Friend,
When Man is God, everything becomes available as an instrument of power. And this vacuum does not produce freedom. It produces envy; and this human vice, organized into a program, becomes Marxism.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s newly released platform is worth reading in full, if your stomach is strong enough. Let me summarize what they are explicitly demanding:
Unlimited abortion and “gender-affirming care” for all—including minors—at public expense. The dissolution of law enforcement: no police, no prisons, no deportations, no immigration agencies. The elimination of the presidency, the Senate, and an independent judiciary. Federal ownership of major economic sectors. Government seizure of the Federal Reserve, insurance, banking, and real estate.
In short, it is an explicit program for the demolition of the American republic: its institutions, its legal order, its constitutional structure, and the moral framework that gave rise to all of them.
Dismissing this as the fever dream of a fringe movement would be a mistake, and an expensive one. The envy that drives this type of politics has no emergency brake.
DSA-aligned candidates have already won the mayoral race in New York City. DSA candidates have picked up congressional seats in New York and Colorado. This is a movement that has completed its long march through the cultural institutions—academia, media, entertainment—and is now targeting electoral power in states that we would have considered immune to this wave.
In fact, in two heartland states, we see two major DSA candidates campaigning with Hasan Piker, the internet leftist influencer who imitates the wardrobe of Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong (a man responsible for more than 65 million deaths), and who is on record saying that America "deserved" 9/11.
Heartland America is not an afterthought for the DSA. It is the target.
This means that the connection between the spiritual and the political has never been more legible than it is right now: this is a contest between two visions of ultimate reality, not merely two competing policy agendas.
Catholics cannot be passive observers of this moment. We are, in fact, uniquely equipped for it. We possess what the DSA explicitly does not: a coherent account of the human person, a tradition of ordered liberty and a community forged by something stronger than class resentment.
The loss of God has terrible political consequences, and not merely spiritual ones.
The DSA knows what it wants and where it is going. The question is whether faithful Catholics will match that determination with our own.
Go forward bravely,
