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MY POV - “The goal of Socialism is Communism.” – Vladimir Lenin
Democratic Socialism sounds so nice, like your nice neighbors who are Democrats. Socialism sounds pleasant, like being social and sharing things. Free stuff, cheap rent, and taxing the rich are appealing slogans. They all come with ginormous price tags.
The coming dismal election in Los Angeles is where voters are having to decide whether to elect a few more progressive politicians or extreme left-wingers. Will they decide to hand additional control of City Hall to an organized socialist movement that openly seeks to replace private ownership, market economics, and individual decision-making with political control over housing, energy, transportation, healthcare, immigration, and major industries?
This is not an accusation invented by conservatives. It is contained in the Democratic Socialists of America’s own documents.
The DSA’s national program calls for placing the largest corporations under public ownership, constructing a socialist society, rewriting the federal Constitution and moving toward a single federal legislature based on proportional representation. Its ultimate ambition is not merely to expand government benefits but to help “construct socialism worldwide.”
DSA-LA is equally candid. Its program outlines a six- to eight-year strategy to win municipal, county, and state offices, elect new socialist leadership, and move Los Angeles toward worker control of the means of production. It calls for publicly controlled energy, municipal enterprises, and the expropriation of corporations operating in housing, groceries, restaurants, and internet service. (DSA Los Angeles)
DSA candidates do not need to become Stalinists or Maoists to take power. Their strategy does not require an armed revolution. The transfer of power can occur through elections, budgets, taxes, regulations, eminent domain, public authorities, and administrative decrees. Marx provides the economic objective. American electoral politics provides the method. California’s stinking election laws will make it easy for the DSA ballot harvesters to turn the tide after Election Day, yet again.
DSA-LA is not contesting one office at a time. It is building an interlocking bloc within Los Angeles’ government. The organization formally endorsed Eunisses Hernandez for Council District 1, Estuardo Mazariegos for District 9, Faizah Malik for District 11, and Hugo Soto-Martínez for District 13, while supporting candidates for city attorney and the LAUSD board. It is endorsing DSA member Nithya Raman for mayor. It also recommended Kenneth Mejia for controller. (DSA-LA Voter Guide)
Taken together, these races reveal the strategy: gain influence over legislation, budgets, audits, appointments, education, and enforcement simultaneously, so that a relatively small socialist organization can exercise power far beyond its membership.
That is how a relatively small ideological movement captures a city: not by winning every office, but by controlling enough strategic offices to dictate the direction of government.
Anybody can easily observe that California and Los Angeles have repeatedly demonstrated that nearly everything government touches becomes slower, costlier, more complicated, and less accountable if it even works. So, what is the DSA’s answer to massive government failures? More government!
Socialism does not eliminate scarcity; it creates it. Just look at the dearth of consumer goods in the Soviet Union and behind the Iron Curtain. It suppresses the signals and incentives that respond to scarcity. In a market economy, shortages raise prices and create opportunities for profit. Those profits attract investment; production expands, and innovators develop substitutes. When demand weakens and a market becomes saturated, prices and profits fall, forcing producers to reduce output, improve their products, or move capital elsewhere. There has never been a successful communist country, so why does the DSA want to create one here?
Government ownership substitutes economic decisions for those made by tax dollars, budgets, and administrative quotas, rather than allowing the market to function. A government agency does not go bankrupt. It requests another appropriation, postpones the deadline, and blames its failure on insufficient funding.
Start with housing. DSA-LA calls for removing housing from the private market by “expropriating privately owned housing,” imposing universal rent control, and repealing the Ellis Act so landlords can never exit the rental market. They want to do away with the Costa-Hawkins Act, which allows landlords to set market rates when a tenant moves out. They also want to convert privately owned buildings into government, nonprofit, or tenant-controlled housing. DSA-LA seeks to eliminate what it calls exclusionary zoning, including zoning protections in single-family neighborhoods. (DSA Los Angeles)
Why would anyone invest millions of dollars in apartments under those conditions?
California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has identified inadequate housing construction as the principal driver of high coastal housing costs. It cited restrictive land-use policies, environmental review, government fees, community resistance, and slow approvals as major impediments. Its answer was substantially more private construction, not government seizure of the existing supply. (Legislative Analyst's Office)
The housing crisis was not created by insufficient regulation. It was created in large part by a government that made housing extraordinarily expensive and difficult to build. The DSA now uses the shortage created by the government as the justification for giving the government still more control.
