The Gospel According to Marx: Why the DSA's Eschatology Is Apocalyptic for America

The Democratic Socialists of America are trying to abolish everything that makes sense other than religion. Instead of abolishing faith, they simply want to replace it.

Every totalitarian ideology needs a religion it can call politics. Marxism has never been a mere economic theory, whatever its adherents claim in academic journals. It is a faith with God evicted from the equation, complete with its own fall of man, its own chosen people, its own promised land, and its own final judgment. It simply refuses to call itself that. Now, the Democratic Socialists of America published new scripture, and the timing could not be more instructive.

At a June meeting of its National Political Committee, DSA leadership adopted a rebuilt platform titled “Workers Deserve More.” The document commits the organization to abolishing the United States Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” defunding the Department of War, granting amnesty to every illegal alien currently in the country, ending sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, and abolishing what it terms the “carceral forces of the capitalist state.”

It aims, in its own words, to “draft a new constitution” and build a socialist republic from the ground up.

This is not a fringe pamphlet passed around a folding table at a community college. It is the doctrinal statement of a movement that has tripled its presence in the United States House of Representatives in a single election cycle, seated a mayor in the nation’s largest city, and already convened an internal committee to scout a candidate for the White House in 2028. When a movement grows this fast, it is worth asking what it actually believes, and worth taking its answer seriously, because its adherents already do.

Workers Deserve More, Scripture Rewritten

Marx himself borrowed the architecture of the faith he despised. Original sin became the fall into private property. The chosen people became the proletariat. The promised land became the classless society. Final judgment became revolution. Read “Workers Deserve More” against that template and the plagiarism is almost embarrassing.

The abolition of the Senate and the subjugation of the presidency and the courts to a single legislative body is not democratic reform. It is the overturning of an old temple order in favor of a new one, consolidated and unchecked.

The demand to abolish the “carceral forces of the capitalist state,” stripped of the euphemism, means no police, no prisons, and no consequence, a purification ritual dressed up as public policy.

Universal amnesty for every illegal border crosser is a false ingathering of exiles, ushering the world’s poor into a promised land without so much as a customs form, let alone judgment.

Public ownership of “the largest corporations and essential industries” is a wageless Eden, an economy purged of its curse.

And lifting every sanction on Havana, Caracas, and Tehran is nothing more than solidarity with a chosen remnant against a capitalist Babylon that the platform’s authors insist is the true source of the world’s suffering.

None of this is new. It is the same offer made in the garden, updated for committee votes and press releases.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

That is the entire pitch, restated. Man does not need God, representative government, or the messy compromises of a constitutional republic. He needs only the courage to seize the right levers of power, and paradise follows. Genesis identified the lie six thousand years before a National Political Committee gave it a press release.

The Liturgy of Solidarity Forever

Listen to how the movement’s own leaders talk, and the religious register becomes impossible to miss. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the DSA’s highest-profile officeholder, has explained his own conversion in language that would not be out of place at a tent revival.

I say sincerity forever, solidarity forever, and socialism forever.

After June’s primary sweep in New York, in which DSA-backed candidates dispatched a five-term congressional incumbent and a sitting borough president, Mamdani did not describe the results as a policy win. He described them as the start of something. A year of momentum, he told the crowd, was not the end of a political movement but the beginning of one, the kind of resurrection language a pastor reaches for when the tomb turns out to be empty rather than the language a campaign consultant reaches for when a candidate wins an assembly seat.

Even the internal disputes read like a church council arguing over a creed. When DSA delegates debated the exact wording of the platform’s police and prison abolition plank, factions split over whether “abolition” meant total elimination or merely defunding toward zero over time, a distinction with the same stakes, and the same tone, as a doctrinal fight over transubstantiation.

One faction leader insisted the demand remained essential to “defining the organization’s political direction” even if elected officials could not yet implement it. That is not a policy conversation. That is theology, argued by people who no longer believe they need God to referee it.

A Revival, Not a Strategy Memo

Revivals are measured in converts, and this one is converting at a pace that should alarm anyone who assumed democratic socialism was a passing enthusiasm of college sophomores. A year ago, the DSA held two seats in Congress. After this year’s primary cycle, the organization is on track for at least seven, with more races still outstanding.

More than thirty DSA-backed candidates have already won their primaries with results still trickling in from races across the country. Victories and runoff advances have landed in at least five states, not merely the deep blue precincts of Brooklyn and Queens where the movement first took root.

The organization does not describe this growth as a strategy memo, either. Its own organizers speak openly about the method in evangelistic terms, canvassers logging what they call millions of individual conversations aimed at winning converts one household at a time, the same math a church plant uses to describe a decade of growth. The result is a movement no longer content with city council seats and state assembly districts. Its leadership has confirmed it is already exploring a run at the presidency in 2028, a scale of ambition that should end, once and for all, the polite conservative habit of treating the DSA as a curiosity rather than a competitor.

The Man Who Exalts Himself

Set aside the individual planks for a moment and look at the structure the platform proposes. Abolish the Senate. Strip the presidency of independent authority. Make the judiciary “subordinate to Congress.” Every check the founders built to slow the ambitions of a single faction gets dismantled in the name of liberating the working class. What remains is not democracy purified of its flaws. It is one institution, unrestrained, claiming final authority over the other two, precisely the concentration of power the platform’s authors claim to fear when a king or a corporation holds it.

Scripture has a name for that pattern, and it is older than Marx by two thousand years.

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God.

The specifics change. The posture does not. Whether the self-exaltation arrives wrapped in royal purple or a union windbreaker, the underlying claim is identical: that a single human institution, purged of every rival, can be trusted with total authority, because the intentions behind it are good. History has never once rewarded that trust, and there is no reason to believe a committee in Brooklyn has found the exception.

The Apocalypse They Don’t Mean

Apocalypse, in its original sense, means an unveiling, and Scripture reserves that final unveiling, the true judgment of nations, for God alone. A platform that promises to abolish the police, the prisons, the presidency, the Senate, and the border, all in the name of liberation, does not produce the unveiling of a new Eden. It produces a vacuum, and vacuums in human affairs are never filled with nothing. They are filled with whatever proves strongest once the restraints are gone.

Even some of the movement’s own newest officeholders seem to sense the gap between the platform’s ambition and the reality of governing. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed congressional nominee who unseated a five-term Democratic incumbent this year on a platform that once called for abolishing borders, police, and prisons outright, has already declined to commit to backing future primary challengers against sitting Democrats, telling reporters those are decisions “you come to your community when the time comes.”

That hesitation is worth noting. It suggests that even true believers understand, at some level, that the platform’s promises do not survive contact with the responsibility of holding office.

America has entertained utopian religions dressed as politics before. Every one of them promised a fall to overcome, a chosen people to liberate, and a final judgment on the wicked, and every one of them, once handed real power, produced something considerably darker than the paradise advertised.

The Democratic Socialists of America did not invent this pattern. They simply gave it a platform, a press release, and, for the first time in a generation, a plausible path to Capitol Hill. The country would do well to read the document for what it actually is before it mistakes a new religion for a new policy agenda.

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