How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Feed the Jews to the Mob

The Democratic Party Embraces Third Worldism

The leadership of the Democratic Party has decided to feed Israel to its left. This is no longer a matter of speculation or of reading tea leaves in polling data. Every plausible aspirant to the 2028 presidential nomination, Khanna, Van Hollen, Newsom, Pritzker, Booker, Gallego, Warnock, Emanuel, has moved, is moving, or is preparing to move toward some version of the anti-Israel position, whether by calling for an end to military aid, by denouncing AIPAC, by using the word genocide, or by maintaining the tactical silence that, in the current environment, functions as a form of the same concession.

Rahm Emanuel, a man who spent his career as the embodiment of pro-Israel Democratic centrism, now argues that the Israelis should pay for the Iron Dome themselves. The New York Times is chasing Hasan Piker. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and child of the Third Worldism whose views on Israel require no explanation, sits in the mayor’s office in the largest city in the country, and the establishment figures who initially tried to hold him at arm’s length, from Schumer, to Jeffries, Gillibrand, have been drawn, with the aid of Obama, one by one, into the gravitational pull of the Third Worldist hatefest.

Former President Barack Obama, left, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani read a book to children at Learning Through Play Pre-K in New York, on Saturday, April 18, 2026. AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity, and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc. Feed this one thing to the beast, and the beast will be satisfied. It is an intelligent calculation, a genius one, really, but it is also a catastrophic one, because it rests on a complete misapprehension of what is being conceded and to whom.

The first error is the assumption that anti-Zionism is a position, a policy preference, a discrete item on a list of demands that can be granted in exchange for quiet on the remaining items. No, no, no. This is a major category error. Anti-Zionism is not a position. It is a worldview, and a worldview does not function the way individual policy preferences do. A policy preference can be traded: you give me this, I give you that, and we both go home. A worldview is the structure within which all positions are generated, the logic that determines which sentences can be spoken and which cannot, and when you concede the worldview, you have not bought peace on the other questions. You have conceded the very logic by which all the other questions will be decided.

Anti-Zionism is the keystone of the decolonial mentalité, the foundation of Third Worldist resentment, the case study around which the entire system of colonizer and colonized, settler and indigene, white and nonwhite, oppressor and oppressed, achieves its most concentrated political force. It is where the theoretical rubber meets the real road, where the theory meets an actual state, an actual conflict, an actual set of policy levers, and becomes, in the world of its grandfather, world. Conceding it does not quiet the theory. It does not quiet anything but validates the movement, and the movement then proceeds to apply itself, with the momentum of a successful campaign of destruction, to the next question and the next, and the next, and the next. Nothing will be spared.

The Democrats’ new Charlie Kirk

The second error is that the liberal establishment treats the decolonial left as though it were a moral movement; a coalition of idealists whose passion on this one subject must be accommodated because the passion is about something real and the moral claim has traction. This is the view from the outside, from the surface, and it is wrong. What is at work inside the American left on the Israel question is not, or not primarily, some moral awakening. It is an inter-elite ruthless competition for institutional position, and anti-Zionism is the instrument through which that war of position is being waged.

Thus, what makes the establishment’s concession so ruinous, so foolish, and so unforgivable is that it misidentifies the recipient. The Democratic leadership believes it is making a concession to some moral constituency, but it is, in fact, making it to a rival power formation within the party’s own institutional base. This is surrender. When the establishment concedes to Israel, it does not purchase peace with idealists but ratifies the victory of a competing elite fraction whose interests and ambitions extend to every institution the party touches, and whose appetite will not be diminished by having been fed the Jews.

The Democratic leadership is hardly the first liberal establishment to arrive at this calculation, and the history of what happens next is not a matter of conjecture but of a sufficiently extensive record that is also consistent, and sufficiently grim that one would think it might give pause to serious people, that is, if there are any left.

Many of the European coallituion parties of the interwar years constitute a most instructive precedent. The socialist movements of the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, in Austria, and in France faced a version of the same dilemma that the Democratic establishment faces today. A radical nationalist flank was pressing from within and without, and among the demands of that flank was a demand that the party distance itself from the Jews, who were understood as a complicating element whose presence in the coalition invited attacks that the party could not afford. (There were, of course, some exceptions.)

