Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic primary for Michigan Senate to Abdul El-Sayed, is making headlines for tacitly condoning her own husband’s vote for Republican Mike Rogers, which he claims is due to his fear of antisemitism. Other high profile figures across the media have echoed the same.

Mike Rogers has received at least $8.7 million in support from Elon Musk, and has solicited money to “protect Elon” from prosecution. Elon Musk is the richest man on Earth and by any definition a neo-Nazi, and has now spent a record $400 million funding Republicans in the midterms. Elon Musk is the economic center of the Republican party and has served on and off as a “shadow president” where he installed neo-Nazis across the government. Every Republican that wins gives Elon Musk more power over the United States government.

If you encounter anyone, such as a friend or relative, proclaiming that they are voting for Republicans due to antisemitism, have them read the headline of this article, and then, if still necessary, this article, which is very short and requires no further elaboration.

No one’s talking about student loans right now, but they’re about to be. Other than the Debt Collective, which has been ringing alarms about ballooning household debt for well over a decade, mainstream and even alternative media has been fairly silent about the fact that starting in October, millions of Americans will have to start paying student loans again for the first time since COVID. This looming student loan debt crisis will only exacerbate a rolling political and cost of living crisis right before the midterm elections.

Student loan debt is about to become a catastrophic problem for the Trump administration and it will be one of the most important things for a future Democratic administration to handle on Day 1. Student Loans are the political and economic crisis that have the potential to continue the large scale changes we’ve seen to our politics. Furthermore, due to the Supreme Court’s intransigence, resolving this crisis might be the very thing that finally strips the court of its undeserved power. To get a sense of what’s about to happen, it’s worth diving into to understand the sheer mess we’re facing, how we can get out of it, and how the left can use it for our political ends.

On July 1st student debtors received emails from their loan servicers that they would have to restart loan payments within 90 days. For anyone who graduated college after 2020, this is a particularly harrowing experience because they have never paid student loans before.

Starting September 29th student loan payments will resume. Those who signed up for payment plans will lose up to 10% of their incomes.Those who didn’t sign up for new plans because they either forgot, or never got the email, or their loan servicer fucked up (something that happens all the time), will be automatically enrolled in a 10-year standard repayment plan. Monthly premiums for the 10 year payment plan are based on total amount owed, not income, so debtors who took out large amounts of student loans will see insane monthly premiums!

Historically speaking, if you’re in charge of a government you usually don’t want to piss off the youngest and most highly educated strata of society since they are likely to engage in politics either through conventional or more revolutionary means. But Republicans don’t care. They are not idiots; they hate the idea of higher education more than they like the idea of winning elections. They don’t want an educated populace. They want a poorly educated populace they can financially exploit and manipulate. They hate you for daring to get an education. They want you to suffer for it.

There is currently $1.73 trillion in public student loan debt, held by some 42.6 million borrowers. For comparison, the total credit card debt in the US is $1.26 trillion and medical debt is $194 billion, making total student loan debt bigger than both categories combined. Unlike other forms of debt, student loan debt is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. If you’re in debt, you’ll stay in debt.

The average student loan debtor is $40,467 in debt, and for those who went to graduate programs that number is considerably higher. This means that when student loan payments resume, the average debtor could be paying around $350 per month on a standard 10-year repayment plan. Given that the average salary for a new college graduate is $56,000 per year or $4667 per month (before taxes) new college grads will be paying 7.5% percent of their income on loans. For those with higher principals, there are income based repayment plans that cap payments at 10% of income (in exchange for the principal ballooning out of control), but given the severe cost of living crisis we find ourselves in (a crisis that’s getting much worse due to the Iran War), forcing young professionals to pay anywhere between 7-10% of income is a potential catastrophe. For reference, the average cost of housing in the US is $2,189 per month or 46% of the average salary of a new graduate, food is $847 per month or 18%, transportation is $1,113 or 24%. For those keeping score at home, we’re already at 88% of a new college graduate’s income (before taxes!) and that’s just for the basic necessities! Student loans have the potential to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

How Did We Get Here?

