It’s A Third World After All

Alex Bronzini-Vender writes:

Wokeness is dead. Or rather, per the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, it is “morphing into something else.” But what? Few are better positioned to say than Rufo, who led the conservative campaign against “critical race theory.” That “something else,” he wrote in March, is “third worldism.” Whereas wokeness was, as he warned several months later, about “changing white psychology” and “redistributing mostly emotional goods and services to oppressed groups,” Third Worldism has a “harder, more classically Marxist edge”—namely, “coerced direct wealth transfers from the bad guys (e.g., middle-class white families) to the good guys (e.g., impoverished Third World immigrants).” The left, in other words, has moved on from demanding you confess to your privilege. Now it demands restitution.

Rufo, who admires El Salvador’s gangbusting strategies as templates for American law enforcement, might think twice before diagnosing anyone else with fetishism of the third world. Still, he is far from the only right-wing intellectual to have settled on Third Worldism as the next front in the American culture war. “Years ago I worried that wokeism might be followed by something worse yet,” writes the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in Bari Weiss’s Free Press. And now, sure enough, “the ideology of ‘third worldism’ is on the rise.” The Manhattan Institute’s Daniel Di Martino concurs, though his definition of the term is more idiosyncratic: In his view, “Third Worldism is the belief that you’re entitled to use public spaces without any responsibility to care for them.” And a report from Marco Rubio’s State Department, an apparent effort to manufacture a casus belli against the Republic of Cuba, deems Third Worldism “a formal pillar of Cuban state ideology” and “a deliberate foreign policy strategy.”

The right cannot quite agree on what Third Worldism means. Is it a synonym for urban disorder, in Di Martino’s sense? A successor to wokeness? Are Third Worldists seeking to reconfigure American domestic policy, or foreign policy, or both? Are they sincere or cynically using the Palestinian cause to manipulate gullible liberals? They can scarcely agree upon how to render the term: Is it “Third Worldism,” “third worldism,” or “Third-Worldism”? If the phrase were meant to do what critical race theory did—persuade and mobilize voters—that incoherence would be fatal. But persuasion may not be the point.

Trump has spent his second term inventing epithets for his enemies (“dumbocrats,” “panicans,” and the like) that reveal little beyond his contempt for them. But Third Worldism, for all its incoherence, is the first true culture-war coinage of the second Trump era. The defining project of this administration is to collapse the distinction between the right’s domestic and foreign enemies, and to construct a single threat that can be pursued at home and abroad with equal ferocity. Domestic Third Worldists are, in Rubio’s telling, nothing more than local agents of a global conspiracy. And an enemy that is foreign in origin can be treated with the same tools usually reserved for enemies beyond America’s borders. Rubio has promised terrorist designations of left-wing groups “soon”; the White House has pledged to treat “far-left extremism” with “the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.” Whatever its persuasive power—and that seems limited—the term can be expected to play an increasingly prominent role in American political discourse.

The State Department’s report defines Third Worldism as a quasi-Marxist ideology in which the “revolutionary agent” is “no longer the industrial proletariat, but the colonized nations and peoples of the Global South.” But the most prolific champion of the term as an instrument of abuse, for now, is Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute. In October 2025, she wrote her first missive on the subject, a Substack post dissecting Zohran Mamdani’s then-ongoing rise to power. Mamdani, Riboua writes, is neither a socialist nor an Islamist. Instead, he’s something more exotic: an heir to “Third-Worldism,” the anti-colonial academic tradition of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. “Third-Worldism,” according to Riboua, is “a postcolonial moral project” that “recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.” And Riboua, who is Moroccan and Berber, claims a special ability to spot the ideology, having grown up “amid the lingering echoes of decolonization.” Armed with this diagnosis, Riboua finds Third Worldism everywhere in Mamdani’s politics. His housing agenda stems from his view that landlords are colonizers and tenants the colonized; his (alleged) opposition to policing, from his view of the NYPD as colonial occupiers.

Above all, there is Israel. Hatred of Israel and of America, she thinks, “precedes and shapes” the economic grievances animating the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Mamdani hates Israel, moreover, because he hates America. “Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project,” she wrote in January. And “when politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice.” For this reason, “the decolonial imagination cannot register October 7 as an atrocity on its own terms.” Riboua, the anti-woke pundit, is clearly indebted to her intellectual enemies. “The decolonial imagination” is a stock construction of academic prose, lending an air of theory to whatever fills in the blank. It’s a conveniently empty phrase: Who, exactly, is doing the imagining? Certainly not Mamdani, who called October 7 a “horrific war crime.” But then, that’s the beauty of attributing a belief to an abstraction: Abstractions never talk back.

