The American republican tradition the Founders constructed is not pure majoritarianism or “democracy” as a single sovereign assembly. It is a mixed regime of separated powers, a bicameral Congress with the Senate as a deliberate federal and cooling check, an independent executive and judiciary, protected property, and the expectation of civic responsibility rather than the permanent concentration of will in one body or administrative center. Madison and the other framers designed those features precisely against the instability of pure democracy, factional capture, and the concentration of power that historically collapses into tyranny or oligarchy.
INTRODUCTORY FILE
CONCERNING THE MARCH 25 2026 “DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION FORUM” Zoom featuring Luke Pickrell of the DSA Marxist Unity Group (MUG) caucus and Danielle Reiff of the Democracy Renewal Group.
This file deals with certain operatives and activists as evidence of networks discussing contingency planning around a legitimacy crisis, “red lines,” extra-constitutional processes, and constitutional transformation. The Zoom featured Danielle Reiff of Democracy Renewal Group, who was a former USAID diplomat focused on overseas democracy promotion and peacebuilding and later involved in U.S. democracy-renewal efforts including DemocracyAID. He discusses anticipation of a legitimacy crisis and contingency plans that could include street mobilization if needed.
Reiff stated she was “foreseeing a crisis of legitimacy around the November election” and that a midterm “meltdown” and crisis of legitimacy “could be a real window of opportunity for us to say, okay, some red lines have been crossed, and we can say, but you know what we really need to do is transform our system.” She called for the plan to be “on steroids” in the following months and discussed a sequence involving an important convening (“maybe like a third Continental Congress”) that would declare red lines, after which participants might move to an “extra constitutional” process or a democratic constitutional convention once conditions were “ripe.” She cautioned against jumping into a convention too soon.
Pickrell participates as a DSA/MUG voice and is a public and published MUG member and East Bay DSA activist who co-runs the Democratic Constitution Blog and Podcast, writes regularly for Cosmonaut, Jacobin, Democratic Left, and related outlets, and has spoken at DSA events, reading groups, and forums. MUG and Pickrell have repeatedly framed this as the recovery of classical Marxist “democratic republicanism,” citing Marx, Engels, the Second International, Debs, and earlier English and French republican traditions that prioritized a sovereign unicameral assembly with equal suffrage. Pickrell’s consistent public argument is that the United States is not a democracy because of the Constitution’s hardwired features such as its malapportioned Senate, Electoral College, presidential veto and war powers, unelected judiciary, and Article V barriers. He argued for creating “an organization that is explicitly anti-constitutional” and questioned whether other groups were prepared to do so.
Pickrell’s public project, and the forum in which he participated, treated those features as the problem to be solved. He defines a democratic system in classic majoritarian terms as a single sovereign representative assembly elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage (unicameralism). He ties this to classical Marxist and democratic-republican demands (Paine, the left of the French Revolution, Chartists, Marx and Engels, Debs, Lenin) and to DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” program language calling for a “democratic socialist republic” with an executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress. He has organized DSA reading groups on the anti-democratic character of the Constitution and explicitly advocates replacing the current order with a more majoritarian democratic republic rather than operating within its checks. The Constitution is framed as the root of minority tyranny and political alienation; and the remedy for Pickrell is a unicameral democratic republic that subordinates the other branches and aligns with socialist programmatic goals of working-class control. Participation in discussions of legitimacy crises and contingency street mobilization shows this is not merely academic critique. It is operational orientation intersecting with broader democracy-renewal and protest-coordination networks. It is possible that the latest ravings of this current corrupt administration and others have exploited this intelligence without naming it specifically to fold all radical opposition to it into one, but regardless, there is a problem within the Democratic Party.
JAMES CARVILLE AND DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP
Carville has repeatedly criticized the DSA’s influence in blunt terms. He has called DSA members a “pack of fools” and “silly people,” said they are “not even Democrats,” urged them to drop “Democratic” from their name because they “hate the Democratic Party,” and argued that Democratic voters will not nominate a DSA-aligned presidential candidate. He has also expressed concern that the rise of socialist candidates could contribute to the “end of the two-party system” or force a party split. These comments treat the faction as a real electoral and branding problem rather than a fringe curiosity, while still largely dismissing its long-term strategic threat.
Those like James Carville and others have repeatedly stated the problem without listing them categorically and therefore appear as old reactionary in view, which voters reject. It shows that Democratic leadership have no real strategy against it, because of a number of reasons which I will not get into.
