Below is my column on Fox.com about the growing condemnation of capitalism in the Democratic Party as establishment figures such as Gov. Gavin Newsom pander to the extreme left of their party. It is a rising mantra among those who ignore the economic foundations of liberty in our Republic, a connection expressly made by the Framers in their embrace of Adam Smith at the time of our founding. Like a game of musical chairs, champagne socialists are rushing to find a seat before the music stops in the coming elections. Ironically, only in the United States are socialist figures in the top percent of earners and own multiple homes from Bernie Sanders to Abdul El-Sayed. As Yakov Smirnoff would say, “What a country!”

Here is the column:

“Imagine the end of capitalism.” Those words in the Democratic Socialists of America manifesto offer Americans a world without landlords, debt, mandatory work hours, and “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation… are common goods and utilities.”

The left often refers to radical changes as “reimagining” everything from police to the Supreme Court to prisons to borders. However, the rise of socialists in the Democratic Party has moved such claims from the merely rhetorical to the outright revolutionary.

The release of the DSA platform on Bastille Day, July 14, was fitting since the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating. The platform promised to change the constitutional system and end the rule of “the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.”

The DSA, which counts various Democrat figures such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, includes a plan to eliminate the Senate, the Supreme Court, the presidency and other institutions in remaking the American constitutional system.

In my new book “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss the rise of socialism and the move among professors and pundits to scrap key aspects, or the entirety, of our constitutional system on the 250th anniversary of the republic.

The book compares many of these proposals to identical policies of the Jacobin movement in the French Revolution. It is a book about revolutions and how they can consume those who start them. Both the American and French revolutions arose during the same period, but one became the world’s oldest democracy while the other became a blood-soaked tyranny known as “The Reign of Terror.”

Notably, the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating. Even figures such as Thomas Paine (one of two figures who played a significant role in both revolutions) supported such measures to allow for more direct democracy.

It was an approach that the Framers expressly rejected. Great students of history, they did not want to replicate the elements that led to the destruction of past democracies going back to ancient Athens. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, referred to it as democracies becoming “mobocracies.”

The DSA is the direct descendant of the Jacobins in seeking to tear down moderating institutions and replace the president and justices with democratically elected figures by a Congress composed only of the House of Representatives. However, many of these suggestions are also found among leading academics and influencers.

As with the original Jacobins, those demanding these changes are not the working class but professors, pundits and young college-educated voters.

Mainstream figures such as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School, have published books such as “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

The media eagerly publishes these radical views, such as the New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” in which Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale call for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

It was an approach that the Framers expressly rejected. As discussed in “Rage and the Republic”:

“Those who want to remain in favor often pander to the extremes. Radical leftist sites like the Jacobin have grown in popularity… They use some of the same words and symbols but still seem improvisational and inauthentic, like a child’s game of dress-up with oversized outfits. Indeed, that is precisely the danger.

“There is little knowledge, let alone memory, of what such radicalism became under the real Jacobins. There is the same blissful ignorance that allowed Rousseauian dilettantes to mutate into monsters, escalating radical agendas with every failure… As the popular slogans became disastrous policies, the momentum would carry them beyond any point of recognition or return. The new Jacobins show the same blind ambition and abandon in striking out at institutions and the Constitution itself.”

Those slogans are now preying on the gullible and the vulnerable. Take the recent pitch of Michaela Brangan, DSA national political education chair, who declared that with socialism:

“[Y]ou are able to take a day off and not have to worry and you don’t have to have a job just to pay the bills because you do not have a lot of bills. Right? Bills are no longer a thing because there’s not for-profit businesses that are constantly trying to exploit you and trying, you know, to put you into debt.”

She laughed at the suggestion of, “Why do we have a Senate? What is so great about the Senate?”

If she wants that answer, she only needs to look around her at the mob seeking to destroy the world’s oldest and most successful republic in history.

She is right about one thing. Capitalism has played a critical role in our republic. This is the 250th anniversary of not just our Declaration but the publication of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” which the Founders eagerly embraced. They believed that you could not be truly independent and free if you are not economically independent and free. They rejected the economic dependency pushed by many on the left.

The left has found a voice in the class warfare espoused by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and others. However, it is not a new voice. It is the same Siren’s call that we rejected 250 years ago. Paine himself would barely survive in France and come to appreciate the structural precautions that Founding Father and President James Madison created in our system that were absent in the French system.

After the Jacobins implemented some of these very same policies, they destroyed their economy and then devoured themselves in waves of executions. Once again, these same voices are asking a people to destroy the most successful and stable democracy in history.

Mainstream figures are conditioning the public for radical changes, often using the same coded messaging. Former Vice President Kamala Harris dismissed the opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court as mere “nostalgia” for a system that is no longer working.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently also pandered to the mob in declaring that “nostalgia is not working,” and added, “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work either.”

It is not “nostalgia” that binds us to this constitutional system. It is the faith in a system based on natural rights; a system that protects the minority from the majority. It is a system based on faith in both political and economic independence; the embrace of freedom and free-market principles that created the greatest prosperity in history.

We have heard these voices before and we would be wise to take them seriously if we are, as Benjamin Franklin asked, to keep this Republic for the next generation.