You can forgive the organized left for being unsure and divided on how to tackle AI. It would be hard to imagine, say, a Roundup executive writing a memo warning about the risk of mutant superhumans as a possible outcome of the latest developments in weed-killing chemical technology, but this is essentially the situation we find ourselves in with AI. Recently Elon Musk and Sam Altman joined Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a call to slow down AI development, citing risks like cyberattacks, bioterrorism, and economic disruption. Companies at the top of cutting edge industries don’t usually plead for regulations, so what’s the catch?

Many of the most popular AI Doomsday narratives can be traced back to one man: Eliezer Yudkowsky. His community blog LessWrong, founded in 2009, birthed the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements that became foundational texts for the modern tech industry. Yudkowski had been radicalized by his own AI research with the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, going from initial optimism about the benevolence of AI to near certainty it would wipe out humanity. The blog was also the source of the infamous Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment, a so-called “informational hazard,” detailing the emergence of a super intelligent AI God. The post eventually inspired a murderous cult.

Not long after the release of the large language model, or LLM, GPT-3 in 2020, mainstream researchers began to openly speculate about the dangers of AI. The AI Doomsday narrative as influenced by Yudkowsky and the Rationalists took off in 2023, coinciding with the growth of Anthropic, and forwarded notably by Amodei. It has remained a mainstay in the branding of Anthropic, the self-styled “ethical AI” company, who proudly tout Claude’s Constitution as evidence of their commitment to building a safer AI. Since 2023, Anthropic has placed the likelihood of a Doomsday scenario (their p(Doom) or probability of Doom) around 10%, a number so disturbingly high it makes one wonder how they can justify continuing to develop such a technology

The AI Doomsday scenarios seem like something out of Terminator: out of control super intelligent models maliciously interpreting their prime directives, hacking into weapons systems, creating bioweapons, and unleashing Judgment Day on all of humanity. This similarity is intentional.

The tech industry has always looked to science fiction to inspire innovations, knowing that fictional technologies can serve as both marketing and value proposition for attempted imitations, like when Meta named its failed virtual reality project after Snow Crash’s Metaverse. AI is among the most represented technologies in science fiction: I, Robot, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner, Neuromancer, The Terminator. Technology in sci-fi is rarely presented as uncomplicatedly good, one purpose of the genre has traditionally been to explore the existential and moral implications of new technologies. AI, however, stands apart from flying cars, robot butlers, holograms, and teleportation devices as one that is almost always a cautionary tale about what happens when men give their thinking over to machines.

This presents a complicated situation for tech marketers who need to reference sci-fi to link LLMs with the weighty cultural idea of Artificial Intelligence, but to do so is also to link LLMs to the murderous, conscious AI technologies these stories are warning against. In other words, if it doesn’t have the potential to break free, hack the main frame, and risk human annihilation, is it even AI? Is it worth all the investment? So they’ve embraced the Doom.

The severity, scale, and supposed likelihood of these Doomsday scenarios beggars belief: a 10% or higher chance AI will end all life on Earth in just a few years. In the face of the confusing and virtually unheard of situation of capitalists begging to be regulated, it’s worth a pause to ask why? Why would they possibly want this? It stands to reason there is some other purpose beyond pure concern for the human race given these companies have not seemed to slow down the pace of LLM development despite their own rhetoric.

One popular narrative on the left in answer to this question goes something like this: AI companies are dangerously overvalued, they cost galling amounts of money to train, maintain, power, and manage; the data centers alone are a massive investment. However, investment on AI has not yet paid the promised dividends in replacing labor costs en masse or radically improving existing services to entice new business. These improvements will never materialize, because the technology is fundamentally limited (an LLM cannot become a HAL), so the industry is precariously kept afloat by private investment which will eventually dry up, and the bubble will burst. The trick is that, by promising that AI Doomsday, and therefore a sci-fi level AI model, is right around the corner, the investments will keep coming in. What’s more, the AI companies, by demanding these kinds of regulations, are positioning themselves to be the ones that write them, conspicuously leaving out the decidedly uncinematic, more immediate threats to labor, the environment, the minds of children and adults of all ages, that do nothing but limit the profits of these companies. The left should dismiss any talk of existential threat around AI, try to lay out real dangers, and propose regulations that address those dangers.

All in all, I agree with a lot of the broad strokes: I also don’t think it’s possible for an LLM to become sentient, I do think that the AI companies benefit from some of this sci-fi glitz, I agree it is a distraction from those more immediate concerns, and I certainly think they are trying to be the ones to write their own regulations. But this story also glosses over a lot.

The issue is that it’s ineffective rhetoric to say “AI companies are exaggerating the danger, AI does not pose an existential threat…here are the actual issues with AI you should worry about.” Rather than building on and transforming the energy fear provides to a regulatory movement, it grinds momentum to a halt, like stopping an angry mob to make sure everyone is mad about the right things.

This reminds me of a critical mistake made in previous generations of socialists; the idea that before any political action happens, before it’s worth contesting power, the people need to be educated. Even now, I encounter people who claim it was a disqualifying error that Bernie Sanders spoke in terms of a 99% and 1% instead of workers and capitalists. DSA has built a socialist movement because we have never excluded people who wanted to build with us for having the wrong reasoning. In doing so, we’ve also recognized that political education is something that is best built in the practice of organizing; someone can come to an issue with the wrong framing and become aligned from our framing of the solutions. People come to DSA concerned about their cost of living, become exposed to the interconnectedness of all the issues we care about, and become socialists in the process.

There is also an optimism in dismissing fears of AI Doomsday as mere marketing. This optimism is most palpable in the economic bubble piece of this story. For some, the AI bubble bursting functions as a kind of Biblical Flood, promising to wash away all of the issues arising from the AI industry. When it finally happens, we will be free of AI customer service agents, AI psychosis, AI in education, AI taking over our jobs, and so on. Unfortunately, this is generally not how bubbles work. The Dot-com Bubble wiped out many online shopping companies like Pets.com, but Amazon is now one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Even if the bubble pops and AI remains unable to generate enough value to justify continued investment, that still may not be enough. These tools are being used across the federal government already. There is a real possibility that rather than crash the American economy, the government and private investors will keep funding these technologies indefinitely to build AI-powered drones and other instruments of surveillance and violence. We can’t rely on the flood to save us.

Most crucially, the real problem with this narrative is that there are real reasons to be afraid. Not in a “Skynet superintelligent AI turning on humanity in a sci-fi judgment day scenario,” but in the incredibly banal “as soon as the powers that be find AI models sufficiently capable to be put in charge of defense, weapons development and guidance (including bioweapons), and information, they will do it.” Smiling serenely and saying (correctly) AI is not super intelligent or sentient will not stop it from being used as though it is.Therein lies the real existential threat: not Skynet, but Shitty Skynet.

Let’s consider a few AI scenarios that have nothing to do with AI becoming super intelligent or sentient (and may, in fact, be worse if it stays as flawed as it is). None of these are sci-fi doomsday scenarios, but they are catastrophically bad and dystopian:

• The Department of Defense integrates AI models into their intelligence apparatus. They are investigating whether Country A poses a threat to the United States. Country A has historically not been a primary target for US intelligence and so there is not a lot of available data on them. Due to various similarities with a previous and well-established threat, Country B, the new information on Country A is close in the data to Country B. The AI model analyzes the limited intelligence collected on Country A and, with multiple queries, eventually pulls in old information about Country B to the report, suggesting Country A poses a threat. The US invades Country A when it poses no such threat. A similar scenario to this almost happened in July, when US forces were about to board a Chinese ship based on a false report from an AI system.

• A weapons manufacturer wants to improve real-time targeting using AI so missiles can course correct when a selected target is no longer viable. Consultants calculate an up to 40% reduction of intercepted missiles. Missile programmers train the model on past targets, many past targets have been schools, so naturally these are part of the data. When the US declares war on a country a swarm of missiles is unleashed on a large target. The new real-time guidance model detects anti-missile defenses and defensively selects new targets for the missiles: all nearby schools. The casualties are massive. Again, this scenario is not far from reality. Early in the Iran War, the US bombed a girl’s school in part due to bad intelligence from AI.

• Companies all around the country log the keystrokes of employees’ company issued laptops to make sure they aren’t doing anything illegal or against company policy. While in the past this was handled by an individual with some keywords, a new company launches with the promise of detecting inside threats before they happen by analyzing keystrokes for implied meaning, not just keywords. Unionization is one of the threats this software detects, and companies all over the country start using this technology. Thousands of employees complaining about stagnant wages and conditions in private messages sent from their laptops are quietly labelled instigators, and are unceremoniously fired, citing performance issues. None of them ever know why they are fired. In the face of ever higher cost of living and dwindling worker rights, unionizing just became nearly impossible.

• ICE has been occupying a city for months and immigrants are disappearing overnight. In response to the crisis, immigrants across the city start following and liking posts from accounts involved in Abolish ICE organizing. Meanwhile, ICE has been using AI and web-crawlers to compile lists of activists, AI is then used to pinpoint other data about them across the internet and run it against DHS’s own database of immigrants. This data is run against local police databases in their collaboration with ICE, any member of the list with outstanding traffic tickets and other minor outstanding charges are deported, citing their “criminal record.”

• A criminal organization, using advanced AI models, set out to hack local banks across the country using a recently identified exploit in a commonly used software. While the big national banks will update their software immediately, the hackers correctly expect some smaller banks and credit unions will not have updated to the patched version of the software. The AI model, pulling from public regulatory filings, scrapes IT job postings (which often reveal what software stack a small institution runs), scores each credit union by likely patch status, estimated deposit volume, and how thin their IT security staffing looks. Within hours, the group has a ranked list of institutions, sorted by “highest yield, lowest resistance.” The group instantly coordinates thousands of small, unsuspicious transactions from each bank, adding up to millions of dollars before anything is suspected. This kind of incident becomes routine.

• A police officer shoots an unarmed teenager. Outraged, residents of the city where the incident occurred take to the streets in protest. Shortly after, a group becomes rowdy, it’s not really clear who started burning trash cans or breaking windows, and some of the rioters’ shoes look weirdly shiny for a group of protesters. Flock cameras capture the whole scene. A white supremacist hacks the Flock cameras and uses AI image recognition to identify and dox every identified protester. The police later use this information to arrest dozens of protesters.

Many of these scenarios are imminently possible, and require immediate intervention to prevent. Versions of some of them are dangerously close to occurring. Doomsday may be slower and more boring that the AI companies want you to believe, but accelerating already existing crises may well spell our doom. Take all of these scenarios together and you have a world that is profoundly dystopian, not a far cry from some sci-fi dystopias, not Skynet, but Shitty Skynet. Yes, the human race still exists, but do we want to live in this world? Of course not, and we have a duty to stop it from coming into being.

When we make opposing AI Doomsday narratives central to our organizing, there is a real risk of us missing the moment. The idea that if we acknowledge any existential risk we’re handing the AI Companies the ability to write their own legislation just doesn’t follow; they will try to write their own regulations no matter what we do. And according to a recent poll showing a majority of Americans believe there is an existential threat, we’re fighting an uphill battle over the cause for concern, when we should be focused on providing the solutions.

DSA is uniquely positioned to cut through the think-pieces and X dot com arguments and present a unified platform for AI Regulation. When we get the parents who are terrified their child won’t learn to think for herself, the rural woman who is being driven crazy by the sound pollution of data centers, the working class family whose energy bills have skyrocketed, the adult son of a lonely woman who has developed AI psychosis, the old hippie worried about climate impact, and yes, the majority of Americans who are sincerely worried there is a chance it will kill us all, all united on a shared regulatory platform, we have a real shot at forcing the full spectrum of reforms we need to meet this moment.

A platform of regulations, covering the gamut of labor concerns, education, frontier development, environmental concerns, safeguards to detect unhealthy use, age restrictions, data center construction, and the use of AI in policing, the military, and intelligence would provide something for this burgeoning coalition to unite behind.

When AI companies shout down to the workers of the world that they are building a dangerous technology that will wipe out humanity, we should answer back, “you are building a dangerous technology, and here’s what we’re going to do about it.”

Earlier this week, Jacobin Magazine released a report titled the “Working Class Win-O-Meter: Dialing up to Victory,” which aims to help candidates win over working class voters. While the report uses extensive polling and novel approaches, it provides very little broader strategies for how Democrats can win over the working class. Even worse, it justifies reactionary views on social issues including immigration and trans rights. Win-O-Meter treats politics as though it were a series of dials a candidate can “turn” in order to win an election. This is a naive and incorrect view of politics, one that narrows our horizons and actually prevents us from winning.

In writing the report authors Jarod Abbot and Joan C. Williams created a series of hypothetical candidates with varying backgrounds and positions and then polled “working class” voters (we’ll get to their definition of working class in a minute). Their polling was extensive, surveying over 40,000 people. Win-O-Meter finds that candidates who adopt popular, somewhat moderate economic populist policies and take reactionary views on some social issues, such as policing, abolishing ICE, and trans girls in sports, see a meaningful bump in support from “the working class.”

The report argues that there are six framings a candidate can adopt: “the economic agenda they foreground, the culture and climate policies they adopt, whom they center in their messaging, the values they invoke, the populist tone they strike or not, and their class background.” If a candidate adopts all six framings a candidate can increase their vote share by up to 10.9 points. But there are a myriad of problems with the assumptions Win-O-Meter makes and the conclusions it draws.

To begin with, political polling reports like Win-O-Meter often try to give off an air of neutrality, but there is no way to run a neutral poll, let alone draw conclusions from one. The first sign that this report has its own biases is who it chose to define as working class: low and middle income voters without a college degree. Since there is no universal agreed upon criteria for what makes someone working class, this poll uses voters without a college degree as a proxy. But many would disagree with this criteria. Are nurses, teachers, and social workers not working class? Furthermore there is plenty of data that shows that voters without college degrees vote to the right of their college educated counterparts, meaning this report, by definition, is going to depict a more conservative working class than one that includes college educated voters.

The report also hides their definition of working class voters, not including it in their executive summary. This is a clever bit of sleight of hand that allows them to claim that they have successfully polled the working class, when in reality they have polled non-college educated voters.

There is of course no universal definition of working class. Is the working class anyone who makes under $250,000? Is it anyone who works for a paycheck? Is it anyone who drives a pickup truck? In selecting who is working class and who isn’t, the report biases its results from the very start. Of course, there is no way to not bias a report like this; how you define working class will determine the result.

Had the report argued that politicians can win over non-college educated voters with a mix of moderate economic populism and some reactionary social views, it would have been a lot more honest. It also wouldn’t have been particularly groundbreaking.

But the problems with Win-O-Meter go deeper than how its authors define the term “working class.” The very thesis of the report, that there are “dials” a candidate can turn to win an election, is fundamentally flawed.

This report falls into the trap of popularism, a term coined by pollster David Shor and boosted ad-nausem by Matt Yglesias. Popularism contends that the best way for a candidate to win is to adopt issues that are broadly popular. While this is straightforward enough, in practice it leads to some pretty awful politics. The most unpopular Prime Minister in British History, Keir Starmer, adopted popularism to devastating effect. He took a hardline immigration stance that alienated his supporters and did nothing to boost support for labor amongst right wing voters.

The report has a list of preferred policies that they say poll the highest, that one could say are popular.

Imagine a campaign where these policies were its centerpieces? This wouldn’t be a socialist campaign. Hell, it wouldn’t even be a progressive campaign. With the exception of guaranteeing the right to organize, moderate Democrats are already running on platforms that look exactly like this! This is the exact same approach that led to Starmerism.

A politician cannot just say the things voters want them to say. Politicians must offer a compelling narrative for why things are the way they are, how they will change them, and why they are the right person for the job. Polling is useful for refining that narrative, but it cannot be used as a compass. Politicians must define themselves on their own terms, not on what polls well.

Politics is a story, played out on a national stage. Trump’s 2024 platform, laid out in Project 2025, was wildly unpopular, but that didn’t matter for his narrative. He was a businessman, who oversaw a historic period of economic growth in his first term and would bring prices down in his second. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, might be the most talented narrative politician of the 21st century. No one remembers the specific policies he ran on in 2008, but they do remember “Hope” and “Change.” Obama’s narrative was simple: “After the disastrous war in Iraq, we need new and better leaders.”

In fairness to the report, the authors do acknowledge the vital role of storytelling in politics, but they fail to understand that in the very act of developing the report, they have already chosen a narrative direction—America is broken because of cosmopolitan and educated elites. They are telling a story about the educated versus the uneducated. The polling helps refine it.

In pursuing their narrative, the authors make their most disturbing conclusions: that candidates should moderate on social issues. Win-O-Meter found that candidates who supported “letting trans girls play in women’s sports” will suffer a measurable drop in support. They encourage candidates to find policies that “resonate” with the working class. But using polling to determine human rights policies is an inherently dangerous game. Majorities of Americans oppose minors receiving puberty blockers, but puberty blockers are absolutely crucial healthcare for trans kids. Even the example of sports is one where tremendous harm can be done to trans kids. Plenty of trans girls find love and community in their sports teams. Trans girls shouldn’t have their rights taken away because they don’t poll well.

Win-O-Meter does acknowledge that if a candidate is going to take an unpopular position, they should not center it in their campaign. They call this the “Mamdani Effect,” after Zohran Mamdani, who was quite adept at reframing questions to focus on cost of living concerns. They malign “Kamala Harris Style” candidates who make social issues the center of their campaigns, but when it comes to trans rights, no major candidates are making them the center of their campaigns. In fact it was Trump who made trans issues the center of the 2024 campaign, not Harris.

Win-O-Meter’s argument is clear: “Taking resonant rather than nonresonant positions on cultural issues could be a key ingredient in Democrats’ formula for winning back many of the Trump-curious voters who went Republican in 2024, at no cost — and often at a modest advantage — for the existing base’s support.”

Michigan Senate Nominee Abdul El-Sayed offers an alternative. When asked by professional ghoul, Jesse Waters, about his position on trans girls in sports, El-Sayed replied that this is a silly issue (it is) and that existing sports governing bodies can handle it (something they’ve been doing for decades). When asked about gender affirming surgeries for minors, El Sayed said that was between children, their parents, and their doctors, then started asking Waters if he was circumcised, showing just how weird and silly this whole thing is. He didn’t say that trans girls don’t belong in sports like his Texas counterpart James Talarico. He didn’t say that minors shouldn’t receive gender affirming surgery. He stood his ground and reframed the question.

In the same section on social issues, Win-O-Meter points out that abolishing ICE does not poll well among its non college educated respondents, but offering a path to citizenship does. The problem here is that ICE is a fascist paramilitary organization currently recruiting the most zealous Trump supporters into its ranks. Democrats must abolish ICE or risk having American Stormtroopers undermine Democracy. There’s no middle ground here. Candidates must use their platforms to communicate the ongoing dangers of ICE and why it must be abolished.

What might best show the limits of this report is the fact that the authors group the climate crisis with cultural issues. The climate crisis has the potential to wipe out much of the material basis for human civilization; that it has been treated as a cultural issue is a grotesque failure of our politics. Instead of imagining how climate can break out from being a cultural issue and take its rightful place as an economic one, the authors accept the idea that it is a cultural issue and move on.

Ultimately Win-O-Meter suffers from a lack of imagination. Most of the messages and policies it polls are generic ones that voters have heard a million times. Its authors do not push the envelope. They do not imagine a different kind of politics.

Socialists cannot win over the working class by turning various hypothetical dials. They can only win over the working class with a mass movement that redefines the cultural and political ground that we all stand on. It is only through winning hegemony that socialists can remake our economic system. Polls can help us get there, but we shouldn’t let them dictate our strategy. Keir Starmer learned that the hard way.

Left candidates are winning across the country, opening up a new frontier for socialist politics. But our policies and vision feel stuck, as though we’re fighting an endless 2024 presidential campaign. As socialists step onto the national and global stage, we need policies that match the ambitions of our political goals. Win-O-Meter does not stake out anything new and instead holds us in the past. It’s time to move forward.

We are living through a time of brutal reaction. Since the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the functional repeal of the Voting Rights Act, fundamental rights of the American people—healthcare, education, due process, safety from armed agents of the state—are being stripped away at an alarming rate. Future historians will look back on this time period as an attempt to establish a reactionary regime analogous to that of Jim Crow.

This political reaction has also been accompanied by a cultural one: the rise of the manosphere, the ubiquity of crypto and sports betting, tradwife influencers, and of course the cavalcade of fascist cultural nonsense that accompanied Trump and his second journey to the White House. None of us can escape its idiocy.

We haven’t really had a full accounting of the awful fascist fever dream that we are all being forced to experience. For all the preening over the supposed excesses of woke and cancel culture, our sudden and horrifying lurch to the far right has mostly gone ignored in mainstream media. It’s crucial that we understand it so that maybe we can wake up.

One way to understand the right wing cultural realignment is to use their own terminology and worldview. The way that fascists understand the world is a reflection of their own cultish mindset, a window into their own irrational ways of existing.

So where should we start in trying to understand this reactionary cult?

There is one idea, the Woke Mind Virus, that can tell us a lot.

A Brief History of the Mind Virus

Coined by Elon Musk in the aftermath of the pandemic, the Woke Mind Virus is the supposed spread of irrational left wing ideas. Musk probably got the idea from Richard Dawkins’ 1993 essay “Viruses of the Mind,” which argues that irrational ideas like religion can spread through society like a virus.

Of course, “woke,” a generalized belief in an egalitarian society, is not irrational at all, rather it is Elon Musk’s cringe fascism that is irrational. Musk began his billionaire career as a darling of Obama-era liberalism, before taking a hard right turn. When he coined the term Woke Mind Virus in 2021, he was beginning the process of transforming from the “real life Iron Man” to the reactionary fascist we know today. Given that he came up with the term just as he was going through a massive and delusional shift to the right, most likely brought on by his trans daughter, Vivian, beginning her transition and cutting him off, it is not that outlandish to believe that he was simply projecting his own broken mind onto his political opponents.

In Musk’s telling, “woke” took hold of the broader culture and destroyed the lives and careers of thousands of totally innocent white men. Of course none of this happened. No innocent white men had their careers destroyed. Very few guilty ones did either. What did happen was that millions of people publicly shared a genuine belief that things could be better and those who committed heinous acts could be held accountable. But the right could never understand this. Instead they believed that those millions must have had their minds infected by a sinister ideology. The right thinks this precisely because their own minds have been infected by a sinister ideology: the Fascist Mind Virus.

You have seen the Fascist Mind Virus. You have seen it take hold of your friends, your family members, your coworkers. You have seen totally normal people all become utterly deranged, living in a false reality where Joe Biden and Bill Gates genetically engineered COVID to feminize men and replace the white race with immigrants. Even in its more benign forms, it can still cause a myriad morbid symptoms. Maybe you know someone who has decided that they’re going to say the “r-slur” again, or can’t stop posting AI memes, or has started writing up masturbatory fantasies in the comments of celebrities’ IGs, or has started betting on the odds that Trump will invade Cuba on Kalshi. Even if you have been lucky enough not to see it take hold of someone you know, you have still seen it spread in how much worse our culture has become over the past five years.

The best way to get rid of a virus is vaccination. What is a vaccine, but the genetic information of a virus, helpfully given to the body? To understand the Fascist Mind Virus is to defeat it. Future historians will spend thousands of hours pouring over internet ephemera to try to understand this resurgent fascist movement, but for now by using the right’s own accusations of the left against it, we can make four observations about how the Fascist Mind Virus infects its victims that will hopefully help inoculate us against it.

1. Focus on Irrelevant Bullshit.

The right loves to argue that the left works itself up into a tizzy about things that don’t matter like pronouns or racism, but it is the right that cares about irrelevant bullshit: ivermectin, the casting of superhero movies, Hasan Piker, the Cracker Barrel logo, which celebrities appear in which beer commercials, nonexistent trans women in the WNBA, whatever is going through Candace Owens’ mind.

The right loves focusing on bullshit because it is a great way to not only distract people from their actual problems, but to make them live in a constant state of rage. Enraged people are easy to manipulate and a world with millions of enraged people is a world where fascism can more easily spread. Fascism relies on the beliefs that you, on a personal level, are under assault from forces both powerful and omnipresent, and there is an entire industry of conservative talking heads fomenting outrage, making our society aggressive, overly sensitive, and intolerant. Individuals afflicted with the Fascist Mind Virus live in a constant state of hyper vigilance and anger, miserable for sure, but also naive and manipulatable.

One of the easiest ways to manipulate an infected individual is the classic trio of racism, sexism, and homophobia. This gets us to our second observation.

2. Reduce People to Superficial Traits

The phrase, “identity politics” is a slur for the right, a way to argue that movements that want to end to endemic sexual assault or police violence are unserious. They say that the left doesn’t care about the content of an argument, only the ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation of the person speaking.

This is exactly what the right does.

Charlie Kirk famously said that he would be scared to fly in a plane with a Black person as a pilot. It doesn’t matter that pilots have to spend 1000 hours of flytime before they even get to touch a passenger plane, for Kirk just the fact that a pilot is Black is enough to make him scared.

Identity politics was originally used to refer to political ideas that seek to liberate marginalized identities. But the right has twisted and morphed identity politics into a dark mirror of their original intent. The right’s identity politics are not liberatory, they are totalizing and confining.

The right loves obsessing over identity. They had a meltdown over Lupito N’yongo playing Helen in The Odyssey. They uphold a vision of goodness that is associated with a caricature of 1950s American patriarchy. They inject themselves with gray market peptides and undergo grotesque acts of plastic surgery to better perform the identities they have foisted upon themselves.

It is here that we should pay particular attention to the right’s peculiar (and some might say perverted) obsession with trans people, trans women in particular. Their latest grievance has been a totally contrived moral panic about non-existent trans women in the NBA. The right cannot abide by any kind of visible trans woman without falling into a hysterical fit. It does not matter her qualifications or life experience, every trans woman is a de facto target based solely on her identity.

Of course, the right is particularly obsessed with trans women because their very existence challenges the rigid gender hierarchies they seek to impose. “The left is trying to impose their gender ideology on us,” has become one of their go to lines. But it is not the left who is obsessed with gender, it is the right, which leads to our third observation.

3. Venerate Manliness

The right loves their manly men.

