Summary
The piece argues that contemporary Western socialist and postcolonial activism relies on outdated ideological frameworks that no longer reflect the political and economic aspirations of many developing countries. It highlights examples of political leaders, economists, and activists who advocate for market-oriented reforms, entrepreneurship, and national development instead of redistribution or anti-colonial narratives. It also presents growing international cooperation, particularly involving Israel and several developing nations, as evidence of a shift toward pragmatic alliances. The conclusion calls for greater attention to voices that emphasize growth, accountability, and practical cooperation.
Key Takeaways
- The argument contends that a growing segment of Western progressive politics embraces postcolonial and socialist ideas that portray Western nations as the primary source of global inequality and oppression.
- It claims many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are increasingly prioritizing economic growth, entrepreneurship, trade, and pragmatic governance over socialist or anti-colonial political frameworks.
- It argues that stronger partnerships centered on development, security, and economic cooperation, including ties with Israel and other regional partners, better reflect the priorities of many developing nations than grievance-based political movements.
Sitting behind George Washington’s desk in New York City Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked the eve of America’s 250th Independence Day with a speech that, instead of celebrating the United States, listed grievances typical of socialists. In his view, the United States is guilty of nativism, racism, exclusionary nationalism, state violence, and capitalist exploitation.
Analyst Zineb Riboua pinned Mamdani and other young Western socialists as “Third Worldists.” Third Worldism is a term describing the postcolonial brand of socialism popularized in the 1970s that blames the woes of the “Global South” – Africa, South Asia, and Latin America – on its usurpation by the West, first by colonial Europeans, then by America’s post-World War II “empire.”
This worldview, promoted heavily in Leftist academia and now on social media, where young American politicians and others have been indoctrinated, purveys a negative, historically imbalanced view of the West. Even before the rising popularity of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Democratic Party’s progressive U.S. Congressional “squad” of Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for billionaires to be “taxed out of existence.” Progressives have also called to abolish ICE and prisons and dissolve borders.
Third Worldism has become a dominant sensibility and defining feature of the increasingly DSA-dominated American left. The DSA platform advocates for state control of major industries and rent control, decries capitalism, and, regarding Israel, demands “full withdrawal from Arab lands” and the “right to resist occupation.” DSA believes that October 7 was “not unprovoked” and was “a direct result of the apartheid regime,” meaning Israel. The DSA opposes sanctions on Iran and calls to close all overseas American military bases.
DSA-backed candidates have recently won Democratic primaries in New York’s 13th congressional district (Darializa Avila Chevalier, June 23), Colorado’s 1st congressional district (Melat Kiros, June 30), and a New York State Senate seat (Aber Kawas). The mayoral frontrunners in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are also DSA candidates. Many DSA politicians hail from immigrant families, giving them “intersectionality” credit with their mostly white, liberal voters. Intersectionality’s ideology of championing the rights of marginalized peoples is the localized version of postcolonial “Third Worldism.” Both philosophies blame Western civilization for mass oppression.
Palestinian American State Senator Kawas expressed the essence of the Third Worldist grievance in a viral video clip:
…the system of capitalism and racism and white supremacy…and Islamophobia have all been used…to colonize lands…to take resources from other people…this is like a long trajectory. And we’re just seeing the manifestations of that continuation, right, with 9-11… and so…when people are asking us to respond about…attack…historically….a lot of us come from lands that were colonized, lands where wars are being waged…a lot of times because of U.S. policy or the policies in Europe…the idea that we have to apologize for like a terror attack that like a couple people did and then there is no apologies or reparations for genocide and for slavery, et cetera, is something that I kind of find like reprehensible.
Kawas’s words illustrate the logic of the Islamist cause, including Hamas’s self-justified October 7 jihad: it is Western imperialism that has caused all contemporary ills, and violence against it is justified. “Palestine,” therefore, has become the organizing center of Third World/intersectional politics. The DSA’s growing popularity has followed the post-2020 wave of Black Lives Matter activism, which gained new energy in campus activism after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, framed as resistance against “settler colonial” Israel, connecting the American national struggle against racism and oppression with international “liberation.”
Chevalier, before her primary win, helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which described its goal as “the total eradication of Western civilization.” Chevalier converted to Islam during her activist years, and has described the alliance between the American left and political Islam (also known as the Red-Green or Red-Black alliance) as a natural extension of anti-colonial solidarity, fitting a pattern described by communism expert Robert Strausz-Hupé (and his co-authors in his 1959 book Protracted Conflict) who observed that communists utilize aspects of traditional cultures to further their revolutionary aims.
Islamist NGOs like CAIR and AMP have benefited from this trend. Former Women’s March and current “MPower Change” Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour has built unlikely coalitions with movements traditionally at odds with religious conservatism. Conflating Islam’s jihad (struggle) with a global struggle (or “resistance”) against capitalism, the free market, and classic rights-based liberal democracy has radicalized activists to support Hamas.
