Members and acolytes of the Democratic Socialists of America are making inroads into the Democratic Party, so it’s useful to see what they stand for.  They may not enact all these pledges, but they will try.  Click on the screenshot below to see their recently published program.

No capitalism and NO BILLS!

But what if you want a different house from the one that the government gives you? Too bad!  But who’s gonna pay for all those free houses, medicine, and transportation? I suspect they’ll just say “tax the rich,” the common DSA answer. But there’s not enough money there to begin to pay for all the stuff promised above.

And no more law enforcement. Eventually, everyone will be law-abiding!

There’s this of course; a major plank of the DSA is the elimination of Israel (and, not said explicitly) and of Jews as well. Invoking the “right of return” of all descendants of Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 would lead to the elimination of Israel. Not a word about the actual genocide of Hamas and the terrorism of the Palestinian Authority.

. . and here goes the separation of powers carefully confected by the Founders:

This comes pretty close to Communism:

And some cant:

To achieve this future, our class must organize. The Democratic Socialists of America is building a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class. Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital; not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society. We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.

DSA has written this program for ending capitalist oligarchy and creating a real democracy. Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up. We push these demands to their furthest extent today, so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future. Join us.

But is that real democracy. What if people don’t want to run the big corporations or get rid of capitalism?

I don’t usually quote the conservative op-eds of the WSJ, but a new editorial-board op-ed describes the unconstitutionality of the DSA program:

The left has long targeted the Electoral College because it thwarts the ability of the most populous states to dominate presidential elections. But in its latest manifesto, “Workers Deserve More,” the DSA says it wants to “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” It also wants to “abolish the Senate.” James Madison, call your office.

Well, read the platform and get yourself educated. Sadly, young people may still learn what communism is, but they also have to study history to see how it worked out. They can’t do that on their phones.

I’ve watched with alarm the increase in the number of members and political candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose membership has swelled from 6,000 members in 1982 to 110,000 members this year. I don’t know anybody affiliated with that party, but the positions espoused by their candidates are so extreme that they often come close to lunacy, as in the case of Darializa Avila Chevaler, likely to be elecetd a Congresswoman come fall. They favor open borders, an end to incarceration and most policing, and, to a man and woman, they are strongly anti-Israel. These stands, which come close to antisemitism, used to bar candidates from election, but now are de rigueur for DSAers. 

DSA candidates are “progressive,” but in an authoritarian way, and in that respect they are no advance over classic liberals or the “mainstream” Democratic Party—if there still is one!  Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of NYC and a DSA member, has been dubbed a “kingmaker”, as the candidates he’s endorsed have won by substantial margins in the primaries. My only consolation is that these are primaries in blue states, though an apparently loony DSAer, Melat Kiros, won a House primary in Colorado a light-blue state.  In all of these cases, the DSA candidate is predicted to defeat the Republican in November.

Will this invidious party spread? We already have DSAers in Congress: Rashida Tlaib and AOC, both of whom I detest. Bernie Sanders, though not a member of DSA, is affiliated with them.  That’s a small number, but it is going to get larger: DSAers in Congress will at least double next year.

In a new article in The Atlantic, staff writer Jonathan Chait describes the principles and history of the DSA, both of which should scare the bejeezus out of any liberal or mainstream Democrat. Click below to read the article for free:

Some quotes;

The general idea that Democratic Party loyalists seem to have about members of the Democratic Socialists of America is that they’re a lot like Democrats, but perhaps a bit more passionate. Voters in New York City are “not afraid of the term democratic socialism,” Joy Behar recently said on The View, to applause. “Social Security is democratic socialism. Partly, unemployment insurance is. The people who pick up your garbage, the people who take the fire out at your house—all of these things are democratic socialism.”

It’s true that the DSA has areas of ideological overlap with the Democratic Party, and would at least directionally support classic Democratic policies such as a higher minimum wage, defending social spending, and opposing the Trump administration. But the DSA’s version of democratic socialism goes far beyond routine public functions such as garbage collection and Social Security (which most Republicans, not to mention Democrats, support), or even aspirational policies such as Medicare for All.

The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.

The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.

These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone “woke” era. They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.

The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.

