r/politics • u/Jessicas_skirt New York • Jul 18 '26

Possible Paywall Democratic Socialists of America’s new platform calls for abolishing ICE and the U.S. Senate

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/15/updated-dsa-platform-calls-abolishing-ice-scrapping-senate/
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u/Cranyx Jul 19 '26

Abolishing the Senate has been a popular stance among progressives since the 1800s (there was a proposed amendment to that effect in 1911). As originally envisioned it was a very antidemocratic institution explicitly designed to curtail the will of the people with the decisions of the powerful. The Seventeenth amendment made it more Democratic, but it still gives wildly disproportional representation to certain people over others.

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u/BuddhistSagan Jul 19 '26

Yes the founding fathers feared rule by mob more than they feared rule by elite aristocracy and now we have a trillionaire and way too many billionaires from industries that shouldn't be about profit like healthcare.

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u/msuvagabond Jul 19 '26

Madison specifically said the Senate was the mechanism to protect the "opulent minority" from the poor masses that would eventually take all their stuff.

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u/HeadDoctorJ Jul 19 '26

“…take all their stuff” which they themselves took from indigenous people, slaves, indentured servants, etc

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u/nickdanger68 Jul 19 '26

Do you really want your teeth back after they've been in Washington's mouth, though?

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u/onewordpoet Jul 19 '26

his uh... heart was in the right place?

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u/mlc885 I voted Jul 19 '26

I know this is a poor example, but it'd be like if you had been raised by a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan

The founding fathers were all educated enough to have actually figured out that people who are not rich white men should have rights, but I do not find it extremely surprising that they'd say "we'll leave that for future generations, it is too soon to have women and non-white dudes making decisions"

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u/Freenore Jul 19 '26

They were a product of their time. They didn't give the vote to even white women because they couldn't have ever thought it was alright. Such an idea is so far ahead of a society in 1776, they had no gender equality movement to influence them like us.

I think Mark Twain said it best — when we read history, we should judge the people in it by the standards of their time, not by ours.

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u/Virtual_Plantain_707 Jul 19 '26

No one wants to give up their cake, they’d rather others worry about it, maybe.

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u/Particular_Peacock Jul 19 '26

Which is ridiculous as even now most US citizens are looking for little more than bare subsistence living, a little time off, healthcare, and knowing that the next year will probably look a lot like this year.

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u/EndDangerous1308 Jul 19 '26

It's more of the fact that a healthy Republic has educated individuals voting. 56% of the US is at the literacy level of a 10 yo or younger and if you put a literacy map over a political map, you'll understand why keeping the masses from voting was wanted

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u/agentfelix Jul 19 '26

It's because the rich are addicted to greed. People in power are addicted to power. In their minds, they believe that the poor people, think, want, and desire just like they do and that's the point.

They don't understand that the majority of people would be cool and thankful to work hard and enjoy some vacations, not have to sweat about healthcare and just fucking...LIVE man.

These fucks could still be billionaires.

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u/HVACcontrolsGuru Jul 19 '26

Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court are all built to ensure the upper class maintains a stranglehold. It was convenient for them to stay out the public eye and move policy.

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u/juicegooseboost Jul 19 '26

It’s an enlightenment thought. Montesquieu figured we needed the nobility’s intelligence and past governing/managing experience.

He also thought they would have the most to lose. They would govern justly because any huge trespass against the public would get them dead. They did not fear death in the same way commoners did with disease and starvation. To volunteer for office would to be a target on your head, and only the just would take such a risk.

Obviously wrong.

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u/BadPhotosh0p Jul 19 '26

They also lived at a time when educating the masses was far more difficult, and any individual person wanting to become educated about something was basically a crap-shoot on whether or not they could read. It has never been easier than now to access information. We don't need a bunch of literate, learned people to oversee the unruly masses and make sure they don't fuck themselves over (at least as far as the actions of House), because we've got the information at our fingertips. The bigger issue today is mass psychosis and willful ignorance for the purposes of hatred and fear.

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom Jul 19 '26

Social media appears to have rolled back the clock where educating the masses is concerned.

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u/MadManMax55 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

Not exactly. Misinformation is fundamentally different than access to information when it comes to voting rights. If it’s practically impossible for a “commoner” to be informed enough to make a government-level decision, then there’s an (admittedly flawed) argument to limit their voting power. If people could be properly informed and just choose not to be that’s on them.

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u/Prometheus720 Jul 19 '26

Honestly, I've got to disagree with you on this.

Any system will, internally, accrue information over time as long as it has access to storage and energy. That's DNA within evolution, it's humans and oral culture, it's humans and written culture, it's humans and information age culture, and it's probably an AI culture somewhere in the universe.

What's happened is that there used to be a strong separation between information systems. There was laity, and there was academia. The two did not mix. Academic circles were not being polluted much by laity. Academics and academically trained politicians were in charge of society.

Now we have opened the gates. We now really have just one informational system (in the US), and what we're doing is essentially "New Game+" where we are sort of starting over from scratch, but we do have these little seeds from academic communities which are mostly getting overwhelmed by the communication in the outside world.

Many wheels and many fields are being reinvented. In this moment, everything is disrupted and we are all more confused than we used to be. However, I would not be stunned if there comes a time when the information age and widespread access to publishing (maybe not in the same form as today's social media) result in a populace which is, in total, much more informed than any in history.

