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. Indeed, 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, and the set of priorities that determines voting patterns is 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.
You don’t have to take my word for it. A recent exit poll of primary voters in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary found that among non-Arab primary voters, the vote was nearly evenly split between Abdul El-Sayed (47.9 percent) and Haley Stevens (48.2 percent). But among Arab voters, 94 percent voted for El-Sayed.
This is identity politics on steroids, and it is alien to the American political experience — certainly in a party primary. Yes, Democrat urban political machines in the late-19th century mobilized immigrant voting blocs, and Democrats for some time now have pushed identity politics among black and Hispanic voters. But what we’re seeing today is something different, and the difference has to do with Third World immigration.
From Minnesota, where Somali immigrants have transformed state politics, to New York City, where immigrant voters (not over-educated white liberals) elected Mamdani mayor over a majority of native-born Americans who voted against him, we’re seeing the kind of ethno-religious voting patterns that have emerged in places like Britain. In that country, which like the U.S. has seen large-scale immigration from the Third World in recent decades, the 2024 national elections revealed for the first time a recognizably Islamic agenda (more on that below).
What Third Worldism means electorally is that political affiliations and voting patterns are fundamentally tribal and essentially anti-American and anti-western. It won’t do any good to complain that Hasan Piker says vile things about white people or the middle class, as if that should disqualify him and any Democrat candidate who associates with him. He is speaking tribally, and his audience understands him in those terms.
Likewise, if voters from immigrant communities support socialist policies it’s not because they are persuaded by Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism but because they want the government to give them and their community free stuff and preferential treatment. They want advantages for their people over the American mainstream.
For example, the right-wing commentariat likes to make fun of Mamdani’s plan for city-run grocery stores, mocking it as a commie scheme that’s bound to fail because of basic economics — and it probably will. But his immigrant-dominated constituency will support it even if it fails, even if it’s a disaster, because it will mean they get food cheaper than they did before, at least for a while.
One thing to grasp about the Third World mindset is that it is not opposed to welfare on principled grounds — in fact it supports welfare, even fraud, precisely on principled grounds. Whenever you can get something for your clan or community from another community (in this case, American taxpayers) that is considered a virtue. Pulling a fast one on the government, or scamming those outside your group, is laudable.
That’s one reason Medicaid fraud, for example, has been so prevalent in the Somali community in Minnesota. For many Somali immigrants, there is no problem at all with defrauding Medicaid through bogus childcare and healthcare schemes as long as you don’t get caught. Among such people, dishonesty for the purpose of advancing the fortunes of your family or clan is a virtue, not a vice. You might get called a racist for pointing this out, as Nick Shirley and others have been, but it doesn’t make the observation any less true.
Or to take an individual example, for years now El-Sayed, who recently won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, presented himself as a physician, even appearing in campaign ads in a white coat, despite never having practiced medicine as a licensed medical doctor and never having completed a residency or passed board exams. Even Politico noticed this, writing back in May that “according to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states,” adding that in New York it’s against the law to use the title “physician” if you’re not licensed.
None of this is to say that native-born American politicians aren’t also capable of fraud or deception. But fraud in the service of an ethnic community is a prominent feature of immigrant politicians. The most well-known case is perhaps Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who had close ties to the convicted figures at the center of the Feeding Our Future Medicaid fraud scheme in Minnesota, to say nothing of her own highly suspicious financial disclosure filings.
The normalization of this kind of fraud goes beyond the usual Democrat identity politics, in which an ethnic or racial voting bloc would support Democrats who promised to funnel federal funds into their district or neighborhood. What it tends toward is something akin to a kind of modern-day Ottoman millet system, in which the central government creates separate systems of justice and public policy for various peoples and groups; different rules for different people depending on their community.
This is a fundamentally imperial mode of governance. As David Betz and Michael Rainsborough of King’s College London War Studies Department have argued, it is the system Britain adopted to manage its overseas empire: “Imperial politics is practically all about the negotiation of the division of the spoils and balance of power within factional groupings who are not and, ultimately, do not even pretend to be, representative of a single people.”
