After Mamdani, we still have to fight Trump’s America

Zohran Mamdani’s impressive victory in running as a democratic socialist for mayor of New York City has been a source of enormous excitement  among large sections of the Left in New York City, the United States, and around the world. The breadth of the multi-racial, working class support for Mamdani is a sharp rebuke to the racist red-baiting and Islamophobic attacks on the candidate and his supporters, attacks that had been massively funded by millionaires and reactionaries.

The undeniable momentum and energy provided to the campaign by the movement for Palestine definitively signals the depth of both the broader generational radicalization and a widespread rejection of the political and imperial status quo. Even acknowledging Mamdani’s on-message campaigning around affordability—a matter of messaging more than substance shared by more right-wing Democrats—the political dynamic as a whole demonstrates the fallacy of writing off the working class as somehow inherently right-wing or incapable of understanding the multi-dimensional nature of our “class interests.”

Yet, less than a week after Mamdani’s win and the broader national Democratic electoral victories, the class character of the Democratic Party came to the fore with its unsurprising capitulation to Trump in the U.S. Senate. Eight leading Democrats, with the possible back-channel encouragement of the Mamdani-agnostic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), voted to ensure even further historic give-aways to the billionaires and a sharpening of the all-out attack on health care under the guise of ending the government shutdown.

The Democrats’ complicit opposition undermines their electoral appeal, demonstrated by their historic unpopularity in the polls. Yet there are sections of the movement opposed to Trump that will, in the context of  electoral celebrations and growing political rifts in Trump’s coalition, increasingly see preparation for the mid-term elections in 2026 as the overriding strategic concern. Given the scope of the threats represented by Trump and the far right, any strategy premised on resuscitating or rescuing the historically unpopular Democratic Party in order to win elections will not be up to the task of addressing the crises that face us.

These overarching crises—economic, ecological, social, and political—that have given such prominence and power to right-wing authoritarianism internationally are deepening.  The massive attacks on democratic rights and the basic structures of the U.S. capitalist republic, as they developed after the second world war and in the era of U.S. imperial hegemony, will have lasting impact. Yet the fact is that many of Trump’s reactionary policies—around Palestine and the freedom of speech and assembly, on migrant workers, the defense of bodily autonomy, not to mention around economic and foreign policy generally—have deep bipartisan roots. The bipartisan consensus reflects the class interests of sections of capital and the petit-bourgeoisie refracted through the twin U.S. capitalist parties and the political coalitions that make up their base. They have been unable to address the crisis of U.S. capitalism since 2008. We are not returning to what the United States looked like in 2008, let alone in 1988 or 1958. What we are confronting, in the United States and internationally, is an epochal shift.

It is critical to maintain a broader perspective and historical understanding the causes and effects of such crises even while we recognize the possibilities and limitations of election outcomes including Mamdani’s. We must welcome questions and debate about what we are fighting for and how we get there in the aftermath of the elections. As the Tempest (NYC) Organizing Committee explained back in August,

Given the threats we are collectively facing, and how far we remain from our goals as socialists, it is healthy and natural that there is an ongoing contest over strategy within this radicalization. We should expect that contest to continue so long as we remain stuck in the conundrum of mass support for left demands but absent an adequate vehicle for their delivery. The current conditions are ripe for the flourishing of, and contestation around, all strategies that aim for social transformation. These must be tested in practice.

The stakes could not be higher, not just for NYC but for the future of the Left in the United States.

Mamdani won 51 percent of the vote against a combined 49 percent for Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa. So, while there is much to celebrate in the historically high levels of voter turn-out and mobilization, the forces of capital and the far right are well placed to take advantage should Mamdani fail. The threats being posed to Mamdani are indisputable. The potential fallout of a failed administration would be both predictable and dire. We have already witnessed the demoralization and strategic disorientation that followed the defeat of, and capitulation by, Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. The Left, and the working class movement more generally, must come out of this period and experience with greater self-organization and higher levels of political understanding and strategic clarity.

In Mamdani’s speech following his election victory, he opens by quoting Eugene Debs: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.” This is compelling language and commendable in its call back to one of the most important socialist leaders in U.S. history. Yet, it raises critical questions: What does this “dawn of a better day” mean for the working class in New York City, in all of our diversity, while living under Trump’s “America”?  What does it mean when important sections of our class are facing indiscriminate state violence, kidnapping, and deportation? What is the nature of this “power,” and how do we wield it?  These are precisely the questions of principle and strategy that our movements and our organizations must be able to address.

Notably, Debs’ speech was actually his Statement to the Court made following the revolutionary’s conviction under the 1918 Sedition Act, a law that criminalized socialist and anarchist organizing and propaganda and used to deport thousands of politically active immigrants.

Debs explained:

There are today upwards of sixty millions of Socialists, loyal, devoted adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color, or sex. They are all making common cause. They are spreading with tireless energy the propaganda of the new social order. They are waiting, watching, and working hopefully through all the hours of the day and the night. They are still in a minority. But they have learned how to be patient and to bide their time. They feel they know, indeed that the time is coming, in spite of all opposition, all persecution, when this emancipating gospel will spread among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greatest social and economic change in history.

While our current numbers are many, many less than the millions referenced by Debs, capitalism, especially in its most recent authoritarian guise, has proven that our goal remains the same as his. We deserve exponentially better public education and transportation; access to housing and not just a fairer housing market; access to health care and not just the declining, market-based Obama-care; full food security and not just the restoration of SNAP benefits; full equality regardless of migration status, gender or race; and an end to imperial war and policing. In this system during this epoch, the Democratic Party cannot deliver on any of these goals.

When he makes concessions on policing and real estate development, Mamdani seems committed to proving that he can be a more effective mayor of one of the most important centers or international capital. In contrast, our strategy must be guided by two interdependent commitments. In the short term, socialists are committed to class and social struggle to defend our communities, rights, jobs, wages, and benefits against Trump’s increased attacks. In the longer term, we must build the broader struggle in workplaces and on the streets to achieve, as Debs put it, “the greatest social and economic change in history.”

Featured Image credit: Anthony Albright; modified by Tempest.