No Ordinary Office: What a DSA-Backed President Can Give the Left (Part 1)

So far as the presidency of the United States is concerned, I would spurn it were it not that it conferred the power to serve the working class.

Eugene Debs, 16 May 1908.

This fall, chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are considering resolutions to encourage a DSA-backed nominee for U.S. president in 2028. Straw polls suggest that New York City congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) may be competitive in the Democratic Party primary race. So far, she is the only DSA-affiliated politician with the national profile to run to win against more establishment-friendly candidates like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Jon Ossoff. The aging Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who won DSA backing for his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 despite not being a DSA member, has ruled out another attempt. Eyes fall on Ocasio-Cortez.

As of now, AOC herself is undecided. However, given that many contenders will announce in spring 2027, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles DSA chapters have already passed resolutions encouraging her to run. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has signaled a willingness to help AOC secure a coalition among labor unions. From there, she may have a path to unite liberal and left voters, win swing states like Michigan, and take the White House. But why do it? Debate has focused on AOC’s electability, the agitational benefits of her running, or her worthiness and reliability as a DSA-affiliated national politician. Detractors emphasize the structural constraints a DSA-backed president would face and argue that DSA must avoid this ‘executive trap’ by focusing instead on party reorganization, mutual aid, legislative races, political education, or developing labor and tenant unions.

But fixating on the micro-level attributes of AOC the individual, or the macro-level constraints of capitalism the system misses a crucial meso-level question: what can a DSA-backed presidency in 2029 do to advance our goals, despite constraints? I argue the U.S. executive holds enormous, unique power to advance socialist priorities globally. This emanates from its legislative veto, agenda-setting power, and court and agency appointments (NLRB, IRS, SEC, FTC etc.), which greatly condition the balance of class power in the United States. Abroad, the White House exerts near-unilateral control over sanctions and weapon sales. A determined president can wield these tools, even despite a hostile Congress and judiciary. Part one of this series illustrates this potential in ‘classic’ socialist domains: building working-class power, taxing the rich, and public ownership of industry. Part two shows how these powers can address urgent, global causes of the American left—Palestine, Cuba, and the climate crisis.

I submit this exercise as a motivation for what we can win—a realist description of the executive powers a DSA-backed candidate like Ocasio-Cortez can wield to advance our priorities. Constructing utopian ‘castles in the air’, as the Communist Manifesto once derided, is not my goal. Nor is it a DSA version of Project 2025—a totalizing policy document for autocratic ‘unitary executive’ power. Rather, I illustrate a few foreseeable, legal achievements under non-ideal conditions that make an AOC presidency worthwhile. It is a socialism for realists. Inevitably, of course, realists who follow rules stacked against us will disappoint, slamming into the limits of the possible. But here lies a more profound achievement. A democratic socialist in the White House will raise expectations for what is possible to expect electorally in America; her failures, narrated correctly to the public, will put floodlights on the remaining constraints. What emerges is a mandate to overcome—successive waves of claims-making to power the permanent campaign.

Many supporters of an AOC-DSA bid emphasize the agitational benefits of the campaign, irrespective of its chances. In the primary, she can consolidate the left pole, inject bold left ideas into the national discourse, and drive recruitment into the DSA, just as Bernie Sanders did in 2016 and Zohran Mamdani in 2025. But if she and the DSA break through the primary despite a last-minute centrist consolidation, her capacity to drive turnout among young, independent, or infrequent voters may prove decisive against MAGA Republicans. This is because under current patterns of partisan polarization, the share of eligible voters who both (1) vote consistently and (2) swing between parties has thinned. As the distribution grows more bimodal, driving turnout from the base—not winning ‘moderate,’ inter-party swing voters—has become increasingly important in deciding elections. [1] 

Other Democrats cannot credibly commit to sufficiently left-populist positions to win; Kamala Harris and Joseph Biden, for instance, backed the genocide in Gaza and brought down their party. Thus, an AOC presidency may be our best chance to avert further descent into autocratic fascism. According to the most recent YouGov polling, she ranks as the second most-considered candidate for president among Democrats and Independent voters and third most popular (behind Harris and Newsom). She is also popular among democratic socialists—winning her NYC-DSA chapter re-endorsement by 86% in April 2026. DSA by now has developed a core of seasoned campaign operators and media surrogates, a base of volunteers, and a bench of public officials. It is a force on the Democratic Party ballot line, especially in cities needed to drive turnout.

