https://hammerandhope.org/article/national-nightmare-trumpism
Our National Nightmare
What’s the way out of the terrors of Trumpism?
Chioma Ebinama for Hammer & Hope
Paranoia strikes deep as the walls close in on American democracy. The reins of government power, technology, and the press tighten and tangle in a few white billionaires’ hands. Total surveillance means no escape. Prosecution looms over student protesters, ICE observers, educators, critics. Deepfakes pervert the possibility of certainty, AI floods the feed with nonsense, and consolidated media tamps the spread of inconvenient facts. The Trump administration tries to destroy unions and uses any pretext to ramp up its all-out war on the left.
Meanwhile, people fight for scraps of basic health care inside a system of corporate profiteering. Federal workers are already in food lines as the government shutdown drags on. Millions face hunger, and insurance premiums are set to spike. Rent, gas, groceries — everything is unaffordable. The ruling elite ignores the climate catastrophe that hurtled across the Caribbean.
Chaos reigns.
We know it’s not all brand-new — the deportations, the National Guard on city streets. Rich people have bought up TV networks before; the right never stopped trying to shred SNAP benefits and Medicaid. But as Trump bulldozes the White House and warps the bounds of the presidency toward autocracy, the political reality in the U.S. can feel slippery and hard to gauge, and as if we might really be doomed.
Maybe no single thing is new, but that’s part of the mind-fuck, the sense of the ungraspable, the seeds of doubt: Where is this American cabal going next, and how far and deep will it drag us with it? We are entering another chapter of the struggles of decades and centuries, those we address in policy papers, at school desks, in clinic appointments, with our art, music, words, protests. But old routes are also unsafe now, and old tools seem to do nothing. How do we stay clear-eyed in reality and find our way through?
The past doesn’t repeat itself, but history is our training ground. On Sept. 25, Assata Olugbala Shakur died in exile in Cuba at age 78. Born in Queens, New York, Shakur dedicated her adult life to Black liberation and socialist revolution in the U.S. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, she practiced multifaceted activism: tutoring kids, supporting rent strikes, selling the Black Panther Party’s newspaper, working at its health care and breakfast programs. The government constantly surveilled Shakur and accused her of multiple crimes, using the FBI’s infamous counterintelligence program to frame her. Her militancy was shaped by racism and police repression. But at the core of her life experiences as a Black woman socialist revolutionary in the 20th century were both a pragmatism and a vision of utopia. Her radicalism lay not in the claims of armed resistance that her enemies touted — for which there was never robust evidence — but in her unerring commitment to mobilizing and serving poor Black communities, denouncing the racist judicial system, and promoting socialism at immense personal cost.
Today, New York City is on the verge of electing as its mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist. People across the U.S. are drawing on grassroots organizing and direct action to respond to increasing state violence, narrowing legal and institutional channels for relief, and economic instability and austerity. Local organizations and resident associations are creating ICE watches to alert migrants while also offering food and legal assistance. Over the summer, SEIU and workers’ rights associations carried out a campaign from North Carolina to Louisiana to denounce ICE’s gross violations of human rights. The Palmetto State Abortion Fund and other organizations are supporting pregnant people despite bills threatening to further curtail peoples’ autonomy over their own bodies. Indivisible and other progressive grassroots coalitions have mobilized millions of protesters in all 50 states to protest Trump’s growing authoritarianism.
In Africa, the Gen Z protest wave, which took off in Kenya, has arrived in Morocco and Madagascar, where the protests led to the ouster of the president. In Europe, Italian unions and students’ associations held a general strike in opposition to the Italian government’s support for Israel and in solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla, a coalition of hundreds of activists from more than 40 countries that tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and create a humanitarian corridor. Palestine solidarity protests continued to fill the streets in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and other European countries this fall.
In her autobiography, Shakur recalled a heated discussion with a Black comrade who questioned her enthusiasm, as a Black woman, for a Chinese revolutionary group based in San Francisco’s Chinatown: “I told him that i thought there were a whole lot of us in the same predicament and that the only way we were going to get out of it was to come together and break the chains. The brother looked at me as if i was spouting empty rhetoric. Some of the laws of revolution are so simple they seem impossible. People think that in order for something to work, it has to be complicated, but a lot of times the opposite is true. We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice. The basis of any struggle is people coming together to fight against a common enemy.” In these movements and beyond, we can all take inspiration from that lesson.
