Here’s Danielle with today’s write-up of our great interview with Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running to represent New York’s 13th Congressional District.
The political establishment loves a convenient distraction. For decades, the script has remained comfortably predictable: dust off the centrists, preach the gospel of the “big tent”—a tent somehow spacious enough to accommodate billionaires, corporate monopolies, and defense contractors—and warn the progressive base that demanding actual material change is a dangerous indulgence.
We are told to wait our turn. We are told that incrementalism is wisdom and that confronting systemic oppression head-on is a recipe for electoral ruin. But as a new wave of insurgent leaders demonstrates, the tide is turning against this politics of timidity. The central question facing the progressive movement—and the Democratic Party at large—is no longer whether we can manage the status quo. It is whether we have the moral clarity to dismantle it before it collapses under the weight of its own complicity.
When party architects like James Carville openly declare that they would rather see the opposition retain control of Congress than watch democratic socialists win seats—fearing that the left might hold leadership accountable—they say the quiet part out loud. They reveal a terrifying truth: to the entrenched establishment, authentic economic populism and challenges to corporate power pose a greater threat than actual authoritarianism.
This is not a big tent; it is a shrinking enclosure designed to protect a concentrated sliver of elite interests. A political party that equates compromise with surrender to the wealthy cannot hope to defeat the rising tide of global fascism. When voters see leaders playing footsie with corporate donors, defending apartheid systems abroad, and treating civil rights as negotiable talking points, disillusionment follows naturally. Lower voter turnout isn’t a failure of the electorate; it is a direct consequence of a system that has spent decades breaking its promises to working people.
You cannot effectively combat authoritarianism at home while financing or excusing human rights abuses abroad. The struggle for Palestinian freedom, the fight to abolish ICE and halt the criminalization of immigrant communities, and the demand for racial and economic justice are not separate, siloed issues. They are interconnected expressions of a single, foundational principle: the inviolable dignity of human life.
When political leaders ask citizens to ignore live-streamed atrocities, or when they weaponize Islamophobia and anti-blackness to crush internal dissent, they inflict a profound moral injury on the electorate. As Toni Morrison observed, racism is often deployed as a distraction—a wedge designed to keep people fighting over rhetoric while structural inequities like housing discrimination, underfunded schools, and food insecurity quietly ravage communities. True progressive politics refuses this distraction. It builds a coalition rooted not in elite consensus, but in the shared struggle of working people—whether in New York City or rural Nebraska—who demand a government that actually works for them.
The path forward requires more than just winning majorities for the sake of holding power. Winning the House or the Senate means nothing if the party uses that power merely to manage the decline of the middle class and protect corporate donors. If Democrats fail to deliver material change—if they continue to offer a watered-down “Republican light” agenda—they risk clearing the runway for an even more dangerous brand of authoritarian populism in the decade ahead.
The rising generation of organizers and insurgent lawmakers understands the gravity of this moment. They are entering the halls of power not to assimilate into the machinery of stagnation, but to rewrite its rules. By anchoring themselves in community accountability, rejecting corporate cash, and refusing to compromise on basic human rights, they are offering a blueprint for a renewed democracy.
The choice is stark. The establishment can continue clinging to a failing status quo that protects the broligarchy, or the party can return to its core roots: fighting relentlessly for a multiracial, economically just working-class movement. The future of American democracy depends entirely on which path we choose.
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