Los Angeles County has spent billions through a maze of city, county and nonprofit programs while encampments remain embedded in sidewalks, parks and commercial corridors. Auditors found poor recordkeeping, inadequate contract monitoring, and an inability to verify whether some services had actually been delivered. Millions of dollars in cash advances could not be properly accounted for. (AP News)
DSA-LA’s answer is not stricter accountability or restoration of public spaces. Its program calls for repealing Municipal Code Section 41.18, opposing restrictions on encampments, and reducing law enforcement’s role in responding to street disorder. (DSA Los Angeles)
The DSA views police power as the problem. DSA-LA proposes reducing sworn police staffing, redirecting police funding, decriminalizing drug use, and shrinking what it calls the carceral state. (DSA Los Angeles)The public is already experiencing the inadequate ability of the police to protect the public through home invasions, vehicle theft, shoplifting, assaults, and whether police even respond when called.
Then there are the roads and sidewalks. Los Angeles can produce extensive climate plans, mobility studies, equity frameworks, and bike and bus lanes, yet it can’t maintain its roads. Reporting in 2026 found that full street resurfacing had effectively stopped after June 2025, fewer than two-thirds of city streets were considered in good condition, and the pace of sidewalk repair was so slow that one estimate projected centuries to complete the work. (The Washington Post)
The Palisades Fire offers a more serious example. The 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir had been drained since early 2024 because its floating cover required repair. How hard can getting a new cover be? It was empty when the Palisades Fire erupted. The water in the reservoir might not have extinguished the fire, but it could have mitigated its severity. Leaving critical water infrastructure unavailable in one of America’s most combustible communities is indefensible. (The Wall Street Journal)
California high-speed rail provides the statewide version of the same failure. A widely circulated graphic attributes the following comparison to Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar:
“For $10 billion, Elon Musk put 300 rockets in orbit. For $11 billion, the State of California has built 1,600 feet of elevated rail—with no rail.” This statement illustrates the difference between private enterprise and government projects. One used capital efficiently to create amazing infrastructure and a profitable business where none had existed before. The other has proposed using an existing, mature technology (high-speed rail), has squandered billions of tax dollars, and shows so little progress that the best possible outcome would be to abandon the project.
SpaceX must make rockets fly. California’s rail authority must keep taxing and politicians writing checks. That is the difference between production and state control.
The DSA would also use government power to reshape culture. DSA-LA calls for anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist education. The DSA’s immigration agenda would place Los Angeles in continual conflict with the federal government. DSA-LA wants to go materially further. Its published program demands that local government be “completely disentangled” from any immigration enforcement. (DSA Los Angeles)
This is not simply a generous immigration policy. It is an ideological project that wants to teach students to understand America primarily as a structure of colonialism, exploitation, and racial oppression. Hate America first. It aligns intellectually with anti-capitalist regimes and revolutionary movements abroad rather than with the constitutional system that produced unprecedented prosperity and attracted millions of immigrants.
The DSA would take Los Angeles backward towards the political economy of the Middle Ages. When access to rulers determined who received property, credit, employment, and commercial permission. Socialism recreates that system in bureaucratic form. The agency replaces the royal court. The politician replaces the prince. The approved nonprofit replaces the privileged guild. Everybody else is merely a peasant whose taxes support the hierarchy above them.
Los Angeles does not suffer from insufficient government. It suffers from excessive taxation, overregulation, selective enforcement, administrative overkill, and almost complete insulation from failure.
The DSA’s answer to every failure will be more government: more taxes, more departments, more regulations, more public ownership and more power for the same political institutions that cannot clear encampments, account for homelessness money, maintain roads, protect neighborhoods, repair critical infrastructure or complete major projects at a rational cost.
Saving Los Angeles from socialist capture begins with recognizing what is at stake. These are not isolated candidates offering a few compassionate reforms. They are part of an organized movement seeking control of the offices that govern housing, policing, spending, education, and transportation.
Los Angeles has already seen what an unaccountable government does with the power it possesses. The last thing the city needs is a bunch of entitled ideologues who have learned nothing from history, hold worthless degrees, never built anything, and have no business experience, trying to implement a command economy while openly advocating for the downfall of America and the capitalist system. Communism’s historical record is not theoretical; the greatest democides have been committed by communist regimes. Be careful who you vote for.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
