A People’s January 6th?

Guest contributor Steven R of Marxist Unity Group replies to Geese’s T.E. Moon on the question of a “people’s January 6th.” This article is an edited version of “A Democratic Revolution Needs Revolutionary Constitutional Politics,” previously published in Geese Magazine.

In “For a People’s January 6th,” T.E. Moon offers an audacious analysis of where the present constitutional crisis is heading. The premise that the Trumpist Right is preparing to overthrow the 2028 Presidential Election seems to be vindicated daily. The vision Moon offers in response—a defensive democratic revolution to force the Right to cede power to a left-populist administration—is compelling, but leaves important threads unpulled. Most important is the question of constitutional politics: who must rule, and how?

If we are to have any hope of transforming the upcoming transition of power into a democratic revolution, we cannot merely mount a defense of existing political norms from Trump, but must challenge the Constitutional order of minority rule that produced Trumpism in the first place with a vision of universal and equal political rights. Opposition to ICE will be a critical flashpoint for this struggle, as we dare to define a revolutionary democratic alternative to both reaction and restorationism.

Who must rule, and how?

Constitutional politics give a class its identity as a subject in history. The disparate struggles of individuals and fractions of a class become class struggle when they unify around a vision of how to constitute political power in society.

For the Bolsheviks, “All Power to the Soviets” was an accessible distillation of a comprehensive theory of constitutional politics. The slogan popularized their program of unqualified state sovereignty for the worker-peasant majority, allowing them to construct a mandate to topple the provisional government in October 1917 and begin the more arduous work of building a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”

In contrast, the lack of such comprehensive constitutional politics contributed to the 2020 George Floyd uprising’s disintegration. Demands to abolish or defund the police captured the imaginations of millions, but without a unifying positive vision of how the people would rule, the rebellion succumbed to exhaustion and cooptation. For the democratic socialist Left to avoid this pitfall and assume leadership of the democratic struggle against Trumpism, we must present a clear alternative to the political order that sustains this regime.

The current constitutional paradigm in America is a product of over two centuries of class struggle constrained by the state America’s colonial elite created in 1787. Thanks to those struggles, Americans now expect things that would be alien to the “Founders,” for instance, a right to vote that formally transcends race, gender, and wealth, or a government that imposes social obligations on private enterprise. But the Constitutional principle of unequal suffrage persists in the Senate and Electoral College, the unelected Supreme Court, “states’ rights,” and contingent citizenship. Trumpism should not be understood as a divergence from that political order, but as a mutation of it, exploiting the logic of constitutional hardball to roll back the compounded gains of class struggle while accelerating the expansion of executive power to suppress its opposition.

If the Left took the presidency after defeating a MAGA autogolpe in 2028, its rule would be hampered from day one by the unequal geography of political power under the Constitution. The new administration would face conditions like those Allende’s Popular Unity government faced in Chile: dogged right-wing obstruction, an uncooperative security apparatus, and a meddling international capitalist class. Moreover, it would certainly need to contend with majority opposition in the Senate, seditious state governments, a conservative judiciary, a hostile Federal Reserve, and the threat of capital strikes.

Of course, problems like these confront every revolution. Victory is never either certain or impossible; it is always a question of relative power and organization. In Moon’s scenario, the working class could meet every obstruction with the threat to resume its strikes and occupations.

But permanent mobilization is not a sustainable answer to the problem of state power. People are finite—eventually, they need to return to work, school, safe homes, ordered lives. And when they do so, for the revolution to survive, they need to leave behind new forms of state power that disorganize and disadvantage the old ruling class, just as the current forms do for the working class. The forms of state power matter; they are the “means of production” of political hegemony. To the extent the people at large acknowledge and participate in them, they answer the question of who should rule and how through public discourse on rights, law, and constitutionality instead of permanent civil war. Mass action may topple governments, but it cannot replace governing.

Thus, to have any hope of long-term success, an ascendant Left would need to transform the state according to a constitutional politics that takes the principle of “one person, one vote” to its conclusion: the transfer of sovereignty from the capitalist minority to the disfranchised working-class majority. The Senate must be abolished, the courts disempowered, executive power subordinated to an expanded and proportional House, state-level reactionary fiefdoms bulldozed by the march of universal rights, citizenship extended to all who live here, and the organs of state-sanctioned violence completely reconstituted. In short, to ensure that the gains of popular mobilization are consolidated, not corroded, we must resume the unfinished work of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy.”

What if the coup is legal?

