The DSA's Biggest Hater Likes One of Their Policies

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1:03Jonathan Chait: Let me ask you something. What do you think the House of Representatives has in common with our show's host, Mary Harris?

1:13Jonathan Chait: Turns out they're both on summer vacation. But while the House is in recess, the U.S. Senate, they've still got two weeks of work before they can check out. And there's actual work to be done. Like, will they confirm Todd Blanche as official attorney general? Will President Trump's Save America Act ever see the light of day? Oh yeah, and is it too soon to start thinking about another government shutdown at the end of September? Like I said, a lot of work, not a lot of time, and the midterms are only going to suck up even more of the political oxygen. But when I asked Jonathan Chait about the Senate's to-do list, he had a different take.

1:50Actually, we should abolish the Senate. The Senate never should have existed in the first place.

2:00Jonathan Chait: Okay, this answer wasn't totally out of left field. Chait just wrote about this over in The Atlantic. And it was inspired by, of all people, the Democratic Socialists of America. The organization has been riding a wave of recent successes. They defeated a pair of incumbent House Democrats in New York. There have been primary wins in Philadelphia, in Denver. However, Chait is not a fan of the DSA. But when they released their official platform recently, tucked away among the calls to defund the Pentagon and enact reparations was another mandate, to abolish the Senate. If you learned about this in grade school, you know that we had the great compromise, right, between the big states and the small states.

2:42And that's why the U.S. Senate existed. And it's true. But we had a lot of compromises in order to enact the Constitution. We had to compromise most notoriously on slavery. But the response isn't, well, because they made this compromise, future generations are bounded by it for all time, and therefore it's good. In fact, if you listen to what the founders like Madison and Hamilton were saying at the time, they weren't saying, we've seen the wisdom of the small states point. and they were right to insist on this institution that gives residents of small states massively exaggerated political power vis-a-vis residents of large states, what they were telling us then was that the Senate was bad, and the Senate in many ways has gotten even worse since that time.

3:44Jonathan Chait: eye to eye. I'm Rob Gunther, filling in for Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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7:19Jonathan Chait: I mean, we should just be pretty clear before we start this conversation. This has very little chance of happening right now, right? We'd have to nuke Article 1, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. So this is like purely a theoretical exercise. This is an abstract theoretical point that's unlikely to happen anytime soon. But you never know. You know, countries do change their constitutions. You know, but I think it's worth thinking about because I think it actually illuminates the principles that we should be applying to questions of governance in this country. So the value shouldn't be keeping the system in place.

7:55The value shouldn't even be the word that people always use, which is norms. The value should be democratic norms. And the Senate isn't a democratic norm. It's an anti-democratic norm.

8:07Jonathan Chait: And we're talking about this, you know, two and a half centuries later. How has this problem gotten worse over time? So at the time that they enacted the Constitution, the ratio between the largest state and the smallest state was something about 13, 14 to 1. And people like Madison and Hamilton were saying, like, it would be ridiculous to give a resident of Delaware 13 times the political representation of a resident of Virginia, which was then the largest state. That's an absurdity. Well, today, the ratio is about 67 to 1. So the ratio that they seemed absurd in undemocratic at the time has gotten dramatically worse.

8:45That's point number one. Point number two is when they designed the Constitution, they considered whether they should put a supermajority requirement into the Senate, and they decided no. There would only be a supermajority requirement for constitutional amendments and for ratifying treaties. Everything else would be decided on a majority rule basis. But over time, a supermajority requirement has crept into the Senate and is now a routine legislative barrier, right? So they've made all these carve-outs for things that they care about, like fiscal bills can be done on a majority basis, judges, executive branch appointments.

9:22But just keeping the government, the lights on in the government, preventing a shutdown, that takes 60 votes. You could put a judge on the bench for life with absolute power to rule on the law with 50 votes. But if you just want to keep the government open, you need 60 votes.

9:40Jonathan Chait: And this is a big self-own because up until very recently, these supermajority rules were included in appointing judges and cabinet secretaries, is my understanding, correct? Right. Then it became more unworkable, so they just started adding carve-outs. But even as they add these carve-outs, they keep insisting that the supermajority requirement for everything else is necessary. But the truth is the filibuster was really a very rare, rarely used tool. And there was a kind of norm that kept it in place. You're only going to filibuster something if you really, really care about it. And a huge number of those instances were Southerners and civil rights.

