Tag: Democratic Socialists of America

A Bigger Tent Needs Stronger Stakes

Democrats can win everywhere without accepting everyone who can win somewhere.

Large open canvas tent filled with people, anchored by stakes labeled liberal democracy, constitutional government, pluralism, public safety, regulated market economy, individual rights, and democratic allies.

A bigger political tent can welcome many people, but only if it is firmly anchored by shared democratic principles.

I am not a Democrat. CIVPAC is not a Democratic organization. We support Democrats, Republicans, and independents when we think they represent a more responsible, centrist, democratic, and politically realistic alternative.

So any advice I offer Democrats is, by definition, unsolicited. But the Democratic Party is one of the two major governing parties in the United States. Its internal arguments matter even to those of us who do not belong to it.

Two Ideas in Tension

Right now, Democrats seem caught between two ideas that are both partly right.

The first is the “win everywhere” idea. I have argued before that both parties should try to compete beyond their comfort zones. A serious national party should not write off whole regions, classes, religions, or cultures. Democrats should want candidates who can compete in cities, suburbs, small towns, working-class communities, and rural areas. They will not all sound alike, and they should not all sound alike.

A party that wants to govern the whole country should try to understand the whole country.

The second idea is James Carville’s warning about the Democratic Socialists of America and the far-left edge of the Democratic coalition. Carville has argued that Democrats need to consider something close to a schism with some DSA-aligned candidates. His point is blunt but not foolish: if candidates who reject core assumptions of liberal democracy, pluralism, public safety, capitalism, or America’s basic alliances run under the Democratic label, Republicans will use those candidates to define the entire party.

That is not paranoia. That is politics.

But there is an obvious tension. How can Democrats “win everywhere” if they are also drawing sharper boundaries around who belongs in the party?

The answer is that “win everywhere” does not mean “accept everyone who can win somewhere.”

A Big Tent Still Needs a Floor

A democratic political party has to be broad. It has to include people who disagree on taxes, health care, immigration, policing, climate, foreign policy, and cultural issues. It has to make room for candidates who fit their communities. A Democrat running in rural Georgia should not have to sound like a progressive activist from Brooklyn. A Democrat running in Brooklyn should not have to sound like a rural Georgia moderate.

Local variation is not the problem. It is the point.

But a party also needs a floor. It needs some basic commitments that define what the party is and what it is not. For Democrats, that floor should include liberal democracy, constitutional government, pluralism, public safety, a regulated market economy, individual rights, and a foreign policy that does not treat America’s democratic allies as morally indistinguishable from its adversaries.

That still leaves room for a wide range of Democrats. It leaves room for progressives, moderates, labor liberals, suburban pragmatists, Black church Democrats, national-security Democrats, and former Republicans who broke with Trump over democracy and the rule of law.

But it does not require Democrats to treat every anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-Israel, anti-party, or anti-pluralist candidate as merely one more flavor in the big tent.

That is the mistake Carville is reacting against.

The Fetterman Test

I thought about this while rereading my earlier post, “A Centrist on the Road.” On that trip, I spoke with a Democratic Party activist from a northeastern state. She described herself as left wing but not far left wing. We agreed that Democrats needed to reach voters outside their normal constituencies. But she also reportedly wrote Senator John Fetterman urging him to leave the Democratic Party.

That struck me then, and strikes me even more now, as a perfect illustration of the problem.

It is easy to say the party should broaden its coalition. It is harder to accept the actual people who make a broader coalition possible.

A party cannot become more competitive in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, or Maine if it treats every culturally heterodox Democrat as a betrayal. If Democrats want to win outside safe blue territory, they need candidates who sound plausible outside safe blue territory.

The Fantasy of Purification

There is also a darker suspicion, held in some quarters, that some DSA and far-left Democrats do not mind seeing moderate Democrats lose in competitive districts. Moderate losses weaken the party’s center of gravity. They make it easier for ideological activists to argue that the old coalition has failed and that the party must be remade in their image.

The fantasy seems to be that if the Democratic Party becomes uniformly left wing enough, millions of hidden voters will suddenly emerge from the woodwork and propel it to national power. That theory has always struck me as closer to faith than analysis. It ignores the voters who actually decide competitive elections. It also treats losing winnable seats as an acceptable price for ideological purification.

