Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia,1 she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika”, meaning “Death to America” in Persian.
Avila Chevalier is also known for making plenty of “controversial”2 statements on social media. In 2019, in another now-deleted tweet, she lambasted Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women”:
In 2020 she endorsed a theory that COVID-19 began in France, rather than in China.
Also in 2020, Avila Chevalier was an ardent supporter of the movement to abolish the police:
During the nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, Avila Chevalier responded to a user asking what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” by posting, “F**k you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”…Two days later, Avila Chevalier rejected an argument that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”…“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she replied, adding several clap emojis.
She has also supported the abolition of prisons — a view she probably still holds. In a recent interview, when repeatedly asked point-blank whether she would put a murderer in prison, she refused to answer the question.
In 2022, she claimed that America’s support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was America “bullying Russia”:
Avila Chevalier has also endorsed any number of extreme economic policy positions:
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Avila Chevalier reposted a message calling for a sweeping government takeover of large parts of the economy. The repost advocated nationalizing utilities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies; suspending rent and mortgage payments; dissolving private health insurance companies; and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords.”
Other deleted posts and reposts included references to communism and anti-capitalist politics. In one April 2020 post, Avila Chevalier wrote that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” adding a laughing emoji.
If this all sounds absolutely crazy, it’s because it is. The woman who said all of these things is going to be a U.S. Representative — not a state representative, or a member of a city council, but a member of the United States’ highest legislative body. And she will be a Democrat — she will be formally supported by the Democratic Party, she will presumably caucus with the Democrats in Congress, and so on.
Avila Chevalier is as much of an extremist as anyone associated with the MAGA movement. The best comparator on the right would probably be Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a long string of similarly extreme and wacky statements. My typical line is that “both extremes are bad, but the Republican extreme is worse”. Avila Chevalier is severely testing that asymmetry.
Nor is this a case of one wacky person winning a lone, lucky victory. Avila Chevalier was one of three Congressional primary candidates backed by New York City’s powerful and charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani. All three won their primaries this week, and two of them — including Avila Chevalier — unseated incumbent Democrats.
But it isn’t even just Mamdani. Around the country, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are starting to win more races in blue cities:
Democratic socialists won big in New York’s primaries Tuesday…several more triumphed in state legislative primaries…In Washington, DC, DSA member Janeese Lewis George won a blowout victory in Democrats’ mayoral primary…In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson, who defeated incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell last year, is a self-identified democratic socialist. And in Los Angeles, city council member Nithya Raman, a DSA member, advanced to this November’s runoff against Mayor Karen Bass…
The DSA has also elected several members of the city councils of New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland (Oregon), San Antonio, and more. And they’ve elected a handful of state legislators in many states — mostly from urban districts.
This is quite a comeback for the DSA. As recently as 2024, its membership was collapsing, but it has soared to new heights:
The Democrats now have their own MAGA — a hard-left populist faction that opposes the traditional party establishment.
Why is this happening? I’m not typically a politics writer, but here are some of my thoughts.
Extremism on the right enables extremism on the left (and vice versa)
Why am I even writing a post about the insanity of the DSA, when an equally insane group of people is running the whole country right now? It’s a fair question. Every week there’s a new report of unbelievable corruption, blatant lawlessness, dictatorial aspirations, policy failure, and general stupidity from the Trump administration:
Since I wrote that post one month ago, Trump lost his boneheaded war with Iran, blamed algae in the Reflecting Pool on nonexistent vandals, tried to ban mail-in voting by executive order, refused to pass a (very good) housing bill, issued an order calling for fewer childhood vaccines, and so on. The man is a walking disaster, and a majority of the country recognizes it.
But the movement that Trump started may end up being just as bad, or potentially even worse. After Trump leaves the scene, ideology will flow in to fill the gap left by his personality cult. We already know more or less what that successor ideology will look like — intensely xenophobic, obsessed with “Western civilization”, virulently opposed to the EU (for supposedly betraying Western civilization) and favorably disposed toward Russia, conspiratorial, anti-science, anti-vaccine, and so on.