In the days after Trump’s second election, the most powerful men in the world bowed before the altar of manliness. Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his new masculine era, appearing on Joe Rogan in a gold chain to talk about jiu jitsu and how corporate culture needs to be more masculine. Meanwhile Trump appointed drunken war criminal Pete Hegseth to lead the new Department of War (more manly than defense), who is bringing a “warrior ethos“ back to the military by testing the troops’ testosterone levels (and firing all the women and Black generals).

In an example of how the Fascist Mind Virus can quickly spread far out beyond the confines of the right, this veneration of manliness has spread out to more liberal spaces. “The Male Loneliness Epidemic” was the New York Times topic de jure for 2025. Centrists went out to search for a “Joe Rogan of the left” to reengage all of these poor lost young men. Even Rutger Bregman, a left-wing economist, spoke about what a shame it was that his young boys didn’t have male role models the way his daughters had feminist role models, completely missing the point that women can be role models for men too! (Also there are plenty of positive male role models!)

The patriarchal nature of fascism and therefore the Fascist Mind Virus is especially important for its proliferation. Hyper-masculinity is its own seductive menace that has been used for the entirety of human civilization to justify extreme hierarchies.

But the flip side of this resurgent masculinity is a horrifying loss of women’s rights. Veneration of manliness is incompatible with women’s liberation. That’s why the right is obsessed with men.

And of course the manosphere would not be possible without the right’s favorite thing in the whole wide world: social media.

4. Use Social Media to Stoke Division.

The “blue haired tumblr girl” meme is so prevalent on the right that it’s a cliche. According to the right, the left is a bunch of dweebs always on their phones.

The far right is a bunch of dweebs addicted to their phones.

That includes the president and vice president of the United States.

I don’t know if social media could have existed without contemporary fascism, but contemporary fascism couldn’t have existed without social media. From Gamergate onward, the right has used social media to spread the Fascist Mind Virus. For the right, social media is a replacement for the real world, a hypersimulation where they can harass women, attack minorities, obsess over trans people, and live out their most rude and antisocial fantasies without fear of consequence. When they do feel consequences, such as getting banned, they throw collective temper tantrums. One of these temper tantrums was so successful it convinced Elon Musk to buy Twitter and turn it into his Nazi safe space.

Progressive movements have successfully used social media to organize, but that has all been orthogonal to social media’s true purpose: make an ungodly sum of money so that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk can have more wealth than the GDP of several medium-sized countries combined. Social media companies want you to spend every waking moment of your life on their sites and the best way to do that is to make you either anxious or angry. Fascists then feed off of that anxiety and anger, spreading it to everyone around them.

Kill the Fascist in Your Head

And as we have seen, the Fascist Mind Virus does not infect exclusively fascists! It’s everywhere. Many pundits have had their brains absolutely cooked on Elon Musk’s Twitter and the result has been a severe warping of their worldview so strong, they are unable to accurately comment on the day’s events (which is their whole job). When Ezra Klein asked if he had become obsolete, the answer was a resounding yes, not because the world does not need commenters anymore, but because the world does not need another guy with a cooked brain.

And perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of our collective struggle with the Fascist Mind Virus is that commenters and even ordinary people do not blame the right for the collapse of American Democracy, but the left! Woke went too far and that’s how Trump got elected again.

There really was a change in American politics post-2016, a disorganized progressive movement with the potential to force political change. The fact that there was a potential challenge to their hegemony sent the right into a freefall of reaction, and then the pandemic and George Floyd protests sent them spiraling again into outright fascism. For us on the left, it’s easier to blame ourselves than to come to grips with the fact that the rich and powerful shifted the ground right under our feet. “We were too obsessed with pronouns,” is the kind of easy self blame that turns our gaze inward so we don’t have to look out at the horrible state we find ourselves in. It’s a psychological defense mechanism, but it’s ultimately self defeating.

But for those who do blame the left for the rise of fascism, there is an urge to submit to the Fascist Mind Virus. You have probably felt this urge yourself: just let all the horrors wash over you and accept that the world is a greedy, twisted place. The Fascist Mind Virus can be seductive to anyone.

The left found this out the hard way with Graham Platner, a masculine figure who could tow the line between right wing male worship and pluralistic politics. There was nothing about Graham Platner that made him fit to be a Senator. He was a rich kid, who joined the army and went on to become a military contractor before coming back home and finding himself unemployed, selling oysters to his mom’s restaurant. But Platner represented a vision of masculinity that was extremely appealing. His backers spoke of him in almost religious terms. They had let the Fascist Mind Virus infect them and in a loser, they saw glory.

But the thing with the Fascist Mind Virus is that reality will always reassert itself.

Submitting to the Fascist Mind Virus is an act of moral and spiritual suicide. Look at Elon Musk, the Fascist Mind Virus’ sickest victim. He is the richest man in the world, yet is miserable. He regularly makes a fool of himself in public then takes to X to sulk. He posts AI videos of himself on Mars. His ex-wife, ex-girlfriends, and children hate him. He doesn’t have a friend in the world. He pays people to play video games for him. His millions of admirers are foaming at the mouth idiots. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.”

It is both our personal and political duty to fight against this Fascist Mind Virus. You are not immune to it. No one is. It has infected people of every race, age, gender, sexuality, and creed. It is coming for you and everyone you love. You cannot escape it. You can only fight it.

The Fascist Mind Virus has real world, material effects. It is the ideological foundation for the rollback of human rights and immiseration of the working class. Women and minorities still make less than their white male counterparts. The state has begun intervening in the healthcare of ordinary Americans. Immigrants find themselves in chains. The Fascist Mind Virus helps create the conditions for a horrible material reality for millions of people, including its own victims.

There has been a huge pushback to Trump’s encroaching fascism including a raft of socialists winning across the country, historic protests, and an entire city mobilizing to kick out ICE. For the first time in a long time, there are mass antifascist movements across the country you can join. If you don’t have time, then donate to socialist candidates. If you don’t have time or money because we live in a capitalist hell and somehow working two jobs and 60 hours a week still isn’t enough, then just surviving each day is more than enough for now.

On a personal level is where it gets real hard. We are under psychic assault by tech oligarchs who want us to spend every minute of our waking lives glued to our phones. News organizations are being swallowed up by those very same tech oligarchs so they can promote their increasingly bizarre fascist agenda. And all the while climate change, which again those tech oligarchs are making worse, is making everything suck (there’s a direct link between heat and anxiety).

Learn to rely less on your phone. Spend several hours a day away from it. Be remorselessly critical of any information that comes from anyone associated with fascists. If you find yourself stuck in conversations about manufactured outrages that don’t matter, then change the topic. Do politics in real life, whether it’s door knocking, organizing your workplace, or something else.

To submit to the Fascist Mind Virus is to not just cause yourself immense psychological pain, but to also miss the opportunity to fight back against it. To live in reality is now a daily struggle. There will be setbacks, but that’s okay. We have to strive to find what is true and real and discard what is not. Perhaps this is an exhausting way to live, but in times like these, it is the only way to live. The alternative is so much worse.

Imagine if a white socialist candidate for Congress accused a Black opponent of “playing the ethnic game,” or spent hundreds of thousands on xenophobic mailers attacking an immigrant candidate. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and every centrist Democrat, pundit, and news anchor would go all out attacking the white socialist candidate, the Democratic Socialists of America, and anyone who’s ever been remotely associated with them for disgusting racism and bigotry.

This didn’t happen, but the opposite did. Over the past two years centrist Democrats have unleashed a highly funded barrage of racist attacks against left candidates in primaries, aided by massively funded SuperPACs. In 2024, AIPAC opened the floodgates with its then-record spending to unseat Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, which led to further record breaking spends like the AIPAC-led $63 million against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

All while the same establishment leaders and media figures currently saturating the media with ludicrous smears against the left, usually by misquoting Hasan Piker, have at best sat silent in tacit support.

While racist smears in elections are nothing new, what is new is how centrists are combining them with virtually unlimited SuperPAC funding from AIPAC world, traditional PACs, and newcomers like AI, Crypto, and Doordash to create a new media ecosystem of racism against the left. What follows is a timeline of this strategy’s emergence and evolution, what it reveals about the true state of the fight between left and center, and finally, how we can use this understanding to fight back.

2024: Bowman and Bush

In 2024, Rep Jamaal Bowman faced the most expensive Congressional primary in history. Even this sentence fails to convey how lopsided the spending was, as the vast majority came from one source: AIPAC. What this paid for was a series of ads that cast Bowman, a lifelong educator who founded and ran a Bronx public school, as a chaotic, untrustworthy liar who was only in it for himself, with taglines like, “Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda: hurting New York.”

If there was any doubt this “angry black man” caricature was rooted in racist stereotypes, Bowman’s white opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, couldn’t help but make the subtext text, with some highlights including:

• Telling reporters Bowman had “an obvious ethnic benefit,”

• Accusing Bowman of “playing the ethnic game,”

• Telling Bowman in a debate that “Your constituency is Dearborn,” an Arab majority city in Michigan.

• Telling Bowman “You don’t mention people who are not Black or brown.”

At the same time, Cori Bush faced a similar onslaught of AIPAC funded attacks rooted in similar stereotypes, including a mailer that altered Bush’s face in overtly racist ways.

Faced with this outpouring of money and racism against two incumbent Black Democratic congressmembers, did Schumer, Jeffries, or the party establishment leap to their defense? Did they call out their opponents’ displays of racism? Did they say anything at all?

No. The Democratic party apparatus largely distanced itself from Bowman and Bush at the exact moment they faced these attacks, leaving nothing but a few perfunctory statements that came with no resources or real support. They said nothing about this highly funded infusion of racism into Democratic primaries. (And yes, Bowman and Bush were incumbents, but they were not on the side of the establishment here.)

Together, this flood of ads combined with open racism built the kind of media ecosystem of racist attacks that now saturate Democratic primaries. But it’s the Democratic establishment’s tacit approval in 2024 that gave every version to follow the greenlight.

2025: Andrew Cuomo

Once Latimer and AIPAC kicked the door open in New York, the flood of shit would inevitably pour into the NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary. It’s no secret that Andrew Cuomo ran one of the most disgusting racist campaigns in modern Democratic history. Nor is it a secret that he ran one of the most expensive ones, where an array of creeps from Michael Bloomberg to Doordash poured millions into SuperPACs amplified his racist message.

Racismmaxxing

Cuomo embraced a gutter racism that ultimately earned him a Trump/Musk endorsement, in a one man race to the bottom that saw him agreeing with an extremely racist right wing radio host that Mamdani would “applaud” “another 9/11.” He even became an early adopter of AI slop, including an ad that was not only racist to Zohran himself, but also managed to throw in an array of racist caricatures of other New Yorkers just for the love of the racism game, I guess?

This whole race is well trod enough that we don’t need to belabor the point. What’s important here is that as a potential Democratic mayor of the largest and bluest city in the country flooded airwaves with tens of millions of dollars of racist commercials, the establishment said and did nothing to repudiate or even acknowledge it.

The message was clear: in the highest profile race in the country, dropping 70 million dollars on racist ads is fine with the Democratic establishment, making openly racist comments is fine with the Democratic establishment. You know who kept going on the racist “Zohran would applaud another 9/11” guy’s radio show even into this year? The literal second most powerful person in the NYC government, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Democrat. Yes, ten million hours of “do you condemn Hasan,” but nothing about this guy.

Given that this happened during the rise of one of the most openly racist Presidential Administrations in US history, the whole thing would be enough to make you want to give up… were it not for one wrinkle: Zohran won.

2026: DSA vs USA

Diana DeGette vs Melat Kiros

Which brings us to this year, where as left challengers rose up across the country, “racism is fine if you use it against the left”-style attacks rained down upon them..

A particularly blatant example was in Denver, where 29-year incumbent Diana DeGette toed the line between repping her hometown and outright anti-immigrant xenophobia, and then ran across it shouting “she’s not from here!”

Let’s take a look at the DeGette campaign’s “redbox”, a legal loophole that lets campaigns signal to SuperPACs who to target with ads, and what to put in them.

Via archived page, as found by the Colorado Sun

“Just moved to Denver, has never held a full-time job here, and has no record of community service” is particularly sinister given that Kiros immigrated from Ethiopia to Denver when she was 11 months old, grew up there, and has lived the majority of her life there

But just as DeGette ordered, “not from here” became a core attack line, with SuperPACs blaring lines like “Melat Kiros JUST ISN’T DENVER.”

Not content to leave it to the dark money, the DeGette campaign even dropped six figures on its own, now infamous “Protect Denver Values” mailer.

How is this any different from what a MAGA candidate would say?

A lot of the response to the “not from here” attack centered on it being wrong factually. But it’s also wrong morally. Even if she had just moved to Denver, what the hell kind of person condones millions of dollars of ads plastering the face with headlines about how they’re not from here? Certainly, not one who is going to fight ICE.

Thankfully, in this race, something did change. The Democratic establishment did speak out on offensive comments, with a coalition ranging from long time elected officials to the entire spectrum of center right to center left news media, podcasters, and op ed columnists, who joined together to vigorously attack DeGette for her racist campai—oh wait no they actually just spent 10 million hours talking about Hasan Piker while saying absolutely nothing about the racism.

Maybe they should have talked about something else though, because Kiros won.

Adriano Espaillat vs Darializa Avila Chevalier

So clearly, the media is not equipped to handle covering stories like this. But they were especially not prepared to cover it in a race where Dominican incumbent Adriano Espaillat’s campaign was involved in an unhinged series of attacks declaring that his DSA challenger, the also-Dominican Darializa Avila Chevalier was…Haitian.

The Espaillat camp attempted to leverage a history of Dominican racism towards Haitians to mobilize Dominican voters against the Afro-Latina Avila Chevalier. From a literal former Dominican Republic cabinet official claiming she was a “secret Haitian” to a senior Espaillat advisor saying that she and Mamdani were part of a Great Replacement style plot to make Washington Heights “no longer a bastion of the Dominican community” and instead “a bastion of the Haitian, Muslim community allied to him.” At the exact time Republicans were fomenting rabid, anti-Haitian bigotry, the Espaillat camp aimed for the exact same flavor of racist fervor.

Though Espaillat himself did a perfunctory distancing, Democratic leadership said nothing, because dipping into this particularly deep racist well is fine with them as long as it’s for a noble cause like “getting Adriano Espaillat a sixth term in Congress.”

The racist attacks also helped kick off an endless media cycle about Avila-Chevalier’s old tweets, which the legacy media decided was more important than out-and-out JD Vance-style anti-Black racism.

Don’t worry though, the New York Times did finally deign to cover the racist attacks on election day, just in time to make no possible difference.

Did I say “racist attacks”? Sorry, I guess meant “Ethnicity Becoming Instrument of Division”

Fortunately, though, this time there was an actual change. While the usual centrists were trying to keep the incumbent at the center of this gross campaign in office, you know which Democratic leader who did call it out? DSA-endorsed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

And she won.

Racists vs Adam Hamawy

Okay this one was just classic acceptable Islamophobia. One wonders if they were actively trying to outdo Cuomo here because they went right to “terrorist,” even though Hawamy is a literal 9/11 first responder.

This is again fine with the centrist Democrat leaders. Maybe in this case it’s because it’s the kind of thing current New Jersey Democratic Congressmembers go around saying in meetings with other Democratic Congressmembers. At least now Josh Gottheimer will have to say it to Hamawy’s face, because he won.

Haley Stevens vs Abdul El-Sayed

Abdul El-Sayed is not a DSA member or even a socialist, but no one with a pathological hatred of Bernie-and-AOC-endorsed Medicare for All supporters, or of Muslims, is going to make this distinction. So another array of creeps led by AIPAC made this the most expensive primary in history, with a ridiculously lopsided spending ratio closer to the Cuomo-level spending we saw in New York.

They threw a lot at the wall here, from attempted Hasan Piker moral panics to claiming El-Sayed, a literal Rhodes Scholar with an MD and two PhDs who taught epidemiology at Columbia and led the Detroit Health Department, was lying about being a doctor. When the money really got flowing at the end, ads leaned into the “Arab men are all misogynists” stereotype. It got so bad that in a positive development, one of Detroit’s two top newspapers actually called it out. These attacks were coupled with increasingly deranged versions of you-think-Palestinians-are-human-and-or-are-a-Muslim-therefore-you-are-anti-semitic attacks that culminated in Haley Stevens’ famed late night tweet:

El-Sayed had some particularly strategic responses here: from an ad with his extremely Midwest-coded grandparents, to openly calling out AIPAC spending in ways that used the very money in politics being spent against him to prove his point about money in politics. While the idea that outspending El-Sayed by so much fully “backfired” is probably a bit hyperbolic given how much ads affected voters when you track by region, his strategy did just enough to overcome it in a way other strategies wouldn’t have. So he won.

Francesca Hong vs A Bunch Of Creeps

The high profile race the establishment did win had a slightly different dynamic than the above, though not nearly as different as pundits have tried to spin it. Hong was outspent on media by a ridiculous ratio via SuperPACs. Some pundits have tried to claim it’s different in this case, and that ads largely funded by the Republican Governors Association, were actually efforts to boost her, believing she’d be easier to defeat in a general election.

I don’t claim to know what’s in the Republican Governors Association’s hearts (besides nothing), but just watch for yourself. Whatever the intent, the message that “Hong is too liberal for Wisconsin” has a clear effect: which is to make voters see that there will be millions of dollars of ads saying “Hong is too liberal” for Wisconsin. In a race that became about “electability,” this worked in tandem with the commentariat’s furor over old tweets, the DSA national platform, and other sundries (never mind that they’re all still more popular with voters than winner David Crowley’s pro-data center policy). The attacks gave any voter legitimately concerned about who could best weather similar attacks from the right pause.

While not so overtly racist like other examples, these SuperPAC spends still formed a part of an ecosystem in which big-name Democrat figures actively laundered the idea that Hong was unelectable, too far left, and too “crazy” into the press. Here’s David Axelrod accusing her of “faculty lounge exotica.”

Even in today’s endless media jockeying over what truly counts as “working class,” Hong’s history is pretty hard to argue: after going to public school and an in-state public college, she was a dishwasher and line cook, before working her way up to executive chef. So, what is it about looking at Francesca Hong that made David Axelrod go “faculty lounge exotica”? Is it perhaps the extremely obvious reason?

This is a less blatant but potentially more effective example of how anti-left media works: use a combination of saturation and validators to say “she’s an out of touch crazy academic stereotype who can’t get elected,” until the press press starts saying “people are saying she’s an out of touch crazy academic stereotype who can’t get elected,” thus raising doubts about her “electability.” This creates a feedback loop, buffeted by the constant noise of ads pushing the same idea. A week before the election, even a lot of left-leaning analysts started buying into it. And in a race decided by about half a percent, it beat her.

So, what does this extensive history of centrist racism tell us?

1. The Facts Are Clear: The Democratic Establishment Is Spending Millions of Dollars Spreading Racism. The Left Is Not.

Whatever is going on in the media, a simple look at major Democratic primaries shows that centrist Democrats are mostly fine with other centrist Democrats spending, benefitting from, and echoing tens of millions of dollars worth of racist media. Meanwhile, the left has done absolutely nothing comparable. And the proof is that if we had, the Democratic establishment and media would be talking about it 24/7 instead of running 34 75 230 stories an hour about Hasan.

2. Centrist Democrats Are More Likely To Be Too Racist Than Too Antiracist

Since Trump’s reelection we have seen the same tired argument used against the left: Democrats lost to Trump in 2024 because they were too far left, too focused on “DEI” and “identity issues” and “wokeness.” Therefore, Democrats must keep moving right, fight off any kind of left challenger, and do whatever it takes to suppress and delegitimize the ones they can’t defeat at the ballot box.

You might say that Democrats actually won the presidency at the height of their embrace/cooptation of anti-racism in 2020, and lost in 2024 on a platform that included “funding a genocide,” but let’s put that aside. When you look at where they actually spend money and allow money to be spent, the idea that the Democratic establishment is obsessed with antiracism to the point of losing election is hard to square with the fact that the party establishment has a demonstrable record of not just tolerating racism, but using record breaking amounts of money to spread racism in their own elections against other Democrats.

Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand run the DCCC, the body theoretically in charge of electing Democratic senators. Are we really supposed to believe that the same people who condoned Cuomo’s $72 million racist campaign and in one case even tried to personally outdo him live on air whiffed in 2024 because they were too obsessed with woke virtue signaling?

3: When Democratic Primaries Get Racist, The Left Is On The Antiracist side

The second Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the primary, the sensible center took to the charts to explain why if you look at turnout by voter precinct, demographic breakdowns, and such, it was clear that the establishment represents real working class New Yorkers, while the Mamdani coalition was evil rich white gentrifiers (of course they each got 50% of the Black vote in the primary, but that doesn’t matter apparently).

As this year’s wave of DSA victories took away the center’s ability to write off 2025 as a Mamdani-only fluke, these efforts have intensified. Now, political establishment figures and allies have taken to a press delighted to boost their claims and insinuations, ignoring examples that shred such a narrative, and that left candidates are wildly preferred by every demographic once you look at people under 45. This reached its apotheosis when Queens Borough President Donovan Richards responded to DSA Assemblymember Phara Souffrant-Forrest, the working class daughter of Haitian immigrants who worked as a union nurse, with the vague yet incendiary statement: “White supremacy comes in all forms.” Like, uh, ending elder parole and copays on insulin?

This is not to say there are no complex, thorny questions here to work through. But you know what isn’t complicated or thorny? Left candidates are winning vast majorities of every demographic of people under 50, and plenty more on top of that, without dropping millions on racist ads or spreading racist rumors or rhetoric. You don’t need to contort a bunch of charts to explain how going around saying “Haitian” like a dirty word and running ads on how an immigrant born and raised in Denver “just isn’t Denver” is racist, or to understand that only one side of the centrist-left divide condones it.

How To Fight Back Against Centrist Racism

After the success of this strategy in 2024, many predicted it would be deployed by the center in every high profile primary against the left. This was correct, but not with the results expected. In most of these examples, the left candidate was able to win anyway.

While it’s difficult to isolate variables in something as complex as an election, especially a close one, we’ve seen enough to understand which elements are in our control, and which seem to be the most effective in overcoming these kinds of racist attacks:

Candidates Must Tackle It Head On

We’ve already touched on how El Sayed built this into his strategy, but it bears repeating. The proof here is not just in how much it became part of the race’s narrative, but that now in the general election, even his Republican opponent is trying to disassociate himself from AIPAC in the eyes of voters. (It’s just for show). The power here is in focusing on the money fueling the attacks, inoculating voters enough so that when they see an endless wave of attack ads, they go “wait, this is really a lot of money to be spending, and it’s the genocide guys right?” At the same time, pieces like his grandparents ad and turning his own name into proof of his outsider legitimacy, “I got a name that’s got 11 letters in it…People like me are not supposed to run,” helped him overcome the racist attacks.

Mamdani too dealt with Islamophobia using his characteristic deftness, laughing off the hyperbolic tone of attacks, but at key points in the race he created high profile moments turning the Islamophobia against him into a statement about what Muslim New Yorkers face as a whole, rooted in the same “I love NYC” messaging and universalist ideology of his campaign.

So as candidates consider what narrative to prioritize pushing through their limited media and press windows, it’s clear that incorporating a line like “the fact that big money is spending so much against me just proves that I really will stand up to big money” into your story, and calling out bigotry in a way that bolsters your own credibility are the best things you can do.

But Candidates Can’t Do It Alone

Still, even the best candidate’s own megaphone to decry attacks is limited. A story, especially this type, is generally not deemed coverage worthy until other voices the press considers legitimate make it one. Back in 2024, the press barely covered George Latimer’s racism until AOC called it out. As slow as coverage of the pro-Espaillat/anti-Haitian hatred was to come, it may not have happened at all without the mayor of NYC publicly weighing in. In Detroit, a mainstream newspaper actually debunking a highly funded SuperPac most likely helped El-Sayed. And in NYC, I experienced it firsthand as part of the DREAM campaign, where an array of political and cultural figures pushed overt attacks on Cuomo’s funders and racism into the mainstream in ways candidates weren’t able.

Just as Axelrod & Co used their credibility, connections, and press access to push “she’s crazy” into the press, the left is now a big enough force that our name figures have the power to push our criticisms in there too. With the added bonus of our criticisms actually being true.

So as the new set of DSA electeds prepare to serve in Congress, they will need to do this. This means potentially ruffling the feathers of their colleagues in some potentially incendiary ways. But as this money flood shows no signs of slowing down, they’re going to need to, because it’s going to be necessary to grow their numbers further. Don’t just play defense, go on offense with press cycles of our own demanding leadership condemns these racist attacks. Say, something like:

“At the exact time Americans are facing the most openly white supremacist White House in generations and are desperate for leaders to fight back, this disgusting tolerance of racism and the money behind it is exactly why so many people are sick of politics and feel abandoned by the Democratic party.”

Hell, demand they blacklist the vendors making this stuff the way they once blacklisted vendors who worked for Democratic primary challengers not that long ago! It’s at least as compelling as demanding someone cancel a rally with Hasan.

For now, newly elected left Congressmembers (and maybe some of the more high profile non-federal ones too) have the type of media megaphone the movement can’t otherwise access. They can use this to deliver piercing truths that break through the overwhelming media monotony of ad money. So it’s time to turn controversy over statements away from Hasan Piker and onto the people in power doing actual racist things.

And there’s little time to waste. If we play our cards right, we’ll soon be in the biggest fight involving mass SuperPAC-backed racism ever. Because if AOC runs for president, get ready for a flood of highly funded centrist racism like you’ve never seen, rolling all the blatant and more sophisticated efforts you’ve just read about into a disgusting blob we can’t even imagine. Congress? Senate? Combine the sheer amount of money in a presidential primary with the fear of a viable socialist Presidential candidate drawing new funders and players into the primary process, and it’s going to get very unpredictable, very fast. There’s going to be weeks of controversies over things we can’t even dream of. But if we strategically call out their racist messaging, and our electeds and other figures with media megaphones use them in solidarity, we can beat it. So let’s get ready for the loudest version yet.

Charlie Heller is the Co-Founder of Greenpill, a cooperatively owned socialist communications agency, whose work includes electing the first democratic socialist in the Hudson Valley, passing the first statewide Green New Deal law in US history, and creating the “SuperPAC-killer” DREAM for NYC.