That is not “win everywhere.” That is lose strategically and call it progress.

Disagreement Is Not Disqualification

The right answer is not to purge the left. Nor is it to purge the center. The right answer is to distinguish between disagreement and disqualification.

Disagreement is normal coalition politics. A Democrat who is more cautious on spending, more supportive of policing, more hawkish on foreign policy, or more skeptical of progressive cultural language should not be pushed out of the party. Such candidates may be exactly what Democrats need in places where they currently lose.

Disqualification is different. A candidate who rejects liberal democracy, excuses political violence, denies basic pluralism, or treats the Democratic Party merely as a ballot line to be captured is not simply a different kind of Democrat. That candidate is challenging the party’s identity.

So the lesson is simple:

Do not purge the center in the name of ideological purity.

Do not absorb the anti-liberal left in the name of coalition unity.

That is not hypocrisy. It is coalition discipline.

The Same Advice Applies to Republicans

I would offer Republicans the same unsolicited advice. There are elements on the far right that seem to have found a home in the Republican Party — indeed, may have seized control of much of it — and they may have permanently damaged the Republican brand. But that is a subject for another post.

The Goal Is a Stronger Tent

The broader principle applies to both parties. A healthy party should be wide enough to hold real disagreement and strong enough not to collapse under the weight of people who do not believe in the core principles of the coalition itself.

The goal is not a smaller tent.

The goal is a stronger tent.

The DSA Platform Is Worse Than the Slogan

Satirical receipt labeled “DSA Platform,” listing major policy promises with tradeoffs marked as ignored and a total reading “Reality Not Included.”

DSA promises benefits without taking tradeoffs seriously. Read the platform. Then decide.

CIVPAC believes readers should see the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform for themselves.

The current DSA program is available here: Democratic Socialists of America Platform.

We encourage people to read it. Not excerpts. Not hostile summaries. Not campaign rhetoric from opponents. The platform itself.

Doing so is clarifying.

DSA does not merely argue for a more generous welfare state, a somewhat higher minimum wage, stronger unions, or more aggressive health-care reform. Some of its proposals overlap with familiar progressive politics, but the platform’s underlying diagnosis and proposed direction are much more radical.

DSA says the capitalist system is the cause of major social harms and calls for a socialist society in which the largest corporations are placed under public ownership and democratic control. It calls for universal rent control, tuition-free public higher education with no out-of-pocket room and board costs, cancellation of all student-loan debt, Medicare for All with no premiums, co-pays, or deductibles, a 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay or benefits, a wealth tax, and public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure and natural resources.

On foreign policy, it calls for ending military and economic aid and weapons sales to Israel, greatly reducing the U.S. military budget, closing overseas bases, bringing troops home, ending economic sanctions on countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, and allowing workers to migrate freely across borders without restrictive immigration controls. It also calls for ending immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and access to jobs, labor rights, and social services for all immigrants.

On constitutional structure, it calls for voting rights for noncitizens, proportional representation, expansion of the House of Representatives, abolition of the Senate filibuster, replacement of the Electoral College with a national popular vote, and limits on the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review.

This platform is not Denmark. It is not Franklin Roosevelt. It is not a slightly more aggressive version of mainstream Democratic liberalism.

It is a sweeping ideological program built on bad diagnosis, magical financing, weak attention to incentives, and dangerous institutional assumptions.

DSA’s platform does not become serious merely because it attaches itself to familiar grievances. High housing prices do not prove that markets have failed. In many high-cost places, the problem is that housing markets have been systematically constrained by zoning restrictions, permitting delays, local veto points, parking mandates, height limits, environmental-review abuse, and political resistance to new supply. DSA’s answer is more public control. CIVPAC’s answer is to ask what is preventing supply from responding to demand — and then try to fix that.

High medical costs do not prove that more government control is the answer. Many of the worst distortions in American health care come from decades of tax preferences, mandates, cross-subsidies, public reimbursement rules, restricted competition, employer-based coverage, and government-shaped incentives. A serious reform agenda would ask how to preserve access, restore price discipline, reduce administrative waste, and create better incentives for patients, providers, insurers, and taxpayers. DSA instead treats the problem as if government promises can repeal scarcity.

