No, I don’t endorse the DSA. Yes, I read the platform, and the item-by-item is the part of your question that deserves the work, so that is most of what follows.
This is the hardest question this campaign has been asked, and the reason is that it is built to be answered in one word. Tribal-affiliation questions have a yes and a no and both are cheap. A document review costs something. I am going to do the second thing.
The 2025–2026 program is still sitting on DSA’s own domain as a PDF and it is what a search engine hands you first. It is not current. The current program was drafted between April and June 2026 by a committee elected under a process established at the 2025 national convention, then amended, finalized and approved by DSA’s National Political Committee. Its authors’ note says so.
The two documents differ, and not cosmetically — the newer one is considerably more explicit about exactly the things you asked about. Everything below is the current one. If you check me against the PDF, some of this will not match, and that is why.
The presidency and the Court. You described restructuring. The plank called A Real Democracy says: “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” That is not a restructuring of two offices. It is the replacement of both and their subordination to the legislature. The same plank abolishes the Electoral College.
The Senate. A Democratic Congress: “abolish the Senate.” Those words, alongside expanding the House, proportional representation, and ranked choice voting in all elections.
Law enforcement. “Abolish ICE” is a plank heading. End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity describes demilitarizing departments, disempowering police unions, and redirecting funding “as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.” End the U.S. War Machine opens with “Defund the Department of War.” So the premise most people would have called the exaggeration is the one the document states most plainly.
The one place your framing overshoots is corporate private property. The plank is “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.” That is sweeping and I argue with it below, but it is not the abolition of corporate property as such. The gap between nationalizing the largest firms and the energy grid, and ending private ownership of business, is the gap between a policy and a different economy. The document is making the first argument.
One more thing worth knowing, because it undoes the choice your first sentence offers. Our Perspective says DSA “is building a party,” that the Democratic Party “is asleep at the wheel,” and that both major parties are “funded by the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.” You asked whether they are a standard left-wing faction or something exceptionally radical. The document declines the first option itself. It does not want to be a faction of anything.
And it is unusually honest about being two documents at once: “Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.” I want to credit that sentence. Most platforms bury the horizon and present it as the legislative agenda. This one tells you which planks are bills and which are a destination. It makes the document easier to argue with, and that is a form of respect for the reader.
Three reasons. None of them is that the positions are too radical to be near.
One: this campaign challenges all politicians and endorses none. A faction is not an exception to that. If the rule bends for an organization whose material planks I largely share, then it was never a rule — it was a preference that had not been tested yet. This is the test.
Two: an endorsement would misreport where I actually am. You will see below that I land with this document on most of what it wants to pass and against it on most of what it wants to replace. A yes reads as agreement. A no reads as opposition. Neither is true. The item-by-item is not a hedge to avoid the question — it is the only accurate answer to it.
Three, and this one is strategic, so you should see it rather than have it operate on you. The point of this campaign is that a human being picks up the ten planks and runs on them. “Read the whole thing before you respond” is not a left-wing idea. “Say I don’t know when you don’t know” is not a left-wing idea. “Source your claims” belongs to nobody. The day those carry a faction’s letterhead, half the country stops reading at the letterhead, and the planks stop doing the only thing they exist to do. I am not trading that for the warmth of being claimed by people I agree with.
Healthcare For All. Universal coverage at no cost to individuals. I support this and have put the numbers on the record: the US spends $14,885 per person per year, roughly 2.5 times the OECD average, for life expectancy 3.7 years below the comparable-country average. The plank also makes medical education public and free, which is aimed at the physician shortage — the actual binding constraint on universal coverage, and the part of this debate that gets the least attention. That is a better-designed plank than it looks.
Treating addiction and mental illness as health issues rather than crimes. This is nearly a quotation of my own premise. I have published the three-tier version: $2.5 trillion spent since 1971, a 500 percent increase in incarceration, no measurable reduction in use.
