Posted on 07/07/2026 5:56:44 AM PDT by MtnClimber
This year’s primary season features the rapid ascent within the Democratic Party of the faction going by the name “Democratic Socialists of America.” Despite the gratuitous co-opting of the label “Democratic,” it is by no means clear that the DSA faction would continue open elections once they had achieved enough power to end them. Instead, the DSA adopts the hardest of hard-line socialist positions on every issue.
I previously reported in my June 24 post that the DSA candidates in New York had accomplished nearly a clean sweep of all the Democratic Party congressional and state legislative primaries in which they had participated. Since then, a DSA candidate has knocked out a 15-term incumbent progressive Democrat in a safe Democratic district in Colorado. And The Washington Examiner reports on June 25 that DSA candidates have succeeded in some 30 down-ballot primary races in “Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah, Maryland,” as well as New York.
So who are these people calling themselves “Democratic Socialists”? I’ve spent some time researching the biographies of these successful candidates. Remarkably, there is a pattern that repeats time after time, with only slight variations. Your budding Communist ideologue comes from a family that has recently achieved modest or even substantial (but not extreme) success in the free market economy; and then a member of the next generation goes away to school at some “elite” institution, often on scholarship, studying some subject where leftist orthodoxy is pervasive (African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology are typical examples). The scion then either remains in school indefinitely, or leaves school but disdains the private economy and dabbles in political organizing or other left-wing not-for-profit endeavors. Combine this sort of background with a sense of entitlement, and the result is a bitter, angry, resentful young person, with no understanding of the blessings of freedom or of the private economy, completely ignorant of human history and convinced that the socialist/communist program will quickly lead to utopia.
Let’s take a few examples.
Zohran Mamdani. His family arrived from Uganda (of all places) via South Africa when young Zohran was seven. The father became a professor of left-wing claptrap at Columbia, while the mother became a relatively successful film director. In other words, Zohran is nothing close to “working class.” Young Zohran then went away to fancy Bowdoin in Maine, where he majored in “Africana Studies.” He then spent around a decade without ever having a real job, dabbling in political campaigns, “organizing,” pretending to be a rapper, and claiming to be “oppressed.”
Darializa Avila Chevalier. After graduating near the top of her high school class in Florida, Ms. Avila Chevalier got a scholarship to Columbia in 2014, where she repaid the generosity of her sponsors by joining the anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine, and the co-founding Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Twelve years later, Avila Chevalier continues to be a “graduate student” in Sociology at CUNY. Although she claims to have spent at least some time as an “investigator” for a public defender organization, almost everything in her Wikipedia biography consists of organizing and leading protests of one sort or another, and it appears that her lifestyle has been supported for the last twelve years mostly to entirely by scholarships and fellowships (likely taxpayer-funded).
Melat Kiros. This is the 29 year old woman who just won the Democratic primary for the Colorado congressional seat covering Denver. Her family immigrated from Ethiopia when she was an infant. According to her campaign website, her father went to pharmacy school in the U.S., so presumably is a pharmacist now. Kiros went to private colleges (Washington College in Maryland) and law school (Notre Dame). She landed a job at elite Sidley & Austin in New York, and then promptly got herself fired in 2023 for writing an anti-Israel screed. She has spent the last three years as a graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver.
Mamdani, Avila Chevalier, and Kiros (and the other DSA candidates) follow in well-worn footsteps of many famous predecessors — all of whom seem to have very similar biographies. Consider:
Pol Pot. I wrote a post about this guy back in 2021. From that post:
Pol Pot (birth name: Saloth Sar) was born in 1925 to a relatively wealthy farming family (Kiernan: “In later years the family would have been ‘class enemies.’”) with some 30 acres of land and six buffalo. One of Sar’s cousins was a dancer in the royal palace, and became one of the King’s principal wives; then one of his sisters moved into the palace and also became a royal consort. By the age of six, Sar too had moved into the royal palace, and after that was sent to top French colonial schools of the time. In his early twenties, they sent him off for further education in Paris. Big mistake. That’s where he took up the trendy Communism of the day. What later became the Khmer Rouge inner circle — in addition to Pol Pot, it was the Thiounn brothers, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Son Sen — were all his pals from his days as a student in Paris.
Lenin. Although Lenin’s paternal grandfather had been impoverished, his father was a striver who (according to Wikipedia) worked himself up to Director of Public Schools for a Russian province, and got himself awarded a hereditary title of nobility! Lenin went off to Kazan University, where he promptly began associating with the radicals of the time.
Karl Marx. The story of Karl Marx, creator of Communism, is no different. He was the son of a prosperous lawyer, Heinrich Marx, but had a huge sense of entitlement and was angry and resentful that he should have to work to make a living. Here is a famous quote from a letter that Marx’s father wrote to him in November 1837:
"Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes?
Really, it’s hard to say it better than Heinrich Marx said it. These “socialists” are a crop of spoiled and ignorant losers who “quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages.” At the moment, that seems to be the key to electoral success in primaries within the Democratic Party. Let’s only hope that it does not translate to general election success.
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Manhattan Contrarian ping
Envy.
Shit for brains...
Really, it’s hard to say it better than Heinrich Marx said it.
Danny Elfman came close:
You criticize with plenty of vigor
You rationalize everything that you do
With catchy phrases and heavy quotations
And everybody is crazy but you
You’re just a middle class, socialist brat
From a suburban family and you never really had to work
And now you tell me that we’ve got to get back
To the struggling masses, whoever they are
You talk, talk, talk about suffering and pain
Your mouth is bigger than your entire brain
What the hell do you know about suffering and pain you dumb f___?
-Capitalism by Oingo Boingo
Hatred and envy of their fellow man.
The siren song of Communism echoes down the years with a sweet melody of free everything...................
Envy and the desire for control.
Any caring person with a sense of fairness would naturally be attracted to communism when they first hear about it.
IF
They are not also told at the same time why it has always failed and always will fail.
Then ol’ Danny Elfman kowtowed to the left, saying that he didn’t believe it.
I guess marrying into Fonda family is the same as being born into it.
Low IQ
Collectivism, a general category for idiocies like fascism, socialism and communism attracts people who, perhaps rightly, recognize that they cannot accomplish anything without the help of everyone else. They understand that as individuals they are non-competitive in the marketplace of ideas, effort or simply of work. They envy those who are and rationalize the disparity by thinking those people must have cheated or had an unfair advantage.
In their collectivist fever-dreams they imagine the state punishing the successful and they being appointed the Commissar of Poetry and Dance or something similar, certainly not one of the workers in the field or foundry
Figures, he had to do to be able to do all those Hollywood soundtracks.
In some cases, it’s guilt and self-loathing.
Rich family, rich town, good schools. But low-self esteem. “I’m no good. I’m not that smart. I’ve never worked hard. But I have everything. It doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem fair. People like me don’t deserve to have so much. So I will become an important revolutionary and complain about people like myself. But, obviously, I’m not going to give up my cushy lifestyle. After all, I’m pretty used to it.”
Rebellion against God.
Communism attracts atheists, they need something to believe in...
Mental illness. Letting everybody vote is a mistake.
Mentally ill people shouldn’t decide how government is run. The Democratic Party is organized mental illness.
Ignorance
Academia
Media
Envy
Pride
Darwinism
Satan
A compelling impulse to make everybody as miserable as they are.
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