Who doesn’t love a good wish list? Come dream with us right here.

First step, we abolish capitalism. Without that most ultimate of evils? No more bills. No more debt. We’re all carefree now.

That’s the basic premise of the Democratic Socialists of America’s vision. If you haven’t looked at the platform lately, we offer you the following condensed version.

In addition to abolishing capitalism (step one), the DSA proposes eliminating the Senate and the Electoral College, subordinating the presidency and Supreme Court to Congress, and placing major industries under public ownership.

Housing, health care and energy all become public goods.

Oh, and we don’t need defense or public safety, so we can defund the Pentagon and get rid of prisons. The lamb will live among the wolves and will not be bitten.

While it’s tempting to dismiss all of the above as fringe politics, that might be a dangerously cavalier approach for sensible Democrats. The DSA’s influence has grown inside the Democratic Party, and both Chicago and New York, no small burgs, are governed by mayors who openly identify with the movement.

Prominent Democrats are beginning to push back. “You can be focused on winning tough races, flipping red seats blue. Or you can be focused on abolishing prisons and … the Senate and Supreme Court. You can’t do both,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote Monday on X, urging Democrats to stop chasing what he called “DSA distractions.”

The obvious question is why a platform this absurd has gained so much ground.

It’s a question many are trying to answer and understand. The DSA’s vision has found an audience among what pollster Nate Silver calls “highly educated, downwardly mobile” young Americans.

Silver came out recently with new data analysis showing that the people most likely to vote Democratic in elections have postgraduate degrees but make $30,000 to $60,000 per year. That tracks with the DSA, too, which Silver points out. The organization revealed in 2021 that 80% of its members have a college degree but make less than $60,000 a year.

Many DSA supporters appear to have done what society told them to do: earn the degree, work hard, play by the rules. Yet many haven’t found the economic security they expected, and they struggle to afford the kind of life they desire, despite doing what they believed would lead them there.

It’s not hard to understand how the DSA’s message might appeal to this group.

The DSA comes tantalizingly close to diagnosing what frustrates so many young Americans: the influence of money in politics, a widening wealth gap and an economy that no longer seems to reward playing by the rules. The DSA’s diagnosis of the problem often contains kernels of truth, but its prescription is where it veers off course.

Recent Echelon polling suggests younger Democrats respond more favorably to the phrase “free market economy” than to “capitalism,” perhaps reflecting frustration with today’s version of American capitalism rather than markets themselves, which is an important distinction. It could also be that these college-educated younger folk sat through a lot of classes where a professor with tenure and financial comfort was talking about “late-stage capitalism” and not using the term as a compliment.

Rather than repairing the broken rung on the economic ladder, however, the DSA proposes tearing the ladder down entirely, dousing it with gasoline and lighting a match.

In opposing concentrations of private power, the DSA proposes concentrating enormous power in public institutions. The platform says remarkably little about why Americans should assume that public power is inherently less susceptible to abuse than private power.

Chicagoans have already watched what happens when ideological ambitions collide with stubborn budget math, political compromise and the practical realities of governing. The result is dysfunction.

And yet it all sounds so wonderful before you get to the hard part.

The DSA’s imagined “day without capitalism” begins like a burned-out parent’s dream.

No commute. No bills. More time with the kids. A leisurely walk to school instead of another frantic morning. It’s an appealing vision.

The problem with wish lists is that they have a way of describing everything we’d like to receive while saying very little about who will pay for it.

The DSA’s platform and messaging skip over the part where someone still has to build the smartphone, stock the grocery shelves, finance the next medical breakthrough and create the jobs that pay for the myriad government services the DSA promises.

None of these things appeared by accident. Neither, for that matter, did the freedom to advocate replacing our existing economic system.

Alas, history teaches us that liberty has rarely endured where governments control nearly every major sector of the economy.

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