As Chait describes, the DSA fractured after October 7, 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel.  Now the organization is pretty much anti-Israel and even sides with terrorists groups (and no, its Jew hatred is based on more than Netanyahu—it’s anti-Zionism, equivalent to antisemitism):

In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.

Now, Chait says, more that half of DSA members openly identify as communists, which means that they want authoritarian power (the dictatorship of the proletariat), though some like Mamdani or Tlaib disguise their antidemocratic aims well, supporting uncontroversial ideas like public health care and transportation. But that’s just the veneer:

In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.

And do you know about the “dirty break”?

The DSA’s long-term strategy is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the “dirty break,” a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.

Not all DSA officials agree on the dirty break. Some still cling to Harrington’s vision of pushing the Democrats leftward. Others favor an immediate split into a third party (a “clean break”). But as Peter Sterne, a onetime DSA member who now reports on New York politics, has written, “The DSA’s current strategy is a ‘dirty break’: gradually build up the necessary partylike infrastructure to eventually break away from the Democrats entirely, while still running candidates in Democratic primaries for now.”

In the meantime, the organization has displayed patience. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the movement’s most valuable political asset, has moved cautiously in office and avoided dramatic policy changes, building political support that he has spent on backing DSA challenges to mainstream Democrats.

. . .Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, recently appeared on MS NOW, a favorite network for normie liberals, where she blamed Democratic members of Congress for discord with new left-wing nominees. “You,” she said, addressing her incumbent colleagues, “are creating the antagonistic dynamic that we do not need. These are two young, talented, intelligent women that got elected against all odds, against millions of dollars. Perhaps there is something we can learn from them.”

The norm that AOC is trying to create is a ratchet that pushes the Democratic Party ever leftward. The DSA is permitted to excoriate the party, but non-socialist Democrats cannot respond in kind. Moderate Democrats are permitted to exist, at least for now, but the ideological pressure runs in one direction.

Now the last bit might be an exaggeration (I love how AOC slots herself in the group of desirables), but it doesn’t seem far from the truth. Thankfully, at present Democrats as a whole are not behind the DSA:

At the most superficial level, the DSA influx has associated Democrats with a series of kooky beliefs and statements. Although Democratic voters approve of the DSA, voters as a whole do not. A national poll found the group’s approval at 21 percent, and 48 percent disapproved. (The same poll had 36 percent approval of the Democrats.) Its specific platform components are if anything less popular. The DSA’s leadership has approved a platform, set to be ratified at its convention next month, calling for “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” opening borders, moving to public ownership for the largest corporations, establishing a 32-hour workweek, and defunding the Pentagon.

So why should we be scared? For two reasons. First, those of us who sympathize with Israel have watched with despair as antisemitism (excuse me: “anti-Zionism”) has seeped into the mainstream Democratic Party, and that’s partly the result of the DSA. More important, the DSA is antidemocratic and antiliberal, and woe to us if they get elected. Even so-called mainstream Democrats, like Kamala “Coconut Tree” Harris, are schmoozing with Democratic Socialists, trying to inject some pro-Palestinian notes and more progressivism into their campaigns. Click, read and weep: here’s an article from the Jerusalem Post:

I don’t think Harris has a snowball’s chance in hell of even being a Presidential/VP candidate in 2028, but who knows what will happen in the next two years?  After all, Democrats embraced her candidacy in the last election, and then what happened? Here’s Chait’s conclusion about the DSA, and why we should fear it:

What the DSA demands of the Democrats is not merely to advocate more generous social policies, or more cautious foreign affairs, but to welcome, or at least accept, authoritarians as their coalition partners. Democrats are likely to face the same kind of pressure that Republicans confronted with MAGA’s hostile takeover: first to ignore their allies’ sinister goals, and then to rationalize and eventually justify them.

As authoritarian elements gain strength, they become more essential to the success of a political coalition, and the price of confronting them rises. The Republican Party has long since passed the point of no return. The easiest time to draw clear moral lines against the encroachment of illiberalism within one’s own camp is at the beginning.

Never will I vote for one of these jokers.

h/t Callum

Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of NYC, as he proffered a number of campaign promises that delighted progressives young and old. (This is besides his pro-Palestinian stand on the Gaza war, which is irrelevant to his actions as NYC mayor but still delighted the benighted.)

