In a recent interview that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received, Megan Romer, national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, offered a window into the ideology now tightening its grip on the American left. Her words were not the careful equivocations of a seasoned politician but the unfiltered recitation of a radical catechism, a checklist of destruction aimed squarely at the constitutional architecture, economic liberty, and national sovereignty that built the most prosperous nation in human history. The positions she affirmed as “long-term goals” were not mere progressive reforms. They were the erasure of America itself.
Consider the inventory: abolish the United States Senate. Replace the presidency and the Supreme Court in their present forms. Eliminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement, erase national borders, and grant unconditional amnesty to every person residing in the country illegally. Slash Pentagon spending to levels that would render national defense a historical curiosity. Largely abolish the prison system. Place the vast majority of large corporations under public ownership. This is not a policy platform; it is a declaration of war against the separation of powers, the rule of law, private property, and the very concept of a sovereign nation. When a leading figure of an organization that wields growing influence within the Democrat coalition openly calls for liquidating the Senate and seizing the means of production, it is no longer alarmist to label that agenda communist. It is simply accurate.
Communism, draped in whatever euphemism the intellectual fashion of the moment demands, has never worked anywhere in the history of humanity. From the famines of Soviet collectivization to the empty grocery shelves of modern Venezuela, from Mao’s Great Leap Forward to the starving masses of North Korea, the story is unvarying: centralized control of the economy, the abolition of private enterprise, and the destruction of independent political institutions produce not equality but mass immiseration, not liberation but gulags, not solidarity but informants. Romer’s utopia is a historical graveyard, and her only originality lies in the blithe confidence with which she offers to lead Americans into the same abattoir.
What makes Romer’s performance particularly galling is the pseudo-intellectual gloss she applies to these corpse-strewn dogmas. When pressed on the mechanics of her wealth confiscation scheme; what tax rate, what threshold, what mechanism she produced nothing. Distinguishing between millionaires and billionaires, she invoked the Marxist incantation of “worker exploitation” and insisted that tax policy should be based on “public spending needs” and a “transition away from dependence on wealthy people.” This is not economic reasoning. It is the verbal tic of an undergraduate who skimmed half a manifesto and now believes profundity lies in refusing to answer questions. Concrete numbers are for the unenlightened; for the visionary, it is enough to wave at abstractions. In the real world, capital flight, collapsing investment, and devastated pension funds would be the immediate returns on such magical thinking. The economy that would emerge from Romer’s revolution would make the Great Depression look like a boom, and the first to starve would be the very workers she claims to champion; herself among them, should her ideological consistency ever be tested.
Yet the truly damning indictment falls not on Romer alone but on the Democrat Party that finds it politically expedient to embrace her and her ilk. No serious observer can claim that every elected Democrat endorses abolishing the Senate or nationalizing General Motors. But the distance between the party’s official posture and the DSA’s red manifesto shrinks by the day. Democrat politicians court DSA endorsements, parrot their vocabulary, and refuse to draw the bright lines that would quarantine this ideological contagion. The reason is as simple as it is craven: power. In their desperation to cobble together a winning electoral coalition, Democrat strategists have decided that the votes of hard-left activists are worth the price of legitimizing people who openly despise the American founding. It is a transaction, and the currency is the country’s institutional integrity.
This transaction exposes more than panic; it exposes a stunning intellectual bankruptcy. The party that once claimed the mantle of reason and working-class advocacy now hitches its wagon to a figure incapable of articulating a single practical mechanism for her revolutionary desires. Megan Romer is not a deep thinker. She is a propagandist who strings together emotionally charged fragments—abolish this, seize that—without the faintest comprehension of the systems she would dismantle. To call her a pseudo-intellectual is generous, for even that term implies an attempt at intellectual engagement. What she offers is ideological ventriloquism: the regurgitation of communist platitudes that were stale a century ago, repackaged in the idiom of the campus common room. When the Democrat apparatus signals that such a figure belongs anywhere near the levers of influence, it confesses its own dereliction. Following a dummy because she wears the correct jersey is not strategy; it is self-indictment.
And here the chant comes into view, that perfect distillation of the mind they have become: “Vote blue no matter who.” It is a slogan designed to bypass the faculty of judgment, to reduce citizenship to tribal affiliation. Competence, character, policy coherence, all are irrelevant so long as the candidate bears the proper label. This is how a political movement transforms into a cargo cult, bowing before empty vessels in the hope that they will deliver the party to power. The same electorate that mechanically repeats “no matter who” would, and does, elevate the most glaringly unqualified individuals to office simply because they promise to caucus with the right team. Supporting a person who cannot defend her own proposals beyond vacuous moralizing is not an act of political loyalty; it is evidence of a brain so smoothed by partisanship that critical thought can no longer find purchase.
The ultimate irony is that the America Romer and her comrades would dismantle is the only reason she can safely speak such nonsense without consequence. The First Amendment she would functionally eviscerate by restructuring the Supreme Court protects her. The prosperity generated by the capitalist system she loathes provides the platform, the technology, the leisure, and the audience for her diatribes. She stands on the shoulders of free enterprise while trying to slit its throat, never grasping that the blade would pass through her own neck before anyone else’s.
The Democrat Party has a choice. It can continue to treat democratic socialism as a quirky junior partner, downplaying its ultimate objectives while borrowing its activist energy, and in so doing prove that it is even more intellectually vacuous than the ideologues it shelters. Or it can rediscover the elementary truths that borders are not oppression but the precondition of self-government, that the separation of powers is not an obstacle to justice but its guarantor, and that private property is not theft but the engine of human flourishing. The early indicators suggest it will do neither, because a party that has made peace with “Vote blue no matter who” has already surrendered its capacity for discernment.
Megan Romer is not the cause of that surrender; she is its symptom. Her radicalism is not a fresh danger but an old poison in a slightly redesigned bottle. It is anti-capitalist because capitalism gives ordinary people power that the central planner can never tolerate. It is anti-American because America remains history’s most decisive refutation of the collectivist lie. That a major political coalition now flirts openly with this ideology is a sign of deep civilizational sickness. The cure begins with calling the sickness by its name, no matter how many pseudo-intellectuals put on a blue tie and insist the red in their lapel is really just a new shade of moderation.