DSA: Abolish Everything. Explain Nothing. | Sequel Sunday

The DSA has a magic word: abolish.

But “abolish” is not a construction plan.

In this Sequel Sunday episode, Chad Law breaks down the DSA’s language, its platform, and the Democratic Party’s strange relationship with a movement it wants to distance itself from while borrowing much of its policy direction.

This episode asks one simple question:

When political movements tell you what they want to tear down, do they know what goes there next?

📲 Text/call the show: 252-CHAD-LAW
 🌐 Home base: ChadParkerLaw.com
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Chapters:
00:00 The Magic Word of DSA
01:25 The Language of Revolution
04:22 Understanding the DSA’s Program
06:37 The Vision of a Socialist Day Off
09:45 Abolishing Institutions: The DSA’s Demands
12:32 The Complexity of Abolition
15:27 The Haircut Analogy: Wanting vs. Hating
18:19 The Reality of Democratic Policies
20:46 The Operating System of Capitalism
21:14 The 32-Hour Work Week: A Dual Perspective
24:26 The Rise of Democratic Socialism
30:05 Democratic Party Dynamics and DSA Influence
33:19 The Real Test for Democratic Socialists
38:48 Demolition vs. Construction: The Language of Politics
42:20 Final Thoughts: Evaluating Political Promises

#DSA #CommonSenseWithChadLaw #SequelSunday

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

America, the DSA sure has a magic word, don't they? Abolish. Abolish the Senate. Abolish prisons. Abolish ICE. Defund the police. Replace the Supreme Court. Replace the Presidency. Say it fast enough, it sounds like courage, it does. But when you slow it down, it's something else entirely. These people are fluent in demolition and functionally illiterate in construction. Because the second question is always the killer. Okay, abolish it. Sure. Great, okay. Replace it with what? Who pays for it? Who runs it? Who enforces it? And who gets punished when it fails? That's the big one. That's where the whole thing starts to wobble. The demolition language is a graduate seminar, folks. The construction language is a guy pointing at a wall going, yeah, put something there. Hey America, it's Chad Law, the last gay conservative. This is common sense, the show where we read the fine prints so you don't have to. And if you've got something to add while we do this or think I've got it dead wrong, text me, 252 Chad Law. I read them at the end of the show. So let's take this thing apart. On Friday, I showed you two of their leaders come apart under a four-word question. And a bunch of you told me to slow down and do it properly. So here's the move in 20 seconds, because the move is this entire episode. Their national co-chair says they believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires. Terrific sentence. Sounds muscular. Sounds like somebody who's already been in the meeting, already run the numbers, already lost patience with everyone in the room, right? Put it on the desk and pull it apart. Tax is a real word. Somebody's going to owe money. The hell out of, that's not a rate. That's not a number. That's a temperature. It tells you how angry we're going to be while we do it. Millionaires, that's the defendant. But take the heat off. Read what's left standing. We think some wealthy people should pay higher taxes. That's it. That's your revolution. The proposition is about as radical as a minivan. Democrats have run on it since before I was born. It's been in the platform for fifty years. Every ounce of energy in that sentence came from three words that contained no information whatsoever. That was one sentence. Today, we do it to an entire platform. And here's where I say something you will not hear anywhere else this week. Everybody's fighting about the label. Is it socialism? Is it not socialism? Are they Marxists? Are they just Denmark with worse food? My side runs that word up the flagpole and hopes you get scared. Their side runs the same word up the same flagpole and hopes you get inspired. And it's working beautifully for both of them. But as long as we're arguing about the word, nobody ever has to answer the construction question. The right gets a monster, the left gets to sound like a revolution, and the Democratic Party gets to look reasonable rejecting a verb while quietly keeping the direction. Everybody at that table's getting paid except you. It's a professional wrestling feud where both guys own the arena. So we're not just doing the label today. Not is socialism bad, that's too easy. That's cable news baby food. Here's the better question. Why does the DSA sound revolutionary about what America needs to destroy and sound like a normal progressive Democrat the second you strip the slogan off the actual policy? Because most of this isn't some brand new socialist blueprint. It's tax more, spend more, regulate more, unionize more, subsidize more. Standard Democrat policy inventory. And I don't say that as an insult. I say it as a reading assignment. Their program came out last month. It's free. It took me 40 minutes. So here it is. Here's the word after the revolution. Universal health care, free college, rent control, and tax the rich. That is not the storming of the winter palace. That's a democratic primary debate with better lighting. Every one of those has been argued on stage, on television, by somebody with a D next to their name in my lifetime. Now, some of it is genuinely radical, and I'm not soft pedaling it because the real thing is worse than the caricature. Same document. Replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary chosen by a subordinate to Congress. Draft a new constitution. Not amend one, draft one. Folks, nobody says draft a new constitution about a country they're planning to stick around in. But look at what's wrapped around all of it. Oppressor and oppressed, abolition, liberation, the owning class, and underneath every line the same moral suggestion. Then America is not a flawed country you fits. It's an exploitation