Powerful special interests are already convinced that a joint DSA-AOC run is a grave threat whose defeat must be prioritized. A group called Third Way representing investment bankers, billionaires, and Fortune 500 CEOs has vowed to spend $15 million ahead of 2028 to defeat the DSA. The group’s president Jonathan Cowan warned that AOC 2028 could run “a reprise of Bernie 2016, 2020, but successfully this time.” If our class antagonists view the terrain in such terms, why don’t we?

Critics within the DSA raise many concerns. First, a national DSA-led presidential campaign could drain resources from other chapter priorities—political education, worker unionization, tenant organizing, ballot measures, and legislative or other executive electoral campaigns. Second, critics argue that tying DSA publicly to the political fortunes of Ocasio-Cortez would be unprincipled given her tenuous commitment to the organization. DSA was not decisive in her 2018 upset against Joe Crowley, and along with Mamdani, she has repudiated pandemic-era positions on defunding the police, which the 2026 DSA platform demands. Critics accuse her of being a Zionist and a strike breaker, corrupted by Internet stardom, whose self-preservation instincts would lead the DSA astray into the asphyxiating fold of the establishment. To critics, this would destroy hopes of an eventual break from the Democratic party.

Third, even if an ideal DSA candidate somehow took the White House in 2029 against a right-wing onslaught and possible self-coup attempt, the structural demands on the U.S. capitalist state would set up a democratic socialist president for failure. She would likely come to power in a country with over 850 military bases globally, private sector union density around 10%, the most powerful fossil fuel, tech, and finance industries in the world, ephemerally thin (or absent) partisan co-majorities in Congress, and veto players in the central bank, state legislatures, and court system that would resist unilateral attempts to make structural changes. Under such conditions, altering property rights or achieving a constitutional transformation would be impossible.

This cynicism about socialist participation in bourgeois government is not especially new or unique to the American context. It animated debates in the 1900-1904 congresses of the Second International. [2] “A socialist in a capitalist government,” wrote Wilhelm Liebknecht, “becomes a nonentity or a traitor.” In the American context, critics envision an increasingly unpopular DSA president forced to manage the painful contractions of U.S. imperial decline and ongoing crisis tendencies of capitalism, as the media relentlessly direct public dissatisfaction against scapegoat minorities and the socialist movement itself. Without a socialist legislative majority or independent party—and with a mass membership numbering in the hundreds of thousands, not the tens of millions—holding this hypothetical DSA president accountable would be hopeless. Wedded more than ever to the Democrats, the DSA would be betrayed, its core of organizers disillusioned.

At the extremes of this bleak prophecy, AOC is transmogrified into François Mitterrand, the DSA of 2028 into the French socialists of 1981-83—a once-in-a-generation fluke of the electoral pendulum squandered, absorbed by forces of the status quo. This fear animates writers in various DSA publications like Cosmonaut, Light and Air, and Democratic Left, who oppose a joint DSA-AOC presidential bid. Caucuses like Red Star, Springs of Revolution, Emerge, and Marxist Unity Group have also opposed AOC’s Congress re-endorsement. Some want DSA to avoid contesting executive offices at all—municipal, federal, or otherwise—until stronger litmus tests are imposed for DSA membership and candidacy. In the interregnum, they call for DSA to bide its time and develop its forces: focus on party reorganization, base-building, political education (particularly Marxist theory), and legislative races—where office-holders are not immediately tasked with running the state.

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…[T]he political institutions in which the domination of the bourgeoisie is organized offer a fulcrum by means of which the proletariat can combat these very political institutions.

Frederick Engels [3]

The abstentionist line discounts how greatly the prospects for socialist institution-building and working-class organization depend on who occupies the White House. This dependency is a reflection of the United States’ enduring hegemonic centrality in world politics as well as the strong counter-majoritarianism of the U.S. constitutional order. Among the dozens of affluent countries in Europe and its settler states with long-running, multi-party elections, the United States is the only one with pure presidentialism. [4] It combines this presidency with a bicameral legislature, a 60% majority threshold in the Senate on most bills, strong judicial review, federalist fragmentation, and a constitution that is unusually difficult to amend. In classroom civics, Americans are taught a folk wisdom that these ‘checks and balances’ shelter political minorities and protect us from tyranny. The reality, as political scientist Lisa Miller has shown, is that this ‘veto exceptionalism’ systemically advantages powerful racial and economic elites against the public.

