The Democratic Socialists of America are having a moment. In fact, they're having a season. DSA candidates are winning nationwide in Democratic Party primaries, knocking off incumbents while running on some of the most deformed and deranged platforms in recent political memory. Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young socialist in Gracie Mansion, is the new leader of the DSA pack. Terrifying as it may be, Zo may be the closest thing the entire activist left has these days to a kingmaker.
It couldn't be clearer what the DSA wants: The democratic socialists want to finish the job, launched by Barack Obama on the precipice of presidential victory in 2008, of "fundamentally transforming" the United States. The DSA's new policy platform, released earlier this month, says the quiet part out loud: "We are workers fighting to transform society," to "draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic."
It would be one thing if these were the words of a starry-eyed freshman pothead, first exposed to Marx and pontificating to dormmates while John Lennon's dreadful song "Imagine" plays in the background. But people like Hizzoner and the new uptown socialist "it girl," Darializa Avila Chevalier, are adults. They are serious. And that makes them not just naive but dangerous.
Zo has had a complicated relationship with the issue of public safety.
The official DSA platform stops short of calling for full "abolition" of prisons or policing, instead calling to "demilitarize police departments" and "end mass incarceration." But Avila Chevalier promoted full-on police and prison abolition from a since-deleted Twitter/X account, and Mamdani condemned the "carceral state" when he ran for state assembly in 2020. After Avila Chevalier's primary victory, Mamdani was pressed during an appearance on ABC News on whether he supports the existence of prisons. "There are prisons," he simply responded.
That's not exactly reassuring.
Just this week, Zo appeared on purported comic Jon Stewart's podcast and doubled down on prevarication. Stewart asked Hizzoner if he is "comfortable" with calls to abolish prisons. "I'm comfortable with disagreement," he replied.
Noted. But the more important question is: Should Americans be comfortable with public officials entertaining the abolition of the twin pillars of public safety, police and prisons?
The answer is obvious: No.
Democratic socialists think they're helping the "little guy" with their anti-cop, anti-prison lunacy. They're not.
According to recent federal data, 62 percent of state prisoners were serving time for a violent offense, such as homicide, rape or robbery. These people are threats to society and need to be incarcerated. As esteemed criminologist Barry Latzer notes, the average American inmate was arrested a whopping 11 times before getting locked up, and an astonishing 83 percent of released prisoners are ultimately rearrested—about half in the first year after release.
Socialists might think they're helping blacks amid our post-"1619 Project" racial reckoning, but they fail here too: Nearly 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other Blacks. The biggest danger to law-abiding Blacks in America today is the threat posed by violent Blacks out on the streets and not behind bars.
There is only one coherent explanation for the DSA's anti-cop, anti-prison obsession: naked, raw ideology.
And there is a name for that ideology: Third World-ism. It's a dystopian zeal for barbarism over civilization. And these days, it's the name of the game for the activist left. We see it everywhere.
Third World-ism explains the activist left's support for the butchers of Hamas over the free people of Israel. Third World-ism explains the activist left's support for punitive environmental regulations that engender economic degrowth. Third World-ism explains why the activist left wants us to have (SET ITAL)fewer(END ITAL) children. Third World-ism explains why the activist left speculates that maybe America actually deserved 9/11. Third World-ism explains why the activist left wants the anarchy of open borders, not the ordered liberty of the nation-state. Third World-ism explains why the activist left sides with illegal aliens and not victims of illegal alien crime. And Third World-ism explains why the activist left sides with criminals, in general, and not victims of crime.
The problem with ideology, as the philosophers recognized millennia ago, is that it is stubborn. It is usually impervious to logic, reason or empiricism. The remedy for bad ideology, therefore, cannot simply be facts and statistics. We also need good ideology: a moral argument that public safety is a public good, and government exists to secure the public good.
Whether there is anyone willing to make that argument in earnest remains to be seen.