Whose Party?

Moderate Democrats seem possessed by the fear that Americans will abandon them—not for their lassitude in the face of a far-right takeover of the country, but because they might be poisoned by the contagion of a handful of socialists who won Democratic primaries in New York in June. This panic was eloquently expressed by James Carville, an architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and still a strategist with clout in the party. The object of his ire was Darializa Avila Chevalier, the winner of the primary in New York’s thirteenth congressional district, which covers Upper Manhattan and a swath of the Bronx. Carville had read in The New York Times that between 2018 and 2022 Avila Chevalier, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, posted tweets disparaging Kamala Harris and the American flag. Like Mamdani, who endorsed her in the primary, she has argued that Israel cannot be both a Jewish state and a state with equal rights.“Lady,” said Carville on his podcast, Politics War Room, I ain’t in the same party as you. I’m sorry, I’m just not…. It’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: Schism…. The idea that we must neglect…all the huge, phenomenal successes [centrist Democr...