Our thanks to the people who made it possible for us to publish Issue No. 8:
Ena Alvarado, Billy Brennan, Ana Valeria Castillos, Erin Crum, Vicky Fontenelle, Daniel M. Gold, Chuck Gonzales, Jaime Fuller, Henson Scales Productions, Kyla Jones, Alan Maass, Nikki Makagiansar, Derecka Purnell, and Will Tavlin.
https://hammerandhope.org/article/mamdani-left-socialism
Zohran Got New Yorkers to Hope. What’s the Plan to Deliver?
Organizers who brought him to the verge of victory are looking ahead to the challenges of democratic governance.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaking in Harlem, October 5, 2025. Photographs by Christopher Lee for Hammer & Hope.
Tasha Cloud, the New York Liberty’s star point guard, was pulled aside on July 3 for an interview after practice. “You were on the road,” a WNBA reporter began, “when Zohran wins the primary the other day.” At the mention of Zohran Mamdani’s name, Cloud broke into a wide grin and interrupted him: “That’s Mamdani. That’s my boy!” Referring to Donald Trump’s threat to deport the democratic socialist if he wins the New York City mayoral race on Nov. 4, Cloud added, “For all of us in New York, I’m just gonna ask that we continue to be on the right path to history — that we protect one another, that we protect Mamdani and what he wants to do.”
What Zohran Mamdani “wants to do” continues to dominate conversations in New York City. When I asked a young technician at Apple about Mamdani as he helped fix my phone back in July, he said Mamdani had inspired him to vote for the first time. “Do you know how I found out about him?” he asked. “He came to my neighborhood! He came to the park where I was playing basketball! And you know what he said? He wanted to know what I think we need in this city.”
Stories like that help explain why Mamdani is the favorite to defeat disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, now running as an independent after losing the primary decisively to Mamdani, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, subway vigilante, and talk show host. But they also raise another question: Will Mamdani be able to do what he “wants to do”?
Mamdani has terrified the city’s real estate and finance industries, pro-Israel forces, corporate Democrats, and a hostile federal government in the hands of Trump. If Mamdani does become mayor — and that’s not a foregone conclusion given the power of his enemies — will the landlords, capitalists, and political establishment allow him to achieve anything? And what role can Mamdani’s mass of supporters play in defending him and advancing the agenda for working-class New Yorkers that galvanized Tasha Cloud and so many others?
For some, the answer lies in mobilizing to hold a Mayor Mamdani accountable to the movements that elected him, with activists rallying outside Gracie Mansion to make their demands known. But this assumes that the organizations and volunteers who lifted Mamdani’s campaign will become “outsiders” once the election is over, having to protest to be heard by the new mayor. Others hope for a “co-governance” arrangement, in which decision-making is shared between City Hall and community stakeholders. But in any case, this may be expecting more than can realistically be achieved under Mamdani, given the hostility of financial and political elites and the current state of movement organizations.
The Mamdani challenge has the potential to build an effective inside-outside strategy that relies on both a democratic socialist in the mayor’s office and a grassroots coalition of community, labor, and progressive forces, working collaboratively. But none of that will happen overnight. For one, the left is in the early stages of creating the organization and developing the political experience necessary for this. “It is daunting,” Fahd Ahmed, executive director of the community group Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM), told me. “But it is possible.”
Two things can be true at once: A Mamdani victory will transform the electoral landscape and advance the potential for a left-liberal alliance to counter a rising right. But at the same time, the left and working-class institutions are weak, and the level of class struggle remains historically low. A single electoral cycle will not do away with these obstacles.
Mamdani’s ability to deliver transformational policies largely depends on how effectively a left coalition can mobilize for them. And the left will be strengthened by a mayor using the bully pulpit, political relationships, and city structures to advance the same agenda and promote movements. This already happened during the campaign; organizations that supported Mamdani grew stronger in the process. “The campaign provided us an opportunity to pretty significantly expand our reach within our communities,” Ahmed said. “The very tactful ways in which our sister organization DRUM Beats carried the campaign into our communities and brought our communities to the campaign has given both organizations a lot more prominence and legitimacy.”