Antonio Reynoso is not a bad politician. A former city councilmember turned Brooklyn Borough president, Reynoso is a progressive with broad appeal, a rare politician that hipsters, Hasidic Jews, and Latina aunties could all get behind. So it was no surprise that Reynoso stepped into the race to succeed Congressmember Nydia Velasquez.

But his skills didn’t matter. His coalition blew apart. One term assemblymember and Democratic Socialist Claire Valdez crushed him.

This has been a story repeated over and over again across the country. In Michigan, Mallory McMorrow, a progressive who made a genuinely brave stand for trans rights in the state legislature, nevertheless found her campaign for Senate floundering, unable to gain ground against former Wayne Public Health head Abdul El-Sayed. In Colorado, Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros beat longtime progressive Diana Degette.

So what’s happening? Why are progressives finding themselves outflanked by candidates to their left And why is this phenomenon happening everywhere?

The answer is Palestine.

It’s hard to remember, but in the immediate days after October 7th, public opinion was with the Israelis. But as the days turned into months and a genocide unfolded, American perceptions changed dramatically, with Israel and America’s unpopular war on Iran sealing Israel’s fate as a public pariah. Half of all US voters describe Israel’s actions as a genocide as do a whopping of 77% of all Democrats.

In the opening days of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, some of the only politicians who dared criticize Israel and openly call for a ceasefire were democratic socialists and they suffered for it. The Democratic Socialists of America was widely condemned by politicians across the aisle, including progressives like then-NYC Comptroller Brad Lander. 2024 was a brutal year for democratic socialists; both Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman lost their reelection bids under a torrent of AIPAC spending. For progressives triangulating on Palestine—decrying Israel’s atrocities while refraining from outright calling the genocide a genocide—was a way for them to satisfy their progressive base while not attracting the ire of AIPAC.

But their triangulation has become a disastrous liability. We live in horrific times and horrific times call for moral clarity. Perhaps Claire Valdez’s most devastating line of attack on Antonio Reynoso was that he had not called the genocide in Gaza a genocide until he decided to run for congress. By trying to please both sides, triangulating progressives became genocide deniers.

Palestine does not rank among Americans’ top issues, but that does not mean it is not electorally salient. Candidates who have been against a genocide from day one demonstrate that they have a backbone and moral clarity, telling voters more than their policy positions ever could. With our politics permeated with cynicism, it is the goal of a candidate to make voters believe that they will at least try to do what they say they will do. A candidate who is willing to call a genocide a genocide, often to their own detriment, at the very least genuinely holds their opinions. In other words: Palestine is a signal to voters that a candidate is legit.

What about centrist voters and candidates? After McMorrow dropped out, El-Sayed was widely expected to win his primary handily against moderate, hyper pro-Israel Congressperson Haley Stevens, but instead only eked out a narrow victory. Centrist and Zionist pundits quickly pointed to his smaller than expected victory as a clear example that Palestine was not a litmus test for more centrist voters. Michelle Goldberg argued that El-Sayed should take the closer than expected results as a reason to moderate Palestine.

But this argument ignores several key factors in Michigan. First of all Stevens outspent El-Sayed 9-to-1 largely thanks to AIPAC money and had the endorsement of Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s popular governor. El-Sayed also made Stevens’ support for Israel and her AIPAC backing a major campaign issue. The fact that she lost despite her advantages says a lot about the Michigan Democratic electorate. Palestine was a major issue in this race and no doubt contributed to El-Sayyed’s victory. To deny it is to stick one’s head in the sand. This doesn’t mean that being all anti-Zionists will automatically win all primaries, but that pro-Palestinian solidarity has gone from a liability to a strength.

This might be frustrating for politicians who saw public opinion rapidly swing from pro-Israel to anti. “I was just following what people believed,” they might say. But that’s how leadership works! Our leaders should be better than us. They shouldn’t chase public opinion on a genocide.

Where Palestine was a fringe issue that was sure to attract the indignation of powerful forces, it has now become the defining issue of our time. The longer a candidate has been willing to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, the more credibility they have in elections.

Calling a genocide a genocide is not a piece of triangulation. It is a moral stand. Voters understand this. Will politicians?

Are you fed up with a capitalist system that caves to fascism? Feeling burnout keeping up with the many boycott days scheduled in this apocalyptic hellscape? Not sure where to turn when, time and again, all your favorite companies and shopping brands bend the knee to an unnamable orange menace you can't seem to stop talking about?

While Power Map is primarily a political magazine offering the freshest takes in Democratic Socialism, we also, like nearly everyone else on the planet, shop. But how do we shop in the hellscape that is late techno-fascist capitalism?

Do Boycotts Work? Yes, but…

The first thing that may come to your mind is a boycott! Don’t give your hard earned money to these evil companies. Bleed ‘em dry. While boycotts absolutely do work, they have to be organized and prolonged. That’s really difficult! Amazon has over 310 million active users every year. That’s a lot of people to organize! Successful boycotts, like MLK’s legendary Montgomery Bus Boycott involved intense organization just to boycott a bus system in a single mid-sized city! So yes, boycotts work, but only if they’re insanely well organized and targeted. A few thousand people saying they won’t shop at Amazon just isn’t going to cut it.

A supplemental option to help your sanity might be “buycotting”: that is, actively buying from companies that benefit society. How could such a company exist within capitalism, you say? Easy: they’re called worker cooperatives.

What is a Worker Cooperative?

There are many types of “coops” – and housing coops or food coops probably come to mind first. A worker coop is similar: it is collectively owned and operated, but specifically by its employees, instead of a board of investors. In practice, this means it's the workers at large who are responsible for the direction of the company and collectively share in its profits.

This might sound like a socialist utopia far out of reach, but worker coops are more prevalent than you might think – in fact, you might buy their products already and not even know it. Actively supporting these companies will help keep them in operation and encourage their growth and competitiveness as alternatives to capitalism. Acts of solidarity can be as simple as buying worker coop product from your local grocery store, or as difficult as moving your whole digital and financial life in a different direction.

Below, you'll find a list of handy “good” businesses – mostly worker owned, some with other alternative models that center workers or customers rather than profit and power-hungry shareholders. And this isn't an exhaustive list – there are so many more coops to be found!

A Socialist Breakfast

Start off the day right with a nice, guilt-free, worker-supporting bowl of oatmeal courtesy of the familiar Bob's Red Mill. According to their website, they have been 100% employee-owned since 2020 (transitioning via an Employee Stock Option Program [ESOP] that founder Bob Moore began in 2010). Pair it with a delicious cup of coffee provided by fair trade and worker owned Equal Exchange (they also sell chocolate bars, hot chocolate, tea, and olive oil that are all quite good!)

If you are a baker then King Arthur Flour needs no introduction. They sell the greatest flour bar none and their website has some damn good recipes. They have also been employee-owned since 2004. Yes they’re more expensive than some of the alternatives, but if you want quality and want to support an employee owned business then the extra cost is worth it!

Out On the Town

Grab a beer at queer-run Boyfriend Coop in Brooklyn. Or, if you prefer your service capitalist and your beer socialist, head to George Keeley’s on the Upper West Side and down a worker-owner-brewed Switchback. In the West Village? Enjoy a cocktail and a taco at Donna, NYC’s first worker-owned cocktail bar.

News and Art

No NY Times article could compare to the humorous snark you'll encounter reading Hell Gate, which covers all things New York City. In DC you can get your news from the 51st. Some of the best tech reporting comes from 404 Media, a coop founded by former Motherboard tech reporters. And maybe the most exciting coop media project of them all, Defector Media, which started out as a news website founded by former Deadspin journalists and is now well on its way to becoming a Cooperative Empire (is that thing?), producing news, commentary, and podcasts, including smash hit Normal Gossip.

And for your music and streaming needs, consider some adventurous options: Mirlo, a worker-owned streaming platform where you'll find some extremely cool indie music, combines subscription-based services and crowdfunding to support musicians on the platform. You can find excellent documentary work like Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union or the popular “Second Thought” on worker-owned Means TV, or help get worker-centered Indy movies made at Denver-based Truce Studios.

Big Moves

Are you ready to really stick it to the capitalist system with some major life changes? Switch to Proton Mail to keep your online data out of the hands of big tech. Owned mostly by the nonprofit Proton Foundation as well as Proton employees, Proton provides end-to-end encryption to keep your data safe, offers VPNs to obscure your location from prying corporate eyes, and has pretty good phone backup storage and online Drive options – a pretty solid alternative to Google, if you don't mind a simpler set of online tools.

Ready to leave your bank? Move your money to a credit union! …Okay, credit unions aren't worker cooperatives, but they are member-owned nonprofits, so as a member you hypothetically have more of a say in how they behave as a company. I'm a big fan of USAlliance – they have a great mobile banking app, a handy map of surcharge free ATMs throughout the U.S. (don't forget to order a debit card!!), and offer an incomparable 3.40% APY on your savings account. That means if you're lucky enough to keep, say, $100,000 in the bank, you could have an extra $300+ a month to help pay your bills (imagine, doing the noble thing AND making more money from it?? Wow!!)

Want to explore even more options? You can search on the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives site for more US-based registered worker coops local to you that provide anything from cleaning services to dog walking to, yes, lumber!

Helping the World and You

Navigating our late-stage capitalist world that emboldens fascism and pointless bloodshed often feels like an impossible task. But even taking the baby steps to embolden an alternative economic system as a personal supplement to activities like campaigning and organizing can go a long way to create systemic shifts. And if it helps you feel less subservient to the megacorporate state and staves off the burnout that feeling of hopelessness can bring, that in itself is a huge step forward!

Subscribe now

For three months this winter, the Twin Cities was occupied by a small army of federal agents here to disappear our neighbors. They kidnapped children and detained grandparents, shot protestors in the street and killed immigrants in detention. The overwhelming ubiquity of this terror campaign was impossible to ignore. While ICE abducted Minnesotans from street corners and bus stops, schools were forced into remote learning, businesses closed or lost employees, and patients skipped medical appointments. With a force of over 4,000 at its peak, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presence in Minnesota outnumbered the ten largest police departments in the metro area combined. Even after the official end of Operation Metro Surge, the secret police have simply dispersed into the suburbs.

But this winter in Minnesota also saw unprecedented participation in anti-fascist resistance. Beyond large marches and demonstrations, 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as legal observers for ICE raids, thousands more delivered groceries to immigrant families staying home, dozens of neighborhoods hosted mass meetings to help more people plug in, and protestors showed up in the night with all manner of noise-makers to nearly every hotel confirmed to be hosting ICE. Immigrant-led non-profits played an indispensable role in setting up the resistance infrastructure and religious institutions have been essential mutual aid hubs, but much of our organizing has been decentralized, leaderful, and spontaneous.

In stark contrast to the sense of powerlessness engendered by status quo politics, our nascent mass movement has proved a formidable thorn in the side of the Trump regime by effectively wielding power in four key areas: in the streets, on strike, through the state, and on our screens. The Minnesota resistance has not been immune to old patterns of performative action that makes people feel powerful without actually being powerful, but enough participants chose strategic interventions to force real, if modest, concessions; our pressure ended the careers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commander Greg Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and compelled the Trump regime to reduce the number of agents here. In what follows, I will explore what makes street power, strike power, state power, and screen power each necessary in our local struggle against ICE and how we can utilize them to build socialism going forward. Much of this analysis is indebted to my friend and comrade Lena P, who was originally my writing partner for this piece and contributed invaluable insights.

Street Power

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis exploded into a massive, Black-led popular uprising. Along with a robust mutual aid network, the uprising also directly challenged the authority of the state. Rebels set fire to a police precinct and occupied the intersection where Floyd was killed for over a year, refusing entry to police at its peak. As the Minneapolis Police Department focused on putting down the uprising, neighborhoods organized their own community patrols to keep each other safe, a tactic first developed by the American Indian Movement five decades earlier. Despite the romantic memory some still carry, the uprising was fraught with race and class contradictions, and it failed to translate the organic mobilization into systemic change. But to call the uprising itself a failure misses its role in the broader process of class formation. The block-by-block organizing and widespread radicalization of 2020 laid the foundation for our resistance to ICE now.

Street power is the ability to shape the course of events playing out on our literal streets. Minnesota has been able to mobilize large crowds during this occupation, drawing between 50,000 and 100,000 to a single march, but our street power has been most effective when diffused in our own neighborhoods. Relying first on group chats and relationships formed in 2020, the old system of community patrols was transformed and expanded outside of Minneapolis into a network of Signal groups dedicated to tracking ICE and deploying observers.

In the early days of Metro Surge, large-scale raids would prompt non-profits to mass text trained observers who would mob the scene, sometimes even preventing arrests. ICE learned from these incidents and adapted. They moved in smaller numbers, earlier in the morning, and attempted to abduct people as quickly as they could, leaving the demonstrations of force mostly to Bovino and CBP once they arrived. Very quickly, the centralized non-profit infrastructure was overrun (the MONARCA hotline was fielding more than one call per minute) and we had no choice but to adapt too.

At the core of the rapid response network are local Signal groups or varying geographic size. Regularly reaching the 1000 user limit for Signal chats, these groups refresh daily so that only those spending time on rapid response that day are in them. Active responders will join the voice call in their local chat and patrol a neighborhood usually in a car, sometimes on foot. Meanwhile, as many as three "dispatchers" will watch the text chat for credible reports of ICE, check license plates against the crowd-sourced database, and communicate with other local chats. ICE license plates themselves are primarily recorded by observers at the Whipple Federal Building (the DHS command center), who also alert dispatchers to large convoys headed in their direction.

Branching off of this system, hyperlocal groups coordinate neighborhood specific rapid response, mutual aid, and distribution of know-your-rights materials. Complimenting mobile rapid responders, stationary observers protect schools, mosques, churches, and other community institutions at high-traffic times, a tactic spearheaded by parent groups originally organized to support the recent Minneapolis Federation of Educators contract campaign. More aggressive tactics emerged as well, like “filter blockades” at strategic intersections or improvised barricades erected in an attempt to prevent federal agents from fleeing the scenes of their crimes. Many who cannot participate in these ways have devoted hours to data entry and organization. When JD Vance derides the “very unique, very Minneapolis specific” response to ICE or Greg Bovino complains that we are “a bit better organized” here, they're damn right.

Most remarkable about the rapid response network is the unshakable courage of its members. Despite widespread intimidation—including leading observers to their own addresses, arrest, brutalization, chemical weapons, car-ramming, murder, and the thinly veiled threat of murder—Minnesotans have not backed down. Thousands of rapid responders, myself included, experienced moments of serious risk to their personal safety and chose to continue showing up in defense of their neighbors. There is a strong sense of collective pride in our resilience and steadfast commitment.

Our street power has been effective despite, or perhaps because of, our lack of formal leadership. Everyday working class people have taken ownership of this movement. There are no marching orders, just figuring out together which direction to walk in. Organized socialists are deeply embedded in the resistance, but we remain a small, if influential, minority. As working class movements continue to grow, there will inevitably be more confrontations with the enforcers of capital. We are going to need capable street power to defend socialist goals, and we are unlikely to achieve it by declaring ourselves in charge of spontaneous mobilizations. Our task, as outlined by Marta Harnecker, is not to command but to convince, to bring grassroots movement leaders into our political project and empower them to carry it out.

Strike Power

For the first time in 80 years, organized labor across industries in an American city unified to walk off the job together in a general strike on January 23rd. We are lucky in Minnesota to have unions that have flirted with coordinated strike action before, but the 23rd still represented a major escalation in the tactics of our local labor movement. Never before in the history of our state—home to the first recorded sit-down strike in the US and one of its most militant general strikes—have unions acted collectively for a work stoppage while under contract with their employers. One poll estimated that nearly 9% of registered voters statewide skipped work, with an additional 14% participating in other ways.

Strike Power is the ability to withhold our labor in order to deprive the ruling class of the value we create. While street power confronts the secret police directly, strike power takes the fight to the economic actors backing the Trump regime. Billionaires spent a combined $2.6 billion in the 2024 election, overwhelmingly for Republicans, and contributed the large majority of funds spent by outside groups in favor of Trump. Trump could not have been elected again without the influence of the billionaire class and his power largely depends on their continued support.

The billionaire class benefits directly from this assault on our immigrant neighbors. Most clearly, the significantly expanded ICE budget has won billions in lucrative contracts for Trump’s largest corporate donors, but immigration enforcement also serves capital by intensifying the exploitation of immigrant workers. ICE terror campaigns undercut workers’ rights and hinder organizing, even targeting outspoken union leaders. The intended result of such tactics is to bully an entire section of the work force into submission. The threat of ICE has for years been a common tool used by bosses to abuse labor and retaliate against organizers. Raids may disrupt production for businesses that employ immigrant workers, but they simultaneously allow those businesses to disregard the minimum wage and labor protections of the workers who are left behind. Deported workers are even further exploited by US corporations seeking cheap labor in undeveloped countries. So while Stephen Miller and MAGA extremists may have ideological interests in mass deportation, the billionaire class has material interests. Make no mistake: ICE is advancing white supremacy, but ICE is also waging the class war.

The general strike has a long history as one of our most potent democratic tactics for disrupting corporate profits, forcing political concessions, and challenging billionaire control over the economy. Without our labor, businesses close, commerce stalls, and the wheels of capitalism stop turning. The moment supporting the regime stops being profitable, the billionaire class will abandon it.

January 23rd was a monumental step in the right direction, but we are still a long way from a labor movement strong enough to topple fascism, much less anchor a movement for socialism. Organized labor is the backbone of working class power and our first line of defense against the oligarchy. I will leave it to others to theorize the role of organized socialists in developing a left-labor bloc, but meanwhile Twin Cities DSA members are organizing for the next strike. Within our unions, the rank and file were excluded from key decisions for this strike. To hear the president of SEIU Local 26 tell it, union leadership called the strike after a private call with only a fraction of their membership. We are fighting for democratic decision making institutionally and building it ourselves in workers assemblies. Outside of the established labor movement, the large majority of workers in Minnesota remain unorganized. Like the corporate and retail employee organizing against ICE at Target, socialists are taking advantage of opportunities opened by this moment to bring a larger share of the working class into struggle.

State Power

The Minnesota resistance has demonstrated how much working people can accomplish by acting together, but it has also highlighted the absolute necessity of contending for state power. The Twin Cities easily surpassed the oft-vaunted 3.5% rule and yet remain heavy underdogs. Many of our local officials, most notably Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz, have done little except talk in front of TV cameras and file lawsuits against an agency that violated nearly 100 court orders in January alone. Facing hostile forces in the federal government and toothless actors at the state and local level, our movement is stretched to its limits just trying to prevent harm. To have socialist control of local government would only strengthen our ability to fight back.

State Power is the ability to control and wield state resources. In fairness to politicians like Frey and Walz, there are limits to the way Minnesotan officials can safely exercise state power under these conditions without risking armed conflict between different levels of government. Still, DSA-endorsed city council members in Minneapolis and St Paul led the charge to strengthen both cities’ separation ordinances to prevent municipal collaboration with ICE, secure millions of dollars in rental assistance for residents unable to go to work, fight to extend required notice before evictions, delay liquor licence renewal for hotels housing ICE, and investigate police response to protests. At the state capitol, socialist legislators have advanced bills to prohibit state and local agencies from sharing data or otherwise collaborating with ICE, ban 287(g) agreements with DHS, and enable Minnesotans to sue federal immigration enforcement in state court. DSA electeds have also taken on important leadership roles in the grassroots resistance. Some liberal politicians have joined our socialists-in-office in these votes and actions, but Frey and Walz are at best doing nothing and at worst in the way.

A mayor of Minneapolis accountable to our mass movement could have the city distribute know-your-rights materials to every business and residence, and find emergency shelter for all of our unhoused neighbors to protect them from ICE harassment and kidnapping. Instead, Jacob Frey vetoed the eviction notice extension ordinance and used his sudden national platform to speak against the abolition of ICE. A governor accountable to our movement would have actualized the widespread demand for an eviction moratorium. They could have ended Department of Corrections collaboration with ICE, directed state agencies to hold the rental car companies supplying ICE accountable for license plate tampering, or called a special legislative session to move anti-ICE bills sooner. The governor could have even shut down ramps to state highways 55 and 62 leading out of the Whipple Federal Building to make it harder for ICE to get around the metro area. Instead, Tim Walz sent the National Guard to the Whipple to contain protest while negotiating behind closed doors with the Trump regime.

Operation Metro Surge was a violent reminder of what is at stake in the contest for state power. Liberal leadership failed working class Minnesotans in the midst of crisis, choosing legal procedure and wealthy landlords over the urgent needs of the people. This ineffective politics of capitulation to capital helped create the conditions for fascism to arise in the first place. To defeat it, our electoral projects must advance transformative reforms that enhance our street and strike power and polarize along class lines.

Screen Power

Screen Power is the ability to capture broad public attention and win the narrative battle about what is happening on the ground through primarily digital tools. Minnesotan screen power is most clearly manifest in the viral videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti murders, but this is not the first time that filming state violence brought Minnesota into the national spotlight. From Jamar Clark to Philando Castille to the infamous bystander video of George Floyd, Black Minnesotans have long used cell phones to document police murder of our neighbors and disseminate the evidence across social media when mainstream news outlets ignored these stories. Videos spread through grassroots networks online became a core feature of the Black Lives Matter movement and significantly shaped public opinion on police and public safety.

Primed by years of watching state violence play out on our screens, neighbors on Portland Avenue started recording at the first sign of escalation on the day Renee Good was killed. Governor Walz’s admonition to “hit record,” coming a full week after Good’s murder, only reminded us of what Black organizers in Minnesota have been saying all along: the repressive arm of the state is never a reliable narrator of its own actions, no matter whether its agents wear a mask or a badge.

Our screen power was effective because it escaped the left and liberal echo chambers where we were always going to attract attention. Even after the news cycle moved on from Good, Minnesota held onto the spotlight through mass participation in the resistance to ICE. So when Alex Pretti was shot 10 times by CBP, his murder broke containment online. ICE and CBP’s actions were widely condemned in a variety of “typically apolitical online spaces,” demonstrating the digital reach that our movement already had and fortifying our advantage in the narrative battle. Recent research has found that content creators in these non-political forums are among the most effective online messengers for changing minds on political issues. For instance, much was made about the viral, well-produced videos released by the Zohran Mamdani campaign, but he dominated social media in large part because New York-based influencers who might otherwise be posting get-ready-with-me’s or celebrity commentary were flooding the internet with Zohran endorsements. Our ability to continue winning over mostly apolitical content creators is crucial to form permission structures for the MAGA base to defect and build a durable majority against fascism.

Social media is unique as a mass communication tool where regular people can, to some extent, collectively shape the narrative through likes and shares. Trump and the billionaire class recognize this power, which is why recently-acquired TikTok is allegedly censoring anti-ICE content, fascist influencers came to Minnesota in droves, and ICE itself is filming propaganda for social media on the job. The digital age demands of organized socialists a comprehensive digital strategy. In addition to presenting a coherent alternative to the ideologies propagated by editorial boards and cable news pundits, we should pursue a culture of implicit support for socialist ideas online by bringing in creators with existing audiences.

Towards a Mass Politics

Through power in the streets, on strike, through the state, and on our screens, Minnesota effectively beat back a fascist occupation. What made each successful was not ideological dogmatism but mass participation. The resistance is made up of mostly liberals who, while increasingly frustrated with the Democratic establishment, remain committed to the party and do not share our end goals of establishing a socialist society. Yet the struggle is changing them. There is no better demonstration of the failure of establishment politics than to buy groceries for the family down the street, come face to face with masked thugs outside of your kid’s school, walk off the job for the first time, and watch the politicians you once trusted do almost nothing. Minnesotans are waking up to the need for a more radical agenda to combat Trump, and they are growing weary of the pace of change. To defeat fascism and win over our neighbors to socialist politics requires more than a clearly articulate alternative to the status quo. Organized socialists must entice our neighbors into political struggle, develop their leadership, and wield power together strategically to deliver tangible gains.

Subscribe now

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must become the next president of the United States.

Just one year in with Trump’s second term, many of our worst fears have been confirmed. We glibly talk of coups, civil wars, rigged elections and concentration camps, not as mere hypotheticals, but as real and tangible things, things that seem in store. Trump posts threats of genocide and the world can only look on in horror to see if he’ll actually do it. Nobody can say for sure how far down this abyss really goes.

But in this darkest hour, we find the enemy exhausted and weakened, our ranks swelling. Rather than a permanent fascist realignment, the new ruling coalition is shattering in real time. Trump’s popularity is sinking to new lows as everything falls apart for him—a flailing economy, the Epstein files, rage at ICE agents kidnapping children and murdering bystanders, and now another pointless quagmire in the Middle East.

And having built a cult around their god-king for the past decade, the Republican party feels more vulnerable than ever as his body rots and withers. Like a medieval king whose person was thought to be linked with the prosperity of the land, so too is the fate of the American fascist movement inseparable from the person of Donald Trump, a man as mortal as any. None of the hopefuls to replace him have the same magnetism.

The danger has not yet passed, nor should we grow complacent, but the tides have turned, and the midterms seem to be shaping up to be a reversal in electoral fortunes on a scale not seen in many years. While we should not over-index special elections, it’s impossible to not feel a tinge of optimism when a Democrat can overperform by 31% in a district Trump won to flip it. It seems we are being given a rare opportunity: a second chance. The question is, what will we do with it?

Enter stage left, a congresswoman from the Bronx.

A Second Chance

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems preternaturally suited to be a repudiation of Trumpism. Her election as a young working class woman of color, would be a symbolic triumph over the oligarchic, white supremacist and misogynistic creed of MAGA. But not merely an apt image, no one is more fitted than she to herald in a new political era. In the 2028 Democratic primary, we will decide what to do with our second chance, and it is by no means certain we will capitalize on it. Because of this, it is paramount that AOC run for president, and we must get behind her. Not only does she have it in her to win, but she has a better chance than Bernie did. She is not his successor, but the fulfillment of his promise.

Every electoral defeat forces the losing party to confront and grapple with its loss. Inevitably, competing narratives and views emerge as to how to move forward, and these struggles define the contours of factional politics. After 2016 two broad camps emerged, roughly mapping onto the Clinton-Sanders divide of the primary. For some, Trump’s first victory was an aberration, a fluke, and one that wasn’t supposed to happen. Others saw an opportunity: Clinton’s defeat was the culmination of NAFTA and neoliberalism, of emptied out towns and closed down factories. The white working class with their “economic anxiety” merely wanted to shake up the system that had failed them.

