A DSA America? Not Okay

By James Lileks

Sunday, July 05, 2026

 

When I got off the T in Boston last Sunday, I saw a table near the exit with some fliers and signs. A cheerful young lady handed me a piece of paper, and as I took it, she asked, “Considering voting socialist this November?” The flier had a red rose, the symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I handed it back as if it was a piece of blotter paper soaked with Ebola and said “Oh GOD no.”

 

“That’s okay!” she chirped as I walked away. Glad to know. Of course, it won’t be okay if the DSA takes over everything, because then every area of life will be a miserable struggle session to ensure uniform purity. People will be trashing grocery stores and destroying all the eggs because the Chicken-American Community has not expressed the right opinion on Gaza. That will be Monday; Tuesday, they will burn cars to protest inflation-adjusted rent hikes. Wednesday, they will want to throw eggs at a rally of fascists — you know, the people protesting a mandate to install a drag queen in every elementary school to lead everyone in a fierce rendition of The Internationale every morning — except of course the eggs were all destroyed in the prior protest. Thursday, they will occupy the offices of all the grocery store chains to protest Egg Insecurity.

 

I have a long-standing aversion to collectivists and socialists and other flavors of Marxism, because A) it’s dreary, boring nonsense cranked out by a hairy fool who probably had the B.O. of a donkey in August; B) it views humans as vast murmuring mobs, devoid of individuality; and C) I’m supposed to follow some 19th century white guy instead of a 20th century black intellectual like Thomas Sowell? Fine, racist.

 

At the heart is the hammer and sickle, which terrified me as a child. It was a good symbol of the enemy: They either want to cut your throat or hit you on the head. It’s like a political movement whose symbols are a straight-edge razor and a claw hammer.

 

The DSA is more of the same, as their new platform suggests. Give more money to everything that doesn’t work, nationalize every industry that is successful, cut open Elon Musk to get all the golden eggs, turn on the infinite money machine, and replace Presidents’ Day with something that honors some frumpy collectivist who shot a cop and fled to Cuba.

 

If you doubt their ultimate objectives, well, there’s always a tweet. DSA candidates are rarely held to account for their stupid tweets. It wouldn’t matter if they were, but it would be nice.

 

“So when you tweeted, ‘I hate America and want to destroy it,’ what were you implying?”

 

“You can cherry-pick all you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that housing insecurity has created generational trauma among marginally served people with intestinal maladies, or Persons of Cholera, but I’d like to point out that I’ve grown in my thinking and intended that to be a dialectical metaphor for the power imbalances that characterize our oligarchy.”

 

“Right, but your next tweet says, and I quote, ‘and I mean that about hating and destroying, not as a dialectical metaphor for the power imbalances that characterize our oligarchy.’”

 

“Again, this isn’t putting a roof over people’s heads or soup on the table.”

 

I’m sure they think there’s a direct relationship between destroying the American system and putting soup in a bowl for the soupless, or the unsouped, as they’re probably called now. But as long as we’re talking about that, CNN recently ran a piece about DSA darling Darializa Avila Chevalier’s past tweet history:

 

In April 2020, Avila Chevalier shared a post lamenting that people wouldn’t accept communism over a lack of varieties of soup — a reference to the critique that the political system leads to fewer consumer choices.

 

“I just cannot get over the fact that the universe has foisted upon us the perfect illustration of literally every failing of capitalism and people are still like we can’t be communists cuz there won’t be enough types of soup,” the post she retweeted read.

 

Oh, you say, that explains it! She’s stupid! No smart person can talk about the manifest failures of capitalism and off-handedly admit we have a bewildering multiplicity of soup options. The nation abounds in soup choices because of capitalism. Under communism, there is one soup, and they are out of it.

 

Luxury beliefs arise when you think that nationalizing Campbell’s and handing the planning, manufacturing, and distribution of soup to The People results in anything other than bare shelves. The guys who think they’ll be writing poems about soup or designing clever soup labels after the revolution will be sent to chicken-plucking farms. Why? The automated plucking machinery stopped working because the guys who knew how it worked were either purged for saying men cannot give birth through their urethras, or quit because the new egalitarian society decreed that people with technical expertise shouldn’t make more than the people who scoop feed out of bags and dump it on the floor. Now that the automatic machines don’t work, it’s a good thing, because it created new jobs — why, Columbia U’s entire class of ’34 is out there now, plucking — and it has reduced the supply of chickens available for consumption, leading to people “exploring vegan options” in the sense that a sack-of-bones alley cat digging fish guts out of a trash can is “exploring piscine cuisine.”

 

All of this is acceptable, of course, because the goal is equity, racial spoils, and reduced standards of living to save the planet, except for the tireless inner-party members who simply must have real coffee and proper jam and air conditioning to keep their strength up for The Struggle.

 

But why would there need to be a struggle after the revolution? The dewy-eyed young DSA voter asks. Ah, child, just you wait. That’s when the real work begins. Those big pits lined with quicklime aren’t going to fill themselves, you know.