The Blueprint That Starts With a New Foundation

I turned seventy this year. Spent a good stretch of my younger life underwater on a Navy submarine, then decades in the working world of technology and school-district systems. Paid for a house the hard way. Still show up for the paycheck while trying to stretch what little retirement savings I have into something that might last. None of that makes me special. It just makes me one more American who has lived under the same basic set of rules most of us grew up assuming would still be standing when we got old.

Those rules—the Constitution, the separation of powers, the messy, slow, deliberately inefficient system of checks—have never been perfect. They were written by flawed men who knew human nature well enough to distrust concentrated power. The system has been bent, amended, ignored in places, and stretched in others. Still, it has been the framework. The thing we argued inside of rather than the thing we proposed to discard.

That is why the current platform of the Democratic Socialists of America catches the attention of someone like me.

Their 2025–2026 program, titled “Workers Deserve More,” is not subtle about its long-term goal. In their own words, they are “workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The mission statement is clearer still: put workers in charge of the government “through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics.”

They speak constantly of the working class. The entire program is framed as a government and economy by and for working people. Yet it is hard to ignore a quiet question that keeps rising: how many of the people writing and promoting this blueprint have ever really worked in the ordinary sense of the word? Not organized, not campaigned, not studied, not protested—but clocked in, carried responsibility for production or service over years, paid the bills from wages, and felt the weight of keeping something running when no one was watching.

The people the platform appears most carefully designed to serve often seem to be those who have never had to. The expansive guarantees, the cancellation of obligations, the framing of almost every material need as a right to be delivered rather than something earned or stewarded—these land differently when you have spent a lifetime earning your keep. The language of the working class is used, but the orientation of the program frequently points toward a different constituency: those who have remained outside the disciplines of ordinary labor.

The structural details fill in the rest of the picture. Abolish the Senate. Expand the House under proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, Congress. Limit the Court’s power of judicial review. Extend full voting rights to permanent residents who are not citizens and restore them to those currently incarcerated or previously convicted. Public ownership and democratic control of the largest corporations and essential industries. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay. Universal healthcare that includes every form of reproductive and gender-affirming care. Publicly owned social housing and universal rent control. Amnesty and the abolition of ICE. Defund the military apparatus. The list is long and consistent.

Some of these items poll well in isolation. That is how platforms usually work. The deeper commitment is structural. The existing constitutional order is treated as the obstacle. The Senate is called anachronistic. The presidency and the independent judiciary are to be subordinated. The whole system of divided powers is to be replaced so that “the working class” can govern without the old restraints.

I am not writing this to claim every DSA member wants overnight revolution. Many of them will tell you the platform is aspirational, a horizon, a set of demands to be pushed as far as possible under the current system while preparing the ground for something larger. That is fair enough. Organizations are allowed to state their goals. What matters is that these are the stated goals, published, debated inside the organization, and now advanced by a group that has grown rapidly and is electing people to real offices.

A man who has lived under one set of rules for seven decades notices when a rising political force begins talking openly about drafting a different foundation—especially when that force claims to speak for workers while its program and its most visible advocates often seem distant from the daily disciplines of work itself. The Constitution was never meant to be a suicide pact, but neither was it designed to be disposable once a sufficiently large coalition decided the old checks had become “anti-democratic.” History is littered with movements that began by promising more democracy and ended by concentrating power in the name of the people. Human nature does not improve simply because we rename the institutions.

I find myself wondering, as many older Americans do these days, whether any place remains safe inside the country if the foundational document itself becomes optional. Red states offer temporary shelter for certain cultural and policy preferences, but the federal structure still binds. Leaving the country is an option some of us quietly research. Yet the deeper question is not geographic. It is whether a people can keep ordered liberty once a critical mass decides the old order is illegitimate and must be rewritten from the ground up—and whether the “working class” being invoked is the same one that has actually been doing the work.

That is the conversation the platform forces, whether its authors intended it or not.