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    Zohran Mamdani’s writer on crafting a historic victory speech: ‘In New York, inspiration is everywhere’

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    In his victory speech after winning the New York mayoral election last week, Zohran Mamdani came out swinging.The speech included, among other dramatic flourishes, a reference to the socialist titan Eugene Debs, shoutouts to the city’s “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses”, tributes to Jawaharlal Nehru and Fiorello La Guardia, sprinkles of Arabic – and it was all delivered with the cadence and command of a hip-hop emcee. Many who were listening could not help but wonder: how the hell did he pull that off?A healthy portion of the credit should go to Julian Gerson, the speechwriter on the Mamdani campaign who typifies the young, leftwing lieutenants powering this insurgent operation – a 29-year-old outer-borough dweller (in his case, Brooklyn) with unerring message discipline. He is especially unabashed when it comes to the words he puts in his boss’s mouth that draw inspiration from socialist greats and the multicultural city that the Mamdani campaign holds dear.“When this campaign has sung the most is when it feels like a love letter to New York,” Gerson told the Guardian.To write the victory speech, Gerson began working a week in advance, collaborating with Mamdani and his campaign consultant Morris Katz on overarching themes, before locking himself in his apartment until he had a draft ready for Mamdani to review on the Saturday before the election. (Mandani never saw a draft of the concession speech, which Gerson said was “not fun to write”.) “Push yourself to think of speechwriting as more than just the written word,” he said Mamdani told him – which is to say the 34-year-old Muslim and Indian Ugandan state assemblyman was already thinking about the space his victory would occupy in the annals of history. Gerson threw out a couple names he hoped to quote in the speech – and recalls Mamdani responding: “‘OK, but can you make sure to quote Eugene Debs?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, he’s already on the list.’”Gerson, the son of a Texas-born mediator with strong ties to the local Democratic scene and a Belgian NYU professor, did most of his growing up in the West Village and attended the prestigious Dalton school in Manhattan. One early exposure to professional writing came when his father, Stéphane, published a book about his younger brother Owen dying in a rafting accident at age eight. “It was a very formative, very hard part of my childhood that taught me how to express myself through the written word,” said Gerson, who gave notes on early drafts.View image in fullscreenGerson got his start in politics as a high school summer intern in Mike Bloomberg’s New York mayoral administration. For university, he went to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he served as the communications director for the Middlebury College Democrats. After graduation, he worked for Manhattan congressman Jerry Nadler – whom he commends for his bravery leading the first impeachment of Donald Trump and for voting against the Iraq war – and did a two-year stint ghostwriting for New York governor Kathy Hochul.Gerson joined the Mamdani campaign in March as political director, soliciting endorsements from elected officials across the state while working with Mamdani to deepen his relationship with a panoply of constituents across the city. “A lot of that was figuring out, how do we get him into parts of Black New York? How do you have him speaking with gay and trans New Yorkers?” Those ground-level experiences wound up supplying Gerson with steady fodder for speeches that would pull straight from the communities Mamdani was courting.For the victory speech, Gerson found the opening Debs quote – “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” also cribbed by Martin Luther King – inside William Safire’s speech compendium titled Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. The quote comes from a speech made when the labor organizer and perennial Socialist party candidate was sentenced to prison in 1918 for denouncing the US’s involvement in the first world war. “That’s it!” Gerson recalls saying when he came upon it.It was in many ways inevitable that the speech would draw comparisons to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory address in Chicago’s Grant park, widely regarded as one of the greatest orations in modern American history. He called it “a formative memory of what a speech can mean and how it can speak to people”, he said. “It was the only speech I really read in depth before I started writing.”Like Obama’s speechwriters, some of whom Gerson said he spoke to for advice, Gerson enjoys the benefit of writing for a deft multimedia performer. In the days leading up to election night, Gerson subbed in for Mamdani to give his voice a break. “At a certain point I would get into it and try to give a performance, and it’s crazy how different and how much better the speech is when you have somebody who just has this innate talent for knowing when to pause, knowing which syllables to emphasize. The most successful speechwriter-principal relationships are those where it’s close to a partnership, where they engage with the material really intensively and make it theirs.”Obama’s many rhetorical imitators in the Democratic party – US senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro – latch on to his pentecostal intonations in their public speaking. But Mamdani, who once pursued a rap career under the name Mr Cardamom and who still psyches himself up for work by playing Many Men by 50 Cent (a vocal critic of Mamdani’s plan to tax the rich), embraces the language and swagger of hip-hop. The kiss-off he delivered to rival Andrew Cuomo in his victory speech – wishing him “only the best in private life” while quoting his father, Mario, the former New York governor, without attribution (“A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”) – was a mic-drop moment straight out of a New York rap cypher.“We all know Mr Cardamom exists in the world,” Gerson said. “But when you’re in the midst of a campaign, you have to shave off parts of your life. First goes exercise, then reading, then grocery shopping – until you’re hoping you just make it to election day with laundry. Cultural consumption shrinks too, but music can still fill the liminal space.”View image in fullscreenGerson works in his own musical tastes, too. For a May rally, he drew inspiration from a song by the Chilean American electronic musician Nicolas Jaar’s band Darkside, using a Spanish lyric: si no funciona, no me diga si no funciona (translation: “if it doesn’t work, don’t tell me that it works”) – to set the tone for the rally speech Mamdani gave last month assailing Trump’s agenda. The campaign’s impulse to tie its populist ideas to musical references is a throwback to the community building and social activism that gave rise to hip-hop’s birth in the Bronx.Mamdani’s victory speech was not a universal hit, of course. CNN pundit Van Jones was among the critics who took issue with a speech he described as “sharp” and combative. “I think he missed a chance tonight to open up and bring more people into the tent,” Jones said.Gerson makes no apologies. “In response to Van Jones: this campaign and this mayoralty will absolutely be inclusive to every single New Yorker. Zohran had that final line in his long list of thank yous where he said: ‘Many of you voted for me, others of you did not and many didn’t vote at all – and I want to be the mayor for each of you.’ To New Yorkers, there’s a genuine eagerness to serve and prove that we’re going to follow through and that this is going to be a great four years.’”Mamdani and Gerson wanted New Yorkers to come away from the victory speech feeling as if they would also have an important part to play in the new administration, and that no suggestion was too small. That includes an Arabic line that made it into Gerson’s final draft – ana minkum wa ilaykum, which can translate to “I am of you and for you.” ” One of the “uncles” in Mamdani’s Astoria neighborhood pitched it to Mamdani while he was there shooting a campaign video in Arabic.“When you’re looking for inspiration, you have to look everywhere,” Gerson said. “Fortunately, we live in New York, inspiration is everywhere, and people are loud and eager to share it.” More

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      in US Politics

      Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’

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      After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal childcare and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said the Dutch environmentalist and former government adviser Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. “Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. “Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”More than a decade ago, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, became the largest city in the world to introduce fare-free public transport. Financed by the city’s resident tax, the scheme faced heavy opposition before its rollout, with some describing it as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.Nearly a year later, researchers found that public transport use had increased by 14% and that the mobility of low-income residents had improved. Similar schemes have since sprung up across the continent, in France’s Montpellier and Dunkirk, for example, and expanded across countries in the case of Luxembourg and Malta.When Mamdani promised to launch one city-owned grocery story in each of New York’s five boroughs, with a view to expanding if the pilot was successful, it reminded Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, of the city-run grocery store she had visited in Istanbul in 2014.Back then, she had been surprised to see the heaving shelves, laden with products that ranged from bread to lentils to basic household appliances, much of it provided by small, little-known manufacturers. Access to these stores was limited to low-income households, with families receiving a preloaded monthly loyalty card to use at these shops, she said. “These city-run grocery stores in Istanbul were successful and replicated by other cities.”More than a decade on, the experience convinced her of the viability of Mamdani’s promise. “I was struck by the fact that New York elite and Republicans wanted to paint these proposals as sort of coming from the moon,” she said. “Things like non-profit stores or free buses, these are not outrageous ideas, nor are they socialist. They’ve been tried in different parts of the world.”For New Yorkers, precedents for city-run grocery stores can also be found closer to home. Chicago is mulling similar plans, while Atlanta and St Paul, Kansas have launched their own takes on municipal-run grocery stores.Mamdani’s campaign also promised to make childcare free for all children in the city, ages six weeks to five years. Days before the election, the state of New Mexico provided the city with a precedent-setting example, becoming the first US state to offer free childcare to all of its residents, in an effort to boost its economy and raise education and child welfare levels.Across the Atlantic, Portugal’s government began introducing free childcare in 2022, starting with children ages one and under with promises to gradually expand the program to children up to the age of three. While the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access, with priority given to low-income and single-parent families.In Berlin, childcare has been free for children from their first birthday until they start school since 2018, though centres are allowed to levy additional charges for provisions such as lunches and extracurricular activities. Across the Nordic countries, free childcare is not universal, but is heavily subsidised by the state for most families.Mamdani’s platform also included a promise to provide new parents with a free baby basket that includes items such as diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, swaddles and books. In Finland, the baby box has been a universal benefit since 1949 and has since been emulated by nearly 100 programs in 60 countries around the world.The sharp contrast in how Mamdani’s policies were seen within the US and abroad probably has much to do with the scant existence of a welfare state in the US, writer Mary Holland noted this week. “To anyone living in a western European state, the self-professed democratic socialist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable,” she wrote in Monocle. “But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even.”Perhaps the most widely panned of Mamdani’s ideas is his vow to freeze rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilised tenants in the city. The former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was among those who slammed the idea, writing on social media that rent control was the “second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing”.In 2020, Berlin passed a law that resulted in a five-year rent freeze, at June 2019 levels, for 90% of the flats in the city. While the law offered relief to about 1.5 million households who had seen rents rise by an estimated third in the six years prior, it was ruled as unconstitutional in 2021 after Germany’s highest court sided with landlords and property investment lobbyists who had argued it was inappropriate and illegal for the state to meddle with the private market.A 2022 paper, however, marked out an interesting impact of the short-lived measure, in that it found that while rent control was in place, residents were seemingly more receptive to new housing developments in their area. The finding suggests that if Mamdani is able to carry out the rent freezes as promised, it could help to pave the way for his promise to also triple the city’s production of affordable homes.Perhaps the strongest precedent, however, for rent freezes comes from New York’s own recent history. In the past 10 years, during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, members of the city’s rent guidelines board voted to freeze the rent four times, one former member of the New York City rent guidelines board, Leah Goodridge, noted recently in the Guardian. “This is why criticisms of Mamdani’s rent freeze ring hollow for me – it’s painted as out of touch, yet there’s already a precedent, backed by government reports and data.” More