10:19The South was a minority. So there was this kind of understanding that it was only fair to allow the Southern minority, which was, of course, entirely white, to prevent civil rights bills from passing by majority rule. So they would filibuster anything on civil rights. Even, you know, lynching laws couldn't pass the Senate for decades into the New Deal era because it would be filibustered by the South. But then this stopped being a thing that that that norms and customs said could only be used rarely and became something that was used for everything. And as that became unworkable, they started adding carve outs.

10:52And what I think they should do is get rid of the filibuster altogether. And then eventually, now when you argue the filibuster, they say, well, it'll be just like the House. Why should the Senate exist at all? And to my answer is, no, it shouldn't exist at all. It should be like the House.

11:06Jonathan Chait: Yeah, a lot of self-imposed rules, arbitrary rules, supermajority rules that, when become politically inconvenient, are tossed aside anyway. You mentioned other countries have done similar enactments. And I'm thinking about your piece you wrote that Great Britain, that the UK, you know, has an upper chamber called the House of Lords that looked a lot different in the past than it does today. Right. The House of Lords used to have, you know, used to be an equal power, used to be a bicameral legislature. And it gave, you know, these these upper class estates veto power over over legislation. It was it was anti-democratic and and conservatives of the time insisted it was necessary to to reign in the temporary passions of the hoi polloi.

11:46But they did manage to just turn it, they didn't eliminate it per se, but they just turned it into a kind of pro forma, a symbolic chamber. And so when Americans envision how they could abolish the Senate, sometimes they think about that kind of process where the Senate would still exist, but it would just be like these rich old guys who just kind of debate and show up and everyone pats them on the back, but they don't do anything.

12:09Jonathan Chait: You know, this conversation about the Senate and the unfair political advantages it gives to smaller states, it comes up pretty often, right? What I don't hear as much, though, and what I wish were part of this conversation is that when I think about it, the House of Representatives also gives smaller states an edge. And this is because in 1920, they permanently stopped growing the size of the House, which up until then had added seats every decade. And if you do the math, right, like Wyoming is the smallest state. It has some like close to 600 ,000 residents. They get one representative. If you use that as the benchmark, states like California, Texas, New York, they really are underrepresented in the People's House as well.

12:48Absolutely true. And it's also true within the Electoral College.

12:51Jonathan Chait: Yeah, because for the Electoral College, the votes are the number of representatives plus senators. Plus senators. So the small state edge that's built into the Senate is also built into a lesser extent in the Electoral College. But to me, the most unjust aspect of the Senate is one we haven't discussed yet, which is race. Because these small states are disproportionately rural, which means they're disproportionately white, which means the Senate gives extra voting power to a group of American citizens who are disproportionately white. So black people, Latinos, and Asian Americans have much less representation in the Senate than they do in the House of Representatives.

13:32And now the House of Representatives is also going to reduce African American representation because a court ruling is basically going to allow Southern districts to gerrymander completely without allowing any Black seats. So basically, the white South is going to return to the Senate and the House.

13:51Jonathan Chait: If we play this idea out, though, how do you imagine a single chamber Congress, how do you imagine that would operate today? Because this is Mike Johnson's Republican Party. They've passed things like the SAVE Act already. I mean, is that a better solution? Yeah. So the question is, if Republicans were in power, would they be able to do things more easily than they can now? And the answer is yes. Yes, they would. You would have a representative system where instead of parties saying, if you elect us, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and then they get elected and say, oh, it turns out we can't actually do X, Y, and Z.

14:28They would do those things, and then people would have to decide whether they liked those things and wanted to throw those people out of power or not. Now, the catch to that becomes, what if they're doing things that aren't just public policy goals but are just designed to entrench themselves in power? And the bill you just mentioned is the perfect example of that, right? It's an attempt by Republicans to basically rewrite the voting rules so that Republicans have an advantage. Donald Trump has said that if he passed this act, Republicans would never lose an election.

15:00Jonathan Chait: Yeah, the Save America Act, right? I don't think that's correct, though. In fact, I'm not even sure that the Save American Act would help the Republican Party. I think it reflects a time when Democrats tended to do well with low propensity voters. And if you made it harder to vote, you could keep away the low propensity voters and then Republicans would win. But I think that that dynamic has flipped under Trump. And now the low propensity voters are more Republican. So I actually think the Save Act would possibly backfire on them if they did that. But I agree that that is a concern. Yeah, it's a concern because, I mean, we've seen both parties, especially in the Senate, use the Senate and the six-year term and the filibuster as a way to, you know, they describe themselves as a deliberative body.