Student debt is rarely a social injustice. It is also the result of personal borrowing decisions, institutional pricing power, weak cost discipline, political encouragement of debt-financed education, and a culture that too often treated college borrowing as an entitlement regardless of expected return. Blanket cancellation shifts costs from borrowers to taxpayers, including many people who did not attend college, paid their debts, chose less expensive schools, or made other sacrifices.

The same pattern appears throughout the platform. DSA begins with moral language and ends with government command. It treats every grievance as proof of capitalism’s failure and every government promise as if it were self-financing, self-administering, and immune from abuse. It gives too little attention to costs, incentives, capital formation, administrative capacity, unintended consequences, individual responsibility, public safety, democratic allies, and constitutional limits.

CIVPAC’s objection is not that government has no role. As our philosophy and broader policy positions make clear, government has important roles: protecting civil rights, maintaining public order, supporting basic research, correcting genuine market failures, providing a safety net, protecting the environment, enforcing contracts, defending the country and our allies, and helping ensure that opportunity is not limited by accident of birth.

But there is a vast difference between responsible public policy and the belief that most social problems can be solved by transferring more power to government or politically favored collectives.

The DSA platform repeatedly assumes away the hardest questions. Who pays? Who decides? What happens when supply falls in response to incentives? What happens when capital leaves? What happens when rent control reduces construction or maintenance? What happens when public systems are captured by unions, bureaucracies, or political machines? What happens when immigration enforcement is effectively abolished? What happens when sanctions are removed from hostile regimes? What happens when American military power retreats and authoritarian states fill the vacuum? What happens when judicial review is weakened and the next illiberal majority inherits that precedent?

These are not technical quibbles. They are the questions serious people ask before giving government more power.

DSA’s foreign-policy platform is especially troubling. A politics that calls for ending arms sales to Israel, drastically reducing American military power, closing overseas bases, ending sanctions on regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, and loosening immigration controls to the point of practical non-enforcement is not merely idealistic. It is a worldview. It is a worldview in which American power is treated as the central danger, democratic allies are treated with deep suspicion, and hostile regimes are often treated as victims of American policy rather than responsible for their own actions.

That worldview is wrong.

CIVPAC believes the United States should use power prudently. We do not support reckless intervention, blank checks, or indifference to civilian suffering. But prudence is not retreat. A stable international order depends in part on American strength, alliances, deterrence, and a willingness to distinguish democratic allies from authoritarian adversaries and terrorist organizations.

The platform’s institutional proposals also deserve scrutiny. Some election reforms may be worth considering. CIVPAC itself supports reforms such as open primaries and ranked-choice voting where they improve representation and reduce extremism. But DSA’s broader institutional program points toward a major restructuring of constitutional government. Limiting judicial review, weakening existing checks, and redesigning institutions in the name of “working-class democracy” should not be treated as harmless reform language. Constitutional limits matter most when a political movement is convinced of its own moral certainty.

The deeper issue is not any single plank. It is the attitude toward power.

DSA’s platform imagines that if the “right” people control the state, the state can guarantee housing, health care, education, jobs, wages, migration rights, climate transformation, public ownership, and international justice. History gives us many reasons to doubt that premise. Economics gives us many more.

The center should not be embarrassed to say this plainly.

Markets are imperfect. Government is also imperfect. Private power can be abused. Public power can be abused too. Capitalism requires rules, but rules require discipline. Social insurance is valuable, but promises require funding. Compassion is admirable, but compassion that refuses to recognize costs becomes fantasy. Democracy requires majority rule, but liberal constitutional democracy also requires limits, rights, courts, pluralism, private civil society, and protection for those who lose the next election.

DSA’s platform is not simply too far left. It is unserious about the constraints that make free societies governable.

That is why CIVPAC’s 2026 endorsements emphasize practical governance over ideological performance, including our most recent endorsements of Greg Stanton, in Arizona, and Haley Stevens, in Michigan.

That is also why CIVPAC believes voters should read the DSA platform.

Do not take our word for it. Read the platform. Then ask whether this is the direction the Democratic Party, or the country, should go.

CIVPAC believes the answer is no.

CIVPAC welcomes comments, corrections, and opposing views. Please share your thoughts on our Contact Us page or leave a comment below. If you are commenting on a particular candidate or race, please include that in your comment.