Compounded, these veto players create gridlock. This is true for the aging statutory architecture of U.S. labor law, frozen for half a century or more—Davis-Bacon, NLRA, FLSA, Taft–Hartley, Title VII, OSHA. But a president, even one like AOC, can loosen the gridlock. In fact, the legal purview of the presidency vis-à-vis other veto players has crept forward over the last century: expansion of executive budgeting authority in 1921, effective end to the non-delegation doctrine after 1937, the 1976 National Emergencies Act, the 1984 Chevron deference (albeit weakened in 2024), and the Supreme Court’s Trump v. Slaughter (2026), which allows the president to remove independent agency heads at will. After the 1960s, the rise of open presidential primaries, national media markets, and television over print and radio has also tilted politics away from less visible party structures and toward photogenic national candidates. [5]

Liberals wedded to the ‘checks and balances’ wisdom fret over the abuses of power that accompany this ‘imperial presidency.’ But capturing the White House also helps the DSA overcome other entrenched veto players. In 2028, potentially dozens of DSA congressional candidates would win riding the coattails of an AOC campaign. With national name recognition and campaign funds, an AOC president would intervene in key 2030 midterm and special elections—further diluting congressional veto players. Armed with Slaughter (2026), she would replace corporate-friendly heads of agencies more quickly than before. And through the nomination process, she would steadily dilute the judicial veto by appointing hundreds of judges to federal courts. If her impeachment articles filed in 2024 succeed, this would include at least two corrupt Supreme Court justices: Thomas and Alito.

The legislative veto also confers on the White House a unique agenda-setting power. An AOC president could mean the difference between either passing a Medicare for All bill like Bernie Sanders’, which would bar duplicate private services and destroy the power of the private health insurance industry, or passing a Pete Buttigieg-style plan that merely overlays a public option. It could mean the difference between a coordinated push to abolish the Senate filibuster (AOC consistently pro) and not (Ossoff lukewarm). An AOC president would also be the most likely to press Congress to repeal the 1967 statute that requires single-member districts, opening the door for state-level DSA campaigns to adopt proportional representation for U.S. House seats.

An AOC president would appoint hundreds to advisory councils, where socialist policy ideas can mature and become mainstream, and she would staff a 2.7 million-person bureaucracy, where space for policy innovation has widened due to legislative paralysis. Artificial intelligence is one such domain, in which federal agencies can invoke a reservoir of enforcement obligations to constrain capital: consumer welfare, copyright, environmental protection. Gig platforms are another, where statutory ambiguity has made the flip-flopping of the National Labor Relations Board since 2016 crucial to the lives of millions of workers. An AOC presidency could restore the Biden-era expansionist approach.

Of course, any law or agency rule is reversible. Since Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg debated the reformist road to socialism, Marxists in the evolutionary strain have sought what André Gorz called ‘non-reformist reforms.’ These are reforms that cannot be safely absorbed by capitalist institutions or the class structure. Stuart Hall called them ‘reforms which transform’; Erik Olin Wright wrote of ‘interstitial’ strategies to expand the space of non-capitalist institutions. The goal is not just to secure temporary, reversible benefits for workers but to forge new, organized claimants on capital.

One hallmark of the non-reformist reform is creating constituencies that endure and demand the reform’s expansion. Consider the design of Social Security. New Dealers in 1935 could have financed it without regressive payroll taxes on lower-income Americans; they could have excluded the ultra-rich through means-testing. But as FDR observed, the program’s universality would generate a sense of entitlement among contributors. “With those taxes in there,” he said, “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” He’s been right for 90 years, and it has expanded. Workers agitated to expand Social Security in 1954 to cover farm laborers, domestic servants, and other occupations; lower the retirement age in 1961; inflation-proof benefits in 1972; and expand coverage to all disabled children and adults. The program has reduced mortality among those 65 and older by 30-39%.