The combination of explicit rejection of the republican form, organized agitation for its replacement, and practical contingency planning cannot be treated as a niche online curiosity. The DSA (with MUG as an active caucus) has grown into the largest socialist organization in U.S. history, wins Democratic primaries, and states these aims openly. While the recovery of the actual republican tradition is confined to small digital corners, the alternative is already organizing, fundraising, publishing, running reading groups and podcasts, and aligning with wider networks. The mission must be stated and defended in the open precisely because the challenge to the constitutional republic is public, programmatic, and active.
MUG’s program and writings explicitly call for fighting the U.S. Constitution as a “slaveholder’s constitution,” demanding a new democratic constitution through a people’s constituent assembly elected by universal-equal-direct suffrage. This would abolish the Senate and independent Presidency and Electoral College, concentrate power in a unicameral people’s House, with proportional representation and uncapped seats, subordinate the executive and judiciary to that legislature, and establish a “democratic socialist republic.” These positions appear in MUG’s draft “Florence Program,” “Workers Demand the World,” DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” program (influenced by MUG), and resolutions such as “Winning the Battle for Democracy.” Pickrell and MUG frame this as recovering classical Marxist-Social Democratic demands for a single sovereign assembly, contrasting it with the current “minoritarian” system.
MUG and allied writings appear to treat the existing Constitution as an obstacle to working-class rule and socialism, advocating open disloyalty to it in favor of a new founding document.
These positions simply illustrate long-standing republican critiques of socialist and Leninist approaches to political form, and the public has not been prepared against it. The Republican Party sure have not prepared the public. It is imperative that a healthy and genuine recovery of civic republican philosophy is made regardless of class. Civic republicanism has historically opposed both monarchical absolutism and the substitution of soviet-vanguard models or pure majoritarian assemblies for deliberative, checked self-government. Leninist theory and Bolshevik practice rejected “bourgeois” republican institutions (parliaments, constituent assemblies) as limited or deceptive under capitalism, elevating soviets and party control as a “higher form of democracy.” This culminated in the dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly in 1918 after one day. Modern DSA/MUG unicameral demands are reflecting that pattern of replacing mixed republican forms with a single assembly under programmatic socialist aims, rather than reforming within balanced institutions.
Pickrell makes the same core arguments, that the U.S. Constitution is undemocratic, and that remedy is a unicameral democratic republic through constituent assembly and popular sovereignty in “The Left’s Rediscovery of Democratic Republicanism” (Cosmonaut / MUG event), “A More Democratic Constitution for the USA” (Next System Studies panel with John Mulkins) where Pickrell speaks at length on his worldview and DSA left’s relation to the demand, and the Varn Vlog with Lucas De Hart and Pickrell on the problems of the U.S. Constitution.
Pickrell and MUG present their demand as a recovery of “democratic republicanism” but drawing on Marx, Engels, Debs, etc. This is a selective but also subordinating recovery. The historical record of pure majoritarian institutions has shown it to be unstable and prone to faction, and mixed-constitution republican theory is not a democratic theory. This is a careful distinction that has been forgotten. A unicameral assembly with equal suffrage and no independent checks is closer to the pure democracy the founders and classical sources sought to correct than to the balanced res publica they reconstructed.
MUG’s ultimate horizon remains a socialist (or democratic-socialist) transformation in which the constitutional redesign serves working-class power. This reflects the patterns of subordination of republican institutions, reducing it to instruments of a materialist or class majoritarian project. It therefore flattens the republican tradition into a vehicle for democratic-socialist ends and treats institutional redesign plus contingency pressure as adequate substitutes for the harder work of civic character and balanced government.
I have anticipated these patterns by critiquing Democratic Socialism, socialism, Lenin, Bolsheviks, and communism.
- Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ Assault on Republicanism: From Theory to the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly details Lenin’s rejection of spontaneous democratic or trade-unionist consciousness in favor of vanguard direction (What Is to Be Done?), his view of bourgeois democracy as “curtailed, wretched, false” (State and Revolution), dual-power tactics elevating soviets over the Provisional Government, and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly as “counter-revolutionary.” I tied this to Counter-Enlightenment affinities to warn that Marxist vanguardism narrows revolution to a single ideological path, displacing pluralist republican resistance to tyranny. This is very relevant to lately proposed DSA/MUG constituent-assembly and unicameral proposals since the current and last year.
- Civic Republicanism as the Enemy: Marxist, Leninist, and Related Hostility is a brief catalogue and refutation of Marxist and Leninist hostility to civic republican forms, institutions, and principles. Do not take this lightly. The patterns are in the logic.
- The Forgotten Anthropology of Freedom: Republicanism Against Socialism contrasts republican conceptions of freedom (non-domination, civic virtue) with socialist frameworks.