There was once a time when college education in this country was either publicly provided and free or readily affordable. That changed thanks in part to Ronald Reagan, who imposed tuition fees on the University of California System as governor, ending a century of free, public higher education. Meanwhile in New York City, the City University of New York system, CUNY introduced tuition fees in 1975, coincidently just as people of color were starting to enroll in the university system en masse. Around this time, in 1965 the federal government introduced the public student loan program we know today. Originally those loans had strict caps on how much could be lent out to borrowers, but those caps were raised or eliminated with time. Meanwhile colleges and universities could keep jacking up tuition because students could take out federal student loans to cover the cost. The 2008 financial crisis further supercharged this trend as state governments pulled funding from universities, pushing them to offload costs onto students in the form of higher tuition.

While all of this was going on, industrial manufacturing in America was dying out, being shipped off overseas where labor costs were lower and there weren’t things like unions or child labor laws. This meant that a college education became essential to anyone who wanted financial stability. The average high school graduate makes $51,688 a year, compared to $81,016 for those holding a college degree.

Before we go any further, let’s dispel the classic conservative myth that college is a waste. As I showed, college earners earn significantly more than high school graduates. People like noted rich-guy Mike Rowe, love arguing that young people should go into the trades instead of going to college, but it’s actually really fucking hard to get a union trade job. Most people with high school diplomas or less education are not going to end up working a lucrative trade job. They’ll end up in the service economy, making near poverty levels wages. A college education is no longer the gateway to the middle class, it is essential to live a life approaching comfortability. Yes, there are affordable colleges, but even state schools cost an average of $24,481 per year when room and board are taken into account. Finally, college degrees are essential for so-called “pink collar” work, working class professions, like nursing, teaching, and social work disproportionately held by women. Even if we had all the trade union jobs imaginable, we’d still need nurses! Oh and by the way there are huge shortages of nearly all pink collar work. I wonder if unaffordable higher education is a reason why?

As the student debt crisis ballooned, presidents took some action to address the crisis. George W Bush introduced the Student Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which forgave student loans after 10 years for anyone who took a job with a qualifying government or non-profit. Barack Obama introduced a variety of payment plans so that instead of having to pay a fixed amount every month, student debtors would pay a portion of their salary, around 10%. None of this was nearly enough to address the crisis, especially as costs of higher education kept on ballooning out of control. Meanwhile Republicans became so polarized against higher education during the Obama years that they straight up became opposed to any relief on student loans whatsoever. COVID offered a reprieve for borrowers, as the federal government paused payments as the economy shut down. Joe Biden, in typical fashion, did the bare minimum to address the problem, waiting until the last possible moment before the payment pause ended to introduce the SAVE program, which would reduce the income threshold for repayments from 10% to 5%, which was then quickly quashed by the Supreme Court. Litigation has kept payments paused since 2020, but after a court decision in March 2026, they are set to resume this month.

There is Only One Solution

There are those who argue that because the general public is split about 50-50 on loan forgiveness, politicians should focus their attention elsewhere. But this misunderstands the problem. Those who don’t support loan forgiveness don’t have student loans or they paid them off long ago back when they were much lower. They do not understand the scale of the crisis. Student loan debt is not a political issue to be weighed by opinion polls, it is an economic crisis that disproportionately affects the educated, the young, and women.

Of course the only actual solution is federal student loan cancellation. We cannot live in a world where we tax young people 10% of their salaries right when they’re supposed to be buying homes and having kids (Did you forget that there’s a fertility crisis? Why aren’t you having babies???). Before COVID, student loan forgiveness had become quite a popular policy idea. Elizabeth Warren’s relatively moderate proposal to forgive $50,000 in student loan debt rocketted her to the top of primary polls and Bernie Sanders followed her up with a proposal to forgive all student loan debt. No doubt that all of the progressive Democratic primary candidates in 2028 will be running on some form of loan forgiveness.

But before that happens student loan payments will resume and it will be a total catastrophe.

Higher education is a human right that should be afforded to everyone for free. What our student loan system has become is essentially an income tax on college graduates. If a politician proposed taxing young educated people an income tax of anywhere between 7.5 and 10% they’d be laughed out of the room. But through the privatization of education in America, poor policy planning, and decades of kicking the can down the road, we find ourselves with this ridiculous tax and it threatens to destabilize an already not-really-all-that stable economic situation.