The Social Security Act of 1935, of course, was a disappointment to socialists and a shell of FDR’s grander ambition. It initially excluded many racialized occupations and continues to subsidize retirement for the rich on cheaper terms than everyone else, relative to their income. But compared to its counterfactual absence, Social Security removed a massive volume of retirement savings from speculative asset markets. It also expanded the horizon of claims-making and guaranteed that tens of millions of people are not immediately dependent for their survival on ongoing wage labor, accumulated capital ownership, or the patriarchal family. Three decades later, it became the template for Medicare, passed by Congress under pressure from the Johnson administration and an activated coalition of AFL-CIO workers and socialists—against hostile elites in the medical industry.

Today, socialists want to force the rich to pay the same percent of their income in Social Security taxes as everyone else and pass other measures to rationalize the welfare state. And these moves are far more foreseeable under an AOC presidency than one favored by Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, or Donald Trump. Non-reformist reforms also do not have to wait for legislative action. Under the autonomous action of a DSA executive, the administrative state can forge an independent power base against a recalcitrant Congress. This happened in the Progressive-era U.S. Department of Agriculture. There, activist bureaucrats like Gifford Pinchot and Harvey Wiley fostered a coalition among farmers, women’s groups, conservationists, and public health advocates in the early 1900s. They then mobilized these ties against recalcitrant lawmakers. The fruits of that process were some of the first drug, forest conservation, and food safety laws in America.

So far, I have described in broad strokes what a DSA-backed presidency could deliver. Skeptics may wonder whether such tactics are more appropriate for generic ‘progressive’ issues like welfare redistribution. Could they also apply to causes at the core of the American socialist mandate? Moreover, could pursuing reforms dilute demands for a DSA-led socialist transformation? Undermining an insurgent left was, infamously, Otto von Bismarck’s motivation for establishing Germany’s social insurance programs in the 1880s. But in Bismarck’s case, we now know his reforms backfired, strengthening the Social Democratic Party. We also know that an AOC president can wield a vast toolset to advance socialist priorities. These priorities include strengthening the working-class, taxing the rich, and building public ownership of industry. I now outline them in specific detail.

Building Working-Class Power

Picture a very plausible sequence of actions if AOC is elected on the back of a left-labor coalition: she immediately fires Trump’s boss-friendly appointees to the Department of Labor (DOL). AFA-CWA union leader Sara Nelson becomes Secretary. Invoking the Davis-Bacon Act, AOC restores Biden-era prevailing wage formulas nationwide, favoring union-scale wages over the Reaganite ‘weighted average’ method friendly to employers. DOL investigations of the estimated $50 billion in annual wage theft are resumed at full clip, and definitions of employee (over contractor) status are broadened to the fullest extent legally possible. AOC then invokes the Procurement Act to extend union preference and enforce prevailing-wage protections for all IT, janitorial, food service, and other federal contracting, leveraging $750 billion in annual spending power. She also restores collective bargaining rights to 1 million federal workers that Trump derecognized in March 2025.

Upon taking office, AOC immediately fires Trump’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel. Endowed with vast discretionary power, new lawyers broaden interpretation of unfair labor practices and prosecute the largest corporate offenders. Although NLRB staffing capacity is constrained long-term by Congressional appropriations, the president requests a larger budget for the next omnibus bill. In the short term, she reprograms some funds and directs existing staff toward more aggressive enforcement priorities in their case selection, settlement posture, and use of 10 (j) injunctions. They pursue not just backpay but actual damages, including disgorgement of corporate profits. The president also fills rolling vacancies on the five-member NLRB and designates its head—perhaps socialist NLRB watchdog Matt Bruenig. Despite some exposure to court vetoes, new NLRB rulings continue to strengthen unions.

NLRB rulings are catalysts of class organization. The 2016 Columbia decision by the Obama-era NLRB, for instance, recognized collective bargaining rights for graduate students who teach and conduct laboratory research. A massive unionization wave followed. Some 20-25% of dues-paying members in the UAW now work at universities. This influx into the old industrial unions has created a symbiotic radicalization dynamic. Graduate students are now amassing strike funds, gaining protections for their research and teaching work, and socializing their peers as class subjects. In return, unions have recruited a new dues base. Radicals from that new base have helped tip the scales against corrupt and class-conciliatory union leaders and toward those like Shawn Fain, who adopt a more confrontational posture to the boss. However, the Columbia NLRB precedent and others undergirding union rights are poised to be overturned by Trump. An AOC-era NLRB could resurrect it.