Both Trump and his movement are clearly a disaster and a dead end. That opens up space for Democrats to do one of two things. The first is to become more extremist, and hope that anti-Trump backlash and base turnout/mobilization will allow the Dems to squeak out narrow victories in 2028 or 2032. The second is to moderate and stand up staunchly in defense of liberalism, attacking Trump’s corruption, economic policies, anti-democratic overreach, and general policy failure. This second approach would capture more swing voters, but would run the risk of inspiring tepid enthusiasm among the base.
I see elements of both strategies emerging. The DSA may be winning mayoral races and some Congressional seats, but it’s extremely unlikely to have a Presidential nominee in 2028. Many mainstream Dems have been moderating on cultural issues.
But the fact that “go moderate or go extreme” is even a question at all right now for the Democrats is thanks to Trump. The backlash to Trump is exactly what has opened up the possibility for Dems to become more extreme and still win elections. Mamdani’s election in NYC was clearly intended as a middle finger to Trump, and it’s no coincidence that DSA membership surges when Trump is in the White House.
Faced with a threat like Trump, some people instinctively become pragmatic and decide to do whatever it takes to make the threat go away. But a lot of people just instinctively reach for whatever weapon they can hurl at the enemy, and the DSA is a weapon that’s convenient and seems sharp.
The next question, of course, is: What can break the mutually reinforcing cycle of radicalization? There are plenty of things that seem to work, but the real message is that reasonable people have to stand up forcefully against the radicals. But it’s hard for moderate Dems to stand up to people like Mamdani right now, because voters are very mad at them.
The failures of mainstream progressivism make Democrats hungry for an alternative
In 2016, I wrote a post on my old blog called “Trump happened because conservatism failed”. I argued that during the George Bush presidency, all of the pillars of the Reaganite conservatism that had dominated the GOP for three decades either achieved bad results or lost the culture wars outright:
[I]n the past fifteen years, the three pillars of conservatism - economic, foreign-policy, and social conservatism - have all had huge, dramatic failures…
Economic conservatism had two big failures. The first failure was when the Bush tax cuts failed to reverse income stagnation…The second failure was when a lax regulatory climate appeared to give rise to a financial crisis that devastated the job market…[T]he formula of "cut taxes and let businesses do as they see fit" is now pretty discredited…
Next, foreign policy conservatism. This failed during the George W. Bush administration, when Bush turned bellicose rhetoric into bellicose reality with the disastrous Iraq War. The Iraq War was a disaster because despite winning the war pretty handily and taking low casualties, we received no gains…
Finally, social conservatism…Social conservatism promised to restore family values by promoting Christianity and resisting things like gay marriage…Secularism is rising rapidly. Gay marriage enjoys wide support, especially among the young. Americans have resoundingly rejected the values pushed on them by Christian conservatives in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
The situation with the Democrats isn’t exactly analogous. The mainstream liberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama didn’t fail. The welfare state was expanded, and poverty fell. Mostly-universal health care was implemented, and the uninsured rate plummeted. Gay marriage and marijuana legalization gained wide acceptance. In fact, it’s exactly these successes that make me think that doubling down on the kind of liberalism I grew up with is still America’s best bet.
But although the main policy thrusts of liberalism generally succeeded, the movement failed in other, more subtle ways. For one thing, it failed to satisfy the dreams of the burgeoning ranks of educated professionals that American universities were graduating. We produced more PhDs than we had teaching positions, more law grads than we had billable hours, more journalism school grads than we had desks at the New York Times. The downward mobility that many of America's educated “precariat” encountered probably pushed them toward socialism — a phenomenon known as a “revolution of rising expectations”.
Liberalism also didn’t have much of a foreign policy. Clinton and Obama both believed in “engagement” with China, which most people now believe was a disastrous failure. Democrats acceded to the Iraq War, at least for the first few years. Obama did nothing to stop Russia from seizing parts of Ukraine in 2014. Dems’ foreign policy seemed to consist of “just do nothing and hope for the best”.
