Cracks Form in the Establishment as Zohran Crushes Cuomo
The left’s gains inside the Democratic Party cannot substitute for building working class power capable of confronting capital with revolution.
Zohran’s victory wasn’t just an upset—it was a fracture in a failing establishment. The old political order that arrogantly believed it had the right to impose its will with impunity is beginning to lose its grip. Millions of working people in the heart of capitalist America got their first glimpse of what it looks like when they believe in a better future. But we must take this small victory not as an end but a beginning in raising class consciousness and fighting for socialism beyond the ballot.
On November 4th, the humble Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the election for New York City Mayor 50% to 41% over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent. According to polls, the result was all but a formality, since the real surprise came in the June primary when Zohran beat Cuomo in a landslide 56% to 43%, even though 31 of 32 polls had him losing.
While there are many stories to talk about, like the groundswell of youth support, the massive grassroots fundraising, and the salience of his simple affordability agenda, the star of the show goes to the over 90,000 canvassers who knocked on doors to get out the vote. The scale of such a campaign was seemingly unprecedented, yet the media refuses to acknowledge the importance of this very rudimentary strategy. For soulless corporate politicians, they can typically muster only a handful of people to door-knock, who are primarily there for the money, whereas Zohran’s campaign actually inspired people and gave them something to believe in.
Zohran’s message isn’t difficult to get out there either, when people are already sick and tired of corporations, billionaires, and landlords getting tax breaks while they struggle to pay rent. Contrast this with Cuomo’s campaign, which had to bend over backwards to bark at voters that Zohran is some evil person with skeletons in his closet. They failed.
This army of supporters, putting in countless hours of work, has resulted in an astonishing 1.03 million votes for Mamdani as of the time of writing this. To compare, the previous 2021, 2017, and 2013 elections had a total turnout of 1.14 million, 1.16 million, and 1.1 million, respectively. The last time someone received over a million votes in New York was all the way back in 1969, when John Lindsay received 1.01 million.
Most surprising of all was how Zohran completely flipped the Bronx and majority black areas. One of the things detractors would point to is his weak performance with the black community, cynically painting his campaign as ‘for the upper-middle class’ and out of touch with marginalized voters. Compared to the primary, Zohran dominated majority-black precincts by 26 points, and the Bronx went from his worst-performing borough to his second-best, going from -18 to +11. This may have been because he was the Democratic nominee, where people voted down the ballot line, but some suggest it was through diligent campaigning and canvassing. The contrast between the two became even more distinct as Cuomo could not shake his association with Trump and the establishment, as he was +42 in precincts that voted for Trump last year.
The Centrist Coup de Grâce
Still, despite this being the biggest electoral mandate in over 56 years, right-wing Democrats and conservatives insist on downplaying this moment. Ross Douthat, the conservative clown at the New York Times, scrambled to post his opinion article titled, “Zohran’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think,” reciting the tired, dead-end strategy of ‘just move to the center and win over Republicans!’ His argument? That just because Zohran won in ‘liberal’ New York, it doesn’t mean it will translate to the rest of the country. But it’s exactly this elite arrogance that causes Democrats to lose or barely inch over the finish line every single election; the idea that people don’t know what they’re voting for and need to be pandered to. It turns out, polls show the exact opposite of Douthat’s theory. Nationwide, 83% support building more affordable housing, 82% support penalizing landlords for rent gouging, 72% support taxing the top 1% more, 72% support raising corporate taxes, and 65% support funding free child care.
And didn’t Democrats try this last year? Kamala Harris, someone believed to be a progressive, completely capitulated to this insurgent centrism and decided to strip her campaign of every moderately populist policy. By the end, she was shouting down her left flank while campaigning alongside Republicans to make the case that she was the pragmatic consensus choice, and she lost miserably. Here we are, less than a year away from the midterms, and the Democrats have no positive message besides not being Trump.