- When Socialists Claim the Common Good: Mamdani and Sanders’ Framing on Public Goods and Services critiques socialist claims to the common good (e.g., via public services) against the older republican-humanist and civic tradition of the res publica. After this article, you never hear DSA politicians or member employing this argument, because it is bad and directly contributes to the problem Democratic Socialists cannot fix, which is the decline of civic education, because its remedy requires teaching the long history of republican theory and tradition. This history will inevitably, if thoroughly and honestly done, bring to light the hostilities and patterns we are discussing, and which many other historians and politicians have also explained.
- Civic Friendship and the Common Good: Republican Tradition answers to Racial Faction argue that many socialist and democratic-socialist diagnoses treat the classical-liberal republican synthesis itself as the source of hierarchy and inequality (racial capitalism, settler domination), converting reform into systemic replacement. I contrast this with republican emphasis on equal citizenship under law, civic friendship, dispersed power, and institutional restraints. The rarity of explicit engagement with republican tradition in contemporary DSA and socialist rhetoric and the focus on attacking founding documents and structures is constitutively flawed. This flaw is observable and predictable.
- “AI Is a Communist Technology”: J.D. Vance Rhetorical Strategy, and the Long European Genealogy of Surveillance comes off of inspiration years ago from the study of Venetian Republicanism and examines rhetoric connecting AI-surveillance to communist technologies and longer European genealogies, in the context of republican concerns over arbitrary power and state capacity.
This project is bringing awareness to the history of absorption of displacement of the republican tradition by socialist, anarchist, or purely liberal frameworks during the 19ᵗʰ-20ᵗʰ century, to recover its concepts of citizenship, civic virtue, mixed institutions, and self-rule against arbitrary domination — not its concepts through its contested alternatives that claim to complete or supersede it. Readers interested in the contrast between republican mixed government and the unicameral and soviet-style models advanced by MUG and historical Leninism are invited to study and share these pieces.
There was also an interview of DSA national co-chair Megan Romer from her July 26, 2026, appearance on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream, affirming core DSA platform positions.
- Bream: “Abolish the Senate.”
Romer: “True.” - Bream: “Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them.”
Romer: “Yep.” - Bream: “Abolish ICE.”
Romer: “Absolutely.” - Bream: “Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally.”
Romer: “As a long-term plan.” / “Yep.” - Bream: “Defund the Pentagon.”
Romer: “Absolutely.” - Bream: “Abolish prisons, at least in large part.”
Romer: “Yeah, again, that is part of a long-term program.” - Bream: “Government or public ownership of most large corporations?”
Romer: “Yeah, absolutely.”
She framed the Senate as an “anachronistic” check (comparable to the House of Lords) and described the goal of expanding Congress into a unicameral legislature while subordinating the executive and judiciary. In her New Yorker Radio Hour interview with David Remnick, she struggled to specify what “taxing the hell out of millionaires” means beyond democratic process and exploitation framing, while defending other DSA positions on the Israel-Palestine war, open-borders long-term aims, and prison/police reallocation.
Why this proves the recovery of the republican tradition is more vital than ever?
The American republican tradition, the one the Founders deliberately adapted from classical and Renaissance sources and wrote into the Constitution, is not mere majoritarianism or “democracy” as pure popular will. This fact does not affirm those that believe it ought to be. It is a mixed, limited regime of separated powers, a bicameral legislature with the Senate as a deliberate cooling and federal check, independent judiciary and executive, protected private property, and the expectation of civic responsibility rather than the permanent subordination of everything to a single collective will or administrative center. Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and others designed the system precisely to resist factional capture, pure democracy’s tendency toward instability, and the concentration of power that historically ends in either oligarchy or demagogic tyranny.
Therefore, there will always be factions that grasp this to varying degree and devote themselves to protecting it, while being able to mark those that fail to uphold it, or desire to alter it as enemies, and they are justified.
Romer’s unhedged affirmations are not marginal policy tweaks. They are an explicit program to dismantle that architecture: abolish the Senate, subordinate the presidency and Supreme Court to a unicameral Congress, move major productive property into public ownership, and erase or radically dilute borders, prisons, and certain law-enforcement functions. This is the negation of the republican form, not a reform within it. It replaces the Founders’ checks, property rights, and federal balance with a vision of democratic control over the means of production and survival needs, closer to the socialist end of the spectrum the classical tradition was built to restrain.
That program is no longer confined to obscure caucuses. The DSA has grown into the largest socialist organization in American history, has elected and backed candidates who win Democratic primaries, and states its goals openly. When a co-chair can affirm the dismantling of core constitutional institutions on national television without apology, the threat is operational, not theoretical. Treating the recovery of the republican tradition as a niche academic activity of my own or any other scholar is dereliction, and apathy merely leaves the field to those who are already organizing, funding networks, and winning ballot access under the existing parties while describing the republic’s institutional skeleton as obsolete. The tradition’s recovery must be stated, defended, and applied broadly in the open, precisely because the alternative is stating, without hesitation, that those things should be abolished.
