On Tuesday, comedian Jon Stewart looked into the camera and told everyone not to worry about the Democratic Socialists of America.
“They’re just a bunch of enthusiastic kids or just gung ho about ‘affordability,’” he argued. Sure, those cute little squirts get a little over-agitated. They start jabbering about communist revolution from time to time. But they’re really just naive, smart, energetic young people who are concerned about “affordability.”
He is lying to you. The Democratic Socialists of America are winning because they are promoting actual evil. Not winning in spite of evil, but because of it. The support for 9/11, the hatred of free markets, the love of China and the Palestinians; this is who they are. The affordability talk is just cover so that useful idiots like Jon Stewart can pretend that they are not revolutionaries determined to tear down America and the West.
The evil is the actual product the New Democratic Party is being built around. It is the jet fuel, the nuclear reactor of the left-wing machine, and it’s being driven by a hard core of specific people: Americans with lots of education and no money — overeducated broke people who believe that they are owed everything and have earned nothing.
Stewart isn’t the only liberal who’s been making himself into a pretzel and bending into weird contortions in order to avoid this reality: The Democratic Socialists of America are actually evil communists who are using the affordability argument in order to hide their actual agenda.
Barack Obama told Stephen Colbert a few weeks ago:
You look at somebody like Mamdani, who I think is an extraordinary talent. He wants people to be able to afford housing in New York. I would assume liberals in New York want the same thing. And so I don’t worry as much about some of these issues within the Democratic Party. What I’m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar, right? You know, can you talk plain English to folks?
Colbert replied, “I think that’s one of the powers that Mamdani has is that not only does he talk like a normal person, but he lives a normal life, but he also names what is obviously wrong. And he goes, ‘We should change that thing.’”
Understand that traditional Democrats must say that the “issues” people have with DSA socialists like Mamdani don’t matter. They must say this. Because if they don’t say this, they’re approving the evil of the people they’re actually endorsing.
Zohran Mamdani doesn’t talk like a regular person. He talks like a dude who just emerged from a Bowdoin seminar on the Middle East. Mamdani is not a man of the people. He is an overeducated broke person who ended up as mayor of New York after a totally unsuccessful rapping career.
But the traditional libs have to pretend this is all some sort of big joke, a giant radical cosplay. “The real Zohran Mamdani isn’t radical, he’s just overenthusiastic. Hasan Piker isn’t an anti-American piece of trash. He’s just overzealous.”
That’s because if the traditional Democrats admit the opposite, that the Democratic Socialists of America are actually evil and they are passengers on the same bus, that gets really awkward.
Jon Stewart is a lot of things. I despise Jon Stewart as a personality. I think Jon Stewart has more to do with the devolution of political talk in America than nearly any figure in American history. I truly believe that Jon Stewart’s reduction of political thought in America to funny faces and clips — as opposed to explication of actual issues — is one of the actions that broke American political commentary.
But you can’t say that Jon Stewart hates America in the same way that Piker or Mamdani does. Remember, it was Jon Stewart has spent an enormous amount of his career talking about 9/11 first responders and trying to get additional benefits for them. It was a big cause for Stewart; I didn’t even like how he approached this cause in terms of federalism, but that was indeed a cause of his.
So how does he make common cause with people like Zohran Mamdani or Hasan Piker, a man who says that America deserved 9/11? Piker hasn’t changed his opinions; on Monday, he hung a picture of 9/11, a newspaper from 9/12/2001, in his studio and bragged about it, but not because it commemorated the tragedy of 9/11.
So how do Democrats deal with the fact that they have a coalition that is now being led by people who truly despise America? How does Jon Stewart, who stood up for American first responders on 9/11, deal with the fact that Hasan Piker is now a leader of his movement, a man who says America deserved 9/11 and has a newspaper from 9/12 behind him?
The only way for Jon Stewart and people like him to live with the obvious conflict, the cognitive dissonance, is to pretend that Piker is cosplaying and doesn’t mean it.
But they all do. These are not blue-collar people who are upset about their economic circumstances and thus turning to economic populism.
That is a lie. That is not what they are. In fact, the proletariat in the United States has never been the seedbed of socialist revolution ever. They’ve never been the seedbed of revolution anywhere. The people who always lead the socialist revolution are overeducated radicals who generally spring from the upper middle class.
But the DSA has a problem. If the DSA is chiefly overeducated, largely white people who don’t earn a lot of money, if that is the core group, there are not that many overeducated, poor people in America. That is not a great seedbed.
So that means that the DSA has a racial problem. The DSA has a class problem. It turns out that a lot of people who went to high school and do not like socialism aren’t going to be fond of the DSA.
But if the DSA can smear enough “affordability” over everything, they think they can get away with it.
Republicans are trying to figure out how to counter that. They are making a mistake by taking this argument at face value. They think that in order to counter the DSA, they have to focus specifically and solely on “affordability.”
That’s not true. Of course people are worried about how much things cost. That is always true, forever and always.
But if you think that “affordability” is driving Republicans down right now, you should know that what is going to allow Republicans to come back is not discussions of “affordability.” It is making sure that people understand the evil of the opposition.
You need to actively make the case as to why the DSA is wrong.
If Republicans wish to win long-term so we don’t bounce between parties forever, they have to teach an actual understanding of how the economy works; the actual belief in the honesty of the markets, recognition that innovation is good, and the sordid, brutal history of communism and its offspring.
They shouldn’t take the communist, leftist bait.
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