From TPM Reader BD, responding to Josh’s post here:
Hi—as a 42-year Washington Heights resident (and a 26-year TPM reader), I feel moved to comment on your dismissive judgment that Darializa Chevalier doesn’t belong in Congress. I’m going to take a wild guess that your view of her is based on some of the truly objectionable social-media breadcrumbs that she has left, and that have been widely circulated by her antagonists.
I’m going to invoke your conditional Platner defense on her behalf: She is young, smart, impassioned, and green, green, green. But let’s see how she grows in office. What you quite clearly fail to reckon with is the nature of her opponent, Adriano Espaillat. While he played a largely benign role in the Democratic caucus, he seemed over the years to become beholden and in some sense corrupted by a cabal of wealthy real estate interests in the Heights and Inwood. In 2024 he tried to oust our true working-class hero, state Senator Robert Jackson (you should look into his story—a man of uncommon decency and gravitas!), and install a flunky in his place. That earned the indelible enmity of many longtime Heightsers—very much including myself.
Jackson endorsed Darializa, and I voted for her. My kids, who have been radicalized by the feckless failure of the extant Democratic Party establishment to defend the republic for which we stand, are not going to sit still for the conventional let’s-get-back-to-the-status-quo nostrums of grumpy middle-aged Matt Yglesias-style centrism. The party is clearly in danger of losing legitimacy on the scale of the British Labour Party.
It’s time to man up, buddy. Break some eggs. Cause a stir. I will be supporting anyone who is interested in building out a coalition that unites my radical children and the Mamdani movement with the kind of more centrist populism that is roiling the heartland party establishments. Everybody else can sit down.