Here are a few of those promises taken from a June 25 article in the NYT:

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani set himself apart early despite his lack of name recognition.

He did it largely by connecting with younger voters, producing sleek, engaging campaign ads on social media and beating the drum about the need to make life in New York more affordable. This narrow focus on a single, salient issue drove Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, which his main rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, described as “highly impactful” as he conceded the race on Tuesday night.

In his victory speech, Mr. Mamdani hammered home his message one last time, attributing his success to New Yorkers who had voted for “a city where they can do more than just struggle.”

I’ve lumped the promises under bold headers, but what’s indented comes from the NYT:

1.) Cheap, city-owned grocery stores funded (like other stuff) by increases in corporate taxes.

One of his ideas to tackle rising costs was to create a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.

Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.

To fund his affordability initiatives, Mr. Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which he says will create an additional $5 billion in revenue. He also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax.

2.) Free city buses (and other transportation improvement).

Among Mr. Mamdani’s most distinctive campaign promises is his vow to make city buses free. As a state legislator, Mr. Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to start a pilot program offering free fares on five bus routes for a limited period. (He later sought to expand the program, but the pilot was not renewed.)

3.) Rent freezes.

In outlining his vision for the city, Mr. Mamdani identified the high cost of housing as the leading reason that residents had left New York in recent years. His main campaign promise was to freeze rents for nearly one million New Yorkers via his appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides on rent increases for stabilized apartments.

He promised to triple the number of available affordable housing units, with 200,000 new homes to be built over the next decade. Mr. Mamdani also said he would double the amount of money the city currently spends to preserve public housing.

4.) Barring ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) from city facilities.

On his campaign website, Mr. Mamdani pledged to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from city facilities while increasing legal support for immigrants being targeted and protecting their personal data.

5.) Free child care.

The rising cost of child care is among the most pressing issues for parents in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has promised to make free child care available for children between six weeks and five years old and to deliver “baby baskets” to new parents that would include educational resources and necessities like diapers, baby wipes and swaddles.

6.) Replacing some police services (Mamdani originally pledged to defund the police but then backed away on that:

Mr. Mamdani has proposed creating a Department of Community Safety, separate from the Police Department, to respond to people having mental health crises, and to expand violence interrupter programs. In April, he told The Times that the new department would free up “police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes.”

7.)  Criticizing Israel and promoting Palestine (which is irrelevant, as I said, to running NYC:

Mr. Mamdani has accused the Israeli government of committing apartheid and genocide in Gaza. His criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians came under fire during the campaign, as did his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

In a podcast interview with The Bulwark days before the primary, Mr. Mamdani declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that Palestinians and their supporters see as a rallying cry for liberation, but that many Jews consider inherently threatening.

Note that Mamdani says he will order Netanyahu arrested if he sets foot in NYC, though that scenario ain’t gonna happen.

Now these promises all sound good and generous, but all of them have problems.  Barring ICE from city facilities may be illegal, rent control could drive up other rents in the city by huge amounts, free buses and child care could help bankrupt the city or reduce transportation options, and a rise in corporate taxes could drive businesses from the city. Not one of these promises has been free of criticism, and not just by Republicans. It’s one thing to offer people pie in the sky, and another to bring that pie down to earth. While I hope these things are possible, I don’t expect that more than one or two of them can actually be met.

In fact, a contributing NYT opinion writer has outlined some of the problems with one of Mamdani’s promises: city-owned grocery stores. (The two store programs outlined above are in small cities lacking any grocery stores, and one of the two hasn’t even come into being yet, as it’s just a proposal). The author of the piece below is is Nicole Gelinas. Yes, she’s a conservative, but you should hear her out, as I haven’t seen anybody say these city-owned stores would ameliorate any problem.

Click the headline to read, or find it archived here

Gelinas’s words are indented:

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s fresh Democratic nominee for mayor, devotes 126 words and a 43-second TikTok on his website to a signature proposal: “city-owned grocery stores.” This brevity might imply that function will follow form, that the idea is so self-evidently sensible that little needs to be said about it.

What this self-assurance shows, though, is that Mr. Mamdani knows nothing about the grocery business, raising broader questions about the practicality of an assertive socialist agenda like his.