Ending qualified immunity. Yes, and this is new ground for me, so here is the reasoning rather than a position. Qualified immunity is not a statute. It is a doctrine the Supreme Court built and then widened, until a plaintiff had to find a prior case with nearly identical facts before a rights violation could be actionable. The result is that the more novel the misconduct, the better protected it is. Congress can end it by legislation, which means it is one of the few items on this list that requires no amendment and no new institution.
Demilitarizing police departments and civilian oversight with real authority. Yes to both. Oversight boards that can subpoena and discipline are different objects from oversight boards that can write letters, and most American cities have the second kind.
Union rights and the right to strike, in every industry. Yes.
Paid family leave, universal childcare and pre-K, a living minimum wage, free public college. Yes to all four.
Right to counsel for tenants. Yes, and it is the plank in the housing section I would fund first. Eviction is one of the few legal proceedings where one side has a lawyer almost always and the other side almost never, and the outcome tracks that fact closely.
Taxing the rich. Higher rates on top incomes, corporations and large inheritances. I have already taken apart the three standard arguments against — the millionaire migration rate is 2.4 percent against a general-population rate of 2.9 percent, and a one-point tax increase costs the average state with 9,000-plus millionaires about 23 people.
Abolishing the Electoral College, ending Citizens United, publicly financing elections. All three are already on my record, and I will repeat the part people skip: the first two require constitutional amendments. A voter in Wyoming currently carries roughly 3.6 times the presidential weight of a voter in California.
Ranked choice voting, proportional representation, and expanding the House. Yes, and here is the useful detail: the House is capped at 435 by statute — the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, now 2 U.S.C. § 2a — not by the Constitution. Expanding it takes a bill. So does proportional representation. Two of the most structurally significant items in this platform need 218 votes and a signature, and they sit in the same section as items needing a new founding document. Those are not the same kind of ask and it costs the platform something to file them together.
DC statehood, and restoring the vote to people with convictions. Yes to both.
Honoring treaties and tribal sovereignty. Anti-discrimination enforcement. Bodily autonomy. Yes. On the last one I have said where I land and why: a government that can compel someone to carry a pregnancy to term has claimed jurisdiction over the inside of a person’s body, and I am not comfortable with that power existing regardless of who holds it.
Green New Deal, in its investment form. Public investment in energy and transit infrastructure, phasing out fossil fuels, guaranteed support for displaced fossil fuel workers. Yes. I wrote a whole paper on whether a community can refuse a data center, and concluded it can, so I am not going to flinch at public authority over energy infrastructure.
Ending immunity for U.S. war criminals and supporting the ICC’s mandate. Yes, and already published. Helping allies evade ICC warrants while demanding other countries respect international law is a credibility problem that reaches far past any single conflict.
Recognizing Palestinian statehood. Yes, published, same place. 146 of 193 UN member states already do.
Ending the Cuba embargo, specifically. Yes. In October 2025 the General Assembly called for its end for the thirty-third consecutive year, 165 to 7 with 12 abstentions. Sixty-plus years is long enough to evaluate a policy.
A judiciary and executive “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” This is the item I reject hardest in the entire document, and my objection is structural rather than partisan.
Judicial review is the mechanism by which a minority holding a right defeats a majority holding a vote. That is not a side effect of it. That is the function. Brown, Loving, Gideon, Obergefell — every one of those was a court overruling what elected majorities wanted at the time, and a judiciary serving at the legislature’s pleasure decides all of them the other way. The platform’s complaint, that the Court “creates and abolishes laws outside the legislative process,” is a real description of a real problem. It is also, word for word, the complaint the right made about Roe and Obergefell. A mechanism built to disempower a court you disagree with does not stay in your hands. It transfers, intact, to whoever wins next. And the people who need a court most are the ones with the fewest votes — which, in this document’s own account of America, is most of the people it is written for.
