A third of Democrats call themselves socialists. Here’s what that actually means.

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If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow

— John Lennon-Paul McCartney

By tapping into deep economic and political frustrations, the Democratic Socialists of America is having a moment.

Following DSA primary victories over Democrats in local and congressional primaries in New York City, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, moderate and conservative Democrats are worried about a radical-left takeover akin to what the right-wing Tea Party did to the GOP after Obama’s 2008 White House win.

“We’re gonna take [the Democratic Party] over,” Sara Almosawi, a member of the DSA’s national political committee, told The Wall Street Journal. “They’re not meeting the American people where they are.”

Why it matters: DSA candidates may siphon support from more traditional progressives while its most extreme proposals threaten to alienate moderate and conservative Democrats and independent voters. That could hurt the party in the November midterms and 2028 general election.

Its new platform is a call to abandon capitalism and US democratic institutions as we know them in favor of a vision of socialism that plays well on college campuses but can’t hold up in the real world.

The DSA would abolish the Senate; replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, Congress; and draft a new democratic socialist constitution.

“If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty,” its manifesto declares.

Zoom in: According to a recent CNN poll, about a third of Democrats and Democrat-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists. The DSA itself, however, has only about 100,000 members.

The group’s early electoral wins reflect its focus on widespread problems that neither Democrats nor Republicans have successfully addressed, including the high cost of living, broken health care and immigration systems, and a political process corrupted by unlimited donations from corporations and billionaires.

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Some of its agenda is straight from a common-sense populist playbook: a minimum wage on which workers can actually live; paid family leave for all; free universal health care and child care; wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations.

But other prescriptions aren’t exactly what most Americans would be comfortable with:

• Nationalizing the largest corporations and essential industries such as food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation.
• Replacing much of the private rental market with publicly owned social housing.
• Opening the borders.
• Demilitarizing police departments, disempowering police unions, and redirecting funding to public services as steps toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.”

Some in the DSA movement use rhetoric that ignores or even tacitly endorses antisemitism and Palestinian terror groups like Hamas, according to the American Jewish Committee.

Republicans will have a field day tarring all Democrats with a “radical communist DSA” brush.

Final thought: As a lifelong Democrat, I am fed up with my feckless party, especially its aging leaders and brand of cultural elitism that puts down anyone uncomfortable with aspects of its “woke” agenda.

The party needs generational change, a new approach to social and economic issues — a down-to-the-studs demo and reno.

But the DSA says that “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.”

No matter how flawed America may be, the group’s call for revolution is as out of step with the country as “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.”

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