Álvaro López, the electoral coordinator for the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, believes “we need to get away from a ‘holding them accountable’ framework toward a ‘building power’ framework.” Building power, according to López, requires ongoing grassroots organizing to widen Mamdani’s base of support, win more local elections, and further develop an inside-outside strategy that can effectively pressure any forces that obstruct the mayor’s agenda.
With a clearheaded assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, but its eyes still looking toward the horizon, the left has the potential to play both a defensive role — organizing movements to counteract the New York elite’s opposition to Mamdani’s policies — and an offensive one of building enduring left structures and reviving the belief that government can work for public needs, not big-money interests.
What does the left do, the Chicago organizer Emma Tai asked, when it has just “a little bit of power”? If anyone can appreciate the importance of that question, it’s Tai.
When I spoke to Tai about the left’s experiment in the Windy City, it had been two years since the teacher and union organizer Brandon Johnson was inaugurated as mayor. After serving as executive director of United Working Families (UWF) for six years, Tai joined Johnson’s transition team in spring 2023. The following year, she led the grassroots effort in support of the mayor’s signature Bring Chicago Home ballot initiative — a defeated referendum to raise the city’s real estate transfer tax on the very rich to fund affordable housing and services for the unhoused.
The UWF was founded in 2014 as a political arm of the city’s strong left-labor alliance, anchored by the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Healthcare. The organization spent the following decade building working-class electoral power and was instrumental in Johnson’s victory, putting a progressive Black organizer risen from the ranks of the city’s militant teachers’ union in the mayor’s office.
Tai believes the American left has become accustomed to being outside the halls of power, leaving it with an underdeveloped understanding of power. When Chicago organizers came face to face with this reality under Johnson — “that our power still is not enough to transform what we’d like,” as Asha Ransby-Sporn reflected in In These Times — it caused strained relationships and exhaustion among movement leaders. Though Johnson’s administration has notched some gains for working Chicagoans, important initiatives like Bring Chicago Home failed in the face of an unrelenting opposition bankrolled by Chicago’s elite, leading to sagging popularity for the mayor.
Chicago organizers learned firsthand that having a friend in City Hall didn’t overturn the practical realities of power: structural limitations, like who has authority over taxing bodies and how the municipal bond market works, and financial burdens inherited from previous administrations, like pension debts and giveaway contracts to corporations.
Chicago is not the first to learn this lesson. In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba, a socialist and leader of the separatist organization Republic of New Afrika, won the mayoralty of the Black-majority city in 2013. He set out to fix the city’s long-neglected infrastructure and foster worker-ownership, as a step toward a “solidarity economy.” But the city lacked revenue and was hindered by an openly hostile state government. Shortly before his death less than one year after taking office, he said in an interview with Jacobin: “Our administration has very little more control over the economic realities of our society than we did before we got in these positions. We have some technical control over those things — or technical influence, let’s put it that way. But not real control.” Nearly a decade later, with his son Chokwe Anwar Lumumba in office, the city’s water system broke down — the state had systematically rejected, withheld, or diverted the funding to fix it for years.
Tasha Cloud, the New York Liberty’s star point guard, was pulled aside on July 3 for an interview after practice. “You were on the road,” a WNBA reporter began, “when Zohran wins the primary the other day.” At the mention of Zohran Mamdani’s name, Cloud broke into a wide grin and interrupted him: “That’s Mamdani. That’s my boy!” Referring to Donald Trump’s threat to deport the democratic socialist if he wins the New York City mayoral race on Nov. 4, Cloud added, “For all of us in New York, I’m just gonna ask that we continue to be on the right path to history — that we protect one another, that we protect Mamdani and what he wants to do.”
What Zohran Mamdani “wants to do” continues to dominate conversations in New York City. When I asked a young technician at Apple about Mamdani as he helped fix my phone back in July, he said Mamdani had inspired him to vote for the first time. “Do you know how I found out about him?” he asked. “He came to my neighborhood! He came to the park where I was playing basketball! And you know what he said? He wanted to know what I think we need in this city.”
Stories like that help explain why Mamdani is the favorite to defeat disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, now running as an independent after losing the primary decisively to Mamdani, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, subway vigilante, and talk show host. But they also raise another question: Will Mamdani be able to do what he “wants to do”?