Fulfilling the promise of a revolutionary democratic constitutional politics through the existing Constitution is impossible. The logic of white minority rule that has frustrated reformers for generations is baked into the process of changing the Constitution itself, which requires the consent of three-fourths of the state legislatures to amend and unanimity among the states for any amendment that might challenge unequal suffrage in the Senate. Just a handful of filibustering state senators from the whitest, least populous states, collectively representing perhaps one-fifth of one percent of the population, could block an overwhelming supermajority from lawfully affecting fundamental change. With the stakes confronting us this century, we cannot afford to accept those terms of engagement. The Left must actively embrace constitutional disloyalty, a refusal to practice politics on our illegitimate Constitution’s terms.

The law matters only insofar as the body politic at large believes it does, and Americans believe in the Constitution. Our country practices a civic religion Aziz Rana calls “creedal constitutionalism”: the hegemonic idea that Americans are more free the more faithfully the country embodies the perfect wisdom of the “Founding Fathers.” This founding myth is the bedrock of a reactionary American nationalism that is deeply suspicious of political imagination, hostile towards majority rule, and deferent to ancient “norms.” It is absolutely corrosive to any kind of emancipatory political project. We have no choice but to contest and replace it with a new hegemonic ideology that reflects socialist constitutional politics.

Attempting to use creedal constitutionalism for our own ends by subverting the letter of the law would leave the door open to counterrevolution by agreeing in advance to terms of engagement that favor the ruling class. Consider, for example, how few of Zohran Mamdani’s millions of supporters would heed the call if the mayor asked the people of New York to take to the streets and confront the NYPD’s racist tyranny, given that he made the strategic choice not to use his campaign to agitate against police power. By that same principle, would a democratic socialist president who ran for office in deference to the Constitution be capable of inspiring mass action to prevent her removal for blatantly subverting it in office?

Further complicating Moon’s narrative, a constitutionally loyal socialist movement may never even get to wield power. If the Left hopes to realize its constitutional politics without breaking with the existing Constitution, how will it meet the moment in the plausible event that Trump’s successor wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote? MAGA is too dangerous to be allowed to remain in power just because a piece of paper says it should—but how can a Left loyal to the Constitution justify a defensive democratic revolution to its base when the threat to democracy comes from the Constitution itself?

For a democratic revolution to be possible in 2029, the 2028 election must be a referendum on a new system of governance incompatible with the existing one, a referendum in which the democratic camp plainly rejects any standard of victory except a freely cast majority of the popular vote. The campaign itself must be the event that disintegrates creedal constitutionalism and asserts the hegemony of a radically democratic alternative, paving the way for new centers of political power to take form and supplant the old ones. Whoever DSA endorses, we must campaign on the message that a vote for our candidate is a vote of no confidence in an undemocratic form of government that suppresses mass political activity.

Arrest ICE!

If the democratic socialist camp waits for the regime to make its move before leaping into action, our mandate may well be obscured by voter suppression. We must shape the terms of the people’s confrontation with the regime by going on the offensive.

We know the Right will enjoy a disproportionate advantage in 2028 thanks to the unequal suffrage baked into the Constitution, which is why DSA must stand by our demand to abolish the Senate and Electoral College. We can also expect that Trump will try to further stack the deck by using ICE to suppress turnout and crush dissent. Our movement needs a line of attack that both contains within it the constitutional politics of democratic revolution and measures up to the urgency of the threat ICE poses. Geese Magazine has it right: It’s Time to Arrest Them.

The movement against ICE already contains some of the raw material of a democratic revolution. While sanctuary policies are semi-legal, the underlying demand to eject ICE from our cities, campuses, and workplaces is a radical challenge to the de facto plenary power of the imperial executive sanctified repeatedly by the courts. In an election where the ruling clique will likely use ICE for election interference, the logical extension of the sanctuary demands DSA is already struggling for is to demand our state and local governments buck federal authority by using all necessary force to protect our democratic rights from ICE. Arrest them. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

DSA is uniquely positioned to advance this demand. Our endorsees occupy public office in most states in the country, including contested states where both media attention and the threat of voter suppression will be highest, like Georgia, Minnesota, and Florida. We can upend the national political landscape by calling the question on ICE’s authority.

As the 2028 election looms, DSA should push our state and local electeds to rally around the demand to protect the right to vote from ICE interference. Socialists in state legislatures and city councils could bring forward legislation designating expansive “ICE-free zones” around polling places and post offices, prohibiting ICE activity within their jurisdiction during active voting, and ordering police to enforce these policies. Socialist mayors could issue executive orders to the same effect. Rank-and-file DSA members could get to work drafting the text of these bills and orders right now.

