LDA or DSA?

There’s a better modifier than “socialist.”

A note before we begin: regular readers of Quislings@Substack know we spend most of our time naming names - documenting enablers, opportunists, and the quietly complicit. This isn’t that. This is a thought experiment about language, framing, and whether one of America’s two major parties might find a better way to say what it actually believes. We offer it in the spirit of the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, with appropriate humility about how far outside our lane we’re driving.

In 2016, voices inside the Republican Party warned that Donald Trump would destroy it. They weren’t wrong - it’s just taking longer than they imagined.

But the party being upended isn’t only the Republicans. The Democrats are unraveling too. This shouldn’t surprise us.

The party of Abraham Lincoln became the party of Donald Trump. Barack Obama and George Wallace were both Democrats.

Realignment is as American as the thing itself.

We recently did something we don’t recommend: we read both the 2024 Democratic and Republican platforms. Cover to cover. OK, some skimming, but all of it.

They both describe what they want to do. What’s largely missing - on both sides - is a unifying principle behind the planks. The Republicans have “America First.” The Democrats have “From the Middle Out and Bottom Up.” Neither exactly stirs the soul.

We have a suggestion for the Democrats.

Liberty.

Not Democratic Socialists of America. Liberty Democrats of America.

The Central Reframe

“Government has no business in your body, your bedroom, your worship, or your gun safe. Personal sovereignty is the highest American value. The state exists to protect individual liberty - not to define it.”

Democrats have historically ceded the language of “liberty” and “freedom from government” to Republicans - even on issues where the liberty argument is arguably stronger on the Democratic side.

That’s a strategic error worth correcting, especially in a year when the Declaration of Independence turns 250.

What a Liberty Democrat Platform Might Look Like

● Economic liberty - Fair wages, affordable health care, and housing aren’t government handouts. They’re the floor of freedom. You cannot be truly free if you are one medical bill away from ruin.

● Bodily liberty - No politician, no bureaucrat, no legislature has authority over your medical decisions. Ever.

● Spiritual liberty - Your faith is yours. The government’s job is to protect it - not promote it, and not impose anyone else’s on you.

● Personal liberty - Live and let live. Your neighbor's private life is not your business, and it's certainly not the government's.

● Second Amendment liberty - The right to self-defense is real. So is the right of your neighbors to be safe. Responsible gun ownership means accountability, not confiscation.

● Economic sovereignty - Workers are sovereign too. No corporation should have more power over your life than you do.

A Few of Those Reframes, Fleshed Out

Guns

The Supreme Court has ruled that bearing arms is an individual liberty the government shall not infringe. What government can do is ensure one person’s liberty doesn’t extinguish another’s. Background checks and red flag laws aren’t gun control - they’re due process protections. The argument isn’t “we want your guns.” It’s “we want to make sure the person packing next to you on the street hasn’t been adjudicated violent.” Responsible sovereignty: you are accountable for your weapon the way you are accountable for your car.

Abortion

The most intimate decision a person can make is fundamentally informed by a person’s faith - not the state. Government-mandated pregnancy is theocratic control over your body. The reframe writes itself: “If you believe in freedom from government overreach, you cannot support the state commandeering a woman’s body.” Anti-abortion laws aren't socially conservative - they're the government imposing its will on the most private decision a person will ever make.

Religious Incursion

The First Amendment protects your right to worship freely. It also protects everyone else from having your religion imposed through law. “Your faith is sacred. So is mine. So is theirs. The government should honor all of them equally, which means favoring none.” School prayer, Ten Commandments in courtrooms, religious exemptions used to deny services - all government-sponsored religion, which is precisely what the Founders feared. Religious freedom means freedom for every faith - not freedom to use the law as a pulpit.

LGBT

Whom you love and how you live is the definition of private life - beyond the reach of the state. Discrimination protections aren’t special rights; they’re the same rights everyone else already has, applied equally. This ties directly to the “live and let live” libertarian tradition many voters - including many Republicans - already hold. As someone’s mother once put it: “Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t real to someone else.” Live and let live.

DEI - Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Diversity is fundamental to America and Inclusion isn’t ideology - it’s the recognition that a nation of 330 million is stronger when more of them are fully in the game. Equity isn’t equality of outcome. It’s ensuring the same rules apply to everyone - that your zip code, your name, or the color of your skin doesn’t determine your access to opportunity. That’s not redistribution. That’s the promise of the Declaration, applied.

Why This Might Work Politically

• It peels off libertarian-leaning independents and soft Republicans genuinely uncomfortable with government moralizing - and there are more of them than recent elections suggest.

• It reframes Democrats as the anti-authoritarian party - a historically powerful American identity that has gone largely unclaimed on the left.

• It puts Republicans on defense. If they are the party of government control over bodies, bedrooms, and worship - and the evidence suggests they are - let them defend that.

• “Liberty” and “freedom” are the two most potent words in American politics. Democrats have largely abandoned them. That’s a gift they should stop giving away.

The Risk

It requires discipline. You can’t run on personal liberty and simultaneously be perceived as favoring government intervention in everything else. The economic platform has to be framed in liberty language too - not as redistribution, but as leveling the playing field so freedom is real, not just theoretical. The floor of freedom, not the ceiling.

Platform writing is well outside our skill set, and this has been a thought experiment - not a proposal. But it reflects how we think about what the Declaration aspired to when it said that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights.

Two hundred and fifty years later, that’s still worth fighting for.

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