The DSA is rising in NYC

Normal liberals should be very alarmed, as socialists despise them the most

During Stalin’s reign, the Soviet Union forcibly sent millions of educated citizens, labeled “enemies of the people,” to labor camps across its vast territory. This is the logical endpoint of socialism, and yet people pretend it’s not real.

Every candidate Zohran Mamdani backed in this week’s New York City congressional primaries won. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral student with no legislative experience who organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, attended a rally celebrating October 7, has posted that “Israel doesn’t exist,” backed convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag and refused in a recorded interview to say whether murderers should go to prison, just beat a five-term incumbent to go to Congress. Claire Valdez and Brad Lander won theirs too. DSA congressional representation is about to double. At the victory parties, crowds chanted “Free Palestine” and told Hakeem Jeffries he was next. I don’t even understand how we would allow anyone who hates our country (their own words) to hold office.

I’ve seen some right-wing triumphalism about all this online (because these people are so insane, they think it’s a win for the cons). But I’d issue caution. Have we learned nothing about the ratchet effect? The ideology that’s fringe today could be mainstream in two or three cycles. The “PR disaster” framing stops working the moment it becomes the normalized position of the opposition party. In a two-party system, a massive chunk of voters are better described as “anti-Right” than “pro-Left.” Whatever the Left becomes, that bloc follows. We are potentially watching normalization of civilizationally-suicidal beliefs and positions in real time, only if we’re all very lucky is it a self-limiting catastrophe.

But the people who should be most paying attention right now are normal liberals, as these people are not liberals. Liberalism believes in pluralism, free markets, rule of law, tech optimism, building things (YIMBY), boarders, police, capitalism being a force for good. The DSA believes in none of that. As I’ve written before about how we stopped teaching the story of prosperity, the catastrophic track record of socialist economics has been quietly edited out of the curriculum and the culture, replaced with vague moral hostility toward success and achievement. The result is a generation that absorbed one side of a debate and was told it was an education. Now 66% of Democrats view socialism favorably. The 20th century ran the socialist experiment at scale. It produced engineered famines, gulags, empty supermarket shelves, and tens of millions of dead. This is not an ancient tragedy, it’s the known destination, and many do not take history seriously enough.

The people driving this don't emerge from nowhere. They come from schools where anti-American professors, many funded by Qatar and China, have correctly identified the American university as the highest-leverage point for capturing the next productive class. This ideology has successfully shaped the activist core that now staffs the DSA machine, and Chevalier is herself a product of exactly this pipeline. The foreign funding of American campus radicalism is well documented and not a conspiracy theory, it's an ongoing influence operation and this week showed it's working. The same thing is happening online, and people are constantly falling for the op whether they listen to Tucker Carlson or any of the extremists on the left who want to capture or tear down our institutions.

The good news for normal liberals is that the math is actually not complicated. The country is not naturally socialist. Beating Republicans does not require any of the extremism, it’s actually much easier: it requires being reasonable, pro-growth, and genuinely interested in making people’s lives better. The Democrats would win in a walk if they simply acted like a normal party. Instead the machinery keeps selecting for whoever most aggressively signals opposition to American civilization, and the centrists keep complying rather than fighting. The question is whether anyone stops it before the ideology from people who vocally hate our country (their own words) becomes impossibly entrenched.

And again, if you’re a normal liberal reading this, I understand that many of you are advocating for something closer to the Nordic model. Those countries are capitalist market economies with strong welfare states and social programs. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen even addressed this during a U.S. visit, pushing back on the idea that Denmark is a socialist or planned economy. That is a reasonable political position to debate. The DSA is a different conversation, they openly describe themselves as a socialist organization, and their stated goals go well beyond the traditional Nordic welfare-state model. We need people to come to terms with this, that this group is not aligned with what you want.