the Constitution, The New DSA Platform, and the Battle for Democracy

By Joe W., NYC-DSA, Groundwork Co-Chair

Source: DSA Program

Last month, DSA released our new and revamped program Workers Deserve More. Coming at the tail end of a years-long collaborative process to replace our previous unwieldy platform, Workers Deserve More was rolled out with much fanfare among active members. The program contains many commonly understood socialist goals like universal no-cost healthcare and public ownership of essential industries, as well as a few less widely discussed positions like the recognition of all treaties. But among the chattering media class, one particular section raised eyebrows: the one on democracy reform. 

The new program commits DSA to the goals of abolishing the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency as we know them and replacing their functions with direct democracy and new institutions subordinate to an expanded and proportional House of Representatives. The right wing media seized on these provisions, calling them unconstitutional and painting them as a fundamental threat to the United States and its system of government. They hounded our national co-chairs and our most high profile electeds, Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with leading questions designed to get them to reject these points and contradict our stated principles. While none explicitly did, it became clear that our enemies in the chattering class had isolated these ideas as a potential wedge between us and the American public, something so outside the norm of American political discourse that they were more useful for the opposition to fearmonger over than for us to promote.

Our enemies are right that these goals are a fundamental rejection of the American system of government as constructed — but they are wrong when they assume that this is politically fatal for us to say. Most Americans are well aware that our government is broken — many of us see the effects of an out-of-control, all-powerful executive, an unaccountable Supreme Court, and an unrepresentative legislature every single day. But the media and the establishment still yearn for the time when the debates of national politics were not so fundamental, when there was a shared consensus across parties for priorities like the Vietnam War and the deregulation of Wall Street. They do not realize our political divide is no longer a conflict between the mainstream and the fringe of all political stripes. The crisis has escalated. The positions of civic patriotism and shared purpose that held the mainstream center of American politics together for the 20th century have collapsed, and in their place the two fringes now contest to explain what’s wrong at the very core of our political economy. The question is no longer "revolutionary upheaval vs. traditional American democracy?” — it’s “democratic reform vs. no democracy at all”.

That is the political quandary DSA is addressing with these program positions. As an organization, we believe in democracy — true democracy. In America, most of us are raised to believe we have always lived in one, though some may recall the flashy Republican canard that the United States is actually a republic. For many on the left, and indeed for many on what used to be the political margins, there came a time when you realized that was not true. Maybe it was in high school civics, or when a cool teacher gave you Howard Zinn, or the 2000 and 2016 elections, but the moment came when it became abundantly clear that democracy, or government of, for, and by the people as a collective, did not exist in practice in America. Once seen, the gulf between the America of hagiography and the actual country we live in cannot be unseen. 

This gulf starts at the most fundamental level: many millions of Americans do not vote. How can this “democracy” express their voices if, for whatever reason, they do not feel engaged enough to even express it? Their so-called apathy has long been a punching bag for institutionalist political observers, but as socialists we view it differently. Low American voter turnout is not conceited or apathetic — it is the product of a political system that lacks the substance and stakes to compel many ordinary people into action, particularly because of the inertia, unresponsiveness, and gridlock of our Constitutional institutions. Much of American politics happens at a scale of forces alien to the American political subject. Presidents, Senators, and Justices are not beholden to citizens or voters but to elite interests; their power is derived not from the consent of the governed but from their structural power over the governed. The governed implicitly understand this, and it drives many citizens to withdraw from the democratic sham instead of embrace it.

The undemocratic nature of the United States becomes even clearer when we examine our institutions directly. Personally, I began to wonder why my state of Illinois had as many Senators as my grandparents did in Vermont — it sure seemed like there were more people in Chicago than in Burlington. And as the Supreme Court took a more active role in American politics, I began to wonder why these unelected Justices were given full oversight of my duly-elected representatives, as well as lifetime appointments to ensure we could never remove them. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, the 2016 election (and my parents’ enduring liberal trauma over Bush-Gore in 2000) clued me into the fact that the President, the sole individual for which almost every American can cast a vote for, is not even directly elected by our votes. 