Though the liberal establishment’s job is to co-opt left-wing energy and water it down enough to please billionaires, it would at least be smart for them to listen to this grassroots energy. The problem for us, of course, is making our left movement radical enough to fight the establishment, not reform it. But it seems the Democrats might be too dull even to notice the incredible opportunity in front of them, to adopt progressive populism and defeat fascism, which is driving this country into authoritarian chaos. Only a minority of the party actually backed Zohran, often on the basis that Democratic members should stick together, while party leader Chuck Schumer refused to endorse in the race.
Instead, the party insists on losing. Just when we thought the New York Times op-eds couldn’t get any worse, they published Binyamin Appelbaum’s article, “Mamdani Isn’t the Future of the Democrats. This Guy Is,” referring to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. The short of it is the same as Douthat’s excuse; this agenda won’t work outside of the ‘liberal’ cities. But these opinion writers are too lazy even to use objective evidence and reasoning; the best they can do is cite that XYZ centrist won XYZ election without examining how and why. Shapiro ran unopposed in the primary and then faced an incredibly weak Republican candidate, Doug Mastriano, whom the GOP wasn’t even enthusiastically supporting. Mastriano had major problems fundraising, hardly did public appearances, and was a radical MAGA guy when Trump was almost unanimously hated after the January 6th riots. Shapiro is also completely bought by multi-national corporations, AIPAC, and the fossil fuel lobby, so it’s no wonder that billionaire elites got behind him rather than some nutcase outsider who believes in QAnon.
The article is predominantly just a puff piece for Shapiro, but the most confusing part is how Appelbaum describes what “Mr. Shapiro’s version of the Democratic Party” is. He says it’s “more patriotic than the GOP and, in some sense, more conservative,” citing how Shapiro wants to improve public institutions rather than dismantle them, along with this vague notion of ‘democracy’ that liberals obsessively cling to in their messaging. First off, if Democrats are trying to be the more ‘conservative’ party, they’ve already lost. And trying to be the more ‘patriotic’ party while the other side is rallying racist nationalism to throw immigrants in concentration camps is, at best, a strategy for failure, and at worst, is saying Democrats should try to out-fascist the fascists. That’s the literal reading of what he’s saying. Still, Appelbaum is doing this weird thing, trying to redefine political terms, making it seem like defending institutions is somehow the ‘conservative,’ ‘patriotic’ position. It’s not; protecting liberal institutions is liberalism. You’re not going to trick conservatives who think they want ‘small government’ into thinking they actually want a fairer society regulated by institutions just because you say you’re a patriot.
The next part is even more strange. Appelbaum says that people will trade ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ for safety and stability. He’s right. People need safety and stability; it’s a pretty basic human need. It makes sense that they would take risks to protect that. But then he bewilderingly writes that “Shapiro recognizes the urgency of convincing people that democracy is still the better bet.” What’s missing is why people have to choose in the first place. Why is this even framed as a two-way decision? Why can’t Democrats provide both?
These couple of sentences really get at why Democrats fail so embarrassingly. They think that people are static points on a graph or numbers in a poll rather than human beings shaped by their present reality. They conclude that the only way to gain more voters is to tailor their messaging to ‘moderate voters,’ or even hopelessly to try to win over Republicans. They think that platitudes like ‘democracy’ and ‘make government work better’ win people over. But, as Marxists who understand that people are shaped most by their material conditions rather than abstract ideas, we know this is a fool’s errand. The one thing people always respond to is politicians running on directly improving their lives through government, which is exactly what Zohran’s campaign focused on. Democrats have a derogatory name for this: “kitchen table issues,” because they know that actually improving people’s lives means disrupting the capitalist status quo of companies extorting people, and with it, upsetting their corporate donors.
Needless to say, Democrats will let the country die if they refuse to change, and we can expect that, given the way things are going. Populist progressivism has proved itself once again to be a winning strategy while the billionaire-backed Democrats cope with excuses for how people could possibly vote to make their lives easier.
Reality Check
The biggest question of all for Zohran is whether he can deliver on his promises. The short answer is: partially.