machine you must dismantle. That's the difference. Not the spreadsheet, the story. And that is why the Democratic Party cannot decide whether disown these people or borrow their vocabulary. Right now they're attempting both. In the same sentence on camera. It's not working. So today we're doing translation. Take the slogan, strip off the costume, and ask the only question that matters. Is there a construction plan under there? Or is this just demolition language pretending to be compassion? Well, let's find out. Let me tell you where this document came from because it does matter. This is not a tweet. This is not four people in Portland going rogue at a meeting with a folding table and a laptop. Last year, the DSA held a national convention and elected a committee to write a program. That committee met most weeks from April through June. National Political Committee members, heads of their national committees, rank and file, they wrote it, debated it, edit it, and sent it upstairs to be approved. There are minutes. Somebody made a slide. Somebody said, let's take this offline. It's called Workers Deserve More. It went up last month, free on their own website. There's a print version if you'd like to hold it. So when somebody tells you this is a conservative caricature, it's a PDF. It has a table of contents off their own website. And I want to start where they start, because if I skip this, I'm doing the exact same thing I spent Friday complaining about. The program opens with a story. A day without capitalism. It asks you to imagine a day off. You like your work, you're trained for it, you work as much as you're able and no more than needed. You don't really have bills, no debt, no landlord, no mortgage, no health insurance. Your retirement's publicly funded. And then it asks you what you do with the day. Walk your kids to school, run errands, doctor's appointment, play a sport, see friends at night, eat together, maybe go to the movies. And then it says a socialist day off could be like any good day now. I'm not making fun of that. I'd be lying if I did. That's a person describing a life without dread. That's the whole pitch. No dread Sunday night, no dread when the mail comes, no dread at the pharmacy counter. Everybody wants that. I want that. So hang on to it because that's their brochure. But now let's read the contract. Same document. Section called a real democracy. Number one, abolish the Electoral College. Replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Next section, a Democratic Congress. Replace the two-party system, expand the House, proportional representation and ranked choice voting in every election, and abolish the Senate. Keep going, end mass incarceration, demilitarize the police, break the police unions, redirect the funding as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison systems. Foreign policy, abolish ICE, end detention and deportations, legalize migration, amnesty for all immigrants, regardless of status, and end visa caps. Defund the Department of War, which is what it's called again, so at least somebody over there is keeping up. Economic democracy, public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. So the DMV, but for everything. And in the preamble before any of it, the sentence that tells you what the whole document is, they're fighting to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic. Now notice how that reads. Every one of those has a verb and an object. Abolish what? Replace with what? Chosen how, subordinate to whom, expand which chamber, redirect from where. There's no fog anywhere in it. People sat in a room and picked those words on purpose and then a committee voted on them. That is a precise document. Whatever else you think, nobody was mumbling. Hold that thought about four minutes, because a couple weeks back, their co-chair went on C-SPAN and did something I'll give him credit for. A Sheik Sidiq, National Co-Chair, Washington Journal, just as about as friendly as a room as exists in this country, unless you count the callers, and the callers were hostile in a very polite way. From Ohio at seven in the morning. He gets asked about abolishing the Senate, and he answers. He says the Senate is a very undemocratic institution. Says a state with a small population gets the same representation as a state with 40 million people. Says government should be proportional to the population. That's a basic core principle. The House already works that way, and his words, we just don't see the point of the Senate. Then he says historically it was built to serve wealthy people who owned a lot of land, and that's still the system we've got. That's an answer. It's a real answer. I think he's dead wrong. The entire point of the thing is that Wyoming doesn't get erased by California, and the small state protection is the only reason there's a country here instead of thirteen of them. But that's a proposition with edges on it. He came down the stairs, you can argue with it. And his co-chair fills in the rest. Expand Congress significantly, make it one chamber. There it is. One house, bigger, proportional. Somebody answered the question. He also said, and I want this on record because it's the most revealing thing anybody in this story has said out loud, that's part of our platform, and we don't think that's extreme. So they can do it. That's established. Nobody in that organization is incapable of a specific answer, which makes the rest of the document so strange. Take the very next demand, same page, same section, replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Chosen how? Majority vote? Which majority? Subordinate? Meaning what exactly? Can Congress remove a judge? Remove him for what? For ruling the wrong way? Because if the legislator writes the law, appoints the judge, and can fire the judge over the ruling, you haven't built a judiciary. You've built a performance review. That's letting the defendant pick the judge, pick the jury, and decide