A brand-new New York congresswoman closed her victory speech Tuesday night with the words “abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA” — and the Democratic Party establishment stood there and clapped, because there was nothing else left to do.
Solidarity forever, comrades! Somewhere, Chuck Schumer is staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. wondering when the party he’s run for forty years started sounding like a megaphone at an Occupy drum circle.
Here’s what happened. On Tuesday, in the New York City Democratic primaries, the Democratic Socialists of America — Zohran Mamdani’s slate, the ones with the rose emojis in their bios — didn’t just win a seat here or there. They went through the establishment like Sherman went through Georgia.
Claire Valdez beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Brad Lander decisively knocked off sitting Congressman Dan Goldman — yes, the impeachment-lawyer Goldman, the heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, the man whose whole brand was being the responsible adult in the room. Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled longtime Congressman Adriano Espaillat. Incumbents. With money. With name recognition. With the entire party machine behind them. Gone.
And it was Valdez — the new face of New York’s 7th — who delivered the line of the night. Not “let’s lower healthcare costs.” Not “fighting for working families.” She told the cheering room: “solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA.”
Abolish ICE. Free Palestine. Join DSA. That’s not a fringe blogger in a basement. That’s a sitting member of Congress, on a stage, with a microphone, treating “abolish the agency that deports criminal aliens” as an applause line you put right next to “thank you for coming.”
Now, normally this is the part where some Democrat strategist appears on cable to assure us it’s an isolated fluke, a quirky local result, nothing to see here. Except this time their own people aren’t buying it.
Van Jones — on CNN, not Newsmax — looked into the camera and said the quiet part out loud: “the left is on the march… democratic socialists are an insurgency… this is a serious movement.” When Van Jones is the one telling you the socialists are an insurgency, you’ve lost the room. That’s like getting a lecture on sobriety from the guy who brought the keg.
And the establishment knows it. Former DNC chairman Jaime Harrison — a man who once ran the entire Democratic National Committee — sounded less like a party leader and more like a guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn: “if you hate the Democratic Party… don’t run for our nomination.”
Our nomination. There’s the whole tragedy in two words. Harrison still thinks it’s “ours.” It isn’t anymore. The kids with the rose emojis just took the keys, and the rules say you can run in their primary, win their primary, and stand on their stage announcing you want to abolish a federal law-enforcement agency — and the party can’t do a single thing about it except politely ask you not to.
Follow that logic where it goes, because they will. First it’s “abolish ICE” — already mainstream enough to be a victory-speech applause line. Then it’s the Border Patrol, because if deporting people is cruel, then catching them must be cruel too. Then it’s the local police, who are just ICE with a smaller jurisdiction. Give it two cycles and the official Democratic position in America’s largest city will be that enforcing any law at all is a “legacy of exclusion.” You think that’s a joke. So did the people Brad Lander just beat.
Here’s the part the consultant class in their Georgetown townhouses doesn’t want to look at directly. This isn’t a one-off. This is exactly how parties die and get replaced from the inside.
Go back and read 2006. The anti-war left primaried Joe Lieberman — a sitting senator, a former vice-presidential nominee, the establishment’s establishment guy — and threw him out of his own party. Everybody said it was a local fluke too. Within a few years the entire Democratic Party had reorganized itself around the wing that beat him. The “fluke” became the platform. The “insurgents” became the leadership. The grown-ups who lost the primaries became the people the new majority apologized for.
That’s the math here, and the math is brutal for Schumer and Jeffries. When the DSA can win Goldman’s seat, Espaillat’s seat, and Reynoso’s office in a single night, every establishment Democrat in New York just learned that the donor money and the name recognition they’ve leaned on for thirty years are worth roughly nothing against a thousand twenty-six-year-olds with clipboards and a Discord server. The incumbents who survived this round won’t fight the movement. They’ll join it — because the only thing a career politician fears more than the socialists is unemployment.
And you — yes, you, the moderate Democrat in Queens who voted for these people for decades because they promised to be reasonable — you just found out your party’s idea of “reasonable” is a congresswoman closing her acceptance speech with “free Palestine, join DSA.” There is no quiet centrist coming to save you. He ran on Tuesday. He’s the guy who lost.
Jaime Harrison says if you hate the Democratic Party, don’t run for its nomination. The socialists ran for it. They won it. And they’re now using that nomination to dismantle exactly the party Harrison thought he was protecting. Don’t run for our nomination, he says.
Too late. They already did. And it’s not “ours” anymore — it’s theirs.
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