On national strikes, it’s perhaps too early to speculate whether AOC would preemptively rule out using federal strike-breaking laws. [6] But a close reading of her record during the looming 2022 railroad strike shows that AOC has been far more eager to help unions secure demands like sick leave than her critics recognize. For tenants, AOC could appoint Cea Weaver as HUD secretary, restore $10 million annually of HUD funds for tenant organizing, and more aggressively prosecute illegal landlord retaliation. In HUD, Weaver (or someone like her) could issue rulemaking for a 60-90 day notice before eviction, good-cause requirements, and tenant right to counsel. The federal government also subsidizes $60+ billion annually in housing. If AOC passes her green housing bill, this amount would grow. At present, landlord neutrality on tenant unions is currently only required for HUD-assisted properties; AOC could require it for all federal funding.

Finally, there are workers beyond American shores, where more than 95% of the global labor force lives. No American working class can prosper long if cheap, exploited labor abroad makes offshoring an enticing option to capital. Any socialist president hoping to strengthen workers must make her ambitions global, leveraging the immense U.S. consumer market, trade network, and capital account. Ocasio-Cortez’s past foreign engagements—with democratic socialists in Brazil, Chile, Britain, and Germany—already trace a constellation of receptive allies. Of course, AOC cannot single-handedly end endemic suppression of labor rights across the world, force Congress (or other countries) to ratify ILO conventions, or unilaterally transform U.S. trade agreements to limit anti-worker provisions, such as investor-state dispute settlement.

However, many unilateral tools are available to presidents to strengthen worker rights abroad. Some tools were, ironically, enabled by Trump and Biden’s firewall on appointments to the World Trade Organization appellate body, which has derailed WTO dispute settlement since 2019. First, AOC can revive the use of Withhold Release Orders (WROs) by customs authorities. A long-dormant artifact of the 1930 Tariff Act, this measure empowers customs to seize imports on “reasonable but not conclusive” suspicion of forced labor practices by the producing firm. Biden used it against companies active in Malaysian rubber, Congolese gold, and Brazilian bone char. Unlike tariffs, which bluntly target an entire country or product category, WROs can target specific abusers. There’s no reason they should not scale to, say, textile firms in Bangladesh or Honduras with documented child labor or debt-bondage practices.

Second, a socialist U.S. trade representative (USTR) can choose to more aggressively invoke Section 301 investigations into violators of “internationally recognized worker rights.” Since the 1990s, the AFL-CIO and its allies abroad have filed worker-rights 301 petitions for cases in China, Guatemala, India, and elsewhere. But under both Republicans and Democrats, the USTR has often declined to pursue these petitions or self-initiate them, because findings could compel tariffs that trigger a WTO dispute or disrupt profits in those supply chains. For Mexico, the USTR has an even more specific Rapid Response Labor Mechanism that suspends preferential treatment for goods from factory plants that deny labor rights. This can be part of a broader strategy to negotiate a better deal for Mexico that improves labor protections. [7] Similarly, the CAFTA-DR, Peru, and Colombia trade agreements have labor chapters with consultation mechanisms to activate something similar.

Third is conditioning U.S. loans on labor rights and living wages. The executive oversees billions annually in credit for development projects abroad—via its Export-Import Bank, Development Finance Corporation, and vote shares on the World Bank, IMF, and Asian Development Bank. Unlike tariffs, loan conditions for a Bangladeshi solar plant or Guyanese road project are harder for the next administration to reverse. Finally, there’s the capital account. We know taxing foreign capital entering the United States can correct a global savings imbalance produced by endemic wage suppression abroad, greatly helping workers. The president can do this with a global clearing union of willing states, similar to Keynes’ Bancor proposal, that maintains current account deficits or surpluses within a narrow band. She can also prioritize passing a U.S.-only Market Access Charge (essentially a financial transaction tax) in Congress or unilaterally impede capital inflows through OCC regulations, CFIUS review, and tighter Treasury International Capital reporting. 

Globally, these capital account policies would deter financial inflows into U.S. bond, stock, and real estate markets. For capital exporters (China, Germany, the Gulf, etc.), these impediments would encourage state planners to internalize their current account imbalances by raising the wage share of GDP—for instance through reform to the hukou or kafala system or simply allowing more unionization. This would strengthen the organizing rights of workers abroad and raise aggregate demand. Such a global clearing union or unilateral financial transaction tax is desperately needed but will simply not happen without a U.S. president backing it.

