Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York City on Tuesday, defeating disgraced former governor and Independent nominee Andrew Cuomo amid a massive blue wave in elections across the country. This victory serves as a symbolic moment where the establishment Democrats were finally defeated and the voice of the people was heard, avenging Bernie Sanders’ progressive democratic socialist movement and candidacy in 2016. To anyone even remotely left leaning, this is fantastic news. Or so you’d think.
It turns out there are a plethora of dissenting voices from every corner of the vibrantly colored tapestry that constitutes the modern American left. Mamdani’s democratic socialist partialities in his policies have put the very same rose-red target on his back that Bernie Sanders once wore five years ago. Liberals (median democratic voters, mind you) find him far too radical, the same way they once considered Bernie the reincarnation of Trotsky. On the flip side, the very radical leftists that both moderates and liberals suppose he aligns himself with consider him spineless, weak-willed and ultimately destructive to the ideology.
I imagine many of you have had semi-similar political journeys. Originally smudged in the unavoidable mud of whatever party your parents subscribed to (likely the neoliberalism of the Obama/Hillary era – you’re a Whitman student, after all), maybe once you hit middle school you undergo a brief party flip (some more radical than others), and from high school and beyond you start to cement yourself somewhere between liberal and progressive, some veering farther left than others.
For the radicals, you have slowly but surely become jaded since junior year. You begin to realize all the theories you read, every page of Marx and Engels and Mao becomes less of a starry-eyed future for a better world and more of a delusion of grandeur in a world that is rapidly deteriorating. Your copy of “Capitalist Realism” begins to accrue dust, tiny specks of cynicism accumulating until you yourself are far too jaded to consider yourself a Marxist-Leninist, much less a democratic socialist, so you simply wear the now degrading and deliberately vague label of “leftist.”
Maybe/hopefully, my personal experience is a less popular one, and you are all still fervent with ideals of change, of revolution, of anything other than this. Since Biden’s election (and especially after Trump), I really haven’t been. But when Zohran won the mayoral primary in July, I felt a flicker of hope, an ignition unfamiliar to me for so long concerning the modern left. All of a sudden, I wanted to read theory again; things began to feel so warmly optimistic in a way I hadn’t recalled in our party since Bernie winning Nevada in 2020. The seemingly immutable lack of praxis so detrimentally seeped into the modern radical left was finally beginning to evaporate. Young, progressive people were going outside and canvassing for a politician! And it’s not even 2008!
Why then do the arbiters of the Democratic Party, the very same magnates of the exact kind of aforementioned limp-d*cked neoliberalism your parents probably belong to, seem to reject Mamdani so ardently? The Democratic Party has not only lost the youth, but they’ve practically ceded it to the opposition. The right has (very obnoxiously) dominated the culture war over the last 4 years, no doubt about that. For the first time since Obama, there has emerged a Democrat who not only resonates with younger voters, but is one. Establishment Democrats (who are really just moderates, who are really just Republicans, who are really just white supremacists and not even trying to hide it) understand the ideological threat people like Zohran pose to their long-established hierarchical hegemony, and they seek to stifle it as quickly as they can. Remember, it is not free buses or healthcare that the establishment fears, it is class consciousness.
This is not to say Zohran is Lenin reincarnated, nor will he be the head of the revolution, if you still earnestly believe in such a thing (power to you, truly), but he is a trailblazer in modern leftist politics. He’s also just a very likable guy. Granted, he is still a politician, and I imagine a series of missteps is to be expected now that he has been elected. He will continue to be scrutinized from all sides, but this should not deter you from having faith, if not in a person, then in an ideology.
The fact that a young (under 40!) progressive democratic socialist is currently set to become mayor of the biggest city in the country is an objective step forward for a party that has been so sluggishly stagnated since 2016. But if we continue to bicker and deliberate on the semantics of his socialism, the authenticity of his demeanor, the credibility of his policy promises, we will forever be stuck in a grave of our own making, eclipsed by the increasing fascism of our opponents. You gotta believe a little; at this point, it’s all we got.
