Abolish Everything, Replace It With What?

Imagine a city where racism doesn’t exist. There is no social hierarchy. It is a utopia of equality and diversity—the kind of place that exists once the old order has finally been swept away. This is the premise of N.K. Jemisin’s short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” The narrator dares the reader to believe such a place could exist.

In the city named Um-Helat those who have encountered race, hierarchy, domination, inequality, resentment are considered dangerous, as they are familiar with the time before utopia. Such a city might exist only in fantasy. But there are people who believe it can be built in the real world. And these people comprise an ascendant wing of American politics.

Zohran Mamdani’s ascent has already changed New York politics. His victory has given the city’s activist left a solid political footing for gaining electoral power. Last week’s Democratic Congressional primaries showed this in action. Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier each defeated establishment or incumbent-backed Democrats. Some will surely see this as a socialist breakthrough—the fruit of many years of attempts by figures like Bernie Sanders to introduce Americans to the concept of socialism. This label captures part of the story. But the deeper story is the rise of a politics of dismantling.

As I wrote about earlier this month, the wokeist movement that burgeoned in the 2010s and crescendoed during 2020 has mutated:

The new radical mood is different. It has little interest in designing a replacement order—its instinct is punitive and obstructive. The danger now is what I would call destructivism: the belief that the most necessary form of political action is to destroy the systems one regards as oppressive.

This new radicalism operates across a spectrum. At the softer end is the familiar progressive claim that existing institutions are structurally unjust and must be reimagined and reformed. Further along are a series of more explicit demands that go beyond reformism: abolish ICE, abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish borders, abolish Israel, abolish capitalism (whatever that really means). 

Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the Mamdani-backed candidates helped launch Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a campus coalition that describes itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilisation.” According to a recent CNN report, she used to tweet pro-communist sentiments from a since-deleted Twitter account.

For neo-decolonial activists, Western civilisation reflects all of the things they regard as oppression: capitalism, Zionism, borders, prisons, police, property, universities, legal systems, national sovereignty, and the ordinary habits of middle class life. 

To call for our civilisation’s “total eradication” is to demand a revolutionary unmaking of the world that Western people inhabit. It is a politics of purification. It’s hard to view this as anything other than naked destructivism. They are talking about dismantling our whole society.

Western civilisation is a lot of things beyond simplistic labels like “capitalist”. Western civilisation is the assumption that government is limited by law; that a person can speak, worship, publish, own property, marry, dissent, sue, vote, and be judged as an individual. Western civilisation means the various habits of argument, self-criticism, contracts, due process, scientific inquiry, and voluntary association that make modern life possible. It is the system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide.

During the George Floyd protests, when another user asked whether there was a better slogan than “defund the police,” Chevalier reportedly replied: “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.” When someone suggested that abolition meant ending policing “as we know it,” she corrected them: “No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”

The same pattern appears in her views on borders and deportation. Chevalier reportedly reposted the claim that “a world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward.” She reposted “Yes, literally, abolish the border.” She reposted that “all deportation is wrong.” When asked recently about that last view, she did not disavow it.

She also called Joe Biden a rapist, talked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag, and described interracial relationships involving white females as Black and Arab men “fetishising ugly coloniser women.”

One could, of course, say that these were old posts. Lots of people say stupid things online. Politicians clean up their social media histories and develop a more moderate voice when they begin asking voters for power. That is all true. But this is her worldview. This is what Zohran Mamdani and New York Democrats are effectively embracing. This is what the Democratic Party is evolving into. And there are plenty of others on this radical spectrum.

Aber Kawas, another Mamdani-backed candidate, recently won a Democratic primary for a New York State Senate seat. In a resurfaced clip, she described 9/11 as being caused by a “long trajectory” of capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia.

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine — and previously reported for having a Nazi totenkopf tattoo, which he had for more than 20 years before covering it up — described himself as a “communist” and called all cops “bastards.”

And the pattern is broader than any one candidate. Calls to abolish ICE, for example, have become widespread in Democratic primaries across the country, especially among younger progressive challengers running against incumbents. So what comes after all of this desired dismantling?

If the police are abolished, then who deals with violence? If prisons are abolished, then where do dangerous, and predatory individuals go? If borders and border enforcement are abolished, then who is able to come in? Who is eligible to receive welfare? Will the United States even exist at all? 

If capitalism is abolished, who decides what gets produced? Who allocates labourers to tasks? Who allocates housing, food, energy, and medicine? If Israel is abolished, what happens to the people who live there? If Western civilisation is eradicated, what replaces it? These are the questions that must be asked of the radical left. So you want to tear down Western civilisation and build a utopia? Well, what does that look like?

Does it look like China under Mao, whose ideological warriors targeted teachers, intellectuals, temples, books, family authority, and religious practice in the name of destroying the old order? Does it look like Soviet communism, where the Bolsheviks abolished private property and built a party-state whose police function only expanded through the secret police? Does it look like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which declared Year Zero, emptied cities, abolished money, and targeted educated people, resulting in famine, terror, and mass death? Or does it look like Hamas, on October 7th, carrying out murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture in the name of tearing down Israel?

A society without police still needs to find a way to enforce order. A society without prisons still needs to deal with dangerous people. A society without borders still needs rules about membership, welfare, voting rights, and obligations. A society without capitalism still needs some mechanism for allocating capital. A society that has apparently transcended Western civilisation still needs laws, authority, restraints, and institutions. The question, then, is simple: who gets that power? And what do they subsequently do with it?

In Jemisin’s story about the city where no racism or inequality exists, a man enters who has learned about our world. The world that existed before the establishment of Um-Helat. He has read the old material: the history, the arguments, the ideas, the categories. He has encountered race, hierarchy, domination, inequality, resentment, and the whole mental apparatus of the time before utopia. In Um-Helat, this is treated as subversive. For he now carries forbidden, dangerous ideas.

So “social workers” come to his house and kill him. They stab him with a pike through the spine and heart, in front of his daughter. That is the post-police utopia rendered with unusual honesty. The old institutions have disappeared. But what is it replaced with? New forms of coercion more brutal than what came before.