Third Worldism And The Political Religion Of Our Downwardly Mobile Elites
Politics as salvation for America's overproduced, underachieving class
Democrats are going full radical. To borrow a line from Kirk Lazarus, in American politics, you don’t ever go full radical.
Darializa Avila Chevalier is a rising star in the Democratic Party. Endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, last week she ousted the incumbent, Adriano Espaillat, in the party primary for a safely blue congressional district. The victory has focused attention on her embrace of ideological communism.
In a now-deleted Twitter account, Chevalier posted that she wanted to “seize the means of production”. She opined that Black and Arab men fetishize white women and joked about using the American flag as a napkin. Now she says she has “grown considerably”.
President Trump denounced Chevalier as a “communist”. When Ari Velshi asked her about this on MSNOW, Chavalier declined to be “reactive”, and objected to the “framing”. At least she didn’t storm out on Velshi. A clip:
Chevalier wants “budgets” to reflect all-American values like “immigration justice”. Translation: she wants infinite immigrants to have infinite dollars, i.e. communism.
Chevalier wants to “move forward” from a politics of “what we should be afraid of” (communism) that “has prevented us from being able to have a politics of hope, and a politics of life [read: communism], that Democrats actually identify with”.
Two terms of Barack Obama, the man elected president on a platform of hope and change, were not enough for American politics. We need a politics of “life”, by which Chevalier means infinite money for infinite migrants, i.e. communism.
Chevalier posted several peans to communist theory on her deleted Twitter account. “Most of the theory I’ve read is communism but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me”, she tweeted.
She wants to burn everything down like Karen Bass so infinite immigrants can receive infinite money in the ashes: full communism.
Party politics and political geography
Downplay divisions as they might, Dems are clearly disconcerted. What explains this new kind of Democrat that has James Carville talking of “schism”, and Letitia James complaining about progressives “blowing up” the party? Sure, the kids have been enthusiastic about ‘socialism’ for a long time, but surely they were always going to grow up and get jobs. Right?
Wrong. One key explanation is political economy. America has overproduced elite liberal arts students, and the glut is clogging up the ideopolises, the urban centers where the ‘knowledge economy’ lives. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis identified the ideopolis as the future home of the Democratic Party in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority.
The ideopolises are America’s cultural production centers. In Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, historian of philosophy Eric Voegelin uses the word “metropole” for this internationalized urban center, a phenomenon that has existed since the first empires had imperial cities.
New York state is the Empire state, America’s first such metropolis. America has many of them, now. They are the bright blue dots on the red political map of the United States.
In their 2023 sequel book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Judis and Teixeira note that they warned in the first book that the party risked losing the working class voter through cultural radicalism, and this warning had been ignored by the party.
In an exclusive interview with Teixeira this week, he told me that the ideopolises have outperformed his growth expectations — with disastrous results. The geography of highly-educated cultural elites produces a top-down radicalism that “open[s] up real vulnerabilities for the party.”
During the interview, which will be released as an exclusive podcast next week, Teixeira admits he was blindsided by the way cultural radicals took over progressive spaces in the 2010s.
“We didn’t anticipate that the professional class liberals who would come to dominate the party would be quite so radical in terms of their cultural outlook and the things they thought Democrats needed to stand for.”
You know, that goes from race and immigration and climate and gender. All these things that have loomed so large in the contemporary Democratic Party, and I might add, and so even social democratic parties in Europe, we just didn’t anticipate the professionals as a group would have such hegemony within the party and drive these things forward and make them so important to the image of the party. That was something we just didn't anticipate, and of course, that completely undercuts any kind of quote-unquote progressive centrism.
By “progressive centrism”, Teixeira describes an agenda designed to appeal to mainstream Americans. For example, Teixeira has long argued for an “all of the above” approach to energy that provides abundance rather than carbon limits.
His own career is a study in the shifting Overton window of what counts as a progressive point of view. Having started as a Marxist sociology student, he now works for the center-right American Enterprise Institute. Along the way, he spent nearly two decades working at the Center for American Progress.
The rise of the Democratic Party ideopolis has produced a new kind of Democrat shaped more by DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, than constitutional principles or the liberal tradition. In 2026, that new DSA Democrat is taking power in low-turnout primary races in deeply blue ideopolis districts.
These are young adults with little or no experience in the real economy. They come from middle class backgrounds and demand a job that feels like saving the world, so they ‘work’ for nonprofits, or stay in school for decades. They rarely make substantial fortunes saving the world.
Immediately following the election results, Batya Ungar-Sargon articulated this explanation very well. There are a couple of pull quotes that deserve emphasis.
First, there is nothing about Chevalier that resonates with people who labor for a living. Her focus is on issues that appeal to the constituency of highly-educated urban elites — her peers, crushed between high rent and low achievement.
It wasn’t “the working class” that voted in this slate of “socialists” and it wasn’t “socialism” they were running on. It was a hatred of this country, a hatred of Israel and the Americans who support it, and a deeply-embedded resentment that their vanity pursuits haven’t resulted in the riches they were promised in their fancy schools.
Chevalier is leading Democrats away from a message that resonates in her district, and districts like NY-13. The Bronx voted for her opponent, and the rest of America is ultimately more like the Bronx than Manhattan. Chevalier won educated whites but lost working classes of all colors. Emphasis mine:
They’ve turned the resentment of a downwardly mobile elite into their only politics, using their hatred of America and their hatred of Israel as a beard to cover up the fact that their candidates ousted the candidates chosen by the actual working class they pretend to fight for.
Chevalier is a professional student and PhD candidate in sociology. Her father is a landlord. She is not poor, but she wants to replace the housing market with public housing, and seize all properties from landlords like her own father.
The Mamdani administration has similar plans in New York City. By making property ownership unprofitable, squeezing the landlords between regulation and rent control, they can take over distressed properties for a grand experiment in public housing.
To the kids who never learned about the consequences of communist redistribution schemes in school, this sounds good.
It sounds even better coming from leftist professors reading the postmodern liturgy.
I see much truth in this ‘economic’ explanation, but it is incomplete, because it stops at the threshold of belief.
Belief, the mental acceptance or conviction that an idea, statement, or proposition is true or real, is an intrinsically spiritual activity. Darializa Avila Chevalier believes in communism the way Christians believe in God. This is crucial to understanding the cult of belief that is taking power in the Democratic Party.
The real communism has not been tried yet. The real God is ‘democratic socialism’, which has not been tried yet. If only the stupid workers would vote right, they would live in a worker’s paradise. It would be literal doomsday for billionaires.
See, it sounds like a cult because it is a cult. Chevalier is in a cult. We must examine this cult as a cult if we are to even hope of stopping it from having power over us.