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      in US Politics

      Jewish New York’s reckoning with Zohran Mamdani: ‘He’s become a vehicle for our tensions’

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      Securing Jewish votes was never going to be a straightforward ride for Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral hopeful who is on track to become the most prominent Palestine supporter to assume elected office in the US – in the most Jewish city outside Israel, no less.The notion that he could sparks outright panic in some quarters.“To be clear, unequivocal, and on the record: I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the New York Jewish community,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Conservative Upper East Side Park Avenue Synagogue said in a sermon last weekend, a line endorsed by more than 1,000 American rabbis and echoed in the op-ed pages of some of the US’s biggest papers.Cosgrove called on his listeners to band together to persuade other Jews to prioritize their Jewish selves and “love of Israel” in the election. His proposed targets? “The undecided, the proudly Jewish yet unabashedly progressive, the affordability-anxious, Netanyahu-weary, Brooklyn-dwelling, and social media-influenced – who need to be engaged.”What Cosgrove overlooked, however, is that many of them already are engaged. In fact, Mamdani is engaging them.View image in fullscreenMamdani’s outreach comes at a moment of flux. Over the summer, as the campaign was heating up, famine was spreading through the Gaza Strip and photos of children starving to death dominated the news. Hundreds of rabbis signed letters urging Israel to let more aid into the besieged territory. Clergy who call themselves Zionists were arrested protesting outside the Israeli consulate in New York; others spoke in increasingly forceful terms from the pulpit in their weekly sermons. In a rare collaboration, Jewish groups that usually avoid tarring themselves by association with one another overlooked longstanding divisions on Israel when they staged a Midtown Manhattan protest calling for an end to the war.As the tenor of the Jewish American conversation on Israel was shifting, a July poll came out showing that 43% of Jewish New York planned to support Mamdani – signaling a level of enthusiasm so high as to portend a transformation in its commitment to pro-Israel politics. Among Jewish voters under 44, support rose to 67%.Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democratic socialist, has been advocating for Palestinian rights since his university days, including through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel. Israel is not the primary predictor of American Jewish politics; many Jewish voters are drawn to Mamdani, or repelled by him, by the affordability agenda at the center of his vision. But most American Jews continue to report an attachment to Israel, which today is still deeply embedded in religious practice and communal life.Mamdani has proved deft at deploying his youthful charisma and an earnest desire to build bridges to tough crowds – like New York City’s capitalist class, which is rankled by his commitment to a rent freeze and tax increases, and the New York police department, which he once called to defund (a position he says he no longer holds).View image in fullscreenHe is trying with hesitant Jewish voters, too. Fortified by a Jewish left that includes the many young Jews active in the movement for Palestinian rights, Mamdani has stepped up his outreach to more mainstream Jewish spaces through a series of meetings, often under strict conditions of privacy imposed by community leaders nervous about blowback. He has listened to anguished accounts of social isolation, antisemitism and attachment to Israel; committed to a large increase in anti-hate crime programming; and tried to explain where his politics come from.It has not always been smooth – rabbis who have invited him to their synagogues have faced criticism; others have made clear he is not welcome. But it has also offered opportunity for respectful and nuanced discussion on a topic that flares nerves. One Brooklyn resident who heard Mamdani speak at his synagogue was disappointed that Mamdani did not more forcefully repudiate pro-Palestinian rhetoric he finds hateful. He also reported being impressed by Mamdani’s intelligence and plans to improve the city. “I need to decide which self I will raise to the ballot when voting,” he said.Phylisa Wisdom directs the New York Jewish Agenda. Her group advocates for the values of “liberal Zionist” Jews who believe in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and who she says represents the majority of Jewish New Yorkers. It is a group that, she says, is going through an identity crisis, prompted by the horrors in Gaza and the recognition that the two-state solution, a value of totemic importance to them, has largely receded into the realm of fiction.“There are a lot of people who couldn’t ever imagine voting for an anti-Zionist mayor and who also could never have imagined their own feelings about Israel and the Israeli government that they are having right now,” she said. “They agree [with Mamdani], for example, that Benjamin Netanyahu should be behind bars.”Of the roughly 1 million Jews living in and around New York City, nearly one-fifth are either ultra-Orthodox, who are concentrated in Brooklyn and tend to vote Republican, or Modern Orthodox, who are more integrated into secular life and tend to divide their votes between the two major parties. Other Jewish voters – Conservative, Reform, nondenominational and secular – tend to overwhelmingly support Democrats.Mamdani may not be able to depend on those traditional voting patterns. The July poll was a high-water mark for Jewish support; an October Fox News poll found that a plurality of Jews – 42% – may vote for Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor running as an independent after being trounced by Mamdani in June’s Democratic party primary. (The Fox poll found 38% of Jewish New Yorkers plan to vote for Mamdani.)Cuomo has made a forceful play for Jewish voters. He has declared his “hyperaggressive support” for Israel, regularly proclaimed that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and called Mamdani a “terrorist sympathizer”, going so far as to suggest he would celebrate another 9/11. (Cuomo later claimed he didn’t intend to suggest as much.) He also joined Netanyahu’s legal team in the international criminal court, a decision he recently tried to qualify around the time that a New York Times poll found voters prefer Mamdani’s approach to Israel and Palestine.Cuomo’s messaging is eagerly fanned by Donald Trump and his acolytes who have unleashed all manner of Islamophobia. Elise Stefanik, the Republican member of Congress, regularly attacks Mamdani, recently calling him “a full-blown jihadist who has called for the genocide of Jews” after he gave an indirect answer in a Fox News interview to a question on whether Hamas should disarm. Laura Gillen, a Democratic member of Congress from Long Island, said Mamdani was “pro-Hamas” and “unfit to hold any office in the United States”. (Mamdani has neither called for the genocide of Jews nor defended Hamas, and responded to the wave of hateful rhetoric in an emotional speech on Friday.)View image in fullscreenMore progressive congregations and Jewish activist groups have rejected both the attacks against Mamdani and the vision of Judaism put forward by more conservative voices, such as Cosgrove, who view support for the Israeli state as a central tenet of the religion.“I’ve been surprised by rabbis who are fighters for justice and willing to be arrested while protesting ICE – more of them than expected are fearful of a Mamdani mayoralty. I fear that might have to do with him being Muslim,” said Ellen Lippmann, the founder of Kolot Chayeinu, a Brooklyn congregation that has hosted Mamdani.Mamdani, whose campaign did not respond to questions for this story, does not need a majority of the Jewish vote, estimated to comprise about 15% of the city’s electorate, to win on 4 November. But Jewish support will be symbolically significant given the level of vitriol from high places. Moreover, Mamdani’s ability to make inroads with the broad middle of Jewish voters distressed by the carnage in Gaza inflicted by the Israeli state will signal whether a real political realignment – certainly in Jewish politics, but with implications for the Democratic party broadly – is truly under way.Interviews with nearly two dozen people who have had some involvement in Mamdani’s Jewish outreach – including undecided voters, rabbis who have hosted him in their synagogues (along with others who would never), and community leaders who have brokered outreach – reveal that his candidacy is forcing Jewish voters to grapple meaningfully with positions on Israel and Palestine that once disqualified candidates from major office but are now moving squarely into the mainstream.Last month, a who’s who of the Jewish left gathered on a Brooklyn rooftop for the Mazals, an annual fundraising event benefiting Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Colorful blazers framed “Jews for Zohran” T-shirts; keffiyehs dotted the multigenerational crowd. A number of honorees – among them M Gessen and the New York State Tenant Bloc – spoke, interspersed with music from the Moroccan Jewish singer Laura Elkeslassy and a klezmer-infused house band. The crowd erupted at every mention of an arms embargo on Israel, a free Palestine, and Zohran Mamdani.New York City’s Jewish left – organized by groups including JFREJ, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and IfNotNow – spent years on the margins warning that the Jewish establishment’s support for an increasingly oppressive state was paving the road for catastrophe and perverting the religion. Now, there was a sense that the Jewish left had finally arrived.JFREJ, which counts 6,000 members, mostly organizes on local issues; Madmani’s agenda aligns naturally with the group’s focus on such issues as housing and immigrant rights, as does the way he links justice for vulnerable New Yorkers to justice for Palestinians. Audrey Sasson, JFREJ’s executive director, does not contain her excitement over his success. Primary night, she said, “was hands down one of the biggest wins I’ve experienced as an organizer in my life, in terms of its potential material impact, potential transformative impact, and the way in which it brought together a massive coalition of organizations and individuals across the city”.View image in fullscreenAlong with JVP and others canvassing under the Jews for Zohran banner, JFREJ volunteers have phoned or knocked on the doors of tens of thousands of Jewish New Yorkers’ homes to campaign for Mamdani, focusing on terrain where they see potential, like Manhattan’s Upper West Side or Riverdale in the Bronx. Alicia Singham Goodwin, JFREJ’s political director, said the shift in his direction has been dramatic over time: “We’re routinely seeing 50% or higher Zohran support whether we’re at the doors or on the phones.”At the Mazals, Mamdani was honored with Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and his former rival in the mayoral race – and spoke in soaring terms of his partnership with the activists present:
      I look at this room and I see so many faces that have not only been a part of this campaign from the start. We hold a common belief in the shared dignity of every person on this planet, without exception, and a refusal to draw a line in the sand, as it so often is done when it comes to Palestinian lives.
      Lander, a longtime JFREJ member, is a self-described liberal Zionist and sort of spiritual lay-leader for liberal Jewish New Yorkers anguished over their relationship to Israel. He recently described the war on Gaza as a genocide for the first time.He is also a wingman for Mamdani’s efforts to earn their support. He, too, ran in the primary, in a rank-choiced system that incentivized collaboration between candidates. Toward the end of the race, the two cross-endorsed each another before embarking on a kind of buddy road trip across the city, putting forward sunny vignettes of Jewish-Muslim partnership that were celebrated by voters as a burst of light in an otherwise dark political landscape.Over a coffee in Brooklyn last month, multiple constituents interrupted our interview to express tearful gratitude for the role he played in Mamdani’s primary victory.“It speaks to a hunger for something different in our politics,” said Lander, an affable and warm conversationalist – “an archetypal Jewish dad”, as comedian Ilana Glazer described him when she called him on stage at the Mazals.View image in fullscreenHis support for Mamdani has created a permission structure for some.“I think I’ve played a useful role for families where the kids ranked Zohran first and me second in the primary, and the parents ranked me first and Zohran fifth, or maybe weren’t initially comfortable ranking him at all,” he said. “Our cross-endorsement created an opportunity for kids and parents to talk to each other, without it feeling so desperately zero sum.”Lander’s current mission is manifold. He has called on his fellow Jews to reckon with war crimes committed in their names. He wants to get Mamdani elected with as much Jewish support as possible. And as “Zionist” increasingly becomes a slur on the broader pro-Palestinian left, he wants to see a movement that is more welcoming to people just starting to question previous commitments to Israel.