If you think it’s creepy and gross that Republicans want you to personally suffer for getting an education, well you’re right, it’s creepy and gross! Student loans are just one front in the war to dismantle higher education. Republicans are defunding universities, making it impossible to get loans for certain professions (mostly professions held by women), and shutting down academic programs The Republican Party does not mind losing a midterm election in pursuit of this goal if long term, higher education becomes something only attainable by the rich idiot children of the elites. So instead of forgiving student loans, Trump is trying to solve the affordability crisis he made significantly worse by...importing potentially tainted Argentinian beef.

But Republicans in their cruelty and stupidity have created a cost of living crisis so bad that there is already a widespread movement to fundamentally reshape our economic system. The resumption of student loans is only going to supercharge that movement.

Crises don’t just disappear on their own. They build and build until they reach some form of resolution. Whoever becomes president in 2029 should forgive student loans on day 1, freeing the millions of borrowers from crushing debt. If the Supreme Court strikes it down, the president should use the opportunity to delegitimize the court by rallying millions against them. At some point the Supreme Court will have to be delegitimized. Student loans could be a potentially powerful way of doing so, but it will require political will and courage.

But January 21st, 2029 is a long way away. And by the way, the Iran War has already cost $37 billion dollars. That’s enough to fund a full year of free, public college in the US. So in the meantime enjoy paying 10% of your income to the federal government. And every time you see a huge chunk of your very limited money disappear from your bank account, just remember, it’s going to people who hate you all for the crime of getting an education.

Last week, Zohran Mamdani released a municipal strategy for fighting antisemitism, a fairly minor piece of policy for his administration. The strategy, among other things, funds hate crime prevention, invests in security outside synagogues, and establishes an awareness campaign about New York City human rights law. There are some good faith criticisms of the strategy, as some of the groups he plans to fund like the Jewish Community Council of New York are Zionist organizations. But on the whole this is a fairly straightforward piece of policy, right?

Haha, nope! Not only was Zohran’s plan poorly received by the usual suspects, but a seemingly huge group of leftists on X who saw the plan as a betrayal. There was a particular focus on the fact that he quoted from the Talmud in his announcement video, with one fairly large “leftist” commentator, Sean Padraig McCarthy, posting a literal blood libel, an antisemitic lie that Jews use the blood of christians for nefarious purposes that dates back to the fucking middle ages. It’s always hard to quantify the size of an internet mob, but McCarthy’s post and others like it got tens of thousands of engagements, enough to be concerning.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of essays that go: “here’s a summary of some stupid drama on the internet,” but this is unfortunately not the first time that there has been a widespread outbreak of internet antisemitism among purported leftists. This latest freakout seems to have been the biggest, but it certainly is not the last. It’s therefore worth exploring the contours of left antisemitism, especially since accusations of antisemitism are one of the right’s most enduring lines of attack against the rising socialist movement.

So what the hell is going on? What’s the source of internet antisemitism and has it really infected the left? How should we respond to these vulgar displays and are they going to get worse?

Before we dive in let’s make something crystal clear: there is no evidence for organized antisemitism on the mainstream left. Let me say that again: there is no evidence for organized antisemitism on the mainstream left. There are plenty of bath faith accusations of antisemitism on the left by those who purposefully conflate antizionism with antisemitism, but when it comes to the actual institutions of the left—the Democratic Socialists of America, the United Autoworkers, the Working Families Party—none are advancing antisemitism in any way. In fact they are some of the organizations most vocally opposed to antisemitism in America.

This is important to remember as we dive into the muck of the internet, particularly X: in actual, physical reality there is no organized antisemitism on the left.

Antisemitism Is Rising Because of the Right

Antisemitism is not some natural phenomenon, it is being organized by specific people, with platforms, money, and power. Of course, people can be antisemitic without being a member of their local Nazi party, but bigotries of all sorts are organized by specific people who do so for specific ends (usually advancing the interests of a group of elites). When we view antisemitism, or any other form of bigotry, as some kind of immutable characteristic of human existence, we run the risk of missing the actual people using actual methods to advance hate. By targeting the actual organizers of antisemitism, we can fight back against them.