Never popular during his first term, Trump’s presidency unraveled almost as soon as it began. By its end, as a new disease upended our lives, the American people were tired of his antics, and wanted to move on. Not a revolution—they rejected that option—but a promise that everything could be reset to the way it was before Trump descended down that golden escalator. They turned to a figure of nostalgia: Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, and the smooth comfort of normalcy that he represented. Over the course of his term, Biden stayed within the bounds of ordinary politics, despite governing in extraordinary times.

This attempt at returning to normalcy failed. With instability and mass murder abroad, and spiraling prices at home, by the end of Biden’s term, America felt listless, with no one at the helm as chaos seemed to be the order of the day. And into this void again stepped Donald Trump.

Trump’s victory in 2024 could not have felt more catastrophic. The weeks that followed were nothing like the dizzying days that came after the 2016 election. Gone was the shock, the confusion. The outcome seemed plausible, even expected. Gone too was the sense that they were a hateful minority. “America is a fascist nation,” the results announced, and as everywhere swung red—across races and ages, genders and geography—we almost believed it.

Having shed his establishment handlers on January 6th, Trump and his movement spent four years in the wilderness stewing and radicalizing, as the thirst for revenge consumed their souls. While his first election was simply the inauguration of a new president, his second marked The End. The ideologies of the broad left—socialism, progressivism, liberalism, feminism, even the concept of human kindness—felt not just temporarily defeated, but vanquished. We were witnessing the fall of democracy and a new era of eternal darkness.

Not reopening the same rifts, Trump’s second term has again divided Democrats between growing camps, somewhat mirroring but not entirely matching those that came before. While the future is ever mercurial, two roads appear to lay before us: one defined by cynicism, another by belief; one which leads only to doom and demoralization, another which can redeem us; one represented by a millionaire governor from California, another by a former bartender.

Capitulation Politics

While no one is in the “lead” for the Democratic nomination (it’s far too soon for that), an early frontrunner is Gavin Newsom. With his outreach to the far right, his flip flopping and his pivots towards reactionary centrism, Newsom seems to be angling to enact an American version of Starmerism. Keir Starmer (for those fortunate enough to not know) is the current Prime Minister of the UK and the Leader of the Labour Party. After a decade of Conservative misrule, in 2024 British voters gave him an overwhelming majority (411 of 650 seats), but this had less to do with Starmer than the fact that he wasn’t the incumbent.

Yet granted such a vast mandate, Starmer has done nothing but squander it, taking a hard right turn on issues such as immigration and trans rights, with predictable consequences for his support. He has propelled the fascist Reform party to first in the polls, while progressive voters flee to the Greens.

While Starmerism may appear at first glance to be similar to the politics of a return to normalcy, it is actually something far worse: total capitulation. The crime of Clinton or Biden wasn’t failing to assess the danger of Trumpism, it was misunderstanding it as a temporary blemish on our politics that would go away. Newsom’s project, by contrast, embraces Trumpism, taking on the bigoted social views of Republicans. Others, such as Josh Shapiro (on his quest to claw back changing Democratic views on Israel) and John Fetterman (on his quest to become a Republican) are also representative of the same Capitulation Politics.

Newsom’s nomination would be a disaster for the same reason it has been in Britain. Progressive voters, already demoralized in 2024 over Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide, will find themselves even more so, only exacerbating voter disengagement, and we will find the fascist right once again ascendant.

Belief vs. Nihilism

There are ideological differences that divide the present Democratic coalition, but the underlying tension isn’t so much between clashing worldviews, but between belief itself and nihilism. Whether socialist or liberal, center left or left wing—we believe in something, and that what happens to people, real people, matters.

Trumpism, by contrast, lacks any of this. It holds no values other than self-enrichment and self-gratification, a screaming maelstrom of animalistic urges, domination, rape and murder. There is no moral logic because it is deliberately anti-moral. Those hurt in its unquenching drive for power could not matter less, just grist for the content mills. And of the MAGA base? They squeal for it, the red hatted piggies hungry for their slop. Their lives haven’t improved, but that’s not the point, resentment and malevolence is all they live for.

Newsom isn’t Trump, but his mode of politics is the same. He and his reactionary centrist politics are a color swapped inversion of Trump, from the use of Content to the naked drive for power. And holding no beliefs, he tramples on the exact same victims as those who suffer under fascism.

Laying out the divisions this way, it’s obvious why a candidate like Zohran was able to break out in a time such as this. An authentic candidate—who is genuine and thoughtful, who cares about his constituents—is a breath of fresh air. Cuomo, another representative of Capitulation Politics, could not stand up to someone like Zohran, because voters saw through him and they did not like what they saw. (It’s no coincidence that Cuomo, like Trump, was a heavy producer of AI slop). And yes the classic young left wing voter were critical for Zohran’s victory, but they alone could not bring him over the top. While Bernie divided left wing voters from left-liberal ones, Zohran united them into a single coalition. Repulsed by Cuomo’s sleaze, such voters turned towards a democratic socialist, ending the career of a candidate who had seemed invincible. This dynamic is a defining feature of the current terrain of politics, and it will continue to be one through the 2028 primary. As a result, it is imperative that we have a standard bearer in the primary who can channel our faith, lest we ourselves fall into the same darkness that has consumed the Republicans. Luckily there is a woman clearly fit for the job.

No Return to Normalcy

An AOC presidency would be no return to normalcy. Democratic voters want a fighter, someone who will take on the corrupt elite, the tech oligarchs and the Supreme Court, who will end the genocide and endless wars in the Middle East, who will destroy Trumpism, not let him walk free. Few have been more consistent on this than AOC. And like Zohran has, she can combine the good-governance and clean politics that appeal to social liberals, with an ambitious and revolutionary vision for America. Where 10 years ago AOC was seen as a fringe radical, today she has wide appeal beyond the socialist core and into the mainstream.

Added to this fertile soil is the fact that an Ocasio-Cortez presidential campaign will be bigger than either of Bernie’s runs. This is for the simple reason that the American left is so much stronger and well prepared than in the late 2010s. Even as the popularity of our message has grown, so too has our organizational might. Recently exceeding 100k members, the Democratic Socialists of America is larger than ever. In 2016 Bernie almost entirely stood alone, today there is a wealth of elected officials who would assuredly endorse AOC, from the halls of congress, to state officials, to the mayor of the largest city in the country. The linkage between labor and the establishment has also shifted in the past decade, as a budding left-labor alliance continues to grow.

AOC is also an extremely effective political communicator. Young and understanding the digital age, such communication techniques are not only pivotal for winning an election, but also in governing. Social media is the primary medium through which a growing number of voters experience politics, and one of Biden’s shortcomings was his inability to adapt to this new reality, ceding much narrative ground to the right as problems arose.

Further differing herself from Biden, AOC seems to understand that Democratic hypocrisies help fuel the very cynicism that strengthens the Republican Party. Yes, with governance and an executive office compromises are inevitable (something we are already seeing with Zohran’s mayoralty), politics is an art of give and take after all, but there is a difference between negotiating with what one can and cannot accomplish, and with enabling a mass genocide. Cynicism feeds into the amorality of Trumpism, while demoralizing humanistic voters.

Beyond persecuting Trump’s officials (something she’s already promised to do), AOC could transform America. While we don’t yet know the precise details of what her platform would look like, we can be certain that she will go further than Biden ever did with an ambitious legislative plan to upend our country’s unjust economic order through proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

We also shouldn’t underestimate what her presidency will do abroad. For decades, the might of the American war machine has been used to kill and to maim innocent people across the world, from Iran and Iraq to Vietnam to Latin America. But under Trump, the coercive logic of imperialism and transactional gangsterism has reached its apotheosis. Under AOC we can attempt to develop a foreign policy of international cooperation and the promotion of the good of all people.

A Chance for Ourselves and the Planet

This isn’t to say that any of this will be easy, or that a President AOC will wash away our problems—it would not. But it would give us the chance, for ourselves and for the planet.

Some, including seemingly some in her inner circle, might believe a Senate seat is the safer target. They are wrong. Yes, a Senator AOC may have greater influence on Democratic politics, and such a move might serve as a stronger stepping stone to a future presidential run than a House seat. But the time for her to run for president isn’t then, it’s now.

More Americans want to abolish ICE today than keep it. All the forces of reaction that Trump unleashed are in retreat, and they have conjured a situation where Americans are shifting leftward at a rapid rate. Whichever Democrat walks into the Oval Office in 2029 will come with an immense amount of political capital at their finger tips.

Furthermore, AOC already has most of what she would gain from a Senate seat. She already has far more name recognition than most sitting Democratic senators or governors, and more popularity. She is also already a prolific fundraiser, and the moment her campaign announced she would be flush with cash. And beyond that she’s already polling in the top handful of candidates!

Were AOC to lose the primary, her career also would not be over. Come 2030 she could run for governor or take on Gillibrand. Reagan ran for president twice, in 1968 and 1976 before he was finally made the nominee, so did Biden. It’s not like she would disappear forever. And unlike in 2018, where AOC stood virtually alone, today we have a far deeper bench of elected officials and candidates ready to pick up where she left off. While such a loss may be bitter and disappointing, we’ve seen what having a candidate like Bernie in the primary can do to help alter the direction of the party, and it’s critical that such a voice is present. The lack of a left wing challenger in 2024 was devastating. The best way to survive the catastrophe of a Newsom presidency and the accompanying right wing backlash is to have a powerful, institutionalized left, which an AOC presidential campaign would help strengthen and grow.

An important question for the naysayers is simple: who else is there? No other candidate, not a Pritzker or a Van Hollen, while perhaps palatable in the situation where AOC declines to run, will be able to activate the depth and breadth of energy AOC will capture. Nor will another option out of the democratic socialist or labor left work. Rashida has neither the interest nor the same public profile, and Shawn Fain will never win a Democratic primary when he has tied himself so closely to one of Trump’s most unpopular policies: tariffs. More importantly, he has a general strike in 2028 to worry about.

Yes, there are fair and legitimate criticisms of AOC (though she is doing her best to address them). She is not perfect. But after years of intense and acrimonious debates about AOC, it can feel as if the weight of the world rests on how they are decided. We proceed as if our discussions and disputes, the articles we write, the posts we make will determine the course of events. Our scribbles cannot contend with the forces of history that align behind AOC. Everything we have argued will matter very little, forgotten and condemned, overwhelmed by that which we have no agency over. Should AOC run for president, millions of people will be instantly energized and her campaign will sweep us away. A man once said that politics begin where the millions are. An AOC presidential run will prove him right.

History is converging to create the means, and the opportunity to have a Democratic Socialist president. While cowards flinch and reactionary centrists sneer, it is on us, and on AOC, to recognize the chance we must take. We may not have it again.

“Nothing ever happens.”

Or so sayeth the meme. Political life in advanced capitalist societies often feels eternally unchanging. The rich get richer, the rest of us get poorer, political institutions lose legitimacy, ecological crises accelerate, and yet the basic structure of the system appears stubbornly unchanged.

This apparent stubborn stability has encouraged both liberal gradualism and left pessimism: one side assumes reform will accumulate into transformation over time, while the other doubts that meaningful change is possible at all.

The Scientific Bias of Gradualism

The evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, developed by Stephen Jay Gould (a personal hero) and Niles Eldredge, offers a more realistic framework for understanding political and economic transformation. The theory holds that species tend to experience very long periods of relative stability, interrupted by brief episodes of rapid, sharp change driven by environmental disruption. Evolution, in this account, is not a smooth and continuous process but a stop-start one, characterized by extended stasis punctuated by sudden massive reorganization

Gould was explicit that this insight had implications beyond biology. A self-identified Marxist and historian of science, he argued that gradualism in evolutionary theory reflected cultural and ideological preferences. “The prevalence of gradualism in evolutionary thought reflects a set of cultural preferences about change, not the overwhelming force of data,” he wrote at the time. The assumption that change must be slow, continuous, and incremental mirrored liberal political beliefs that social systems naturally improve through reform, patience, and institutional learning.

Punctuated equilibrium challenged that comfort. Stability, Gould insisted, is not the absence of evolution but one of its central features, and therefore something that must itself be explained.

Seen through this lens, capitalist societies appear less as continuously evolving organisms than as systems optimized for stability and keeping things running more or less as is. Legal frameworks, property relations, labor markets, welfare regimes, and political parties are all structured to reproduce existing arrangements and manage conflict within narrow bounds. Change does occur, but it is typically marginal, technocratic, or distributive, leaving underlying power relations intact. Incremental reform often strengthens the resilience of the system rather than transforming it, postponing crisis while quietly accumulating contradictions.

This helps explain why liberal political economy so often misreads moments of rupture. Financial crises, mass uprisings, sudden realignments, and state transformations appear to come “out of nowhere,” even when their causes have been visible for decades. Trump and the wave of authoritarianism he is riding seems like some strange outlier. The problem is not a lack of warning signs, but an analytic framework that assumes continuity where history repeatedly delivers anything but.

Historical Disruptions

Historical materialism has long recognized this pattern. Marx described capitalism as a system capable of reproducing itself for long periods while generating internal tensions that eventually erupt into crisis. The point was never that collapse was inevitable or that outcomes were predetermined, but that structural contradictions tend to accumulate silently until existing institutions can no longer contain them.

Gould noted this affinity directly, observing that punctuated equilibrium aligned closely with Marxist accounts of long stability punctured by revolutionary transformation. “Punctuated equilibrium has often been called a Marxist theory. That is not accidental,” he wrote in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983). He argued instead that Marxists had simply taken historical discontinuity seriously long before biologists did.

Twentieth-century political economy offers abundant examples of this dynamic. The New Deal as a state compromise to stave off massive strike waves was not the result of decades of patient reform, but of the Great Depression’s sudden destruction of economic orthodoxies and political constraints. Social democratic like solutions across Europe expanded dramatically after World War II, when total war shattered fiscal taboos and legitimized planning on a scale previously unthinkable. The neoliberal turn of the 1970s was likewise not a slow ideological conversion, but a response to inflation, energy shocks, and profitability crises that destabilized the postwar settlement. In each case, long periods of relative stability ended abruptly, and new regimes emerged in compressed time.

And here again over the last year we see the kinds of black swan weeks that feel like years happen over and over again–with rapid risings and fallings of the US right and left. Zohran’s win in NYC is a thing simply unimaginable a decade ago. The financial crisis of 2008 and the overlapping shocks of the 2020s suggest that we may be living through a prolonged punctuation whose outcome remains unresolved.

Existing institutions have absorbed extraordinary stress without fully transforming, producing a sense of suspended crisis rather than resolution. Punctuations do not guarantee successful adaptation. Some end in authoritarian consolidation, stagnation, or fragmentation rather than renewal.

One risk in applying punctuated equilibrium to politics is fatalism. If systems change only during crises, it can seem as though agency matters little outside moments of rupture. Gould rejected this conclusion. Long periods of stasis are not empty time. They are periods in which ideas are developed, organizations are built, capacities are tested, and alternative institutions are quietly assembled. When rupture comes, the decisive factor is rarely the brilliance of new ideas invented in the moment, but the readiness of forces that already exist.

Implications for a Strategy of the Left

This all has important implications for left strategy. “Stasis is data,” Gould famously wrote in 1977.

It suggests that the central political task during periods of apparent immobility is not to force premature breaks or indulge in fantasies of imminent collapse, but to prepare for moments when the constraints of normal politics weaken. It also cautions against mistaking institutional durability for legitimacy. Systems can endure long after they have lost popular consent, precisely because they are designed to resist change.

Punctuated equilibrium does not offer a blueprint for political action, nor does it even promise a general law of change. But a nondogmatic, non-mechanistic reading of it applied to society is a way of thinking clearly about time, crisis, and transformation. It reminds us that stability is not a natural, eternally constant baseline and that real change often happens faster than those living through stasis are prepared to imagine.

Capitalist societies are not slowly evolving toward justice or collapse. They are systems under pressure, capable of long endurance and sudden failure. The task of politics is not to predict the exact moment when equilibrium breaks, but to decide who is prepared to shape what comes after.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela on January 3rd was an illegal violation of another’s nation’s sovereignty. But why did it happen, and more importantly, what can we in the U.S. do to resist it and other coming imperialist ventures? Power Map’s Daniel Goulden spoke with Gabriel Hetland, an Associate Professor of Africana, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at the University of Albany, to try and get to the bottom of these critical questions.

Daniel Goulden: The first thing I want to ask you about is drug trafficking. The arrest warrant accuses him of running a drug cartel basically, is that at all true?

Gabriel Hetland: It’s such a farce that the Department of Justice actually admitted that this organization that they have been talking about for months, the Cartel de los Soles, doesn’t exist. It is true that there is some drug trafficking in Venezuela and that it has infiltrated the state, but Venezuela is not a producer of drugs on any scale whatsoever. It’s a very minor player in the transit route for cocaine, mostly from Colombia, but most of that goes to Europe and not the U.S.

There’s a lot of illicit activity in Venezuela. There’s illegal gold mining, there’s all sorts of corruption, there’s phony businesses that get money from the state and then don’t actually produce anything. So there’s many forms of illegal and corrupt activity that the state is involved in, and I’m sure Maduro himself and officials were involved in that in various ways, but the idea that he was the head of this drug trafficking cartel is ridiculous.

One account that I think is probably pretty accurate says that the CIA invented Cartel do los Soles in the 1990s, but it wasn’t actually a cartel, and wasn’t actually an organization. Tren de Aragua, which is a gang in Venezuela that does have some reach in the U.S. does exist, but that’s not the cartel that Trump and Rubio have pointed to, and Maduro’s not the head of it either. Whatever criticisms you can have of Maduro, the idea he’s the head of a narco state is ridiculous.

And then just to point out how farcical this whole thing is, in early December, Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras, who was convicted in the United States and sentenced to 45 years for actual narco trafficking, was pardoned by Trump!

Daniel Goulden: So what are the actual reasons for this kidnapping? Trump himself says it’s for oil, but at the same time, oil companies are not producing as much, and the price of oil is not high enough to justify new investment. It weirdly seems that oil is not the actual reason for this. I’m curious about your take on that.

Gabriel Hetland: I think oil is part of it, but definitely not the whole thing. I would say a major factor is the project to destroy the Latin American left. Another is Marco Rubio’s lifelong obsession with Cuba. Venezuela is a stepping stone to his real goal, which is regime change in Cuba. We can all have our complicated feelings about the government in Cuba, but Marco Rubio shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

Stephen Miller has also been surprisingly heavily involved, and he’s obsessed with fentanyl production in Mexico. He wanted to bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico over the summer, but that got translated into the boat bombings of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, although no evidence has ever been produced to substantiate any of the claims that the people smuggling them were actually drug dealers.

Then Venezuela fits into the broader anti-immigrant frenzy. War with Venezuela is useful to whip up anti-migrant tendencies, and Venezuelans specifically have been targets of such racist, xenophobic sentiment. There’s also a specific reason that if the U.S. is in a war with Venezuela, they’re hoping that the Supreme Court will say they can deport as many Venezuelans as they want and call them enemy combatants. I’m not sure how this relatively smooth kidnapping of Maduro will affect that because it’s not like the U.S. is in an active war with Venezuela.

I do think oil is part of it. Not the main one, not the only one, but Trump is obsessed with oil. And he’s obsessed with controlling Venezuelan oil. There’s reports that Trump has been talking to oil company executives for months about his plans in Venezuela. He didn’t inform Congress of what he was going to do, but apparently he told oil companies a while ago. He has a ridiculous narrative that Venezuela stole the US’s oil. I think that’s loosely based on the fact that U.S. companies were involved in the development of the Venezuelan oil industry over the course of the 20th century, and then there was a nationalization of oil in Venezuela in 1976, but that was fully compensated in the courts. There was a renationalization under Chavez in 2007, and there are some disputes around that and some oil companies are upset about it, but Trump is just really confused when he talks about all this.

But the idea of resurrecting Venezuela’s oil industry is also a really challenging project. It’s been utterly devastated by U.S. sanctions. Experts who study it have said it’ll take a decade to get back on its feet. This is not something that Trump could actually profit from overnight, it will take quite a long time.

And then the other thing I would say in terms of motivation for what is happening is a will to dominate. The Trump administration, domestically and in foreign affairs, just wants to have the ability to do whatever the hell it wants, anywhere, with no restrictions. You can see this in the rhetoric that Hegseth and others have used, it’s all about whatever the U.S. decides, that’s what’s going to go. It seems like there was a minor motivation for Trump to take out Maduro because he didn’t like the fact that he was dancing in the streets, and Trump felt he was making fun of him and making light of the threats. There’s this machista element. During the press conference Hegseth had an almost psychosexual moment, where he was talking about warriors and how beautiful it was how these men were completing the operation.

Daniel Goulden: What is the connection between America’s chaotic domestic politics and what just happened in Venezuela?

Gabriel Hetland: There’s some obvious ones like the anti-Maduro lobby, and the anti-communist far right in Miami, that Marco Rubio is connected to, and they have exerted significant pressure on Trump over the last year. There was a special envoy, Richard Grinnell, who was going down to Caracas and had a pretty good relationship with Maduro. He was trying to get a deal for Chevron and open up the Venezuelan economy. It seemed like Trump was fairly open to that, but then there were some far right Cuban American Republicans in Florida that just exploded and were really upset about that, and were pushing against a “normalization” of relationships with Venezuela.

It’s hard to disentangle the project of foreign and domestic domination. Trump wants to do whatever he wants with his enemies. I talked about it in a piece I wrote for New Left Review in October as “dominance without hegemony.” We think of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as political rule that is achieved through a combination of force and consent, but with consent prevailing over force, and popular buy-in to some extent. Trump is not operating in that way a lot of the time. He’s operating in a much more openly coercive, nakedly repressive way, both domestically and abroad. There’s some degree of continuity in that project in the foreign and domestic realms.

The other thing is the Epstein files. The desire to distract from the domestic pressure around the Epstein files has been regularly mentioned. It’s hard to imagine that that hasn’t been something of a factor—the old whip up a foreign war to distract from your problems at home seems to be part of the dynamic going on.

Daniel Goulden: I noticed a lot of people saying that in the lead up to Iraq we at least came up with a narrative that we were giving the Iraqis freedom when we wanted to invade for oil, now we’re not even doing that. But it seems to me that was missing the point because it was still the exact same thing. Oil was the narrative this time, while the actual reasons were not oil, but attempting to solidify an authoritarian hyper-masculine regime, and make Trump look good.

Gabriel Hetland: I think they would have been delighted to have a non-Madurista government in place, but the reason they are in this quasi-alliance, and left in place most of the Maduro government, is because of their interest in stability. They recognize the opposition has no prospects of smoothly transitioning Venezuela or controlling the military. Maria Carina Machado, a far right leader who earlier this year won the Nobel Prize (ridiculously in my opinion), doesn’t have any actual ability to run or control Venezuela. That’s why Trump very explicitly threw her under the bus, saying she doesn’t have the respect to be president. He means within the current regime.

The word democracy didn’t appear once in the press conference on January 3. That’s pretty striking because even though it clearly is not a motivating factor at all for Trump, it has been something Marco Rubio has talked about a fair amount over his career, but I don’t even know if he has used the word democracy at all in recent comments about Venezuela, maybe he was sort of gesturing in that a direction a bit, but the idea that it’s about democracy is absolutely not part of the project whatsoever.

It’s really the project of dominating Latin America, threatening other leftist leaders in Latin America, threatening other countries around the world.

Daniel Goulden: What is next for Venezuela and the Venezuelan people?

Gabriel Hetland: It’s important to start with the fact that Venezuela has been in an incredible crisis since 2016-2017. There are many different factors that are responsible: mismanagement by the Venezuelan government, currency policy, the dependency on oil and the decline in the price of oil around 2014. Then U.S. sanctions were a huge piece. Life has been really hard in Venezuela. Something like seven to eight million Venezuelans left in the last decade. But the situation now could be even worse, and this is what’s terrifying.

The number one biggest threat to the economic well-being of ordinary Venezuelans and political stability is the oil blockade that Trump has declared as of December 16th. He said there’s going to be a complete and total blockade of sanctioned oil tankers. The oil blockade could be devastating because Venezuela gets the vast majority of its income for the state, which then also uses it for importing medicine and food and all sorts of necessary basic goods, by selling oil abroad. Virtually everything in Venezuela comes from the sale of oil. To the extent that the Trump administration has in fact succeeded in blocking the sale of oil and explicitly plans to continue that blockade for the indefinite future, that could be utterly devastating. The well-being of ordinary Venezuelans is profoundly under threat right now.

Everything Trump is talking about doing just adds to that. He’s talking about controlling Venezuela’s oil industry, specifically controlling the profits from it. It’s a little unclear, but it seems there’s going to be some institutionalized relationship there. It’s neocolonial. The U.S. is saying they’re going to force Venezuela to only buy American-made goods based on the sale of Venezuelan oil. It’s incredibly coercive. Rubio has very explicitly said that his plan is to coerce the Venezuelan government into doing whatever the U.S. wants. If you combine that with Trump’s desire to personally control the oil revenue and personally control the oil industry as much as possible, it doesn’t bode well for the Venezuelan people.

It also means that the question of stability is really hard to imagine in that scenario. If Venezuela has even less income than they have now that will be catastrophic for the population, and catastrophic for the stability of Venezuela because there’s actors who benefit from oil money flowing through Venezuela. A lot of that is illicit and corrupt, but it keeps a degree of stability that could be blasted away if that goes by the wayside.

Daniel Goulden: Trump was incredibly hard on Venezuela in his first term. It’s not like this is a new thing, although the tenor is much more extreme. Did the Biden administration reverse any of that or did the Biden administration keep a lot of those sanctions in place, which set the groundwork for Trump to do what he’s doing now?

Gabriel Hetland: The Biden administration did loosen some of the sanctions, but it did not remove them or normalize relationships with Venezuela. There was an ability for Chevron to pretty actively get involved, and that had some effect. Venezuela had a modest, but genuine economic recovery over the last two years after close to a decade of recession and depression. 74% of the economy was destroyed between 2012 and 2020, which people say is the greatest collapse of a non-war time economy in modern history, and the greatest collapse of an economy in Latin American history period. That lasted through 2020. Then in the last couple of years it had started to recover a bit. Life was still really hard for ordinary Venezuelans, it wasn’t great for them, but it was getting a little bit better. That happened under Biden.

