The Fantastical Abstract World of the Democratic Socialists

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

If you were looking for an excruciating experience, the New York Editorial Board — a Substack — has you covered.

 

The outlet recently posted a lengthy interview with Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Zohran Mamdani-endorsed candidate mounting a primary challenge against the Democratic Party’s Hispanic Caucus chair, Representative Adriano Espaillat. In it, Chevalier’s interlocutors tried valiantly to drag the self-described socialist candidate down from the clouds, albeit to no avail.

 

They chose an easy one: murder. How would Chevalier, a “prison abolitionist,” handle that?

 

“I think a lot of folks misunderstand what that vision of the world actually is,” Chevalier replied before launching into a cerebral diatribe in which she denounced both the murderer and the nebulous environmental milieu that creates murderers.

 

“Because what we have right now is a system in whenever harm happens, there’s more harm being perpetrated, not only on the folks who engaged in the harm, but also on the victims of the harm,” read one ponderous but still representative sentence in the blizzard of newspeak she unleashed.

 

Her interviewers tried again. “But what do you do to the murderer, though?” one asked. The question was met with yet another dissertation in which a lot was spoken, but nothing much was said. “But did we answer what happens to the murderer?” Chevalier’s increasingly agitated questioner asked. “Do you not incarcerate the murderer?” Somehow, this line of inquiry did not engender a “yes.”

 

Their aggravation now palpable, another interviewer asked if it was possible for Chevalier to be “a little less abstract.” But, of course, it was not. Her contention that it is her goal to “create systems where that’s not even the possibility” — by which she meant the act of murder, an evil so intrinsic to the human experience it is literally Biblical.

 

Chevalier could not “be a little less abstract” because she deals with the world as though it were an abstraction — really, one big metaphor that an intrepid constructivist could reshape with the right combination of words and concepts.

 

For example:

 

 

Once again, we’re confronted with metaphors meant to describe the reality that the Democratic Socialist left inhabits — or, maybe, wish they inhabited.

 

The system of “apartheid” she’s describing that supposedly prevails in Israel isn’t really apartheid. Israeli Arabs do not have second-class status. They are doctors, lawyers, and Knesset members — taxpaying, enfranchised citizens of a state governed by the rule of law. That’s just a strong allusion that conjures up inciting images.

 

Indeed, Chevalier isn’t even really talking about Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. She’s talking about America.

 

You see, the all but genocidal campaign of ethnic repression over which Israel presides is eerily similar to what’s happening in Brooklyn. People have been “priced out of their homes.” She neglected to mention that they’ve been “priced out” by the very transient, wealthy young people who have formed the backbone of the DSA coalition from Washington, D.C., to New York City — often over the objections of older, black residents who care about keeping crime down and the tax base stable.

 

The conditions in the West Bank and Brooklyn are “visually similar,” she says, because “corporate interests” are “coming in” and “claiming the land” and “kicking the people who live there out.” What in the world is she talking about? None of this makes any logical sense unless you regard it as an elaborate allegory.

 

There was no logical progression from the conditions she describes above, which could fairly be described as property management on an open market, to “violence.”

 

“The tear gas that was being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza in 2014 was the same tear gas that was being dropped on black protesters in Ferguson in 2014,” Chevalier declared. We are presumably supposed to see something profound in her recognition that tear gas has the same chemical composition everywhere on earth. That “summer was very formative for me,” she mused, “because it showed me that connection is not only one that is like, but it is the very same system.”

 

There you have it: It’s a metaphor. And Israel has very little to do with it. Israel is, as it was for the Marxist and Islamist radicals of the 20th century, a proxy battle in the ultimate fight against the United States and its attachment to the rapacious capitalist enterprise.

 

To ask Chevalier to abandon abstractions and descend to ground level with us mere mortals is to abandon her entire worldview. Politics is, to her, an abstraction — an extension of a poetic struggle against the American civic and social compacts. And it must forever be an abstraction. Because when you ask her to make concrete sense of it all for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to her outlook, she can’t do it.