DSA Communists Did the Paperwork

There is a particular kind of American political scandal that requires no leak, no whistleblower, no source hurrying through a parking garage. The document sits in plain view. It has a title, a ratifying body, recorded votes. And for weeks, nobody who might be expected to read it reads it, until one reporter does, and then the country pretends to be surprised.

This week Fox News reported, citing a source, that the Democratic Socialists of America plan to eliminate the United States Senate, replace the president and the Supreme Court with bodies chosen by Congress, grant amnesty to all immigrants, and defund the Department of Defense. It landed like a revelation. It was a rerun.

Stu Smith of City Journal sat with the DSA's National Political Committee proceedings back in June and reported, from the members' own mouths and the adopted text, that the organization's rebooted platform commits it to scrapping the Senate, abolishing "the carceral forces of the capitalist state," defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with "an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress." He didn't get it from a source. He got it from the tape. The distinction matters, because a source can be wrong and a tape cannot, and because Smith did the one thing the American press has apparently forgotten how to do with the radical left, which is to take it at its word. City Journal

The word, in this case, is a document called "Workers Deserve More!" The name is the softest thing about it. Adopted in June by the NPC, the 27-member body that functions as the DSA's board of directors, it is the official program of what is now, by its own July 4 announcement, the largest socialist organization in American history: 120,000 members, surpassing Eugene Debs's Socialist Party at its 1912 peak. More than 250 of its members and endorsees hold elected office. One of them is the mayor of New York. AMAC

What the document proposes is not a policy agenda. Policy agendas operate inside a constitutional order. This one proposes to replace the order. Abolish the Senate. Abolish the Electoral College. Make the executive and the judiciary creatures of Congress. Dismantle police and prisons. End sanctions on Iran, Cuba, and Russia. Take the largest corporations into public ownership. And, holding it all together, the stated ambition to "win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic." The men who wrote the Constitution designed the Senate, the independent judiciary, and the separated executive precisely as brakes on transient popular majorities. The platform's authors understand this perfectly. That is why they want them gone. Cliff Connolly of the Marxist Unity Group, who drove the structural amendments, argued exactly this at the meeting: the Senate, the presidency, and the Court exist to block the popular will. He was not confused about the founders' intent. He was objecting to it. The Gateway Pundit

The internal machinery deserves attention because it dissolves the last available excuse, which is that this is the work of a loud fringe outvoted by sensible people. The platform came out of a committee that spent two months on the language, and when the NPC took it up, the presenter urged passage without amendment. Leadership instead added four amendments: the "real democracy" provision subordinating the president and Supreme Court to Congress, police and prison abolition, language naming Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state, and ranked-choice voting.

Two passed unanimously. The "real democracy" amendment prevailed by a razor-thin margin. The carceral abolition plank passed 16 to 8. The radicals did not sneak anything past the moderates. They beat them, in the open, with a roll call. NPC co-chair Ashik Siddique allowed that "abolishing the Senate is pretty radical" while suggesting more and more people were coming to see it as reasonable. Another NPC member, David Jenkins, has been captured on video putting the destination in four words: "Our goal is communism." The Gateway Pundit + 2

Nor is any of it new. The DSA published its case for abolishing the Senate in 2014, when the organization had roughly six thousand members and the position cost nothing. What changed is not the doctrine but the leverage. Six thousand became 120,000. A pamphlet became a governing program, and the program now has a city attached to it. I wrote in June about what that leverage looked like from the ground in Brooklyn, when three Mamdani-backed candidates swept their primaries and the DSA put on paper exactly what comes next. The paper is here now.

The reaction from the right arrived in ascending order of volume. President Trump got there before the platform even broke into the news cycle. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Washington on June 26, days after the New York primaries, he told the room the DSA winners "are not social Democrats, these are hardcore, godless communists," and the press treated it as McCarthy cosplay. At Mount Rushmore on July 3 he warned of a "resurgence of the communist menace in our land," and told the crowd, "you can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both." On the Mall the next day, the country's 250th birthday, he called the ideology "a cancer" to be "cut out fast." House Speaker Mike Johnson followed: "The Communists are inside the gates! It's time for all freedom-loving Americans to stand and be counted, and help us defeat this MADNESS. By God's grace, we will." And Spencer Pratt, of all people, supplied the tabloid version, rebranding the organization "Destroying Society Altogether" and declaring that "they want to do more to destroy America than Al Qaeda did. Socialists are terrorists." Townhall + 2

Here is the uncomfortable part, the part that fact-checkers keep circling without landing on. Strip away the Pratt hyperbole and the Johnson caps lock and ask a narrower question: was Trump's core claim, that the DSA's leadership is substantially communist rather than Scandinavian social-democratic, accurate? Smith answered that too, in a follow-up, the cable networks also failed to read: a majority of the DSA's governing board openly identifies with Communist ideology, and since the 2025 convention, the Communist bloc has prevailed on the most contentious votes.

When CNN's Kaitlan Collins corrected the president on air, explaining that democratic socialism is not communism, she was describing the DSA's name. Smith was describing its leadership. Only one of them had done the reading. We covered the strange spectacle of Trump and Musk both declaring war on communism the same week the DSA won New York; the platform is the document that retroactively makes that week look less like paranoia and more like pattern recognition. City Journal

Which brings us to the people for whom this document is not an abstraction but an employment contract. The platform is explicitly built as an alignment standard for chapters and elected officials, a measuring stick the organization intends to hold against the people it puts in power. More than 250 of them now govern inside the constitutional arrangement that their own program proposes to demolish. Zohran Mamdani commands the largest municipal police force in the Western Hemisphere under a platform whose adopted text abolishes it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez legislates in a Congress her organization would crown as the sole surviving branch of government. Between now and the July 14 launch event, every one of them can be asked the only question the document leaves open, and it is a short one. Do you own this, or do you disown it? The press that ignored Stu Smith for three weeks might start by asking it. The document is public. It always was.

Stu Smith's original reporting on the NPC meeting and platform: City Journal.

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