The two best analyses of Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory are this one, by Michael Thomas Carter, and this conversation that Daniel Denvir, the Terry Gross of the Left, hosted with two organizers in New York City. Both analyses focus on the elephant in the room.
Virtually all of the commentariat has emphasized Mamdani’s videos, his undeniable charisma and political fluency, and Andrew Cuomo’s weaknesses. The latter were oddly invisible to most commentators up until the very night that Cuomo conceded; then it became obvious that he was a weak candidate and was always going to lose. There’s a lesson there about power, which people always treat as static, when it’s not.
But easily the most important factor in Zohran’s victory is the movement that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has built in New York City since the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. Carter and the two organizers Denvir talks to — Gustavo Gordillo and Grace Mauser — provide both historical perspective and immediate nuts and bolts commentary. Make sure you read and listen to them.
I want to stress two elements in what I heard.
First, DSA has seen a lot of failures along the way. Failure is always a hard thing for social movements to deal with, particularly in the United States, where failure is the ultimate sin. But as Eve Weinbaum pointed out years ago in her excellent book To Move a Mountain, which I highly recommend, every movement meets failure. The only question is how it deals with failure, and Weinbaum has a rich and reflective analysis of just that question. DSA has figured out not only how to deal with failure but also how to grow from it. We saw the fruits of its labor on election night.
Second, yesterday, my wife and I went to a massive outdoor DSA party celebrating Zohran’s victory. What struck me most about the celebration was that it showed how much DSA has built a movement culture. You could see it in the way everyone was talking to everyone….
Auteur: Corey Robin