The evidence Riboua marshals for this thesis can be strikingly thin. “Even yesterday,” she offered on a podcast interview with the president of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “he was siding with Egypt against Argentina”—in a World Cup match, that is. “As a mayor you have so many problems, especially in a place like New York,” she continued. “But the fixation is constantly towards these either foreign conflicts or symbolic conflicts, because it’s a tool to politically mobilize people.” Even the mayor’s rooting interests, it seems, betray an anti-Western moral creed.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp observes, Riboua’s imagined Mamdani—a crusader against America itself—bears little resemblance to the real Mamdani, whose Fourth of July address this year included paeans to our “grand experiment in self-governance.” And it’s difficult to read Mamdani’s mayoralty as one where a monomaniacal focus on the Middle East “precedes” a socialist economic agenda. Mamdani chose to reappoint Jessica Tisch, a standard-bearer of New York’s pro-Israel establishment, as police commissioner. Why? Almost certainly because power brokers in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul chief among them, had recommended that he do so. Mamdani seems to believe that conceding on his pro-Palestinian agenda strengthens his hand in Albany, where he needs to negotiate his economic program. (The mayor of New York City lacks authority to impose new taxes on the wealthy, a campaign promise.) Mamdani might just as easily have conceded on the economics to push harder on his pro-Palestinian agenda. But he’s done the opposite—not what you’d expect of a Third-Worldist mayor obsessed with foreign conflict.

Rufo’s account is, to his credit, supple enough to accommodate Mamdani’s moderation. He disagrees with Riboua about the Third-Worldist project’s sincerity. Leftists, he thinks, are cynically harnessing the Palestinian cause to win domestic political power. “The ultimate Third Worldist ambition,” he writes, has little to do with Palestine itself. “Palestinians are mostly a tool for manipulating domestic politics” in far-left cities. In the end, it’s “fundamentally about money.”

But Rufo, too, seems unsure who or what he’s actually aiming at. The point of Third Worldism, he says, is to “secure a wealth transfer, or lifestyle subsidy” in “expensive cities.” Yet the abortive Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, whom Rufo named in March as one of the project’s chief evangelists, won nearly every county of America’s second-least-urbanized state in June’s primary. How did the champion of an urban project get nominated by a coalition of rural Democrats?

Even on Rufo’s terms, it’s hardly a coherent story. “Whereas woke was about culture, ideology, and aesthetics,” he writes, “Third Worldism champions coerced confiscatory taxes, wealth transfers, and race-based reparations.” But the word “reparations” appears six times in his 2023 book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Even Rufo’s sympathizers will find little that is new in what he presents as the most alarming recent developments on the American left.

The basic patterns of the campaign, selecting an obscure academic term and presenting it as telos of the American left, call to mind Rufo’s earlier campaign against critical race theory. Still, Third Worldism wasn’t conjured from nothing: It’s a real tendency on the American left, if a marginal one. Where the State Department’s report takes inventory of the Third-Worldist presence in America, such as it is, it finds a handful of tiny groups. There’s the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the oddball micro-party whose presidential candidates tend to draw a few hundredths of a percent. There’s Code Pink, an antiwar group, which figures among the “Third Worldist organizations” that “serve as natural (and often willing) vectors for subversive foreign influence.” But the group’s most recent filings report just seventeen employees, $2.9 million in expenses, and just $1.79 million in revenues. Then there’s the National Lawyers Guild, “one of the most persistently relevant—and insidious—organizations in Cuba’s US network.” In 2024, its most recent filing, the group reported $827,926 in revenues against $1,097,397 in expenses. These groups, the report alleges, “collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” If Havana really is buying the American left, it’s getting a bargain.

The closest analogs to Third Worldism are Bush-era coinages like “Islamofascism” or the “Axis of Evil,” terms conservatives set aside in the 2010s in favor of enemies closer to home. But Third Worldism is more ambitious than any of its predecessors. Where wokeness named a domestic enemy and the Axis of Evil a foreign one, Third Worldism collapses the distinction entirely. And what the term collapses in theory, the administration has collapsed in practice. Last autumn, immigration agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter onto the roof of a Chicago apartment building, marching its zip-tied residents out in various states of undress. Months later, the administration arrested a foreign head of state, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, under U.S. criminal law. The administration polices American cities as though at war, and makes war abroad as though it were policing—a formation the historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls the “Homeland Empire.” Third Worldism supplies the Homeland Empire with its ideal enemy, one that lives here but answers to puppet masters abroad.

Across a hundred pages, Rubio’s report on Cuba recasts the domestic spread of Third Worldism as no homegrown development at all, but the product of a sixty-seven-year-long Cuban campaign to “turn Americans into instruments of their own nation’s undoing.” “The George Floyd riots,” “the rise of Antifa,” and the “explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses” can each “be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.” It traces sympathy for the Palestinians, in particular, to Havana: An “affinity for the cause of ‘Palestinian liberation,’” the report explains, “was embedded in the founding anti-imperialist and anti-Western creed of the Cuban Revolution itself” and flows into the United States through the regime’s network of left-wing organizations and their partners in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.”

