The DSA Has Slogans, but Isn’t Interested in Policies

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

Apparently, nothing is quite so devastating to the Democratic Socialists of America as simply and directly asking them, specifically, what policies they want to see enacted if their candidates win office.

 

The New Yorker’s David Remnick interviewed DSA co-chair Megan Romer Friday. It did not go well for Romer. You can watch the video here; notice Remnick did not ask her about algebra or obscure regulation details or historical dates. He simply asked her to go beyond the slogans and to articulate specific policies. And on issue after issue, she simply couldn’t:

 

Romer: But we do believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires, yeah, absolutely.

 

Remnick: Well, what does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?

 

Romer: Uh, yeah, you know, again, I don’t have like a solid . . . but I think—

 

Remnick: But, shouldn’t you?

 

Romer: Um . . .

 

Remnick: I mean, if you’re the co-chair—

 

Romer: That’s a good question.

 

Remnick: If you’re the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn’t you be more specific than just taxing the hell out of something? What exactly do you mean?

 

Romer: So again, it’s democracy, right? And we have to look at what we need to spend and what we need. We don’t want to depend on the existence of millionaires because that means people are still getting exploited. So, yeah, we need to look at what we need to pay for in the interim, what sort of tax base we need for that to happen, and build from there.

 

The interview moved on to “prison abolition.”

 

Remnick: What does prison abolition mean to you?

 

Romer: So, again, let’s start from first principles, right? What do we need? We need safety,

 

Remnick: Let’s not begin from principles. Let’s begin from what is to be done, to use a Leninist phrase.

 

Romer: We need community safety. We need people to be safe. We need people to be able to live their lives without fear of being assaulted, without fear of being robbed, without fear of violence. What communities do we know are the safest? It’s not communities with cops on every corner, it’s communities that have good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that.

 

Having asserted that “good park systems” make the public safer and cops do not, Romer never got around to specifying what prison abolition meant. The conversation then turned to “defunding the police”:

 

Remnick: What does defunding the police mean, in your mind?

 

Romer: Every year, police budgets go up, every year, there’s a backlog of rape kits that don’t get tested.

 

Remnick: But should they be maintained?

 

Romer: I am not in favor of getting rid of police entirely, tomorrow.

 

Remnick: No, defunding the police means no funding, I think that’s, you know, in plain English.

 

Romer: I don’t think so, I think it means—

 

Remnick: Well, tell me what it means.

 

Romer: I think it means taking funding back and moving it elsewhere, right? So, pulling some of that funding back and moving it elsewhere.

 

Remnick: To what extent?

 

Romer: To the extent to which we are fully funding social services, to which we are fully funding schools, lunch programs for kids, afterschool programs for kids. Communities should be clean and they should be safe, we should be funding putting trees up, so people have more. . . .

 

Note that in 2024, the most recent year that full data is available, the U.S. federal, state, and local governments collectively spent nearly $1 trillion on K–12 education that year. If American K–12 education spending was a separate country, it would be the 21st largest in the world in terms of GDP.

 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture spends $18.9 billion on the National School Lunch Program and $6.1 billion on the National School Breakfast Program. School meal programs are reimbursed by the USDA for each meal they serve.

 

The interview continued:

 

Remnick: I don’t think anybody’s going to argue about any of that, trees or anything of the like, but they’re concerned—

 

Romer: But they do. They do, because there’s always more money for the police budgets, and there is never money for, “How do we just literally make our community safer, nicer, healthier?”

 

Eventually, the discussion turned to foreign policy and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

Remnick: In the weeks preceding the invasion of Ukraine, DSA’s international committee released a statement blaming NATO expansion and the United States essentially for the crisis. After the invasion, DSA released a statement condemning the invasion and calling for a cease-fire. There have been people in DSA who have been even more firm that it was mainly the United States’ fault that Russia felt compelled to invade Ukraine. How do you feel about it?

 

Romer: We do not believe in pouring U.S. money, military, weapons into anything — we don’t think it makes it better anywhere. But obviously Russia is this oligarchic dictatorship, which is hyper-capitalist, and Putin is this crazy right-wing oligarch, of course, he is going to make horrific human life ending decisions.

 

Remnick: Well, isn’t this precisely why those countries wanted to be in NATO?

 

Romer: [slight chuckle] Yes, but why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual . . . sending actual human beings to talk to human beings and figure out what—

 

Remnick: I don’t understand, what kind of — there’s been all kinds of diplomacy, however failed since the beginning of the invasion. We shouldn’t send weapons to the Ukrainians?

 

Romer: No.

 

Remnick: So, just allow Russia to overrun Ukraine entirely.

 

Romer: We should be sending huge teams of diplomats, we should be figuring out how to negotiate, how to get Russia off Ukraine’s back. We should — yeah, absolutely.

 

Remnick: So, Russia would get off of Ukraine’s back by us sending diplomats.

 

Romer: I don’t think that there is adequate negotiation, I don’t think that there has been anywhere near adequate diplomacy.

 

Remnick turned to what solutions the DSA wanted to see in the Middle East:

 

Remnick: What is the position that DSA is headed toward here? Is it for a two-state solution, or is it a binational, one-state solution? What in fact is the position of DSA?

 

Romer: Yeah, so our position is a free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem. And so, I think that could be safely read as a one-state solution.

 

Remnick: So, the Camp David accords that were being negotiated at the beginning of the century, under the Clinton administration, had the Palestinians accepted it, that would’ve satisfied you?