“In the same way that I tried for many years to get liberal Zionists to be open to anti-Zionists in their institutions and midst, I want to get anti-Zionists to not treat everyone who does believe in two states like a racist.”Many of the attacks on Mamdani exacerbate the definitional war that marks this issue in political discourse – a rhetorical swamp where words are so contested that they lose all meaning. In writing, I try to avoid use of the word “Zionist” outside quotes because it’s hard to know what people mean when they say it. The prevailing view on the left is that being a Zionist implies support for ethnic cleansing or unequal rights; others insist it speaks broadly to the belief in flourishing Jewish life in the Holy Land. “Antisemitism” opens another can of toxic worms; a decades-long, organized effort to conflate hatred of Jews with opposition to the Jewish state is now fueling the Trump administration’s dismantling of American universities. On the pro-Palestinian side, “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are just two protest slogans that engender responses that speak as much to the anxieties and projections of the people who hear them as they do to the intentions of those who shout them (which also are not always clear).Perhaps recognizing such vocabulary poses a barrier to meaningful coalition building, Mamdani has attempted to bring more careful nuance to his positions.He has said he will discourage use of the intifada protest slogan, explaining he has come to understand why some Jews hear it as a call to violence. He repeatedly invokes international law to back up his positions – in characterizing Israel’s war as a genocide; in justifying his intention to seek Netanyahu’s arrest should he travel to New York, in compliance with an ICC arrest warrant; and in condemning Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.View image in fullscreenWhen asked – and he is asked with great frequency – whether he supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, he responds by summoning a framework that seems designed to be hard for liberals to argue with. “I would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion,” he said in the first mayoral debate when, on cue, Cuomo trotted out the “right to exist” line. “And part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country.” He has also said he does not support the right of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan to exist as countries that prioritize Muslim citizens. (The “right to exist” construction does not really come up in contexts outside Israel; Edward Said called it “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law”.)It is an ideologically consistent view that is out of the bounds of old politics in New York City, whose mayors have long been expected to pay official visits to Israel. (Mamdani’s refusal to commit to visiting the country was previously its own line of attack. He has noted that even if he wanted to visit, he likely would not be allowed in given an Israeli law banning entry to boycott supporters.)“He’s very clearly not a Zionist” in a country where elected officials are expected to be, Sasson said. That his politics are no longer viewed as radical “is a real shift. That is a reckoning that is complicated for people.”Lander echoed the idea as we discussed a concern, expressed by a number of people interviewed for this story, that Mamdani will refuse to hire Zionists for his administration. “There hasn’t been a bar on Zionists in the New York City government, nor should there be,” Lander said. “There has been a bar on anti-Zionists, and there’s not going to be. That’s hard for people.”In fact, at a recent synagogue Q&A, Mamdani explicitly said Zionists would not be banned from his administration. This, along with his characterization of the Hamas attack of 7 October as a war crime rather than an act of legitimate resistance, has caused anger among some voices on the pro-Palestinian left, including some who have gone as far as to denounce Mamdani as a Zionist.In August, Lander accompanied Mamdani to a private event in the Brooklyn home of documentary film-maker Sandi DuBowski, where more than 80 Jewish New Yorkers came to hear the candidate’s answers to questions submitted in advance. Only truly undecided voters attended, many of them Modern Orthodox Jews well to the left of their staunchly pro-Israel – and increasingly Republican – communities. “It felt like an incredibly rare moment for people who really came with a lot of hesitation and a lot of reservations,” Dubowski said.Several attenders, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of damaging personal and professional relationships, found Mamdani intelligent and personable. They said they do not believe him to be antisemitic, and are horrified by the rampant Islamophobia directed at him.“I want to apologize to you for what my community’s been putting you through,” one woman reportedly said at the start of the event. “It’s not acceptable.”They also described an acute sense of isolation and a sense of abandonment by a progressive movement they once felt a part of but now feel has spit them out over their commitments to Israel.For much of their demographic, emotional identification with Israel is fundamental to what it means to be Jewish – a complex symbiosis between the state and American Jewry that rapidly accelerated after 1967, snuffing out what were once prominent Jewish voices of dissent from Zionism. Today, US synagogues that feature Israeli flags on their pulpit and incorporate prayers for the state and its soldiers into their liturgy are the norm.“Every part of my life is embroidered with that place,” one woman who was at the event told me. She wanted Mamdani to validate that relationship and was disappointed.View image in fullscreen“I want him to understand that that brand makes me feel not welcome, because it calls me a Nazi,” she added, referring to elements of the pro-Palestinian movement she believes support violence against Israelis and their supporters. She said she still does not know how she will vote.“I hate Netanyahu, I hate this war, and I’m appalled every single day at what is being done in Gaza and in the West Bank,” another attender said. “And yet, when someone tells me that Israel shouldn’t exist, or that it’s a settler colonial state from the beginning, or that people should go back to Europe, or that I shouldn’t wear a Star of David because it’s a symbol of a fascist state – that makes me absolutely bonkers.”The attenders I spoke to expressed concern about the practical implications of Mamdani’s support for BDS in a city with extensive institutional and economic ties with Israel. Since the mayor has some authority over the City University of New York, they fear Mamdani may appoint trustees who will end students’ option to study abroad in Israel or cut other academic exchanges. “The same way that you can’t really do junior year abroad in Iran or North Korea – we could add Israel to that list of nations,” a third attender fretted.Mamdani did not allay those concerns, they said, saying he has not given thought to whom he will appoint to the CUNY board.“I think that a lot of people in the camp that he’s in think that American Jews are simply privileged white people who like to whine about something that happened 75 years ago,” the second attender said. “That’s not what is happening. People are triggered and terrified.”When I asked her what they are terrified of, she responded: “People are terrified that the 50-year golden age for Jews in America is over, that it is becoming OK, both on the left and on the right, to dislike Jews, that it no longer has any stigma attached to it, that Israel behaving the way it’s behaved has given people an excuse to say, ‘look, Jews are terrible.’ without feeling like they’re bigoted.”Despite those misgivings, she plans to vote for Mamdani: “You gotta vote for the Democrat in the general,” she said. Her husband will write in Lander.Efforts to bring Mamdani into Jewish spaces have seen some bumps. At least one Conservative synagogue pushed back forcefully against speculation he would visit on Yom Kippur. When he attended services in Tribeca led by Lab/Shul, a broadly progressive community with wide-ranging views on Israel, he got a huge ovation – eclipsing the welcome for Lander and congressman Jerry Nadler, both of whom flanked him in the front row – but one that was followed by a more tortured, private response from a less vocal minority.“Some people said: ‘It destroyed my day,’” said Rabbi Amichai Lau Lavie, the leader of Lab/Shul. “The word against him on the street and from people I know is that ‘he won’t see us.’ I can see how on some levels that’s misguided, and I can also see where it comes from.”Elsewhere, Mamdani has been increasingly welcomed with open arms – in spaces more politically aligned, like the progressive, nondenominational Brooklyn synagogue he attended on Rosh Hashannah, and an Israelis for Peace vigil on the 7 October anniversary, but also in more outside-the-box campaign stops, like a Sukkot sit-down with Hassidic Satmars. He also recently published a full-page ad in Yiddish-language newspapers read by many ultra-Orthodox voters, outlining his plans to combat antisemitism and make childcare free – both issues of concern to these voters.A 12 October event at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, in the leafy neighborhood of Park Slope, seemed a particular win for civility. The Reform synagogue is one of Brooklyn’s largest, and among the more mainstream stops on Mamdani’s Jewish outreach tour. Senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner had invited Mamdani to sit for a private Q&A with congregants and almost 400 showed up. Several dozen angry protesters, some in Maga hats, gathered outside. (Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa met with congregants last week; Cuomo will do the same on Tuesday.)View image in fullscreenThe congregation – like most others – has been roiled with division since 7 October. It counts among its members Senate minority leader and pro-Israel stalwart Chuck Schumer, who has enraged progressives by not endorsing the nominee of his own party for mayor. The congregation displays Israeli flags but includes anti-Zionist members – people who are “really upset” by Mamdani’s stance on Israel and others who have canvassed for him, according to Timoner, who by many accounts works overtime to keep irate congregants praying under the same roof.Multiple attenders said the event was calm and substantive. Mamdani heard from congregants upset about the intifada slogan and listened to accounts from members about antisemitism in their kids’ schools. Half the time was spent on local issues having nothing to do with Israel.Two people who were in attendance said they felt Mamdani dodged questions about antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement, pivoting to generalities about universal rights and safety. They also said he spoke with inspiring passion about improving New York City.“It was deeply respectful on all sides,” Timoner said of the discussion. “I think that people felt heard and that people also listened.”In his sermon, Cosgrove, the Upper East Side rabbi, envisioned a revival of the “Great Schlep” – that 2008 effort led by the comedian Sarah Silverman to send young Jews to Florida to get their “bubbies and zaydes” to vote for Barack Obama – but in generational reverse. Now, said Cosgrove, it is incumbent on older Jews to sound the alarm about Mamdani to their children and grandchildren.To some, his exhortation exhibits a misread of Mamdani’s message and his appeal. “In your sermon you suggest that Jews need to prioritize the safety of other Jews over non-Jews, to prioritize the safety of Israeli Jews over Palestinians,” Mik Moore, one of the creators of the original Great Schlep who now runs a similar effort called Mensches for Mamdani, said in a statement addressed to Cosgrove.“Maybe this is why you are struggling to understand how Mamdani, as a Muslim anti-Zionist, could ever care as much about Jewish New Yorkers as Muslim New Yorkers. You have projected your value system on to him, and don’t trust him to act on behalf of those outside his own group.”Ultimately, the anguish over Mamdani’s candidacy – the anguish that Cosgrove is attempting to redirect to fear – is not really about him. It is a reflection of an American Jewish population in crisis, scarred by the intracommunal psychodramas that have raged since 7 October and contending with what it means to associate with a state that has fallen so far down the world’s moral ladder.“It plays out like the Jewish education of Zohran Mamdani,” said one person involved in efforts to broker his outreach events, describing the displays of grievance often directed his way. By many accounts, Mamdani has listened patiently.“He’s become a vehicle for our tensions and conflicts,” said Lander. “It’s fair to ask him, as the person is going to be our mayor, to reflect that he’s going to represent everyone, even people who he strongly disagrees with, on some important issues. It’s not fair to ask him to heal our collective wounds and traumas.”View image in fullscreenA mainstream Jewish shift on Israel is not likely to make a material difference to Palestinians anytime soon. Netanyahu has spent the last decade throwing his lot in with Republicans and Christian Zionists, forsaking the liberal Jews who once provided Israel’s backbone of support. A tenuous ceasefire is formally in effect in Gaza, but largely on Israeli terms that do not impose real requirements on it to stop killing Palestinians – as long as it does so at a lower intensity – let alone ensure Palestinian freedom.But shifts in US public opinion might, over time, put an end to the so-called “Palestine exception”: the idea that support for liberal and progressive causes can exclude the cause of equality for Palestinians. If the US continues to hold fair elections and continues to exert leverage over Israel, that will make a difference – eventually.“There’s definitely a sea change in the Jewish community, and it’s being mapped along the sea change in the wider electorate,” Sasson of JFREJ said.“We’re building a multiracial, multifaith coalition across the city to address the most pressing issues around economic and racial justice that affect all of us, Jews included. But the thing is, you can’t fight for those things and ignore what’s happening in Gaza.” More