Taxing the Rich

Taxing the rich is a canonical left demand. The 1848 Communist Manifesto called for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” The old American Populist, Progressive, and Socialist parties championed it, and Milwaukee ‘sewer socialists’ played a decisive role in passing Wisconsin’s 1911 income tax law, the country’s first. DSA biennial platforms call for taxing the richest individuals and corporations, even as taxes on the 1% have massively eroded. By 2018, the richest 400 Americans paid a smaller share of their income in taxes than households at the bottom 50%. In 2025, at least 88 corporations on the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 paid $0 in corporate income tax, despite collecting $105 billion in profits. Special interests relentlessly lobby to widen loopholes in the tax code while lawmakers vote to debilitate IRS enforcement and pass tax breaks (e.g., in 2001, 2003, 2010, 2018, and 2025).

Therefore, a DSA president must not only push for higher tax rates and enforcement budgets in Congress; she must unchain the hounds at the IRS, SEC, and DOJ. About $600 billion of owed taxes goes unpaid each year, and the richest 5% are responsible for about $300 billion of that. Every $1 million spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile yields $12 million in revenue. Auditing complex partnerships can return yields of 20:1. But for years, the IRS has prioritized auditing poor, black counties in the Deep South. Similarly, DOJ prosecutors can prioritize getting maximum payouts from white-collar criminals. Much American wealth accumulation happens through market manipulation and fraud; as Elon Musk said in 2024, possibly hinting at his SEC charges, “if [Trump] doesn’t win, I’m fucked.” A DSA president can ensure Musk and the Trump dynasty are indeed bankrupted for their fraud, crypto-scams, embezzlement, and emolument violations.

Even with a hamstrung Congress, the executive branch can unilaterally rewrite volumes of Treasury regulations. Presidents of both parties have waged a class war with this regulatory power; why not use it against capital? First, the president can end the carried interest loophole, which basically allows private equity and hedge fund managers to report their income as capital gains. Such capital gains are taxed at lower rates than wages. Congress failed to end this loophole in 2017, and Trump widened it in 2020 with S-corporations and ‘carry waiver’ escape clauses. But a dormant 1984 statute allows Treasury to treat disguised payments for services as taxable income. This move would generate billions annually, be (somewhat) insulated from court veto, and be extremely popular.

Secondly, a socialist-led Treasury can hammer corporate tax havens. In 1996, Clinton’s Treasury blew a hole in the tax code by letting companies ‘check the box’ on whether their subsidiaries are taxable or not. Registering subsidiaries in tax havens like Ireland exploded. Realizing the mistake, Treasury tried closing the hole in 1998 but retreated after backlash from corporations and their allies in Congress. Obama tried again in 2009 and also chickened out. The legal authority is still there; a socialist should use it, come hell or high water. Similarly, Treasury can amend its anti-inversion regulations so U.S. companies cannot reincorporate abroad for tax purposes. It killed a $150 billion Pfizer-Allergan merger by flexing this threat, but it can strengthen the regulation to prevent more inversions.

Treasury could also revive its “earnings stripping” documentation rules, introduced in 2016 but dismantled by Trump, to disallow corporations from using their Irish parent offices to load US branches with intra-company debt, which they use to mask profits as interest payments.

Transfer pricing rules are another low-hanging fruit. When a U.S. company sells a patent or intellectual property right to its own subsidiary in, say, the Cayman Islands, the ‘price’ of the internal transaction determines where profit is booked—in the tax haven or the U.S. economy. Existing rules favor a “comparable transaction” method, which companies game for tax purposes because there are no “comparable” transactions for novel, intangible property like patents. Treasury can revise these rules to favor profit-split formulas that allocate income to where sales, workers, and assets actually are. This would affect tens of billions annually.

