In Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the boys are not dragged to Pleasure Island. They are invited. A pleasant man with a warm manner promises them a place with no school, no work, no fathers, and no bills, and they climb into the coach on their own legs, laughing at the ones who stayed behind.
The transformation into donkeys does not happen at the gate. It happens later, gradually, while they are still enjoying themselves, and by the time the ears come in there is no one left to complain to, because complaining requires a voice and they no longer have one. Pinocchio escapes only because he is warned in time and runs. His friend Lampwick does not, and the last we see of him he is being worked to death in harness. The Coachman then sells them all. That was the business model from the beginning. The carnival was the gateway drug. The donkeys were the endgame.
Democratic socialism is that coach, and the American left has helpfully chosen the donkey as its own emblem, which spares the rest of us the trouble of inventing a metaphor. The Democratic Socialists of America have spent a decade being defended by people who insist the whole thing amounts to Denmark with better slogans, and that defense survives only because almost nobody bothers to read what the organization writes about itself.
The DSA program calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. It identifies the enemy not as this or that greedy executive but as the entire global system of capital. It calls for a new constitution and a democratic socialist republic, and it concedes, in writing, that some demands can be won under the current system while complete victory requires building a new society from the ground up. That is not Copenhagen. That is a stated intention to replace the constitutional order, published on the organization’s own website, in English, for free.
Housing is where the machinery is easiest to see, because housing is where they have been most candid. The DSA Housing Justice Commission states that social housing must expropriate property from capitalists and deliver it to the working class, and explains why in theoretical terms: capitalism depends on private ownership of land, and any program that leaves that ownership intact is not worthy of the name.
The Connecticut chapter closes the last escape hatch by insisting that the goal is to collectivize land ownership rather than merely transfer a deed from a private landowner to a state landowner. So when a candidate tells a room full of exhausted renters that he is fighting for their rent, he is telling the truth in the same way the Coachman told the truth about the free candy.
East Bay DSA has published the sequence in order, which is an act of transparency for which we should all be grateful. First comes universal rent control. Then comes the admission that public limits on the private housing market are not the ultimate goal, and that the transformative aim is to take housing off the speculative market altogether and bring land and housing under complete democratic control. Then comes the mechanism, spelled out with no euphemism at all: cancel rent, close the eviction courts, and as landlords exit the market, use state action to acquire private property.
Read that again slowly. The plan is not to seize the buildings from thriving owners in a dramatic morning raid. The plan is to make ownership legally worthless, wait for the owners to flee, and then have the state collect the carcass at a distress price while calling the whole process liberation.
Notice what the tenant actually receives at the end of this. He does not become an owner. He never becomes an owner, because ownership is the thing being abolished, and it is being abolished for him too, not only for the man he was taught to hate. He trades a landlord he can sue, leave, negotiate with, or outbid for a landlord who writes the housing code, staffs the housing courts, sets the maintenance budget, decides the waiting list, and counts the votes in the election that might theoretically remove him.
His old landlord wanted his money. His new landlord wants his compliance, and unlike the old one, the new one cannot be moved away from. There is no second apartment across town when the state owns both of them. The eviction courts that were closed on his behalf are not there for him either when the allocation committee decides his unit is too large for his household. This is the ears coming in.
Just to make these asinine concepts very real for those considering whether they want to vote to grow those ears: The Cato Institute just came out with a study that shows DSA proposals would jack US governmental spending from 40% of GDP in 2024 to up to 92%. That would cost the American taxpayer more than $200 trillion over 10 years - and we know that projections usually fall short of their promise.
The rest of the program follows the same shape. Nationalized banks are sold as a strike against Wall Street, and they end as a state that decides which citizens receive credit, which means a state that decides which citizens can start a newspaper, fund a campaign, hire a lawyer, or survive a season of unemployment after saying the wrong thing to through the wrong outlet or about the wrong people.
Opposition is not outlawed under such a system. It is simply defunded, quietly, by people with excellent intentions and complete discretion.
Democracy is not repealed. It is starved of the private ground it needs to stand on while the putatively democratic voting continues indefinitely but stops meaning anything.
The last free act of the electorate is the one that made all the subsequent ones ornamental.
Democratic socialism uses the tools of democracy the way the Coachman used the coach. The vehicle is real. The destination is real. The passengers are the merchandise and most of them have neither the knowledge nor the courage to understand what they are doing, why, and to where they are happily agreeing to go.
And when the American voter finally arrives at the promised land, having been assured the whole way that this is simply what compassion looks like in policy form, he will find that the only role left for him is the one his party has been openly printing on its own literature for over a hundred and fifty years.
