The Mamdanisation of the Democratic Party or the risk of a Corbyn-like scenario

*This article was originally published in French

On October 8, 2023, the blood had barely dried in the kibbutzim of southern Israel when, in Times Square, part of New York’s radical left was already celebrating Palestinian “resistance.” Hamas had just massacred, raped, burned and kidnapped. In New York, activists hailed the attack, mimed throat-slitting gestures, and chanted the number of Jewish dead as if it were a score.

Among them was Darializa Avila Chevalier, then unknown to the wider public. Thirty-two months later, she has just defeated Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent congressman and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th congressional district. In this solidly Democratic district, winning the primary is tantamount to winning the seat. Barring an accident, she will soon sit in the United States Congress.

She will not enter alone. That same night, two other candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani also won their primaries. Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller, a progressive Jew close to the DSA’s political universe but not a DSA member, defeated Dan Goldman in the 10th district with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Claire Valdez, a union activist and radical-left elected official, won in the 7th district against an opponent endorsed by the outgoing incumbent.

Three different profiles, but one same signal. Chevalier embodies the militant radicalism born in the aftermath of October 7. Lander shows how part of the Jewish left, even when critical of the DSA, is increasingly forced to accommodate it. Valdez illustrates the ideological escalation that has become almost routine in certain Democratic strongholds. Three victories in one night, two incumbents defeated: this is not a local anecdote. It is a method. And perhaps already a national warning.

Because Mamdani is no longer just New York’s mayor. In a matter of months, he has become a kingmaker inside the Democratic Party. He has understood one simple thing: in a low-turnout primary, an organized minority can defeat a passive majority. That is true in New York. It can be true elsewhere.

That is the strength of the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, and of the broader ecosystem around it. It is not a great mass party. In some ways, it is more effective than that: a militant machine. It recruits, trains, mobilizes, occupies the ground, imposes its slogans and punishes dissenters. The moderates have elected officials. They have activists. In American primaries, that is often enough to make the difference.

The DSA was not born yesterday. But it has changed scale. Long marginal, it now claims tens of thousands of members and has weight in several major American cities. Since 2017, it has made the boycott of Israel one of its markers. It has declared itself anti-Zionist, turned rejection of Israel into a political test, and did not hesitate to withdraw its support from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for voting in favor of Iron Dome, the defensive system that intercepts rockets fired at Israeli civilians. At that level of radicalism, even protecting Jewish lives becomes suspect.

It would be wrong to see this as the revolt of a forgotten proletariat. The numbers suggest the opposite. In her district, which includes part of the Bronx, Avila Chevalier lost the Bronx portion by thirty points; she lost majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, as well as low-income areas, by ten points. She won among young voters, affluent voters, and swept the most highly educated precincts by twenty points. The candidate herself is a faithful portrait of her electorate: at thirty-two, she is entering the seventh year of a PhD at the City University of New York, has been a student for fourteen years, and has made her own precarity the central argument of her campaign.

This left is urban, educated, academic. It speaks the language of the campus: colonialism, domination, privilege, oppression. Everything is read through the same grid. The police become an occupying army, the border a form of violence, the landlord a settler, and Israel the ideal culprit. This vocabulary did not fall from the sky. It has been shaped for years in universities that have become the laboratory of this worldview. Much has been said there about “decolonization,” and far less about who funded these departments. Qatar, which hosts the political leadership of Hamas, is now the largest foreign donor to American higher education, with more than six billion dollars given since the 1980s, a third of it since 2021. One should not pretend that a check mechanically produces an ideology. But the atmosphere this money helped sustain — the atmosphere of encampments and slogans after October 7 — is precisely the world from which these new elected officials emerge.

Since October 7, the relationship to Israel has become the central test. It is no longer merely a matter of criticizing an Israeli government or the war in Gaza. One must use the right words, at the right moment, with the right anger. Say “genocide.” Refuse nuance. Describe Israel as a colonial state. Distrust AIPAC. And above all, never suggest that the October 7 massacre might complicate the narrative.

The Palestinian cause is no longer just a cause. It has become a password. Anti-Zionism, a sign of virtue. And the worried Jew, very quickly, an inconvenience.

