The civil war between the Democratic Party establishment and the far-Left rebels seeking to replace it has oftentimes been described as a kind of political Super Bowl, a showdown for the ages in which two powerhouses are set to collide with dramatic effect. Think immovable object meets unstoppable force.
And yet it’s turned out to be a drubbing; think Pop Warner team meets Kansas City Chiefs.
On Tuesday evening, three such rebels endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani prevailed over two sitting congressmen and the preferred successor of a retiring member. Among the winners: Darializa Avila Chevalier, a police, prison, and border abolitionist who believes the United States to be a “f*cking disgrace” and has expressed her disgust with interracial relationships featuring “ugly colonizer women.” Among the losers: Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), a down-the-line progressive who led the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump and was recently banned from a Brooklyn coffee shop over his support for the continued existence of Israel.
Priorities.
For his part, a visibly irritated Mamdani responded to a question about the targeting of Goldman with the declaration that “I have many political disagreements with Congressman Goldman when it comes to his votes and his views on Israel. What we saw online goes beyond that.” End of statement. The bare minimum, delivered without a trace of detectable sincerity — cold as ice.
These are the new Democrats: ruthless, vindictive, wannabe Bolsheviks eager to wage jihad against Western Civilization. Lest you dismiss that conclusion as loaded hyperbole, consider that Columbia University Apartheid Divest — a group Avila Chevalier helped found as an undergraduate and participated in antisemitic protests alongside as an alum — has been explicit about its objective: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an internationalist one … we seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South.”
It is remarkable that openly anti-American terrorist understudies are now the ascendant force within one of the country’s two major parties. After all, it was only a few years ago that Joe Biden won Team Blue’s presidential nomination not as a moderate, but as the personification of the median Democrat. But then again, this transformation, which to some might have appeared to occur all at once, should hardly come as a surprise. It’s actually the inevitable destination of a course charted long ago.
Mamdani has touted the victories of his three mini-mes as the triumph of a politics for “working people.” His claim to that mantle is belied by every conceivable data point imaginable. Avila Chevalier prevailed by 20 points among the majority college-educated and by five points in higher-income neighborhoods, according to the New York Times. In areas dominated by younger residents, she came out ahead by almost 25. Her opponent won lower-income areas by nearly 10.
A similar story played out in Goldman’s race; he lost younger neighborhoods by 24, and both majority college-educated and higher-income ones by 40. He won lower-income areas by 14.
The democratic socialist movement isn’t a program for working people; it’s a vanity project for privileged, well-off conformists who moved from one far-Left bubble in college to another in the Big Apple.
Progressives’ capture of and despotic rule over a panoply of influential American institutions — and most importantly the university — has fostered this radicalism. For decades, students have shipped off to schools where they’ve spent their formative years being taught by Left-wing professors, preached at by Left-wing administrators, and rewarded by their peers for pushing ever Leftward. Clout on campus is directly correlated with how willing one is to embrace the kind of politics advocated by Avila Chevalier and Mamdani. Higher tax rates, affirmative action, and foreign policy restraint are blasé on the quad. It’s socialist redistributionist schemes, reparations, and a fetishization of America’s enemies abroad — and Islamist extremists in particular — that get the blood pumping. And only just at this point, everyone knows that as an addict builds their tolerance, they require stronger junk to achieve a high.
At the national level, Democrats are now professing shock at the Mamdani sweep. One senior House member managed only a “Holy sh*t” and “Buckle up” after being contacted by Axios.
Spare them your pity. For decades, party leaders have not only indulged this wing but also absorbed their ideas. Upon taking his oath of office in 2009, Barack Obama embarked upon an apology tour to the Muslim World. In 1985, Bernie Sanders visited Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua and came back “impressed.” Three years later, he took a honeymoon to the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse and came back raving over the “strengths” of its system. This is the runner-up in each of the last two Democratic presidential primaries, mind you.
Both the former president and Vermont senator have embraced the ahistorical tale about how the United States invited Iran’s everlasting wrath by overthrowing its benevolent, democratic leader in 1953. In truth, it was the Iranians who ejected the power-hungry Mohammad Mosaddegh from his office. But thinly-disguised campus radicals like Obama and Sanders would never let the facts get in the way of their cartoonishly villainous conception of their own country.
And when antisemitic riots — an expression of anti-American and anti-Western sentiments as well as anti-Israel ones — broke out across the country in support of the deadliest pogrom since the Holocaust, all but a few elders either praised or turned a blind eye to them. Democrats’ shock is that of the man who feeds a fire with gasoline only to be consumed by it.
Tuesday was a victory for them, yes. But the democratic socialists won years ago, they just hadn’t started counting the votes until now.
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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.
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