Chicago —
Amid the corporate carpeting and industrial artwork of McCormick Place, the Democratic Socialists of America spent a rainy weekend preparing their next steps for taking over the Democratic Party and taking down capitalism.
The “DSA Merch” table had $30 T-shirts and $45 sweatshirts with roses and Green New Deal slogans. A table from a local socialist bookstore stocked Palestinian poetry collections, Black Panthers histories, “The Communist Manifesto” and a children’s book called “Prisons Must Fall.”
The attendees at the lakefront convention center called one another comrades. A pamphlet with a sketched red fist laid out the group’s program, including “a future without capitalism,” where “food, education, energy, medicine and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.” It encouraged supporters to dream of a world where they don’t have to worry about paying rent or loans and can embrace “a socialist day off.” It pitched a 32-hour workweek, universal healthcare, reparations for slavery, and “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.”
It said the DSA wants to “replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” and it wants that Congress to be an expanded House of Representatives with an abolished Senate — a position DSA co-chair Megan Romer stuck by in a recent Fox News interview that went viral.