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      Democratic socialists think they’re on a winning streak – can they build on Zohran Mamdani’s victory?

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      It’s an energizing time for democratic socialists across the country, and not only because New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in the New York City mayoral primary moves the United States’ most populous city closer than it ever has been to having a member as mayor.For supporters of the leftwing, worker-led political ideology, last weekend’s annual democratic socialists of America national convention in Chicago, which welcomed tens of thousands of politically minded individuals from across the country to the unionized McCormick Place convention center, was further recognition of the growing influence of the DSA, the country’s largest socialist organization, founded in 1982.Amid the backdrop of a fraught national political stage, one in which traditional Democrats are struggling to connect with voters and a Donald Trump-led GOP continues to push a far-right agenda, a growing cadre of democratic socialist politicians are finding increasing success in local elections by touting platforms of progressive policies, tapping into social media with snappy, engaging content, and connecting face to face with typically forgotten voter blocs.View image in fullscreenThe continued presence of democratic socialists Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative; and Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan representative, in Congress has been an inspiration to many of these similarly minded political hopefuls.However, it’s Mamdani’s recent success that many DSA-endorsed candidates like Jake Ephros, running for Jersey City council; Kelsea Bond, running for Atlanta city council; Jorge Defendini, running for Ithaca common council; and others who attended this convention are hoping to replicate. The goal is to show that the campaign isn’t a flash-in-the-pan win, but instead a burgeoning tide shift toward a leftwing political future divorced from capitalism, despite criticism from traditionalist Democrats and Republicans alike.“Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York or Omar Fateh in Minneapolis, also poised to become a socialist mayor of a major city – these are things that come after years of structure that DSA helped build up in a bunch of chapters … This is also why DSA is growing so much and having all this new energy, because we’re just really demonstrating what the alternative is,” said Ashik Siddique, the national co-chair of the DSA. “The Democratic party has not really presented a meaningful alternative.”With the DSA’s membership having surged in recent months, and both the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections on the horizon, this weekend’s convention was a key opportunity for many to strategize on how to capitalize on expanding influence and recent wins.“There’s so much excitement around our huge victory, Zohran Mamdani winning the primary,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair for the New York City chapter of the DSA. “People are coming up to us and asking us about the campaign, wanting to learn from our experience as well, and I’ll say that the big change that I’ve seen over the years is that DSA as an organization has matured politically.”While the NYC-DSA continues its work, other chapters will attempt to follow its lead, organizing around their own socialist candidates while the national DSA organization reaffirms its position on Palestine, organizes to end US aid to Israel, supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – which calls on consumers to stop supporting both Israeli companies and companies that have supported Israel – and stands against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in solidarity with immigrants.That and a clear economic agenda that supports the working class “over billionaires, the bosses, the corporations that are raising prices, that are keeping our wages low” are what will lead to further success for democratic socialist candidates, in Gordillo’s eyes.Persistence can also be helpful.It helped Alex Brower, who won his election for Milwaukee common council district three alderman in an April special election after the death of his predecessor, in his third bid for office as a democratic socialist.“That happens to a lot of socialists because … if socialists were 100% successful, we’d have a socialist America right now. So there’s a lot of losing, but I think, honestly, I think we learn more by losing than winning,” Brower said.Many DSA-endorsed candidates will also be deep in the throes of fieldwork in the coming months: knocking on doors, attending events, meeting with neighbors and being visible in communities, all key to keeping the DSA’s recent momentum going, according to Ephros, who is currently running for the Jersey City council on a platform of affordable social housing, universal rent control, universal childcare, public healthcare and the Green New Deal, among other issues.“It goes a long way to just demonstrate: ‘Oh, this isn’t some shadowy, weird, fringe guy who calls himself a socialist and that means scary things to me; it’s my neighbor and he’s active in the community and he’s showing up,’” he said.Over the three days of the convention, the conference’s largest in its history, DSA members gathered to deliberate resolutions that will guide chapter actions and concerns over the next two years.Members voted to approve a measure for “a fighting anti-Zionist DSA”, a resolution that prompted much debate and some resistance due to a clause that would expel members for supporting Israel. Arguments both for and against the measure were raised to the crowd of voting members on Sunday afternoon, delayed by calls from DSA leadership to hold applause in favor of the silent American Sign Language motion for clapping, consisting of the waving of both hands. The request was only mildly successful.Members also voted to prioritize efforts to put up a DSA-endorsed socialist candidate for the 2028 presidential election, and elected both new and returning delegates to the DSA’s national political committee, the 16-person body that serves as the organization’s board of directors.On Friday, members heard from Rashida Tlaib, the keynote speaker for this year’s convention. As one of Congress’s most outspoken supporters of Palestine, Tlaib largely spoke about the responsibility Congress has to condemn Israel’s bombing and starvation of the people in Palestine. She also emphasized the work she believes the DSA still has to do.View image in fullscreen“For DSA to live up to our potential, we have to be willing to grow ourselves. We need more members for more diverse communities and leadership roles, y’all. We are failing, and again, I’m telling you as a big sis, we are failing when a room like this only has a handful of our Black neighbors. You need to be intentional,” Tlaib said to Friday’s intently listening crowd.“A lot of working-class folks have strong historical ties to the Democratic party. They know they have been let down, and they’re looking for a new home. They want to envision the alternatives, and we have it.”Álvaro López, an electoral coordinator for NYC-DSA who assisted Mamdani’s campaign, attended the DSA convention for the first time after being a member since 2017. He’s grappling with what to take from the convention’s more introspective measures.“In this convention, unfortunately, Donald Trump was not raised. Zohran’s victory was not strategically discussed, and I think that’s a product of our larger, big-tent organization that we have. I think there is a lot of work for the left and the DSA to still get to a point where we are really thinking about how do we build power, and how we are not so inward looking and think of ourselves as the protagonist of everything around us,” López said.The NYC-DSA’s strategy for creating successful campaigns has previously involved contesting local and state-level positions, before shifting to one that seeks to place democratic socialists in the highest levels of local politics. With many DSA chapters strategizing what that looks like for them back home, taking similar steps may help, Gordillo believes.“Many working-class people, for example, don’t really know what the state assembly is,” he said.“It’s harder to get traction or to do mass communications that way, so we decided to run a socialist for mayor,” he said of reaching voters in local elections. “We need to do that, not just in New York City. We need to do it in Minneapolis. We need to do it in Los Angeles and in Detroit and Michigan, eventually in 2028. I hope that we take that to the federal stage in the presidential run.”A resolution brought up at this year’s DSA convention would create a strategy to build socialism in each of the 50 states and help the DSA build more statewide organizations. The DSA has also previously expanded an electoral program to provide more support to chapters that want to learn how they can run their own candidates and develop class-struggle elections.It’s political actions like these that can be the key to winning races, even by the smallest of margins, Tlaib said on Friday, reminding DSA members of her win in 2018 by only 900 votes.“We are standing at a crossroads in American history,” Tlaib said. “We are going to take this country back for our working families and defeat these pathetic, cowardly, hateful fascists. We’re going to win because we don’t have any other options, and yes, we are going to free Palestine. They don’t have any other choice. Our movement isn’t going anywhere, and we’re just getting started.” More

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      Can Democratic socialists get Zohran Mamdani across the finish line?