All of these institutions — the Senate, the Presidency, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court - are not democratic as we would understand the concept to mean under that of, for, and by the people definition. They are designed to take political power out of the hands of the collective and locate them in the hands of a subset without the explicit consent of the majority of the whole. Yet they were all established, in whole (or in part in the case of the Supreme Court), by our Constitution. For the generations raised during the Cold War and then the Global War on Terror, the supposed benefit of the American way of life was hammered into our skulls daily: we were a democracy, a democracy where every person’s rights and votes were guaranteed by our Constitution, and we were fighting to bring democracy to the rest of the world, who presumably did not enjoy a political system as well designed as ours. Our own first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, said it clearest at the Virginia convention to ratify the Constitution: “Our Consti­tution has provided for a well regulated democracy where no king, or president, could ever undermine representative government.” 15 years later, in Marbury v. Madison, John Marshall established judicial review for the Supreme Court and gave not a king but himself the power to undermine representative government.

Understanding the contradiction between one of our highest stated virtues as Americans and the institutions we supposedly created to preserve it is politically explosive. Contradictions are painful, and people’s psyches can only resolve them in two ways: either by concluding that American democracy is a lie, or concluding that the Senate, Court, and President are actually democratic. The latter is the common approach taken by American liberals and institutionalists. They say: the Senate is not disenfranchising those of us in New York and California whose voices in national politics are diluted by up to thirty times compared to the voices of those in Wyoming or South Dakota — it is simply just that it is more democratic to let states, invented political units of arbitrary borders, have equal voice to one another. The electoral college doesn’t provide a way for elites to overrule the people — it simply incorporates the relative power of Congressional delegations (skewed by the Senate!). The Supreme Court isn’t a despotic check on the will of the majority — it’s a mechanism to defend the rights of minorities.

The facial absurdity of this argument is why many across the political spectrum instead arrive at the former conclusion, an observation that has become increasingly relevant in an era of anti-democratic overreach. We do not have a true democracy in America, and we never did. At this country’s founding, collective decisionmaking was reserved in most states for the property owning, or, in short, the already comfortable. For the first century after that founding, America’s elite denied millions of American residents the right to participate in governance. The early American elite used the odious institution of chattel slavery to deny millions more even the most basic human rights and dignities. After a bloody Civil War and a brief interregnum of human freedom, millions of former slaves and their descendants spent the next century again systematically removed from collective decisionmaking, without intervention from the “democratic” institutions of the American Constitution. Meanwhile, it took another Amendment to the Constitution and decades of political pressure outside the halls of power for half the population to itself gain the guarantee of the right to vote. These victories, once won, were incorporated into the narrative of American democracy, and they were hard fought. But they did not singularly solve the issue of the anti-democracy inherent in the American political system — they simply added more subjects to Justice Marshall’s regulatory framework, without removing the anti-democratic nature of the framework itself.

The issue with recognizing a true democracy has never existed in America is obvious: what do we do about it? Some people, mostly on the right but occasionally on the left, conclude that democracy itself is unattractive, that the masses can not govern and need the benevolent and enlightened to impose a rule that produces a better structuring of society that will in turn reify and protect their rule. This response, while distasteful, does something politically necessary — it challenges the precept that democracy is in itself good. It makes those of us who believe government of, for, and by the people is a facially positive system develop our precepts into actual political positions. It makes us present as what we are, utopian and utilitarian in equal measure. Democracy is good for a seemingly dialectical reason: democracy trusts that humanity, in its teeming masses and infinite diversity of thought and appearance, is smart enough in the aggregate to make determinations of its own collective interest, even when those determinations require sacrifices and hard choices. As “small d” democrats, we believe in democracy not because it guarantees the best outcomes for every individual but because we believe that when people share common interests, the expression of those interests into political reality is the best outcome for the masses of people.

