“Imagine the end of capitalism.” Those words in the Democratic Socialists of America manifesto offer Americans a world without landlords, debt, mandatory work hours, and “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation … are common goods and utilities.”
The left often refers to radical changes as “reimagining” everything from police to the Supreme Court to prisons to borders. However, the rise of socialists in the Democratic Party has moved such claims from the merely rhetorical to the outright revolutionary.
The release of the DSA platform on Bastille Day, July 14, was fitting since the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating.The platform promised to change the constitutional system and end the rule of “the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.”
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The DSA, which counts various Democrat figures such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, includes a plan to eliminate the Senate, the Supreme Court, the presidency and other institutions in remaking the American constitutional system.
In my new book “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss the rise of socialism and the move among professors and pundits to scrap key aspects, or the entirety, of our constitutional system on the 250th anniversary of the republic.
The book compares many of these proposals to identical policies of the Jacobin movement in the French Revolution. It is a book about revolutions and how they can consume those who start them. Both the American and French revolutions arose during the same period, but one became the worlds oldest democracy while the other became a blood-soaked tyranny known as “The Reign of Terror.”
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Notably, the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating. Even figures such as Thomas Paine (one of two figures who played a significant role in both revolutions) supported such measures to allow for more direct democracy.
It was an approach that the Framers expressly rejected. Great students of history, they did not want to replicate the elements that led to the destruction of past democracies going back to ancient Athens. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, referred to it as democracies becoming “mobocracies.”
The DSA is the direct descendant of the Jacobins in seeking to tear down moderating institutions and replace the President and jus
