Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

Zohran Mamdani is the future of the Democratic Party and there is little the Democrat establishment can do to stop it.

Most Americans are undoubtedly tired of hearing about New York and the socialist currently leading the city’s mayoral race, but what happens in the Big Apple may unfortunately affect the whole country.

New York held its first debate Thursday night between three leading candidates: Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Mamdani. You can read my night-of analysis here.

But I have one additional takeaway from the debate and race as a whole. The reason Mamdani, who is a state assemblyman and is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, has captured so much attention from the media is that he very much represents the zeitgeist of the evolving Democrat base.

What has struck me about Mamdani from the beginning is not simply his radicalism, but his open radicalism.

Sure, he’s modulated some of his positions from the heady, revolutionary days of 2020. He no longer publicly says that the NYPD is a threat to public safety or puts photos of himself on social media flipping off Christopher Columbus statues. He’s wiggled his way out of talking about the issues that he and virtually everyone on the Left supports when in power. But his policy positions remain very much to the Left of what the Democratic Party would admit it supports. And it couldn’t be clearer that he’s a true believer.

Mamdani’s radicalism is hiding in plain sight.

Government-run grocery stores? Mamdani’s all for it. I’m sure he’ll have a slick video for the first grand opening on social media.

Free city bus rides? Don’t worry, the “rich” will pay and it will cause crime to go down. After all, fare evasion isn’t a crime if the bus is free, right?

Don’t call it defunding the police, call it funding social workers who will surely make the crime issue on the subway go away.

All these terrible ideas have been tried—some even have been tried in New York—but Mamdani’s young base likely doesn’t know or care about that.

Make no mistake, Mamdani is woke on all the cultural issues too. His most dedicated staffers and supporters are DSA members looking to seize power by any means necessary. It would be a mistake to think their only goals are seizing the means of production and giving handouts to their constituents.

Most importantly of all in terms of what Mamdani represents, the Democrat base wants someone who will “resist” President Donald Trump no matter what. If you want to understand the Democrat shutdown strategy, look no further than Mamdani.

It was not too long ago that the assemblyman started making a name for himself by screaming belligerently at Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan over the arrest of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, a Palestinian refugee has become a martyr of sorts for the Left despite or more likely because of his support for Hamas.

Mamdani leads a Green-Red coalition that more openly embraces socialists and Islamists than the previous Democratic Party iterations would have acknowledged. And this very much works in the modern age given the collapse of the Democratic Party establishment.

The Democrat base doesn’t want moderation, they want confrontation, they want theatrics. They don’t want “abundance” for all, they want to soak their enemies to give to their friends. They want blood, in most cases rhetorical, in some cases literal. Mamdani gives the base what they want, even if his policies ultimately differ very little from the supposedly “moderate” Democrat establishment.

Think of it this way. The tussles on college campuses between protesters and university leadership are very much like the battles taking place within the Democratic Party. The activists and the base make a ruckus, and the leaders shift a little to the Left to appease them. This tug leftward continues over and over again until the “establishment” of today is like the anti-establishment Left of yesterday.

Mamdani represents a triumph of the activist Left over a tired Democrat establishment that can no longer justify itself. In a practical political sense, the current establishment has proven to be a loser.

The country is no longer looking for Biden-ism or Cuomo-ism. The American people saw through the fraud.

So instead of putting forth a “moderate” candidate and trying to slip in the radicalism once in power, they are going for a more strident form of leftism. Bernie Sander-ism, but in a younger, slicker, Millennial package.

Whether this works outside the bluest cities and states is an open question. But it does represent a serious change in American politics, and potentially a very dangerous one. At the very least the old Democrat establishment would “evolve” a bit when in danger of losing support and getting mugged by reality, or more precisely, angry voters.

The new upstarts aren’t phased by reality. They will adopt the most leftwing position and stick with it, no matter the results or repercussions. Once in power, are they likely to let it go?

Mamdani represents an uncompromising, ruthless version of the Left that won’t be deterred by reality, political or otherwise. If he wins, this will become a model used elsewhere. That Mamdani may become the next mayor of New York is a threat not just to New Yorkers, but the whole country.

AUTHOR

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett. Jarrett on X: @JarrettStepman.

It’s a simple question: How can “Queers for Palestine,” the slogan on protest signs of pro-Palestinian (or anti-anti-Hamas) protesters, be a thing? (Homosexuality is stigmatized and criminalized in the Palestinian territories, while in Israel it is legal, and in secular spaces not stigmatized. As a practical matter, one would much rather be queer in Tel Aviv than Khan Yunis.)

To answer the question, one must consider the operating ideology of left-wing activism, which for lack of a better term might be called “Everything Leftism.”

An Ideology and a Structure

Everything Leftism operates on two levels, as an ideology and as an institutional structure. As an ideology, it is a corruption of or derivative from intersectionality. As intersectionality views all oppressed identities as linked in compounding dimensions, Everything Leftism views all left-of-center issues as linked in compounding dimensions.

