CatholicVote president warns rising socialist candidates seek to dismantle American institutions

CatholicVote President and CEO Kelsey Reinhardt warned July 28 that a rising class of democratic socialists are using the opportunities provided by the U.S. to advance a political movement hostile to the country that made their success possible.

In a statement titled “Cut Flowers: A Note on the DSA Rising Class,” Reinhardt disputed claims that the candidates represent the working class. Instead, she portrayed them as members of an elite, highly educated class shaped by prestigious universities, law firms, and other American institutions.

“A generation of socialist candidates — Ivy-educated and meritocracy-perfected — has turned the ladder it climbed into a weapon against the country that provided it,” Reinhardt wrote.

“A civilization can be measured not only by what it produces, but by what its beneficiaries choose to do with what they have received,” she added. “America has produced a generation of political candidates who represent something genuinely new. They call themselves Democratic Socialists.”

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Reinhardt challenges democratic socialist candidates’ working-class image

While these candidates are portrayed as representatives of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, Reinhardt said that “story is not true.” She examined the backgrounds and positions of four socialist political figures currently seeking public office in Colorado, New York, and Michigan.

Reinhardt first pointed to Melat Kiros, the Democratic nominee in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, who was born shortly before her father won the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery. She was raised in what Reinhardt called the “coveted Cherry Creek school district” and holds a bachelor’s degree from Washington College and a law degree from the University of Notre Dame. After receiving her law degree, she worked as an associate at the law firm Sidley Austin.

According to Reinhardt, Sidley Austin fired Kiros after she publicly defended rhetoric calling for the elimination of Israel and described Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as an “inevitable consequence” of Israeli policy.

Reinhardt said Kiros’ path represents “not the American working class, but the American meritocracy at its most generous.”

Reinhardt also cited the background of Claire Valdez, a New York state assemblywoman and former union organizer who won the Democratic nomination in New York’s 7th Congressional District. 

Valdez attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as a union organizer at Columbia University, which Reinhardt called an “institution that has spent the last decade discovering it is easier to fund radicalism than to teach the Western canon it was founded to transmit.” Valdez called racism the “largest, most coherent, and most consistent aspect of American society,” in 2016, according to Reinhardt’s statement.

Valdez’s campaign launch featured an appearance from Mahmoud Khalil, whom the Trump administration has accused of supporting Hamas and is seeking to deport because of antisemitic activities it views as dangerous to national security.

The CatholicVote president also highlighted Gustavo Gordillo — a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America — who immigrated to the U.S. from Peru as a child. His parents, Reinhardt said, “built the American dream in Miami.” He graduated from Yale and built a career in New York’s art world.

“He proudly describes his politics not as a critique of capitalism gone wrong, but as opposition to the American economic order in its healthy functioning,” Reinhardt said. “Gordillo believes that an economy that is inaccessible to the majority of workers is not a ‘malfunction’ of capitalism, but its inevitable, ‘natural’ consequence.”

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District, is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, according to Reinhardt’s statement. Chevalier has publicly described the U.S. as a “f***ing disgrace.”

“She is adamant in defending her position that all jails, political borders and police departments should immediately be banned,” Reinhardt wrote of Chevalier.

Lastly, Reinhardt pointed to Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. El-Sayed attended the University of Michigan on a full scholarship, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, earned his medical degree from Columbia, and later taught epidemiology there. 

According to Reinhardt, El-Sayed presents himself as a champion of Michigan’s working class while campaigning alongside Hasan Piker, whom Reinhardt called a “radical anti-American” commentator. 

His campaign calls for free Medicare and housing for all and higher taxes on billionaires. At the same time, Reinhardt noted, El-Sayed owns several properties in India and the United Arab Emirates. His household net worth is reportedly estimated between $700,000 and $2.1 million.

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“These are not paycheck-to-paycheck Americans,” Reinhardt wrote. “They are the beneficiaries of the most generous institutional inheritance any generation of newcomers has ever received — Rhodes scholarships, Ivy League degrees, elite law firms, tenure-track professorships, the good school districts, the professional class. They ascended the American ladder in a single generation.”

A warning about American institutions

Reinhardt described the phenomenon as “adversarial assimilation,” a phrase political scientist Robert Leiken has used to describe a form of integration in which individuals absorb elements of a host society’s culture while developing hostility toward that society.

“Incorporation into the institutions of the West is producing not attachment to Western freedom, but hostility toward it,” Reinhardt wrote. “Not gratitude, instead, a grievance dressed in academic language.”

Reinhardt said “we have been here before” and invoked Saint John Paul II’s warnings about societies that separate themselves from their cultural and religious roots.

“It goes on producing the outward achievements — the degrees, the institutions, the professions — while the interior soil dies,” she said of a culture severed from its roots. “Cut flowers can look beautiful in the vase for a while. And then, they cannot.”

“That is what the rising DSA class represents,” Reinhardt added. “Not the arrival of a new working-class politics, but the arrival of an educated class that has been taught, by our own institutions, to despise the civilization that formed them.”

Reinhardt said the movement raises a deeper question for Americans: “What kind of institutions have we built when Yale, Oxford, Columbia, and Sidley Austin produce, in a single decade, a political movement whose organizing conviction is that the American order should be dismantled?”

She called on voters to defeat socialist candidates in the upcoming midterm elections but argued that victories at the ballot box alone would not be sufficient to solve the crisis. 

“The deeper work is cultural,” Reinhardt explained: “to recover, in our schools, our parishes, and our own homes, the transmission of a civilization — rooted in Christianity —  worth being grateful for.”

Reinhardt concluded by urging Americans to pray for the country and speak truthfully with their children “about what we have inherited and why it is precious.”

“Vote — and vote informed — as we approach the midterms,” Reinhardt said. “And encourage others to do so.”