Mamdani has terrified the city’s real estate and finance industries, pro-Israel forces, corporate Democrats, and a hostile federal government in the hands of Trump. If Mamdani does become mayor — and that’s not a foregone conclusion given the power of his enemies — will the landlords, capitalists, and political establishment allow him to achieve anything? And what role can Mamdani’s mass of supporters play in defending him and advancing the agenda for working-class New Yorkers that galvanized Tasha Cloud and so many others?
For some, the answer lies in mobilizing to hold a Mayor Mamdani accountable to the movements that elected him, with activists rallying outside Gracie Mansion to make their demands known. But this assumes that the organizations and volunteers who lifted Mamdani’s campaign will become “outsiders” once the election is over, having to protest to be heard by the new mayor. Others hope for a “co-governance” arrangement, in which decision-making is shared between City Hall and community stakeholders. But in any case, this may be expecting more than can realistically be achieved under Mamdani, given the hostility of financial and political elites and the current state of movement organizations.
The Mamdani challenge has the potential to build an effective inside-outside strategy that relies on both a democratic socialist in the mayor’s office and a grassroots coalition of community, labor, and progressive forces, working collaboratively. But none of that will happen overnight. For one, the left is in the early stages of creating the organization and developing the political experience necessary for this. “It is daunting,” Fahd Ahmed, executive director of the community group Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM), told me. “But it is possible.”
Two things can be true at once: A Mamdani victory will transform the electoral landscape and advance the potential for a left-liberal alliance to counter a rising right. But at the same time, the left and working-class institutions are weak, and the level of class struggle remains historically low. A single electoral cycle will not do away with these obstacles.
Mamdani’s ability to deliver transformational policies largely depends on how effectively a left coalition can mobilize for them. And the left will be strengthened by a mayor using the bully pulpit, political relationships, and city structures to advance the same agenda and promote movements. This already happened during the campaign; organizations that supported Mamdani grew stronger in the process. “The campaign provided us an opportunity to pretty significantly expand our reach within our communities,” Ahmed said. “The very tactful ways in which our sister organization DRUM Beats carried the campaign into our communities and brought our communities to the campaign has given both organizations a lot more prominence and legitimacy.”
Álvaro López, the electoral coordinator for the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, believes “we need to get away from a ‘holding them accountable’ framework toward a ‘building power’ framework.” Building power, according to López, requires ongoing grassroots organizing to widen Mamdani’s base of support, win more local elections, and further develop an inside-outside strategy that can effectively pressure any forces that obstruct the mayor’s agenda.
With a clearheaded assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, but its eyes still looking toward the horizon, the left has the potential to play both a defensive role — organizing movements to counteract the New York elite’s opposition to Mamdani’s policies — and an offensive one of building enduring left structures and reviving the belief that government can work for public needs, not big-money interests.
What does the left do, the Chicago organizer Emma Tai asked, when it has just “a little bit of power”? If anyone can appreciate the importance of that question, it’s Tai.
When I spoke to Tai about the left’s experiment in the Windy City, it had been two years since the teacher and union organizer Brandon Johnson was inaugurated as mayor. After serving as executive director of United Working Families (UWF) for six years, Tai joined Johnson’s transition team in spring 2023. The following year, she led the grassroots effort in support of the mayor’s signature Bring Chicago Home ballot initiative — a defeated referendum to raise the city’s real estate transfer tax on the very rich to fund affordable housing and services for the unhoused.
The UWF was founded in 2014 as a political arm of the city’s strong left-labor alliance, anchored by the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Healthcare. The organization spent the following decade building working-class electoral power and was instrumental in Johnson’s victory, putting a progressive Black organizer risen from the ranks of the city’s militant teachers’ union in the mayor’s office.
Tai believes the American left has become accustomed to being outside the halls of power, leaving it with an underdeveloped understanding of power. When Chicago organizers came face to face with this reality under Johnson — “that our power still is not enough to transform what we’d like,” as Asha Ransby-Sporn reflected in In These Times — it caused strained relationships and exhaustion among movement leaders. Though Johnson’s administration has notched some gains for working Chicagoans, important initiatives like Bring Chicago Home failed in the face of an unrelenting opposition bankrolled by Chicago’s elite, leading to sagging popularity for the mayor.