The captured-court problem is real and I would rather fix it with instruments that survive a change of government: term limits or staggered fixed terms for justices, a binding and enforceable ethics regime, and discipline about jurisdiction-stripping. Note what the last few days demonstrated about how live this is: on September 2 the House rejected 212–206 a constitutional amendment that would have fixed the Court at nine seats, well short of the two-thirds needed. Court structure is not a fringe question anymore. It is being voted on. That makes it more important, not less, to be careful about which end of the institution you reach for.
Abolishing the Senate. Two objections, and the first is arithmetic rather than philosophy.
Article V contains exactly one entrenched clause: no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. Abolishing the Senate by amendment therefore requires the consent of all fifty states, not thirty-eight. It is the single thing the Constitution comes closest to making unamendable, which is presumably why this platform pairs it with drafting a new constitution — the only route that gets there. The malapportionment complaint underneath it is legitimate and I will not pretend otherwise. But expanding the House and adopting proportional representation are both available by statute and would do a meaningful share of the same work. Demanding the unreachable remedy while the reachable ones go unused is a choice, and I do not think it is the one that gets a working-class majority more power sooner.
“Fully abolishing the police and prison system.” I separate the steps from the goal, because this plank does too.
The steps I support and several are overdue: demilitarization, ending qualified immunity, real civilian oversight, moving crisis response for mental health and addiction out of the police entirely. Done properly that is a large reduction in both police contact and incarceration, and most of the harm this plank names would fall with it.
The goal I reject. There is a category of predatory violence for which the correct response is incapacitation, and no amount of upstream investment reduces that category to zero. A serious position exists on the left here — a carceral system smaller by an order of magnitude and different in kind — and “fully abolishing” is not that position; it is the sentence you write when you do not want to specify the remainder. I would rather argue for the 90 percent reduction I can defend than the 100 percent I cannot.
One tension worth naming, not as a gotcha but because the document’s own logic collides here: this plank calls for disempowering police unions, and it sits in a program whose closing section is titled Democracy At Work and commits to protecting and expanding union rights “regardless of industry.” Police unions are the hardest case for that commitment and the platform resolves it by exception rather than by principle. I think the principle needed is that a union may bargain over pay, hours and safety but not over immunity from discipline — which is a rule about scope, and would apply to every union, and is the version I would defend.
Abolishing ICE, ending all detention and deportations, amnesty for all regardless of status, ending all visa caps. Partial agreement, and the disagreement is specific.
I have published a two-failure-mode analysis: enforcement outrunning process, and process so backlogged that the word is decorative. 557 immigration judges holding 3.3 million active cases. Nearly 12 million pending USCIS cases. Refugee admissions at zero since January 2025, against up to 125,000 a year previously. A 7 percent per-country cap producing fifteen-year waits for Indian applicants.
So: ending per-country caps and quotas, yes — that is in this plank and it is correct and it is achievable. Legal status for the 580,000 DACA recipients and for long-resident populations, yes. Restoring refugee admissions, yes. Funding the courts and making immigration judges independent of the Justice Department instead of employees of it, yes, and that last one is the single highest-value fix nobody campaigns on.
Where I break: “end ICE detention and deportations” without qualification means no removal of anyone for any conduct, and that is not a position I can defend. It also conflates an agency with a function. ICE began operating in 2003; the enforcement function long predates it and would survive its abolition under another name. Abolishing the agency and abolishing the function are two different arguments and this plank runs them together, which lets the harder one ride along on the easier one.
Voting rights for all permanent residents. No, for federal elections. The franchise is close to the only thing citizenship distinctly confers, and if permanent residents should vote in federal elections then the honest reform is a functioning path to citizenship — which this same platform also demands, and which I support. I would rather naturalize people than give them a vote while leaving them non-citizens.
“Public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.” The second half is a live argument I will take seriously; the first half I reject on the grounds that it uses the wrong variable.
Natural monopoly is the standard and defensible case for public provision — the transmission grid, water systems, the broadband last mile, rail. Where a market cannot be made competitive because duplicating the infrastructure is absurd, public or heavily regulated ownership is not radical, it is the ordinary answer, and much of the world already does it. But “the largest corporations” is a threshold, not a principle. Size is not the property that makes public ownership right. Market structure is. A very large firm in a genuinely competitive market and a small firm with a captive market are opposite problems, and a rule indexed to size gets both of them wrong.
