By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appeared before a joint
session of Congress to deliver a high-stakes address on healthcare. When he got
to the podium, he discovered that the wrong speech—an old State of the Union
address—had been loaded into the teleprompter. For seven minutes he
half-winged, half-read from a print copy.
For his aides, that was a long seven minutes. A young,
extremely dismayed George Stephanopoulos muttered to Mike Feldman, an Al Gore
aide, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened.”
“I dunno,” Feldman replied, “the Holocaust was pretty
bad.”
That’s sort of how I feel about the reaction among many
of my friends to yesterday’s election results in New York City.
It’s really bad. But as with all bad things, you have to
ask, “Compared to what?”
Several Democratic Socialist candidates—one or two who
might have replied to Feldman, “No, this is worse”—won their congressional
primaries, which means it’s all but assured they will win in the general
election, because that’s how New York works.
The worst of them is Darializa Avila Chevalier. She is a
32-year-old doctoral student in sociology. I assume she’s going to be ABD for a
while (that’s “all but dissertation” for those of you who may not have known as
many students-for-life as I have). Avila Chevalier is the kind of
caricature-made-flesh that Fox News producers, GOP consultants, and right-wing
Leninists dream about. I really don’t mean that as an insult to the producers,
consultants, and Leninists, because they have every right to crow. She’s not a
strawman. You can quote her directly without fear of being accurately accused
of exaggeration. The things she’s said or endorsed on social media would fit perfectly in a Trump
rally speech (and spare me the “retweets don’t equal endorsement” retort).
She is for abolishing all prisons, eliminating the
police, erasing the border, legalizing prostitution, controlling prices to deal
with inflation, and nationalizing vast swaths of the economy, including seizing
property from landlords. When repeatedly pressed on the question of whether murderers—lawfully
convicted by a jury of their peers—should be sent to jail, she refused to say
anything approaching “yes.” Instead, she lamented how prison traumatizes
murderers and denies them an opportunity to “reflect” on the harm they caused
to their community, which is why she would like to see the murderers returned
to that community. You know, to better reflect on stuff.
Of course, she hates Israel with blinding passion (she thinks Bernie Sanders is too Zionist), believing it has no
right to exist. When Hamas launched its pogrom of rape and murder, she was one
of those people who immediately attended that pro-Hamas rally the next
day—while the raping and murdering had not yet abated. But she also thinks
America is a “f—ing disgrace.”
She may be a wonderful friend and colleague, a terrific
cook, and if she has dogs or cats, they may love her dearly. But if we can
judge politicians by their publicly stated views—and if we can’t, what are we
doing here?—I think she’s a horrible person.
I can go in a dozen different directions from here. For
starters, she’s a perfect example of how weak parties are ruining our political
system, and doing profound damage to our country. The Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) hate a lot of people and groups, but you know who they hate the
most? Mainstream Democrats. The DSA is in spirit, if not fact, the successor
organ to the Progressive Party of the 1940s.
For those of you unfamiliar with this history—and why
wouldn’t you be, given that it’s not widely taught in schools—the Progressive
Party, led by former FDR Vice President Henry Wallace, was a Trojan horse full
of Communists, Soviet spies, fellow travelers, and useful idiots. This isn’t an
exaggeration. No less a figure than I.F. Stone wrote in 1950 that “the
Communists have been the dominant influence in the Progressive Party ... If it
had not been for the Communists, there would have been no Progressive Party.”
John Abt, the Progressives’ chief lawyer, was a member of Alger Hiss’ cell. Lee
Pressman, who headed the platform committee, was a Communist. Wallace’s
speechwriter, Charles Kramer, was exposed by the Venona papers as an active
Soviet spy. Even Rexford Tugwell—arguably the most left-wing member of FDR’s
brain trust—eventually felt the need to leave the Progressive party because it
was simply a Communist front.
In 1947, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other liberal leaders recognized the threat posed by the emerging Progressive
Party and its sympathizers and helped to organize Americans for Democratic
Action. The group’s primary concern was bolstering American liberalism’s
resolve to oppose the Soviet threat. But there was a more practical concern as
well: The whackjobs were a threat to the Democratic Party. Henry Wallace was
probably more of a useful idiot than a knowing Communist agent, but the result
was the same. He lent credibility to Communists—both on and off the Soviet
payroll.