Liberalism’s successes also failed to prevent the rise of Trump. For a while it seemed that the electoral victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were pushing the GOP toward the center — George W. Bush was a “compassionate conservative” whose policies reduced homelessness and bolstered the welfare state, and Mitt Romney was a moderate big-government conservative in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller. Even Trump won in 2016 in part by moderating on Social Security and gay marriage and adopting the labor movement’s position on free trade.
But Trump also represented a hard swerve to the right on racial issues — something most Dems had thought was settled. Dissatisfaction with liberalism’s failure to prevent the resurgence of 1920s-style racism drove lots of Democrats to 2010s-era wokeness and the activist movements of the “resistance” period.
Wokeness itself then failed in many respects. Police defunding was generally a disaster, and was swiftly reversed in most cities. DEI and the trans movement alienated a lot of regular Americans. The toxic online culture of Bluesky-style progressives alienated a lot of elite Americans. The Biden administration’s decision to treat immigration like a cultural issue for the first three years of his presidency caused a backlash and a flight to Trump in 2024.
In other words, Democrats succeeded at most of the things that liberals cared about in the 1980s and 1990s, but it wasn’t enough. They simultaneously pissed off their own base (by failing to stop Trump and fulfill young people’s dreams) and swing voters (by being too woke). This has given rise to a strange dynamic in which Democrats struggle to win swing voters, while Democratic primary voters just keep on moving to the left. Almost every demographic group in the nation has become more Republican in recent years:
And despite Trump’s unpopularity, voters still trust the Republicans more on many issues, including immigration.
And yet Democrats increasingly favor socialism over capitalism:
This is why the DSA in the Mamdani Era reminds me of MAGA. It’s an insurgent movement responding to a wave of discontent among the base, even though its extremist ideas will have a tough time winning over swing voters. To the extent it succeeds, it’ll do so more because of backlash than because its ideas are truly popular, but the movement will view even the narrowest of electoral victories as a sweeping mandate to reshape the country along truly radical lines.
But what will those lines be? The DSA’s recent electoral victories — especially Mamdani’s mayorship — are beginning to make this a bit clearer.
The two Lefts are now one
The American left has always been deeply divided, even at its moments of greatest energy.3 In the 2010s, there was a deep and visible split between two factions: socialists and resistance progressives. Anyone who spent time in left-wing Facebook groups or left-leaning corners of old Twitter couldn’t help but notice the furious battles between “Berniebros” who wanted to focus more on the working class and economic issues, and more identitarian types who wanted to make race and gender the center of everything. The iconic moment of this battle was certainly when BLM protesters rushed the stage and yelled at Bernie Sanders, calling his movement white supremacist.
This split actually goes back a long way. America’s “woke” progressive movement is a very old movement that goes all the way back to abolitionism — in a way, it’s America’s own original homegrown left. Class-focused socialism, in contrast, is largely a European transplant, and has generally struggled to find a foothold in a nation too focused on racial divides to develop Europe-style class consciousness.
But as I always say, these two strains of the American left are a bit like the fundamental forces of nature — at very high energies, they become the same thing. Tons of Bernie fans marched in the Floyd protests in 2020, and the DSA itself — as you can see from Avila Chevalier’s social media posts — is extremely “woke” on racial issues.
The thing that really pumped energy into the new Mamdanian left wasn’t Trump — it was Palestine. The Palestine protests failed to capture the hearts of the nation like BLM did in 2020, but they united a new generation of leftist activists behind a single passionate cause.
Palestine didn’t just inspire the imaginations of leftist Zoomers — it gave the DSA and the socialist movement an issue that the Democratic establishment couldn’t triangulate. Remember that Biden actually implemented many of the things that Bernie Sanders and his movement wanted — he forgave huge amounts of student loans, passed something very much like a Green New Deal, and threw more government money at health care.
