Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson thought he would scare people by reading out loud what the Democratic Socialists of America stand for and it sounded great!
“I don’t know if you’ve seen this,” said Johnson.
“This is their platform, this is actually quotes from their platform that they published about a day or two ago.… They put this on paper! They’re saying the quiet things out loud.”
Johnson continued: “Abolish the Electoral College, replace the two-party system with a multi-party ‘democracy,’ expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked-choice voting in all elections,” Johnson said.
He continued, describing how the DSA would establish public ownership of large corporations, abolish ICE, and end sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.
“End all military and economic aid to Israel, prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza,” Johnson continued.
It should be noted that while the DSA does support most of these points in its official platform, there is a debate about others, like ranked-choice voting and the merits of abolishing the Senate. But all in all, Johnson appears to be trying to fearmonger by threatening the American people with a good time.
In fact it sounded so good that supporters of the DSA have turned that clip into a TikTok video.
Currently going mad viral on TikTok pic.twitter.com/1Wu1X81eqZ
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) June 30, 2026
More Republicans should go out and spread the word about the DSA policies. It would be great if Trump did so too.
I am genuinely surprised he actually called the genocide a genocide. Does this mean he has to primary himself now?
… implement proportional representation and ranked-choice voting …
Either one sounds good -- but what’s the point of doing both?
There are some DSA platform parts I have issues with. These are all quotes from the platform on the DSA USA site. It’s a platform so it’s simplifying and over stating things.
I’m not a fan of rent control as a system. If not done very carefully you end up with situations like NY where people are paying $1000 for one apartment and $5000 for the next identical apartment. This encourages everybody to manipulate the system.
The bit about a ceasefire in Gaza is a botch in the sense that a DSA government could ask/demand one but they don’t have the power to make it happen. The bit about all aid to Israel is a mistake. At the very least removing all leverage we have to get Israel to slow down is counter-productive and could be a disaster if Israel goes to Russia or China for support and ends up escalating the violence.
US Military budget needs reduced but that sounds like they mean all. This would be dangerous in that many parts of the world depend on US troops for stabilization or protection. Yanking them out would cause wars.
Read literally that would mean sanctions on Russia also.
Totally open borders is a bad idea.
Full voting for non-citizens is a terrible idea.
Treading on very dangerous grounds there. It’s too vague to have any idea what it really means but the idea in general is bad.
Why did Johnson say or write “democracy” in quotes? If we have multiple parties, we’re automatically a dictatorship?
We have a few other parties now, but they’re very weak. So, he meant, no parties except the two who control everything by whichever one takes the most corporate money?
I’ll bet that a lot of people would like more parties. Who has not held their nose and voted for the one out of two who is the least awful?
I notice that the DSA platform tactfully doesn’t say “Fix the Supreme Court by running those bastards out of town”, although fixing SCOTUS must be one of their primary goals.
Re: Aid to Israel: A few weeks ago Netanyahu was weather-ballooning the idea that he wanted to end all US aid and replace it with “agreements focused on shared military research, intelligence sharing, and defense technology cooperation” (whatever he means by this in practice).
Pierece @#2,
Since in the US each state gets to decide the process, I think they are suggesting that either option can be adopted.
@JM #3:
US aid provides no leverage; Israel’s attitude is one of complete entitlement. The aid just feeds the Israeli war machine.
From an outsider’s perspective I don’t see any places that require US troops. Where outside the US do you think they need to be, and why?
There are already US sanctions on Russia.
Why? Why shouldn’t permanent residents and taxpayers get to vote?
There are already US sanctions on Russia.Sorry, I confused myself, ignore that
Some voting systems are both proportional and ranked choice by their nature. The variant of the Hare-Clarke voting system used in the Australian Senate and in the lower houses of Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory is both ranked choice and (roughly) proportional. The proportionality is limited because none of them elect a large number of candidates in a single electorate (for example, 6 seats in a normal Senate election, 5 seats in Tasmania and 7 seats in the ACT).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate#Electoral_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare%E2%80%93Clark_electoral_system
@8
Much of Southeast Asia is stuck between allying with the US or China. Some like the Philippines ask the US to setup bases. Others, like Vietnam, play a careful act of balancing between the US and China that couldn’t happen if US bases were not possible.
South Korea would be hosed by somebody but there are multiple possibilities. Taiwan would be in a much worse situation if the US pulled support. Japan would have to play friendlier with China without any US army or navel support. NATO would have to be disbanded.
The wars in the Middle East would play out very differently but I’m not sure if it would be for the better or worse.
US intervention in South America has been more destructive then helpful and there are no permanent bases to remove. The US has not traditionally cared enough about Africa to do much.
prl @ # 10 -- Thanks! (I think…)
Maybe if I deep-studied both links, and many of their secondary links, I’d feel less confused.
Maybe if Australians didn’t elect so many hard-right &/or corrupt legislators, I’d feel more like emulating them.
I’m not sure there are any electoral systems that prevent that. But I’d certainly prefer our federal electoral system -- federal elections under federal law and an independent electoral commission overseeing electoral boundaries, the electoral roll and conduct of elections (with oversight by the High Court) to what they have in the US.