15:43Jonathan Chait: They stand in the way of radical change. I don't know. I do think there is a lot of worry that if you had this House, imagine you just gave them full power. I mean, they would bend the knee to Donald Trump legislatively rather than just rhetorically. Yeah. I mean, I think if you actually created something more like a parliamentary system, the system would change in a lot of ways. You wouldn't just change this one aspect and everything else would stay in place. I think you would have a lot of differences that would appear. One of them is that we've come to accept that campaign promises can't be taken literally because it is so hard to pass legislation in the United States of America.

16:22So Donald Trump can run around saying all these crazy things. But then the moderate Republicans will say, well, like, don't worry, that stuff isn't really going to happen. You know, that's just how it is, because that is how it is in the United States, right? You make all these promises while you're running, and then you get in office and you decide, you realize you can't actually do most of them. And that's the assumption. But in a parliamentary system, that's not how it works. You actually have a program, you run on it, and then you do it. And then people decide whether they like it or not. So if you got used to that equilibrium, I think it would actually be harder for someone to campaign on a bunch of crazy promises and have the moderate members of the party just dismiss that as nothing to worry about.

17:05Jonathan Chait: So that's the one idea Jonathan Cheat likes in the DSA platform. After the break, we'll dig into the rest.

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18:25Jonathan Chait: Abolishing the Senate. That's probably the only place where Jonathan Chait and DSA leaders can find themselves in sync. He's been a prominent critic of the left for a long time now. And his criticism of the DSA in particular, well, he's not sugarcoating his POV here. Some of his recent bylines describe the group as undemocratic and even maniacal. Here's what I think. I think the Democratic Party has room for socialists, for economic socialists. I'm not a socialist, but I think a socialist is someone who has enough in common with the Democratic Party that they can work together in a coalition. I don't think the Democratic Party should have room for communists.

19:01And the DSA has a lot of communists. Communists are roughly half of the leadership of the DSA. So when I say they're undemocratic, I mean, it's literally, they literally are communists who are setting policy. And if you look at a lot of the DSA's documents, when they talk about the societies in the world that they wish to emulate, you're talking about Cuba, China, Venezuela under Maduro and Chavez. I mean, that's what communism is. It's not just economic socialism. It's just it's a desire to create a one party state. And to me, that's a basic moral line. you shouldn't work with authoritarians within your coalition.

19:42The Republican Party has failed that test, right? Donald Trump is an authoritarian. The moral test that Republicans faced was to say, he's an authoritarian. I may agree with him on his policy goals, but if I'm committed to democracy, I can't work with an authoritarian. It's too dangerous. My first commitment is to democracy. My second commitment is to my policy goals. Democrats should have the same thing. I don't care if a communist agrees with me on Medicare for all, because they are not committed to democracy. They cannot be in my coalition. That's the line I want Democrats to draw.

20:17Jonathan Chait: You know, I'm thinking what you just said there makes me think of two things. One, I'm just watching this. I don't know if you watch Jamel Bowie's Instagram stories, and he puts out these face-to-video camera stories. And he recently, I just saw one this morning that was all about how the Republican Party is trying to gin up a red scare. They're trying to throw the word around like communism to get its base, you know, afraid. And his take was that it doesn't really bring the same way as it did in Red Scares of the past. We don't have like a communist enemy, like monolith that we did in times past.

20:49Jonathan Chait: But also like he points to, you know, people like Zoran Mamdani, mayor of New York City. And he says that the way that they govern is not really in line with trying to establish a communist, a communistic society in the United States, but trying to do something more akin to FDR's New Deal. What do you think about that? Well, it's certainly true that even if Zoran Mamdani was a communist, and I don't think he's not a communist, but even if he was, you can't impose communism at the municipal level because communism is like a one-party state, right? If he tried to arrest his critics and have them locked up and shot and shut down the New York Post, he would be stopped by the federal government, right?

21:29Because he would be violating the Constitution. You can't have, a communist mayor is not a thing. So I don't think it's his ambition, but he doesn't also doesn't have that power.

