The oath is a familiar one. The president and vice president take it, as do members of Congress and many other high government officials. It requires the oath taker to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

We can identify many of America’s foreign enemies, but what about domestic ones?

Now that the Democratic Socialists of America have published their platform, it appears they would qualify as a domestic enemy of the Constitution. If they achieved power they would, to quote the stated goal of former President Barack Obama, “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

When someone tells you their intentions in advance about how they would restructure what the Founders gave us in 1776 and 1789, we had better take them seriously and respond accordingly.

This is not conjecture. Among other things their goals include eliminating the U.S. Senate and expanding the House of Representatives, while creating a multi-party system, free housing and health care for all, free Palestine (translated — eliminate Israel), abolish ICE, empty prisons, which would release murderers and other hardened criminals to prey on the innocent, abolish the Electoral College, replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress, establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic principles and accountability to the people (meaning government control), enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.

The problem with the last one is that after a very short time there would be no wealth or corporations to tax. Are you paying attention to Cuba where the lights were off again last week? A man interviewed in Havana by a Miami TV reporter said he couldn’t afford meat, even if he could get it, because it costs 3,000 pesos.

The ignorant and sometimes deliberate voters who support the DSA agenda should be careful what they wish for. They should look around the world and study history to learn where socialism has been tried and miserably failed, leading, along with its twin sister communism, to massive deaths, imprisonment, censorship and denial of rights that are protected by our Constitution. Cuba is just one of many examples.

Anyone familiar with the past that extends beyond yesterday might recall the slogan “Workers of the World Unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” It is the most famous English translation of the rallying cry from the 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto,” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The DSA agenda might be considered a modern version of the Manifesto, because its goals are remarkably similar.

More from the DSA: “You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses, they are common goods and utilities.”

As studies have shown, apparently to no avail for those who embrace the DSA agenda, even if the government confiscated all the money owned by corporations, billionaires and millionaires, it wouldn’t pay for all of this. Socialism is equally shared poverty, robbing people of incentives to work and prosper according to their talents and persistence.

If ever there was an identifiable domestic enemy, this is it. It must be fought, not only at election time, but by members of both parties and publicly or we will lose the Constitution to our regret and to the regret of generations to come who will blame us for refusing to fight this scourge that is expanding its influence before our eyes.

©2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.