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      Was it his charisma, communication skills or his captivating short-form videos? His high-profile endorsements or his clothing style? These elements were said to have contributed to Zohran Mamdani’s record-setting success in New York’s June mayoral primary.But another major factor in his win may have been his ties to the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).Known for its endorsement of the Vermont independent senator and socialist Bernie Sanders’s run for president, as well its role in electing the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group has re-energized US left political movements in recent years, even while eliciting critique and fear from conservatives and some Democrats.In Mamdani’s campaign, a stunning 60,000 volunteers knocked on 1.6m doors across New York City, home to 3.6m housing units. The effort reportedly led to conversations with a quarter of all New Yorkers who voted in the primary.Though the campaign has not yet released data showing how many of those volunteers were mobilized by NYC-DSA itself, Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the chapter, says his organization turned out thousands. Though other organizations, such as the grassroots political group Drum Beats, also brought out volunteers, he said the chapter had an “unparalleled field operation in New York City”.“New York City DSA formed the heart of the field team,” he said.But the road ahead for Mamdani, who is a state assemblymember, may still be bumpy. Mainstream Democrats have been slow to embrace the democratic socialist, who ran on universalist material policies like a rent freeze and fast and free buses.In the past, centrists and conservatives have defeated DSA primary winners in elections that looked eminently winnable, such as India Walton in the 2021 Buffalo mayoral race. And rightwingers have already launched heavy smear campaigns against Mamdani, with polls showing the race could be tight. Fellow Democrat and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Mamdani defeated, switched to an independent party run just to stay in the game, and incumbent Eric Adams is vying to keep his seat.The Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, a centrist, said: “Mamdani’s primary victory in the nation’s cultural financial and media capital is the greatest challenge faced by traditional Democrats in more than 50 years.“The future for the Democrats is unclear,” he said.Asked if mainstream Democrats should embrace the young socialist, he said much of the base the party needs to energize to win elections in New York and elsewhere is moving to the right, and “will not accept” a socialist.View image in fullscreenEven so, NYC-DSA says it is ready for the battle, and if Mamdani wins, it could catapult the group from the sidelines to the center of the party.“The opposition is in total disarray right now [and] their fragmentation is only going to be a source of weakness,” said Gordillo. “We’re ready to mount an offensive campaign that replays a lot of what succeeded in the primary with the army that we’ve amassed.”Electing socialistsWhen formed in 1982, DSA had 6,000 members nationwide; that number grew modestly over the next 25 years. Then, in the mid-2010s, in the wake of democratic socialist Sanders’s run for president – and Donald Trump’s subsequent 2016 presidential victory – membership began to soar.Today, DSA boasts 80,000 members who oppose capitalism and advocate for the public ownership and democratic control of key sectors and resources such as healthcare, and the shift of power to workers from corporations.Though socialism was once a dirty word in the US, especially after crackdowns on socialists and communists in the 1950s, more than half of young Americans hold a positive view of it today, according to the rightwing Cato Institute thinktank.Though DSA factions have often sparred over the role elections and endorsements should play in the movement, the group has increasingly entered the sphere in recent years. The national group is supporting candidates in municipal elections from Ithaca, New York, to Atlanta, Georgia, with local chapters backing additional candidates in Boston’s mayoral race, council runs in Richmond, California, Detroit, Michigan, and others. In Minneapolis, a DSA-backed mayoral candidate, state senator Omar Fateh won his primary this month, ; unlike Mamdani, Fateh has also won endorsement from local party officials.View image in fullscreenThe New York City chapter, now home to 10,000 members, began prioritizing elections in 2017, creating an electoral working group. Since then, it has secured two New York City council seats and six New York state assembly seats, including Mamdani’s, which he has held since 2020. Another 250-plus DSA-backed officials hold office nationwide, including progressive “Squad” democrats in Congress: Rashida Tlaib and Greg Casar, and Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson.NYC-DSA employs a methodical volunteer model for each of its endorsed candidates. It has also been highly selective about who it chooses to support.“You have to go speak to multiple branches of the chapter, talk to the electoral working group, go through multiple rounds of votes within DSA,” said the DSA-backed New York state senator Jabari Brisport, who represents a Brooklyn district.The robust endorsement pays off, Brisport said. “When you’re running with a DSA endorsement, you really have a whole operation of dedicated volunteers who want to advance socialism,” he said. “They help with everything from field organizing to comms to fundraising.”For NYC-DSA, electoral campaigns are not only focused on single candidates but also on building support for their movement, said Phara Souffrant Forrest, another DSA state assemblymember from Brooklyn.“When DSA campaigns for a candidate … we’re organizing their district around shared values like housing justice, healthcare for all and workers’ rights,” she said.The chapter does not use paid canvassers, though Mamdani’s campaign hired roughly 50 for specialized outreach.“Our main asset, which money can never buy, are volunteers who are passionate, who feel ownership over a campaign because the win would be personal for them,” said Sarahana Shrestha, a DSA assemblymember representing a south-eastern New York district.Her campaign brought in many voters who had otherwise “given up on electoral politics”, she said. DSA members appeared to do the same in the mayoral primary, mobilizing thousands of new voters.‘Cadre candidates’Some DSA endorsees – such as Ocasio-Cortez, who the group supported in her 2018 campaign – receive DSA backing upon request once they have launched their campaigns. Others, like Mamdani, are “cadre candidates” who have strong pre-existing ties to the organization and are recruited by and from the chapter.Since joining NYC-DSA in 2017, Mamdani has been deeply involved with the organization, helping lead other electoral campaigns and working closely with the chapter on his successful 2020 assembly run.View image in fullscreenOnce in office, Mamdani became an integral part of NYC-DSA’s socialists in office committee, designed to facilitate chapter communications with elected socialists. Today, many of his staffers are chapter leaders. And when launching his mayoral campaign, “he said that he would not run at all if he did not receive our endorsement,” the NYC-DSA organizer Michael Thomas Carter wrote in Drop Site News.“While the coalition that coalesced around his campaign was much broader than NYC-DSA, in this very direct sense our organization is responsible for his mayoral run,” he wrote.This commitment to the chapter has been a throughline in Mamdani’s career, said Gordillo.“He’s been really tested to learn how to exercise leadership while also being accountable to a base, because he’s done that in DSA pretty often,” he said.Mamdani has championed some NYC-DSA campaigning efforts he did not pioneer, such as the successful fight for a bill to expand publicly owned renewable energy, which Gordillo helmed. But he has been a leader on other initiatives, such as the “Not on Our Dime!” bill, which aims to pressure Israel to follow international law and on which he was the lead sponsor. (Ending US support for Israel’s military is a key issue for DSA, whose national organization ended its support for Ocasio-Cortez and former New York congressman Jamaal Bowman over insufficient support for the issue.)View image in fullscreenThat back-and-forth has continued through the mayoral campaign, with the chapter’s political operatives also helping him make connections and shape his platform.“He met with our Labor Working Group a lot to learn more about what were the top demands for different unions where we have a lot of member density,” said Gordillo, who is a union electrician by day.Transformative changeMamdani won more votes than any other mayoral candidate in New York City primary election history. Brisport said that’s a testament not only to the power of NYC-DSA’s organizational skills, but also to the popularity of their political values.“Clearly there is something in the air that is shifting, because open socialists are running for office and winning, showing that our ideas are good, workable things that people actually need,” he said.Mamdani’s embrace of the democratic socialist label has been a boon for NYC-DSA, with about 4,000 members joining since he launched his mayoral campaign. It will also be a test for the chapter and for American socialism.“Zohran ran as an open democratic socialist and the billionaire class, the most powerful forces in the world and in the city, are aligning against him,” Gordillo said. “They will be finding every moment to amplify anything that they can say is a mistake or a failure, and because he ran in a way that was so tied to the movement, I think that any of his shortcomings will also be attributed to us.”The chapter is now preparing to mobilize volunteers around the general election, but also organizing to support Mamdani’s key policies like a proposal to increase taxes on the rich. The organization is prepared to hold Mamdani accountable to socialist values, but also to communicate his successes to the public, said Gordillo.“We will make sure that the billionaire class and corporate interests can’t just fearmonger about him, or hide it when he fulfills his campaign promises,” he said.“The fate of the left in New York rests on the success of the Mamdani administration, so ensuring that there is a successful mayoralty is going to have to become our top priority.” More