As an article in Dissent Magazine explains, “Despite an inspiring history of municipal socialism, city government is not the best platform for an ambitious program to expand the public sector.” But there are many specific things Zohran can definitely achieve. Most importantly, freezing rent on stabilized housing units falls within the mayor’s office’s purview and can be implemented without resistance, especially since previous mayors have done so. Having control over zoning allows him to better allocate resources toward public housing and away from commercial real estate development. Regulations on housing and labor are also well within his authority, and he can use city agencies to enforce them. The mayor can improve the employment terms of city workers and increase their wages. Important for all workers, the mayor can emphasize wage‐theft enforcement, protect underserved workers, contractor compliance, and gig-economy regulations. Though this is a non-exhaustive list, these are certainly victories for the working class.
For us, it’s important that just being in office, Zohran is a bulwark against the establishment and will be able to block the relentless corporate capture that has defined the city under bagmen like Eric Adams. For example, in 2019, Amazon planned to build a massive corporate campus in the city with $3 billion in government incentives, which was eventually cancelled. As mayor, he could certainly throw a wrench in these disgusting corporate welfare projects.
The unfortunate dilemma is the choice he faces: relentlessly fight the establishment and risk failing your agenda, or align with the establishment and make compromises, only to pass a watered-down version of your plan. If we remember, in 2020 Bernie was polling better than Biden against Trump in the general, but decided to surrender to the establishment, only receiving some marginal influence in return, when he could’ve channelled the movement into something that would challenge the status quo long term. Already, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is being extremely difficult about Zohran’s agenda. She has already come out against his free bus fare plan and, regarding his plan to increase taxes on elites and corporations, said, “I’m not raising taxes on high net-worth people right now, because we cannot have them leave the state.”
This is the limit of reformism. Zohran has given people immense hope, but he will not achieve what we need to actually make a better society. It’s the difference between freezing rent and abolishing rent. We cannot just vote out capitalism; we must build a revolutionary movement beginning with the project of unionizing and raising class consciousness.
This choice is most exemplified by how a progressive mayor handles the police. Zohran, in the past, has met the moment with a fairly compelling public statement on police reform, saying in one 2020 comment, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.” Now, as mayor, he is confronted with both the need to use the police and the desire to reform it against their will. If Zohran tries to implement too drastic reforms, it could push the NYPD to walk off the job, creating a political mess that could unravel quickly. There’s also the added threat that such a scenario could provoke Trump into sending the National Guard or punishing the city in other ways. The only other option is to make some marginal changes at the discretion of the police while allowing all the excesses of police violence and brutality to continue. Take the scenario in which a cop brutalizes someone, and Zohran uses his office to charge them and discipline the police: they will do everything in their power to make his life hell. This exact scenario happened when cops in Buffalo walked off the job to support their colleague who cracked the skull of a 75-year-old man. Zohran will also be responsible for deciding whether or not to sic the police on protestors when conflict inevitably arises.
There is no easy answer, but there is a correct answer. Zohran needs to recognize that the police will fight him regardless of what he does. He needs to be prepared for the day these cops put their power fantasy egos above the safety of everyone in the community. That’s why he should be using his office and his influence to build alternatives for non-emergency calls, as well as a community defense force, as dual power. Though it isn’t a perfect analogy, we ought to look to the 1960s when Black Panthers formed a civilian defense force to protect their community when the racist police were either directly attacking them or plainly refused to help black communities. But the problem is, Zohran is not nearly that radical.
Compromises or Capitulation?