whether we're having a trial. And who's the executive? Somebody Congress picks. Who answers to Congress is not a president. We already have a word for that. It's called staff. They didn't abolish the presidency, they demoted it to middle management. Now, the strongest version of their side, and I looked it up instead of guessing, that's roughly how a parliamentary system works. There are functioning democracies that pull executives out of the legislature. Britain, Israel, it's a real answer. I'm not pretending otherwise. But here's my problem with it. Those countries have the rest of the plumbing. They have a separate head of state, independent judicial appointments, conventions built over centuries, and every one of them has spent the last ten years in a knife fight over precisely this. Israel damn near came apart over whether the legislator could overrule its own Supreme Court. So subordinate to Congress isn't a design, it's one word carrying an entire branch of government and nobody defined it. Period. Then there's the new constitution. Who drafts it? Which convention? Who's in the room and who picks them? What's the ratification threshold? Because right now you need two-thirds of both chambers, or two-thirds of the state calling a convention, and then three quarters of the states to ratify. And one of the two chambers you'd need is the one you'd just abolished. That's asking a building to demolish itself, then sign for the delivery. There's a chicken and egg situation in there somebody should raise at the next meeting, but we can't rely on journalists to ask honest questions of these people. Oh, and then the big one steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system. Tords. That's the word. That's the entire legal department sitting in one preposition. Tords is doing the same job that, quote, up to 70% off does at a mattress store. Because on television it's abolition. Moral, total, clean, fits on a sign. And the second somebody asks what happens on a Tuesday night in Los Angeles, it becomes a horizon. Long term, directional, something we're working towards. I'll take that seriously because it's the defense they'd give and it isn't crazy. No movement implements everything at once. Every political program in American history has had things that it outran the next election. True. But long term is not a governing blueprint. Long term is how you keep the verb and put down the burden. You say abolish at the rally and step towards at the hearing, and the two audiences never meet. And here's the tell. The timeline is only ever vague in one direction. Nobody has ever once said we intend to gradually phase out the Senate over several decades as conditions allow. The demolition is immediate and specific, the replacement is always a horizon. So read the document twice, and here's what you're left holding. The half about what they're tearing down names institutions by name with verbs. The half about what comes after names feelings, democracy, dignity, needs, the public good. All of those was written by a lawyer. The other one was written by a retreat. Before I read you the second half, I want to tell you where I actually learned this, and it was not in politics. Before marketing, before any of this, I did hair. A licensed cosmetologist. I stood behind a chair. And here's what happens in that chair. A woman sits down, you spin her towards the mirror, and you ask her one question. What are we doing today? And nine out of ten, what comes back is a list of everything she hates. I hate the length. I hate what it does right here. I hate that it goes flat on this side. I hate my forehead, my jawline, I've hated this cowlick since I was eleven. I've heard it all. And it is specific, it's precise, there's no fog anywhere in it. She could have submitted it in writing to me. So you say, okay, what do you want? And there's nothing there. Not because she's dumb, not because she doesn't care. She cares more than anybody in that building. She'll even hand you a photograph, and the photograph is a different woman with a different face, a different hair type, $800 of professional lighting, and a full-time employee whose entire job is her hair. Which is not a plan either. That's the hate list with a picture stapled to it. And here's what I learned back there, and I've never been able to unlearn. Every item on the hate list is real, all of it. She's not making it up, and I never once thought she was. It just isn't a haircut. Somebody still has to decide what this is going to be when she stands up. And that's the part nobody can do for you and nobody enjoys, because the second you say out loud what you want, you can be wrong about it. Hating is free. Wanting actually costs something. So when I read a political program that's fluent in what it hates and foggy about what it means, I don't think those people are liars. I don't think they're stupid. I think they're in the chair. The difference is when my client couldn't answer the question, the worst thing that happened was six weeks of bad bangs. These people are asking for the entire country. Friday, we stripped one sentence. Let's do the whole grocery list. Guarantee universal health care at no cost to individuals. Strip it? That's Medicare for All. And Medicare for All is a bill. It has a number. September 13th, 2017, 16 original co-sponsors, and I'll read you four Corey Booker, Kristen Gilbrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. Four people who ran for president of the United States. If that's the revolutionary cell, the revolution has an awful lot of Senate parking. That's not a socialist plot. That's a Tuesday press conference with a podium and a banner. Next, a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits. Strip it. That's the 32-hour workweek act, House Bill, Mark Tancano, Senate companion, introduced March of 2024 by Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the committee at the time and held a hearing on it that same week. And here's Sanders' own line about it. A 32-hour work week with no loss of pay is not a radical idea. He's right, it isn't. That's my entire point. And he made it for me in a press release. Next. Pass a federal jobs guarantee. Strip it. Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, Corey Booker, 2018. A pilot at the Department of Labor in up to 15 high unemployment communities. When he introduced it, it was just the first federal jobs guarantee bill ever introduced to Congress. He brought it back in 2019 with Elon Omar. Remember that one. We're going to come back to Senator Booker. Next, cancel all student debt. Strip it. That's not even a proposal. A sitting Democratic president tried to do it by executive action and the Supreme Court stopped him. You can't storm the Bastille when the last warden already opened the door himself and got sued over it. Next, enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations. Strip it down. Tax rich people buy things. Elizabeth Warren ran an entire presidential campaign on that. There was a calculator. It was on her merchandise. This is not radical, folks. These are Democrats wearing radical clothing. Run the tape back. Five demands out of the revolutionary program. Five strips. Every one of them landed on a bill with a Democratic senator's name on the top. The same Senate they want to abolish. So where's the revolution? Not in the bill, in the costume. It is not in the policy. I looked. It's a Democrat primary platform with better graphic design. It's in their story. And that's on their website too, different page. This one's the one nobody reads. What is democratic socialism? First sentence. Quote, capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. Designed. That's the word. That's the whole machine, and it's the only word in that sentence that actually matters. Not capitalism produces unequal outcomes. Not capitalism has winners and losers. Not capitalism needs guardrails, which a lot of people believe and which you can have an actual argument about. Designed on purpose by someone to do this to you. And once you swallow that one work, watch what happens to every other sentence in American politics. Your rent isn't high because 30 years of nobody building anything ran into everybody wanting to live in the same eight cities. It's high because it was designed that way. Your job isn't shaky because the industry changed, designed. And every bad thing that happens from you from that moment on isn't a problem to be solved. It's evidence. Evidence in a case that closed before you walked in. Traffic is evidence. The weather is evidence. The self-checkout is definitely evidence. That's not a small thing to install in somebody. That's an operating system. Because if the building was designed to crush you, then fixing the building is collaboration. Reform is complicity. Improvement is a trick. You don't renovate a trap. That's why the verbs have to be abolish. They're not being dramatic. Inside that story, abolish is the only honest verb available. You can't reform a thing you've just told everyone was built on purpose to hurt them. Their own preamble says it. Their enemies are not individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital. Not this or that cop, judge, or president. The entire structure. So here's what I think is actually happening. And I'll be careful because I can't read minds and I'm not going to pretend I can. I can't tell you what's in their hearts. I can only tell you what that language does. Let's take one policy, the 32-hour work week. It has two completely different sales pitches. To a 50-year-old Democrat in the suburbs, it's HR 1332, Tacano's bill. There's a phrase and schedule, there's a hearing. To a 25-year-old who's watched Rent eat half his paycheck and has quietly stopped believing that anything he does on a given Tuesday changes where he ends up. It isn't a bill. It's liberation. Same eight hours, two products. And the second one is a much better product. It doesn't just hand him a shorter week, it hands him an explanation for his whole life, a villain with a name and a side to be on by Thursday. Nobody ever cried at phase in schedule. Now, the fair part, and it's real. Plenty of those people believe every word of it. This isn't a room full of cynics running a con. I'd bet most of them are truer believers than the senators who co-sponsored the same bills. And that exploitation story didn't come out of nowhere. If you're 25 and you've watched institutions in this country move heaven on earth to make powerful people whole, and then explain very patiently why nothing can be done about your situation, you don't need a pamphlet to start wondering whether the thing was rigged. And again, I'm not auditing their hearts, I'm reading their receipts. And as a recruiting instrument, that story is doing numbers. Over 120,000 members as of last month. And a CNN poll at the end of July, about a third of Democrats now call themselves Democratic Socialists. A third. That's no longer a faction, that's a wing of the party with a printed program. Which leaves a question I could not put down this week. If the policy is Democrat policy, and the co-sponsors are Democrat senators, and a third of Democrat voters now use the label, then why is every Democrat in Washington acting like these people just moved in next door? They've been there since the 80s. They didn't move in next door. They've been in the House since 1982, ladies and gentlemen. 1982. Think about it, March of 1982, Detroit. Two left-wing groups merge, and the Democratic Socialists of America exists with about 6,000 members. Folks, I spent a long time in marketing, so track this as a product. 