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      ‘Working-class New Yorkers are being pushed out of the city they built’: why Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor

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      In a quiet and unassuming coffee shop in Astoria, a once affordable, diverse neighborhood in Queens where rent is skyrocketing to the heights of other parts of New York, a man in a black jacket sits against the window.He doesn’t look the part of a large metropolitan city’s typical politician, but Zohran Mamdani represents this area in the state legislature as the assembly member for district 36 – the first south Asian man in the state assembly and only its third Muslim.On Wednesday, Mamdani, 33, announced his candidacy for mayor of New York.“There is a representation of sets of voters that typically, in the very best scenario, have been erased from the political fabric, and in the worst scenario, have been persecuted by the political system in the city,” Mamdani told the Guardian.“I represent Steinway Street – the same street that Michael Bloomberg created the demographics unit within the NYPD to illegally surveil Muslims on the basis of our faith [after 9/11]. And now the representative of that street is going to run for the same position that created that department.”Mamdani is a millennial who watches Love Island and Love is Blind. And before he was elected as a local representative in 2020, he assumed many identities, including a foreclosure prevention counselor and failed rapper – a career he said helped prepare him for this very moment.“I would stand and rap with this guy in the equivalent of a 14-seater public bus. As we waited for the bus to fill up, we would try and sell our CD,” Mamdani recounted.View image in fullscreen“Once you’ve done that, it’s a lot easier to ask people on the Broadway platform of the N/W train if they’ll sign your petition to get on the ballot.”Before moving to Queens at the age of seven and taking over local leftist politics, Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, to parents Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University professor who specializes in study of colonialism, and Mira Nair, a director and producer of Mississippi Masala starring Denzel Washington and the film adaptation of the Reluctant Fundamentalist.When asked if he considers himself a nepo baby, Mamdani is diplomatic in his response.“I’ll leave that to others. There have definitely been opportunities that have been afforded to me,” Mamdani, who worked on the soundtrack for one of his mom’s films, Queen of Katwe starring Lupita Nyong’o, said.“But in local politics, I don’t think it has meant that much to the people of Astoria and Long Island City.”Though nearly a year away, the New York mayoral race is already crowded. The city’s comptroller Brad Lander threw his hat in the race in July; the Democratic primary, so far, includes two state senators, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, as well as former comptroller and current assembly member, Scott Stringer.All of these candidates, including Mamdani, may also have to challenge incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who says he still plans on finishing his term and running for re-election – despite facing federal charges of bribery and fraud for allegedly accepting foreign campaign contributions and lavish gifts from Turkish nationals.A socialist, Mamdani distinguishes himself from the pack on political ideology – but it probably doesn’t hurt that he’s young, charming and often addresses large crowds with Obama-esque orations.“We are here to say these struggles are interconnected – whether it’s BLM or BDS, it’s all about justice. We are here to say you cannot disentangle this fight for freedom. You will not scare us away from this call for justice,” Mamdani said into a loudspeaker in Astoria Park during a 2021 protest against the Israeli occupation in the aftermath of violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.Unlike many other politicians, Mamdani doesn’t avoid the topic of Palestine. He cofounded his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and has fought to make it a local issue.“I think Palestine has often been a glaring contradiction in our politics for many, many years. I could not understand why we would draw a line at universal beliefs when it came to Palestinians, why we thought that everyone deserved safety, everyone deserved justice, everyone deserve freedom, except for a certain class of people,” Mamdani said.“As we’ve seen over the past year with the genocide that our country has funded and continues to fund – an Israeli military bombing campaign that has expanded into Lebanon and Syria and Yemen – we are continuing in this country to find money to kill kids while we tell public housing tenants that we don’t have enough money to fix their boilers.”View image in fullscreenThe cost of living crisis plaguing New Yorkers is another issue Mamdani cares deeply for, which he said stems from his time as a foreclosure prevention counselor. During that time, he negotiated with lenders and the city on behalf of low- to middle-income homeowners in Queens who were delinquent on their mortgage payments and on the brink of eviction.“What I will bring to this race is an explicit and relentless focus to the number one issue of importance to New York City voters,” Mamdani said. “They can’t afford their rent. They can’t afford their childcare. They can’t afford transit. They can’t afford their groceries.“The mayor has an incredible set of powers to provide relief in each of those areas, and yet, at every opportunity that has been given is almost always taken the decision to exacerbate the cost of living crisis, and that’s why working-class New Yorkers are being pushed out of the city that they built, the one that they call home.”The young politician has built somewhat of a reputation for putting his body on the line for the causes he supports, sometimes literally. Mamdani is credited by hundreds of the city’s taxi drivers for helping secure life-changing debt relief for them.In 2021, Mamdani went on a 15-day hunger strike to protest of predatory loans that targeted the taxi drivers who purchased “medallions”, the physical certificate required to operate a yellow cab. The city eventually caved and struck a deal with medallion loan guarantors, securing $450m in transformative debt relief for these drivers.It was just one of the “handful of times” Mamdani was arrested for a cause.Mamdani was arrested again earlier this year at Hunter College, where the city’s rent guidelines board voted to increase the rents of rent-stabilized tenants 2.75% on one-year leases and 5.25% on two-year leases. If elected, Mamdani says he will immediately freeze these tenants’ rent upon assuming office.His policies have already garnered the support of one group: the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The organization, which helped elect fellow socialist US house representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who also represents some of the same areas as Mamdani at the federal level, endorsed Mamdani on Saturday.“NYC-DSA has officially decided to endorse Zohran Mamdani in the June 2025 Democratic primary election for mayor of New York City,” the political organization told members after its annual convention. “Now, it’s time for us to get to work to replace our corrupt, autocratic mayor with a proven socialist and a cadre-member of NYC-DSA.”Mamdani said he plans to work – every day of his campaign – on making New York more affordable.“We all love this city, and yet it doesn’t mean much if we can’t afford to stay here. We don’t want New York to be a symbol. We don’t want it to just be something that is unattainable for so many. We want it to be where people live, grow old and raise families.” More