The threat was different than the threat posed by the
DSA. The Progressive Party was a real third party. It posed an electoral threat
as much as an ideological one. But because the Democratic Party was a real
party back then, it could draw bright lines and pick real fights with its
enemies—and they were enemies—to their left.
Today, the Democratic Party lets DSA candidates run as
Democrats, even though the DSA is ideologically committed to a hostile takeover
of the party. The DSA isn’t a formal party; it calls itself “a political and activist organization, not a
party.” What it is is a fifth column within the Democratic Party. There is no
sensible, informed Democrat who thinks these people are good for their party. I
mean, sure, they will feed the alligator one limb at a time in exchange for
their turnout efforts, but no grown up believes open socialism, open borders,
and closed prisons is a good message for a national party—or good policy.
Every Republican in the country is going to run against
Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and the other Jacobins and wreckers
of the DSA. But the Democrats, much like the Republicans, have been powerless
to shape and control their candidate selection, messaging, or donor dollars for
so long, they can’t even imagine how they might start acting like a real party.
This matters for countless reasons. For starters it’s bad
for civic health to tell people impossible and idiotic things are possible and
smart. I don’t think any of these barista socialists has the skill, power,
legal knowhow, or constitutional ability to pull off a fraction of what they
claim to want. But they can still do enormous damage by trying. You can’t cure
COVID by injecting bleach into the patient, but you can really hurt the patient
by trying all the same. And you can’t fund a city budget by confiscating wealth
from rich people who, by definition, have the resources to vote with their
feet.
This is one of the reasons I am less worried about all
the socialism talk these days. In America, when people don’t like the economy
or their place in it, they say they want an alternative to the status quo. The
status quo gets called “capitalism” and people are told that the alternative is
“socialism.” Socialism in theory will always be very popular with some fraction
of the public, socialism in practice rarely ends up being popular because it
doesn’t work, and it doesn’t provide what people want from it. At least not in
scale. Lots of people like their retail socialism—rent control (if they have a
rent-controlled apartment), entitlements, etc.
Also, the people who really want socialism in
practice—the actual ideologues—aren’t the people the politicians and political
journalists assume they are. The avowed socialists claim they are fighting for
black and brown people and other minorities. But they disproportionately rely
on the votes of the more affluent and aggrieved, status-class anxiety suffering
white people. The barista socialists with master’s degrees are the shock troops
here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary because young white progressives
flocked to her. The same holds for Avila Chevalier, who lost the poorer and
darker-skinned slice of the Bronx by some 30 points. She lost the black and
Hispanic precincts, but cleaned up among young, higher income, whiter and
college educated voters. The idea that minority and working class voters are the
reserve army of a socialist proletariat is a lie agreed upon by white
progressives, mainstream reporters, and a lot of Republicans. Democrats and
journalists are terrified of being called racist or dismissive of minority
concerns, but the people hurling those accusations are peddling that myth to
claim a constituency they don’t have.
One last point about why all of this matters. As I keep
saying, you can’t have just one sane party. You need two sane parties. The
crazier or more extreme one party is, the more permission the other party has
to be crazy and extreme. The only way to prove your party isn’t crazy is to
police the crazies on your own side. Period. Strong parties can do that.
Cowardly, anemic parties-in-name-only can’t or won’t.
In my career, there have been times when I would have
rejoiced along with the Fox producers and GOP consultants at the stupidity of
the Democrats in this election. So much column fodder! But when I heard the
news yesterday I was deeply saddened, not so much for the potential damage to
the country, or to New York City. I was crestfallen for two reasons. The first
is because of what this says about the plight of Jews in America, the
Democratic Party, and my hometown. But the more relevant reason here is simply
this: The Democratic Party just gave a massive in-kind donation to the GOP and
its crazies. Because a lot of voters may be disgusted with the GOP—and they
should be—but if you convince them that the alternative is these gargoyles,
they’ll continue to vote for what they see as the marginally less insane party.
Yesterday’s results weren’t the worst thing ever. But
man, they were bad enough.
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