Chicago organizers learned firsthand that having a friend in City Hall didn’t overturn the practical realities of power: structural limitations, like who has authority over taxing bodies and how the municipal bond market works, and financial burdens inherited from previous administrations, like pension debts and giveaway contracts to corporations.
Chicago is not the first to learn this lesson. In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba, a socialist and leader of the separatist organization Republic of New Afrika, won the mayoralty of the Black-majority city in 2013. He set out to fix the city’s long-neglected infrastructure and foster worker-ownership, as a step toward a “solidarity economy.” But the city lacked revenue and was hindered by an openly hostile state government. Shortly before his death less than one year after taking office, he said in an interview with Jacobin: “Our administration has very little more control over the economic realities of our society than we did before we got in these positions. We have some technical control over those things — or technical influence, let’s put it that way. But not real control.” Nearly a decade later, with his son Chokwe Anwar Lumumba in office, the city’s water system broke down — the state had systematically rejected, withheld, or diverted the funding to fix it for years.
Zohran Mamdani and New York Assembly member Al Taylor participate in a paper-shredding event in Harlem, October 5, 2025.
On its face, the economic reality of New York City couldn’t be more different. New York is home to hundreds of thousands of millionaires, countless billionaires among them. The sleek glass skyscrapers of Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row” on 57th Street function as investment properties, standing largely empty for most of the year, while New York renters scramble to find housing in a market where vacancy rates are in the low single digits. The first task of a Mamdani administration will be to generate the funds needed for policies to confront the affordability crisis and much else. But while the wealthiest residents in the wealthiest city in the world can certainly afford to pay more taxes, only the governor and state legislature have the authority to change the tax code — and they can foil New York City’s plans. The city’s last progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, confronted this while trying to fund his signature universal pre-K program.
The reality — as any radical, socialist, or even progressive mayor has learned — is that winning City Hall does not grant its occupant the reins of power. The landlord and corporate class still hold most of them. De Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have seemed all-powerful during his three terms, but this was because his agenda was the same as the city’s capitalist class. Zohran Mamdani will be, from day one, at odds with New York’s powerful elite, the state officials who have taxing authority, and the federal government, which can shut off tens of billions of dollars in funding that both the city and the state rely on.
As Jasmine Gripper, co-director of New York Working Families Party (WFP), explained, once the mayoral election is won, “We still have to have and run external campaigns that create the ecosystem and the pressure for those who hold the levers of power to help deliver on his agenda.”
Building the kind of external campaigns Gripper envisions will require a clear assessment of the left’s relative strengths and weaknesses. DSA’s López told me that some of his comrades were eager to talk about lessons from the 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. “I was just a little bit taken back,” López said. “We’re not forming cordones,” he said, referring to organs of popular power formed by Chilean workers to defend themselves and Allende. “Taking over factories is not on the agenda.”
The New York left is in a different political moment. If Mamdani wins the general election, it will happen at a time when masses of people are rejecting Trump and the establishment Democrats who have refused to stand up to the right. But at the same time, the sustained organizing efforts and structures needed to engage that mass sentiment are largely underdeveloped. Organizations and coalitions will need to develop structures and mechanisms for democratic decision-making, so that newly activated New Yorkers can plug in in meaningful ways.
“An ideal,” DRUM’s Ahmed said, “would be if we could develop neighborhood-based organizing committees” out of the campaign’s neighborhood canvassing operations. “They could play this role of staying well-connected to the community, connected to the administration, and sort of being able to go in both directions.” But Ahmed emphasized that this was still an ideal, while pointing out the wide discrepancy between electoral campaigns and ongoing organizing efforts. “It’s one thing to knock on doors to mobilize people,” he said. “It’s another thing to actually know people behind those doors and know who they listen to or who they influence.”
That type of deep organizing could certainly receive a boost under a Mayor Mamdani. But in the near term, coordinating an inside-outside strategy will depend on the existing left and its ability to build effective coalitions and keep open lines of communication with City Hall.
Mamdani and the New York City chapter of DSA do have some experience in pushing successfully for progressive taxation. DSA’s 2021 campaign to tax the rich supported the work of Mamdani and other state legislators in Albany to increase taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations. The budget, which passed despite opposition from Cuomo, then the governor, ended up raising almost $4 billion in revenue annually. To build pressure on legislators, DSA organized mass canvassing throughout the city. Now the organization is gearing up for a similar effort.