Worse is that Zohran has already conceded. On the campaign trail, he decided to drop police reform from his agenda. In June, he said, “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police.” Then, a few days after the election, he made the stomach-churning statement that he is keeping New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
This is a crushing blow to any hope that Zohran would be fighting the establishment. Jessica Tisch is the daughter of elite billionaire James Tisch, deeply dedicated to supporting the Israeli ethnostate project. Her family even spent an unbelievable $1.3 million supporting a Cuomo super PAC dedicated to attacking Zohran. Jessica herself is also a rabid genocide-supporting Zionist who had her officers train with Israeli police and directed them to identify the watermelon as a symbol of ‘anti-semitic hate.’ As described in a WIRED article, “Tisch was a main architect of the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, an enormous, $3 billion, Microsoft-based surveillance network of tens of thousands of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, social media feeds, biometric data, cryptocurrency analysis, location data, bodyworn and dashcam livestreams, and other technology.” It goes on to say, “[Tisch] got her start in the department’s controversial intelligence division during the height of its ‘mosque-raking’ mass surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers.” In an article by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, he writes, “At a press briefing last month, Tisch called a proposed $80 million federal cut to the NYPD’s counterterrorism budget a ‘betrayal’ and demanded that the matter be placed above politics.” Some other parts of her record include defending killer cops, frequent Islamophobia, supporting the IDF, laundering the fascist Israeli race-war narrative, and labeling anti-genocide Palestine protestors as ‘terrorists.’
A lot of progressives are refusing to acknowledge this obvious duplicity, retreating to say that this is somehow a ‘strategic compromise’ to prevent police resistance. But it should be clear that this puts him at odds with the people he is supposed to represent. So many of his supporters, people who canvassed for him, and DSA members who endorsed him did so because he would fight Zionism, not capitulate to its most ardent custodians. This makes his promise of arresting Netanyahu if he comes to New York virtually impossible. Though he could still fire her if conflict comes up, it doesn’t even make sense to put himself in that position in the first place. Why would you risk a big mess when you could fix it now? It’s not strategic; it’s surrendering.
To get to the bottom of whether we can expect Zohran to challenge the status quo or not, we should track the trajectory of these ‘compromises.’ Remember that Zohran initially strongly opposed Zionism but gradually softened his rhetoric. The first problem was his deliberately taking hostile interviews from establishment and centrist programs that demanded he answer back-handed questions. The grossest of which was when he went on right-wing stooge Tim Miller’s podcast, where he forced Zohran to take a stance on the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ leading to months of disingenuous attacks and Islamophobia after he gave a very reasonable and nuanced answer. After that instance, Zohran retreated and then said he “discourage[s] the use of intifada,” essentially saying that he doesn’t think Palestinians are allowed to use the language of resistance when talking about their struggle against a literal genocide.
In another instance, when asked about his views on Cuba and Venezuela, he described those countries as ‘dictatorships,’ the kind of rhetoric that war-mongering politicians use to justify military intervention against them. Though Zohran apologized and retracted after DSA’s International Committee strongly condemned his statement, our representatives need to do far better than remain completely ignorant of international issues. In fact, internationalism is something the left should be resolute about, since building socialism is impossible without the working class of the entire world.
Zohran obviously should’ve been harsher in these interviews or not taken them in the first place. Publicly, he needs to counterattack because they will keep exploiting his half-hearted answers. This approach isn’t an accident; it’s indicative of a person who either doesn’t believe in these life-or-death issues enough to be unflinching or thinks it’s politically expedient to say what the media wants to hear.
During the primary campaign, Zohran already began to bend on his anti-Israel stance to try to get the most rabid of Zionists off his back to no avail. That should’ve been his first lesson: stop trying to compromise with people who hate you no matter what you say. As late as October, you still had radical Zionist freaks like Bret Stephens writing hit pieces like “Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me,” to slander him. As time went on, when the campaign prepared for the general, the more his campaign relied on experienced liberal Zionist campaign managers who played a part in convincing him to water down his rhetoric. To maintain the image that he would be a mayor for all New Yorkers (apparently including Zionists), he began adopting rhetoric that appeals to liberal Zionism, particularly supporting the idea that ‘anti-semitism is rising,’ which is an extreme bastardization of a real problem that is being used to crack down on Palestinian activists. Zohran’s rhetoric on the October 7th uprising has always been very muddled; granted, it would be obtuse for us not to acknowledge that a brown Muslim man like Zohran is in a much more difficult position to speak on this issue than a white person in such a racist country. Still, he has completely conceded the position to Zionists by describing it as a ‘horrific war crime,’ thus making no distinction between himself and those who use that false narrative to carry out the genocide. He doesn’t even support the right of Palestinians to resist, saying “of course Hamas should lay down their arms.”