Thus, for the Everything Leftist all issues are mutually dependent. In this view, the interests of 2SLGBTQI+ people in the United States depend on Palestinian sovereignty, which depends on radical decarbonization of the economy, which depends on widespread access to taxpayer-funded abortion, which depends on de facto open borders, which depends on every other issue in the progressive playbook.

As an institutional structure, Everything Leftism operationalizes this ideology in the philanthropic and governmental spaces. Charitable organizations and advocacy groups seeking support from left-wing institutional Big Philanthropy will be pressured to align with Everything Leftism not only on any single issue but on all issues, or at least to silence themselves on issues on which they do not align. Meanwhile, where and when administrations aligned with Big Philanthropy hold power, they will use their discretion in government grantmaking, regulatory policy, and prosecutorial decision making to carry out the tenets of Everything Leftism. The Biden administration has announced and carried out a series of “whole of government” schemes related to Everything Leftism, most notably regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and climate change.

Everything Leftism in Practice

Everything Leftism is much easier to see than to define. Groups associated with left-of-center causes sometimes just “tweet it out,” with graphics in the typical corporate-liberal pastel-style demonstrating how all issues are mutually dependent.

Consider the following image from the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug legalization group tied to George Soros and funded by him and numerous other prominent liberal institutional funders:

Sometimes the issue lists of supposedly single-issue groups show the depths of Everything Leftism. The Sunrise Movement is ostensibly a campaign group for an immediate severe cut in carbon emissions to stop the supposed “climate crisis.” But its list of “our demands” includes “union jobs for all,” “abolish the police,” and “ensuring that indigenous communities are well resourced and safe.” Sunrise Movement claims that these Everything Leftist positions are inherent to its environmental mission, but in reality they are extraneous.

In the labor-union space, this is why the United Auto Workers (UAW), driven to strike in part due to the consequences of the shift to electric vehicle production driven by the American and international governments’ war on cars, supports the “just transition” away from conventional fuels. Labor unions in many ways pioneered Everything Leftism with “social justice unionism.” After John Sweeney, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member aligned with government-worker unions and unionism’s radical Left, replaced the George Meany-Lane Kirkland center-left Truman-LBJ regime at the AFL-CIO in the 1990s, they turned their dues-funded treasuries into general-purpose piggy banks for left-wing economic and social movements.

In a sense, the Everything Leftist intersectional politics of the DSA replaced the old industrial-class politics of Meany, Kirkland, and their turn-of-the-20th-century predecessor Samuel Gompers. Those industrial-class politics may have been left-of-center—they gave America the capital-P Progressive Movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society, which all had many political-economic problems. But they were also patriotic and recognizably American in their liberalism, as evidenced by Gompers’s resistance to European socialisms of his day and the Meany-Kirkland regime’s work against international Communism during the Cold War. But in the new post-Sweeney era, Big Labor has joined the Everything Leftists, backing causes further left than the liberalism of the Biden administration, and so the UAW demands Israel not defeat Hamas in battle.

Concluding Thoughts

Once the concept of Everything Leftism is introduced, it is easy to find examples. Blaming school choice on “racism, homophobia, and xenophobia”? Everything Leftism. Calling everything “x justice” – “racial justice,” “environmental justice,” “economic justice,” “algorithmic justice”? Everything Leftism. California offering government-funded sex changes to illegal immigrants? Everything Leftism.

Knowledge of Everything Leftism, like knowledge of the related social justice unionism, should teach that there is no prospect of long-term alignment with the Left for moderate concession on a single issue. For a real-world example, ask the Republican and conservative groups that allied with liberals for moderate relaxation of criminal justice policies whether they expected their erstwhile partners to jump headlong into defunding police and de facto legalizing mass criminality in the name of “racial justice.”

But the Permanent Revolution is the demand of the Everything Leftist, so the move to abolish the police was inevitable. That was the ultimate objective for many of the left-wing groups, and it was published in the New York Times as such.

So to answer the opening question, how can “Queers for Palestine” be a thing? Everything Leftists saw an opportunity to combine two or more supposedly oppressed identities into a novel intersectional combination and took it. This happens often and across issues.

Let any conservative seeking to work with (or worse, appease) a left-wing faction beware.

AUTHOR

Michael Watson

Michael is Research Director for Capital Research Center and serves as the managing editor for InfluenceWatch. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he previously worked for a Washington, D.C. public relations firm.

RELATED ARTICLES:

What Was “The March For Gaza” Really About?

Why Did Gavin Newsom Meet With Hamas-Linked Groups?

Who Is “Queeg” And Why Should Trustees Be Aware?

Is Marxism Becoming The Norm In Labor Unions?

Tag Archive for: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

Jarrett Stepman

An Ideology and a Structure

Everything Leftism in Practice

Concluding Thoughts

Michael Watson