The real source of organized antisemitism is the right and they are organizing like mad. Elon Musk has spent millions supporting open white supremacists. Prominent members of the Republican party, including JD Vance have embraced the Great Replacement theory, an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims global Jewry is trying to replace white people with immigrants. You may consider Candace Owens a crank (even though she has over 6 million followers), but Tucker Carlson is a mainstream Republican propagandist using his massive platform to relentlessly advance antisemitism (and maybe also run for president god help us).

None of this is to say the far right hasn’t always been antisemitic (they have), but the genocide in Gaza gave far right antisemites the cover they needed to come out of the shadows and into the light. When people are mad about the state of the world, it is easier than ever for them to find themselves in an ecosystem of antisemitic propaganda, thanks entirely to the far right funding and propagating it online. To this end, researchers have found an explicit connection between Israeli violence against Palestinians and antisemitic hate crimes.

In fact, much of the so-called “left antisemitism” that we see online is directly attributable to the far right’s takeover of social media platforms. I’ve been an active socialist organizer for over eight years and I can’t help but notice that whenever there is intraleft squabbling over antisemitism, I happen to have no mutuals with any of the left antisemites. As an example, here’s one left antisemite who had his 15 minutes of X fame when got into an argument with Hasan Piker’s producer. While he claims to be “anti-KKK”, his main cause seems to be…combating anti-white racism on the left. Is this guy a real guy? I have no idea!

Twitter was always a warped mirror of society, but under Elon Musk’s rule, X has become a fascist house of mirrors. When X temporarily showed users’ locations, it inadvertently revealed that many far right accounts are actually run out of the very same third world countries they spend their time denigrating. This is because Elon has created an incentive structure for spreading hateful misinformation (and child sex abuse material). For people like Sean Padraig McCarthy, who is absolutely a real person, the constant stream of antisemitism desensitizes them and entices them to give into their worst impulses in order to seem clever and iconoclastic. This is the exact same process that has led to the spread of fantastically sexist incel terminology like mogging, chads, and looksmaxxing, which have normalized atrocious levels of misogyny. Antisemetic internet vernacular like goyslave and goyslop spreads along paths long trodden by incel slang.

So when we see what appears to be left antisemitism on X, not only should we doubt the veracity of the accounts as actual members of the left, but we should be skeptical of the entire discourse as a whole. Of course there is left antisemitism on X. There is antisemitism all over X. It is a site built for spreading antisemitism. Discourse on X is permanently tainted and isn’t evidence for anything other than the fact that X is a pernicious and demonic influence on our society and should be shut down immediately.

Are there people on the left who are antisemitic even outside of X? Absolutely. Are left wing organizations actively spreading antisemitism? No. Could unorganized internet masses cohere some sort of left populist, antisemitic force? Maybe, but they would face some pretty powerful roadblocks, mainly the fact that every single mainstream socialist politician and organization is viciously opposed to any form of antisemitism.

Antisemitism Is a Weapon Against The Left

Antisemitism is a very real problem and it’s one that only the left can solve. Mainstream Jewish organizations that are supposed to fight antisemitism, most notably the Anti-Defamation League, have spent the last three years calling anyone who is even remotely critical of the state of Israel an antisemite. Antisemitism has become a buzzword of both the center and right to deflect any criticism of Israel. This reached its ridiculous nadir when Hollywood producers accused Mark Ruffalo of antisemitism for criticizing Larry Ellison’s support of Israel and his monopolistic takeover of Hollywood. Bad faith antisemitism is mutually beneficial for both Zionists and antisemites. It allows antisemites to conflate very legitimate criticisms of the genocide in Gaza with antisemitism, while Zionists can use the existence of far right antisemitism to push for stronger support for Israel. This is why the component of Zohran’s antisemitism initiative that funds Zionist groups both damages the fight for Palestinian liberation and risks backfiring, increasing antisemitism instead of decreasing it.

We should also see antisemitism as part of a broader push by the far right against all minorities. Since October 7th, there’s been a very present and very weird centering of Jewish feeling when it comes to the Gaza genocide. Scott Galloway, cohost of the Raging Moderates podcast, demonstrated this when he told Abdul El-Sayed that he took exception to the candidate labeling the genocide in Gaza as a genocide, because Jews have a very special relationship with the world genocide (unlike the Armenians, Bosnians, Tutsis, Yazidis, Romani, and of course Palestinians). Antisemitism is not some special form of bigotry that carries more moral weight, but part of a whole host of bigotries that combine to form the horrid Voltron that is the far right.