While it could be said around a year ago that Zohran was at least anti-Zionist, that’s no longer the case, as he said he would allow Zionists in his administration. Mind you that no politician, even Republicans, would ever say that they would allow a white supremacist in their administration, so why would this be any different? Zohran has also retreated from his position on arresting internationally wanted war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, just a year ago giving a firm ‘yes,’ then this year giving a rambling 2-minute non-answer. Not only is this backstabbing his supporters, as mentioned previously, but it also sets the precedent that his administration will not uphold international human rights law.
The most recent submission was Zohran’s endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries during a Meet the Press interview. When asked if Jeffries should be Speaker of the House if Democrats win the midterms, he answered with an emphatic “Yes!” This comes a few days after he urged New York City DSA not to endorse progressive Chi Ossé’s primary challenge to Jeffries, saying that “The choice before us is not whether to vote for Chi or Hakeem at the ballot box. The choice is how to spend the next year. Do we want to spend it defending caricatures of our movement, or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement?” While Zohran’s message to DSA reflected how many DSA members felt, especially the left caucuses— that Ossé seems like an opportunist rather than a committed socialist— his endorsement of Jeffries reflects someone who is bending the knee to the establishment rather than someone building a movement to fight it.
Winning is Not the Point
It should be said that all these compromises will result in more of the status quo, not less, should this continue. What the left needs is more leaders who do not compromise but instead roll with the punches in order to advocate for the correct and moral position. Why are we allowing the Zionists, the perpetrators of the hundred-year oppression of the Palestinians and the genocide that played out for the world to see through our screens, to write this chapter of history? Do we not deserve someone who won’t let that happen?
And what do we get out of this compromise? While it would be reductionist to say that nothing positive will come of this administration— certainly, millions having their rent frozen is nothing to scoff at— this doesn’t bring us any closer to dismantling capitalism. Unfortunately, these compromises indicate he will likely dilute, capitulate, and bargain away his vision while entrenching himself with the establishment. The reason to be concerned is not pessimism; Democrats have a long history of co-opting progressive energy and channeling it to produce more exploitation. Take the anti-war movement in the late 2000s when Obama used that energy to win the election, then proceeded to expand the War on Terror while covering the DoD’s tracks with illegal drone strikes and covert assassinations. Zohran seems more like someone who shakes hands than someone prepared to risk burning bridges for what’s right. Already, Trump has joked about straight-up deporting him, and he can’t let fear of something like that guide his decisions.
Something we need to be very wary about is the progressive Democrat strategy firm that Zohran worked with called ‘Fight Agency.’ This firm helped Bernie Sanders, Ruben Gallego, and John Fetterman, all of whom have been absorbed into the establishment after presenting themselves as change-makers. They are exceptionally effective with young people and know how to push all the right buttons when it comes to anti-billionaire messaging. However, this group has almost no principles, seeing that they helped install one of the most pro-war and pro-Israel politicians in the Democratic Party in Fetterman, and are now helping former Blackwater contractor Graham Platner run for Senate in Maine. Though they lean ‘anti-establishment’ right now, once they gain more influence in the Democratic Party, we should expect this group to become malicious toward the left, both by co-opting left energy by channeling our optimism into dead-end candidates and by running against left radicals.
More importantly, winning elections is not the point. This is actually the same error that Democrats make and why they lose so much. Their idea is that if they win enough close seats with centrists, they can get a majority coalition. But the problem is— now what? Every time this happens, those centrists don’t want to pass anything, people lose faith in them and then they get voted out. Similar for the left— does it matter if you won if all you did was water down your actual position and debase what socialism is? Socialism will not be built in a day, and it certainly won’t be built with a social democrat running in a capitalist party.