 

Romer: Good question. I need to look at what the actual specifics there were, I don’t know them off the top of my head.

 

I will grant that the Camp David negotiations during Bill Clinton’s presidency are the one topic that Remnick asked about that is fairly obscure; by my math, Romer was 17 during the negotiations.

 

Remnick then asked about likely soon-to-be-Representative Darializa Avila Chevalier and her choice to attend an October 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas rally, which, Remnick said, many people saw as a justification of the October 7 attack:

 

Remnick: In other words, you would’ve gone to that rally, had you been able?

 

Romer: That’s a good question, I probably would have, yeah, yeah. I don’t live in New York City, so I wouldn’t have—

 

Remnick: One day after the slaughter of 1,200 people, and taking of over 200 hostages, you would’ve come and rallied behind Hamas?

 

Romer: I think that October 7 was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp, and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.

 

Remnick: Well, sure it is.

 

Romer: Do you think it is?

 

Remnick: You’re saying you’re supporting it.

 

Romer: I’m saying that I think it was inevitable. I think that you cannot put people in a cage and expect them not to revolt.

 

Later in the interview, Romer excused Hamas’s violence against gays:

 

Remnick: Queer-friendly is a good point. Earlier you expressed some support, I think I was reading you right, for Hamas. I wouldn’t call that a queer-friendly organization, would you?

 

Romer: I would not call Hamas queer-friendly, I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege. I think that most queer-people who have been killed in Palestine have been killed by Israeli bombs.

 

In 2016, Hamas tortured and murdered one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, for being gay. Documents recovered by the IDF in 2025 allegedly detailed Hamas torturing and executing recruits within its ranks for having gay sex. In 2022, unidentified assailants beheaded a young Palestinian man for being gay.

 

According to the Human Dignity Trust, “Same-sex sexual activity is prohibited in Gaza under the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936. The relevant provision carries a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment. Only men are criminalized under this law.

 

The law was inherited from the British. It continues to be in operation in Gaza today, though it is not in force elsewhere in Palestine.”

 

Near the end of the interview — perhaps sensing that she had not come across as knowledgeable and thoughtful in her answers — Romer emphasized that she doesn’t really speak on behalf of the Democratic Socialists of America:

 

Romer: So, if you’re looking to me to be the one true arbiter of DSA thought, I am absolutely not. I come from a—

 

Remnick: Who is? Or that doesn’t exist, and never will?

 

Romer: DSA, it doesn’t exist. A convention, I guess, would be the closest to the one true arbiter of DSA, and it happens every two years.

 

Over on the DSA Reddit, you can find DSA enthusiasts calling Remnick “a member of the ‘elite New York intellectual class’” who “considers himself above regular fly over state working class people.” (I feel like I’ve heard that kind of knee-jerk snide dismissal before.) But recall which questions tripped up Romer:

 

·         “What does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?”

 

·         “What does prison abolition mean to you? ”

 

·         “What does defunding the police mean, in your mind? ”

 

·         “How do you feel about [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine]? ”

 

·         “What is the position that DSA is headed toward here? Is it for a two-state solution, or is it a binational, one-state solution?”

 

Those are not trivia questions. He’s asking her what she thinks. In theory, there’s no wrong answer.

 

I could write that Romer is a shallow, uninformed moron, and that would be a lot of fun and probably go viral. But it probably wouldn’t dissuade anyone who feels positively about the DSA. Fans of the socialist movement will probably dig in their heels and conclude, like that Reddit commenter, that Remnick, you, and I are being smug elitists because Romer had troubling answering those questions and articulating what policies she wanted to see.

 

So perhaps a better, more productive question to DSA fans is . . . shouldn’t a political movement that wants higher taxes on the rich be able to say what those tax rates ought to be? If you’re going to call for prison abolition, shouldn’t you be able to lay out what that would look like? If you don’t really want to “defund the police,” but merely want to reduce police budgets . . . shouldn’t you say what you mean and mean what you say?

 

And if you truly believe that Vladimir Putin is a “crazy right-wing oligarch” who makes “horrific human life ending decisions” — i.e., large-scale war crimes targeting civilians — don’t you need a better approach than just “sending huge teams of diplomats”?

 

In other words, if you want to dissuade a young socialist, don’t yell at them. Just show them Romer’s interview and ask them if they feel like those answers are sufficient.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, an observation about how the Democratic grassroots’ rage at the party’s establishment is driven in large part by the events of 2024, and how Biden’s presidency ended:

 

“The cancer has spread. It’s metastasized into his bones and further,” Hunter Biden told the BBC. “It’s very painful. It’s very debilitating in many respects, but he’s still out there. He’s still doing his thing, that is, he so believes in this country and as long as he’s alive, I’m promising you, he’s going to continue to fight.”

 

Left, right or center, we should all be praying for Biden in his fight against cancer, and that he be spared as much pain as possible.

 

But we’re also left with the uncomfortable confirmation that if Biden, his family and his most ardent supporters had gotten their way, and he had somehow managed to get reelected for another term in 2024, he almost certainly would have had to resign the presidency over these debilitating health issues by now.

 

Already this morning, I’ve seen a decent number of readers insisting that had Biden been reelected, his family and team would have just attempted to hide his cancer and treatments from the public. They may well have tried, but bone metastasis is a sign of advanced cancer, and I don’t think a condition as serious as that, and the required treatments, could be successfully hidden for very long.