1982, 6,000. Late 2014, 32 years later, roughly 6,500. That's what a brilliant businessman, Bernie Sanders, says. Three decades, 500 customers. That's not a growth chart. That's barely a pulse. Then it goes to over 120,000. Here's what a marketer knows that a pundit usually doesn't. When something sits flat for 30 years and then goes vertical, the amateur says, great product. It's almost never the product. The product didn't change. The market moved to it. Same demands, same analysis, same oppressor, same oppressed. What changed is the customer, a generation that came up through 2008 with student debt and a housing market that priced them out of their life the parents had. You don't have to sell that person the idea that something's wrong. They showed up pre-sold. The product was never bad. It was early. And they needed common core education to catch these people up to it. And the placement changed, which is the part I find genuinely impressive. And I don't have to say that lightly. Because the founder of this organization, Michael Harrington, wrote the distribution strategy at the beginning. He called it realignment. Don't run as a third party. Third parties lose in this country, always have. Work inside the Democrat Party and move it from within. That's not conspiracy theory. That's on his own history page, published since Reagan's first term. And it's a good plan. Look, because you don't have to win America. You have to win a primary in a district where the primary is the whole election and the turnout is a rounding error. You don't need a majority of the country. You need a Tuesday in June and about 9,000 people. That's it. So, 44-year-old product in the original packaging, distribution designed in a factory, and a market that finally showed up through common core education. Which brings us to the part where the Democratic Party pretends it has never seen the box. Two weeks ago, a reporter named Igor Bobick did the simplest thing in journalism. He walked around the Senate and asked Democrats about it. What came back is the best evidence I've got. Elizabeth Warren asked about abolishing the Senate. She's a senator. I don't even know what they mean by that. I don't have any idea. Senator, a third of the people who vote for your party use that label. Their program's been online for a month that has a print edition, and you co-sponsored their healthcare plank twice. That's like the CEO of Coke saying he's not really familiar with Pepsi. Bernie Sanders, the man who spent 40 years making that word sayable in American politics, who put the 32-hour work week in front of his own committee, asked whether he supports abolishing the Senate. One word, no. Then he told reporters that he had a flight to catch. 40 years, one syllable, gate B12. Mark Kelly of Arizona says it's in the Constitution. It's a critical component of the government, and in his view, it's not a serious recommendation. And he's right. I'll give that flat, no notes. John Fetterman, who the only person in this entire story who sounds like a human being, says these people sat in a room and asked how much crazy stuff they could cream into a platform. Abolish the Senate? Sure. Abolish the presidency? Yeah, why not? And then he says the line that should have been in the story. I'm unique. I'm the only Democrat that will call it out. Nobody corrected him. He's right. Fetterman is out there doing the work of an entire opposition party in a hoodie. It's crazy to me. And I'm not a big Fetterman fan. Now, here's where it stops being funny because the United States Senator wrote my episode for me and I don't think he noticed. Tim Kane, Virginia, ran for vice president of the United States. He asked about the DSA surge and he said, I'm reading this, I know people in Richmond who align with DSA who don't want to abolish the Senate. They don't want to abolish the presidency. If you ask them why are you DSA, they will say, I'm a Democrat, but I like DSA because I don't like the concentration of wealth. Read it again. I'm a Democrat, but I like DSA. That's a sitting senator telling a national reporter that the Democratic socialists in his own city are Democrats who like the branding. He said that as a defense. That's a character witness who accidentally reads the confession into a report. He meant, calm down, they're harmless. What he described is a Democrat in a costume at a meeting. What I've been saying. These are not revolutionaries, folks. I could not have written it better. I tried. Kane's version is still better than mine. And then there's Senator Booker. This one's classic. Booker gets asked about the platform. He says his constituents care about their economic situation and about health care, not about proposing things that would require a constitutional amendment, which he calls farcical at this point. His words. Good line. Very strong, very dismissive. And then, in the same interview, same reporter, same breath, he says what he does support statehood for DC, statehood for Puerto Rico, and changing equal state apportionment, because five states out of the Dakotas and the Mountain West have 10 senators between them and fewer people than Los Angeles County. And he says that's really problematic. Now, changing equal state apportionment requires a constitutional amendment and not a regular one. Article 5 of the Constitution walls off exactly one thing from the normal process. One, and it is this no state without its consent shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. Meaning you'd need Wyoming to voluntarily vote to matter less. That's asking the last guy at the poker table to agree the chips don't count. So the senator called constitutional amendments farcical, and then, before the reporter could get to the next question, proposed the single most farcical amendment available in the entire place. And if the name's ringing a bell, it should. Corey Booker introduced the first federal jobs guarantee bill in the history of Congress, which is sitting in the DSA program today, word for word, while he tries to separate himself from the DSAs. All right. Fair is fair, and this part matters. Those senators genuinely do reject the institutional demands. That's real, and I'm not going to pretend it's theater. Sanders no is a no. Kelly's right on the Constitution. Nobody in