By Michael Gold
Do you want to live in a country where the police and prisons no longer exist? Where your stock funds can potentially be seized on behalf of “the people”? Where authoritarian regimes like China and Russia are praised as examples to follow?
Meet the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the most pernicious political movements growing in the U.S. today.
Just as the Republican Party was beset, besieged and ultimately overwhelmed by the MAGA movement, so now today the Democratic Party is being beaten with a stick and threatened by the Democratic Socialists (DSA). Let’s hope they don’t succeed.
We now have a Democratic Socialist mayor of the nation’s largest city – Zohran Mamdani. In Democratic Party primaries in June, DSA members won New York City races for two seats in Congress and six seats in the state legislature, where they will face Republican nominees who are unlikely to beat them. DSA candidates also won state assembly primaries in Buffalo and Syracuse.
The DSA’s program says that its goals are to: “Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.”
In the DSA’s thinking, there are only two classes – rich and poor. Who gets to define who’s rich? They’re talking about Elon Musk, but are they also talking about you or your neighbor, who maybe owns a small house with a small patch of grass called a lawn?
The DSA’s simplistic analysis, about on the level of a first-grade child, might account for the organization’s lionization of cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur. Chesimard was convicted of first-degree murder in 1973, in the killing of a New Jersey State trooper, Werner Foerster. She escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba. Repeated efforts by the U.S. to extradite her failed. She died in Cuba in 2025.
Here’s what the DSA wrote and posted on the X social media site after she died: “Rest in Power, Assata Shakur. The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades. The Cubans welcomed her and other Black Revolutionaries with asylum, and their solidarity and loyalty allowed Assata to live out her days in Havana.”
I’m speculating that the DSA thinks that once they have distributed “publicly owned social housing” with universal rent control, low-cost food, utilities, and free universal healthcare and college education, there will be no more need for police.
Satisfying everyone’s material needs sounds great! But how the DSA plans on implementing this fantastical, messianic vision presents us with several giant red flags. They’re ignoring a universal truth. There are always going to be people who want to do harm to others.
Unfortunately, the human race has organized itself in tribes. And these tribes often hate each other. That tendency is unlikely to go away any time soon. Witness the current genocide in Sudan, with Arab Muslims killing black African Muslims just because of their skin color. Approximately 150,000 to 400,000 people have been killed since this civil war started in 2023, according to a New York Times editorial on July 13, 2026. Millions of Sudanese have had to flee their homes and lack access to food and medical care.
The DSA’s constitution states that: “We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.”
I’m all for a humane social order, equal treatment of women and racial equality, but when you start talking about “popular control of resources and production,” you’ve lost me.
What does popular control mean? The United States’ population is currently about 342 million people? How are all these millions going to control the nation’s resources, farms, manufacturing facilities and stores?
Ah, this is where it gets tricky. Someone always has to be in charge. The question is who? I’d rather have an expert veteran running the factory where they make the Cheerios. Likewise, I’m going to trust a farmer who’s spent twenty years on his own land to know what he needs to do to grow a healthy wheat, corn or oat crop.
The underlying point here is that the DSA wants their own people running things. This reminds me of the old Soviet Union, also known as the U.S.S.R. The DSA wants a planned economy. We saw how well that worked in the U.S.S.R. The U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991, brought down by its inability to deliver the material goods its population needed to survive, such as a trivial thing known as food.
The other aspects of the DSA constitution should alarm us. When they talk about equitable distribution and non-oppressive relationships, we’re going to be in trouble.
Do I want my milk, eggs and yogurt to be less expensive? Of course. Do I think the DSA can deliver on that promise? There’s no question that they can’t. What I see in the DSA vision is the prospect of their organization building a Soviet-style state apparatus that would be so heavily regulated and supervised that food, and other goods, will have a very long, slow, difficult journey to market, if they arrive at all.
The Soviet Union experienced a state-induced famine in 1932-1933, when it tried to bring all of the country’s farms under state control, called “collectivization.” The government took farmers’ harvests for the Red Army, and also exported it, to earn foreign currency to build state factories and industries. Millions starved to death so the state could meet the goals of its five-year plan.
Red China suffered a similar catastrophe with a famine that lasted from 1959 to 1961. The famine occurred directly as a result of its “Great Leap Forward” campaign, which the Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, implemented to industrialize the country as fast as possible. Again, a socialist state literally took away the harvest from its farmers and sold much of it overseas, to pay off its debts to the Soviets and purchase machinery for industrialization. Approximately 30 to 46 million Chinese died because of Mao’s dictates.
The DSA may be playing the democratic game right now, but make no mistake, its goal is to toss out what we have with the goal of giving us a system where we are less free.
What are the DSA’s chances of actually doing so? Not very good. I think the vast majority of Americans would reject such a message. But there is a possibility that the DSA could disrupt the Democratic Party and drive it harder to the left. It would be a huge mistake for the Democratic Party leaders to let the DSA make this happen.
The country is going through a number of different crises now that provide an opening for the DSA, as it did for MAGA 10 years ago.
A lot of people are struggling to get a job that pays well. Women are going to college in increasing numbers, which is a good thing, in my humble opinion, but men feel they’ve been left behind.
Too many Americans are poor. The official poverty rate is more than 10 percent. Affordable housing is hard to find.
The climate is changing, which is making the weather strange and extreme, causing floods and extreme heat, among other problems. The western U.S. is going through a multi-year super drought. The intensity of the wildfires in Canada were caused partly a result of the high temperatures resulting from climate change.
The answer to these many problems does not lie in the DSA’s cult-like belief in destroying the foundations of American society, then building a top-down utopia on the ashes. Their vision can only end up oppressing the very masses it says it seeks to liberate.
Our political system needs an overhaul, not arson by the DSA.
Michael Gold is a columnist for The Yonkers Times. His work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers. He’s a volunteer trustee with the Putnam County Land Trust.