The Socialist Sugar High: The DSA’s Free-Stuff Fantasy Is Headed for a Brutal Crash

 

The DSA's free-stuff revolution sounds sweet until crime rises, streets darken, and ordinary Americans discover that ideology cannot answer a 911 call. In a practical sense, abolish police and prisons, and America may not get justice—it may get chaos, predators, panic, and a desperate public begging for order.

Ever watched a kid tear through a bag of candy, ricochet off the furniture, and announce he can fly?

That is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) right now: wired on the sugar high of free stuff, chanting about abolition, and acting as if abolishing police departments and tearing down prisons will somehow make America safer, kinder, and brighter. Just add free health care, free college, free child care, free housing, well-lit streets, and a few community gardens. Voilà. Utopia by Tuesday.

It is a fantasy. A dangerous one. Historically illiterate, politically fashionable, and built to collapse the minute it meets the real world.

Then the rest of us get the bill.

I looked at the DSA’s platform and the official material from its Abolition Working Group. No smoke. No mirrors. They want to defund police, abolish prisons, and bulldoze the existing criminal-justice system. They call it ending the “criminalization” of poor people.

Sounds tenderhearted. Sounds noble. Sounds like something printed on an overpriced tote bag.

But beneath the velvet language is a hard-edged con: the belief that crime will dissolve if government spends enough money on housing, services, and community programs. As if a violent criminal will suddenly look at a new public garden and say, “You know what? I have seen the error of my ways.”

That is not public safety. That is wishful thinking wearing a graduate-school vocabulary.

Let us get down to street level.

Frances Gill, a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee, was asked a simple question recently: What happens when a rapist is loose and there are no police officers to find him?

A straightforward question. A nightmare every parent understands.

Her response was not an answer. It was a detour. A U-turn in a fog bank. She shifted the discussion toward “well-lit streets.”

Streetlights.

The host asked: “If my daughter is assaulted and raped, is there any agency that would seek to find her assailant?” The response, in substance, was: Let us talk about lighting.

That is not a plan. That is a dodge with a light bulb screwed into it.

Nobody is against safer streets or better lighting. But a streetlamp cannot investigate a rape. A community meeting cannot chase down an armed attacker. A mural cannot arrest a serial predator. You cannot illuminate your way out of a felony.

Yet this is not some stray idea whispered by a few activists in a coffee shop. This is the party line. The DSA wants to eliminate cash bail, get rid of electronic monitoring, and stop imprisoning people for parole violations.

That is not reform. That is a deluxe “get out of jail free” card, handed to anyone prepared to say the right words about poverty, oppression, or “survival offenses.”

The DSA talks about ending policing “full stop.”

Full stop.

No police. No jails. No meaningful accountability. No serious answer for the woman walking alone from work, the elderly man attacked at a bus stop, the store owner robbed for the third time, or the family whose child got caught in the crossfire.

This ideology was cooked in the soft air of college seminars, not on the hard pavement of dangerous neighborhoods. It is an academic fantasy written by people who treat crime as an abstract theory—until it shows up at their own front door.

Then suddenly, they want security.

Funny how that works.

Now let us look at the numbers, because numbers have a way of ruining a perfectly good ideological party.

A recent poll asked Americans whether they supported the DSA’s proposal to abolish jails and prisons. Only 26% agreed. That means 74% of Americans rejected it. Even 61% of Democrats thought the idea was insane.

So when politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Kwame Mamdani push this kind of agenda, remember this: they are not speaking for most Americans. They are speaking for a loud, radical minority that has become addicted to its own ideological perfume.

They love the smell of purity. The public gets the stink of the consequences.

Then there is the free-stuff sales pitch.

Bernie Sanders has spent years promising free college, free child care, free health care, and apparently free everything short of a complimentary moon landing. It sounds wonderful—right up until somebody asks the question politicians hate most:

Who pays?

America’s national debt is over $39 trillion. But in the socialist fairy tale, money is always there. It grows on rich people. It falls from the ceiling. It appears whenever somebody says “tax the billionaires” with enough feeling.

You cannot buy the country a pony with Monopoly money.

History already ran this experiment, and history is not known for giving make-up exams. In 1917, Russia’s Provisional Government abolished the Tsar’s police force. The result was chaos. Crime surged. Criminal gangs and military deserters roamed the streets. Ordinary people—the same people socialists claimed to be saving—were terrified. Many had to protect themselves because the government had removed the very force responsible for maintaining order.

That was not liberation. It was a vacancy sign for criminals.

And what came next? Lenin and the Bolsheviks stepped in, promising order. Russia did not get freedom. It got a police state.

That is the dirty little joke of abolitionist politics: destroy order long enough, and people will eventually beg for somebody—anybody—to restore it. Usually, that somebody is not a civil libertarian. Usually, he is a strongman with a clenched fist and no patience for rights.

But do not expect Bernie or AOC to dwell on that history. They are too busy enjoying the fruits of the capitalist tree they keep threatening to chop down.

Bernie Sanders’s PAC spent $221,000 on private-jet travel in the first quarter of 2025. He owns three houses, including a waterfront home in Vermont. AOC lectures America about climate justice while traveling in first-class comfort.

It is the old sermon from the private jet: You peasants must sacrifice.

They fly across the country to tell you that your pickup truck is ruining the planet. They sip the expensive coffee, board the premium seat, and then glare at the working man for driving 20 minutes to his job.

The hypocrisy is not accidental. It is the business model.

Then there is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, another DSA figure. Once he got into office, the tune changed. Suddenly, he was “proud” of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for lowering crime. Suddenly, he credited police for reducing murders and shootings to record lows.

Imagine that.

When his own city, his own reputation, and his own political career were on the line, law and order did not seem so offensive after all.

But nationally, the DSA still flirts with abolition.

That is not principle. That is survival instinct. Mamdani is trying to spray perfume over a political dumpster fire and call it reform. He is like a fox running the henhouse while assuring the chickens that he has gone vegan.

The DSA says the criminal-justice system protects the wealthy and targets the poor. There is no kernel of truth in that criticism. Yes - the system is flawed. It makes mistakes. But what it needs is reform.

But the DSA does not want reform. It wants demolition.

Its answer is to tear down the whole structure and replace it with “community infrastructure.” That phrase sounds lovely until a man puts a knife to your throat.

You cannot community-negotiate with a knife.

You cannot build a housing project quickly enough to stop a gang shooting.

You cannot hold a restorative-justice circle while somebody is breaking into your home.

The DSA’s central promise is the oldest political scam in the book: something for nothing. Free stuff. No consequences. No police. No prisons. No discomfort. No hard choices.

Just sugar.

But sugar highs do not last. The crash always comes.

Take away police, and you do not create utopia. You create a vacuum. Predators fill vacuums. Gangs fill vacuums. Fear fills vacuums. Then ordinary, law-abiding people become prisoners in their own homes.

And when they are scared to walk outside, scared to send their children to school, scared to open their businesses, they will not call the DSA. They will not call for another community meeting. They will call for whoever can restore order.

History says that “whoever” is often the man nobody should have trusted in the first place.

So go ahead. Vote for the socialist sugar high.

Enjoy the free-stuff promises. Enjoy the applause. Enjoy the fantasy.

Just do not act surprised when the bill arrives—and there is nobody left to call for help.

 

On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my  “Brief Book Series” worth exploring. You can also read them here on Google Play, or in Barnes & Noble bookstore: Brief Book Series.