DSA Unveils Simple Plan to Save America by Abolishing Every Part of America
Nation to Be Replaced With Newsletter, Logo, and Strongly Worded Social Media Account
The Democratic Socialists of America have unveiled a refreshingly uncomplicated plan for repairing the United States: remove the United States. DSA national co-chair Megan Romer reportedly affirmed support for abolishing prisons, borders, ICE and the Senate, defunding the Pentagon, granting broad amnesty and placing large corporations under public ownership during a televised true-or-false segment. The group’s official program also calls for abolishing the Senate, while its abolition working group advocates eliminating the “carceral forces” of the state. This is political reform in the same sense that pushing a Buick into a quarry is an oil change. Most popular components of the platform: free services, handmade banners and meetings in which the phrase “lived experience” is used often enough to qualify as structural reinforcement.
The presidency can go. The Senate can go. Borders can go. Prisons can go. Police can go. The Pentagon can be converted into a circular public pantry, although planners have warned that its five-sided architecture may perpetuate geometric hierarchy.
“The problem with America is that it contains too many American institutions,” explained a policy organizer while attempting to abolish the folding chair on which he was sitting. “Once we eliminate the government, national defense, immigration enforcement, incarceration, private ownership and possibly Tuesday, ordinary people will finally be free to complete the paperwork necessary to receive their collectively allocated lentils.”
A Government Without the Government Parts
Constitutional scholars traditionally define a nation as a political community with territory, laws, institutions and the power to enforce them, per the framework laid out in the U.S. Constitution. The DSA’s innovation is to regard those items as clutter left behind by dead white men who never attended a restorative justice circle in Bushwick.
Territory is exclusionary. Laws are coercive. Institutions are undemocratic. Enforcement is violence.
After those are removed, the nation will retain a logo, a newsletter and a social media account capable of condemning neighboring nations for having territory, laws, institutions and enforcement.
A survey conducted by the Center for Advanced Clipboards found that 84 percent of Americans support reforming at least one federal institution, but only 7 percent support replacing the entire constitutional order with a neighborhood council moderated by somebody named Cedar. The remaining 9 percent clicked “maybe” because they thought the survey was offering student-loan forgiveness.
Nationalized Toasters and the New Deputy Assistant Secretary of Everything
Economists were particularly intrigued by the proposal to nationalize major corporations. Under capitalism, critics note, large companies can be inefficient, arrogant and nearly impossible to reach by telephone. Under public ownership, those same qualities would become protected benefits administered by a deputy assistant secretary. Amazon packages would arrive in six to eight fiscal years, airline boarding would require a congressional appropriation, and every broken toaster would become the subject of an inspector general’s report.
The DSA insists that abolishing borders would produce freedom of movement. Border communities responded that they already have movement and would prefer someone to check whether the movement is carrying drugs, weapons or a handwritten promise to attend immigration court in 2038.
A rancher near the southern border described the plan as “bold,” which in rural political dialect means “written by someone whose closest encounter with a border was choosing between oat milk and soy.”
The Final Abolition
The logical beauty of the platform is its consistency.
If prisons sometimes fail, abolish prisons. If borders generate controversy, abolish borders. If the Senate frustrates progressives, abolish the Senate. By this reasoning, the nation should abolish hospitals because people die in them, schools because students fail, and umbrellas because rain occasionally lands sideways.
Experts call this the “broken lamp theory of governance”: rather than replace the bulb, socialist reformers throw away the house, nationalize the hardware store and accuse darkness of being a capitalist construct.
The final stage of the plan will abolish America’s remaining problems by abolishing the vocabulary used to describe them.
Crime becomes “unplanned wealth redistribution.” Illegal entry becomes “spontaneous residency.” Military invasion becomes “cross-border dialogue with armored vehicles.” Economic collapse becomes “mandatory simplicity.”
At press time, the DSA was drafting a transition document explaining who would enforce the abolition of enforcement. The task has been assigned to a new national committee with unlimited authority, no constitutional restraints and strict rules against authority.
America may soon become the first country in history to save itself by ceasing to meet the definition of a country. Supporters say the transformation will prove socialism can work once every institution capable of measuring whether it works has been compassionately dismantled.
As comedian Colin Quinn once cracked about his own Brooklyn neighborhood’s political drift, the revolution always sounds great until someone asks who’s picking up the trash. New York has been asking that question since roughly 1975.
Humorous Observations
- A political platform that fits entirely on a protest sign is not a platform, it’s a slogan wearing a platform’s clothes.
- The Pentagon’s five sides were apparently more controversial than its budget.
- Nobody has explained who enforces the abolition of enforcement, and nobody plans to.
- “Spontaneous residency” is doing an enormous amount of linguistic weightlifting.
- A nation that abolishes its own definition still has to explain itself to the United Nations.
This piece is satire. The abolition committees, clipboard surveys and lentil-based welfare systems described above are comic inventions built around real DSA policy positions and public statements. It is a work of satirical journalism intended for humor and commentary, not a factual news report. Bohiney.com has produced satirical news of this kind since its founding, in the tradition of American political satire.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!