“I couldn’t stomach a system designed to profit off despair, so I joined D.S.A.” So wrote Zohran Mamdani in a recent Democratic Socialists of America recruitment email, the New York Times reported in July. The membership of prominent progressive politicians, including Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the DSA has been treated gingerly. That should stop, and affiliation with the DSA should finally and rightfully be regarded as disqualifying for an elected official.
The DSA held its national convention this weekend and did us all the favor of making clear that it is self-consciously incompatible with public service.
According to the Algemeiner, the first example of this was the passing of a resolution affirming the DSA’s adoption of Thawabit, “the principles originally set by the Palestinian National Council in 1977 and repeatedly reaffirmed since.” Accordingly, the resolution made it an expellable offense to say “Israel has a right to defend itself” or to “have knowingly provided material aid to Israel,” among others.
As a socialist organization, it’s not surprising that the DSA has instituted totalitarian-style Stalinist rules or that the group considers free speech among its primary threats. But I suppose they’ve at least simplified the process by making clear that if you want to know what to do and what not to do, just check with the Palestinian National Council first.
The other notable part of the convention was the existence of a resolution censuring Ocasio-Cortez for being too pro-Israel, which is a bit like accusing Gargamel’s cat of being too pro-Smurf. AOC’s biggest offense appears to be reversing her opposition to Iron Dome, the purely defensive Israeli missile-defense program whose only role in the conflict is to lower the total number of Jews killed by Palestinian terrorists. The resolution was not voted on but may be at a future conference.
Ethan Eblaghie, a co-author of the resolution, told City & State: “What this resolution … aims to do is for us to be able to indicate very clearly with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s office that this is something that we feel very strongly is unacceptable, and that for us to continue to have any sort of productive working relationship with her, we would like to see her take much stronger positions.”
Eblaghie didn’t seem to think AOC would actually be expelled. The likely reason is that the DSA is too cowardly to do anything about her near-but-not-total disregard for Israeli civilians. But a better reason for her to avoid expulsion would be for Ocasio-Cortez to walk away from the organization of her own free will. Why would any politician want the grand wizards of the DSA exerting influence over them?
More important, why would any politician want their name to be associated with a classic race-war hate group?
Nor can the New York clan of the DSA be considered powerless or fringe anymore. While the national organization may only have 80,000 dues-paying members, the New York chapter “formed the backbone of Mr. Mamdani’s canvassing operation and played an essential role in pushing the nation’s largest city to embrace an unwavering progressive campaign agenda,” as the aforementioned Times story notes.
And then there is what Mamdani means to the DSA. The New York chapter co-chair put it this way: “The fate of D.S.A. and honestly, I think, the progressive movement in New York, is tied to Zohran’s administration, and we’re aware of that. So the No. 1 goal for D.S.A., and I hope a coherent left as we move forward, is to make that administration successful.”
Even before that, though, a mere Mamdani victory in the election would by itself do great damage to the social fabric in New York and elsewhere. The privileged socialist got a clear boost from his defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a slogan calling for the murder of Jews around the world. He has since sorta-kinda-maybe backtracked, saying he’d discourage such incitement in private. But he didn’t back off of his core defense of the phrase itself, despite its total lack of nuance. (The intifada was an event, and globalizing that event would mean reproducing that event around the world. It would be like saying “globalize the Holocaust” but insisting you were just encouraging setting brush fires.)
It is no surprise that a majority of Jewish New Yorkers would feel less safe in a city run by Zohran Mamdani. It is less clear why anyone would associate themselves with Mamdani and his tinpot Stalinists at the DSA. And it is most confusing of all why any politician’s membership in such a group should be acceptable.