THE CLEVER SUBSTITUTION OF THE DSA AND MUG
So, this is the problem with the subversion of the meanings of government that has visible consequences into our era. The DSA/MUG version of “democratic republicanism” is not a recovery of the American constitutional republican tradition, but a deliberate substitution:
- Definition of democracy: Pickrell and MUG define a democratic system narrowly as “a single and sovereign representative assembly with members elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage.” They treat the U.S. Constitution’s features (bicameralism, equal state representation in the Senate, Electoral College, independent judiciary, separation of powers, federalism) as anti-democratic obstacles rather than deliberate republican safeguards against pure majoritarianism and concentrated power.
- Historical framing: They claim continuity with Levellers, Paine, Chartists, Radical Republicans, Marx, Engels, and Debs. This is selective and it is also substitution. Classical American republicanism (Madison, the Federalist, the mixed-government design of 1787) treated unchecked majority rule and a unicameral sovereign legislature as dangers. It built counter-majoritarian institutions precisely to protect rights and prevent factional tyranny. Marxist usage of “democratic republic” historically treated it as the political form that would enable the working class to take state power and then transform property relations, not as an end in itself.
- Programmatic end: The demand for a new constitution is paired with an explicitly socialist economic program (public ownership of major industries, working-class control of the means of production, etc.). The political form is instrumental to class rule. This is openly stated in MUG materials and reflected in DSA’s program language about a “democratic socialist republic.”
- Displacement effect: By redefining “republic” and “democracy” as majoritarian unicameralism plus socialist economic transformation, the tradition of limited, mixed, federal republican government is treated as obsolete or reactionary. Civic education and political language that once centered on separation of powers, enumerated powers, and checks against majority (or minority) abuse are subordinated to the demand for a new founding that removes those constraints. This is not hidden in the primary sources; it is the explicit argument in Pickrell’s writings and MUG’s interventions inside DSA.
Advocating constitutional amendment or even a convention is protected political speech. Discussing contingency plans that treat a disputed election as a “window of opportunity” for extra-constitutional transformation, while building networks that include former USAID democracy-promotion professionals applying foreign-country frameworks to the United States, is a different and more concrete political fact. Democratic leadership has noted the electoral popularity of socialist rhetoric and the organizational growth of DSA but has largely responded with dismissal rather than a sustained defense of the existing constitutional order on its own terms and have received a response that makes it seem there is no problem here, but there is. The recordings and the formal program documents make the underlying orientation clearer than most public messaging, and I still hold the Democratic Party accountable for this.
The Democratic Party’s long-running failure to transmit the actual foundations of American republican government (separation of powers, federalism, the deliberate constraints on pure majoritarianism, and the distinction between a republic and an unconstrained democracy) has left successive generations of young people without a coherent civic grammar just as social media algorithms, campus culture, and activist networks have supplied a ready-made substitute in the form of socialist and “democratic-republican” rhetoric. Rather than contest the premise that the Constitution is an illegitimate obstacle to progress, much of the party’s leadership and institutional apparatus has treated the country’s political history as something to be managed, downplayed, or selectively denounced, while simultaneously gatekeeping entry into real power and then harvesting the resulting alienation for short-term mobilization. The result is visible in the documented growth of the DSA and its Marxist Unity Group caucus, which openly redefines republican language as a call for a unicameral sovereign legislature and a new founding that subordinates the existing constitutional order to working-class rule; in the recorded contingency planning of networks that include former USAID democracy professionals treating legitimacy crises as opportunities for extra-constitutional transformation; and in the repeated, largely dismissive warnings of figures like James Carville that the party is being ideologically subordinated by forces it refuses to name clearly. What looks like mere apathy or tactical softness is better understood as a structural abdication: by refusing to defend or even accurately teach the republican tradition on its own terms, the Democratic coalition has effectively outsourced the political education of the young to the very currents that regard that tradition as the primary obstacle to be overcome.
At the same time, the Republican Party has largely enabled and exploited the same vacuum rather than filling it: it routinely collapses the specific project of constitutional replacement advanced by DSA’s Marxist Unity Group and allied networks into a diffuse charge of ‘radicalism’ or ‘terrorism,’ thereby avoiding any sustained defense of the republican tradition on its own historical terms and treating the resulting cultural and generational drift as a permanent campaign asset instead of a civic emergency that both parties have refused to name with precision.
