The Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish the U.S. Senate and make the Supreme Court and the presidency answerable to the House — a direct assault on the constitutional order that gives every state, no matter how small, a voice against mob rule from the coasts.
This isn't campus posturing. DSA-aligned elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani are the rising face of the Democratic Party, and their organization has already proven it can seize governing power by winning the low-turnout primaries that decide real power in deep-blue districts.
The DSA platform calls for eliminating the Senate's equal representation for states and concentrating authority in a single legislative body, according to the New York Post. The executive branch and the Supreme Court would be rendered subservient to the House. No checks. No balances. No federalism. Just raw majoritarian power concentrated in one chamber dominated by the most populous — and most left-wing — corners of the country.
It is an old argument, and it was settled before the Constitution was even ratified. In 1787, John Adams published his multi-volume defence of American state constitutions against French intellectuals who demanded the same thing the DSA demands now: a single, omnipotent legislature with no upper chamber to slow it down. The French revolutionaries got their way two years later. The result was the Terror.
The Post framed the DSA's agenda as "openly revolutionary," comparing its institutional-wrecking strategy to the Bolsheviks — the point isn't to achieve these goals tomorrow but to delegitimize every structural obstacle to centralized power. Why should North Dakota have its own government? What gives Idaho the right to govern its own territory? These questions aren't rhetorical for DSA. They're the agenda.
The Washington Examiner took a different angle, tracing the organizing machine that turned DSA from a protest faction into a governing force. Pittsburgh was the proving ground. DSA-backed candidates won the mayor's office and the district attorney's race by targeting Democratic primaries where a small, organized faction can punch far above its weight. That model preceded AOC's 2018 upset, the Examiner reported — her victory simply gave the movement a national face. Mamdani's rise in New York follows the same playbook.
DSA hasn't won everywhere. Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey lost his 2025 primary to a moderate. DA candidate Matt Dugan lost his general election when his opponent ran as a Republican. But the Examiner's lesson stands: this style of anti-establishment, activist-driven primary politics has become a "durable force" in Democratic contests nationwide.
Leftist influencer Hasan Piker has said, "I don't have an issue with an end goal of communism." The DSA may bristle at being called communist, but its members echo the sentiment, and its platform reflects it. As the Examiner noted, socialism "has never fit easily within an American republic whose constitutional order is built on pluralism, private property, and limited government."
The DSA isn't trying to fit in. It's trying to tear the structure down — starting with the Senate, the institution the founders built to keep the whole country from being ruled by whoever holds the biggest megaphone.
The Senate won't be abolished this year. But delegitimizing it is step one, and the people doing it are already sitting in Congress. The open question is whether enough Americans still understand what they'd be losing.
