Tag: Israel

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.

Iran, War, and the Discipline of Not Knowing

AI Generated Symbolic Illustration of White House in Fog

The Fog Beyond the Battlefield

Wars are hard to understand while they are being fought. The fog of war applies to more than just the battlefield itself. That is especially true when the conflict involves Iran, Israel, the United States, nuclear facilities, regional proxies, intelligence claims, authoritarian censorship, partisan politics, and a flood of propaganda from every direction.

That does not mean citizens should say nothing. It does mean we should be careful about what we claim to know.

Much of the information coming from this war is unreliable, incomplete, or strategically framed. Casualty figures may be wrong. Damage assessments may be exaggerated or understated. Claims about nuclear facilities may be true in part and misleading in part. Images and videos may be old, staged, mislabeled, or generated by artificial intelligence. Governments, media organizations, political factions, and foreign actors all have incentives to shape public perception.

That is not a reason for moral paralysis. Iran’s regime is repressive, dangerous, hostile to the United States, hostile to Israel, and committed to projecting power through proxies and intimidation. Iran’s nuclear program is a legitimate concern. Israel has a right to defend itself. The United States has real interests in preventing nuclear proliferation, protecting allies, preserving freedom of navigation, and maintaining some degree of regional stability.

But none of that eliminates the need for disciplined judgment. The fact that Iran is dangerous does not make every claim about the war reliable. The fact that a military action may be justified in principle does not prove that this particular military action was the best course. The fact that some critics of the war may be naive or reflexively anti-American does not mean that all criticism is unserious.

Democracies Fight With the Consent of the Governed

A democracy has to think differently about war than an authoritarian state does.

A dictator can begin a war with greater confidence that he can suppress dissent, hide losses, control information, punish critics, and continue the conflict long after the original rationale has become doubtful. A democratic government cannot assume that. America may have superior military power, but it must keep explaining why the war is necessary, what the objective is, what costs are justified, and how success will be measured.

That is both a strength and a weakness.

It is a strength because public consent disciplines the use of force. It makes it harder to sustain wars based on vanity, ideology, vague ambition, or wishful thinking. It forces leaders to answer questions that dictators can evade. Why this war? Why now? What is the achievable objective? What would count as enough? What happens afterward?

It is a weakness because our adversaries understand it. They can play for time. They can absorb punishment, manipulate civilian-casualty narratives, exploit partisan divisions, spread disinformation, wait for elections, and bet that democratic publics will tire before authoritarian regimes crack.

That has been a recurring feature of many conflicts involving the United States. It was true in Vietnam. It was true in Iraq. It was true in Afghanistan. It is true in Ukraine, where Russia’s strategy depends heavily on the belief that the United States and Europe will eventually lose patience. It is also relevant to any conflict involving Iran.

The mistake is not that democracies require consent. That is one of their virtues. The mistake is entering or escalating conflicts without recognizing that public consent is part of the battlefield.

That Makes Truth a Strategic Resource

There is an old children’s story that some public officials seem never to have learned, or have forgotten: “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The lesson is not that wolves never come. The lesson is that a person who lies repeatedly destroys his ability to be believed when the danger is real.

That lesson applies with special force to war. Blatant lies by government officials, even on issues unrelated to the conflict, weaken the public’s willingness to believe the government when it may be telling the truth about the conflict itself. Trust cannot be turned on and off at the convenience of those in power. A democracy that may need public support in a crisis cannot afford leaders who treat truth as a tactical instrument.

This is not just a matter of civic virtue. It is a matter of national security.

If the public believes that government officials routinely lie about elections, crime, inflation, immigration, health, corruption, or their own conduct, then the public will also discount official statements about war. Some of that discounting will be healthy skepticism. Some of it will become destructive cynicism. But leaders who have squandered credibility should not be surprised when citizens hesitate to believe them in a crisis.

That is one reason the Iran war is so difficult to assess. We do not know enough. We do not know the full damage to Iran’s nuclear program. We do not know which claims of battlefield success are reliable. We do not know how much of Iran’s military capability has been degraded and how much has been hidden, dispersed, or preserved. We do not know whether Iran’s leadership will respond with caution, revenge, negotiation, or delay. We do not know whether regional actors will be deterred or emboldened. We do not know whether a ceasefire is the beginning of a settlement or merely an interval before the next phase.

The Hardest Question May Take Years to Answer

We also do not know whether the costs will prove justified.

That may be the hardest truth. However this war ends, if it ends, we may not know for many years whether the costs were justified. We may never know. If Iran’s nuclear program is delayed for a decade and a wider regional war is avoided, some will call the war a success. If the program is only briefly disrupted, if Iran emerges more determined, if civilian suffering fuels radicalization, if allies lose confidence, or if the conflict returns in a more dangerous form, the judgment may be very different.

History rarely gives clean answers in real time. Sometimes it does not give them at all.

Force Requires a Clear Objective

That does not mean democracies should never use force. Pacifism is not a strategy. Some threats are real. Some regimes are aggressive. Some dangers grow worse when ignored. A world in which Iran acquires nuclear weapons would be more dangerous. A world in which authoritarian regimes learn that democracies will never act is also dangerous.

But military force should be tied to a clear objective that citizens can understand and sustain. If the goal is to delay Iran’s nuclear program, say so. If the goal is deterrence, say so. If the goal is to protect shipping and regional stability, say so. If the goal is regime change, the burden of proof is vastly higher. A democracy should not drift from one rationale to another as events unfold.

Citizens should also resist the temptation to treat uncertainty as permission to believe whatever is emotionally satisfying. Supporters of military action should not assume every strike is successful, every critic is weak, or every official claim is true. Opponents of military action should not assume every American or Israeli action is reckless, every Iranian claim of victimhood is reliable, or every use of force is imperial folly.

The responsible position is harder. It requires opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions while demanding honest evidence about what military action has achieved. It requires supporting Israel’s right to security while recognizing the risks of escalation. It requires resisting authoritarian propaganda while also refusing to become a captive of our own side’s wishful thinking. It requires understanding that in a democracy, sustaining public consent is not a public-relations problem. It is part of the strategy.

That is the civic discipline war requires.

When facts are uncertain, principles matter more, not less. Those principles should include opposition to nuclear proliferation, respect for democratic accountability, skepticism toward authoritarian propaganda, skepticism toward domestic political spin, concern for civilian life, and insistence on achievable objectives.

Strength Requires Credibility

The United States should not be casual about war. It should not be casual about Iran’s nuclear ambitions either. Serious policy requires holding both thoughts at once.

The public does not need leaders who pretend to know everything. It needs leaders who can be expected to tell the truth about what they know, what they do not know, what they are trying to accomplish, and what costs they are asking the country to bear.

That is not weakness. That is how a democracy prepares itself to act with strength when strength is truly necessary.