The Jewish question, the party leaderships reasoned, was consuming political capital that could be better spent elsewhere. The communists and socialists did not, for the most part, share the antisemitism of their radical competitors; they regarded it as primitive, as beneath the level of serious politics, as a distraction from the real business of class struggle and economic reform. But they were not prepared to fight on this ground, because fighting on this ground meant a war with forces inside and adjacent to the coalition whose energy they needed to defeat the bad orange men. And so, in one party after another, in one country after another, the same decision was reached: the Jewish question would be quietly conceded; the party would not spend its capital defending a position that was costing more than it was worth; and the serious business of politics would proceed on the terrain where the party believed it had the advantage.

The concession on the Jewish question did not produce a coalition that was satisfied on the Jewish question and available for moderate governance on everything else. It produced a coalition that had learned that its principles were negotiable under sufficient pressure, and that the application of moral-political force on a single point of maximum sensitivity could extract a retreat that would then be extended, by the same force and the same logic, to the next point and the next. The nationalists did not get quieter after the socialists stopped defending the Jews. They got louder. The worldview that had been conceded on the Jewish question turned out to be a worldview with implications far beyond the Jews.

The British Labour Party’s long arc on the Israel question is a second case, less catastrophic in its consequences but no less instructive in its mechanism.

Labor’s postwar leadership maintained, through the 1950s and 1960s, a broadly sympathetic position toward the State of Israel, rooted partly in the socialist character of the early years of Zionism and partly in the moral weight of the Holocaust.

The erosion of that position began in the 1970s, accelerated through the 1980s, and achieved its terminal expression under Corbyn. It was a long series of small concessions, each of which was understood, at the time it was made, as a reasonable accommodation to a legitimate concern. The anticolonial left within the party insisted that Israel was the one case in which the party’s commitment to decolonization was being betrayed by a sentimental attachment to a settler state. The leadership, which did not wish to fight on this ground and which had other priorities, understood that the anticolonial and migrant constituency was growing and the pro-Israel constituency was shrinking, and made the accommodation. It did not defend the position. It allowed the position to erode, gradually, through a series of shifts and tactical retreats, each of which was too small to constitute a crisis and all of which, taken together, constituted a transformation.

By the time Corbyn assumed the leadership, the transformation was complete, and what the moderates discovered was not that they had lost on Israel while holding everything else. They discovered that they had lost the ability to hold anything. The moderates who had conceded Israel in order to fight on other grounds found that there was no other ground. The ground itself had shifted beneath them.

The French left and Algeria is the third case, and in certain respects it is the most clarifying, because it is the case in which the concession was most obviously correct on the merits and most obviously destructive in its consequences.

The French Left’s turn against the Algerian War was, by any reasonable moral standard, the right position. The war was a catastrophe, the ruthless methods were unconscionable, and the defense of French Algeria was indefensible. But the anticolonial framework that was mobilized to oppose the war did not retire itself when the war ended. It did not say: we were right about Algeria, and now let us return to the normal business of French political life, applying our judgment case by case to the questions before us. It said: we were right about Algeria and now the Third Worldist logic applies everywhere and always, and the task before us is not to demobilize but to extend. The French left that emerged from the Algerian War was not a left that had won one argument and was prepared to be moderate on the others. It was a left that had discovered a permanent indictment of all of Western civilization, and that could be applied to every question the West would ever face regarding its relationship to the rest of the world, and it applied it, and has never stopped applying it.

The moderate Democratic leadership, which believes itself to be practicing realism, is not making a new mistake by imagining that a sacrificial logic can be controlled. In many ways, it is one of the oldest mistakes in politics. But there is no prescription in any of this, because prescription implies a situation that admits of remedy, and I am not certain that it does. The decision has been made. It will not be reversed by argument, because the men who made it do not believe they made a decision at all. They believe they recognized a reality. We are all Third Worldists now.

Follow Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s geopolitical and national security work at JINSA