The DSA is performing the devil’s greatest trick

Charles Baudelaire, a French poet, gets credit for the line about the Devil’s greatest trick being to convince you he doesn’t exist. (No, it wasn’t Kevin Spacey in the movie “The Usual Suspects.”) Usually people reach for it to describe evil operating in plain view, unbothered, because nobody bothers to look.

It came to mind reading the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2025-2026 platform. More precisely, it came to mind watching what happens to that platform once it reaches any election campaign.

Nothing about the document itself is hidden. It sits on the organization’s website. The national political committee adopted it formally. Fox News revealed it, so did the Washington Examiner and so did the Washington Monthly. Under a heading called “A Real Democracy,” it calls for getting rid of the Electoral College, the Senate, the presidency and the Supreme Court. In their place goes an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” with Congress itself rebuilt into a single proportionally elected chamber.

The preamble doesn’t hedge about any of it: a new constitution, a “democratic socialist republic.” Co-chair Ashik Siddique has defended the Senate plank on the record, calling the chamber “a very undemocratic institution.” You would think the socialists would be as proud of their platform to deconstruct the U.S. Constitution as a parent who slaps a bumper sticker on their car that says, “Proud Honor Roll Parent.”

So no, the platform is not the Devil in........

© The Hill