that building is voting to abolish the Senate, and no serious person thinks they are. That's not what I'm questioning. What I'm questioning is a party that spends a week explaining that these people are strangers while its own senators have their own names on top of their bills. You can reject the verb. You cannot pretend you've never seen the policy when you're the one who's written it for years. And then there's the question nobody in this fight wants to sit with, including me. Have any of these people ever actually been tested? Really, these DSAs everyone's freaking out about. Look at where the wins are. New York City, a handful of house seats and districts so blue the primary is the election, state legislative seats and college towns. Those aren't tests. That's a focus group that votes. Winning a primary in Brooklyn is not a referendum on America. It's a referendum on Brooklyn, and Brooklyn already told us. Win a June primary where turnout is a rounding error and everybody in the room already agrees with you, and you have not been evaluated by the American people. You've been evaluated by the people who show up. So watch what happened this month in the middle of the country when actual voters got handed the actual DSA thing. Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, Democratic Socialist, State Assembly member running for governor, led every poll for months. The final one had her at 44%, 22 points clear. She lost. By about half a percentage point, fewer than 4,000 votes. 22 points in the polls, 4,000 votes in the actual box. And before that vote, look at who wasn't standing next to her. Bernie Sanders declined to endorse her, told John Favreau that he was not that familiar with the race. AOC declined and the national DSA declined. And after she lost, Sanders told Politico that they just have limited resources. Here's my opinion, and I'm labeling it as a one, because I can't prove it, neither can anyone else. But I think the DSA's can count. I think they looked at Wisconsin and at her old posts about abolishing prisons and defunding the police and made a decision about the endorsement record. Because those same two people endorsed Mandami in New York City. They endorsed El Sayed in Michigan. Sanders got involved in a governor's race in Maine. Just not that one. Limited resources. And the real test is still coming. Abdul Al-Syed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan on August 4th, endorsed by Sanders, running on Medicare for all. He won it 48.5 to 47.5. One point in a Democrat primary. Now he goes to a general election in November in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024 against Mike Rogers, who has Trump's endorsement and outside money landing at a level nobody in Michigan has ever seen. That's the first time one of these candidates faces the middle of the country with the whole country watching. So anyone telling you this is an unstoppable wave is guessing. Anybody telling you it's already dead is guessing too. We don't know yet. Nobody does. But there are only three things that can happen, and I'd watch for which one you're seeing. One, the party absorbs them. Democrats do what we just did. Strip the costume, look underneath, and go, oh, this is our stuff, just louder and matter. And then they decide the volume is the point because you can't get a 24-year-old off the couch with a phrase like in schedule. That takes the word abolish, fine. They reject the idea these people are radicals and they vote. That might happen. Two, Democrats don't vote at all. The quiet one, the 58-year-old who's fine with the universal health care and not fine with rewriting the Constitution, does not switch teams. People almost never switch teams. They just find something else to do on a Tuesday. That's how you lose Michigan to a lawn that needed mowing. Three, they take the lesser of two evils. They decide the radicalism is real, it scares them, and they hold their nose in the other direction and vote Republican. Fear of radicalism is the most reliable vote mover in the history of this country, and it works from either direction. It moved voters against the left in 68 and 72, and against the right plenty of times since. It also very often is irrational, which has never once made it less effective. Now, notice what all three have in common. Not one of them turns on the policy. Nobody in America is staying home over a 32-hour work week. Nobody's crossing party lines over childcare. All three get decided by the vocabulary, which means the words we spent this hour taking apart are not a side issue and not a language lesson. They're the variable. They may beat the whole election. If you want my guess, America, and it's a guess, I own it. A party that spends 2026 explaining abolish the Senate to Michigan and Wisconsin is the best gift Republicans have been handed in 20 years. But I'd have said that kind of thing before Tuesday. So would every poll in Wisconsin? They had her up by 22 points. So let's all be a little humble about the guessing. What I'm not guessing about is the language. That's the part on paper. And one more thing that happened in Wisconsin, nobody's talking about. When the general election got close, Hong said in a debate that she does not support the full platform of the national DSA and that she isn't endorsed by DSA nationally, walking back her own 2020 post about abolishing the police. So the costume came off with about eight months to go. Which tells you exactly what the costume was for. The primaries. So here's what you're actually holding, folks. A policy inventory that's been on Democrat letterhead for a decade. A moral story that says the country was built on purpose to hurt you. And a set of demolition verbs that the story requires and the policy doesn't. Three separate things sold to you as one thing. And that's the tool. You can run it on anyone. Them, me, the guy you like, the guy you can't stand. Three questions, not four, just three. One, what's the demolition