So far as principled leftists should even be running in elections right now, they need to be people who aren’t there to make friends, and it could even help them win more. A quirk that social science discovered is that people are more swayed by those who stand by their convictions and fight for them rather than by those who say what they want to hear. People are more convinced when people make social sacrifices and take risks for something they believe in, rather than when they make a good argument for it. And this makes sense; you’d trust someone more who demonstrates they’ve incurred costs for what they believe in than someone who says what you should believe. The most obvious example is how Trump dominated the 2016 primary as an outsider just from his blind arrogance and conviction. It was in part because he said everything with conviction and incurred media attacks for it, so people believed in him despite having disagreements with him. This worked so well that Trump supporters began saying things like “we know Trump lies, but he lies for us.” The left seriously needs to use this sort of attitude against the establishment.
Someone we should look back to in history is the way Malcolm X, a true radical in every sense, would speak with such conviction to the hostile white media. It was the one trait that made him so inspiring as a figure; he never compromised on the right of black people to resist their oppression by any means necessary. So we must be unafraid to express our radicalism and present it with confidence. As capitalism deteriorates, it time will only prove us correct.
The Urgent Tasks of the Left
A few things must be clear from now on for the American left, namely, the DSA, the largest leftist coalition right now. Delegates in DSA must continue moving left, rejecting opportunism. At the very least, DSA needs to adopt the positions set forth by Marxist Unity Group and other left caucuses; to “free [DSA] from the Democratic Party and all other capitalist influences,” adopt a guiding program to achieve communism, electoral discipline, a strong line against imperialism, to abolish the Constitution, and to establish a new union that completes the project of Reconstruction.
The DSA and all left parties must immediately stop running candidates in the Democratic Party. We need to stop making this elementary error based on the belief that somehow we can change a capitalist party from the inside— as we know it doesn’t have internal democracy, it’s owned by the 1%, and its members do not want to actually change in a progressive direction. In fact, on November 21st, House Republicans brought to the floor a resolution called “Denouncing the horrors of socialism and opposing the implementation of socialist policies in the United States,” where 86 Democrats voted in favor and only 98 voted against it. If nearly half (46%) of your party is siding with conservatives to reject your policies outright, you don’t belong in that party.
Capitalism cannot be voted out. Continuing to do this hopeless routine only drags us to the right, rehabilitates the Democratic Party, and wastes our precious time. On the path to dismantling capitalism is dismantling capitalist parties; there is no getting around that. It is our immediate task to secure a new ballot line for the working class or run candidates as independents. The Democratic Party is possibly at its weakest in history, it’s time that socialists show the working class that we are their true representatives even if it means risking Republicans winning. We cannot stay trapped in this two-party nightmare forever. It’s time to rip the band-aid off.
The left equally needs to stop being distracted by identities, labeling, purity testing, and finger-pointing. Materially, the reason reformism doesn’t work has nothing to do with individuals— it has to do with the structures that make it impossible without revolution. So when we criticize a figure like Zohran, we must aim to show that these are structural inevitabilities, not necessarily moral failings. Our task is not to raise a panic every time Zohran ‘betrays’ us; it’s to educate the masses that the capitalist political structure forces this to happen.
Because our vision needs to be set not merely on reforming capitalism but on seeing through a revolution that destroys it. As Lenin wrote in 1920 after achieving the first successful proletarian revolution in history,
“The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realize the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realize that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses—hitherto apathetic—who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it.”
That is our blueprint. We need to build unions and the class consciousness of the working-class people so that when the moment comes when neither the upper nor the lower class can carry on in the old way, we can establish socialism.
Zohran’s win may not be the answer, but it is a symptom of capitalist decay, the establishment losing legitimacy, and the rising consciousness among the masses. It is our job to channel that energy into revolutionary optimism and hope. The real pessimism is the belief that only marginal change is possible, when, in reality, the revolutionaries of the past have proven that a better world beyond capitalist greed and misery is possible.