There are practical issues in making the US senate proportionally representative, since each state retruns only 2 senators.
@JM #11:
So if I read you right it seems mostly to come down to two areas:
1. Fear of China
I’m not sure how much US forces dissuade China so much as provoke it. I’m not saying that China is not a threat to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines or elsewhere, but has China been involved in any wars this century? Or even since, say, 1980? Compare to Russia and the US.
2. NATO
Tot* is an amoral prick that on principle I never want to agree with, not even a little. That aside, NATO is very expensive for the US. Russia is a threat, but the NATO countries are not the ones under threat, with or without US troops. And what exactly is in it for the US?
*The orange turd
i consider rent control equally important to universal basic income. housing is a human right and housing as a market is fucking inimical to that.
@#2 Pierce R. Butler (and Mano)
If a state has, say, 5 congressional districts, then a third party would need around 15% or more of the votes to get a district drawn for it under Proportional Representation. If I am a Democratic Socialist but I live in a district that is 15% DS, 40% Democratic, and 45% Republican, but I don’t have RCV I can EITHER choose the DS candidate in hope that the DS party will cross the threshold for the next redistricting cycle, OR I can vote for the Democrat to keep my district out of the clutches of the Republicans, but I can’t do both. Only by having both PR and RCV can a third party hope to grow enough to get a seat at the table.
@prl, Pierce R Butler:
Canada has most of those (federal elections run under federal law, and a militantly non-partisan commission defining electoral districts and actually running the elections) though we don’t have ranked choice voting or similar. Something like ranked choice or proportional representation has come up a few times as a possibility (most recently under Justin Trudeau, though provincial PR ideas had come up earlier as well) but have been mishandled or in fact actively dropped in all cases so far. Justin Trudeau admitted that dropping that was one of the biggest regrets of his term as Prime Minister. (I’d say it was far from the stupidest thing he did, but it was something early that set the tone for how he saw promises, and it effectively cost him a by-election later on because the by-election in St. Paul’s would have been kept by the Liberals under a ranked choice voting, but they lost it thanks to first-past-the-post.)
Canada also hasn’t really had an openly ‘hard right’ federal government (yet). Some of the provincial governments, yes. But Poilievre (who was palling around with the ‘truckers’ that clogged up Ottawa during the pandemic) lost the most recent election: in part because he scared off a number of the old school Red Tories, who were just fine with Carney as a fairly conservative-leaning ‘Liberal’; in part because a lot of the normal NDP voters decided this year would be an ‘ABC’ (Anything But Conservative) year and held their noses to vote Liberal to keep Poilievre out; and in part because Trump couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the ’51st state’ malarkey. Harper’s government before that was still trying to pretend to be moderate in order to retain power, which was part of why he was so controlling on communications, because he knew a lot of his own backbenchers had no interest in pretending. And Mulroney before that was more ‘neoliberal capitalist’ than ‘hard right nationalist’. (Campbell is sadly a bit of a footnote; she might have tacked back to more of the classic Red Tory but we’ll never know because the hard right nationalists went off to form the Reform party and cratered the Progressive Conservative party in the process.)
prl @ # 13: … I’d certainly prefer our federal electoral system …
Apparently y’all have managed to keep it clean -- something the US has blatantly failed at.
There are practical issues in making the US senate proportionally representative, since each state retruns only 2 senators.
And the Senate has considerably more power than the House. I think I like having a bicameral legislature, since numerous bad ideas have passed one body only to have the other one kill them, but otherwise would agree with abolishing the Senate.
moarscienceplz @ # 16: Only by having both PR and RCV can a third party hope to grow enough …
Not sure I understand. What, in your example, would a “3rd party” in a ranked-choice voting system gain from proportional-representation that RCV wouldn’t give it already?
Jenora Feuer @ # 17 -- Thanks for the summary, which reinforces my impression that liberals fail more often due to persons than to policy. What do you think has allowed “3rd” parties in Canada to succeed (more than those in the US, anyway) in a 1st-past-the-post system?
I’d like to note that for all the noise US politicians make about the purported superiority of our system, when the US has had the opportunity to re-write other nations’ constitutions (Panama, Haiti, Cuba, Philippines, Japan, Iraq…), we have never implemented anything like ours.
@moarscienceplz
Not counting the fact that the current Australian opposition is a coalition of 4 parties (who either don’t compete with each other at all, or have agreements limiting their competition with each other), the Australian House of Representatives, which is elected using ranked choice in single-member electorates, so not PR at all, has, out of 151 seats, 4 members of the Greens, 1 Katter’s Alliance member, 1 Centre Alliance member and 13 independents (not party aligned).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Australian_federal_election#House_of_Representatives
In the UK House of Commons, which has neither ranked choice nor PR, out of 650 members, there are 11 parties represented apart from Labour and Conservative, with a total of 111 seats, and an additional 6 independents. However, many of these parties have narrow regional focuses, like the Scottish Nationalists and Sinn Féin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_election#Results
It reminds me of this text from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: “Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father-in-law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities. Because of his humanitarian feelings Aureliano sympathized with the Liberal attitude with respect to the rights of natural children but in any case, he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand.”