Now under Trump with the repressive and coercive situation, I think that could not only be reversed, but made even worse than it was before. We’ll have to see what happens as things are really dynamic and fluid, but there could be some very bad scenarios.

Daniel Goulden: The new president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, at first it seemed like Trump was pitching that she was going to play ball, but then she had a big press conference and said “Maduro is still our president.” Will the new Venezuelan government go along with these neo-colonial requests from the Trump administration?

Gabriel Hetland: Her initial statement was indeed confrontational, and pro-Moduro. That was hours after he had been kidnapped and was in the process of being flown to New York. But on Sunday, the day after, she did a much more conciliatory post on Instagram, where she explicitly said we want to cooperate with the U.S. Since then she’s been mostly conciliatory with some occasional more nationalist rhetoric. I think you have to appreciate the difficult spot she’s in. Trump said that if she doesn’t do what we want, she will meet a face worse than Maduro’s. I don’t know if he’s saying that they would kill her, but it seemed to be the implication.

There’s a lot of good reporting going back months now suggesting that there had been talks between the U.S. and Venezuela, and the plan was to put Delcy Rodríguez in, and apparently Maduro had signed off on that. It would have allowed him to stay in Venezuela and not even have to go into exile. But it seemed clear that Trump wasn’t willing to not have Maduro as a trophy.

A lot of Venezuela experts are speculating, and I would tend to agree, that it’s hard to believe that Rodríguez and some other high ranking members of the Maduro regime weren’t coordinating to some degree with the U.S. I don’t think this necessarily means they plotted the whole thing or betrayed Maduro, but the operation was relatively peaceful. There are 80 people dead, we don’t want to act like that’s not a lot of people, but it’s still a relatively modest death toll for such a major operation. How smooth it was, suggests that there might have been some degree of coordination, and then certainly she has been pretty cooperative, with the important note of what else could she do? She has a gun to her head. It’s hard to imagine what else she could do in this situation.

She’s also trying to appease the Chavista base by occasionally making more nationalist comments and talking about autonomy. She doesn’t have no room for maneuver. She has what Trump needs right now, which is the ability to control the government. She’s able to hold together the coalition and the military in place, and maintain a degree of unity. That’s pretty important. Trump doesn’t want a chaotic situation. He doesn’t want boots on the ground. He’s said he’s open to it, but it’s clear that’s not their preference. So she has something, but other than that she doesn’t have that much leverage. The Trump administration would say, with some credibility, that if you don’t do what we want, we’ll get rid of you and find someone else in the Maduro regime who will.

Daniel Goulden: Medium to long term, will she be able to hold the coalition together? Will the coalition fall apart? Or will there be a bottom-up uprising against the regime and its complicity with the U.S. government?

Gabriel Hetland: Her ability to hold the coalition together is going to be pretty tricky. For the time being it seems feasible that she might be able to provide some degree of stability. Things seem to be surprisingly calm and stable in Venezuela, more than I would have thought if you had told me on Saturday morning that Maduro had been abducted. There’s reports of pretty significant repression. But I would say the problem, again, goes back to the question of the economy. If the sanctions regime remains in place, the oil blockade in particular, it’s just going to get more and more pressure that’s going to explode in various ways. Then maybe you could see a bottom-up popular uprising, or you might see something with members of the military who are upset.

If the U.S. does push a coercive neo-colonial relationship, it’s possible, I don’t want to say that it could have positive effects in Venezuela, but it could be less devastating than some of the alternatives. If enough of the money from selling oil to the U.S. went back to Venezuela and Delcy Rodríguez was able to utilize it to keep various people in powerful positions, especially in the military, happy and then provide some degree of material comfort to ordinary people, I think she will have a possibility of maintaining a higher degree of stability. Whether or not that will happen is a very open question.

There’s also a bunch of competing factions within the Venezuelan state and within Chavismo. There’s different armed groups, involved in illegal gold mining and other illegal activities. The potential for some sort of armed conflict exists. That could certainly happen in Venezuela. It’s not totally far-fetched. If Delcy Rodríguez was not able to keep various sectors happy and provided for, we could see a very unstable situation.

Daniel Goulden: What do you see as the best avenues for people in the U.S. who are horrified by this to resist and fight back against the Trump administration?

Gabriel Hetland: The classic sort of things like protesting and marching are important. We’ve certainly seen a lot of more mainstream Democrats criticize the attack on a procedural level, critical of the fact that Trump doesn’t have congressional authorization for this. But are we really okay with the abduction of foreign leaders and military coups that are authorized by Congress? That’s a pretty weak way to oppose it. A stronger way is to have a more forceful anti-imperialist project, as we’ve seen with the Palestinian movement. It’s been both stronger than it’s ever been, and also sadly seems to be very ineffectual in terms of changing U.S. policy over Gaza, but there’s still a potential. We have seen a lot of growth in that in the last year or two. That is one thing that needs to continue happening. There has to be people saying over and over again that the U.S. is acting as an empire and it doesn’t have the right to do so. We don’t want to live in an empire, we want the U.S. to be a partner to Latin America and treat other countries with respect, at a minimal level not invading them or violating their national sovereignty.

Another thing I’m thinking about is oil imperialism and decarbonization. That’s a more long-term project, but I do think that matters. The extent to which oil is one of the factors here, it’s not the only one, probably not the most important one even, but one of them, means that decarbonization in the U.S. is crucial, and weakening the power of fossil capital in the U.S. is an important part of that. If oil companies don’t have a market for oil in the U.S. because we’ve transitioned energy systems to renewable energy, then why would Trump invade other countries for oil? That’s not going to happen overnight, but it would eliminate one of the significant factors pushing imperial projects of domination in Latin America and elsewhere.

Really pragmatically right now the focus should be pretty relentlessly opposing what the U.S. is doing. There’s been calls from people on the left to not denounce Nicolás Maduro right now and just focus on U.S. actions, I’m in partial agreement. I think we shouldn’t focus too much in this moment on criticizing Maduro. And in terms of critiquing what the US has done it doesn’t matter if Maduro is legitimate or illegitimate. There are many valid reasons to criticize Maduro, however, and I think we can’t shut our eyes to that either, even if we strategically maintain the focus on the US actions.

I find it a little frustrating that there’s a section of the left that wants to go in the opposite direction and hold Maduro up as a wonderful example of a revolutionary leader. I would say that just as we should be quiet about Maduro, I don’t think we should be talking positively about him either. I’ll say as somebody who has studied Venezuela for two decades, it’s ridiculous to talk about Maduro that way. You lose all credibility. There’s massive frustrations of the people of Venezuela, and we absolutely shouldn’t be celebrating him because if you do, it’s clear very quickly to anyone who knows about Venezuela that either you don’t know what you’re talking about, or you’re ignoring a very different reality from the one you’re trying to spin. Just be quiet when it comes to that question and keep the focus on fighting U.S. imperialism.

We can try to push moderate Democrats into more anti-imperialist stances. I’m not a big fan of Chuck Schumer, and he’s been awful on Venezuela. A month or two ago he refused to explicitly condemn the idea of regime change within Venezuela. But some of his statements in the last few days have been stronger. He’s actually questioning the idea of regime change, and questioning some of the lies that Trump has engaged in. So I think that this is a moment to hold up more anti-imperialist progressives and leftists like Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani and AOC, who have had much better statements. Bernie in particular has been really good this week. He explicitly called this rank imperialism, and said it’s not only unconstitutional, it’s not just a problem that Trump isn’t going to Congress, but Trump doesn’t have the right to go after other countries. We should be supporting that and amplifying it, and trying to push other Democrats, and some Republicans too, to take stances like that.

Most of the Republicans have not been particularly great on the issue of Venezuela, but some like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I’m not a fan of, has had a pretty strong critique of Trump’s Venezuela policy for quite a while. We need to have our clear left politics, and our clear anti-imperialist stance, but we have to be strategic. We’ll have to work with liberals, and might even have to work with some moderate Republicans to push back on Trump’s authoritarian project.

This is a moment that is going to expose the limits of U.S. power within Latin America. Trump wants to push everybody out. He’s threatening Gustavo Petro in Colombia, he’s threatening Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, he’s threatening Lula in Brazil. But when he’s done so over the past year on various issues, it’s blown back in his face at times. Trump tried to slap 50% tariffs on Brazil because he was upset about how Brazil was correctly prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro for his attempted coup. Trump got mad about that and went after Lula, but it helped him. Lula was floundering in the polls before, but he was boosted by it. So it’s possible that there will be an anti-imperialist backlash that will help some leftist, nationalist and anti-imperialist candidates in Latin America.

I would end with that to stop Trumpism, we need to have a credible appealing alternative and that’s where the project of democratic socialism represented by the DSA in New York City comes in. Zohran Mamdani and his amazing victory is so necessary. You can’t fight Trump by saying “we don’t want this,” you have to show people that you can deliver something different and something better. I think we’ll be able to change the political dynamics in this country and hopefully in the world, by building a better, different political project.

Daniel Goulden: What is the outlook here for other Latin American leftists, both in terms of the threat from Trumpism? I know that there had been talks of the pink tide receding? Is this maybe a chance for the pink tide to come back? Are these governments in danger of U.S. intervention?

Gabriel Hetland: There’s contradictory dynamics. It’s really frightening that Trump is going to feel emboldened by his success in Venezuela. He’s also had some success in Argentina, where they pumped $40 billion in its flailing economy because the far-right libertarian president Javier Milei was destroying Argentina’s economy and the U.S. rescued it, allowing Milei to win an important national election. His party did surprisingly well when they should have failed. There was also a far right leader just elected in Chile. So Trump’s project of remaking Latin America on far right terrain is going to continue, and he will have some ability to succeed in that. He’s going to threaten other leaders and may engage in that just as he did with Maduro. He’s been talking about doing so with Gustavo Petro. Apparently he and Petro are going to meet in the White House, so we don’t exactly know what’s going on, but that’s a good sign that Trump’s not immediately talking about invading Colombia.

Trump has said to Petro “watch your ass,” that’s a direct quote, and he’s said similar things over and over again. You can imagine that with Colombia’s presidential election in May, Iván Cepeda, the presidential candidate for the left, saying to right wing opponents “do you think the president of Colombia should have to watch his ass the way that Trump told him to?” They’ll be in an awkward spot and either say yes, and show they’re supplicants to U.S. empire, or they’ll have to defend a leftist president who they don’t like. The dynamic will play out in interesting and not entirely predictable ways across Latin America, and in ways that will sometimes benefit the left.

Cuba is going to be devastated. The U.S. is demanding that Venezuela sever its economic relationship with Cuba, which has been fundamentally important for the Cuban state for a number of years. Venezuela sends heavily discounted oil to Cuba. They don’t use most of it, but sell it back on the international market at market rates and use the money for hard currency that Cuba then uses for all sorts of purposes. So Cuba is going to quickly be in a tight spot economically because of what’s happening in Venezuela. They’re the object of direct military threats right now. It’s not clear when exactly that would happen or if it will happen, but it’s a frightening and real possibility at the moment.

It’s a really dangerous time, but I don’t think it’s an entirely hopeless time. We’re in for a wild ride, but it’s not going to be exactly what anyone might predict.

Daniel Goulden: Socialism has always been about internationalism, but in the past we simply didn’t have that many national level figures. It’s hard to engage in internationalism with just your state representatives. But now we have the mayor of the largest city in America who’s a democratic socialist and shares politics with Sheinbaum, Lula and Petro. Given that the way Trump’s aggression in Venezuela is so linked with his domestic aggression, is there potential for international solidarity and international organizing among the broad democratic socialist left?

Gabriel Hetland: There’s definitely potential for that to happen. You’re absolutely right that the left needs to be genuinely internationalist. We don’t want oil imperialism, but we also don’t want, from an eco-socialist point of view, Trump to invade Greenland and then have access to critical minerals that we need for renewable energy, for instance. We don’t want green imperialism either. Having internationalism be a major focus of the left is essential.

The extent to which the left can not engage in what are in my mind relatively unnecessary and self-defeating foolish sectarian battles is important. Don’t get into internal fights about the character of other governments when you don’t have to. Be strategic and disciplined, and just keep your eyes on the prize of opposing U.S. imperialism. It’s not only okay, but necessary to criticize leftist governments in other countries if you study them and actually understand them, but strategically, the priority should be, especially in a moment like this, fighting U.S. imperialism.

If the left in the U.S. is shown to be standing in solidarity with popular movements and ordinary people in Latin America, that could mean something for them. With Palestine, leftists are standing in solidarity with them, even if they’re not effectively stopping the genocide, but it means something. It keeps a political connection and a human connection. I think there’s some value in it. The left should use this moment to become more internationalist and try to build a movement that can stop Trumpism for the long term and let Latin America breathe a little easier.

In his immortal podcast Revolutions, Mike Duncan coined the term “The Entropy of Victory” to refer to the historical tendency for post revolutionary groups to fall into disorganization. After attaining a long sought victory, the coalition that brought the revolution about tends to fall apart along new political lines. Some want to consolidate gains. Others want to push forward. Allies become bitter enemies. Former enemies become friends.

While we have not (yet) lived through a revolution, any organizer lucky enough to notch a win under their belt is very familiar with the fact that while winning is exhilarating, it is also chaotic. A group of scrappy fighters finally crests the mountain and looks across a fresh, new landscape of political possibilities and asks themselves, “What now?” They will not all have the same answer.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory catapulted the organized socialist left across a new threshold of power. An unapologetic Democratic Socialist will now run the largest city in the country and all but declared war on Donald Trump and oligarchic authoritarianism in his victory speech: “After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.” As Trump’s approval ratings fall and the Republicans seem poised to take a historic beating in the upcoming midterms, the socialist left is now on the front foot, a legitimized and powerful force. Our time has finally come.

But in the months since Zohran’s primary victory several fights have broken out inside the socialist movement that demonstrate the entropy of victory. We should not shove these disagreements under the surface. It sucks when those on the left disagree with each other, but ignoring an argument doesn’t make it go away. Instead we should look at who supports what and why, and synthesize new ways forward. This article is an attempt to do so by looking at a question that has underlined many political debates since Zohran’s election: should we consolidate our gains or should we expand? Consolidation would have NYC-DSA focus on winning Zohran’s platform, while expansion would use this moment of political change to expand our movement.

We’ll look at two debates over the potential congressional races of Alexa Avilés and Chi Ossé to better understand how organizers are trying to answer this question.

It’s Zohran’s Party Now. Or Is It?

Before we dive in, when we say the organized socialist left, we’re really talking about the Democratic Socialists of America. Since 2016, DSA has been the only game in town for mass socialist organizing, but in the months after Zohran’s victory, DSA has become something that just a year ago would have been a pipe dream: a true political party.That’s a huge deal. All of these disagreements that we will explore involve factions within DSA and while it can be easy to write them off as “DSA drama,” a popular genre of internet discourse, these are all real political conundrums. We have a socialist party now and we have to figure out how to navigate the future.

And complicating all of these fights is Zohran himself. Unlike Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has always put some distance between herself and DSA, Zohran was an elected leader within the organization before running for office and as an assemblymember regularly took part in internal decisionmaking and democracy. As mayor-elect, that hasn’t changed. Zohran has actively encouraged his supporters to join DSA and is still taking part in DSA decision making. That makes total sense! Zohran is a party leader and party leaders can and should take part in the decisions of their party.

But where Zohran has chosen to intervene has caused friction, particularly in the cases of Chi and Alexa, the entropy of victory rearing its ugly head. In both cases, organizers, including Zohran himself, have had to grapple with the electoral opportunities presented in the wake of victory and the political realities of trying to implement a democratic socialist political agenda. These points of disagreement will define the political questions socialists struggle with for the foreseeable future.

Alexa vs Brad vs Dan

The first disagreement we’ll look at was around Alexa’s abortive campaign for congress in NY-10, which includes the most progressive parts of Brooklyn. Congressman Dan Goldman, an heir to the Levi Jeans fortune and Zionist moderate, is a terrible fit for the district. He has been a target of the left for years. Alexa Avilés, a NYC-DSA endorsed councilmember, expressed interest in primarying Goldman and received the overwhelming endorsement of the chapter, but then a problem named Brad Lander emerged.

Brad Lander is New York City’s progressive comptroller who was initially viewed as a front runner for mayor, but his happy warrior wonk shtick never really caught on and he found himself eclipsed by Zohran. Lander could have then cozied up to Cuomo in the hopes of landing a plum administration job, but he didn’t. Instead he and Zohran co-endorsed one another and Lander spent the last few weeks of the primary campaign as Zohran’s most fervent supporter.

There was speculation that Zohran would appoint Lander as First Deputy Mayor. But Zohran ended up appointing Dean Fuleihan, a long-time city technocrat. While Lander has always painted himself as an Elizabeth Warrenesque policy dork, he is still a politician with his own career to think of which could have brought him into conflict with the mayor he was appointed to serve. First Deputy Mayor is not the city equivalent of Vice President, a position devoid of power. It is an incredibly important role that will be key to enacting Zohran’s agenda.

Without a mayoral gig, Lander decided to run for Congress in NY-10, which includes his home of Park Slope. While Lander might have lost citywide, he is incredibly popular in NY-10 and the strong favorite to win, effectively cutting off Alexa from the progressive lane. Zohran understood this and expressed as much to Alexa, even saying to her in private that he would support Lander, despite the fact that Alexa was endorsed by NYC-DSA. Lander entered the race with Zohran’s support and Alexa ended up dropping out a few hours later.

This is not just about which candidate to support, there is a political question here. Zohran could have easily appointed Lander First Deputy Mayor—a job Lander very clearly wanted—thus clearing the progressive lane for Alexa. He prioritized his own administration’s success over opening up a potential congressional opportunity for NYC-DSA. Zohran has argued that his successes in office are DSA’s success. Socialists have to show that not only can we govern, but that our governing is superior to that of our capitalist enemies. If Zohran fails, then he risks taking our entire project with him. It’s understandable then why he picked a capable technocrat who helped Bill de Blasio win universal 3k during his first term.

But Zohran’s decision to prioritize the implementation of his own agenda ended up preventing NYC-DSA from running a historic campaign against one of the most powerful Zionists in Congress. What if Lander would have been a perfectly capable deputy mayor and Zohran just removed an opportunity for nothing? Lander is a progressive Zionist, while Alexa is an anti-Zionist. Her victory in NY-10 would have been a national rebuttal of pro-genocide politics.

The end result was a number of DSA members furious with Zohran for endorsing against her. Why couldn’t he have waited until she dropped out? Why couldn’t he have used his influence to at least put pressure on Lander to run as progressive of a campaign as possible, using Alexa’s potential run as leverage? These questions will not derail either Zohran’s administration or NYC-DSA’s political ambitions, but they are nevertheless disorganizing. This is the entropy of victory.

There was a chance for NYC-DSA to expand its political horizons, but Zohran chose to consolidate his wins. Now granted, had Lander entered the race before NYC-DSA endorsed, there’s a good chance members would not have endorsed Alexa. Nevertheless, a political question became a conflict.

Coming for the King

The next point of major disagreement is over another congressional race, this time against arch enemy of the left and House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries. Chi Ossé, a Socialist city councilmember, expressed interest in running against Jeffries, who represents NY-8, which contains progressive and Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including NYC-DSA strongholds. It would be a longshot race, but Chi’s supporters argued that a narrow win for Jeffries would nevertheless weaken him considerably. Despite recently joining the organization, Chi promised to work closely with NYC-DSA and many members enthusiastically supported him. But Zohran was worried that Jeffries would interfere with the implementation of his political agenda. Jeffries is the most powerful Democrat in the United States, who only endorsed Zohran a few days before the election. Given that New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has deferred to Jeffries in the past, it wouldn’t be hard for him to pick up the phone and kill Zohran’s agenda, which will need money from the New York State budget.

Those who supported Chi argued that this was a misreading of how politics works. Jeffries and Hochul work for their wealthy donors and will oppose Zohran’s agenda no matter what. The way to win is not to try to placate them, but to attack them. If Jeffries was under threat from a serious primary challenge, he’d have little room to maneuver against Zohran’s agenda for fear of losing his election.

Zohran ended up attending an NYC-DSA electoral forum and speaking out against endorsing Chi. Ultimately, Chi lost the electoral working group’s recommendation 54-46. While Zohran’s opposition did not create a landslide against Chi, it almost certainly tipped the scales. Just like in the Alexa race Zohran chose consolidation over expansion and the consolidators won.

Should I Stay or Should I Grow?

Political questions do not exist in the abstract, they manifest themselves in real-life decisions about strategy. It would be great if we could debate political questions in their platonic form, unfortunately the realities of human existence prevent that. So we can’t help but debate the question of whether we should consolidate or expand within the confines of political conditions.

It feels weird to say, but the socialist movement cannot content itself with running the nation’s largest city. We seek nothing less than complete international transformation of our political and economic systems. This is the core argument for using this moment to expand. We are a movement that is bigger than New York City, that is bigger than the United States of America. To fail to use this moment of unprecedented momentum to build our project, would be a devastating missed opportunity. Finally, expansionism can help achieve Zohran’s agenda. By aggressively going after powerful opponents, we can keep them on the backfoot to prevent them from messing with Zohran’s agenda.

But if Zohran is not able to freeze rent, to lower costs for working families, or deliver on community safety, then our entire project will be delegitimized. Can Zohran afford to risk his mayoralty by appointing Brad Lander to the second most powerful role in the city or by making an enemy of the most powerful Democrat in the country? Consolidation and the transformation of New York City is a worthy goal in it of itself and will allow the socialist movement to grow sustainably over the next few years. And while continuing to take on big fights could help Zohran win his agenda, reckless fights will have the opposite effect.

It’s easy to see how just small changes in the political winds could drastically alter our analysis for various situations. What if Jeffries is unable to carry the banner of opposition (a decently likely proposition) and like Chuck Schumer, sees his favorability plummet? Then a primary challenge would have been the right decision. What if Zohran meets more than expected resistance and will need to rely on powerful outside movements to support him? Then maybe running two difficult congressional races would have taken away resources from him. What if Brad Lander’s campaign for congress tanks like his mayoral campaign? (On day one of his campaign his X account was hacked by crypto scammers.) Maybe Alexa should have stayed in the race.

Putting Up Guardrails

It’s impossible to say whether either side of the consolidation or expansion debate is correct or not. Even if you find yourself stridently in one camp, it is easy to see that the other is operating in completely good faith. And to complicate things even further, there are very few pure Expansionists and Consolidators. Instead these two poles represent political outlooks that can be applied to any political decision, not identities. They are approaches to understanding the contradictions of power. There were some organizers who supported endorsing Alexa, but opposed endorsing Chi and vice versa! Political questions are never abstract and the conditions that inform upon them are crucial.

But there are some things we can do to narrow the framework of the debate so that the political questions become starker and easier to dissect. Think of them as political guardrails that keep us from veering off the strategic path to victory.

The first guardrail is for the Expansionists. Zohran’s victory does not mean that the usual laws of political gravity do not apply. Just because Zohran won does not mean that the organized left can win any election. It does not mean that third parties are suddenly viable. It does not mean that we should endorse anyone who shows up at a meeting and declares themselves a Socialist running for higher office.

In fact, Zohran won because of the rules of politics not in spite of them. While yes, Zohran was originally polling at 1%, Cuomo’s unfavorability was astronomically high. It was always clear that Cuomo was beatable, it was just an open question of who would beat him. Furthermore, Zohran benefited from the public reaction against Trump’s narrow victory. The lesson from Zohran is not that we live in a new world where they do not apply anymore and we can win anything, but that we are in a moment when the underlying political conditions favor a well-run Democratic Socialist campaign.

So that limits the Expansionists. We can’t expand wherever and whenever we want. We still have to be ruthlessly strategic about electoral politics.

As for the Consolidators, if we decide to focus on implementing Zohran’s platform, it’s important that we do so because implementing his platform is crucial for the international socialist movement. We cannot build socialism in one city. Yes, the political moment requires Zohran to be successful, but our movement is so much bigger than Zohran, so much bigger than any one person. Implementing Zohran’s platform needs to build socialism, whether it is by politicizing and organizing thousands of New Yorkers to fight for it and/or cohering segments of the working class and giving them power. If he just wins policies without building the socialist movement, Zohran will be a better version of Bill de Blasio, nothing more.

And we don’t have much time. 2028 is coming a lot sooner than any of us expect. The United Auto Workers is already planning for a general strike and as soon as the 2026 midterms are over, jockeying for the 2028 presidential campaign will begin. 2028 will be one of the most important moments in American history, when the broken and damaged authoritarianism of Trump comes head to head with a rising and radicalized democratic movement. If a Democratic presidential candidate wins, thermostatic public opinion will swing back towards the right. Without a powerful left putting overwhelming pressure on the president, we could end up with another milquetoast liberal like Biden and find ourselves in a moment of fascist resurgence. If we need to focus on New York City now, that is understandable, but that cannot be the limit to our horizons.

We cannot escape the contradictions of power. Overthrowing capitalism by definition requires it. We are lucky to be struggling with such weighty questions, but that doesn’t mean that struggling isn’t difficult. We have learned how to win, now we have to learn how to figure out what comes next.

“It’s not about left vs right, it’s about ___” gets thrown around a lot in US politics, to our detriment. It is an incorrect statement that only makes things harder to understand. Take a recent analysis from longtime Intercept DC Bureau Chief and Drop Site co-founder Ryan Grim on Zohran Mamdani’s meeting with Donald Trump:

As Jamelle Bouie put it: “‘politics is bottom/top not left/right’ might work as a slogan but is shit as analysis. who is the bottom? who is the top? who constitutes an ‘elite’ and who belongs to ‘the people?’ these are important questions that have to be answered.”

And once you do answer these questions, you land back at the truth: politics is about left vs right. Always. Because these words describe political directions, and there’s only two. While particular policy positions may change, the fundamental principles of what they are trying to achieve do not. As Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind finds through tracing centuries of conservative thought, the right wing’s immutable core principle is the preservation of a hierarchy of domination, by the few over the many. And this right wing emerges in reaction to the left, whose principles demand an equalizing redistribution of power from the few to the many.