The same method can be used to mobilize popular pressure for other Mamdani proposals, like child care for all and government-owned grocery stores. And the election campaign will provide a ready base. One canvasser I spoke to, Kareem Edmonds, described his evolution from doomscroller to regular canvasser for Mamdani to plugged-in politico. When I asked him what he’ll do next, he answered, “We have an obligation to sharpen our fangs” to fight for the policies of the campaign. Whether thousands of newly activated voters like Edmonds can plug into future organizing will play a big part in shaping Mamdani’s and DSA’s future.
López is optimistic. “What NYC DSA does have right now is seven geographic branches that can act like little socialist local city halls, where people can tap in, understand the struggles and the challenges that Zohran is facing,” and see how all his agenda items “have to be supported by campaigns from below.” The goal will be for newly activated campaigners to learn about what is being proposed and then discuss what comes next. “There’s going to have to be constant feedback between Zohran’s office and those different campaigns,” López said.
Other organizations involved in the Mamdani coalition have their own means for bringing in and activating new supporters. For example, Ahmed says that DRUM has used a membership-oriented approach, involving its base in discussions and decision-making in campaigns. “With our members, we’re engaging the community institutions, the community leaders, ethnic media, ethnic organizations, faith institutions,” he said. They’re “finding who the organic leaders in the community are and being in spaces of social connection.”
But many other movement organizations don’t engage in the same practices. As Ahmed asked, how common is “deep, rigorous democratic engagement of the rank and file” among the groups and unions that endorsed Mamdani, “versus top-down decision-making,” versus just operating on the basis of what’s good for their particular organization?
Given this unevenness, political education will be all the more important to both grassroots mobilization and deepening public support. Back in 2021, during Mamdani’s first year as a State Assembly member, he told me that elected socialists need to be careful about creating a false sense of hope. “Preaching a gospel of abundance within conditions of austerity,” as he put it, requires being clear about the way the system works — or rather doesn’t work. In New York, like other cities, local and state government functions have been hollowed out by decades of negligence, austerity, and now a hostile federal government. “When we talk to our constituents, we try to be honest with them” about the political and systemic challenges, Mamdani said. “There are many obstacles that are unseen, and you need to know them. Because if you don’t connect the dots in politics, it seems like you can never achieve change. And that’s what they want you to think.”
On its face, the economic reality of New York City couldn’t be more different. New York is home to hundreds of thousands of millionaires, countless billionaires among them. The sleek glass skyscrapers of Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row” on 57th Street function as investment properties, standing largely empty for most of the year, while New York renters scramble to find housing in a market where vacancy rates are in the low single digits. The first task of a Mamdani administration will be to generate the funds needed for policies to confront the affordability crisis and much else. But while the wealthiest residents in the wealthiest city in the world can certainly afford to pay more taxes, only the governor and state legislature have the authority to change the tax code — and they can foil New York City’s plans. The city’s last progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, confronted this while trying to fund his signature universal pre-K program.
The reality — as any radical, socialist, or even progressive mayor has learned — is that winning City Hall does not grant its occupant the reins of power. The landlord and corporate class still hold most of them. De Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have seemed all-powerful during his three terms, but this was because his agenda was the same as the city’s capitalist class. Zohran Mamdani will be, from day one, at odds with New York’s powerful elite, the state officials who have taxing authority, and the federal government, which can shut off tens of billions of dollars in funding that both the city and the state rely on.
As Jasmine Gripper, co-director of New York Working Families Party (WFP), explained, once the mayoral election is won, “We still have to have and run external campaigns that create the ecosystem and the pressure for those who hold the levers of power to help deliver on his agenda.”
Building the kind of external campaigns Gripper envisions will require a clear assessment of the left’s relative strengths and weaknesses. DSA’s López told me that some of his comrades were eager to talk about lessons from the 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. “I was just a little bit taken back,” López said. “We’re not forming cordones,” he said, referring to organs of popular power formed by Chilean workers to defend themselves and Allende. “Taking over factories is not on the agenda.”
The New York left is in a different political moment. If Mamdani wins the general election, it will happen at a time when masses of people are rejecting Trump and the establishment Democrats who have refused to stand up to the right. But at the same time, the sustained organizing efforts and structures needed to engage that mass sentiment are largely underdeveloped. Organizations and coalitions will need to develop structures and mechanisms for democratic decision-making, so that newly activated New Yorkers can plug in in meaningful ways.
