The second Trump administration has been doing a right-wing authoritarian speedrun. The welfare state has been slashed and the machinery of state repression massively ramped up. Republicans have attacked health care subsidies and food assistance for low-income families, while ICE now has a bigger budget than most militaries. Suspected criminals without US citizenship have been deported without a whiff of due process to a notorious Salvadoran prison. Legal permanent residents have been arrested and threatened with deportation for attending protests or writing op-eds. And Trump is increasingly labeling his domestic political opponents “terrorists.”
All of this and more has happened in less than ten months. No one knows how far it will all go or if the process will be reversed. Much depends on how the opposition party meets the moment.
Right now, Democrats are at a crossroads. One possibility was highlighted last week by the victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election. A starkly different one was illustrated when the forty-three-day shutdown of the federal government ended with a humiliating defeat for Democrats under the leadership of Mamdani’s fellow New Yorker, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
In a recent interview, Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara said that he was definitely a supporter of Mamdani’s run for mayor “from the beginning.” (Little wonder, considering Mamdani’s long history as a Jacobin contributor!) But Sunkara admitted that he hadn’t really thought that Mamdani, who started the primary polling at 1 percent, would win. He thought of the race “more as a pressure campaign — to bring cost-of-living concerns to the forefront of the race.”
Now, Mamdani is New York City’s mayor-elect. What happened?
Two things. First, Mamdani slowly but surely won over more and more of the existing electorate. Second, he expanded the electorate in remarkable ways. In the primary, turnout was higher than…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