21:38Jonathan Chait: Right. But even when I think about people like Bernie Sanders, who really made democratic socialism a thing in my lifetime, and the subsequent lawmakers who got elected, AOC, you know, a bunch of other representatives, I just get the sense from what they talk, they're trying to do something more akin to the Scandinavian model of socialism. Like that was when, you know, Bernie Sanders was running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Everything was about the Scandinavian countries having higher taxes and then universal health care. I mean, maybe this platform does have a lot of what you're saying in terms of like, you know, writing a new constitution and getting rid of all sorts of private capital.

22:13Jonathan Chait: But I just don't see that playing out in any sense. But you're telling me that the threat that that's where this is all headed? Well, that's where the that's where the communists want it to head. And we don't know what's going to happen. But what the DSA is, is it's a coalition between people who are actual democratic socialists and communists. When the DSA was founded in 1982, they had a rule to keep out communists because Michael Harrington, one of the founders, understood that there was a long history in the American left of communists infiltrating left-wing groups and steering them in radical directions and taking control of them.

22:49So he said, we're not going to have communists in this organization. But then basically after 2016, a lot of the communist groups saw the rise of the DSA under Bernie Sanders and said, there's a lot of energy here. We are going to move into this organization. And they did. And in 2025, they eliminated the rule banning communists. And now really is half, you know, roughly half the leadership of the DSA is communist. It doesn't mean the entire organization is communist. It does mean the entire organization is people who are willing to work with communists.

23:19Jonathan Chait: And who are these communists in particular? Are they the leadership, the committee that's been holed up for weeks in the DSA headquarters trying to carve out this platform? Is that who you're pointing to, are communists? And you think they have more outsized influence than, say, somebody like Zoran Mondani or Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? No, because you can't get a communist elected in office, right? And you can't become famous without becoming elected, right? So if you're working behind the scenes to steer the DSA's platform, no one's going to know your name. The only way people are going to know your name is if you're elected and you can't be elected as a communist.

23:53Jonathan Chait: Right. But I guess what I see as the DSA, like I live in New York, Zoran Mamdani is my mayor. I actually live in the district. They call it the People's Republic of Astoria. Like every one of my elected representatives from city council up is a member of the DSA. And when I see people attracted to vote for these candidates, I don't think, I've never heard anybody talk about communism. Like maybe I'm in the fishbowl. I could absolutely be in the fishbowl. But I just feel like people were attracted to Zeran Mamdani's campaign of free buses, free daycare, you know what I mean? Like the grocery stores.

24:23Jonathan Chait: I don't think anybody's talking about seizing the means of production just yet. Right. But you're not describing, you're not, you're describing the problem. That's the problem that leftists have faced the whole time, that what communists will do is get into an organization and they won't say, vote for us so we can, you know, send all our enemies into prison camps. They will find more popular themes that they can draw in broader people of the left while maintaining control of the organizations. That's what happened with the People's Party under Henry Wallace. That was controlled by the Communist Party.

25:00But they didn't say, vote for us, we're communists. Vote for us so we can end the Constitution. They said, vote for us so we can enact civil rights and we can extend the New Deal and end the Cold War.

25:13Jonathan Chait: Yeah, I guess what I would say to that is that, you know, like the number of people that have been activated as an electorate through in New York City and elsewhere, we're seeing a lot of DSA aligned candidates win. I don't know. It just feels like the Democrats, they need to take advantage of those voters, even if what you're saying has truth to it. I just don't see like communism as as a winnable strategy. Right. So what we're doing now in New York, what Mayor Mondani is doing, bringing people in and sort of aligning them with the Democratic platform. Like Zoran Mondani was on the New York Times with Lulu Garcia Navarro, and he said, no, this is a big tent.

25:48Jonathan Chait: I'm not trying to kick anybody out. I'm not trying to kick anybody out if they are supported by AIPAC money. He said that. But that's not really true, right? Because he intervened in a lot of these primaries and did kick out a lot of Democrats. That's I think I think I understood that to be like once, you know, you win the once you win the nomination, then he's going to support anybody who's in the Democratic Party. Maybe that maybe I'm splitting there. Maybe I'm doing too much work for him. Sure. Fair enough. Yeah. No. And I look, I mean, he's he's recognized the same problem that I mentioned a few minutes earlier.

26:16Right. We're like at the municipal level. Not only can you not do communism, you can't really even do socialism. Right. I mean, it's just because like it just doesn't work. And it's like seizing the means of production within a city isn't isn't a thing. That's not socialist theory. That's not anything. So what is he doing? He's just like, he's filling potholes. He's just doing stuff that people of all ideological persuasions would do. So I'm not saying that anyone has anything to be afraid of by Zora Mandani's, you know, running of New York City. But I am saying that being in an organization that has a communist influence has real dangers for the Democratic Party that people need to be cognizant of, even if it's not manifesting today.