I will caveat this by saying that while antisemitism is not morally worse than any other form of bigotry, it does happen to function as a catalyst that can unite all far right conspiracy theories. When thinking about racism, we generally use a definition along the lines of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In the current day, antisemitism is not doing this at nearly the same level something like anti-Blackness, or other forms of bigotry like transphobia.

What makes it threatening, at least for now, is something different: it makes the far right’s story more coherent. In times of rising anger towards elites, scapegoating people at the bottom of society like undocumented immigrants can go very far in redirecting anger away from those at the top. But still, people look to the top, and that’s where antisemitism comes in. “Yes”, antisemites say, “you’re right, there is a greedy 1% robbing you. But it’s not billionaires, it’s the Jews, who are the reason the immigrants are here in the first place!” This is why antisemitism has long been known as “the socialism of fools,” and every person falling prey to it is a potential socialist lost to the right.

Through the Great Replacement theory, antisemitism is increasingly a load-bearing piece of modern far right ideology, doing crucial ideological work to hold fascism’s paradoxical combination of populist and elitist rhetoric together. So we should cut it off.

Socialists in power should use this moment to go after far right antisemites using the institutional power they have. They should aggressively prosecute and disrupt white supremacist terror cells, shut down X, and pull all government funding from the companies that are run by fascists (remember, the US government is giving Elon billions via government contracts). Finally, antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry should be called out relentlessly and repeatedly. As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò says, we must “bring back shame.”

In practical terms, we need to reframe the discourse around antisemitism to focus on its actual source, the right. If we force the media, politicians, and society writ large to focus on the well known and powerful antisemites on the right, spurious allegations and cherrypicked anonymous X accounts won’t be able to shape the antisemitism discourse in ways that undermine us, while we will be able to shape it in ways that undermine the right. This is a missed opportunity for Zohran’s strategy to fight antisemitism, which targets antisemitism in a neutral, apolitical way, rather than going after the far right.

We owe it to ourselves and our movement to fight antisemitism on our own terms, not the right’s, and if we want to actually stop antisemitism and the network of bigotry it fuels, we should go after its true source: the far right.

Everything feels incredibly stupid right now. The mainstream news is more concerned with Hasan Piker than the literal Nazis infesting the country’s governing party. The LessWrong guy is advising Bernie Sanders who is doing events with Steve Bannon. You’re supposed to do these in threes, but I really don’t want to go through all the potential stupid enough third things, so please just pick your own, I’m sure you’ve got one.

In one way, this is all a new level of stupidness. But underneath, a lot of it is familiar: the media panics about anyone daring to criticize the US’ violence abroad, the warnings of existential threats whose vagueness somehow makes them even more urgent, the elites committing massive fraud and crimes with absolutely 0 chance of facing consequences… we already did this! It was called the Iraq War, and it already taught us what we can do about it. We just … didn’t do it.

Right now, we face a series of historic turning points, from how we handle the media’s scandal machine, to the midterm elections, to what we demand from candidates in 2028 and beyond. As we face each one, we will only be saturated with more of this stupidity. So as organizers, it’s our job to remember the lessons we already learned all those years ago, and use our collective power to put the country back on track towards actually following them.

Lesson 1: The US Does A Massive Amount of Horrible Things Around The World And It’s Better For Everyone Be Honest About It

The newest phase of the Hasan Piker media cycle is the stupidest yet. Instead of showing out of context clips of the streamer designed to stoke scandalous outrage, Axios became the first mainstream-ish outlet of this cycle to actually interview him directly. Of course, they then immediately posted out of context clips from their own interview to stoke scandalous outrage. In this one, Piker says the US has caused more damage to the world than al-Qaeda.

You can say, “if you watch more than five seconds it’s clear what he meant.” But I’m not going to say that because we all fucking know what he meant. What I am going to say is: this is an especially stupid thing to act scandalized about because it was the bog standard liberal opinion during the Iraq war. From 2002-2008 it was extremely obvious that the US going around killing a million people was killing more people than al-Qaeda did!