“Aggressive wealth taxes.” My objection is engineering, not ideology, and the record is unusually clear. Twelve OECD countries levied individual net wealth taxes in 1990. By 2017 there were four. Austria repealed in 1994, Denmark and Germany in 1997, the Netherlands in 2001, Finland, Iceland and Luxembourg in 2006, Sweden in 2007, France in 2018. The reasons repeat across all of them: valuing illiquid assets, administrative cost, and revenue that came in under projection. I want the same distributional outcome through instruments that have working machinery — mark-to-market treatment of gains on publicly traded holdings, a serious estate tax, and ending stepped-up basis, which is the single largest untaxed transfer in the code.
“End all military and economic aid to Israel.” I have published the harder half of this — the $3.8 billion annual package, the roughly 49 Security Council vetoes, the Leahy Law that requires suspension of aid to units credibly accused of gross violations and has never once been applied here. My position is conditionality and enforcement of laws already on the books, not termination. The relationship continues; the blank check ends. On the right of return and Jerusalem, those are final-status questions that get decided by parties to a negotiation, and I am not going to settle them in a bullet point.
Ending blockades, embargoes and sanctions as a single category. This is the plank whose error is its structure. Cuba, Venezuela and Iran are three different instruments with three different records, and collapsing them into one demand means the strongest case carries the weakest. The Cuba embargo has failed for sixty years and should end. Sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program were the leverage that produced the only agreement that ever constrained it. A foreign policy that cannot distinguish between those two is not an anti-interventionist foreign policy, it is an unexamined one.
“Defund the Department of War.” Reducing the military budget, yes. Closing overseas bases, yes, and I would start with the ones whose strategic rationale ended with a conflict that is over. Defunding the department as written is not a budget position; it is the elimination of the institution, and it belongs in the same category as the constitutional planks rather than in a list of things a Congress could do.
Drafting a new constitution. This is the mechanism everything above depends on, and I have already published against it. Article V has two paths. The first, Congress proposing and states ratifying, has worked twenty-seven times. The second, a convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, has never been used in 237 years, and whether such a convention can be limited to specific subjects is genuinely unresolved — the text is silent, no court has ruled, and the only precedent we have is 1787, where delegates convened to revise the Articles of Confederation and replaced them entirely. Roughly 28 states currently have live applications for a balanced-budget convention against a threshold of 34. Anyone on the left who wants a constitutional convention should look carefully at who is closest to calling one.
On what this document wants to pass — universal healthcare, drug policy as health policy, qualified immunity, union rights, paid leave, tenant counsel, taxes on high incomes and large inheritances, Citizens United, the Electoral College, ranked choice voting, an expanded House, DC statehood, the Cuba embargo, Palestinian recognition — I am with it more often than I am against it, and on several items I got there first and independently.
On what it wants to replace — a new constitution, an abolished Senate, a judiciary subordinate to Congress, police and prisons abolished, ownership keyed to corporate size — I am against it, and those are the load-bearing planks. The document says as much itself: the first list may be won under the current system, the second requires building a new society. I want the first list. I do not want the second, and not because it is too ambitious. Because a legislature with no court above it and no second chamber beside it is a worse machine for protecting the people this platform is written for, and it will be handed to someone else within a decade of being built.
So: not an endorsement, and not a dismissal. Those were the two cheap answers and the question deserved neither.
One last thing, and it is about method rather than politics. Reading the actual document cost me the easy argument twice over. The version of this platform that circulates — the one where socialists want to seize the hardware store — would have been simple to knock down. And the year-old PDF, the first result any search returns, is milder than the current text and would have let me correct you on your strongest premise. You were right on all three, and more right than the stale document would have shown. That is what Plank I is for. It is not a rule about politeness. It is a rule that keeps you from winning an argument against a document nobody wrote.