He claims that “a network of city-owned grocery stores” would offer cheaper food and dry goods because it would avoid paying rent or property taxes, “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehousing and distribution.” These assertions collapse upon the slightest scrutiny.

Here are the problems with the proposal (again NYT stuff is indented)

a.) There’s no space for such stores. 

New York City’s government does not have a secret stash of large, empty, retail-ready ground-floor spaces conveniently located along major pedestrian and transit corridors. Indeed, the city regularly rents real estate, including retail-style space, from private owners.

b.) The city government likely lacks the ability to buy groceries at lower wholesale prices compared to regular stores.

As for city-owned grocery stores’ ability to “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehouse and distribution,” the supermarket industry is an intensely intricate business.

“Product doesn’t magically appear on store shelves,” says Ron Margulis, who long covered the industry as a journalist and who hails from a family of supermarket operators. “There is a science that’s applied to making sure the product sent to the shelf is actually going to be purchased, and that science costs money.”

The price a store or chain pays depends on a number of factors, from size and efficiency — volume discounts — to location to an understanding of the complex supply chain.

Whether Mr. Mamdani will have one supermarket in each of the five boroughs, as he originally proposed, or more, as implied by the imprecise term “network,” the city probably will not be able to get wholesale prices as low as far larger and more efficient supermarket chains.

c.) Some distributors would not sell to nonprofit stores:

Moreover, some major New York supermarket operators cooperatively own grocery distributors that buy products from manufacturers and share income with the members. They would not allow a nonprofit public entity to join these networks. As for the city creating its own centralized distribution and bulk purchaser, John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, says such an investment would make sense only if the city operated at least 100 stores.

d.) Mamdani hasn’t shown that the city can bet already-existing stores with their razor-thin profit margins. Anybody who’s looked knows that the profit margin of grocery stores is only about 2%.

Other pesky details intrude on Mr. Mamdani’s plan. Wholesalers offer stores lower prices if they participate in promotions, with in-store coupons and prominent placement. To take advantage of such offers, the city would have to be a marketer of branded products — often, less healthy, higher-margin products.

The reward for successfully navigating the science of stocking shelves is an average 2 percent profit for grocery retailers, Mr. Margulis notes. Mr. Mamdani has made no compelling case that the city could engage in such superior negotiation and cost-cutting techniques to overcome this margin and provide less expensive products. This prospect is especially uncertain because the city-owned stores would probably face higher labor costs, including government-scale pension and health benefits.

e.) Who decides what to sell in these stores?

Once Mr. Mamdani has addressed these issues, he and his top staff members would have to confront another question: What products to sell in the stores? His idea of partnering with “local neighborhoods on products and sourcing” may sound straightforward. But are community board members going to argue over whether to stock Pringles or Lay’s potato chips? Should a city-owned store even sell sugary soda? Should vegetarians who are morally opposed to killing animals be forced to subsidize other New Yorkers’ steak purchases? And while it would be virtuous for the city to focus on selling fresh produce, retailers need to stock high-margin snacks and processed foods to subsidize fresh produce, meat and fish, which carry lower profit margins.

. . .And if city stores would be selling fresh produce for no profit, they would be competing with 1,000 low-priced street vendors, many of them immigrants, who operate carts under a program the Bloomberg administration began.

In his TikTok, Mr. Mamdani pledges to work with “nearby farms.” But as the city’s green markets demonstrate, high-quality food from regional sources is expensive, even absent profits for a third-party retailer.

The problem is that Mamdani is riding on a wave of socialist sentiment promoted by the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC, who appeal to the benighted young folk.

But don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of American society that should be at least partly socialist, including Social Security, Medicaid, free school lunches for the poor, and, especially, free medical care for Americans who can’t afford it.

But there are those who spend their whole lives carping about capitalism, saying that we shouldn’t allow people to be billionaires, etc., and yet most of those people spend their lives taking advantage of the benefits of American capitalism.  (I expect you can name one such person pretty quickly.) If Mamdani can get those grocery stores built, funded, and selling healthy food, more power to him. But his entire socialistic program simply isn’t going to work, and I think he’ll find that out pretty quickly. As for the free buses and child care and so on, well, those pies are still up there in the stratosphere.