It’s an attractive story. If Israel’s waning popularity in the United States is really just the product of Cuban influence, conservatives are relieved of the harder questions: Why has Israel’s standing declined among the young, among a growing share of American Jews, and even among Republicans themselves? Its believers are excused from reckoning with Israel’s conduct. In the view of the State Department, the children of the West have simply been seduced by Cubans and Iranians into “turning against their own inheritance.”

There’s another reason to expect the term Third Worldism to stick around: The right needs it. In the first year of his second term, Trump invested much of his political capital in the shock-and-awe campaign against the imagined cores of liberal power: the administrative state, higher education, media, big law, and so on. That campaign extracted substantial concessions from liberal institutions but fell well short of snuffing out liberalism writ large. Instead, the American left seems more energetic than ever. Left-wing insurgents have romped through Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., New York, Colorado, and Michigan. To admit that campaign largely failed would be to admit the second Trump presidency has itself been a failure. So either Trump failed to defeat the enemy—unthinkable—or the enemy has found new, foreign patrons to replace its defeated domestic ones.

Since the Soviet Union’s global power began waning, the right has missed nothing so much as a credible story about foreign interference in American life. Visions of sallow men in Moscow pulling the strings of the civil rights movement kept conservatives energized for decades. But by the eighties, as the Soviet Union visibly struggled to project power even within its own territory, such theories grew implausible. And while some American conservatives recognized the need to modernize their conception of the enemy, others struggled even more valiantly to keep the foreign-influence story alive.

As the writer John Ganz observes, Rubio’s Riboua-inspired campaign against Third Worldism bears an uncanny resemblance to the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, formed by Strom Thurmond in 1981. The committee, chaired by freshman senator Jeremiah Denton, set out to prove that the American left was an appendage of the Soviet Union, with Cuba’s intelligence service as the crucial intermediary between American left-wingers and their international handlers. Its star witnesses were the journalist Claire Sterling, whose book The Terror Network posited a Moscow-directed web of global terrorism, and Arnaud de Borchgrave, an ex-Newsweek correspondent who had come to believe that his own firing was evidence of KGB penetration of the American press.

De Borchgrave told the subcommittee that the whole terrorist enterprise had been set in motion at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana—a claim, Ganz notes, that Rubio’s new Cuba report recycles almost verbatim. According to a 1981 New York Times opinion piece, De Borchgrave also predicted, citing unnamed sources, that Castro and Arafat were planning to destabilize American inner cities through their “racial assets”; the Rubio report’s attempt to tie Black Lives Matter to Cuban intelligence is much the same prophecy.

The makings of a “little red scare,” Ganz observes, were in motion. But the project ultimately flopped. The most knowledgeable witness the subcommittee called, former CIA director William Colby, testified that “the Soviets are not directly directing the orchestra.” When the Johnson administration went looking for the foreign puppet masters behind the antiwar movement, he recalled, its own intelligence agencies reported back that there weren’t any.

The paleoconservative and white supremacist intellectual Sam Francis was a staffer on the subcommittee, and the failure of this effort to renew the culture war led him to conclude that theories of foreign influence were a dead end for the right. The right’s true enemies, he decided, were closer to home: the credentialed, college-educated managerial elite. It was this project, locating the enemy domestically, that animated Rufo’s campaign against wokeness in the early 2020s. Now, though, the right is unlearning the lessons of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism.

These theories of third-world influence, Ganz writes, failed even when the Soviet Union was there to make them plausible. Today’s go-around is even less likely than its predecessor to convert anyone beyond the already faithful: The framework’s proponents can hardly define their noun. And if Rufo expects Third Worldism to move voters the way critical race theory did, he’ll be disappointed. In February, for the first time in the quarter century that Gallup has asked the question, more Americans said their sympathies lie with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Barely three in ten approve of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. And the shift has reached the right’s own ranks: 57 percent of Republicans under fifty now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points over the last year.

Still, Third Worldism may not need to persuade anyone at all. Rubio’s report struggles with the question of what, but not with the matter of who. It contains striking detail on the various organizations it alleges are complicit in the Third-Worldist conspiracy: Code Pink, the National Lawyers Guild, the DSA, and The People’s Forum, a Manhattan community center, and many more. (The report finds the latter group to be not just “pro-Cuban” but “anti-Trump.”) Already, the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed the community center, alongside BreakThroughNews, a China-friendly—though First Amendment-protected—news outlet. The campaign to cleanse Third Worldism from American life is beginning. It’s an ironic turn. If the right succeeds, American institutions will come to resemble nothing so much as those of the Third World the right has invented.