But this only made the socialists hate Biden more. The socialist movement has always been an intensely factional project — actual policies aren’t as important as whose gang is in charge.4 Bernie Sanders always emphasized the need to overthrow the Democratic establishment, and he always hired people from within the socialist movement, even when this required hiring grossly incompetent and somewhat wacky people. For factionalists obsessed with taking over the Democratic party, Biden’s adoption of many of Bernie’s core issues was anathema, precisely because it made such a takeover less likely.
Palestine was an issue that the Democratic establishment couldn’t triangulate. The Dems are less pro-Israel than the GOP — Obama’s Iran deal demonstrates that — but actually throwing a U.S. ally under the bus was a bridge too far for the institutional descendants of Bill Clinton, LBJ, JFK, and FDR. The anti-Israel movement’s fringe of antisemitism also probably scared Jewish members of the Democratic establishment into not supporting the Palestine cause. The sheer moral repugnance of the October 7th attacks — which socialists like Avila Chevalier have been willing to ignore or even endorse — also helped make it a perfect wedge issue.
Trump may have enabled the DSA to widen its support base, but it’s Palestine, not opposition to Trump, that provides the animating spark for the leftist resurgence. It’s a culture war wedge issue and a litmus test. It’s something that leftist leaders can speak passionately about, in uncompromising terms that energize their base and signal to swing voters that they have deep-seated values. It gives the foot soldiers an enemy to hate — the villainous AIPAC, whose money the DSA sees as its archnemesis.
Detractors (including myself) have called the Palestine movement an “omnicause”, noting how it muscled other leftist hobbyhorses like climate change and health care out of the discourse. But paradoxically, this will probably make DSA leaders more pragmatic in power — at least, unless and until they take the Presidency. Would the DSA implement Venezuela-style socialism if they controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress? Probably, yes. But that stuff isn’t a big deal right now, because what matters is winning elections.
Just look at Mamdani. He came into office promising government-run grocery stores, free buses, a rent freeze, universal child care, etc. In office, he has governed like a moderate, abandoning most of his expensive proposals and doing some surprisingly pragmatic things like supporting small businesses. He’s free to do this because A) American socialism is ideologically plastic, and B) his support for Palestine will never waver. Avila Chevalier will be the same — she’ll call for universal job guarantees and universal basic income and whatever, but in the end she’ll probably just vote with the Democrats until it comes to anything involving Palestine.
The DSA’s all-in support for Palestine has also elevated the importance of Islam in the progressive movement. Note that Darializa Avila Chevalier converted to Islam during the Palestine protests. Mamdani is not a strictly religious Muslim, but speaks about how his Islamic background gave him respect for social justice, anti-imperialism, and so on.
This is a synthesis that some people call “Islamo-leftism”. The idea is not that leftism is a front for Islamic interests5 — Islamo-leftism has no interest in sharia law. Nor is this the Iranian Revolution of 1979, where a leftist vanguard unwittingly acted as an advance wave for Islamists who eventually took over. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. It’s the idea that Islam is being used to invigorate, inspire, and help further the leftist cause.
There are several advantages to this approach. First, it allows attacks on socialists to be portrayed as Islamophobic, taking advantage of Americans’ natural impulse to protect minority identities from discrimination and bigotry. Second, it helps the socialist movement leverage the massive wave of talent from high-skilled Muslim immigration (Mamdani being a prime example). Third, it imbues the American Left with “anti-imperialist” bona fides, since European countries colonized many Muslim countries back in the age of colonialism.
It would be way too much to claim, as some conservatives do, that the rise of the DSA signals a shift away from focusing on Black people to focusing on Muslims. But it will probably involve a modest recalibration. Muslim progressives — children of high-skilled immigrants like Mamdani, and educated converts like Avila Chevalier — will probably win some power in the Democratic party at the expense of older Black Christian and (especially) Jewish leaders. Islamophobia will certainly be elevated — and antisemitism downgraded — in the pantheon of social ills that progressives promise to combat. This might not appeal to working-class people of color, but it will definitely appeal to the educated, mostly-White urban progressives who powered Avila Chevalier’s election and who increasingly form the core support base of the Democratic Party.
