History gives us a useful name for what happens when political control expands into economic life: the apparatchik. In the Soviet system, party officials gained power because they sat inside machinery controlling jobs, housing, production, investment, and opportunity. Their influence came from position, not from building companies or competing for customers.

That is the danger in moving more industry and property into political hands. The people who control government gain more say over contracts, permits, financing, housing, energy, and opportunity. Socialism promises to break the power of elites, but it can instead replace them with a politically connected class backed by the state: a modern apparatchik system in everything but name.

DSA’s constitutional agenda would widen that power. The organization wants to abolish the Senate and Electoral College and replace the current presidency and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress. The Constitution specifically protects each state’s equal representation in the Senate unless the state agrees to surrender it. DSA wants the chamber gone, which helps explain why it also wants a new Constitution.

Its political strategy matches the ambition. DSA runs candidates through existing elections while building an organization distinct from the Democratic Party and a network of socialist elected officials. The objective is to accumulate power inside the current system and then use it to remake the system itself.

For most Americans, the economic consequences would arrive first. DSA promises universal health care without individual cost, free education through college, student debt cancellation, publicly owned housing, universal rent control, a federal jobs guarantee, and a 32-hour work week with full pay. Those commitments would land on a federal government already running enormous deficits.

Healthcare shows the scale. The Congressional Budget Office has modeled single-payer systems that would shift roughly $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in additional annual health spending onto the federal government. If demand rises faster than the supply of doctors, nurses, hospital beds, and operating rooms, people wait. In Canada, more than one-third of hip and knee replacements in 2025 were not completed within the country’s 26-week benchmark.

Housing presents another hard limit. The government can cap rents overnight, but it cannot create apartments by decree. Research on San Francisco found that expanded rent control led affected landlords to reduce rental housing supply by roughly 15%.

Families feel those distortions quickly. The average American household spends more than $6,000 a year on groceries consumed at home. A 5% increase adds roughly $300 annually; a 10% increase adds more than $600. The dollar raises the stakes further because its reserve currency status lowers American financing costs and gives Washington extraordinary financial leverage. Fiscal credibility is national power.

Public safety is even more immediate. DSA treats reductions in police power and funding as steps toward abolishing police and prisons. Yet when someone is raped, kidnapped, robbed, or murdered, society still needs officers who can intervene, investigators who can find the offender and secure institutions that can keep dangerous people away from the public. Research has repeatedly found that police presence can reduce violent crime and homicide. Reform law enforcement where necessary, but abolishing it strips the government of one of its most basic responsibilities.

The border is another basic responsibility. DSA wants ICE detention and deportation ended, broad amnesty, migration legalized, visa caps eliminated, and voting rights extended to permanent residents who are not citizens. Communities have finite housing, classroom space, hospital capacity, police staffing, and public dollars. CBO has found that recent immigration increased state and local revenues while increasing direct spending by even more. A sovereign country cannot control its future if it surrenders control over who enters and in what numbers.

The foreign policy agenda is where “radical” starts to feel inadequate. DSA wants American military bases overseas closed, military power sharply reduced, assistance to Israel terminated, and sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela lifted. America First has every reason to reject endless wars and failed nation-building, but restraint without strength is retreat. China does not become weaker because America closes forward bases. Iran does not become less dangerous because Washington abandons economic pressure. Russia does not become more restrained because the United States narrows its own options.

Taken together, that posture is borderline treasonous in its practical effect. It asks Americans to accept a political program that would intentionally reduce American leverage, weaken deterrence, and create more room for hostile governments to operate.

The same danger is emerging in the race for artificial intelligence. AI, advanced semiconductors, electricity, cloud computing, and data centers are becoming core infrastructure for military, intelligence, and economic power. Yet DSA chapters are organizing against data center construction while the national organization advocates greater political control over energy. Communities should demand that developers pay their infrastructure costs and protect ratepayers, but America cannot make the infrastructure of the AI era harder to build while China accelerates.

The DSA agenda ultimately points toward a country with more political control at home and less strategic power abroad. That is the opposite of national resilience, and the opposite of an America First approach built around sovereignty, strength, and deterrence.

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DSA intends to pursue that transformation through elections. The danger is not that America wakes up one morning as the Soviet Union. It is that Americans surrender, piece by piece and ballot by ballot, the constitutional, economic, and security advantages that allowed the United States to defeat the Soviet model in the first place.

That is a national security threat hiding in plain sight.

Colton Overcash is the founder of Vertex Strategies. He previously held two presidential appointments at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration and served on the staffs of U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis and U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx.