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The Democratic Socialists of America have published a new program called Workers Deserve More. Its opening vision is deliberately inviting: imagine a day without capitalism in which you enjoy your work, control your own labour and work only as much as you are able and society needs. There is no debt, no mortgage, no landlord and very little reason to worry about money. Food, education, energy, medicine and transportation have become common goods rather than businesses.

It is easy to understand the appeal. Housing is increasingly unaffordable, medical costs can ruin American families, corporate power has become entangled with government, and too many people work long hours without achieving much security. Socialists do not invent these grievances. They gain followers by recognizing real failures and then presenting themselves as the only people willing to fix them.

The trouble begins when the DSA program moves from describing its destination to explaining how it intends to get there. Its goal is not a regulated market economy with universal healthcare and stronger social programs. The DSA wants to end capitalism, establish a classless society, draft a new constitution and create what it calls a “democratic socialist republic.” It concedes that some demands may be won through the existing system, but says complete victory requires “building a new society from the ground up.”

The DSA presents those immediate demands as transitional. That does not moderate the destination; it makes reform within the existing system an instrument for eventually replacing it. This is the revolutionary premise beneath the pleasant illustrations. Private ownership, profit, corporations, the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate, police, prisons and border enforcement are not treated as institutions that may require reform, but as obstacles standing between the working class and liberation.

The economic promises depend upon the same evasive logic. Declaring housing, food, electricity and medicine to be human rights does not produce houses, grow food, generate electricity or train doctors. All remain scarce goods requiring labour, investment, expertise and choices about competing uses. Prices do more than collect payment: they transmit dispersed information about supply, demand and trade-offs that no planning committee possesses in one place. If prices and private ownership no longer perform that coordinating work, political authorities must decide what will be produced, how much will be available and who receives it.

The DSA calls that authority democratic, as though the adjective settles the matter. Its program would place the largest corporations and essential industries under public ownership while making the executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. It would also abolish the Senate and Electoral College. Whatever one thinks of those individual institutions, their combined replacement would concentrate enormous political and economic power while weakening the independent bodies capable of restraining it.

That combination is more dangerous than any single spending proposal. A government that finances housing, controls major industries, directs energy and transportation, and oversees much of employment possesses forms of leverage that no private corporation can match. If the same political movement controls the legislature and the institutions intended to review its decisions, dissent may remain legal on paper while becoming increasingly expensive in practice.

This is where democratic socialism parts company with ordinary social democracy. Liberal societies can provide public healthcare, social insurance, labour protections and assistance to the poor while retaining markets, private property, constitutional restraints and competing centres of power. Those compromises can be debated and adjusted. The DSA rejects that settlement because it regards capitalism and the present constitutional order themselves as the problem.

The DSA is a big-tent organization, and not every member or endorsed candidate will be equally committed to every clause. But this is its national program, not a fringe caucus tract; DSA says candidates seeking national endorsement will be expected to accept and promote it. Its official ambitions are radical enough without James Lindsay’s more heated comparisons with Lenin and Mao.

The DSA promises a society in which ordinary people finally control their lives. Its path there, however, requires dismantling the economic and constitutional pluralism that prevents any one faction from controlling everyone else. The utopia appears gentle because the program dwells on the day after the revolution. We should pay considerably more attention to what must be broken on the way there.

References

• Democratic Socialists of America. “Workers Deserve More.” Official DSA program, 2026.
• Kaiser, Adam. “DSA Launches New Program.” Democratic Left, July 17, 2026.
• Hayek, F. A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, September 1945, pp. 519–530.
• Lindsay, James. “What Is the DSA Platform?.” The New Discourses Podcast, Episode 214, July 22, 2026.