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The Democratic Socialists of America, an insurgency within the Democratic Party, is having a moment, and it is showing us something worth noticing: This is the democracy John Adams warned us about.

Given the record of socialism in power, critics of the DSA and what it stands for are justified in suspecting that these radicals are not actually all that serious about the democratic part of democratic socialism, that the word “Democratic” in the faction’s name is no more meaningful than in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But the thing to be feared here is the opposite: They are extremely serious about the democratic part and will strip Americans of their rights, liberty, and property in the name of—and with the aid of—democracy.

Democracy is the oxygen of the American political atmosphere, and as in the physical atmosphere, you only want a little bit of that oxygen—too much oxygen in the mix and the political metaphors start to write themselves: People develop tunnel vision, the central nervous system breaks down, tiny sparks turn into explosions and conflagrations, and the thing we cannot do without becomes the thing that kills us. Sola dosis facit venenum, advises the old physician Paracelsus: It is the dose that makes the poison.

What distinguishes the American constitutional order is not its democratic components—which it has in common with any number of daft utopian schemes and failed revolutionary projects—but its antidemocratic components: the Bill of Rights, which places Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties beyond the reach of mere majorities, the division of national powers among the branches and subdivision within the legislative branch, the further division of political power between the national government and the states, etc. On top of these is the broader American order that counterbalances political power per se with private power, including civic institutions explicitly protected by the Constitution (the press, religious bodies, private associations) as well as that greatest of all guarantors of liberty: property.

The DSA, in the name of democracy, proposes to remove all buffers between the individual and centralized national political power wielded on a purely majoritarian basis. The DSA would, according to its own platform, abolish the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, and replace the latter two with House committees controlled by the majority party. The DSA would eliminate Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to criticize elected officials (by, among other things, nullifying the Citizens United decision) or to petition them for redress of grievances (by abolishing lobbying), and put elections under the control of the majority party in Congress by mandating state to control of the financing of political campaigns. It would override property rights by imposing state ownership on U.S. businesses.

This is a formula for mob rule, of course, and the DSA would expand the size of the mob by extending voting rights to noncitizens and incarcerated felons. It is strange—and ahistorical—for the DSA to assume that it and its allies will always have the biggest mob, as though Donald Trump had not received millions more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024. Nationalists, socialists, and national socialists are always confident that they have the People on their side, and all of them are right—at times.

It is not only the radical left that wishes to eliminate our constitutional safeguards and competing centers of power. The so-called new right (the fourth or fifth “new right” in our political history) sneers at “procedural liberalism” and insists that the “common good” provides the caudillos of their dreams with a moral mandate to restrict economic liberties and ordinary daily liberties (see, e.g., Sohrab Ahmari’s entirely insipid odes to the so-called blue laws), to wield the force of the state to put American businesses (especially technology companies) under political discipline, etc. The most contemptible of them reject such foundational American commitments as religious liberty and advocate, as in the case of Curtis Yarvin, a return to monarchy. They speak more often in terms of old-fashioned European étatisme and that slippery “common good,” but the closer they approach to electoral politics the quicker they are to invoke “the People” on whose behalf they, like their leftist variants, purport to be acting. The division of power and structural limitations on political ambition are no less inconvenient to the utopians of the right than to the utopians of the left.

“Absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats,” as John Adams observed. Adams was at times terrifyingly prescient:

Obsta principiis, nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.

(The war against foppery is, alas, evidently lost.)

Adams was famously acerbic on the subject of democracy—which, being an intelligent and educated man, he understood to be something distinct from what the United States has long enjoyed, i.e., a republican form of government with its motions controlled by certain limited democratic processes:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.

What the DSA has in mind is the democracy that Adams warned us about: one in which power, once blessed by a temporary majority, is arbitrary, undivided, and irresistible. The DSA promises that it will use this only to do good for the People, which is, of course, the same promise various peoples heard from the Jacobins before their Reign of Terror, from Lenin and Stalin before their terror, from Mao before his terror, from Hitler before his terror—and from Donald Trump, who murders and oppresses and steals and terrorizes while promising that his only ambition is to “Make America Great Again.” I do not mind if the ladies and gentlemen of the DSA wish to call that “democracy,” which is what John Adams called it.

But, if you ask me, terror is terror.