verb? What exactly do they want gone? Is it abolish, defund, dismantle, drain, replace, take back? Write it down. Number two, what's the moral story? Who's the oppressor? Who's the victim? And who gets to be innocent in this version? Every one of these comes with a cast list, and yours was handed to you before you agreed to anything. Three, and this does all the work. What's the construction answer? What replaces it? Who pays, who runs it, who enforces it, and my favorite, who gets punished when it fails? That's the big one. If one and two are crisp and three is a fog, you haven't been handed a program. You've been handed a mood with a wrecking ball. And folks, I'd tell you to run it on the DSA, but you don't need me for that. You'll enjoy that too much, and it won't teach you anything. You already know these people are crazy. Run it on the next thing that comes out of my mouth. Now, let's actually do the thing they asked you to do. Their program fairly opens by asking you to imagine a day without capitalism. So let's take them up on it. Picture it all the way back. By the way, you're reading by a lamp full of whale oil. That's not a metaphor. That was the lighting industry. Ships went out for years at a time, men died doing it, the product came home in barrels, and it was the most expensive option on the market. The pre-capitalist supply chain was a boat full of guys hunting the largest animal on earth so you could read after dinner. And if you weren't well off, your day ended when the sun went down. That was the whole evening. And nobody abolished that. There was no movement, nobody wrote a program, nobody marched on Nantucket, nobody stood up and demanded the dismantling of the extractive maritime whatever. There was no Harpoon Justice Working Group, folks. Somebody merely worked out how to make kerosene out of crude oil. Burned about six times brighter at a fraction of the price. And the whale oil lamp was gone inside a generation. Now, before somebody clips that and lies about it, no, that did not end whaling. That's not the conversation I'm having. Whaling actually got worse in the next century before treaties finally shut it down. I'm not telling you markets fix everything, and if I did, you should run my own three questions on me for saying it. My point is narrower than that and harder to argue with. The thing that ended the whale oil lamp wasn't a verb. It was an answer to, quote, what replaces it. So all a construction answer is somebody shows up with the next thing, and the old thing doesn't have to be destroyed, it just stops being necessary. So here's where I land, and this parts for one person. If you're young and you're angry and the numbers on your life don't work no matter how many times you run them, I'm not here to tell you you have been fooled. I don't think you have. Your read on your own situation is probably sharper than mine. But look at what you're being handed. You may think you're voting for a revolution, but it's really just a dressed up Democrat, folks. And I want to be precise about who that insults because it isn't the Democrat. It's you. Nobody offered you a bad policy. Some of that policy is fine. Some of it I'd argue about all day and might even lose. That's not the problem. The problem is they didn't ask you to evaluate anything. They asked you to feel like a revolutionary while voting for a phase-in schedule. It's a monster truck rally that turns out to be a zoning meeting. And here's what cost you, and it's more than people realize. A construction answer treats you like a citizen. It says, here's what it costs, here's who runs it, here's what happens when it breaks, here's the part I'm not sure about, now you decide. A demolition story treats you like a resource. It doesn't need your judgment, it needs your anger on a schedule roughly every two years. One hands you a lever, the other hands you a villain. And you can't do anything with a villain. That's the trick. You can only carry him around. A lever fixes your house, your situation. A villain just gives you something to think about in the shower. So no, I'm not asking you to love capitalism this afternoon if you don't. I'm not asking you to stop being furious, stay furious, some of it's earned. I'm asking you one thing and it costs you eight seconds. When somebody tells you what they're going to tear down, make them tell you what goes there next. Who pays, who runs it, who enforces it, and who gets punished when it fails. Because abolish is a feeling, replace is a job, and the people who actually fix something in this country, whatever party they're in, and I don't care which one, are going to be the ones who showed up wanting the job, which is unglamorous and pays badly in attention, and is why the line for it is so short. Which leads me to my Reagan reminder. January 21st, 1985, second inaugural, not the famous one, nobody quotes the second one. Reagan, who spent his whole career telling you what was wrong with government, says something I didn't expect to find. He's talking about the founding, about the moment that people said government is not our master, it's our servant. And then this. Quote, that system has never failed us, but for a time we failed the system. That's the whole argument on this desk today, and it's 41 years old. One side says the system was designed to hurt you, so it has to come down. Reagan and me say the system is the best thing we've got, and when it goes wrong, it's because we went wrong, which is a much harder thing to be told because there's homework in it. One of those lets you off the hook. The other one puts you to work. Guess which one pulls better? I know which one I'd rather be handed. I also know which one is easier to sell. One quick thing before we go. If common sense has become part of your weekly routine, Chadparkerlaw.com is your home base. Every week you'll find something new, my latest books, a new editorial, the gaily news, the free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto, and