% neither like nor dislike. Gallup found last year that 66% of Democrats view socialism positively, against 42% for capitalism. Among all American adults, those who dislike democratic-socialist leaders still outnumber those who like them, 38% to 17%.
In 1912, Eugene Debs won 6% of the presidential vote — the high-water mark of American socialism for a century. That ceiling held because Americans who had seen the alternative, or fled from it, kept explaining what the word meant. The explaining has stopped. The 56% who “neither like nor dislike” are not tolerant. They are untaught. Nobody has told them what a single legislature with a subordinate court system produces, and the schools have had other priorities for some decades now. That silence, not the platform, is the real story: a radical program does not need a majority when most of the country cannot say what is wrong with it.
My assessment: the Democratic Party will not formally split. Party machines do not commit suicide; they metabolize. The likelier future is quieter — moderates staying home, independents drifting, and a program once unthinkable becoming, clause by clause, unremarkable.
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But prediction is not the point. The document is. The DSA has done America the courtesy of writing down, in advance and in public, the state it intends to build. The least a free country can do is read it.
I did — the first time in Russian. It ends the same way in English.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.