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, 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” 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
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