"I walk slowly, but I never walk backward" Abraham Lincoln
When the Democratic Socialists of America released its 2026 platform, “Workers Deserve More," it presented a vision of governance that would have been unrecognizable to Abraham Lincoln—and antithetical to the Republican Party he helped build. While Lincoln and the antebellum Republicans argued for constitutional liberty and free labor within America’s existing framework, and while Reagan-era Republicans championed limited government and individual freedom, the DSA’s 2026 program calls for the abolition of police, prisons, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and national borders, alongside the nationalization of private corporations and state-run healthcare. A close comparison reveals that the DSA platform bears a far stronger resemblance to Mao Zedong’s ideology of perpetual class struggle and institutional demolition than to either Lincoln’s Republicanism or the conservatism of the Reagan era.
Lincoln and the Republican Founding: Rule of Law and Free Labor
The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 centered on the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln’s arguments were deeply rooted in constitutional process and moral persuasion. He opposed the extension of slavery into new territories and warned that a “house divided” could not stand, yet he never called for abolishing existing constitutional structures. The Republican Party was founded on the slogan “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” emphasizing individual opportunity and government protection of rights rather than government ownership of industry. Lincoln’s 1860 platform opposed slavery’s expansion but accepted constitutional limits on ending slavery where it already existed. The party’s core philosophy was incremental, legal, and institutional: it sought to end a great moral evil through speeches, elections, and legislation—not by dismantling the Senate, courts, or borders.
This tradition continued into the Reagan era. The 1980 Republican platform emphasized “lower taxes, limited government,” free enterprise, and individual liberty. Reagan conservatism was suspicious of state power, championed free markets, and framed American government as one of enumerated powers—a direct inheritance of the founders’ skepticism of centralized authority. Whether one agrees with its specifics, the Reagan Republican tradition saw the individual, not the collective, as the locus of sovereignty.
The DSA’s 2026 Platform: Institutional Abolition and State Control
By contrast, the DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” program reads as a blueprint for revolutionary transformation rather than reform. The platform explicitly demands abolishing the carceral state—police and prisons—while eliminating ICE and national borders. It calls for nationalizing private corporations, implementing state-run healthcare, imposing rent control, and providing free public college. Structurally, it seeks to abolish the Senate, replace the Supreme Court, eliminate the Electoral College, and extend voting rights to noncitizens. These are not policy tweaks; they are the wholesale demolition of America’s constitutional architecture.
Where Lincoln cautiously respected constitutional boundaries even while challenging slavery, the DSA treats existing American institutions as illegitimate obstacles to be torn down. Where Reagan Republicans believed “peace through strength” and constitutional order preserved freedom, the DSA characterizes America’s entire governmental framework as an apparatus of capitalism requiring destruction.
Parallels to Mao: Perpetual Revolution and Class Enemies
The DSA platform’s language and logic map far more neatly onto Mao Zedong’s ideology than onto Lincoln’s republicanism. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” was built on the concept of perpetual class struggle—the idea that even after socialists seized power, reactionary elements remained embedded within society and its institutions, requiring constant purification through mass mobilization. Mao called for the destruction of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. This translated into purging universities, attacking the judiciary, demonizing “capitalist roaders,” and dismantling traditional governance under the banner of revolutionary equality.
The DSA’s calls to abolish police, prisons, courts, and the Senate function as an American analogue. Rather than reforming institutions, the platform demands their elimination, substituting mass democracy and worker control for constitutional checks and balances. Like Mao’s Red Guards, DSA rhetoric frames political opposition not as disagreement but as structural evil—“capitalist,” “carceral,” or “fascist”—that must be uprooted. Mao sought to replace “bourgeois” authority with “people’s” communes; the DSA explicitly aims to shift “structural political and economic power away from corporations and into the hands of the working class.” Both treat private enterprise as an enemy class to be eliminated by state power.
Lincoln believed in a union of states with constitutional protections for individual rights; the DSA envisions a union of workers where nationalization replaces private property. Reagan Republicans warned that government expansion endangered liberty; the DSA proposes expanding state control over housing, healthcare, education, and industry to an extent Mao would recognize.
Why It Is Not Lincolnian
The differences are philosophical, not merely partisan. Lincoln’s Republicans saw government as a necessary protector of individual rights in a pluralistic society. They held debates, ran candidates, and passed laws. The DSA’s 2026 program treats democratic capitalism itself as illegitimate and frames its mission as revolutionary transformation. Lincoln opposed slavery because it denied human beings the fruits of their own labor; the DSA opposes capitalism because it allows individuals to keep the fruits of their own labor. For Lincoln, freedom *from* state-compelled labor was the goal; for the DSA, freedom *through* state-compelled redistribution is the method.
Abraham Lincoln once said that America was the “last best hope of earth” because it offered self-government under law. The Reagan-era Republican platform affirmed that vision through limited government and economic freedom. The 2026 DSA platform, by contrast, borrows its structure not from Springfield, Illinois, or from the Constitution, but from the ideology of Mao’s China: perpetual class struggle, the denunciation of existing institutions, and the conviction that only revolutionary demolition of the old order can birth a new society. In that sense, the platform is more Mao than Lincoln—and more revolution than republic.
As the DSA’s 2026 platform pushes beyond traditional left-wing reform into outright structural demolition—demanding the abolition of the Senate, Supreme Court, prisons, police, and national borders, while calling for the nationalization of private industry—the fault line between institutional Democrats and revolutionary democratic socialists is widening into a chasm that the party’s “big tent” may no longer be able to contain. Where mainstream Democrats still operate within the framework of constitutional governance, seeking to expand the welfare state through legislation and elections, the DSA treats that same framework as an illegitimate bulwark of capitalism to be dismantled by mass mobilization. This is not merely a disagreement over the size of government or the pace of change; it is a collision between reform and revolution, between a party that wants to capture the state and a movement that wants to abolish its core institutions. Should the DSA continue to elect candidates who openly embrace platform positions that read like a Maoist wish list—while simultaneously threatening to primary establishment Democrats deemed insufficiently radical—the coming Civil War 2.0 may not be between left and right, but between Democrats and democratic socialists, turning what was once an internal coalition dispute into a genuine struggle for the identity, and possibly even the survival, of the oldest political party on Earth and the American center-left in a way that could reshape the two-party system or spark something far more dangerous than a primary challenge.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