Everyone pretending to not know what this means or acting like it’s some incendiary thing is obviously full of shit, but they’re especially full of shit because they already lived through years and years of this claim being totally normal. Especially given the unbelievable chaos Trump 2.0 has wrought on everyone from Tehran to fucking Canada, do not let anyone get away with pearl clutching about obviously true criticisms of how our country is treating people, whether outside the US or within it. In the last year or so alone, DOGE’s cuts will kill 14 million people and are nearing 1 million already. Al-Qaeda might want to do that, but they haven’t done it and the US has.

The idea that you must treat voters like babies is exactly how you get Kamala Harris talking about the “most lethal military in the world” while voters get more and more angry about her support for genocide in Gaza. Even if all you care about is electoral politics, the Iraq War is a key reason Bush and Republicans became so unpopular by the end of his term. Attempting to retcon once standard callouts of the US’ deadly Global War On Terror foreign policy (which a recent study found caused 4.5-4.7 million deaths across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, averaging out to more deaths than the 9/11 attacks per week) at a time when “ground invasion of another country” is one of the few things Trump seems to still not have an appetite for, is sociopathic. Anyone smothering our ability to speak plainly about what US wars do is both running cover for the warmongers’ ability to keep mongering wars, and trying to protect them from consequences electorally.

Lesson 2: WMD Threats Show How Not To Handle AI Doom Threats

Starting a few weeks ago, the entire media and political world and social media became suddenly focused on the possibility of a Sentient Artificial Intelligence destroying humanity. The whole debate has been quite unusual not just due to its sci-fi nature, but because of the amount of unknowns involved.

How is a layperson supposed to gauge the likelihood of AI becoming sentient? How are we supposed to assess the claims of tech billionaires whose entire business hinges on AI, whose stock values are effectively linked to the amount they can hype their product, and who have long documented histories of lying? How are we supposed to assess the main incidents like “Hugging Face” when the accounts are mainly provided by the AI companies themselves? And for all the whistleblowing supposedly happening, why is what they’re blowing the whistle on so vague?

But for all the talk of unprecedentedness around the current AI doom panic, much of the way it’s unfolding is precedented as hell. It’s the same logic of the threat of Weapons Of Mass Destruction in the leadup to the Iraq War:

Very powerful people have saturated the media with a PR campaign designed to warn us of a threat that could kill us all. Virtually all discussion of this threat is led by the same people demanding control of the response to it. Many of them also have long and publicly documented histories of calling for the policies they are now calling for since long before this threat was “imminent.” The likelihood of this threat happening is unclear, with some totally certain, and others saying the likelihood is 10%. The evidence, which is largely marshalled by these same sources, is convoluted and hard to understand, but rather than defuse the panic, that lack of understanding of specifics and probability is treated as even more of a reason to act urgently and at a massive scale.

These aren’t exactly equivalent situations, but a huge portion of the logic, methods, and aims of the key actors involved are. We heard how even if it was only a little likely that Saddam Hussein had or was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, the threat was so great that we just had to take huge violent action resulting in millions of deaths–just as if there’s even a 1% chance of AGI destroying humanity, we have to dedicate every resource on Earth to stopping that instead of dealing with say, the climate crisis, which is destroying the Earth. (It’s worth noting that the Anthropic resignee who kicked this off appears to be a climate denier.)

And we heard how, as part of the post-9/11 War on Terror strategy, that the threat was so great we just had to keep giving more and more centralized power to spy on and detain and attack ordinary people to the executive branch and military industrial complex–just as the threat of AGI is so great and complicated we have to empower the AI industries to do whatever it takes to deal with it (and not punish them for the crimes they already committed!).

As my difficulty this week finding a store that hasn’t sold out of a book called End Times Fascism attests, the world faces many grave threats. But this makes it even more imperative that we don’t panic and get led around by people whose vague urgency just happens to align with what they already want.

The Iraq War provides so many examples of what happens when we do give in to that panic. Most obviously, the entire US federal government uniting to carry out massive destructive action that killed millions and destabilized dozens of countries in a way they’ve yet to recover from. But also, in what it took to build and maintain that war machine: a mass power grab by the same people who lied us into the war in the first place, and who were fresh off using 9/11 to create the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.