Knowing this history is especially helpful in understanding how the MAGA movement’s breaks with past Republican policy are not part of some novel new post-right politics, but merely the latest iteration of a tactic as old as the right. It is not new for the right to adopt changes that may, at first glance, appear to move against existing hierarchy the way the left does. But look closer, and they are only ever in service of updating tactics to preserve that hierarchy. For example, the right wing may expand the category of whiteness to welcome new ethnic groups, but they are not doing it to weaken racial hierarchy, they’re doing it in order to recruit new troops for its defense.

As wrong as it is, this “notaboutism” is so pervasive in US politics, it’s worth analyzing the idea itself, how it’s used, and to what ends. It mainly exists within three groups, for three different reasons: regular people, the center-right political class, and contrarian pundits. In each case, it’s wrong. So, why do we keep hearing it?

Regular People

If you’re some kind of socialist organizer, you’ve probably heard an ordinary person say something to the effect of, “I’m not really left or right wing” or “we need something that’s not left or right.” Having spent years honing your theory and praxis, it can kind of drive you crazy to hear.

In context though, it makes sense. When ordinary people hear “the left” and “the right” they are likely not thinking of these terms as political descriptors but of all the existing things they see in the world that are associated with “the left” and “the right.” These are as much a stew of free floating cultural constructions as they are political institutions—ask a random person what the left is and you’re as likely to hear the “Democratic Party,” as “AOC,” or “the labor movement,” “Nancy Pelosi,” “higher taxes,” “DSA,” “hippies,” “blue hair,” etc. When they hear the right, they might think “Trump,” “trucks,” “country music,” etc…a similar jumble of signifiers.

Especially in today’s increasingly fandom-oriented society, it is not surprising that people don’t want to tie themselves to all these things. At a pure identity level, identifying as right or left wing is just not that interesting given it includes basically everyone, so it feels more unique and personal to be some other thing, especially if you’re not ready to add a “far-” prefix.

This is especially easy to do in the US because of a general lack of conscious ideology. As any canvasser can tell you, very few people have the kind of coherent ideology that the type of person reading an article like this would. Instead, they draw from a whole mess of ideas and positions for all kinds of unpredictable reasons, picking positions from across the political spectrum in ways that are generally quite contradictory. So the commonly expressed idea of just these two choices, mostly mapped on to two political parties, feels inadequate.

As a result, going “beyond” left vs right can also feel like an anti-establishment thing to say. I often hear it from people who are rightfully frustrated with the failures of the US two party system. So yeah, if the “left” is considered “a fairly right wing center left party” and “right” is “an openly fascist neo-Nazi party,” it makes sense you’d look for that secret third thing.

But…there isn’t one. If you are fed up with a system where every available option seems to represent the powerful few at the expense of the many, the only thing that can truly satisfy you is an option that will do more to end this hierarchy, an option that is by definition further to the left. Any option further to the right can only ever pretend to provide anti-elite, pro-masses change, often by defining the top and bottom in false ways. For example, while some people may buy the “right wing populist” idea that “verified twitter accounts” are the elite oppressing the masses, while the single biggest recipient of federal contracts is “anti-establishment,” that doesn’t make it true. When it comes to universal human dignity and equality, you are either with it or against it. When people hold a mix of right and left wing ideas and positions, what matters is not spinning this contradictory combo into a new politics, but finding the underlying principles and values that will lead them more fully and coherently to the left.

(I debated whether to include a fourth group of just “politicians,” who across the political spectrum may invoke the phrase in the media, but there the analysis is very simple: they say it to appeal to the regular people who think they think it might compel. That’s all!)

Center-Right Political Class

Now this is where we enter the bad faith zone.

A host of think tanks and lobbying groups like No Labels, pundits like the right wing excusers, love to marshal versions of “it’s not about left vs right.” What it should be about instead, they say, is either some sweet spot in the middle, or something else entirely like “common sense.”

Unlike the sometimes good faith motives regular people have, this set uses notaboutism as a marketing tactic that is nearly always just masking demands to move to the right. Despite the fact that the existing US right wing is ten billion times the threat to everyone on Earth as the left is, these centrist calls somehow always manage to center admonishing the left for daring to ask for too much, with little comparable invective for the right’s actually-existing, ideologically fueled destruction.

Unfortunately, the center-right political class can get away with this because of how the aforementioned cultural detritus around left and right wing create a general hostility towards having an ideology in general, with help from the media’s persistent, idiotic treatment of the right not as a political movement with agency but some kind of fundamental expression of human nature.

And in this environment where ideology is supposed to be inherently bad, the pitch also can rely on something like: instead of those rigid ideologies, let’s just do “common sense things” that “aren’t about politics.” I remember even as a little kid this made no sense to me: politicians are saying politics should not be about politics? What?

But again, it’s just a smokescreen to hide the truth. In real life, the most common sense policies are left wing policies: just compare the effectiveness of the left wing version of healthcare (public, universal) to the right wing kind. The entire center to right media apparatus is essentially designed to make us think obvious truths like “we can make people less poor by giving them more money” and “if corporations won’t move from fossil fuels to renewables at the scale and speed needed to prevent literal human extinction, the government should make it happen directly” aren’t the case.

While it’s not the only tool the center right uses to sidestep this kind of debate, it’s certainly one of the most ridiculous. Because at the end of the day, they’re just doing marketing: look at the substance of any of their policy proposals and they’re as winged as anything else.

Contrarian Pundits

This is the most frustrating one: the idea here is there is some kind of cross left/right antiestablishment politics that can be created, usually by politicians who are not fully a part of the Democrat or Republican establishments, either because they are further to the left or right than the average, or hold a few “unexpected” positions.

Another recent example in the same vein as Grim’s “bottom vs top” politics idea:

The mere idea that there can be a “bottom vs top” politics should not be allowed in serious discourse. By any reasonable understanding, this is what left vs right is. You see similar ideas to the claims a year ago that Trump 2.0 would be “anti-monopoly”—you didn’t have to wait until one family practically owns every single major media corporation to predict that this would not be true. It’s close too to Cenk Uygur’s casting of Marjorie Taylor Greene as some kind of new politics for voting to release the Epstein Emails and then resigning, ignoring the much more obvious truth that she is saving her own political career from a sinking ship that had no problem putting Epstein’s “closest friend” into the White House, twice.

I think this strain of notaboutism is powered by a weirder mix of things, that depends a little more on the particular source than the two kinds above. But the ingredients are generally: an intense dislike of the Democratic party as an institution (which can be reasonable or not, depending), a general contrarian streak manifesting as a desire for novel takes, and a negative polarization against the legacy media and its methods of political analysis (which again, can be fair, or pushed past the point of making any sense).

But the main dynamic is still simple: mistaking marketing for substance. Is it true that Trump rails against “elites” far more than George Bush and Mitt Romney did? Sure. Does this mean he won’t turn the entire United States government into a misery and suffering amplifier for everyone who isn’t a billionaire, all so those billionaires can execute the biggest upward redistribution of wealth and resources (aka theft) from the bottom in history? I promise you do not need me to answer this one for you.

To be clear, analyzing how the right brands itself is valuable in aiding our ability to defeat it. In 2016 and, to some extent, 2024, less mainstream political analysts were able to spot the potency of this marketing when legacy institutions could not. But they should not ride so high on their ability to see how the right cobbles together its power as to miss who the boot is always stomping on. On this, Trump & co’s “heterodox” opinions are just the latest new polish.

When encountering this, be especially careful around the word “populist,” which often obscures more than it explains here. Whatever anyone is trying to say with it, in practice, “populism” describes an appearance, not an action. The fact that “right populism” exists proves this, as the right is inherently opposed to empowerment of the masses. The things that populism describes are not political substance, but a way of branding political substance. A way that, when used by the right, is deliberately misleading.

So the next time someone tells you it’s not about right vs left, ask, well, what is it about? Rich vs poor? Elite vs non? Workers vs bosses? Capital vs proletariat? Sure, a cultural association with all the flaws of the existing Democratic Party, or the highly funded media caricatures of democratic socialism may make some suspicious of “the left.” But it’s our job to, as clearly and powerfully as possible, redirect that energy towards building actually existing left institutions that do live up to those left wing principles of dignity and equality, and can defeat efforts to mold society around the right wing principles of domination and inequality.

And when we do have to debate how to do so, remember that claiming to be for the little guy while actually selling him out to the big guy is likely the most classic politician lie in history.

Whether pundit, politician or ordinary person, we can all do better than falling for the oldest trick in the book.

With Zohran’s victory in the mayoral election, NYC-DSA has reshaped New York’s political landscape, and through an unrelenting fight against cynicism and mediocrity, built the largest, most influential left organizing force in the country.

Today, we stand stronger than ever, but our momentum also brings uncertainty. Many of us have felt an intense whiplash between the phenomenal achievements in our city and the dire situation across our country. Now that we’ve shifted the political reality, the eyes of the country—even the world—are on us. What will we do with that power? What must we do?

Exactly what we’ve done before: fight strategically and ambitiously to once again reshape our political terrain. That’s why we must endorse Chi Ossé and take down the exhausted Democratic machine by primarying Hakeem Jeffries.

Jeffries represents everything that’s brought our country to the brink of entrenched fascism. As the highest ranking Democrat in the House, he has been complicit in the political conditions that leave the working class nothing but harder and shorter lives. His top donors are the architects of our suffering: BlackRock, which has stolen our homes for profit; Lockheed Martin, which has stolen our tax dollars for war; and, of course, AIPAC, which has stolen our dignity for destruction.

Jeffries stands directly in the way of the future we want to build, blocking progress in Brooklyn first, nationally second. He fights harder against his own left flank (supporting moderates over progressives in primaries, even when the progressive was the incumbent, and stalling efforts to restore federal worker bargaining rights) than the fascists entrenching federal power (praising Marjorie Taylor Greene and voting for a resolution that glorifies Charlie Kirk and “Biblical truth”). His promises are nothing more than toothless attempts to tinker around the edges of a desperately broken system. He goes to battle with strongly-worded letters and a child’s baseball bat.

The contrast could not be more stark. Where Jeffries repeats tired clichés about affordable housing while taking money from the architects of displacement, Chi Ossé wins dignity and economic relief for working class New Yorkers by banning the expensive and humiliating practice of forced broker’s fees. Even before his active DSA membership, Chi has consistently fought alongside our movement, winning material investments for housing, a library, and parks, and increasing access to Narcan. He took divisive votes against Eric Adams’ austerity policies shoulder-to-shoulder with our Socialists in Office, and faced the same political repercussions they did.

Despite Chi’s strongly aligned record as a councilmember and consistent presence on the left, some point to his delay in joining NYC-DSA to claim that he can’t be committed to our project. But Black Leftists being reluctant to join us is an ongoing issue that is not unique to Chi—we know this from the existing racial makeup of our organization. NYC-DSA has consistently struggled to engage the Black electorate and to connect with the existing political and community formations that form the connective tissue of the city’s Black Left.

Zohran’s campaign made enormous gains on this front through dedicated outreach that shifted support in Black working class neighborhoods from the primary to the general election. Chi’s campaign offers us the opportunity to build on that momentum, starting with a trusted messenger with a multigenerational family history in Central Brooklyn who has already built a dedicated base of support.

Like Zohran, Chi is a gifted political communicator, with a massively outsized platform. Since joining NYC-DSA, Chi has used that platform to make frequent and sincere efforts to grow our organization in video and in print. He wrote that, “[t]he months spent canvassing in the cold and the days spent standing outside poll sites in a sweltering heat wave with dedicated DSA organizers reminded me of the beauty of organizing and fighting for a cause together. I knew it was time to join and once again put the demand of the moment first.” His own story of choosing to join the organization provides a pathway to demonstrate that a commitment to improving material conditions for Black communities and a commitment to building socialism can not only coexist but are mutually dependent.

With Chi carrying this banner, we can inspire voters tired of the Democratic Party establishment’s entitled approach to the Black community to win the change they deserve. And critically: this race is winnable. 13,000 people registered to vote in NY-8 between February and November of this year—10,000 of them in Jabari Brisport’s senate district alone. Zohran won NY-8 in the primary by picking up 75% of the vote in Senate District 25 (19,000 of 39,000 votes), a DSA stronghold represented by Jabari Brisport, through a relentless field game and by keeping 20-30% of the vote in the rest of the district with comms, flyers, and public appearances only. There was not a field operation in the majority of NY-8 for the primary, something that would change with a Congressional campaign with a larger budget for a single district than Zohran had across the entire city.

The easiest way to take Chi and DSA to a historic win is to rely only on these northern precincts, picking up 17,000 votes in AD 55, 56, 57. However, part of the reason to run this race is that we have an opportunity to expand and grow on that coalition by running a robust, well-trained, and unrelenting ground game across the district. By reactivating the dormant Operation P.O.W.E.R. coalition of the married, explicitly Black socialist radicals, Inez and Charles Barron in central districts, AD 54, 55, 56, 57, we will pick up another 6,291 votes. The southern precincts, by far the most difficult and conservative, will be won through multilingual canvassing in Brighton Beach, Mosque visits, and targeted canvassing in the large developments of Coney Island, allowing us to secure the final 4,103 votes. The DSA electoral difference has always been in canvassing, and this race is not only winnable with our field power, but also an opportunity to dramatically expand our capacity and bring along new recruits into our other chapter campaigns.

Victory is never assured. But running a charismatic, well-known, native Black Brooklynite in this district will allow us to expand our organization to neighborhoods neglected by the system and their elected officials for too long. Building a multiracial working class coalition is a prerequisite to the world we need to create. Zohran’s campaign made new inroads across the five boroughs, including in the eastern and southern parts of NY-8. This achievement required a high degree of visibility. Without a top-of-the-ticket campaign, we risk losing momentum, and an opportunity to keep people engaged in this fight.

This race would also increase media coverage and voter attention for all of our downballot races, especially for the Black socialist slate of Jabari Brisport, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Eon Huntley, and Christian Celeste-Tate, whose districts all overlap with NY-8. If we were to wake up the morning after primary day in June 2026 with a disappointing loss but with a socialist mayor, more SIOs in the State Assembly, and 20,000 NYC-DSA members, we would be waking up as a more powerful organization than ever before.

Finally, going on the offense is critical to defending our gains. We need to deliver Zohran’s affordability agenda, and we cannot make the mistake of believing that Hakeem Jeffries—who could barely even muster the will to say his name—will stand with us. The Democratic establishment will not fall in line with just one mayor, no matter how successfully he governs. Jeffries is looking for any and every reason to sabotage our movement. Running a nationally visible, powerful communicator will empower us to call out when and how Jeffries is undermining our agenda. Win or lose, such a challenge is our only leverage.

As members of the strongest left-wing organization in the country, we’ve created both a blessing and an obligation for ourselves. The blessing is the knowledge that we can make history, and that our struggle is not futile. The obligation is to fight like we know that’s true—with the ambition and urgency this moment demands.

It’s time to take our politics to the national scale, and strike at the heart of our opposition. The future will be ours, but only if we fight for it.

On the morning of the 6th of December, 1648, soldiers under the command of Col. Thomas Pride took their positions outside of the English Parliament. This was no normal morning, nor were they the usual guard—they had dismissed the militia when it had arrived. No, Pride and his men were there for an altogether different purpose. As MPs began arriving, Col. Pride checked their names to a list. Those who were on it, members of the Peace Party, who had voted to continue negotiations with the King to restore his rule, were arrested. Others, such as Denzil Holles, upon hearing of the purge, fled the country. With the moderates removed from Parliament, the road that led to the regicide, and to the republic, was cleared.

Members of Parliament may have kicked off the civil war against the King, but it was not they who died and suffered over its course. Pride’s Purge happened because of Parliament’s decision to continue to try to come to a settlement with a monarch who obviously had no interest in coming to an agreement, even after a decade of war left 200,000 dead. For the men of the New Model Army, a return to the status quo ante bellum was unthinkable, not when so many of their friends had perished in the conflict. What would it all have been for?

Today we are not in an open civil war. There are no battles nor armies. Armed men do not roam the country. But that does not mean that we have not suffered in our fight against our own tyrant. Over the course of the government shutdown, the longest in history, federal workers went without pay, and people went without food. Immigrants continue to be disappeared, our cities are under occupation and lives are ruined. And we, The People, have put our heart and soul into opposition. The largest protests in American history happened just a few weeks ago, and after tireless work, we dealt a colossal blow to Trump in the elections last Tuesday. And then Senate Democrats gave in. Our own Peace Party.

What was it all for?

Senators have cushy lives. They have given nothing. For them, standing up to Trump, is to cast a vote. They take on no risks, face no consequences, put in no effort. They continued to be paid through the shutdown.

Yesterday, Maine Senator Angus King had the gall to claim that he stood up to Trump, and that it simply did not work. He did not. He voted with the Republicans at every opportunity from the start. Throughout the past year, at every turn elites and elite institutions—universities, corporations, the media—those with power have caved and collaborated, while those of us without power, just everyday Americans, have thrown our bodies at the machine. We stood up to Trump; Senator King and the other cowards did not.

For 40 days, Senate Democrats held out, but in the end they caved in exchange for a false promise of a future vote they will surely lose. They simply rolled over and surrendered. All of the talk of saving healthcare subsidies was empty words. The shutdown, and the ways it negatively impacted people’s lives, was for nothing.

What was it all for?

Our supposed “leaders,” corrupted by the Senate, lack the will and moral fortitude that the average person off the street holds. So yes, they too must be purged, not with armed men on the steps of congress, but with the ballots of voters. But it cannot end there.

Biden’s victory in 2020 promised a return to normalcy. The same strategy of moderation and compromise that now brings the shutdown to a close, squandered the political opportunity that followed January 6th to remake the country. We did not move forward, but instead found ourselves back and even further so than before.

It is clear that we need a full transformation of American democracy, one that can destroy the power of the Trumpist cause, and render anything similar impossible. To do anything less would be a betrayal, a treason of its own. We cannot choose to tinker around the edges, to make minor procedural changes to our government, an adjustment here, a switch there, but a Reconstruction down to the very foundations of our republic. Not court reform, but the immediate removal of judges. Not the end of the filibuster, but the Senate’s abolition. Not mere dismissal for ICE Agents and Republican officials, but trials for their illegal acts. We must approach the second Trump term as an aberration, the Oval Office is sede vacante, everything it has done is a crime, no different than if the Confederacy occupied Washington.

We must also understand that liberty and democracy are incompatible with the amassing of immense wealth, not when billionaires can purchase our country like a common commodity. This is no new observation, it is centuries old. But our failure to heed it, to do anything to rein in the sycophantic oligarchs around the president—who even now enrich themselves at the expense of the public—is dooming us to despotism. To overturn our political system, without also revolutionizing our economic one, would be a grave miscalculation. Their fortunes are more dangerous than any weapon the agents of the state may use against us; they must be disarmed.

We cannot delay our preparations until 2028. Instead we must act now. We need to prepare campaigns and find candidates, put pressure on existing electeds through legislative efforts, street protests, strikes, and above all to get organized because our enemies surely are. We must ensure anyone we put forward has the steely resolve to chart the course we have set, any who will falter cannot be allowed to stand. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

After the American Civil War, the blood that soaked the land was transubstantiated into the Reconstruction Amendments (amendments that Trump now seeks to undo). These holy documents—laws that undid the evil of slavery—radically reshaped our country. Their authors understood, on a profound level, that the deaths and sacrifices of the prior four long years meant it was for them “the living…to be dedicated here to the unfinished work,” as Lincoln put it. Millions could not be marched back into bondage after all that had happened. Otherwise what would it all have been for?

Yesterday the Senate Democrats caved, selling us out. They will do it again. We should not put our faith in them for they care little of the struggles and sacrifices of the past 40 days, of the past year, of the past decade, for they do not themselves struggle and sacrifice. But we do, we who have been unpaid and unfed, beaten at protests, faced discrimination, harassed, left homeless, arrested, deported, murdered. We who have borne the brunt of Trump’s policies, over the shutdown and the past decade, understand. And so when it is our turn, we will not hesitate. We will not cave.

Earlier this year Maine Governor Janet Mills made national headlines when she quipped “see you in court” to Trump at the National Governors Association summit after he threatened the state over its laws that allow transgender athletes to play sports. In the bleak days of February, when it seemed like everyone was capitulating and few Democratic figures had yet to mobilize against the new administration, it was a bright moment for opponents of the president and trans people alike. For a relatively low profile governor from an otherwise sleepy state, it was also much of the country’s first introduction to Mills as a figure. Overnight she became a liberal icon. Sites selling shirts with her likeness and her now famous quote quickly cropped up.

Given her national reputation, one would assume that Mills’s entrance into next year’s Democratic primary race would galvanize Democrats across the political spectrum. From this outside perspective it would be easy to be confused as to why an alternative candidacy in Graham Platner so quickly ballooned when Mills was on offer. Many were quick to ascribe this to Mills’s advanced age or that Platner, as a burly white working class male type figure, had some intrinsic appeal. While both of these factors may have been in the mix, they don’t explain the full story.

Missing from much of the discussion online is much substance about who Janet Mills actually is as a political figure. Afterall, there is a reason why I, a trans woman who is appreciative of Mills’s stance on Trump, and someone who is on the record as hating the hyper-masculine populist trend as a solution to our post-2024 woes, am so opposed to Mills’s candidacy and jumped on the Platner campaign (although now after tattoo-gate, I have jumped off it). And I am obviously not the only one, given a recent poll showing her behind by 34 points. The fact is that in Maine, and to those familiar with the state’s politics, our governor has a far more complicated history than her more recent image depicts. Far less paid attention to, for example, was what Mills was at the time doing with her powers as governor, such as (unsuccessfully) trying to cut funding for childcare, refusing to sign a bill that would end the state’s cooperation with ICE, or more recently, opposing a ballot question on Maine’s gun laws—changes being pushed in the wake of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of 18 people.

It would be easy to think from her comments to Trump that Mills is a liberal champion, but within Maine she is well understood as a moderate, leaning to the right of the Democratic Party (a party whose legislative caucus she frequently is out of step with). One should not expect her to be straightforwardly a safe vote as a senator under a hypothetical future Democratic administration trying to push anything like court packing, or trials for ICE agents. While she may not be quite the level of a Lieberman, a Manchin or a Sinema, Mills will almost certainly be in the bloc of moderate Senators who endlessly frustrate liberals with their positions, and will be a roadblock to progress—after all she’s already announced as much with her declared support for the retention of the filibuster.

It’s not uncommon for residents of a state, particularly politically active ones, to have a quite different perspective on a local figure than those looking in from elsewhere across the country. Yet the gap between how many progressives in Maine view Janet Mills, and those only familiar with her from the Trump incident, is wide and divergent. With her new national prominence, it’s worth exploring her history in detail.

First, we should give Mills a bit of credit: it was genuinely quite bold of her to stand up to Trump in the meeting. It is also not something out of character for her to do. As Attorney General, she was frequently at loggerheads with Governor Paul LePage, a far right Republican elected with only 37% of the vote, who has often been compared to the president. It was this record that helped propel Mills to victory in a crowded 2018 gubernatorial primary. And four years later she would face LePage in her 2022 reelection campaign in which she trounced him, attaining the highest vote share by a gubernatorial candidate since 1998 (and the largest by a Democrat since 1982). With Trump occupying the White House, these are certainly desirable traits in a candidate.

At a time when trans people are under intense attack, and Democrats are under pressure to abandon trans people in the name of electability, that Mills chose to defend us is worth immense praise. Her actions put her in a tradition of Maine politicians standing up to authoritarianism, not unlike when Maragret Chase Smith (a family friend of the Mills family during her childhood) gave her Declaration of Conscience speech against McCarthyism in 1950. But it would also be a mistake to assume (as evidently many have) that the reason Mills did so is because she is a passionate defender of trans rights. Mills has a solid record on the issue—as much as any Democratic governor would—but as anti-trans bills were later introduced and debated in the Maine State Legislature, she would clarify her comments: “if [lawmakers] wish to change [the law], they have the authority to change it, but you don’t change it by executive order or by wishing it differently.” When asked about her personal stance on the issue, she declined to comment, saying the issue of trans children in sports was “worth of a debate, a full democratic debate.” Not exactly a full throated defense of trans people.

Instead these comments make clear Mill’s real passion: the law.

When Mills stood up to Trump, she wasn’t so much doing it out of strong conviction about trans issues, she was doing it because she was “complying with state and federal law.” Her disagreement with the president was around his use of executive orders to unilaterally change the law, something he straightforwardly does not have the power to do. This should not be surprising to anyone who knows Mills’s history. A graduate of Maine Law, Mills spent her whole career as a prosecutor, becoming the first female district attorney in New England in 1980, and culminating in her appointment as Maine’s Attorney General in 2009, which besides for a brief two year window, was an office she would continue to hold for the next decade. Like LePage before him, Mills is not going to simply let Trump get away with violating these laws, and the institutions she has spent decades defending and enforcing. To do so would go against the animating impulse that has defined her career.

But there is a far darker side to Mill’s commitment to our legal institutions, and one that causes her to frequently clash with those in the state who want more out of our government and who are critical of the injustices that it has wrought. The clearest example of this is the issue of Wabanaki Sovereignty.

Maine’s relationship with its indigenous nations can be described as rocky at best. Unlike all other federally recognized tribes, the four in Maine (the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Mi’kmaq Nation, the Penobscot Nation and the Passamaquoddy Tribe) have a unique set of rules that govern their relationship with the state. This is based on the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, a law passed by Congress to settle a dispute between the Wabanaki and the state government, and since then the state has used the settlement to deny these nations the sovereignty to which they are entitled. Because of this, the Wabanaki nations do not have the same rights and legal protections as sovereign nations that other federally recognized tribes hold, nor do they have the same access to federal benefits and programs, a fact that is hindering their economic development and causing the state to lose out on thousands of jobs.

In her role as governor, Mills has played a major role in enforcing this status quo, using her veto pen to oppose both sweeping legislation, and piecemeal reform. To be quite clear this is not a question of moderation on Mills part, nor is this a partisan issue, many Republicans as well as Democrats are quite supportive of changes to the law. LD958, the reform Mills vetoed earlier this year, was introduced by the Republican House Minority Leader, and passed by the majority Democratic legislature. Mills’s defense of the institution of Maine’s state government is something we may welcome when it comes under federal attack, but we can’t forget that it also limits what she is willing to support when it comes to changes, and that it leads her to support ugly, racist policies.