“An ideal,” DRUM’s Ahmed said, “would be if we could develop neighborhood-based organizing committees” out of the campaign’s neighborhood canvassing operations. “They could play this role of staying well-connected to the community, connected to the administration, and sort of being able to go in both directions.” But Ahmed emphasized that this was still an ideal, while pointing out the wide discrepancy between electoral campaigns and ongoing organizing efforts. “It’s one thing to knock on doors to mobilize people,” he said. “It’s another thing to actually know people behind those doors and know who they listen to or who they influence.”
That type of deep organizing could certainly receive a boost under a Mayor Mamdani. But in the near term, coordinating an inside-outside strategy will depend on the existing left and its ability to build effective coalitions and keep open lines of communication with City Hall.
Mamdani and the New York City chapter of DSA do have some experience in pushing successfully for progressive taxation. DSA’s 2021 campaign to tax the rich supported the work of Mamdani and other state legislators in Albany to increase taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations. The budget, which passed despite opposition from Cuomo, then the governor, ended up raising almost $4 billion in revenue annually. To build pressure on legislators, DSA organized mass canvassing throughout the city. Now the organization is gearing up for a similar effort.
The same method can be used to mobilize popular pressure for other Mamdani proposals, like child care for all and government-owned grocery stores. And the election campaign will provide a ready base. One canvasser I spoke to, Kareem Edmonds, described his evolution from doomscroller to regular canvasser for Mamdani to plugged-in politico. When I asked him what he’ll do next, he answered, “We have an obligation to sharpen our fangs” to fight for the policies of the campaign. Whether thousands of newly activated voters like Edmonds can plug into future organizing will play a big part in shaping Mamdani’s and DSA’s future.
López is optimistic. “What NYC DSA does have right now is seven geographic branches that can act like little socialist local city halls, where people can tap in, understand the struggles and the challenges that Zohran is facing,” and see how all his agenda items “have to be supported by campaigns from below.” The goal will be for newly activated campaigners to learn about what is being proposed and then discuss what comes next. “There’s going to have to be constant feedback between Zohran’s office and those different campaigns,” López said.
Other organizations involved in the Mamdani coalition have their own means for bringing in and activating new supporters. For example, Ahmed says that DRUM has used a membership-oriented approach, involving its base in discussions and decision-making in campaigns. “With our members, we’re engaging the community institutions, the community leaders, ethnic media, ethnic organizations, faith institutions,” he said. They’re “finding who the organic leaders in the community are and being in spaces of social connection.”
But many other movement organizations don’t engage in the same practices. As Ahmed asked, how common is “deep, rigorous democratic engagement of the rank and file” among the groups and unions that endorsed Mamdani, “versus top-down decision-making,” versus just operating on the basis of what’s good for their particular organization?
Given this unevenness, political education will be all the more important to both grassroots mobilization and deepening public support. Back in 2021, during Mamdani’s first year as a State Assembly member, he told me that elected socialists need to be careful about creating a false sense of hope. “Preaching a gospel of abundance within conditions of austerity,” as he put it, requires being clear about the way the system works — or rather doesn’t work. In New York, like other cities, local and state government functions have been hollowed out by decades of negligence, austerity, and now a hostile federal government. “When we talk to our constituents, we try to be honest with them” about the political and systemic challenges, Mamdani said. “There are many obstacles that are unseen, and you need to know them. Because if you don’t connect the dots in politics, it seems like you can never achieve change. And that’s what they want you to think.”
Zohran Mamdani greets supporters in Harlem,
October 5, 2025.
As the coalition that supported the Mamdani campaign works to deepen the base of support for his policies, a more democratic vision of the city can emerge. For example, New York City DSA co-chair Grace Mausser said that any gains Mamdani achieves toward an affordable city need to be accompanied by outreach and education to clarify where the changes are coming from — not for the purpose of winning praise but to drive home a political message: Government should be responsible for helping people live better lives.
