The DSA Wants to Abolish America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

I understand that it is considered déclassé to participate in what the self-consciously serious among us have termed the new “Red Scare.” Well, okay then: déclassé it is. There is virtue in calling things by their names, and the appropriate name for the Democratic Socialists of America is “red.” They are communists. They are Jacobins. They are wreckers and despoilers and iconoclasts, who, if left unchecked, would wipe the United States from the face of this earth. To be “scared” by such figures is not only rational, it is imperative.

 

Asked on television by Fox News host Shannon Bream to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to each of our civilizational building blocks, the co-chair of the DSA, Megan Romer, casually dismissed each in turn:

 

BREAM: Abolish the Senate?

 

ROMER: True.

 

BREAM: Okay, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?

 

ROMER: Yep.

 

BREAM: Abolish ICE?

 

ROMER: Absolutely.

 

BREAM: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally?

 

ROMER: As a long-term plan, yep.

 

BREAM: Defund the Pentagon?

 

ROMER: Absolutely.

 

BREAM: Abolish prisons, at least in large part?

 

ROMER: Yeah, again, as part of a long-term program, yeah?

 

BREAM: OK, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations?

 

ROMER: Yeah, absolutely.

 

One must award Romer credit for her thoroughness, for, despite her casual tone, she managed in the space of a minute to demand the abolition of every load-bearing structure in America. To abolish the Senate is not only in effect to abolish the states, but, given that the Senate is the only unamendable part of the contemporary Constitution, it is to abolish the union, too. To abolish the Supreme Court is to abolish the rule of law. To abolish our borders and our military is to abolish our sovereignty. To abolish prisons is to abolish ordered liberty. And to abolish private property is to abolish our economy. That is, at least, an ethos.

 

The American system of government is built atop the presumption that the government exists to secure the natural rights of the people, and little else besides. The DSA’s vision represents a perfect inversion of this premise.  Romer and her friends want to shirk all the basic responsibilities of the state — national defense, territorial integrity, policing, the protection of individual liberty — while micromanaging all of the private tasks that have traditionally been the preserve of civil society. Running Apple and Denny’s is in; maintaining an army and navy is out. Providing housing is included; superintending the punishment for murder is proscribed. “A wise and frugal government,” Thomas Jefferson submitted during his First Inaugural, “shall restrain men from injuring one another,” but “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.” Evidently, the DSA prefers the opposite course.

 

Reviewing the combination of aspirations that Romer elected to catalogue, one might be tempted to ask how, absent a constabulary of some kind, her movement intends to enforce its vision. But alas, we already know the answer to that. The United States has been a nation for 250 years, and during that time alone, its citizens have watched as the spiritual ancestors of Romer’s cause promised liberation and flowers and delivered the blade of the guillotine instead. In a vacuum, the chance that Megan Romer and Co. would be able to contrive a constitutional order superior to our status quo is slim. But as a communist? That chance is nil. Americans ought to be suspicious of anyone who expresses a desire to dissolve the Senate or the Supreme Court or the border patrol or the free market, and when that call comes from the Bolsheviks, that suspicion ought to be trebled. From Paris to Moscow to Beijing, we have seen how the story ends.

 

Commenting on the American character a year before the Revolution, Edmund Burke praised the colonists for their foresight. “In other countries,” he wrote, “the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance.” But in America, he proposed, “they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.” The result: “They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” Megan Romer is a tyrant, and the ideas she is advancing are infinitely more tyrannical than anything that King George III or his parliament could have concocted in a month of Sundays. It would, indeed, be preferable if we did not have to deal with communists in the United States, but we do not have that luxury at present. We need not wait for the chains before objecting to the forge.