Ellie Lerner is an editorial associate at the Renew Democracy Initiative, where she supports editorial production and contributing authors for The Next Move.
My late grandfather, Michael Lerner, taught me to “always go with your highest vision.” As a founder of the New America Movement—an organization that folded into the nascent Democratic Socialists of America over 40 years ago—he argued that justice meant refusing to settle for anything less than our highest ideals of what is right.
I understand why that message is so appealing; it satisfies a basic human itch for certainty and conviction. But I’ve watched with growing unease as my generation embraces a politics that jettisons liberalism in the name of that same vision. I see that now in the DSA’s recently released 2026 platform, and I worry: what is the highest vision actually asking us to give up along the way?
The DSA, like the Republican Party, seems comfortable throwing out the checks that keep political power from concentrating in one place. While the right’s unitary executive theory consolidates power in the executive branch, the DSA calls to concentrate power in the legislative—a unitary congressional theory, if you will. Neither side is spending much time worrying about what happens when their side is not in power, perhaps because they don’t expect to have to hand it back.
The new DSA platform calls for replacing the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” and for abolishing the Senate outright. While rethinking the Senate isn’t inherently unreasonable, consolidating power into one branch of government may lead to what the founding fathers aggressively warned us against: the tyranny of the majority. A single body that writes the laws, passes them, chooses the executive, and then rules on their own constitutionality answers to no one when it gets something wrong.
In these far-reaching proposals, I’m reminded of my grandfather’s book, The Politics of Meaning, which became a progressive manifesto for merging social justice idealism with spirituality.
My grandfather argued that policy solutions addressing people’s everyday materialist concerns would never be enough; people were suffering from a spiritual and ethical emptiness, and liberal politics had to speak to that emptiness directly, or it would fail no matter how many bread-and-butter problems it solved. If liberal forces are to be successful, they need to provide a broader vision that gives people more meaningful narratives and a sense of purpose to their lives beyond being more empowered consumers.
I can hear in the DSA’s preamble an attempt to address some of the spiritual emptiness my grandfather was targeting. The platform invites readers to “imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism.” In addition to calling for freedom from debt or rent or a health insurance bill, it promises a version of work itself transformed: a job that’s “interesting to you,” that you’re “well trained for,” where “you would control your own labor and see it going to good use.” On your day off work, “you could meet up with friends or family and eat together, maybe go to the movies or down to the park.” A paycheck as well as a cure for the alienation my grandfather spent his career trying to overcome through progressive spirituality. This utopian world, DSA promises, “is the guiding star of our movement.”
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There is a lot to admire in what the DSA is reaching for. They’re essentially updating the holistic vision for self-actualization Karl Marx himself sketched out over a century ago, in which a person could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and philosophize in the evening.
But what if your evening philosophizing leads you to disagreement with the party? What if your own sense of meaningful work, or your own guiding star, looks nothing like what the DSA has decided is in the collective interest? Liberalism is built to protect room for different visions of the good life. Yet this platform, with its prescriptive solutions and unitary congressional theory, is fundamentally illiberal.
Therein lies the trouble with my grandfather’s argument in The Politics of Meaning: once politics becomes intertwined with meaning itself, compromise becomes impossible. Pragmatism stops being merely difficult and becomes heretical. The whole system of checks and balances starts to look like an obstacle rather than a safeguard. The competing interests of the collective and the individual are viewed in zero-sum terms.
Indeed, the DSA platform has a lot to say about what the collective deserves while sparing little room for individual freedom. It calls to “establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.” The platform is explicit that even this is only a way station: “We know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up,” it states. “We push these demands to their furthest extent today, so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future.”
Nowhere is collective idealism checked by a concern for individual rights. This is a crucial distinction because movements that subordinate the individual to some larger historical destiny treat anyone who won’t get on board not as a fellow citizen to persuade, but as a problem that destiny will eventually route around.
To its credit, the DSA’s platform is anti-Trump and anti-MAGA. But a closer examination of the DSA’s worldview, what the platform calls a “Working-Class Foreign Policy,” reveals that this isn’t a principled anti-authoritarianism, but a campist anti-one-type-of-authoritarianism.
The dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are insulated from criticism under a call to “end economic warfare against countries whose governments act independently of the United States.”
Israel is the only country for which the platform demands a US foreign policy intervention. Israel is not perfect—quite far from it under its current government. But it is still significantly more democratic than the DSA’s role-model regimes in Cuba and Iran.
For the DSA, only authoritarian governance gets treated as a matter of sovereign preference. A platform that opens with a vision of universal human flourishing has nothing to say about women in Iran, or pro-democracy movements in Cuba, or dissidents anywhere in the regimes it defends.
American foreign policy has plenty of sins to answer for. But the DSA’s platform is not a criticism of neoconservatism or an overextended foreign agenda. Instead, it evokes the history of leftist factions that took a romantic view of Castro, or harbored nostalgia for the Soviet Union. It is a mirror of the elements on the right that looked longingly at Franco or Pinochet.
Take Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with millions of followers and one of the DSA’s most prominent allies, who spoke to impressionable College Democrats dressed in a Mao Zedong-style uniform. The Chinese dictator, responsible for tens of millions of deaths, is one of his personal heroes.
An alarming absolutism runs through DSA’s worldview. In 2024, with an actual authoritarian on the ballot in the United States, they showed their inability to cede their strict vision of what counts as “the highest good.” In the final days of the election, DSA declined to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, releasing a statement that described Americans as facing the “same ‘choices’ for president.”
In 2024, the DSA made the choice my grandfather made in 2000. Endorsing Green Party candidate Ralph Nader over Democratic nominee Al Gore, my grandfather was one of a number of voices on the left who believed the Democratic Party had strayed too far from its principles to deserve their vote. In a handful of swing states, including Florida, Nader’s campaign helped tip a very close election to George W. Bush.
Given how bad things are under the Trump administration, frustrated Democratic voters may find comfort in the DSA’s uncompromising self-assurance. It’s easy to confuse rigidity for principle and to mistake a mob for a movement, and to forget the cost of living in a big, diverse country with competing visions of human flourishing. The highest vision my grandfather taught me to chase has become a license for a political idealism that is more likely to increase polarization rather than bring us closer to a vision of America as a beacon of hope.
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For Democrats, pushing back against the DSA is a moral and strategic imperative.
Great article. The DSA also lacks a reasonable economic analysis and proves that the perfect is an enemy of the practical.
Excellent observations. The DSA under founder Michael Harrington, were Social Democrats that aligned their political intents with the moderately socialist platforms of the democratic Scandinavian countries. However, like so many Leftist organizations, they went down the Marxist rabbit hole into fascist thinking; yes, "extremism" of both the Progressive Left and MAGA right can lead to fascism, or as we politely call it today: authoritarianism (fascism without the military). As someone once said: the way to hell is paved with good intentions.