We are witnessing the most egregious rollback of voting rights since the premature end of Reconstruction. Republican state legislatures throughout the former Confederacy are systematically disenfranchising Black voters with discriminatory congressional maps, adding to an autocratic arsenal that already includes restrictive voter ID laws and an outright refusal to accept election results they don't like.
This escalation is thanks to the Supreme Court, and it isn't the first time that the court has been instrumental in the defense of American apartheid. In the wake of the Civil War, representatives from the loyal states, abolitionists, and most of all freedpeople themselves made genuine strides towards refounding America as a multiracial democracy based on universal and equal suffrage. The Supreme Court undermined the laws and even the constitutional amendments that would have guaranteed liberty and equality to future generations of Americans. Almost a century later, the Civil Rights Movement secured more legislation intended to right this historic wrong. We're now seeing it undone by that same old reactionary institution: the Supreme Court.
We're seeing the end of a relatively brief era in which the court was defined by progressive decisions like Brown v. Board of Education (1954, abolished segregation in public schools). The recent decisions that gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, Louisiana v. Callais in 2026) are drawn from a longer, more consistent tradition of reactionary, racist jurisprudence that produced decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896, declared the constitutionality of laws mandating racial segregation) and Dredd Scott v. Sandford (1857, declared the unconstitutionality of citizenship for Black people).
The Supreme Court can destroy the progress made by movements for democracy because it is not subject to democratic accountability. Justices are not elected, but are rather nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The president is elected by the Electoral College, not the people. The Senate represents states, not people. As a result, some of the justices dismantling the Voting Rights Act were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators not elected by a majority of the national population. The right to overturn legislation was even created for the court by the court itself (1803, Marbury v. Madison) and does not derive from the Constitution.
More and more people are awakening to the need to refound the United States of America as a genuine democratic republic, based on a new Constitution that guarantees universal, equal, and direct suffrage to all residents. These are demands that can be found in DSA's program. Specifically, we demand:
The ongoing attacks on democracy and targeting of minorities are part of the strategy that the capitalist ruling class has always used to hold on to power. The working class is the majority, meaning our interests would be best served by a truly democratic system. This explains the capitalist class’ general hostility to democracy. They know that once every worker has an equal right to vote, it won’t be long until we establish equal rights to healthcare and housing too. Appealing to racism and other forms of prejudice has been historically successful in preventing the working class from uniting to fight the capitalist ruling class. It also allows capitalists to isolate some segments or the working class and hyperexploit them. At first it was the chattel slavery practiced by the framers of our undemocratic Constitution. After the Civil War it was convict leasing and sharecropping. Now it’s undocumented labor and prison slavery. At the same time that Louisiana is disenfranchising Black people, it has passed a law criminalizing homelessness and requiring people convicted of that new crime to offset the cost of their incarceration by performing unpaid labor. For as long as the capitalist class is allowed to rule, it will always pose a threat to the freedom and material wellbeing of workers, especially Black workers.
In contrast to a capitalist economy based on authoritarianism and white supremacy, DSA demands a socialist economy based on the same level of democracy we want to see in politics. Specifically, we demand:
To win these demands, DSA is working to build an independent, mass, democratic socialist party. The Democratic Party depends on funding from the capitalist class. Its politicians depend on our undemocratic political system as an excuse for why they don’t deliver on their promises and they depend on our unproportional electoral system to secure their status as a major party. The working class can only depend on itself. We need a party grounded in that truth. DSA is funded by, and therefore only accountable to, its members. We function democratically, uniting workers engaged in workplace and community struggles all over the country into an organization of over 100,000 democratic socialists fighting to finally establish a government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people. If our demands are your demands and if the struggle of the working class is your struggle, then join DSA today.
