You Are Asking for the Keys

There is a political genre I have come to distrust. It begins with an invitation to imagine. Imagine waking up without debt. Imagine never worrying about a medical bill. Imagine housing guaranteed as a right. Imagine working fewer hours. Imagine retirement secured by the public. Imagine food, energy, medicine, education, and transportation no longer organized around profit. This is more or less how the Democratic Socialists of America open their 2026 program, Workers Deserve More. In their “Day Without Capitalism,” the future is secure, humane, materially generous, and liberated from many of the humiliations that define ordinary American life. The same program then moves into much larger territory: a 32-hour workweek with full pay, universal rent control, public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, abolition of the Senate, replacement of the presidency and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress, and steps toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.” I have to admit something: much of the first paragraph sounds lovely. I would also like a balcony. The problem begins when the movement moves from describing the life it wants to describing the authority it needs. At that point I am no longer reading a healthcare proposal. I am being shown plans for another constitutional and economic order. Except they are not really plans. They are more like watercolor renderings of the lobby. This is the problem I want to discuss. Not socialism itself. Not whether capitalism is sacred. Not whether the existing order deserves preservation merely because we inherited it. It does not. I support universal healthcare. I support substantially higher taxes on extreme wealth. I support reducing the ability of concentrated money to purchase political power. None of those convictions requires me to pretend that a movement proposing to redesign the state has explained itself merely because it has chosen morally attractive nouns. A democratic movement asking citizens to delegate power owes them information proportional to the power being requested. The burden of specification should rise with four things: magnitude, discretion, coercion, and irreversibility. The larger the change, the more discretion officials will exercise, the more coercive authority will be required, and the harder the change will be to undo, the more citizens deserve to know in advance. If you are asking to repaint the kitchen, I do not need structural drawings. If you are asking to remove two load-bearing walls, replace the electrical system, transfer ownership of the building, rewrite the deed, and move the staircase, I would like considerably more than a vision statement. America is the building. You are asking for the keys. I. The Burden of Specificity No political program can answer everything in advance. That would be absurd. Legislation changes during negotiation. Agencies write regulations. Courts intervene. Economic conditions move. Coalitions fracture. Unexpected events occur. Nobody proposing a modest adjustment to a tax credit needs to arrive at a campaign rally carrying appendices on Treasury enforcement procedure. But the amount of tolerable ambiguity should decline as the amount of delegated power increases. A proposal to change a tax rate leaves most of the constitutional and economic order intact. A proposal to alter the ownership structure of the largest corporations does not. A proposal to reduce incarceration can be debated through sentencing law, prison policy, and rehabilitation. A proposal to abolish police and prisons eventually has to tell us which institutions will exercise coercive authority instead. A proposal to improve Congress is one thing. A proposal to abolish the Senate, replace the presidency, subordinate the judiciary to Congress, and draft a new constitution is another. This is not because radical ideas are automatically illegitimate. Some radical changes are necessary. It is because the democratic stakes are different when the action is difficult to reverse after power has been transferred. You vote before the machinery exists. Then the movement wins. Then the machinery gets designed. Perhaps you like what emerges. Perhaps you do not. But by then the people interpreting the mandate possess the authority to act. This is the danger concealed inside the phrase we will work out the details democratically. When? Before the election? Excellent. Afterward? Less comforting. The problem with “we’ll work out the details later” is that later is usually after you have the power. And once political actors possess power, they become remarkably imaginative about what voters authorized. Details are not bureaucratic decoration. They are how democratic consent becomes meaningful. II. The Coalition Needs the Vagueness Take one of the largest promises in the DSA program: public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. Which corporations? What counts as large? Market capitalization? Revenue? Employment? Market share? Strategic importance? Who owns them legally? The Treasury? A sovereign wealth fund? Workers? States? Citizens individually? A new federal holding corporation? Who appoints the board? Can an administration remove management? Can Congress direct capital expenditure? Can the company issue debt? Can it acquire competitors? Can it close an unproductive division? Can it move production? Who receives the profits? What happens to existing shareholders? Are they compensated? At what price? What happens to pension funds and retirement accounts holding the shares? These are not hostile questions. They are what ownership means. And DSA’s own discussion of the program makes the ambiguity unusually revealing. One of the people involved in drafting it explained that “public ownership” had been left broad enough to hold together different currents inside the organization’s “big tent.” Different factions may imagine different institutional arrangements when they read the same phrase. That is politically convenient. It is also exactly the problem. Public ownership can mean direct state ownership. It can mean social wealth funds. It can mean worker ownership. It can mean municipal ownership in selected sectors. It can mean something closer to extremely heavy regulation of nominally private firms. Those are not versions of the same mechanism. They distribute power differently. They distribute risk differently. They create different incentives. They create different opportunities for corruption. They fail differently. This is where ambiguity becomes useful to a coalition. Details divide people. Everyone can agree on “economic democracy.” The fight begins when someone asks who appoints the board. Everyone can applaud “public ownership.” The fight begins when someone asks whether a retiree’s shares are bought, seized, converted, or left alone. Everyone can agree that concentrated private power is dangerous. The coalition becomes less serene when someone asks precisely how much concentrated public power will replace it. Abstract language allows factions to stand under the same banner while imagining different institutions. That may be useful for movement-building. It is not sufficient for democratic authorization. A movement’s internal need for ideological harmony is not a substitute for the citizen’s need to know what the movement intends to do with power. Suppressing disagreement does not create unity. It postpones the argument until after the election. That is not democratic depth. It is constructive ambiguity with a ballot attached. III. The Left Has Excellent Demolition Verbs Then we reach the part of the activist left that I find considerably harder to take seriously. It has developed an extraordinary command of demolition verbs. Defund. Abolish. Dismantle. Decommodify. Decolonize. The vocabulary for construction remains noticeably smaller. There was a glorious period in American politics when apparently every failing institution could be repaired by adding … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com