American Socialists Want to Be Spain
Last month the Democratic Socialists of America, who now govern New York and Seattle, adopted a platform whose preamble states their aim without euphemism: win the battle of democracy, write a new constitution, build a democratic socialist republic. Its three chapters propose arrangements that have governed Spain since 1978. Americans debating whether such a design works can consult a country that has run it for nearly half a century.
The first chapter carries the weight, because it would replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary elected by Congress and subordinate to it, enlarge the House, adopt proportional representation and abolish the Senate. Courts and executive would answer to a Congress that had just shed its upper chamber.
Spain reached that destination gradually, and without a revolution. Its lower house invests the prime minister, and since 1985 the Cortes have chosen all twenty members of the General Council of the Judiciary, which decides judges’ promotions and therefore their pay. The same majorities appoint the Constitutional Court, and the Senate is decorative, because the lower house lifts its vetoes by absolute majority.
Under closed lists and party discipline, elected by Congress means elected by a handful of people. Majority rule holds only while losing stays cheap. Subordinating the judiciary to the legislature leaves the rights that make a comeback possible in the hands of whoever has just won.
The Spanish record is public: in the 2025-26 session the Cortes passed ten laws and ratified twenty-one executive decrees. The Judicial Council sat blocked for five and a half years and came unblocked in June 2024, to general applause, once the two large parties split the seats. The Constitutional Court, appointed the same way, upheld the 2025 amnesty for Catalan separatists, dividing along the lines that had voted it. The government has spent three years on rolled-over budgets, and nobody can compel it to present new ones. An American equivalent would be a president financing the government for three years without an appropriation, before a Supreme Court his own majority in Congress had picked.
The second chapter points the same way, promising free health care, free education from preschool through university, universal rent control and a thirty-two-hour week at full pay; Spain has all of it except the shorter week. The bill is itemized: at the close of 2025, 853,509 people were waiting for surgery, a median wait of 121 days, and 4.06 million more were waiting for a first specialist appointment. Spain also leads Europe in diplomazitation, 34.6% of graduates in jobs that do not require their degree against 20.9% in the Union, and its average graduate scores below the average Dutch high-school leaver on the OECD adult skills survey.
The third chapter cuts the war department, closes overseas bases, ends aid to Israel, recognizes a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, and lifts embargoes on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. Spain recognized the Palestinian state in May 2024 and came to the last NATO summit at 2.1% of GDP while its allies signed up to five. Americans who resent allied free-riding should note which member the platform proposes to imitate.
One premise runs through the three chapters: laws exist to deliver what citizens want rather than to organize how people live together. On that premise every check is an obstacle, whether the court that annuls, the senate that blocks or the judge who interprets.
Denmark or Britain also pick their executives in parliament without ending up like Spain. Neither hands parliament the appointment of judges, and neither lets a simple majority rewrite the constitution in practice: amending the Danish text takes two successive parliaments and a referendum carrying forty percent of the electorate. At Westminster, losing the budget vote means resigning or calling an election.
Spain never had to win such a vote. What would take a constitutional amendment in Washington was installed in Madrid by an ordinary statute in 1985, and has sustained itself since through the division of council seats. Nobody deceived the voters.
They are part of the mechanism: among seven European countries, Spaniards are the least likely to regard a constitutional court striking down its own government as democratic. A candidate who behaves undemocratically loses 5.9% of the vote there, and gains 21% among voters of his own party.
The American platform is unlikely to travel far. Nearly eight in ten Americans want their political system substantially reformed, yet only 27% credit democratic socialism with good ideas, and the program would need a constitutional amendment and reinforced majorities. That difficulty measures institutional strength: its authors need a revolution to obtain what Spain never had to write down. Americans are arguing over a program that will probably never win. Spain argues over none, because its version won without being written.
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Adapted from "Los socialistas estadounidenses querrían ser españoles", The Objective, August 9, 2026. Translated by Anthropic's Claude.