Since coming to office Mills has used her veto power against a wide variety of issues, covering everything from tenant protections, to the rights of farmworkers, to the rights of public sector workers (who she has been no friend to when it comes to wage negotiation). Glaringly, she vetoed a proposal to close down the infamously racist Long Creek facility, the state’s youth prison. This past session in addition to blocking the anti-ICE legislation mentioned previously, Mills also pushed back on expanding ranked choice voting to state offices (Maine only uses RCV for federal offices due to an obscure constitutional wording—again the law). One of the major wins of Mills’s time in office—paid family and medical leave—only happened with the threat of a ballot question hanging over it. Currently, as her senate campaign gets off the ground, she is doubling down on the state’s existing “yellow flag law,” a compromise that failed to prevent the 2023 mass shooting. Following that shooting, while even conservative Democratic Congressman Jared Golden was flipping on gun rights, Mills was vetoing a bump stock ban.

Her approach to the budgetary process has been similarly frustrating. While Republicans may try to frame her as such, Mills is certainly no tax and spend liberal and under her time in office, the state has taken an extremely fiscally cautious approach. During the boom years following the COVID-19 pandemic, as federal funds flowed to the states, rather than using the flush of cash the state had to improve things for residents, Mills instead opted to save, running up huge surpluses in the state’s budgets. In fact these surpluses were so significant (and continue to be so) that the state’s rainy day fund—an account where any excesses in state funds go—earlier this year reached its legal maximum. While the state’s accounts are filling up, under the guise of responsibility Mills has pushed for cuts to public services, and generally resisted funds for new programs. She has also been an opponent of new taxation, even vetoing a proposed bipartisan tax hike on the wealthy put forward by a Republican.

It should also be understood that while Mills has nothing but contempt for the LePages or the Trumps of the world, she doesn’t have the pure hatred of the GOP that the moment calls for. Coming from a Republican family, she endorsed her brother when he ran for governor in 2006. While this is somewhat understandable, more recently, and far more damningly, when asked about her soon to be opponent just a few months ago, Mills told reporters “I appreciate everything [Collins] is doing,” something the Collins camp is already taking advantage of in its ads.

It is obvious that our system is broken. Most Americans do not think it is working. Our institutions have failed to prevent Donald Trump from attempting to rule the country as a monarch. If Democrats return to power in 2028, a return to normalcy will not vanquish Trumpism anymore than it did in 2020, and we need elected officials willing to enact greater change if we hope to see it defeated. We need to be willing to overhaul our institutions if we want to protect our democracy. And that is not Janet Mills. She will speak out against authoritarianism—a brave and laudable thing to do—but will do little to go on the attack.

As a trans woman living in Maine, I am incredibly thankful that Mills did not buckle when Trump threatened the state. Because of her actions (Maine did beat Trump in court) my community continues to be protected to an extent from a federal government that hopes to attack our existence. But with our country in crisis, her particular brand of politics is not suited for the moment. Electing Janet Mills in the hopes of getting the anti-Trump crusader, is likely to get you Janet Mills, the moderate lawyer. Having those sorts of senators is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Right Wing Excusers aren’t misguided allies—they’re your enemies

There is infinite money in telling oligarchs what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is that the left is bad, moving the left more towards the right is right, and you’re such a special little boy for thinking it.

Are you afraid of the left, but don’t want to lose your social circle by relocating to Trumpworld? Don’t worry, there’s no shortage of reasonable, liberal-branded opportunities to fight against the increasingly mainstream democratic socialist-left that is about to elect Zohran Mamdani and shows up in droves to Bernie and AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy tour.

The newest example of this liberal-branded reaction is a Substack publication called “The Argument,” which launched in August off a $4 million investment, and features a murderers row of people who are consistently wrong about everything. These pundits, which include centrist wonk par excellence, Matthew Yglesias, are mostly connected to “Abundance”, a well-financed attempt to popularize a new brand of politics that primarily exists as the subject of intra-elite grievance over why its own brand isn’t popular. But while the money and website are new, pick three articles’ “Arguments” at random and it is pretty easy to see the same old centrish shlock:

-An article Arguing that if the US taxed immigrants more and denied them more services, Democrats would get more popular than Republicans.

-An article Arguing that universities should adopt affirmative action policies to hire more conservative academics, even when they are less qualified1

-An article Arguing that Zohran Mamdani is less popular than the right wing Democrats he polls better than.

The common thread of these Arguments is to treat the right as an agencyless force of nature whose actions are determined primarily by the overreach of “the left,” a group it mainly defines through a mixture of decontextualized poll numbers and random anecdotes. These Arguments then conclude that the only way to stop the right is for the left to underreach and move to the right.

Their Arguments are wrong. Democrats just ran on the most right wing border bill in US history and lost. Universities are already strangled by an omnipresent bad faith campaign designed to bring all its aspects under right wing domination, and if you think that’s bad, why help them? And, is Zohran less popular than the moderates? The article’s own data shows he’s not!

Radical Centrists Right Wing Excusers

This extremely tired phenomenon is regularly eviscerated by the podcast If Books Could Kill, while the electoral wrongness has been chronicled by Anat Shenker-Osorio, so we don’t have to dive into why it’s wrong. While this phenomena has become known as “radical centrism” or “reactionary centrism”, these terms are now sanitizing the project, especially at this stage of fascism. Instead, the project is better understood as one of Right Wing Excusers. The Arguers at The Argument, and other writers in their milieu, distort facts and displace agency to sanitize the evils of the right. This is the primary effect that the entire centrist edifice from the Atlantic to NY Times Op Ed board to The Argument achieves.

What defines Right Wing Excusers? It’s that whatever the facts, they must be cherry picked, distorted, or outright made up to fit the same story:

1. When the right does something bad, it’s the left’s fault—not the right.

2. Anyone who wants to oppose the right should stop supporting left wing policies and support more right wing policies.

3. And if you don’t, you are the cause of the right winning.

When You Blame The Left, You Excuse The Right

Perhaps the ur-example of Right Wing Excuses emerged last month when for some reason, the entire internet had to hear Ezra Klein argue that the way to prevent hateful and violent politics from spreading was to be more accepting of those very politics, instead of “shaming” them by telling the truth of how they are bad.

As with all Right Wing Excusers, Klein goes through mental gymnastics to make a trademark right wing evil, political violence, into the fault of the left. He then looks for what compromises to make with the right, landing at “run anti-abortion democrats in states where abortion is more popular than democrats.” When called out on this factual error, he says, well, it was just an “illustrative example,” it could be some other thing. The fact that his go to compromise would fail on its own terms isn’t the point, it’s finding compromises as an end in itself.

But least noted in the discourse is one of the places from where he tries to derive his authority: the far right itself. Klein, without shame, says that what “right-of-center podcasts” have told him informs his analysis of why we should be more welcoming to the right. Uh, hold on now. Does this include Ben Shapiro, who he had on his own podcast about “how to take the temperature down”? I may not write for the New York Times, but I can tell you that Ben Shapiro does not want to take the temperature down. His entire life goal is to burn the place up.

What Klein–and the other Right Wing Excusers, who pal around with open racists like Richard Hanania—either fail to recognize, or won’t acknowledge, is that far right figures like Ben Shapiro literally always always lie about everything. Not only does Klein take these right wing liars at face value, but he launders their justifications for all kinds of reprehensible shit through the New York Times and gives them his own stamp of trust. This isn’t “listening” or “building coalitions,” it’s actively trafficking right wing propaganda to new, unsuspecting audiences. The only tent that grows is the right’s.

A Compromising Fetish

In most cases, these writers defend themselves from the charge of being full MAGA by claiming to be about compromise, something the left is supposedly so unable to do it needs every single op ed page of every major publication to write 12 articles a day about it. But if the Right Wing Excusers paid as much attention to the actual left as to the right, they’d find a movement that is actually quite open to compromise, when it makes sense tactically.

After all, Zohran Mamdani began his mayoral primary by moderating on police funding. If a significant portion of the left actually acted the way the Right Wing Excusers caricature claimed we do, would 50,000 volunteers have powered him to the largest primary victory in New York City history?

Here’s another leftist open to compromise:

There are different kinds of compromises. One must be able to analyse the situation and the concrete conditions of each compromise, or of each variety of compromise… anyone who is out to think up for the workers some kind of recipe that will provide them with cut-and-dried solutions for all contingencies … is simply a charlatan.

That’s Vladimir Lenin. He wrote a whole book about the folly of blanket refusal to compromise. And however you feel about him, you can’t say he wasn’t successful at taking power away from the right.

The point is, there’s compromise to enable the continued fight, and compromise to give up the fight, but for Right Wing Excusers, this distinction never seems to exist. It’s always time to compromise more. Sure, the least lazy ones may throw out a few things they wouldn’t advocate just to make it seem like they don’t support every compromise, but only as a rhetorical flourish

“Stupid or Evil?”

We can try to figure out: do the Right Wing Excusers genuinely want more left wing outcomes, and just wrongly believe that always moving right is the only way to get closer to them? Or do they just want more right wing policies and are dressing it up as a strategy? Are they Yglesian bullshitters, or Kleinian dupes?

But, given how easy it is to just join DSA or volunteer for Zohran or find the next No Kings Day, is this really the best use of our time in 2025?

As Toni Morrison said: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Look at how much work debunking, refuting, and defending basic principles there is against the Right Wing Excusers—is distraction not the same mechanic the Right Wing Excusers use on the left? After all, advocating to make the US’ less-racist political party more racist is one of their main priorities.

But as tempting as it is to say, “log off, touch grass, ignore it,” this won’t cut it. In the war for the attention economy, we can’t just stand down. The pages of the New York Times and even weird substacks written by and for elites affect the millions who don’t read them. If they weren’t designed to steer anyone with power to the right, oligarchs wouldn’t bother funding them.

Fortunately, having had my long share of angry quote tweeting, hatereading, and long discussions over all the ways wrong people are wrong, I think I can give some insight on a more constructive politics approach. So let’s turn to the classic debate about politicians: “stupid or evil?”

For so long, I played the stupid or evil game about politicians. It’s self explanatory, and yet, so frustrating. Are we mad that they are wrong factually, or mad that they are wrong morally? Did Joe Biden allow Netanyahu to commit a genocide in Gaza because he was idiot who believed Netanyahu’s lies or was he an evil man who was fine with it? Does it matter?

One of the great things about spending your time actually organizing for a better world is how much it frees you from this trap. When you’re in the fight yourself, it no longer matters if your opponent is constantly doing evil because they are stupid or because they are evil. What matters is forcing them to change by building and exercising power.

So let’s do what organizers do with the evil or stupid debate and internalize power’s cold truth: we don’t have to know what’s in the heads of Right Wing Excusers, we just have to make them think a lot harder before opening their mouths.

Don’t wonder if Matthew Yglesias is wrong on purpose or by accident, if Ezra Klein hosting Ben Shapiro is a misstep or malevolence, if Jerusalem Demsas is just spitballing bad ideas or is a true bad idea believer. Just tell them that they’re Right Wing Excusers, and that they should stop excusing fascism.

So the next time you see the Argument posting a terrible take, don’t sit around debunking it. Just call their ass out: “You’re a Right Wing Excuser and no one should listen to you.” Let someone out there refute the data, sure. But just look around you. We don’t need more data on why it’s wrong to excuse the right. We need more people making it unacceptable to do so.

No more excuses. The right is wrong. Anyone who says otherwise is as bad for us as them.

A Black Hawk helicopter circles low over the rooftops. Ropes fall from their open door and agents rappel down towards the apartment building below. They crash through the windows, terrifying residents of the building. Charging through the apartment block, they zip-tie everyone they find. Black residents go to one side. Brown to another.

Meanwhile in a field office, other agents prepare for what they call “Freaky Friday,” when they will go out and round up children, ages 14-17. They will offer them money to leave the country immediately. If they refuse, their parents will be deported.

These are the latest actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or as it is colloquially known, ICE—a name that looms large over America’s political imagination. For the right, ICE is an agency dedicated to the project of restoring America’s greatness by deporting millions of undocumented criminals. For the center it is a misguided agency with some bad apples. For the left, it is an agent of authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing.

ICE agents have kidnapped, disappeared, and tortured immigrants. They have refused to identify themselves. They have stranded and abandoned children after deporting their parents. They have assaulted protestors. They have made false 911 calls to punish a police department that wouldn’t work with them. They hogtied a protestor and paraded him around on a gurney. They pepper sprayed officers of the Chicago Police Department.

Federal agents have immunity from prosecution if they do no more than what is necessary and proper as part of their “official duties,” but it is clear that what many ICE agents are doing goes well and beyond any supposed official duties. ICE agents are not and should not be above the law: the time has come to prosecute ICE.

Prosecuting ICE agents is not a particularly radical proposal. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive, and Congressman Dan Goldman, a relative moderate, called for an ICE agent who brutalized a protester to be prosecuted, and Democrats in the House and Senate have announced plans to investigate ICE agents. Even Nancy Pelosi agrees. As ICE agents continue to engage in egregious acts, the pressure for officials to take action will continue to grow.

We can’t expect Trump’s Department of Justice to prosecute ICE agents, so we will have to rely on state and county level prosecutions. Since federal agents may have immunity, prosecuting ICE agents on the state level is legally tricky, but doable. Courts have ruled that a state can prosecute federal agents if they violate a state law in a way that goes beyond what is necessary and proper in carrying out their official duties. In 1906, two soldiers shot a man who witnesses say had surrendered. The Supreme Court ruled that the state criminal case against them could proceed because it was up to the state court to decide whether the shooting was carried out in the performance of a duty imposed by federal law.

This means that in order to prosecute ICE agents, state and county prosecutors will have to identify specific actions that violate state laws and cannot be reasonably said to be included in an ICE agent’s official duties. Governors, mayors, and other elected officials should call for the prosecution of ICE agents and state and district attorneys should begin prosecuting them. This is not only important for blue cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, which are being targeted by the Trump administration, but also for cities in red states with governors who may be more accommodating to ICE. Prosecuting ICE agents would be a stark reminder that the rule of law applies to everyone—presidents and ICE agents included. Furthermore, prosecuting ICE agents would necessarily slow their deportation operations, a moral necessity. This goes beyond immigration enforcement. The actions of this administration are a deliberate attempt to ethnically cleanse the country of brown immigrants.

So what would prosecuting ICE agents look like? First off, direct confrontations between local police and ICE agents would be a disaster. Given the political leanings of many police departments, some might refuse to do so, but more importantly, having two armed agencies face off against each other is a recipe for violence.

Instead district and state attorneys general should seek arrest warrants for ICE agents who break the law. If an ICE agent has an arrest warrant out for them, they will be unable to engage in normal life. Any traffic stop or other encounter with the police, even when they are off duty, could result in their arrest.

Issuing arrest warrants for ICE agents will require observers to track and document crimes from ICE agents, as well as work to uncover their identities since many refuse to publicly identify themselves. Observation and reporting could be done by professionalizing the already large groups of volunteer ICE watchers. New York Attorney General, Tish James developed something similar to this: an online portal where volunteers could submit footage of ICE agents, after a raid on street vendors in Manhattan. Even if individual agents can’t be identified, Field Directors can be prosecuted for issuing illegal orders.

Prosecution should be done nationwide and at scale. Right now, court battles against Trump’s draconian immigration policies are usually focused on singular cases, like Kilmar Garcia, but prosecuting ICE agents should be done by a nationwide coalition of district and state attorneys general holding ICE agents accountable. Inevitably many of these cases will get struck down by the court system, but some will be successful. At the very least such a large number of cases will seriously hamper ICE’s operations and resources.

They will also make recruiting much more difficult. ICE and Customs and Border Protection were given over $170 Billion in Trump’s recent budget, more than every single state and local police department in all 50 states combined. This means that an already lawless and authoritarian agency will balloon in size. Yet despite the lucrative pay and benefits it offers, ICE is having trouble recruiting. It will have even more trouble recruiting if becoming an ICE agent means that you will be tried for your crimes.

Kafkaesque has become a term used to describe any absurd situation, but Kafka’s actual work is about the horrors of authoritarian states. The true absurdity of The Trial is that K never knows if the group prosecuting him is an official government body or just random people. This blurring of the lines between state-sanctioned and arbitrary violence is a feature of authoritarian states that is incredibly dangerous. It allows ICE to brutalize and torture immigrants and citizens alike. It is truly Kafkaesque and it must be stopped immediately. There have already been several cases of private citizens attempting to impersonate ICE agents and kidnap immigrants. How many more of these horrors are happening under the radar?

Trump will retaliate against governments that prosecute ICE, but he will attack any Democratic state or local government anyway. There is no negotiating with authoritarianism. We can only fight back.

As he enters his second year in office, Trump’s approval rating has taken a nosedive, even on immigration, his once strongest issue. Meanwhile, his administration is fighting back against popular backlash to his immigration policies by attempting to portray ICE as victims of violence as opposed to the perpetrators they are. Prosecuting ICE agents is a tangible way of tangling up the machinery of Trump’s authoritarianism and building popular support against him. Most importantly, we have a moral duty to stand with undocumented and documented immigrants, the most vulnerable members of our society.

Bernie Sanders was on fire.

The most votes in the Iowa caucuses. First place in the New Hampshire Primary. A dominant display in union-dense, racially-diverse Nevada. Three consecutive popular vote victories.

The Vermont Independent had usurped Joe Biden’s longstanding lead. The former Vice President to Barack Obama was on the ropes.

A lackluster fourth in Iowa. A disastrous fifth place in New Hampshire. In Biden’s best state, Nevada, Sanders still doubled his vote total.

Pundits mused that Sleepy Joe was toast.

But, the former Vice President had something no other candidate did: demonstrable support from African Americans, the cornerstone of the Democratic electorate.

South Carolina, whose electorate was two-thirds Black, was next on the Primary calendar. In what was described as “a last ditch effort” to stop Sanders, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden.

Biden won nearly half of the popular vote..

The dynamic was familiar. Four years earlier, Sanders had consistently lost big to Hillary Clinton amongst the Democratic Party’s Black electorate — regardless of class, region, or age. 2020 brought hope that Sanders, one to consistently message about class rather than race, could improve his standing. In fact, Sanders was gradually narrowing the former Vice President’s lead amongst Black voters in national surveys — until South Carolina: where he was rebuffed by thirty points.

Overnight, the entire trajectory of the race changed.

On the eve of the Super Tuesday primaries, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed Biden. The next day, Biden won 10 out of 15 primary contests, solidifying a lead he would never relinquish. Almost instantly, Bernie Sanders’ plurality evaporated, replaced by a prohibitive deficit against condensed opposition. The only states where Sanders prevailed — California, Colorado, Utah, Vermont — had a small Black electorate, emblematic of his failure to court the “heart and soul” of the Democratic Party.

The race, effectively, ended right there.

While the emerging COVID-19 pandemic soon turned the world upside down, the metaphorical autopsy of Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign came back with the cause of death: a critical failure to make inroads with Black voters, dooming him against Joe Biden.

What was less clear was why.

Did Sanders’ progressive ideals alienate Black voters?

Was the specter of socialism too much to overcome?

Did Sanders focus too much on class war, and not enough on racial justice?

Less than three months after Sanders dropped out, a middle school principal, Jamaal Bowman, unseated a sixteen-term incumbent in a Bronx and Westchester-based district.

Bowman, born and raised in East Harlem, had been an educator in the Bronx for decades. While he had never run for office before Bowman boasted a vast personal (and civically-engaged) network that spanned decades — parents, students, colleagues. On the trail he was a natural talent with real presence. Gregarious and charismatic, he was the sequel to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: the principal with a love for both his students and The Wu Tang Clan.

Eliot Engel had become dangerously out-of-touch with his majority-minority district. During the COVID-19, the incumbent holed up in suburban Maryland as New York became the pandemic’s epicenter. At a vigil in the Bronx following the murder of George Floyd, Engel harangued the organizers for speaking time, infamously uttering “if I didn’t have a Primary, I wouldn’t care,” into a hot mic. The gaffe was nothing short of political suicide. With the pandemic raging and Black Lives Matter protests taking place daily, Engel proved ill-equipped to meet the political moment.

On Election Day, Bowman clobbered Engel by fifteen percent. The plurality-Black 16th Congressional District was finally represented by one of their own.

Bowman’s triumph was ground-breaking. The former principal decisively won communities, neighborhoods, and zip codes — Black homeowners in Wakefield and Williamsbridge, middle-class co-operators throughout Co-op City, and the multi-racial working class across Westchester’s economically-marginalized cities, like Yonkers, Mount Vernon, and New Rochelle — where the left had never previously been competitive. This was not Astoria or Bushwick, there were no cadre DSA or WFP electeds down the ballot, and certainly no gentrifiers to speak of.

Upon arriving in Washington, Bowman unsurprisingly joined The Squad. In November, Bowman was one of six House Democrats to break with the Democratic Party and vote against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act because it did not include the Build Back Better Act.

Less than three years later, Bowman’s “no” vote was the focus of relentless negative advertisements, which assailed the Congressman for not sufficiently supporting Joe Biden.

Such was not a problem for Bowman’s first re-election, where he coasted to a thirty point victory. However, said victory came via a radically altered Sixteenth District, for the seeds for Bowman’s downfall were planted during the decennial redistricting period. Having lost population according to the Census, New York State was due to lose one Congressional District in 2022. And, following an attempted Democratic gerrymander being struck down by the State Court of Appeals, the court-appointed Special Master pushed Bowman’s district farther north into suburban Westchester County, while drastically reducing the Bronx portion. In 2020, the Bronx accounted for greater than forty-percent of the vote in NY16. Two years later, as a consequence of said redistricting, that number would fall to six-percent.

All told, New York’s 16th Congressional District lost more than sixty-thousand Black residents.

And, despite Bowman’s margin-of-victory, his 54% felt more like a ceiling than a blowout.

Eliot Engel, a noted Israel hawk who chaired the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, resented his successor. Along with a handful of close allies, Engel represented a dogged constituency who never gave Bowman a chance, and plotted their political revenge for years. Redistricting presented opportunity. Amidst the chaos, they tried (and failed) to convince neighboring Rep. Mondaire Jones to launch a sneak-attack on Bowman, once an ally. Despite publicly posturing that he would never challenge a fellow-Black progressive, Jones polled the hypothetical matchup, but found himself down thirty-points to the popular Bowman, and ultimately abandoned the idea.

Westchester County Executive George Latimer was their choice for 2024. Latimer, who had never lost a race, boasted a thirty-year career in Westchester County politics. And, while not well acquainted with the Bronx (his initial announcement failed to mention New York’s lowest-income county), Latimer knew that his path to victory came via the district’s affluent, suburbs. Already laying the groundwork for a challenge, October 7th further spurred Pro-Israel forces, led by AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee), to invest their considerable financial resources in Latimer. The Westchester County Executive’s had always struggled to fundraise. AIPAC ensured that would no longer be an issue for Latimer.

Opposition research trickled out every week. Bowman immediately endorsed a ceasefire in Gaza, while Latimer championed the pro-Israel consensus of the Democratic Party establishment. Bowman would undoubtedly crush Latimer in the district’s Black communities, but their electoral footprint had been significantly reduced since his 2020 election. Whereas Latimer was well-positioned to harness the suburban backlash to the incumbent. By the new year, before AIPAC had spent a single dollar, Bowman was ten points underwater.

Across media spaces, the race became a referendum on the War in Gaza. In Westchester County, that was certainly the case, with Latimer appealing to the large Jewish population, who cast the left-leaning incumbent as antisemitic for his sympathy for the Palestinian plight.

However — in the Bronx, Mount Vernon, and Yonkers — Israel-Palestine was rarely litigated.

Instead, Bowman’s vote against the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Project became the featured line-of-attack, perpetuating the narrative that the incumbent was preoccupied with furthering his own image — at the expense of both his district and the Democratic President.

“Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda, and he’s hurting New York,” the ads repeated.

For weeks on end, this message consistently dominated the airwaves of the New York media market. What some might argue as Bowman’s greatest strength, his outspoken and candid nature, was ruthlessly turned against him. There was little appetite among Bowman’s opposition to litigate Palestine with working-class voters.

Nonetheless, even in defeat, Bowman’s Black support in the Bronx increased. Had New York State counted only eight-five more people during the 2020 Census, Jamaal Bowman’s district would not have been altered. His seat in Congress was lost to an accident of history.

—

I spoke to Jamaal Bowman recently about the left’s odyssey to build more rapport in Black neighborhoods, particularly in light of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City Mayor against Andrew Cuomo. While Mamdani would go on to defeat Cuomo resoundingly, he nevertheless lost Black voters by 20 points. We spoke before Zohran’s victory, when he was just beginning to poll neck and neck with Cuomo.

What had made Bowman so successful with Black voters, where other progressives had failed?

“The answer is easy: I’m Black,” he chuckled.

“I see no ideological divide between the Black community and progressives. Black people want affordable housing, fully-funded public schools, universal childcare, and jobs.”

A good candidate that can appeal to the Black community, in Bowman’s eyes, does “not shy away from class and race.” Many Black people want to see “one of our own” elected.

“Progressives sometimes, like Bernie Sanders, double and triple-down on class issues. For the Black community it is class and race. Bernie himself told me he tried to stay away from the race issue. We want to hear you have a racial analysis along with your economic analysis.”

Facetime with the community, rather than ideological kinship, is a prerequisite to running for office: “I didn’t run as a progressive. I ran as Jamaal Bowman, an educator who happened to be Black. I had worked in the Bronx for seventeen years. I taught and graduated thousands of kids over the years. Those people were excited to get on board with my campaign.”

On the issues, where the progressive left, increasingly college-educated, and the Black community, diverse and disproportionately working-class, are “talking past each other,” Bowman points to public safety and capitalism, where “certain segments of the Black community are ‘more conservative.’”

“The average Black person might speak about public safety from a more punitive, and less sympathetic, perspective — doubling-down on accountability. Whereas many progressives will go into a systemic dissertation on the criminal justice system. In my opinion, both things need to be occurring. Harm is done, but there needs to be accountability; part of that accountability needs to be rehabilitation, not recidivism.”