In the era of Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE, that is a tall order, but an important one. “We’re talking about decades or more before anything truly economy-transforming happens,” Mausser reckoned. “But in the meantime, if we can improve the condition of working people’s lives, if we can increase people’s trust and belief in the government even a little bit, I think that puts us in a much better place than where we are right now, with a decent portion of Americans believing the government is corrupt and too big.”
During the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, democratic socialists in Milwaukee and dozens of smaller cities and towns showed that socialist governance could be good governance. More than 1,000 socialists were elected to mayor’s offices, local boards, and legislative bodies in municipalities across the country. The longest-serving socialist mayor of the era, Daniel Hoan of Milwaukee, was in office for 24 years. Even Time was forced to admit at the time that Hoan “remains one of the nation’s ablest public servants, and under him Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.” — despite Hoan counting “the city’s bankers, utilities men and big real estate owners his sworn enemies. The Press, except for a small Socialist sheet, is solidly against him. Republicans and Democrats have virtually lost their separate identities in uniting to oppose him.”
Of course, New York City is far larger and more complex than Milwaukee was during Hoan’s time. The learning curve for Mamdani and his supporters will be steep — but rich with possibilities. “I’ve been very impressed, but maybe also relieved, with the humility that I feel like a lot of folks are taking with this right now,” said David Turner, a DSA member and city worker. Having worked for two years at New York City’s Office of Labor Relations, Turner has been studying the workings of city government and how existing practices could be used or revised under a different administration. His conclusion: Within the structures of City Hall is a trove of tools for governing — “different knobs to turn and levers to pull and switches to flip,” he said. “We don’t need to just hit all of them at once, because there is a comical amount of options available.” To govern effectively, both Mamdani’s administration and its partners outside City Hall will need to learn which knob turns what, and which to turn when.
The smarter that the whole Mamdani coalition is about how the city works, the more effective it can be in transforming New York. “A lot more people need to be involved in the nexus between an administration, movements, and communities,” Ahmed said. “Knowing how to weigh pressure from the inside, pressure from the outside, if we do this, what’s the impact and what’s the potential blowback.”
Building a democratic movement must also contend with the low level of civic engagement among the city’s roughly 8.5 million residents. Without that engagement, experiments in participatory democracy won’t necessarily lead to positive results. But organizations like DRUM and DSA can organize their membership base to both deepen political education and expand the mayor’s support. Meanwhile, Mamdani can provide leadership, momentum, and concrete entry points for the movements. For example, New York City mayors have at their disposal the Office of Civic Engagement to reach constituents — along with departments that can hold community events and multiple offices to launch initiatives and projects.
Beyond this, the mayor can explicitly call on supporters to organize throughout the city — as Turner put it, to “flood the zone” of civic life and significantly increase engagement. Mamdani could encourage supporters to run for seats on school and community boards, which could help drive local policymaking and discussion. In the case of the Rent Guidelines Board (a body appointed by the mayor that decides on yearly rent increases), Mamdani could invite New Yorkers to show up to the board’s public meetings, turning this city structure into a space where the public engages its government. Turner recounted how his own City Council member, Chi Ossé, promoted a council hearing on the FARE Act, legislation he had proposed to outlaw landlords charging broker fees. Hundreds of people showed up — and the act passed.
While much can be done from inside City Hall, building broader democratic institutions remains primarily a job for left organizations. “I talk to so many city workers who just have so many ideas about how they would want their agency and their respective work to be done better,” Turner said. “Ideally, they would be able to voice a lot of this through their union, but their union has no interest and no desire to voice any of these concerns.” Movements for union democracy could make them more representative of their rank and file, Turner said.
Whether driven by unions or movements for racial and social justice, a left agenda is only as strong as the forces pushing for it. As Gripper put it, “I don’t want Zohran to sit on his own or sit with some of his folks and come up with ‘the Black agenda.’ This is our responsibility to create. It’s on us to create the agenda for our community.”
Building a truly popular governance in New York City is a long-term project. Mamdani’s tenure can go a long way toward providing leadership for that project, but he can’t do it single-handedly, nor should the left want him to. The movement for a truly popular democracy has to be grounded in the current reality of the left and labor movements. But the momentum from a Mamdani victory can simultaneously strengthen both the mayor’s agenda and the left.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hadas Thier is a writer, journalist, and activist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the author of A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics.Hammer & Hope is free to read. Sign up for our mailing list, follow us on Instagram, and click here to download this article.