As Muskism, a recent examination of Elon Musk’s rise to power and economic model details, the Department of Defense in this era worked to integrate the rising tech industry into the military industrial complex, and we’re still paying the cost. Because this was what turned Musk and Peter Thiel from mere rich people into the nation-reshaping tech oligarchs they are today. First, the DOD contracted companies like SpaceX and Palantir to provide critical services (satellites and surveillance respectively). But soon, the government became so reliant on the companies for these services, Musk and Thiel were able to become effective monopoly providers to the government. Ultimately, they used this reliance to reverse the power relationship, gaining the ability to actually rewrite government policies and regulations in their field in a feedback loop that gives them more and more money and ultimately state-level sovereign power. In fact, this is a large part of why we even have the AI industry/bubble we’re now dealing with in the first place.

Allowing bad actors to sell us simultaneously on a) an existential threat and b) that only they can understand and solve it risks creating disasters of its own, letting people with known agendas of evil seize even more power over the rest of us. We learned in the leadup to the Iraq War that assessing existential threats requires very concrete evidence, examination by people who do not obviously benefit personally or politically from confirming power’s narrative, much clearer assessments of the potential cost of giving them what they want, and extreme vigilance towards preventing further concentration of power at the top, rather than consolidating it.

And if they are lying…

Lesson 3: If Elites Don’t Face Consequences, You Usher In The Age of Elite Impunity Where They Get Even Worse

Bill Clinton faced a lengthy impeachment trial for something that, however bad, did not kill a million people or usher in a new age of government torture. George W. Bush did do those things, and faced no consequences. The whole Bush era was replete with endless lists of crimes considered far beyond what we could expect from America, a kind of shocking violation of norms and embrace of the trampling of rights and deadly destruction at home and abroad. (It is not a coincidence that the creation of ICE was bound up in this.) But once Bush was out of office, he learned to paint, started palling around with the Obamas, and is now spending his 2026 working to help Donald Trump retain control of Congress.

You could argue that this level of elite impunity has always existed, or that it dates back to Ford’s pardoning Nixon, or that it was more of a steady erosion accompanying the rise of neoliberalism. But the final rubicon was crossed when the Obama administration decided to let the Bush administration get away with it all (along with the fraudsters who caused the 2008 financial crash), and bring the country into the Modern Age of Elite Impunity.

Imagine if the elected officials, bureaucrats, defense contractors, and allies who committed grave crimes and harms through the Iraq War (and financial crash) actually faced consequences. We can’t say for sure it would have stopped a serial liar and lawbreaker like Donald Trump from making it to the White House. But I think we can say it would have made it more likely he would have faced a single consequence by now. And it definitely would have given the rest of his gang pause, making his allies think twice going along with him out of pure self-preservation, and maybe even providing enough precedent to push his centrist enablers in the media to talk a little more clearly about his criminality rather than rationalize it away.

Instead, the country said in 2008 that “you can do whatever you want and face no consequence,” and we’ve paid a higher and higher price since.

While there’s no shortage of elite impunity across Trumpworld, let’s just focus on AI again. This industry is fundamentally based on what at least one executive internally called “the largest theft of human labor in history.” To get to their current stage, AI companies have regularly violated tons of laws and regularly lied about them, from invasions of privacy to worker exploitation to abetting mass shootings and genocide (to say nothing of top AI ringleaders’ unrelated personal crimes), or their systematic facilitation of the crimes of their fellow impunity-holders in the government like DOGE, ICE, bizarre sequel wars on Iran, Venezuela, and bombing fishing boats, among other things.

So even if we take the potential AI safety crises the AI billionaires are drawing our attention to in total good faith, it still draws attention away from the actual crises they are already causing, through actions that also make them billions and billions of dollars. As Lina Kahn points out, there are already many laws against what the AI industry both is doing and is warning of doing, and there is no reason that them being “AI” related means they should no longer apply. After all, if someone builds a bomb in their garage and it explodes and kills people, they’d be held liable. Why isn’t Sam Altman? It’s not just because branding them as “AI” seems to make people think no human involved has any control, it’s also because they’re rich and elite enough to have joined the class of people in the US that never face consequences for anything.

