NEW YORK—Following the Mamdani sweep by people seeking Democratic Party nominations for Congress, the politically entrenched right has descended into what might be called full-blown moral panic. The New York Post ran the now-infamous headline “The Hateful Slate,” claiming the victorious Democrats—Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—hate Israel, hate cops, and hate private property.
Of the three candidates upon whom the right has chosen to focus its vitriol, the sharpest attacks have been directed at Darieliza Avila Chevalier in NY 13, who defeated long-time Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Rather than engaging with any of her substantive positions on housing, healthcare, unions, or raising wages, the right has characterized her as anti-American based on a years-old tweet.
As an Afro-Latina organizer and Ph.D. student, she studied how the immigration system criminalizes Black immigrants from Latin America. The young Democratic Socialist will be the first Dominican-American woman elected to Congress and one of the few Muslim members when, as expected, she wins the election in November.
Some important staple issues she built her campaign around include: Medicare for All, the expansion of Social Security, and building deeply affordable public housing with the caveat of rent caps and protections for tenants.
Carving out her niche on the progressive left with the slogan “Babies Not Bombs” allowed her to connect the anti-imperialist struggle to domestic issues. She argues that funding for the genocidal and apartheid state of Israel could be better spent on child tax credits, baby boxes, and paid family leave, among other priorities for residents in Harlem and the Bronx.
Her political consciousness was shaped in large part by her trip to Nablus in the West Bank as a 20-year-old Columbia student, where she taught English to young Palestinian students. Upon returning, she said:
“That was a really formative period for me, because I was essentially living in the heart of the occupation and seeing the way that Palestinians had to navigate all these systems, the impact that it had on children as young as the ones that I was working with… I came back, and I couldn’t unsee all those things. And I started seeing them in our own systems, right? Our systems of policing, of deportation, of the controlling of our movement.”
“The connections just solidified in my mind… Oh, these are not only like systems, they are the same system. It was the same tear gas made in the USA that was being dropped on Gaza that was also being used against (Black Lives Matter) protesters in Ferguson.”
Even as a young activist, Chevalier began to intimately understand how these systems of oppression were dialectically intertwined. She would later refine these positions as she studied sociology for her doctorate at CUNY and became increasingly involved in community organizing.
These experiences centered her politics on an anti-imperialist, housing, healthcare, and immigrant rights agenda that is desperately needed for her constituents. Yet the media has chosen to focus on almost none of this agenda.
Rather than coming after her record of dedicated activism, scholarship, or positions on the issues, the right has focused on her old tweets. Some of her criticism was of President Biden’s litany of sexual assault allegations, as well as her dislike of Kamala Harris, which ironically many on the right have been even harsher against the former President and Vice President.
Other critiques she made were of police and prisons in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and in the spirit of the Black radical tradition. She also admonished settler colonialism with land acknowledgments and lambasted borders and deportations in response to I.C.E. terror.
The most derided tweet of hers, however, had nothing to do with policy. Instead, the right has focused its energy on her tweet that read, “I forgot to get napkins, so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”
Unsurprisingly, conservative and corporate commentators have seized on this years-old tweet to brand her as anti-American. Since defenders of oligarchy cannot successfully push back on her policies, they accuse her of hating America.
This wrapping of oneself in the flag to shield legitimate criticism is not a new phenomenon by any means. It was used to brush off the criticisms of police brutality and white supremacy during the Black Lives Matter movement. It was a convenient retort against the opposition to the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And now this anti-America critique will be increasingly trotted out to vilify the working class or socialist agenda. It’s further proof that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Over the last decade, the right consistently argued against purity politics, labeling the left as snowflakes. Of course, much of this supposedly principled stance was abandoned when the right took power and cracked down on campus protests.
When it comes to the abstract symbols of Americanism, they now clutch their pearls with a ferocious disdain. It reveals a strange, but telling contradiction. Namely that, a symbol of the United States is worth defending more than its people.
They fought for the ability to use slurs against LGBTQ people, African Americans, and people with disabilities as a matter of free speech. But when it comes to any lack of reverence for the flag, suddenly, they cry foul.
Furthermore, it reveals that this professed love of the flag and the country is often an ideological abstraction. It is patriotism without substantive content. If they truly love the country, why is so much vitriol directed toward large segments of its own population?
Wouldn’t a love of America require providing healthcare to all Americans? Wouldn’t it necessitate ending homelessness for our fellow Americans? Wouldn’t it mean that no American is exploited by their boss? Instead of these material questions, they would rather center the debate around a symbolic controversy.
Since the center and right cannot effectively fend off the working class agenda, they will try to brand l those who fight for it as anti-American.
As the socialist and progressive movements continue to grow, the attacks will likely intensify. Working-class movements must continue to push back against these cheap nationalistic talking points in favor of egalitarianism that delivers real material results and a unifying ideology that is inclusive of the myriad of differences among the working-class.
The fact that a year-old joke has been the entire focus of their criticism, rather than engaging with her policies on housing, healthcare, foreign policy, or unions, reveals that critics have found symbolic attacks more politically useful than engaging directly with her platform.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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