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      The US right keeps accusing Democrats of ‘communism’. What does that even mean? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The Trump campaign, flanked by an army of online trolls commanded by Elon Musk, has been struggling to settle on an attack line against the Democratic ticket. Of course, a decade or so ago no one would have thought a candidate unable to think of nasty nicknames had a problem; but Donald Trump has made us all ask stupider questions and have stupider thoughts. If in doubt, though – and no matter what any Democrat actually does or says – the Republican party will level the charges of “socialism” and “communism” against them.To state the obvious: free lunches – ensuring that poor kids won’t go hungry – are not communism. The one time in recent history that the US clearly resembled the Soviet Union – empty shelves and long lines outside shops – was under Trump; to be sure, other countries also had supply chain problems during Covid-19, but the former president proved exceptionally irresponsible and incompetent. But there’s another, less obvious similarity with the late Soviet Union in particular: the experience of being at the mercy of bureaucrats. No, not the DMV, but vast private corporations with quasi-monopoly power, something with which Trump’s Republican party, unlike the Biden administration, is evidently fine.Ever since the New Deal, the US right has relied on an ideological mixture as incoherent as it is toxic, with charges of communism freely interspersed with accusations of fascism. Into that mixture, US reactionaries sprinkle what is politely called “anti-elitism” but often enough amounts to thinly disguised antisemitism. Musk and the Republican ideologues now regularly portray Kamala Harris as controlled by secret “puppetmasters”, the Soroses (son and father) in particular, bent on advancing a “globalist” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.Most rightwingers would struggle to explain what these terms really mean; but then again, for many of them politics is not a philosophy exam, but a contest over what can incite fear and hatred of dangerous Others threatening supposed “real Americans”. One fairly simple, almost intuitive throughline, however, is the notion that Real America wants individual freedom, while Real America’s enemies are collectivists bent on creating all-powerful bureaucracies whose business is not business, but telling people what to do. (That is also why, when pressed, rightwingers will inevitably identify “bureaucrats” and the “managerial class” as core members of the “liberal elite”.)The truth is that much of day-to-day life in the US is horrendously bureaucratic: filling out “paperwork”, spending hours on hold, being at the mercy of individuals who might be reasonable when they have a good day (and respond to the plea “Can I talk to you like a human being?”) or simply use discretion to say no when they happen to have a bad day. Europeans never believe this could be the reality in the land of the free, because European pro-business parties like to sell them the story that every day in the US, somebody starts the equivalent of Microsoft in their garage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, plenty of Americans do not see that US businesses can be bureaucratic nightmares because, to be blunt, they know nothing else. Often unable to travel for financial reasons, they accept red scare tales about countries they’ve never seen. Democrats are complicit in encouraging a nationalism that makes the case for reform unnecessarily difficult: if people are constantly told by both parties that theirs is the greatest country ever, why mobilize for fundamental change?Capitalist bureaucracies are maddening, but the madness has a method: it’s driven in part by fear of liability (something Democrats are reluctant to address properly) but above all by the hope that frustrated customers will eventually just give up and let the insurance claim go, rather than spend another two hours on the phone listening to the automated message: “Your call is important to us.” Corporate power has increased enormously in recent decades, partially based on the rightwing doctrine that monopolies are OK as long as they benefit consumers. Bureaucratization has also increased in areas where the state, driven by neoliberal ideology, has tried to engineer competition in public services – in the process creating ever-larger bureaucracies devoted to measuring and surveillance. George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind is a prime example.The Biden administration has at least tried to change course on monopoly power, under the leadership of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whose career started with an attack on the mistaken pro-monopoly theory. The government has gone after “junk fees” such as exorbitant credit card late fees; most recently, with its Time is Money initiative, the White House is confronting predatory capitalists using red tape to extract time and, ultimately, money from powerless customers unable ever to “speak to a representative”. Meanwhile, just as with the upside-down reasoning about monopolies, distinguished defenders of the little guy such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have twisted themselves into justifying junk fees.True, daily indignities and frustrations in dealing with private-sector bureaucrats are trivial compared with the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. But it’s not trivial to want to make life just a little fairer by reducing the power of private actors to behave like dictators.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      His socialist podcast became a surprise hit. Now he’s an uncommitted Democratic delegate