From this to Epstein to Elon, it’s all the manifestation of the informal legal and political principle enshrined by the Bush era and made permanent by the Obama administration: the bigger the crime you commit, the less you can be held liable for it.

Once you start seeing this, you start seeing it everywhere, and it becomes clearer every day that we cannot defeat today’s fascism without overturning it. If instead of holding AI oligarchs (and Trump, and everyone else) accountable for the damage they’ve actually done, we put them in charge of a system designed mainly to address the hypothetical future issues they come up with, there is no way that system will ever protect us from their machinations, let alone punish them for those they’ve already carried out. If they think their product is so dangerous, they must a) stop making it and b) be held liable for its damages the way a normal person would be.

But again, we already know all this! We cannot go along with any plan that further cements the elite power to avoid accountability for their actions, and must actively fight to take the power they have accrued away from them to prevent it from snowballing even further. We must put anyone new in power there with a mandate to make these elites finally face consequences, and provide them with a combination of relentless support and pressure to finally do it.

Lesson 4: If The President Is Historically Unpopular and Then a Financial Bubble Collapses and Causes A Crisis, Don’t Squander The Opening For Change

To denote how historically unpopular Trump is right now, you will often find pollsters comparing him to “2008 George W. Bush.” By then, the country really was sick of the Iraq War and everything its leader represented. So sick it did something thought impossible: elect the first Black president, who ran on a promise of “Change,” in the most resounding Democratic victory since FDR.

Looking back at the ‘08 Obama campaign, it’s striking how vague it seems in comparison to today’s most exciting campaigns, to a great degree more of “a vibe” than, say, Zohran Mamdani’s handful of policies so foregrounded that crowds chant them back at him. Even so, it was a shock to see the ur-Change Campaign turn into a Larry Summers-led financial recovery that obliterated Black wealth while undermining protections against foreclosures not to mention the total refusal to prosecute anyone from the Bush administration or Wall Street. The clear thrust of the Obama administration’s efforts were not towards the sweeping Change his campaign evoked, but were instead largely focused on keeping the system intact. This was the key factor behind a historic collapse in Americans’ trust in the Federal Government that began in 2008, and unlike previous collapses, has still not recovered. Until it does, it’s hard to imagine an end to the ceaseless “anti-incumbent” wave that has us seesawing in and out of fascism every four years now.

This wasted opportunity is such a historical failure because is hard to imagine a better opening for serious transformational change than post-2008. ….until now that is. Today’s AI bubble is easily comparable to the subprime mortgage bubble of the past. As Cory Doctorow puts it, 35% of the S&P is made up of the “Magnificent Seven” AI companies, six of them lose money on AI, and the seventh, Nvidia, mainly sells hardware to the other six. This is not a recipe for economic stability, and we should certainly be ready for the possibility of a collapse that could echo 2008.

Historically hated president and Republican party, possible financial collapse, shifting Overton window… we’ve been here before. And we saw what happens when you don’t change enough in response. When everyone hates what’s going on, we can’t waste the opening to change what’s going on or else I’ll have to write this article again in 20 years, probably from some kind of well-hidden, self-sustaining, sovereign socialist blimp I live on or something.

Fortunately, this is the one area where we actually have substantial some new advantages we didn’t have back then. There is a rapidly growing and powerful organizational left now. Policies that could actually substantively change and fix things like Medicare For All and the Green New Deal are widely known. The same level of chaos dragging us down has made openings for new ideas.

Which makes it all the more important that we remember this lesson and put it into practice: that when you have a mass revolt against the status quo and the elites responsible for it… change the status quo and get rid of the elites responsible for it. What better way to to change things than to unapologetically visibly push for and enact sweeping reforms of the scale most of us have never really lived through in the US? What better way to create a clear sense of rupture with the people previously in charge than to blacklist and put them on trial for what they did to the people, instead of letting them go back to their mansions and X accounts to build up to the next cycle?

In one way, all this stupidity is frustrating. How many of the lessons that may be required for humanity’s survival are things we already learned almost 20 years ago? But on the other hand, it’s good to know things aren’t so far gone that these basic common sense lessons still don’t apply. The problem isn’t that there’s no way to fix this, it’s that we haven’t done it yet. So, time to keep building a groundswell of demand to make it happen, and create the conditions in which they will.

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!

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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.

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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.