In 2021, New York City elected Eric Adams as Mayor. As crime increased in the wake of the pandemic, Adams told New Yorkers that they would not have to choose between justice and safety. A former police officer from South Jamaica, Adams’ law-and-order message crushed his more liberal rivals throughout the city’s Black neighborhoods.

“We were amidst the third iteration of Black Lives Matter, when George Floyd was killed. There was a whole movement around ‘Defunding the Police,’ and that became the rallying cry for criminal justice reform. And you’re just not going to get the median Black voter to support Defunding the Police. That’s a tough sell.”

Bowman’s election to Congress came at both the apex of “Defund” and the Black Lives Matter movement. His insurgent victory, along with that of Cori Bush in St. Louis, was dubbed the “George Floyd Era.” However, according to the Pew Research Center: “Since 2020, the share of Black adults who say police spending in their area should be decreased has fallen nineteen percentage points (from 42% to 23%), including a thirteen point decline in the share who say funding should be decreased a lot (from 22% to 9%).”

“When you unpack it — having mental health professionals respond to mental health issues, police focus on violent/serious crime, supporting incarcerated people with programs — Black people are on board,” Bowman said. “However, the slogan was weaponized very well by opponents of progressives. Bail reform happened around that time as well. There was a messaging problem,” he concluded.

Public Safety and Policing had been the seminal issue of 2020; four years later, criminal justice reform was barely discussed, as both Bowman and Bush were defeated by opponents bankrolled by AIPAC. While Zohran Mamdani laser-focused on affordability and costs-of-living, the democratic socialist also made clear he had no plans to cut the NYPD’s headcount, so as not to alienate working-class voters. Rather, Mamdani pledged to create a new entity — The Department of Community Safety (DCS) — staffed with trained social and mental health workers; focused on expanding violence interrupter programs and mental health teams that respond to 911 calls. “The police have a critical role to play,” he told The New York Times. “Right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net. This department will pioneer evidence-proven approaches that have been successful elsewhere in the country.” While Mamdani did not embrace “Defund,” his vision for police is rooted in the reforms of 2020.

—

“The Black community is almost completely aligned with Progressives when it comes to Gaza. Black voters are pro-human rights, against apartheid and genocide. Black elected officials are co-opted by the Israel lobby. They have been strategically building relationships with up-and-coming, talented Black elected officials — supporting their campaigns and whatnot.”

This dynamic, according to Bowman, is reflected by the political and lobbying power of both Israel and Palestine in Washington D.C. and New York City: “How many Palestinian leaders did Hakeem Jeffries meet with in Brooklyn when he ran for his Assembly seat? I would guess zero. How many Pro-Israel leaders did he meet with? I would guess more than zero. Black elected officials consistently engage with the Pro-Israel lobby, and have not been with a Palestinian lobby.”

However, while Black voters agree with the progressive line on Gaza, material conditions (economic issues) are still the dominant driver of political preference: “What the Black community cares about is money coming to our community, going somewhere else. Why are we spending money to bomb children that are starving to death when we can invest that money, not only on preventing those children from starving to death, but on childcare, transportation, affordable housing. I’m struggling here — why are we sending $4 Billion to Israel?

Democratic socialism, increasingly appealing to Millennials and Generation-Z, is still viewed skeptically by older voters, the heart of the Democratic electorate. The flaws of Capitalism are nonetheless familiar. Older Black voters (particularly the middle-class) remain weary of socialism: “We have worked very hard for four hundred years to succeed in the system that enslaved us, lynched us, oppressed us, and kept us out of power. Many of us have broken through that system to build wealth. The idea that others can work hard to build wealth too. Now progressives come along saying “Abolish Billionaires, Tax the Rich, and everything should be a cooperative,” and you have Black people being like, “Hold on a second. I’m doing well in this system. And now you’re trying to switch it up on me?”

According to the Pew Research Center, “despite having generally pessimistic views of capitalism, nearly six-in-ten Black adults (58%) said that supporting Black-owned businesses is an extremely or very effective tactic for helping Black people move toward equality in the U.S.” In fact, the same survey found that “Black adults are the only racial or ethnic group more likely to view capitalism more negatively than positively, and also the only group more likely to view socialism more positively (52%) than negatively (42%).”

So what’s lost in translation?

“People in Co-op City don’t know what a socialist is. [It’s] hard to ask someone who is 60, 70, 80 to embrace this new thing. Show up, do the work, and listen. I don’t think ideology in and of itself is the answer to our problems. When you’re Black, you’re not thinking about ideology, you’re trying to get from one day to the next: keep a roof over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, live and age with dignity.”

So what can progressives do to build support among Black voters?

“Do the work in those communities over a period of time. It’s not that complicated. Show up in an authentic way, not for your agenda, but for the agenda of the community.”

Sometimes “doing the work” and “community” are terms used by the establishment to gate-keep their opposition from seizing political power. However, this sentiment is rooted in truth and history. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party had real organizations. Precinct captains went from block-to-block whipping votes, inserted themselves into neighborhood struggles, and ensured their local clubs were packed with volunteers. Most importantly, many in the neighborhood wanted to belong to a kind of civic life, and the political machines provided that modest wish. Now, the machines hardly run at all.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for Mayor, with fifty-thousand volunteers and counting, attempted to recreate the sense of civic life, decaying in New York City for decades. Standing in the way was Andrew Cuomo: “He’s a household name. He is an institution. Whether you disagree with his politics or not, people trust him. A lot of people want dramatic change, but there are many others who want things to be stable. They perceive Cuomo as someone who provided stability,” Bowman told me as we concluded our conversation.

A consistent theme in my writing has been the influence of relationships and institutions, rather than ideology, on voter preference. Naturally, I followed-up: “Cuomo led among Black voters, not because of name recognition or some great ideological statement, but because they know him — not just his name — but what he’s about; in some cases, that relationship spans many decades. He symbolizes stability, something pre-pandemic, something trusted.”

“That is exactly right,” Bowman asserts, “and cannot be underestimated.”

—

While Zohran Mamdani did not win Black voters overall, he built an entirely unique coalition; rooted less in race, and more in age, housing, and transportation.

A cursory review of the election results shows Mamdani’s results neatly tracing many of the city’s subway lines. In neighborhoods where younger voters (Gen-Z & Millennials) have asserted themselves politically, particularly in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, Mamdani trounced Cuomo. According to precinct data reviewed by The New York Times, Mamdani won “middle income residents,” those whose incomes are between fifty and one-hundred thousand dollars per year, by ten-percent; while winning majority-renter precincts by fourteen percent. Of the demographic data sorted by the Paper of Record, renters (70%) and those with “middle-incomes” (49%) were the two largest segments of the Democratic Primary electorate. Muslims and South Asian enclaves, long overlooked and taken for granted by the political class, emerged as a formidable voting bloc too, breaking heavily for Mamdani, one of their own. While Andrew Cuomo’s core coalition bookended the ends of the economic spectrum (the wealthy and the poor), Zohran Mamdani’s coalition was the “in-between” (working, middle, and upper-middle-class renters spanning white, Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods).

However, in spite of this mandate — the most votes ever in a New York City primary election — pundits have mused whether Mamdani has a “problem” with Black voters. Yet that is to view the Black electorate as monolithic. Consider the farthest reaches of Central Brooklyn, beyond the frontier of gentrification, such as Ocean Hill–Brownsville. On these blocks, Black voters comprise more than sixty-percent of the electorate in precincts Mamdani won by thirty and forty points, respectively. Here, the Black electorate is far younger than the citywide average, and indexed heavily towards the middle-income renters where the democratic socialist performed best. Most importantly, the campaign exhibited a consistent presence in this overlooked corner of Brooklyn, for many months. The same could be said for pockets of Mamdani support in the Bronx neighborhoods of East Tremont and Fordham. These precincts, in the heart of Cuomo Country, were islands of Mamdani supporters. Why? African Muslims, one of many new immigrant groups taken for granted by the Democratic Establishment, were courted by the Mamdani campaign, which visited a head-spinning 135 mosques the Friday before the Primary.

The common thread linking Mamdani’s strong support from Black voters is relationship. Not only did the voters, in many cases, meet him directly; they routinely heard from his eager supporters, before becoming ones themselves. Now, the Democratic nominee, armed with a movement that keeps on growing, is moving full speed ahead to November. Soon, the narratives will be retired.

You can read more of Michael Lange’s work on his substack, Narrative Wars.

When Zohran Mamdani sat down for an interview with Jorge Ramos, he was hit with a question everyone in the Cuba solidarity movement knows all too well: “Do you think [Cuban President] Miguel Díaz-Canel is a dictator?”

Ramos later explained the true motivation for the question, what he calls el bautizo de Miami, the Miami Baptism.

“When whoever arrives in Miami, immediately you ask, ‘Was Fidel a dictator? Is Raúl a dictator? Is Díaz-Canel a dictator? And then, in the case of Venezuela, it is exactly the same. Do you think Hugo Chávez was a dictator? Do you think Nicolás Maduro is a dictator? By asking that question, the community immediately positions you. You are either with us or against us.”

That phrase, the Miami Baptism, captures how conversations about Cuba are policed, not only in Miami but across American political life. Before you can talk about the blockade, sovereignty, healthcare, housing, or U.S. intervention, you must first pass a test: Do you condemn the Cuban government? Only after performing that ritual act of denunciation are you allowed to speak.

That’s exactly the trap Zohran Mamdani fell into as the first guest on Jorge Ramos’ new podcast. The hosts pressed him on whether he believed Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel or Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro were dictators. In the moment, Zohran gave a cautious answer but declined to use the word “dictator.” However, within a few days of the interview, no doubt in anticipation of the manufactured outrage that would surely follow, his campaign released a clarifying statement asserting that both leaders are dictators:

“I want to be clear on where I stand. I believe both Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Canel are dictators. Their administrations have stifled free and fair elections, jailed political opponents, and suppressed the free and fair press. And yet, our federal government’s long history of punitive policies toward both countries, including extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans and the continuation of a decades-long blockade of Cuba, have only worsened these conditions. Democratic socialism is about dignity, justice and accountability. And above all, it’s about building a democracy that works for working people, not one that preys on them.”

It’s meaningful that Zohran acknowledged the U.S.’s role in creating the very conditions it condemns. You’ll be hard-pressed to find many politicians even willing to call the “embargo” what it is—a blockade. But the whole episode showed the question was never meant to spark debate; it was a question with no right answers.

This ritual is not unique to Cuba. It runs through nearly every U.S. foreign policy debate. Whether the subject is Gaza, China, Venezuela, or Iran, there is always a precondition for entry into the conversation. You must first condemn Hamas, denounce Xi Jinping, oppose Maduro, insist you “stand with the Iranian people.” These are not analytical questions. They are loyalty tests that shrink the range of acceptable speech and make honest discussion about the realities of U.S. intervention impossible. The frustrating thing is that on Gaza, Mamdani stared down the question and didn’t flinch. On Cuba, he blinked.

As a first-generation Cuban American who grew up in Miami, I learned and internalized many of the same assumptions about Cuba that lay beneath Ramos’ “Miami Baptism” — that Cuba was a place of repression and scarcity, frozen in time, its suffering self-inflicted. But when I visited Cuba as part of a Democratic Socialists of America delegation in 2023, I did not find a country that fit neatly into categories of “dictatorship” or “democracy.”

Cuba is, undeniably, a single-party state. No one outside the Communist Party apparatus holds much formal power. But it is also a country where, in 2019, a three-month nationwide debate helped shape a new constitution. That constitution reintroduced habeas corpus, set presidential term limits, banned discrimination, and enshrined both private property and the presumption of innocence. The government held over 133,000 community meetings where millions of citizens participated and submitted proposals for revisions. Citizens in each of Cuba’s 168 municipalities gathered to debate clauses, propose changes, and push Cuba’s National Assembly to amend the draft before it went to a referendum. The island went through a similar process to ratify its radically progressive Family Code in 2022, and is engaged in a similar process currently around reforming its Labor Code. Democracy in Cuba is participatory and municipalized, a different conception of democracy than those accepted by the Global North. That may not be satisfactory to critics and even to some Cubans, but it is a far cry from the system implied by calling Cuba a “dictatorship.”

That does not absolve the Cuban government of responsibility for repression. I do not excuse the arrests that followed the 2021 protests any more than I excuse the police violence that met protesters in Minneapolis or New York City. I believe Cuba needs to continue to reform and modernize it’s political system. But the fact that Cuba lives under constant siege, facing a superpower that spends billions to destabilize it, is a crucial part of why its politics operate the way they do. No understanding of post-revolution Cuba is complete without the context of the U.S. blockade.

That context is what the “dictatorship” question erases. Since 1959, the United States has waged an undeclared war on Cuba’s right to self-determination through invasions, assassinations, economic strangulation, and propaganda. It began almost immediately after the revolution’s victory, when Washington cut off sugar imports and oil supplies in an attempt to collapse the new government. The CIA trained and armed Cuban exiles for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, then followed it with Operation Mongoose, a campaign of sabotage, bombing, and assassination attempts that stretched for years. Later came the embargo itself, formalized in the 1960s and expanded under every president since. Even during moments of supposed thaw, like under Carter and Obama, the machinery of economic warfare never stopped. The goal has always been the same: to make life on the island so unbearable that Cubans themselves will demand the Revolution’s end.

Wartime conditions rarely produce liberal democracies, but they do produce something else: a stubborn, defensive form of sovereignty. Cuba’s one-party system and its culture of vigilance were not born in a vacuum. They were forged in response to an external power that has spent six decades trying to starve, infiltrate, and overthrow it. The United States created the conditions that make Cuba less “democratic”, then points to those conditions as proof that Cuba is not free.

The “dictatorship” question is designed to reinforce this narrative. This dynamic doesn’t only operate in the media or among right-wing exiles. It also reaches into our own movements. When a trusted comrade is put through the “Miami Baptism,” or any of the myriad of bad-faith denunciation rituals out there, the point is to divide us, to turn our energy inward. We do not have to take the bait. It is healthy for movements to approach our elected officials with skepticism. Accountability is part of what makes our politics stronger. But we also have to remember that endless cycles of clarification and moral posturing are not what build power. Statements are not the point; material action is.

For decades, the left in the United States has only had rhetoric to fall back on. We have not had elected socialists with the ability to materially act on our politics. Now that we do, our standards must evolve. The measure of a socialist in office is not how quickly they clear a rhetorical trap, but how they use their position to advance the movement’s demands in the real world. That is the work that matters. It is important to recognize when someone is being targeted in bad faith, as I believe Zohran was, and to know when to not let our opponents drive a wedge into our movement.

Zohran Mamdani has been and will continue to be an ally in the fight to end the blockade. As an Assemblymember in Albany, he met with diplomats from Cuba’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and was one of the first signatories to a nationwide DSA letter urging President Biden to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. While his statement was frustrating and, in my opinion, unnecessary, Zohran understands the blockade’s devastating effects, and I believe that as mayor he will support efforts to bring it to an end.

Despite the immense hardships imposed by the blockade, Cuba has managed to build a society rooted in human well-being. With limited resources, it has provided universal healthcare and education—rights still denied to millions across the so-called “developed world.” What could Cuba accomplish if it were not economically cut off from the rest of the world? If it’s government were not forced to govern under siege?

Until that happens, asking whether Cuba is a dictatorship is not analysis — it is performance.

President Trump, for his supporters and detractors alike, is a kaleidoscope, reflecting and refracting the greatest hopes and greatest fears of the beholder. In one light, he is the ultimate (white) Nationalist Hero, defending our nation from hordes of immigrants. In another, he is the great Business Man, granting billions in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, all to restore some prosperous economy of yesteryear (1980s? 50s?). For his detractors, he is a strongman authoritarian, Mussolini born again. Or maybe he’s a dopey man-child, destroying what’s left of the social safety net in a temper tantrum. There is a projection of Trump for every faction of Americans, but all of these projections are united by a common theme: Trump is a Man.

This cartoonish image of masculinity has spread across our politics and culture. It enabled the cult following and appointment of fit, but not exactly healthy, RFK Jr to the Department of Health where he hopes to ban mifepristone. It is the one that prompted intense fixation on a year-old TikTok from an Australian skincare brand from men who saw in these women a symbol of everything wrong with the world: incompetent female HR directors refusing to hire men for decent jobs, turning the workplace into another backdrop for narcissistic social media posting, while men languish at their computers with no romantic prospects. And it is the image of masculinity that inspired Tucker Carlson to compare America to a “bad girl” about to get “a vigorous spanking” from “daddy.” For a loud and highly motivated contingent of Trump’s base, gender-based grievance motivates the frothing support for Trump, prompting the liberal media establishment to take notice and ask, repeatedly, frantically: “What do we do about men?”

For feminists, the question is exasperating. It implies that liberals must slide to the right to appease young men dreaming of a “retvrn” to a world that only ever existed in coffee commercials: beautiful women dressed in flattering but modest dresses, floating around immaculate homes, high on loving devotion for their husbands and children. If we give these men what they want, it would clearly come at a great expense to women. They want to return to a culture of universal veneration of masculinity, to remove women from the workforce and pressure them to get married early and become mothers to large broods of children. In our wildest fears, these men would institute state-mandated girlfriends, as Jordan Peterson has suggested.

While this vision of the future is so absurd, reactionary, and ridiculous that no reasonable person would ever buy into it, it is a compelling fantasy for a not insignificant population of men. This is not a conversation feminists can afford to cede. The question then, is the same, but taken on our own terms: What do we do about men?

We Need a New Tack

Contrary to accusations the “woke” rhetoric of feminism “went too far” and pushed men to the right, the real causes of misogyny are material, rooted in men’s experiences, desires, ideals, all shaped by the expectations they grew up with and the world they loathe to exist in today. The new movement of Men’s Rights Activists (who by and large, wisely, don’t use that label) blame DEI and a society made soft by appealing to female sensibilities that clashes with men’s biological and spiritual need for hard work, glory, and early death. Unfortunately, mainstream feminist thinking falls into a mirrored version of this framing.

Feminist criticisms often emphasize moral failing in men to resist the sway of the alt-right, and reject explanations pointing to male loneliness or economic precarity as pitiful excuses for misogyny. Thus the only acceptable narrative is that men (perhaps due to their essential nature) are too tempted by patriarchal power to ever give up misogyny. But if that’s the case, there is no changing men and all this energy directed toward complaining about it is basically pointless. This is not going to get us anywhere.

The point of finding the reasons misogyny exists is not to assign moral blame, it’s to understand how to change it. “Men are more reactionary in part because they are lonely” is not a call to individual women to fix this loneliness. It’s certainly not a call to date incels or to “give nice guys a chance.” The reality that a lot of men are alienated and lonely is something we must address because it has consequences for all of us. “Men are lashing out because their economic prospects keep them from living up to what they believe it means to be a man” does not suggest women should tolerate misogyny or mistreatment. It is another important factor to recognize if we’re going to achieve liberation for women.

I don’t blame feminists at all for expressing outrage and dismay at the seemingly intractable problem of widespread misogyny, growing even among the younger generations, who some thought would bring us into a progressive future. I share their frustration and grief. I don’t even blame them for ignoring or discarding these men as lost causes. But this doesn’t even begin to point us in the direction of how to address the issue. We need to understand that it’s not random that these sentiments are catching on so much right now among young men. These ideas have been around and easy to access for a long time, but there are reasons that have led men who otherwise would have gone on to have the passive, unexamined misogyny of a typical man to now become radicalized into an Andrew Tate-style intense hatred of all women. What caused this shift?

One mainstream feminist explanation for this radical shift is simple reaction: men correctly perceive that the past decades of women’s encroachment into men’s domains and increasing economic power have left men without the leverage of past decades. They were promised a mother/bangmaid/secretary/housewife and instead got women who expect equal contributions to the household. This idea is not without merit, but it’s also an incomplete story.

Misogyny and Economics as a Sexual Strategy

Precarity brings out the worst in human nature. While the very wealthy have always been funders of fascism, it’s not for them. Fascism distracts the masses of precarious and dissatisfied workers from solutions that affect the position of those very wealthy people. Racism, sexism, nationalism all rise when people who have come to expect upward mobility and prosperity find it slipping away. In the current American economy there are no reliable paths to prosperity. Now only around 50% of children can expect to outearn their parents compared to 90% born in the 1940s, and recent generations have felt advice for success shift from “just go college” to “just go to law school” to “just major in computer science,” without a clear sense of where to go now that the tech jobs are becoming more sparse. Young men and women alike are drawn to get rich quick schemes, gambling, influencing and streaming, and fringe ideologies, all of which offer bold, but illusory promises of financial gain.

This is no doubt a part of the picture, but it would be misplaced to argue the relationship between class and sexism, a primeval entanglement, works only in one direction. As Engels once argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, sexism grew out of the early need of resource-wealthy men to ensure their spoils went to their own progeny. This incentive for control of women’s sexuality spawned increasingly complex and psychologically all-encompassing ideologies of gender: roles, ideals, archetypes, and systems of direct violence like domestic abuse, rape, sex trafficking and indirect violence like, social shame, discrimination, beauty standards violence. This sprawling system of control was all used to enforce gender norms. The most insidious aspect of it all was that none of it required conscious, intentional enforcement, only fear of the “consequences” of unregulated female sexuality.

Women’s entry into the workplace, their subsequent advances against wage discrimination and unfair labor practices thanks to unions and socialist feminists, and their ability to make an independent wage fundamentally disrupted many of these systems of control, and the ideologies they upheld. It became more difficult to suggest a fundamental inability for women to do certain kinds of work when they were being paid to do it, or to keep women under surveillance in the home when they could afford to take themselves out.

This disruption did not escape the notice of conservative men, who often even openly acknowledge that the reason they don’t like women working is because they want women to be financially dependent on men. Most men are not so pathological and seem very content to enjoy the benefits of a dual-income relationship, and a partner who amounts to much more than a dependent and subservient extension of themselves. But unfortunately, conservatism among men abounds.

Misogyny then, especially control, has a close relationship with economics. A worsening (perceived or real) of men’s economic circumstances and/or an improvement (perceived or real) in women’s economic circumstances can intensify misogyny in the resentful, disempowered men, who feel that they have lost the manliness that comes from material success and denied the social success of association with attractive women.

We also can’t overlook the role of the internet in giving shape and direction to the vague, somatic angst of alienated men. Andrew Tate, now facing charges of rape and human trafficking, is just the tip of the iceberg. Even though the X, The Everything App must know I’m a woman given the number of tweets it shows me about the luteal phase, it shows me countless posts designed to tell men some version of the same things: women have it easy, women have no sense of responsibility, women want to take away your fun, women prefer men who are taller than you, women prefer men from other races, women have lost their feminine, nurturing nature, women have lost their sexual allure, women will sleep with other men but not you (oops, wrong link), women will take your money, women will trick you into raising another man’s child. I can only imagine what the actual targets for this content are seeing. In a culture where fewer and fewer people have friends in the real world, the terrible nightmare world the internet shows the morbidly depressed and lonely feels more and more real to them.

A stark rise in economic precarity, the ongoing liberation of women, and worsening alienation for men and women alike have primed men to be radicalized by social media feeds that incentivize whatever gets the most attention, even if it’s untrue and unhealthy. We cannot accept this as the new paradigm of masculinity. Doing so not only means losing a generation of men to a vile ideology, but subjecting another generation of women to abuse.

The Way Forward

Any strategy to address misogyny requires two prongs: the implementation of economic and social policies to promote the success and well-being of all and a society in which women are able to safely escape and fight the misogyny of romantic partners, employers, fathers, and other men. While increased prosperity without a larger cultural shift away from misogyny will not forward the goal of gender equality, there is little room for cultural change without a substantial change in the economic situations of working men and women. Additionally, since sexism is a vital tool of the wealthy to maintain their power, increased prosperity will require a shift away from sexism. The cultural and economic go hand in hand.

An ideal society that wanted to eliminate sexism would remove the economic dependence of women (and men) on their partners and employers so things like healthcare, a place to live, basic sustenance, were no longer only accessible by employment, marriage, or independent wealth. Any steps to create a safety net for all people work towards this ideal, and any steps that give more power and agency to the working class bring us closer to actually realizing this ideal in a way that isn’t subjected to the whims of the ruling class.

Organizing the people who would benefit from the democratization of the workplace and the end of precarity (working class men and women, Australian skincare employees alike), into political groups that can organize for their interests and into unions which can directly pressure for better working conditions is crucial to the goal of women’s liberation, and to men’s as well. The Equal Pay Act could not have been won without years of agitation from labor feminists pushing for the same protections in unions, and it was unionized women who won the right to maternity leave and other workplace reforms enabling more balance between their paid wage labor and the unpaid labor at home. While on the whole, the prosperity won by unions depleted the fertile ground of fascism. Perhaps unionized women today could help deliver to America the long parental leave enjoyed by many other countries, helping to balance the load of domestic and child-rearing tasks, giving men and women more time with their families, and perhaps most importantly uniting them in shared struggle for a mutually imagined future.

Ending misogyny, even this surging virulent form, is not as simple as any sets of policies, or the immediate effects of economic equality. It is deeply ingrained in the culture, and while it may be dormant or less overt in times of prosperity, the roots will take much longer to destroy. These roots are also impediments to the willingness of many men to see women as allies in the improvement of their lives, and the preponderance of this kind of misogyny in men makes some women reluctant to organize with them in turn. The road will require more trust than any individual deserves, but it’s the only way out.

Zohran Mamdani’s blowout victory in his democratic primary run for mayor over Andrew Cuomo (a serial sexual harasser who like Trump forwarded a macho, strong man persona) and in particular his high support from men, especially young men, shows the power of this kind of solidarity-based politics to change the cultural landscape. Many of the same demographics that Trump won in 2024 went for Mamdani in the democratic primary; this is not a matter of committed bigots, but a result of a political imagination that has been, until very recently, constrained.

Socialists, and anyone else invested in building a better world, cannot afford to write-off so many people whose interests are fundamentally aligned with our own. It’s clear some men have radicalized beyond hope of working with, befriending, or loving women, and from whom women need protection. But the average man, currently told his best interest is in denigrating women while he suffers a poor paying job and isolation, could be told instead that he could have his basic needs met, could find some dignity and healthy pride through working in a community for a shared cause, could see the ways in which working alongside women is more satisfying than trying to dominate them, could perhaps also liberate himself along the way.