The recent electoral success of candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has prompted many Republicans and commentators on the right to attack these Democrats for being “socialists” or “communists” — as if those labels will persuade voters, particularly younger voters, that DSA-backed candidates are just too radical.
It’s not going to work. For many Americans, “socialist” is no longer an epithet the way it was during and immediately after the Cold War. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers (and even older Millennials) are simply mistaken if they think that calling New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani a commie is going to sting, or that pointing out the hypocrisy of well-heeled leftists is going to stick. This week Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana cracked a joke about “Lulu Lenins,” which is funny but isn’t going to deter voters who back DSA-affiliated candidates.
The main reason it won’t work, though, isn’t generational but cultural. Socialism or communism isn’t really the problem with the DSA crowd, nor are the oft-lampooned woke white women who vote for leftist radicals. The real problem is that mass immigration from the Third World over the past 30 years has brought in huge numbers of people from Muslim-majority countries, where ethno-religious identity is more important than political ideology. Their voting patterns are determined by a set of priorities that are radically different than the traditional American mainstream.
Tribalism, in a word, is what drives much of the support for DSA-affiliated candidates. And it’s beginning to make its mark on our elections simply because we have imported massive numbers of people from tribal societies who have not assimilated to American life in a meaningful way. That means, generally speaking, that Muslim immigrants will vote for a Muslim candidate, Arabs will vote for an Arab candidate, and so on.
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