Khaled Abu Toameh, a veteran journalist, JCFA fellow, and Gatestone Institute analyst of Palestinian affairs, has observed from his talks on American university campuses that the rhetoric there is far more radicalized than that of West Bank Palestinians, who are primarily concerned with day-to-day well-being.
While the academically indoctrinated children of the Third World lead the DSA revolution, their family and origins poignantly illustrate the clashes between “Third Worldism” and reality. Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University professor of postcolonial studies, is the father of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who headed his campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Yet the Mamdani family was part of Uganda’s Indian trading diaspora, a community that held a privileged, intermediary position under British colonial rule – a reason Idi Amin cited when he expelled Uganda’s Asians in 1972. Yet he has become a leading voice arguing that the West itself is history’s chief villain.
Similarly, Melat Kiros was born in Ethiopia, a country that suffered under the Marxist Derg military junta (which governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991), its Red Terror campaign (1976-1978), which killed tens of thousands of Ethiopians, and its mismanagement of a 1983-1985 famine, starving hundreds of thousands more. The Derg’s toll on Ethiopia exceeded that of the five-year Italian occupation (1936-1941) that preceded it by a generation.
These facts explain why the postcolonial dogma of writers Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak no longer aligns with the current realities of the peoples of the developing world, which are now moving in the opposite political direction to American progressive politics. After decades of poverty, curtailed freedoms, and authoritarian rule worse than that of the colonizers, the developing world wants out of socialism.
A growing number of leaders and thinkers in developing countries, such as the late Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, have rejected the oppressor-oppressed framework, seeing it as an excuse for their failed governments’ lack of accountability. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on his country to shed what he terms a “colonial mindset” and focus on growth.
These new attitudes may explain Latin America’s electoral shift, from Argentinian President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele to Colombia’s newly elected president Abelardo De La Espriella and Peru’s newly elected president Keiko Fujimori, who have all succeeded in running against the region’s Leftist “pink tide.” Bukele has said he wants to move his country “from the Third World to the First World.”
Milei has argued that the West’s political vocabulary has drifted toward collectivism, which these countries are trying to leave behind. Speaking at Davos in 2024, Milei, an economist, said modern “socialism” no longer requires state ownership of production; it survives under different labels – social democracy, progressivism, nationalism – all of which assign the state control over individuals.
In that vein, Senegalese activist Magatte Wade has spent years campaigning against African regulatory regimes that block entrepreneurship. Zambia’s Dambisa Moyo has argued that foreign aid, not its absence, has entrenched poor governance across Africa. South Africa’s Temba Nolutshungu has made the same case against state monopolies and redistribution schemes, calling them a second form of subjugation that locks the poor out of real economic opportunity.
Israel fits naturally on this side of the divide. The Abraham Accords and the recent “Isaac Accords” with Argentina were built on pragmatic economic and security cooperation that stands in opposition to progressive grievance politics. Islamic states Morocco, Sudan, Somaliland, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan have all expanded cooperation with Israel since 2020. India’s relationship with Israel, frozen for decades by Cold War-era Third Worldism, has deepened. For years, Israel has also assisted African states in development projects. These are relationships built around what states can build together, not around a shared account of who wronged whom.
The “Third World” rhetoric, academic doctrine, and social media buzz have influenced some young Americans to see their home country as the enemy, subverting American interests and alliances, including with Israel and the Gulf States, and finding favor with the enemies of the West.
To counter this trend, the divergence between the developing world’s voices of change and those of regressive “Third World” socialists must be exposed. Israel and its allies should actively platform and elevate leaders, economists, and entrepreneurs across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and Western immigrants’ children, who have argued for growth, trade, and practical cooperation over grievance, socialism, and subversion.
References
- Nayib Bukele, quoted in “El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele on Bitcoin, Debt, and Development,” Business Insider, https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/el-salvador-bitcoin-law-nayib-bukele-legal-tender-world-bank-2021-6-1030548231
- George Ayittey, interview transcript, NPR, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/235812687
- Javier Milei, “Special Address by Javier Milei, President of Argentina,” World Economic Forum, January 2024, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/01/special-address-by-javier-milei-president-of-argentina/
- Magatte Wade, Liberty Ventures Network, https://www.libertyventuresnetwork.com/magazine
- “Netanyahu & Milei Announce Isaac Accords in Jerusalem,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oaFjbgU4MA
- Zineb Riboua, “Third-Worldism, Islamism, and the Return of Global Struggle,” April 19, 2026, https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/third-worldism-islamism-and-the-return
- Maya King, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Mamdani Ally, Ousts Espaillat in Primary,” The New York Times, June 24, 2026
- Elena Moore, “Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros Poised to Become the First Gen Z Woman in Congress,” NPR, July 1, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/01/nx-s1-5876122/colorado-primary-election-melat-kiros-democratic-socialist
- “Aber Kawas,” Democracy Now!, June 30, 2026, https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/30/aber_kawas
- Khaled Abu Toameh, in Israelophobia and the West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It, Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, https://jcfa.org/israelophobia-and-the-west/
- “Who are the Democratic Socialists of America?” July 7, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-are-democratic-socialists-america-2026-07-07/
