Democratic socialists have been riding a wave of recent successes: Their party defeated a pair of incumbent House Democrats in New York. There have been primary wins in Philadelphia and in Denver.

In the wake of these achievements, Jonathan Chait, a staff writer at the Atlantic, has turned in a series of articles that characterize the Democratic Socialists of America as antidemocratic, against the Democratic Party, and even a hindrance to policy goals like universal healthcare. Chait, safe to say, is not a fan of the DSA. But when the organization released its official platform recently, tucked away among the calls to defund the Pentagon and enact reparations was another mandate: to abolish the Senate. There, Chait is in firm agreement. “The Senate never should have existed in the first place,” he said.

Chait points to the Senate’s creation—a compromise between bigger and smaller states to enact the Constitution. “If you listen to what the founders, like Madison and Hamilton, were saying at the time, they weren’t saying, ‘We’ve seen the wisdom of the small states’ point, and they were right to insist on this institution that gives residents of small states massively exaggerated political power vis-à-vis residents of large states,’ ” he said. “They were telling us that the Senate was bad, and the Senate, in many ways, has gotten even worse since that time.”

On a recent episode of What Next, guest host Rob Gunther spoke to Chait about what it is about the Senate that could get two sides of a fractured Democratic Party to see eye to eye. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rob Gunther: We should be clear before we start this conversation: Abolishing the Senate has very little chance of happening right now, right? We’d have to nuke Article 1, Section 1 of the........

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