Black Dems are right about the DSA threat — but they helped create it

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards is voicing the fury of the black political establishment, and of much of the black community, when he slams Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comrades in the Democratic Socialists of America — but what he won’t admit is how much he’s enabled these extremists.

In a couple of terse social media posts, Richards compared the DSA to white supremacists and 1960s-era white liberals who “pretend” to support black civil rights.

He’s not wrong, in that the DSA’s base is educated white voters and its policies reflect their lefty core beliefs and class interests — and don’t serve minority communities’ needs.

Defunding the police, closing the prisons, legalizing prostitution, freezing the rent: None of it helps black or Hispanic neighborhoods, no matter that a few minority candidates happily mouth the slogans they learned on campus.

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But Richards and many of his peers have played along with the hard left for years, on criminal-justice issues, on charter schools (which minority families support), on lunatic housing policies and more.

That alliance helped local black Democrats reach their current pinnacle and political influence — but also opened the door to the DSA’s rise.

And now the DSA doesn’t plan to wait its turn; Mamdani and his faction don’t even treat Richards and his allies as important partners in running the city.

Drunk with victories in House races here and across the country, often over older minority incumbents, DSA leaders have sharpened their rhetoric against establishment Dems, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

But complaining that they’ve moved your cheese is no way to fight back, and even grabbing the left’s “white supremacists” language to express ire won’t do much.

The DSA is out of step with Richards’ community of middle-class homeowners and working-class strivers, native-born and immigrant: Earlier this year, the mayor’s property-tax and “death” tax proposals threatened to rob them of the generational wealth they’ve spent a lifetime building.

African-Americans are stakeholders in the United States, they’re not interested in toppling the American system or capitalism — such voters are the only practical counterweight to the DSA now.

But leaders who can rally them against the DSA will need to say outright how un-American the socialists’ program really is — and politicians who’ve been playing footsie with the far left for years will find that a very tough pivot.

Richards is right to damn the DSA — but the new kids are succeeding because the establishment had gotten too lazy to do its own job properly.