Third is taxing wealth. We already have a federal wealth-transfer tax on the books: the estate tax. Too little of it is actually paid. How much the wealthy avoid it is highly dependent on obscure valuation and strict-liability rules set by the Treasury Department. To raise effective tax rates, Treasury can tighten rules on dynastic wealth by reintroducing the proposal to restrict valuation discounts on so-called ‘family limited partnerships’; they proposed this rule in 2016 but withdrew in 2017 after wealthy elites organized against it. Reissuing it, alongside tighter rules on grantor and short-term trusts, would impede billionaires from gaming the tax system to shuttle wealth to their heirs. AOC can also rebuild the Global High Wealth unit that audits billionaires, which was cut 38% by Trump, and staff it with specialists in pass-through and partnership structures.

Corporations and the wealthy will be greatly antagonized and spend massively on Congress races and court lawsuits to stop this. Success requires building walls to prevent wealth from translating itself into political power. That means appointing judges willing to erode the Supreme Court precedents that allow unlimited dark spending in elections. A U.S. president must also hold Congress’ feet to the fire and threaten a government shutdown if they do not overturn a set of ‘rider’ prohibitions on campaign finance. These riders are smuggled into annual appropriations bills to prevent executive agencies from requiring private corporations that do business with the government to disclose their political spending. Obama had proposed it in 2011, but the Chamber of Commerce mobilized against it. Obama acquiesced. Riders also prevent the IRS from closing sham ‘social welfare’ nonprofits used for dark money transfers and prevent the SEC from requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political spending. Overturning these riders can help inoculate the public against their spending.

Building Public Ownership

One check on private capital is building publicly owned capital and investment capacity, managed democratically, for the public interest. This is perhaps the brightest line distinguishing the demands of the socialist and communist left from generic progressives. But however radical the demand is nationally, public ownership is common globally. In social-democratic Norway, this includes 74 companies valued at around 23% of GDP, including the national energy company Equinor (67% state-owned), telecom company Telenor (54% state-owned), and bank DNB (34% state-owned). Combined with the state-owned enterprise portfolio, Norway’s two social wealth funds own about a third of all equity on the Oslo stock exchange and 75% of the country’s non-home assets.

Recently, the U.S. federal government has quietly built its own $27.7 billion portfolio: a $400 million stake in rare-earth producer MP Materials, making it the largest shareholder; a 10% stake in Intel plus a warrant for another 5%, funded by a $5.7 billion conversion of unpaid CHIPS Act grants; equity in Lithium Americas; and a first-ever “golden share” in U.S. Steel that gives the government a board seat and veto rights. Trump has used that ownership power to prevent a steel plant closure in Illinois, and his advisors describe it as building toward a sovereign wealth fund. A DSA president can build on this inheritance, managed not for nationalist or anti-democratic ends, but for the public.

First, the president can ensure that workers see returns on their public investment. Currently, the U.S. massively subsidizes innovation, allowing firms to socialize costs and privatize gains. But ARPA-E has statutory rights to claim royalties or equity on research in advanced energy technology made with its funding; the Energy Secretary routinely waives this right. What if instead, returns were claimed and routed into a public trust? Similar changes, insulated from Congress or courts, can be made to the Defense Production Act, CHIPS grants, National Science Foundation, Export-Import Bank, and the Federal Financing Bank. In a capitalist order dominated by monopoly rents on intellectual property, leveraging public innovation programs for socialist ends is powerful. It shifts focus from present-day distributional conflict, where ‘quarterly returns’ capital is fixated, to ownership of productive technologies in the future, where capital is often myopic.

Second is building public power in the literal sense. The Tennessee Valley Authority supplies electricity to 10 million people, has its own bond-issuing authority, generates $1 billion in net income annually, and operates roughly 55% of its power from non-carbon sources. Its board and executive are presidential appointees. The Bonneville and Western Area Power boards in the American West, which market federal hydropower, are also appointed by the Energy Secretary. A socialist president can direct them to expand renewables, prioritize serving municipal and cooperative utilities, and finance the buildout with federal grants or their own borrowing capacity. This is the largest pool of federal productive capital.

Next is publicly financed worker cooperatives. The USDA lends billions annually to electricity and telecom cooperatives and can guarantee such lending for an expansion of the cooperative economy. A socialist-appointed FCC sets broadband subsidy scoring administratively and can favor municipal and cooperative internet networks over commercial carriers like Comcast. A socialist Small Business Administration can use loan programs to underwrite worker cooperatives and conversions to employee-ownership; Congress passed a statute allowing this in 2018, but it has sat on the back burner. Financing conversions to worker ownership is an underrated tool of executive branch power—it will be useful as millions of aging business owners retire without succession plans.