everything else we're building together. And if you've got a question, an idea for an episode, or you think I missed the mark, call or text me at 252 Chad Law. The best conversations on this show start with your messages. And remember, if you see us anywhere out there, share us. Next time somebody says abolish, don't argue with them. Just ask what goes there. And watch how fast the room changes. America, this has been common sense. Stick around for the after hours while I answer all the questions that came in during tonight's live broadcast. Alright, phones lit up. Let's get into them. Kyle, 3097. Wait, where'd the intro video go? Kyle, it's gone. Killed it this week. Here's why. 30 seconds of logo animation right at the front while you're sitting there deciding whether to stay. And the data on that is not closed. So third of people are gone in the first 30 seconds, more than half inside the first minute, and one on the top reasons is branded content. So I was spending most valuable 30 seconds showing you my name, which you already knew. It's why you clicked. Turns out the branding is me. I'm the branding. It's a talking show. So you don't need the video. All right, Marguerite 8412. Do you think any of them have actually read the whole platform? Uh, the people who wrote it, absolutely. There's a note at the end, a committee elected at their convention, met most weeks, April through June, drafted it, debated it, sent it up for approval. Somebody sweated over those words. The 120,000 members, no idea. I would guess most haven't. And I'm not going to be smug about it because if I pulled my side on what's actually in the last platform we ran on, I'd be embarrassed for everyone involved, possibly including myself. People join movements the way they join churches. You come for the feeling and you assume somebody in the back has read the documents. Great question. Thomas, ending in five five two six, Chad, you spent an hour saying they're basically Democrats, and also that they want to abolish the Senate and write a new constitution. That's contradictory. Picked one. Thomas, that's the best objection to this episode, and I've sent the same text. Here's my answer. Both are true, and the split is not random. The radical demands are the ones that can't happen. Abolishing the Senate needs a constitutional amendment that Article V basically forbids. A new constitution isn't happening in your lifetime or mine. Those are the loudest things in the document, and in practical terms, they're decorative. The ordinary demands are the ones that can actually pass healthcare, housing, a jobs guarantee, the work week, bills with numbers. So they're radical exactly where it costs them nothing, and conventional exactly where it counts. That's not a contradiction in my argument. That is my argument. Great question. All right, next one. Bridget 881180. Fine, but you never said is the 32 work week actually a good idea or not. Caught me. I used it as an exhibit and never gave you a verdict. Short version, I'm against it. And here's my one question. Who eats it in a 12-person business? Mandate that everybody produces the same output in four days and gets paid for five, and somebody's hiring a fifth person or eating the loss or quietly turning full timers into part-timers. My money's on the third one. But look what just happened. I can have that argument. There's a bill, there's a phase in, there's a cost, and somebody can show up with a study out of Britain and tell me I'm wrong. That's the whole point of tonight's show. Give me something I can lose an argument to, not just vocabulary. Andre, 6743. This was a hit piece. You ran your three questions on the left all night, not once on your own side. Drain the swamp, abolish the Department of Education. I'll wait. Andre, you're right that I didn't. So let's do it right now, live, and you tell me how it goes. Abolish the Department of Education. Demolition verb crisp. Moral story crisp. Washington took your school and gave you nothing. And I've said versions of that. Construction answer: who writes the check that Title I currently writes to a poor district in Eastern Oregon? Who administers special education requirements when a school tells a parent no? Who enforces it when a district decides some kid is an inconvenience? And what I usually hear back is the states. Which states? All of them, the ones that feel like it? That answer goes up. Same as theirs. So it fails. And I'm not going to pretend otherwise because it's my team saying it. There may be a real argument down there. I think there probably is, but abolish the Department of Education is not that argument. It's a bumper sticker in a suit. Good text, Andre. Uncomfortable, but keep them coming. I like that. Wesley 4038. Genuine question. Do you read all these documents yourself or does someone hand you a summary? Myself, and I'll tell you how because it's dumber than you think. I walk about five miles a day out on the property with the dogs, and I listen to this stuff through my glasses. Not earbuds. I've got these Shrek ears, and uh earbuds hurt my head and my ears. So picture a grown man walking through cattle at seven in the morning, listening to the Democratic Socialists of America explain a day without capitalism while a heifer stares at me. That's the operation. That's the whole newsroom. And I'd rather do it that way because by the time I get back to the desk, I've usually worked out which sentence is the thing carrying everything. Today it was one word. Designed. All right, that's the show. Go ask somebody what goes there. And remember, I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, saying, God bless you, President Reagan. And as always, may God save America.

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It's marvelous that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for feeling amorous. Oh it's wonderful. It's so marvelous that you should care for me. It's wonderful, it's marvelous, glorious it's glamorous.