As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Americans are rightly reflecting on the enduring genius of the Constitution. For two and a half centuries, separated powers, federalism, and institutional checks have protected liberty against the concentration of power.
That system has survived civil war, depressions, and foreign totalitarian threats. Yet as the nation celebrates this milestone, a radical faction at home has published a manifesto aimed at dismantling the constitutional structure that made those achievements possible.
The platform calls for the ‘public ownership and democratic control’ of major corporations, energy grids, and transportation infrastructure.
The Democratic Socialists of America just released a national platform titled “Workers Deserve More.” The populist title conceals an agenda far more radical than another increase in the minimum wage or an expansion of organized labor’s influence.
This is not a conventional progressive wish list. It is a blueprint for remaking the American republic and weakening the constitutional limits that stand between citizens and concentrated political power.
The platform begins by demanding the abolition of the United States Senate. The DSA would replace the bicameral Congress with a single legislative chamber, concentrating federal lawmaking power in a radically expanded House of Representatives.
That proposal attacks one of the central compromises of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Senate protects smaller states from domination by a handful of heavily populated metropolitan regions and forces national majorities to build broader coalitions.
A single chamber based solely on proportional representation would move the country toward unchecked majority rule — precisely the danger James Madison warned against in Federalist 62.
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The assault does not stop with Congress. The DSA platform also calls for severe restrictions on judicial review, placing the Supreme Court under congressional control and preventing it from striking down unconstitutional laws enacted by the proposed single chamber.
The platform would also replace the independently elected presidency with a centralized “premier” chosen by the legislature.
Consider the structure as a whole: one dominant legislative chamber, a premier answerable to that chamber, and a Supreme Court stripped of its ability to enforce constitutional limits.
That is not democratic reform. It is the consolidation of federal power in a single political institution, with few meaningful safeguards for individual liberty or dissenting minorities.
The economic program is equally sweeping. “Workers Deserve More” calls for the “public ownership” and “democratic control” of major corporations, energy systems, and transportation infrastructure. In plain English, it proposes state control of large sectors of the private economy.
History offers no shortage of warnings about such nationalization. From Eastern Europe to Venezuela, government seizure of private industry has produced shortages, economic decay, corruption, and diminished personal freedom.
The DSA pairs this centralization of political and economic power with a direct assault on national sovereignty. Its platform treats borders and citizenship not as foundations of self-government but as obstacles to be removed.
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Its immigration plank demands unrestricted “freedom of movement,” abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an end to deportations, and federal voting rights for noncitizens.
Combined with proposals to eliminate cash bail, demilitarize law enforcement, and dismantle the carceral system, the agenda would weaken the government’s ability to protect law-abiding citizens while expanding its control over nearly every other part of life.
The timing is supremely ironic. This summer, as Americans celebrate 250 years under a system designed to limit government power, the DSA is offering a system designed to maximize it.
The organization claims to speak for workers. Its platform would instead make ordinary Americans increasingly dependent on a centralized state that controls political institutions, major industries, public safety, and access to citizenship itself.
The country should call this platform what it is: an anti-constitutional program dressed in democratic language. America’s strength lies in the limits placed on government, not in the power surrendered to it.
The DSA platform is a reminder that the struggle to preserve the republic did not end with its founding. On America’s 250th anniversary, citizens should defend the constitutional guardrails that have kept power divided and Americans free.