None of that is legal. “Arrest ICE” bills would struggle to even secure a floor hearing in hostile legislatures. No court would uphold them, and no police department in the country would enforce them. But the fact that these bills would be completely incompatible with the hegemonic legal order is the point. Their mandate comes from a higher law, one that no court can adjudicate and no constitution can qualify: the people’s absolute right to live under a government of their own choosing. In other words, if the people do it, it can’t be illegal.

Regardless of whether a single “arrest ICE” bill passes, shouting the demand from the rooftops—in every government chamber we can get a foothold in, in every race we field a candidate in, on every news platform open to us, in every town square we can fill with demonstrators—would give the democratic movement directional unity. Following in the abolitionist tradition, the movement could escalate from demonstrations demanding the passage of “arrest ICE” measures to mass “citizens’ arrests” of ICE agents or street blockades of targeted areas, and from there to direct confrontations with the state.

It is clear that a growing mass constituency despises ICE. They are marching people into camps, invading cities, and killing civilians. The crisis is already before us—our task now is to use it to expose the rottenness of the Constitutional order that prevents the working-class majority from putting a stop to it.

No prairie fire in wet grass

Moon’s piece is appropriately ambitious. A democratic revolution seems far-fetched now, but no one foresaw the ferocity of the uprisings of 2020 in 2018, either. As the regime and American political economy in general both careen deeper into crisis, vast new possibilities both hopeful and fearful will open up, and old assumptions will continue to be overwritten.

That being said, prospects for revolution this decade still seem slim. DSA, organized labor, and left-wing social movements are still far too small and unorganized in 2026 to contemplate seizing power. Even assuming massive quantitative growth in coming years, the democratic socialist camp’s qualitative ability to wage class war will still be leagues behind the antislavery movement in the 1850s or the industrial unionist movement in the 1930s, two moments of revolutionary possibility that ultimately still ended in defeat.

But to take Moon’s analogy further, the Trumpist camp lost the battle on January 6th in humiliating, discrediting fashion, yet it still won the war in the following years. Assuming DSA loses the battle in 2028-9, how might we win the war?

Unlike Trump’s shock troops, socialists will not have the luxury of America’s constitutional machinery working in our favor. MAGA was able to deflect serious consequences for January 6th and claw its way to unprecedented power come 2025 by virtue of an undemocratic state that structurally privileges its politics. Trump could count on friends in the malapportioned Senate and aristocratic judiciary to make it impossible for Biden to implement anything resembling a coherent and popular platform that could renew popular support for liberalism. That much is off the table for us. But what can we emulate?

For one, we can adopt disruptive legislative tactics. In the wake of the 2022 midterms, Trump loyalists took advantage of the razor-thin majorities produced by our sclerotic party system to depose establishment Republican leaders in a series of contested Speaker of the House elections that brought Congressional business to a halt and bent the entire political universe around their agenda. They did so with a cadre of partisans not much larger than the roster DSA is sending to Congress this year.

Outside Washington, MAGA also carried out a discursive coup that left Democrats completely disoriented. They used the cost-of-living crisis as a foot in the door for a comprehensive political vision: “The Democrats are making it impossible to live in this country because they’re letting millions of ‘illegals’ in and burning all our money on DEI. We need mass deportations and a revolution against the woke deep state, and only Trump can do it.”

This narrative was padded with blood lies and blood libel. But it didn’t matter. With Bidenism completely gutted, the Democrats had no credible positive vision with which to construct a counter-narrative. So they played defense, cobbling together an incomprehensible strategy to contain Trump with fruitless efforts to disqualify him, while insisting that they could do the reprehensible things he wanted to do better. “Trumpism with a human face” handed “Trumpism without apologies” the largest Electoral College victory for a Republican since the Reagan era.

Whether the Right retains its grip on power or a centrist Democrat returns to the White House, the next administration will find itself just as beset by crisis as the current one. Our task will be to use its every failure to popularize the constitutional politics of revolutionary democracy. What MAGA did by lying, we can do by telling truths irreconcilable with the existing political order: Life is becoming unsustainable in this country because we do not live in a democracy. We need to stop playing by the rules of an undemocratic Constitution and replace it wholesale with one that will put the working-class majority in power.

The question of who has the right to rule and how will remain unavoidable no matter what happens in 2028. Constructing a constituency that opposes the restrictive, anti-majoritarian logic of creedal constitutionalism is a necessary task in the quest to make a democratic revolution possible, however long it takes.