By Vince Bzdek

With her upset victory over Congresswoman Diana DeGette, Colorado’s Melat Kiros joins a growing number of Democratic Socialist candidates expected to enter Congress next year, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York and Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania.

As this new progressive coalition prepares to expand its footprint in Washington, many of us are wondering what a Democratic socialist actually is.

According to the Democratic Socialists of America website, a democratic socialist is someone who advocates replacing capitalism with a socialist economic system, where wealth and the major drivers of the economy are collectively owned and managed by the working class. They also believe this transition must be achieved through existing democratic processes, rather than violence.

Here’s the language from the website: “Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods and society.”

DSA’s National Political Committee just adopted a new platform last month called “Workers Deserve More!”

It’s a little shocking reading the platform on the 250^th anniversary of our country, because it essentially calls for an end to the American experiment as we know it.

The platform has four pillars:

Working-Class Democracy

• Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy through proportional representation elections, expand the number of seats in the House and end the Senate filibuster

• Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote

• Limit the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review

• Grant voting rights for people with criminal convictions and noncitizens

Thriving Working-Class Communities

• Medicare for All — universal healthcare with no premiums, co-pays or deductibles, including reproductive and gender-affirming care

• Housing for All — universal rent control, guaranteed right to counsel for tenants, public investment in social housing

• Tuition-free public higher education with no cost for room/board, and cancellation of student debt

Economy for the Working Class

• A 32-hour work week with no cut in pay or benefits

• Higher taxes on top earners, corporations, large inheritances and a wealth tax

• A Green New Deal-style transition off fossil fuels, with public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure

Working-Class Foreign Policy

• Permanent Gaza ceasefire, ending military aid and arms sales to Israel and recognizing Palestinian sovereignty.

• Ending economic sanctions on countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran

• Open-border freedom of movement, ending immigrant detention/deportation, and amnesty regardless of status

• Major cuts to the military budget and closing overseas bases

In addition, a free market think tank publication called The City Journal reported  that the group’s National Political Committee proposed four amendments to the document as well:

• Replace the presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress
• Abolish the current law enforcement and prison system 
• Install universal ranked choice voting
• Recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine

There was also a spirited debate about support for abolishing the U.S. Senate altogether, but none of those amendments have been published as part of the official platform yet. 

The nationwide group consists of chapters in all 50 states and counts more than 100,000 members. It describes itself as a political and activist organization, but not a party.

Our lead political correspondent Ernest Luning reported earlier that during a candidate forum in June sponsored by Colorado Politics and the Denver Press Club, Kiros said she didn’t agree with all the provisions in the recently adopted platform, such as abolishing the U.S. Senate, pulling the United States out of NATO and abolishing law enforcement.

Instead she said her campaign was focused on fighting for working people, making Denver more affordable and battling government corruption.

She has said definitively she wants to abolish ICE, pass Medicare for All and get big money out of politics.

“We will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine,” she has also said. She has also called for the U.S. to embargo arms to Israel, including funding for the defensive Iron Dome. 

DSA brass say they are a “big-tent” organization, and not everyone within that tent has to agree with everything in the platform for the democratic socialists to be a force this fall. And what most of these candidates call for is more a combination of capitalism and some socialist features like the Nordic countries have, rather than a full embrace of this platform.

But even acknowledging the various degrees of democratic socialism, I can’t help thinking we’re witnessing the birth of a pretty radical blue MAGA. This new faction will give Republicans tons of ammunition to label the Democratic Party a bunch of crazy Communists, turning the battle for the House and Senate into a much more competitive fight than it was just a few weeks ago.

For old folks like me who lived through the Cold War, the word socialist still conjures up bad memories of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and their gulags, secret police and totalitarian reign over Eastern Europe. We think of socialism as a failed economic experiment of long bread lines and big overreaching bureaucracy that belongs on history’s dust heap. Socialism still conjures images of Orwell’s Big Brother or the Borg in “Star Trek” for us, in which all freedom and individual liberty are subsumed by the collective. We hear “socialist” and we hear this:

“WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. YOUR UNIQUENESS WILL BE ADDED TO OUR COLLECTIVE. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.”

I imagine Republicans will try to tap into some of those old residual fears as they take on these new younger socialists as well. 

Rep. Lauren Boebert, Kiros’s Republican doppelganger who surprised her own party with a similarly successfully firebrand campaign in 2020, had this to say to 9News’ Kyle Clark:

“I think this is a gift to the Republicans who are running on the general ballot in Colorado,” she said. “In 2024, the Democrats were electing more moderate candidates. And that was their goal, to show that they could be reasonable, to show that they can work across the aisle. And this time, all of that has gone out the window and they are showing their true colors, saying we want socialism. And inevitably, we want communism. We want you to own nothing and be happy.”

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.