Avila Chevalier embodies this generation to the end. A convert to Islam, shaped by Columbia and the networks of Students for Justice in Palestine, returning to support the pro-Palestinian encampments in 2024, she is not just one more radical candidate. She is the product of a new militant universe in which Israel is not a foreign-policy issue, but a marker of belonging.

Brad Lander tells another story, and perhaps an even more troubling one. Jewish, long a left-wing Zionist, close to the DSA before distancing himself from it after October 7, he should be proof that another left still exists. But his case mostly shows how far the center of gravity has shifted. Even those who do not share the hardest line now know they must accommodate it. They can distance themselves. They can no longer confront it head-on without risk.

Claire Valdez, finally, shows the logical next step: escalation. In some districts, there is almost no debate left on Israel. The pro-Israel line has already disappeared. The competition now takes place between candidates who share the same words, the same reflexes, the same indignations. The question is no longer who thinks what, but who will go furthest, fastest.

This is what one might call the Mamdanization of the Democratic Party. Not the victory of one man, but the installation of a system in which Israel becomes the supreme test. In which AIPAC becomes the name of every suspicion. In which Jewish donors, Jewish elected officials, Jewish organizations are asked, again and again, to prove that they are not on the wrong side of history.

Officially, AIPAC is a legal, public, bipartisan pro-Israel advocacy group. In the imagination of this left, it has become something else: the proper name of hidden power. They no longer say “Jewish power.” They say “AIPAC.” The vocabulary has changed. The old reflex, however, is recognizable. Mamdani himself called the organization “monsters” at a joint rally with his candidates. When the word “lobby” becomes an obsession, one should always listen to what it carries.

For Republicans, this is a gift. For years, they have tried to convince voters that the Democratic Party has become the party of the DSA, “defund the police,” obsessive anti-Israel politics and indulgence toward antisemitism. New York has just given them the perfect poster. Every refusal to clearly condemn Hamas, every slogan about “genocide,” every attack on AIPAC, every ambiguity on Israel will feed a Republican ad in the states that decide elections.

Because New York is not America. Of course. But national politics no longer works that way. A handful of very loud elected officials can now shape the image of an entire party. Republicans will not need to prove that Mamdani represents all Democrats. It will be enough to show that Democrats do not know what to do with him.

The problem will not only be electoral. It will also be very concrete. These elected officials will vote in Congress. And this left does not merely oppose American aid to Israel. It also views aid to Ukraine with hostility, denounces NATO, wants to reduce American power, distrusts sanctions against Iran, and often sees the enemies of the West as victims of American “imperialism.”

For Democrats, the trap is formidable. In parts of Brooklyn or Queens, this line can win a primary. In Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Arizona, it can lose a presidential election. What still counts in Washington as a strategic consensus — supporting allies, containing hostile regimes, maintaining the transatlantic relationship — risks becoming, vote after vote, an internal battlefield.

The British already know this story. It had a name: Jeremy Corbyn. When he took over the Labour Party, many insisted the danger was exaggerated. That Jewish Labour members were panicking. That the right was exploiting the issue. That the media was caricaturing him. Then Labour sank into an antisemitism crisis from which it has never truly recovered. In 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an independent public body, found that the party had broken the law in its handling of complaints. Corbyn was suspended, then marginalized. The party of Clement Attlee, the party that built Britain’s welfare state, lost its honor before it lost power.

The comparison is not gratuitous. Corbyn himself supported Mamdani. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and those close to him hailed Mamdani as an American counterpart. From London to Paris, from Paris to New York, one finds the same mechanism: anti-Zionism presented as courage, accusations of antisemitism dismissed as a right-wing maneuver, and the worried Jew transformed into an obstacle to progress.

Labour thought it could absorb Corbyn. Part of the French left thought it could contain Mélenchon. The Democratic Party may believe it can confine Mamdani and the DSA to a handful of urban districts. This is always how capitulations begin: with the idea that the problem will remain local.

Yet New York has just sent a warning — not only to American Jews, nor only to Israel’s friends, but to Democrats themselves. Republicans have already understood the opportunity they have been handed. The question now is whether Democrats will know how to prove them wrong. For now, they are mostly giving them ammunition.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).