‘The Democratic Party is asleep at the wheel’: Democratic socialists are strategizing for their biggest moment yet | CNN Politics

Amid the corporate carpeting and industrial artwork of McCormick Place, the Democratic Socialists of America spent a rainy weekend preparing their next steps for taking over the Democratic Party and taking down capitalism. The “DSA Merch” table had $30 T-shirts and $45 sweatshirts with roses and Green New Deal slogans. A table from a local socialist bookstore stocked Palestinian poetry collections, Black Panthers histories, “The Communist Manifesto” and a children’s book called “Prisons Must Fall.” The attendees at the lakefront convention center called one another comrades. A pamphlet with a sketched red fist laid out the group’s program, including “a future without capitalism,” where “food, education, energy, medicine and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.” It encouraged supporters to dream of a world where they don’t have to worry about paying rent or loans and can embrace “a socialist day off.” It pitched a 32-hour workweek, universal healthcare, reparations for slavery, and “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.” It said the DSA wants to “replace the president and Suprem