What might that look like in America in 2026, practically speaking? Well, Democratic lawmakers in Massachusetts recently introduced a bill to create a “Muslim Commission” to place Muslims in state government and influence policymaking. In addition to assessing programs and policies in state agencies and recommending new legislation, the commission will serve as a “liaison between government and private interest groups,” and accept private donations and grants.
On the local level, it means Muslim immigrant communities recreating versions of their home countries here in America. In Hamtramck, Michigan, the first Muslim-majority city in America, the all-Muslim city council recently voted to legalize backyard animal sacrifice over the objections of the non-Muslim minority. Sharia courts, which function as putatively voluntary arbitrage bodies on matters of family law, have in recent years drawn the attention of some Republican officeholders. Yet efforts to “outlaw Sharia” miss the mark, mistaking the effect for the cause. The reason Sharia courts are growing across America is because we have brought in a large population of Muslims that want to use them. Even El-Sayed has said he has an “obligation” to follow Sharia law until the day he dies.
At a more advanced stage, Third World tribalism looks like what we see today in Britain, where several generations of mass immigration from Muslim-majority countries have reshaped British politics. The Labour Party has bent over backwards to accommodate the emerging Muslim vote and graft into the liberal establishment.
The results have been mixed, to say the least. The Muslims of Britain do not have the same priorities as the left-wing managerial class represented by the likes of Labour’s erstwhile prime minister, Kier Starmer. They also don’t necessarily conceive of themselves as ideologues making common cause with the left. Rather, they tend to view themselves as a distinct ethno-religious community with its own distinct priorities and commitments, not least of which right now is Gaza.
Indeed, the appearance of independent Muslim political candidates in Britain in the 2024 elections — candidates that might have once run under the Labour Party — was the direct result of the Israel-Hamas conflict. There were five such candidates, all of whom won thanks to large numbers of voters in their districts who say the number one political issue for them is the conflict in Gaza. They delivered huge upsets to Labour in areas that had long been secure. Elsewhere, senior Labour politicians in areas with large Muslim populations narrowly fended off pro-Palestine independent candidates and saw their majorities drastically diminished. Because a majority of British Muslims are more likely to have a positive view of Hamas than a negative one, it simply made political sense for single-issue candidates in 2024 to run on a pro-Hamas platform.
What you have here is essentially a foreign population adjudicating their tribal grievances through British parliamentary politics, much as local municipal governments in heavily Muslim areas of the country, such as Birmingham, have been doing at the local level for years. Britain has now reaching a kind of tipping point: conflicts in foreign lands that should have nothing to do with the British electorate are becoming a major domestic political issue. Why? Because of the of the makeup of the British electorate.
The rise of religious sectarianism in British politics, in other words, has gone hand in hand with the arrival of large numbers of Muslims from the Third World. Instead of parties coalescing around ideas, Britain increasingly has different sectarian groups organizing around ethnic or religious affiliation. Political Balkanization along these ethnic and religious lines means the country’s unassimilated Muslim population is coming into its own politically, and will soon be able to stand on its own, apart from Labour. What we’ll likely see in the coming years is the transformation of what had been ethno-religious Muslim voting blocs into candidly Muslim political parties.
All of that to say, what is happening in Britain is going to happen here, unless we drastically reduce the number of Third World immigrants we allow into our country. We can already see, in the rise of the DSA and its rapid takeover of the Democrat Party, what kind of politics these people bring with them, even after two or three generations in the West. It is a politics of patronage, of grift, of religious supremacy and tribal loyalties over and against the native population and its institutions. If Americans on the right are wondering how to stop DSA-style socialism, there’s no point resurrecting Cold War-era talking points about the dangers of socialism. What must be done is both simple, as a policy, and politically difficult: stop letting Third Worlders into the United States.