There is also a federal conservatorship over mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and their boards are answerable to a presidentially appointed FHFA director. Reorganized, they can require mortgage purchases for housing cooperatives and community land trusts, which struggle to find lenders. They can also set underwriting standards to favor non-speculative housing ownership. Similarly, the Postal Service has authority to pilot basic banking services through its tens of thousands of existing offices, which often operate in rural communities abandoned by commercial banks. In the long term, the president can push Congress to pass serious proposals to socialize banking services through the central bank. Similar to Brazil’s Pix platform, a ‘FedAccounts’ can reduce barriers and fees for consumers, pay for itself and generate revenue via seigniorage, appropriate capital’s investment function, and stabilize U.S. macro-financial flows.

Finally, consider what a DSA-backed president could do, unilaterally, to build public pharmaceutical capacity. Under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, when a patented invention is developed with federal funding, the government has “march-in” rights to license it to others. Another statute (28 U.S.C. § 1498) lets the government use any patent it wishes, without permission, and pay the holder reasonable compensation afterward. No court injunction is available to stop it. Together, these statutes empower the government to place drug production under federally supported manufacturing facilities: insulin inhalers, HIV antiretrovirals, naloxone, GLP-1 agonists, novel cancer therapies, and effective (but commercially unprofitable) antibiotics. [8] The proof of concept is that this model was already used for vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. It is a powerful tool to discipline capital, save thousands of lives, and strengthen global health.

This essay has covered a lot of policy ground, some of which may sound like a lofty blueprint. However, describing practically how the legal powers of that office can be used in 2029—of what we can win for the left—is essential to motivating a potential campaign and shaping our expectations for it. The U.S. presidency is no ordinary executive; it differs from other institutions not in the degree of its power over the world but in its unique kind of power. Captured by an allied democratic socialist, it will greatly help the left overcome the immense structural barriers to our agenda. In part two of this essay, I continue the analysis of what a democratic socialist like AOC can do from the White House on Palestine, Cuba, and the climate crisis and then answer a burning question about such a possibility: what if we fail? Where would policy defeats leave us?

Footnotes

[1] AOC’s position as a woman is not a weakness here. We have good evidence in political science that voters perceive women as less electable, but this is their faulty estimation of a group preference. When forced to choose themselves between candidates in surveys, the majority actually slightly prefers women, all other candidate attributes held equal. Positive effects among Democrats and Independents outweigh negative effects among Republicans.

[2] A noteworthy case surrounded the decision of French socialist Alexandre Millerand in 1899 to join the ‘Republican Defense’ cabinet in France during the crisis years of the Dreyfus Affair. In the Second International congresses, Jean Jaurès defended it as a tactical necessity to stabilize the besieged Republic and its democratic gains against right-wing, anti-Semitic monarchists. Opposed were Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, and Rosa Luxemburg. Such opposition was generalized later into a critique of Eduard Bernstein and Jean Jaurès’ reformism.

[3] From the 1895 preface to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (1848–1850).

[4] France is typically seen as the other case, but its president has a weaker legislative veto and must share power with a prime minister, whom the National Assembly can dismiss.

[5] See here, here, and here.

[6] The Taft-Hartley Act empowers the president to request back-to-work injunctions during ‘national emergencies’ for industries like steel and shipping (used against longshore workers by Nixon in 1971 and Bush in 2002). The Railway Labor Act empowers Congress to impose a contract to avert a national strike (used by Biden in 2022). And 5 U.S.C. § 7311 and 18 U.S.C. § 1918 empower the president to fire en masse federal employees who strike, as Reagan infamously did during the 1981 PATCO strike by air traffic controllers.

[7] Such measures do not require a dubious altruistic savior mentality at the zero-sum expense of American workers; the current Trump USTR is quietly negotiating for higher Mexican wages because higher Mexican labor costs discourage US firms to move jobs across the border. A prosperous Mexican working public also provides the consumer demand for the goods of American workers and absorbs more low-wage refugee labor flowing from the Northern Triangle that would otherwise come to the United States.

[8] Innovation policy levers, again, can also help the government retain public rights to prescription drugs and erode non-patent ‘exclusivities’ which prevent public production.