DSA radicals trying to centralize power by scrapping the Senate are completely ignorant of our history

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.Its plans call for, among other things, abolishing the US Senate and making the executive branch and the Supreme Court subservient to the House of Representatives.Like many a revolutionary organ, the DSA acts as a party within a party, and it increasingly represents the youth wing of the Democrats.Elected officials aligned with the group, like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, look to be the future of the party.Yet the DSA’s ideas are remarkably old-fashioned — so old, in fact, they were refuted by John Adams in 1787.That was the year he began publishing a multi-volume work called “A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America.” (It was so long ago Americans still spelled “defence” with a “c.”)The book refers to “constitutions,” plural, because Adams hadn’t seen the new US Constitution drawn up in Philadelphia that year: He was actually defending the state constitutions against French intellectuals who insisted they should be more radical.That was just two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, with all the murder and mayhem it would bring.The old French versions of today’s DSA schemers condemned bicameral legislatures for the same reason Mamdani and AOC’s fans do now: Their idea of “democracy” called for centralizing power in a single body.No checks, no balances and certainly no federalism — the whole nation was to be personified in an omnipotent unitary legislature.Adams, who’d 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 kind of centralized despotism — so he ...