So this is what I think we can look forward to in Democratic party politics over the next few years. DSA types will promise big socialist projects that never get implemented, while lambasting the Democratic establishment on Palestine to create a wedge issue, and taking advantage of the anti-Trump backlash to win electoral victories. They will govern surprisingly pragmatically, leading some admiring progressives from outside their movement to think of them as “sewer socialists” who get things done. And to the extent that they gain control over foreign policy, they will be more sympathetic to Russia and China, and hostile to Ukraine and Taiwan. They’ll be smarter than MAGA — these are Democrats we’re talking about, after all — but will retain similarly transformative goals.
Whether their rise continues, of course, depends on a lot of things — whether Trump’s movement flames out, whether America’s mainstream liberals can reinvigorate their own movement, and so on. But for now, I think this is the equilibrium we’re heading towards.
Update: Here’s a good example of the kind of passionate and often toxic politics that the New Left typifies. California State Senator Scott Wiener, who eventually labeled Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” after initially resisting the label, and who has been a staunch and consistent fighter for transgender rights, was harassed and chased out of a trans event in San Francisco:
It’s hard to see how this sort of activism can be reasoned with. It remains to be seen how many Democratic primary voters this sort of activist can win over.
She has not yet finished her PhD. There’s something very fitting about a sociology ABD becoming America’s most extremist Congressman.
This is the journalistic euphemism for “wacky”.
For a good primer on what the factions were in the 1960s, I recommend Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night.
For a great example of this from the 1970s, I recommend Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, which tells the story of how the antecedents of the modern DSA defeated the Democratic establishment for perhaps the only time in American history to nominate George McGovern. McGovern was a moderate on policy, but that didn’t matter to Thompson and the New Left, because he was anti-establishment.
Some people who don’t like this term liken it to “Judeo-bolshevism”, an old conspiracy theory alleging that communism was merely a front for Jewish interests. In fact, “Islamo-leftism” puts leftism, not Islam, in the driver’s seat, so it’s almost the opposite of “Judeo-bolshevism”.
I'm so over some of the current generation of DSA members, currently running for office, or planning to, who have been brainwashed on Russian propaganda, 9/11 and Holocaust denialism (weird how people believe Chevalier was the sole worst candidate Mamdani supported when Kawas is right there, too), and indoctrinated into using violent language under the guise of supporting whatever their cause du jour against the US.
They are trying to do the Democrat party what the Tea Party and MAGA did to Republicans. They don't actually care about delivering on policy, they care about destroying the establishment. If their ideas are bad they still win and if they lose at the ballot box they still win because they hate Democrats more than they love Democracy or beating Republicans.
Chevalier is a fucking nutjob, but she should be a wake up call that Reps need to understand their Districts better, understand where Democratic voters are right now, or they need to fucking retire and make way for someone who can who's hopefully not crazy like Jerry Nadler did. I just really hope these candidates don't drag down the national brand further in 2028.
I think for voters what is mainly attracting them to these candidates is that they are Pro Rent Control, are charismatic and have a good social media game. On the other hand, quite a few are Anti Ukraine/Anti Nato which is bad imo. They support Palestine but won't support Ukraine. They have no principles.
Chevalier is so bad that AOC and Bernie refused to endorse her (which was the right call). Lander is a great pick overall, but I think the Dem party in NYC needs to do a better job on the ground with voters.
I can confidently say I dislike DSA more than MAGA. I also live in Chicago where the failed DSA mayor is not helping their shitty cause. My plan going forward is to continue to live in annoyingly liberal areas and continue to stuff DSA idiots into lockers as often as possible because I refuse to concede this city to these fucking idiots. Wish me luck.