26:55Jonathan Chait: If you look at the landscape of the Democratic big tent, right? And you have DSA as the furthest left there can. Just map it out for me. Where do people like Abdul El-Sayed fall? Where do people like Ken Martin fall? What is the big tent of the Democratic Party right now? Yeah, Ken Martin is left of Senate within the Democratic Party. Abdul El-Sayed is like three notches to the left of him. And the DSA is like one notch to the left of Abdul El-Sayed. So it's all pretty close in your estimation. I don't know. It depends on how much space you have in those notches. Like, I'll say it was really, really, really left wing.

27:33But, you know, the Democratic Party has a problem, right? The Democratic Party is seen by most Americans as too far to the left. It was seen by two, that way under the Biden administration. And they've really made no efforts to correct that. Instead of correcting that, you have a lot of people who say, like, what if we go even further to the left? Maybe they'll like us more.

27:53Jonathan Chait: Really? Left in what ways, though? Well, that's a great question. I think people who have the left-wing social issues on immigration, on transgender rights in some areas, have recognized that they have got a little bit of a weak spot. And instead of trying to push further left there, they're saying, let's just stop talking about those things and only talk about economics. But when we talk about economics, we're going to talk about it in a much, much more left-wing economic populist way. And that's what El Sayed does. That's what Graham Plattner did, right? It's every single economic question can be defined as an evil thing that billionaires are doing to screw the rest of us.

28:31And if you just reduce everything to that and get everyone mad at the billionaires, then people will forget about all the social issues where the Democratic Party has maybe a position that's out of step with popular opinion.

28:42Jonathan Chait: What do you think an alternative strategy might be that really highlights the generations of tax cuts we've seen, you know, across my entire lifetime? the lack of investment in public services. Like these are things that have happened, right? And I think have contributed to the inequality that we're seeing, the rising inequality that we're seeing today. Like what is a better way? What is a more effective way to talk about that than blaming billionaires? I think they should zero in on the bad things that Donald Trump has done. Instead of having a message that's saying, we hate the Democratic Party as much as we hate the Republican Party because they're both controlled by corporations.

29:11We should say, Donald Trump, you know, cut a trillion dollars off of Medicaid to give rich people a tax cut. He's making your health insurance premium spike. He's stealing money for himself and his buddies. And we're going to reverse all those things.

29:25Jonathan Chait: To give rich people a tax cut, though. I mean, those are like the billionaires. A giant tax cut for the rich. Yes. It's the biggest upward transfer of resources in the history of the United States of America. That's what they should be focusing on. But when I hear that pitch, I also hear like the rich are in line with Donald Trump to get tax cuts because their policies work for them. So it does sound like, you know, we're just circling around the same idea. Like the billionaires have too much. They are not donating to the Democrats. They are donating to the Republicans via all sorts of different investment vehicles.

29:55Jonathan Chait: But that's only kind of true. And it's not true that every single problem you want to solve is the problem is—so like when Abdul El-Sayed talks about health care, he talks about these evil health insurance companies who are screwing you because they're greedy. When I'm talking about healthcare, I'm saying Donald Trump cut a trillion dollars off of Medicaid so we could give rich people a tax cut and we should restore that. Those are completely different concepts. Different concepts that might both be grounded in the same reality that we're occupying, though, right? I mean, I think the one that I said is true and the one that Al-Sahad said is like 20 % true.

30:29Jonathan Chait: 20 % true. I think, but there is some truth, right? Like the healthcare companies are - It's not completely false, but it's mostly false. Before I let you go, do you have any predictions for the midterms or beyond? Do you have a sense of where this is headed? I don't have any better sense than the polls in the betting markets. I mean, it looks like Democrats are favored narrowly to win the House and narrow underdogs to win the Senate. And, you know, I don't know anything more than those predictors do. And then we can, a few more elections, we can get rid of the Senate altogether, right? Yeah, we'll get there.

31:04Jonathan Chait: Jonathan Cheat, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Jonathan Chait is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest piece is called Abolishing the Senate Might Be the DSA's Best Idea. And that's the show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Temsu-Sharme, and Patrick Ford. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Rob Gunther. You can find me at BlueSky. I'm at 1RobGunther. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.

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