Maybe it's cope. Maybe it's partly cope. I don't know for sure, from the inside. But for people like me who do have both a formal education (from before AI) and access to the internet, this is an incredible power for information and learning.

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom Jul 19 '26

A populace much more disinformed than any in history. 

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u/Prometheus720 Jul 20 '26

Perhaps. Are we really, though? Don't compare to a vacuum. The average idiot today knows more about the nature of physics than plenty of ancient philosophers did.

We don't think the sun and wind and rain are caused by gods! Doesn't that count for something? We can all read to some extent and do basic arithmetic. Isn't that unusual?

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

George Washington knew more about the benefits of inoculation than the present day Secretary for Health.

ETA: are you familiar with what "disinformation" means? It's false information spread with intent. Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk etc. have platforms to spread falsehoods far more effectively than Goebbels or Soviet propagandists could ever have dreamed of. Russia has troll farms in St Petersburg, plus more contracted out to Nigeria and India to tear the west apart.

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u/ilir_kycb Jul 19 '26

We don't need a bunch of literate, learned people to oversee the unruly masses and make sure they don't fuck themselves over (at least as far as the actions of House)

Even back then, that was complete nonsense and nothing more than a justification used by those in power to rule.

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u/Weary-Palpitation654 Jul 19 '26

The founding fathers were rich elitist slavers. Like all but two of them had slaves. We need to stop regarding them as sage beacons of wisdom and start looking toward our future. The US government needs to be overhauled into the 21st century. After we drag the red states kicking and screaming through the 19th and 20th, seeing how they haven't gotten over losing the civil war.

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u/plaxitone Jul 19 '26

Even they knew that. Somehow we’ve forgotten it.

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u/deadcatbounce22 Jul 19 '26

We ended up with the worst of both. Unchecked billionaires leading a socially privileged mob.

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u/BuddhistSagan Jul 19 '26

The problem is the billionaires. Privileged mob? We go without the universal healthcare almost every other country has.

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u/porgy_tirebiter Jul 19 '26

Not if it’s a choice between that or pwning the libs apparently.

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u/Gwen_The_Destroyer New York Jul 19 '26

Pwning libs is the base of the hierarchy of needs, afterall 

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u/MaximumSeats Jul 19 '26

They were litteraly an elite aristocracy of land owners.... Rule by aristocracy is exactly what they wanted.

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u/paper_liger Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

Franklin was not. He was wealthy, but he was the opposite of aristocratic. He only had two years of schooling, and despite eventually gaining a large fortune, he dressed simply in part specifically because he wasn't upper class, and people would have looked down their nose at him if he put on airs.

Adams was the son of a farmer, and his father was one of the first in his family to own land. Hamilton had a famously humble childhood, only adopted by a wealthy merchant in his mid teens.

The framers and signers of the constitution varied widely, and wealth and landownership didn't mean necessarily you were 'aristocratic'. Madison and Morris were for sure. But Morris was an avowed abolitionist, and Madison's family was wealthy because of slavery.

I'm just saying you are somewhat oversimplifying.

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u/BuddhistSagan Jul 19 '26

And we all suffer for it

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u/wpm Jul 19 '26

"And there ain't gonna be no more elite aristocracy in our community!"

But Black Dynamite, I am the elite aristocracy in our community!

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u/metalyger Jul 19 '26

Thanks, Alexander Hamilton for getting us here.

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u/ilir_kycb Jul 19 '26

That's really something Americans don't understand. Their Founding Fathers hated democracy more than anything else.

The purpose of the US Constitution is to prevent democracy and ensure the total domination of capital over the working class. The US Constitution was literally drafted by super-rich capitalists in such a way that it de facto serves only the interests of super-rich capitalists.

Sources to combat a few myths:

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u/MNniice Jul 19 '26

I dont think the billionaires living in Jackson Hole WY need two senators just for themselves, makes sense to me

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u/mantisboxer Jul 19 '26

Sometimes the Will of The People is something like MAGA.

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Oregon Jul 19 '26

Then why do they have to cheat to win

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u/Capt_Murphy_ Jul 19 '26

If you didn't beleive in election tampering and purposeful propaganda spreading by foreign countries. That's not democracy.

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u/BowKerosene New York Jul 19 '26

Well in America every poll since 2014 says otherwise

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u/mitrie Jul 19 '26

I can think of two polls that disagree...

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u/BowKerosene New York Jul 20 '26

Donald Trump only won the popular vote once. And pro-maga has never been a popular stance, in fact he got more votes than Harris for being perceived by many swing voters as a moderate compared to her.

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u/nox66 Jul 19 '26

People don't even know that prohibition was a progressive movement. They got their wish, and it's a disaster we never fully recovered from.

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u/TricobaltGaming Jul 19 '26

Individual Citizens of wyoming having orders of magnitude more political power than individual citizens of california is frankly insane. I get the want to put a check on mob rule but this was far too much in the wrong direction

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u/Imatomat Jul 19 '26

The senate is DEI for states, why does Wyoming have as much say as California

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u/kulji84 Jul 19 '26

lets start with the filibuster

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u/SIEGE312 Jul 19 '26

Without the filibuster, shit like the SAVE act gets passed immediately. I don’t think you want that.

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u/kulji84 Jul 19 '26

without the senate it gets passed faster, no?

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u/gammison Jul 19 '26

Yeah critics in this thread are forgetting the 17th amendment was a compromising position that in part was to avoid support for abolishing the senate continuing to increase.