There is, of course, a political problem. For those of us who believe that American democracy is a political fiction and that we would be better suited by true democracy based on majority rule, we must contend with the necessity to defend the rights of political minorities. The history of states purporting to be based on popular will, including the United States and the Soviet Union, is riddled with examples of a majority using their political mandate to oppress minorities by virtue of their beliefs, race, religion, sexuality or status. We, as socialists and therefore descendants of the liberal tradition dating back to the 18th century, must contend with the fact that there are other principles we hold as equally dear as democracy. Liberal principles of fundamental human rights are not babies to be thrown out with the bathwater when we reject, as we should, liberal individualism and its most nefarious iteration, property. The right to life, the right to equal protection in the domestic and social sphere, and the right to the wealth and privileges afforded to the majority must remain protected by the state for that duty of care to be assumed by the collective, and therefore must exist under the legal framework of any socialist society. While it is true the American Framers sought to use the Supreme Court and other undemocratic institutions as a mechanism to protect their wealth and status from the prejudices of the so-called rabble, it is also true they foresaw the possibility of the tyranny of the majority being used despotically in the absence of minority protections. The disgusting irony was always, of course, that they completely missed the tyranny of the majority as it pertained to their own slaves and to the indigenous peoples they were rapidly dispossessing. 

Importantly, the power of the Supreme Court to overrule the will of the legislature and of states is not always used for purposes antagonistic to the socialist project. The Court has famously protected the rights of the indigent and the arrested, as well as, eventually, the civil rights of racial and sexual minorities. The Court, for a time, even made a specific effort to enumerate and incorporate rights to marriage, to travel, and to contraception. This version of the Court earned great credibility among liberals and institutionalists between the New Deal and the Trump Administration because it sought a holistic application of individual’s freedoms. The issue, which has become rapidly clearer in the last decade, is that the Court’s power itself was not the proximate cause of these changes. Mass social movements produced new legal frameworks and forced existing structures to accede to changing understandings of social mores and the rights of individuals. The only thing the Court truly held was the power to unilaterally determine legality, and as soon as the balance of forces determining the Court’s composition changed the ideological character of their decisions changed with it. The challenge then for real, socialist democracies, is therefore to create frameworks of law and governance that protect the rights of minorities without becoming reliant upon the power and privileges of the unelected, unrepresentative few.

This is the tension DSA attempts to approach with its program. We understand a political problem — the failure of the “democracy” of the United States — and we seek to both rectify the failure and to produce a society that is collective in character in being so rectified. Focusing on the undemocratic institutions of American governance gives us a front where both campaigns can be waged. Because we seek to create a socialist society through popular support, the struggle for democracy in our society is the same struggle as the one against the institutions of the American state that would be most able to crush a popular movement for socialism. The call to abolish the old order of things is not just an appetite for destruction — it is laying the groundwork for the establishment of new institutions that better serve the masses. That is the purpose of pressing these issues now, no matter how shocking or idiosyncratic they may be to the media class.

None of this is to say that our program should be binding or understood as the exact beliefs of every DSA member in our ranks, including our candidates and electeds. Our project is frequently best served when we focus on the material issues of the working class and on delivering immediate amelioration of the effects of capitalism, something our public-facing members are best served in reaffirming as much as possible. But our goal as a social movement numbering in the hundreds of thousands should not be just to deliver reform for sections of the working class. Our goal has to also be to encourage and promote a fundamental restructuring of social relations, to advance a politics atop the wave of discontent not just centered on treating symptoms but on attacking root causes. Simultaneously, these politics can not just be utopian dogmas. We have to provide the middle link, the connection between where the masses are and the maximal socialist vision we would like them to arrive upon. That’s the fundamental next step of our project, a step our platform allows us to begin exploring: building the bridge between our rising popularity and our as yet unrealized political horizon. 

We have identified a problem — the lack of true democracy in the United States. We have identified mass discontent that is the product of that problem - the apathy and cynicism Americans have toward our government. But our job is to not simply acknowledge discontent. Our job is to direct it, and solidify it into a positive and actionable vision for something new. The purpose of the program is to show people that their anger is the product of something tangible, something not fixed but temporal, created by people and thus changeable by people. The purpose is also to show that a better world is possible, that roadblocks do not have to remain as they stand, and that this organization, DSA, is the one fighting to change it. So yes, while removing the power of the Senate and the Court would require at the very least a Constitutional Amendment to Articles I and III, we commit no fatal sin in advocating for that either. Our vision is expansionary. It is designed to get people talking about what form of government would better suit their needs. That is all the project of socialism has ever been.