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      View image in fullscreenThe elected officials, party functionaries, staffers and donors descending on Chicago for the most rollicking Democratic national convention in more than half a century will welcome an unlikely guest. Daniel Denvir, who as host of the socialist podcast The Dig regularly criticizes the Democratic party from its left, will attend as an alternate Rhode Island delegate for the uncommitted movement, a nationwide effort to pressure the Democrats to change course on the war in Gaza.The movement has shifted its focus to Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Denvir is a forceful voice on the topic, having spent the last 10 months honing and broadcasting a leftist perspective on the US role in the Middle East. The pivot to focus on Palestine has culminated in Thawra, a 16-part, 40-hour conversation with the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on Arab radical movements that has spanned five months of programming.The link between on-the-ground organizing and historical analysis is at the heart of The Dig’s political education project. “I had long thought that the academic left was far too cloistered from the activist left in the United States,” Denvir recalls of the show’s founding impetus, “and that activists and organizers outside of academia would greatly benefit from understanding the world better in their efforts to change it.”View image in fullscreenIn the show’s near-decade of life, it has become a crucial hub of the left media ecosystem, with political guests including Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joined by Marxist academics such as David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Silvia Federici.In the aftermath of 7 October, listenership has leapt, with October downloads up about 150% from the month prior. That bump came thanks to episodes like one on the history of Hamas, Germany’s bizarre relationship with Israel, and historical tensions between Zionism and anti-Zionism within the Jewish diaspora, which together have been downloaded a quarter of a million times.The Dig was born into a moment of growth of the American left: the Democratic Socialists of America were expanding, American attitudes toward capitalism were cooling, and Trump’s presidency was propelling protests and resistance movements. It has matured alongside surging nationwide support for unions, rising labor militancy on campuses and youthful demonstrations against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.The Dig’s listeners are “overwhelmingly sharp, interesting people, committed to doing important work to transform the world, all over the world. What do they need to know?” Denvir says, in explaining how he chooses his subjects. “I’m trying to map out the terrain.”Denvir’s visit to Chicago for the DNC will bring his intensive study of the history of the Middle East to bear on the current political moment. “We continue to witness constant massacres of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military with American weapons. It’s clear that the administration’s policy is not only morally abhorrent, but also driving away large numbers of voters who Kamala Harris needs to defeat Donald Trump,” Denvir says. “Our uncommitted delegation will be inviting Harris delegates from across the nation to join us in calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We speak for the majority of Democratic voters who have long supported a ceasefire.”As he reminds listeners at the end of each episode, in a cheeky nod to Marx: while other podcasts aim to understand the world, The Dig aims to change it.‘It’s empowering to people’The Dig has been focusing primarily on the war in Gaza since last October – specifically on, as Denvir describes it, undoing the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” fueling US support for the unfolding catastrophe.“This sense that the Arab world is full of backward fundamentalists who irrationally want to do violence unto us in the US is only possible if the actual history showing that things are precisely otherwise is thoroughly mystified,” Denvir says. “Thawra is a project aimed at the very heart of the mystifications that have sustained a century-plus of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and that has led to the current genocide in Gaza.”Early experience attuned Denvir to narratives emerging from outside Washington. He cut his teeth in media freelancing in Ecuador, where he lived in 2008 with his partner, the political scientist Thea Riofrancos. When they returned to the US, he worked as a staff reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, and – after moving in 2015 to Providence for Riofrancos’s job – cobbled together piecemeal writing work in a hollowing-out digital news ecosystem. As an experiment, he made a scuffling effort to kick the podcast off in September of that year, without finding much direction: one of the guests on his first episode was an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason.During that election season, Denvir campaigned for Bernie Sanders and joined the growing Democratic Socialists of America. The podcast found its footing, Denvir recalls, amid “Trump’s election in the context of my own unemployment and lack of a clear path as a journalist”. It was soon picked up by Jacobin magazine, where it is still hosted.Denvir’s aim was to “translate the intellectual and academic left to a broader audience”, he says, addressing its persistent gap with activists and organizers – a gap he found less pronounced in Latin America. “There shouldn’t be a hard divide between organizing and analysis or theorization,” Denvir says. “Organizing is a way to test those theories and see what works and what doesn’t.”Initially, Denvir invited journalists, scholars and organizers to discuss “American class warfare” in the form of its punitive immigration system, mass incarceration, and social and labor movements. In the years since, Denvir began doing more interviews with book authors, becoming something of a socialist Terry Gross.The show has also become more international: even before the turn to Palestine, Denvir conducted multipart interviews on the history of Iran, China, and the relationship between Cuba and southern Africa. Though he lacks formal graduate education, he evinces a professor’s comfort with critical theory and its vocabulary. His voice is schoolboyish and bright, his delivery considered, and he occasionally breaks out in small fits of laughter in reaction to his interlocutors’ – and his own – just-so points.View image in fullscreenIf its themes seem at first blush seem disparate, the show coheres by finding the connectedness of sundry struggles for liberation. “Labor or housing or immigrant rights or anti-carceral or anti-cop organizing, all of that is at its best when it’s systemically aligned with a broader struggle for socialist transformation, and a broader understanding of the capitalist order,” Denvir says.“Everything he does he brings the same care to. That itself is part of his political analysis that everything matters,” says Riofrancos of Denvir. “Every person’s important, every issue is important, everything requires care and attention, everything has a history. Everything has a struggle behind it.”His urge toward comprehensiveness means that episodes often run above the two-hour mark, occasionally approaching three. “I’m pushing the boundaries of what people think is possible, or reasonable, on a podcast,” he says. But anything less would mean for a fundamentally different podcast. I pointed out to Denvir that this length puts him in league with Joe Rogan. The difference, he says, is that “I don’t smoke weed until after I get off air”.The show’s great success is in achieving a scholarly rigor that’s accessible to the masses. Riofrancos, who as senior adviser to The Dig consults with Denvir on question lists and the show’s direction, says guests regularly thank Denvir for his especially close reads, often comparing the experience to their dissertation defenses.Yet “you can be someone that does not have academic formation and listen to his podcast and become more intellectual and knowledgeable. I think that’s empowering to people,” says Riofrancos. “When you listen, you feel like you’re getting smarter, you feel like you’re touching something that’s new to you.‘I’ve learned something I can use’Astra Taylor, a film-maker, writer and co-founder of the Debt Collective debtors’ union, first appeared on The Dig in 2018 to discuss a book she’d co-authored on Hannah Arendt. She was won over by Denvir’s close attention to the art of interviewing, they became friends, and she has since come to guest-host the show, including interviewing Denvir about his own book All-American Nativism in 2020. Like Riofrancos, she sees the show as being “not just smart” but also “empowering”.“You exit a Dig interview and you’re like: ‘I’ve learned something I can use to be a part of this bigger socialist movement, that over the course of history has changed the world,’” Taylor says. “We might be losing right now, we might be in an electoral morass, but when I take this long perspective I see that people have made it through similarly complicated, fraught periods, that people have transcended their circumstances, that people have been unrelenting in their quest to build power.”The Dig’s backlog of episodes reads as an index of how the left interpreted crucial political events over the last eight years. A two-part episode on higher education in crisis and university unionism closely followed my own graduate workers’ union’s six-week strike in the winter of 2022, helping me to contextualize that charged experience. The late Mike Davis, whose The Monster at Our Door analyzed the threat of a global virus outbreak, came on for an episode at the outset of the Covid pandemic to situate the moment; when the George Floyd protests broke out three months later, he came back to discuss Prisoners of the American Dream, his treatment of the destructive effect of racism on US socialist and labor politics. Adjacent episodes more directly spoke to demands to defund police and the context of the uprising.As the show has become more popular, Denvir has himself turned more directly toward building power. In 2020, after throwing himself into the Sanders campaign, Denvir argued for retooling that campaign’s infrastructure to fight more lastingly for social and economic justice. At the state level, he and other veterans of the campaign co-founded Reclaim RI, which has become a vehicle for tenant organizing and pursuing housing justice in Rhode Island.Joe Shekarchi, speaker of the Rhode Island house of representatives, credits Reclaim RI with playing an important role in addressing the state’s housing woes, including authorizing $10m toward launching a first-of-its-kind public housing developer at the state level. “Dan is a gentleman. He’s polite,” says Shekarchi. “I consider myself a moderate; I’m sure he would consider himself a progressive, but he’s someone I can sit down and have a productive conversation with, come to an agreement and work collaboratively to get whatever the issue is over the goal line.”View image in fullscreenThis summer, Denvir is taking his productive conversations on the road. On 26 July, he co-hosted a live episode in London interviewing the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the political scientist Laleh Khalili, on Palestine and international politics. This month, he will travel to the DNC; two weeks later, he will tape a live episode at the Socialism 2024 conference, also in Chicago, on the geopolitics of energy transition.Each of these disparate geographies and themes is of a larger piece. The world as interpreted by The Dig is deeply interrelated, comprehensible through close study and changeable insofar as it can be understood. The convention is the next opportunity to put that framework into action.“We can’t win social democratic reforms on the domestic front without challenging US power abroad,” Denvir says. “We are confronting climate change, the genocide in Gaza and increasingly violent great power rivalries: we need a global program that acts in concert with progressive forces around the world.” More

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      I spent years studying American communism. Here’s what I learned | Maurice Isserman

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      I’ll leave it to future historians to puzzle out the reasons why, but in the second decade of the 21st century, in the unlikely setting of the most thoroughly capitalist country in world history, large numbers of Americans, mostly young, displayed a new interest in socialist ideas, values and policy proposals, and in turn in the often neglected history of socialism and communism in the United States.Having written three books early in my scholarly career dealing with one or another aspect of the tangled history of American communism, the last appearing in 1990, I figured I’d said all I had to say on the subject, and turned to other topics. Enough time had passed by the time of the 2010s socialist revival that the several score ageing communists and ex-communists whom I’d interviewed for my early books were now long dead.But in 2020 an editor at a New York publishing house, noticing the upswing in interest among young Americans in leftwing (although non-communist) politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, contacted me wondering if there might be a readership emerging for a new narrative history of the Communist party USA, from its founding in 1919 to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.We decided there was, and the result, out this month, is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.A lot of what I had written in earlier books on the subject still seemed valid to me. But some things needed to change. For one thing, no one writing on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s had any real idea of the extent to which the party was involved in Soviet espionage activities in the 1930s and 1940s. More generally, what struck me as I returned to the topic was the mystery of why so many often highly intelligent and in many ways admirable people, as communists were when considered individually, could have remained so loyal for so long to a fundamentally flawed movement that never had a chance of success in the US.Most of the interviewees I met while researching my earlier books, starting when I was a graduate student in the 1970s, were in their 60s and 70s by the time I sat down with them, armed with my primitive cassette tape recorder. I came to think of them as the “YCL generation”: teenagers or young adults who had joined the Young Communist League in the early days of the Great Depression, graduating to the adult movement in the course of the decade, some of them fighting in Spain, others organizing unions of steel workers in Ohio and agricultural workers in California, some writing for and editing publications like the Daily Worker in New York and the People’s World in San Francisco.Not a few of them wound up spending time in federal prison in the 1950s for violating the Smith Act, a law that made it a felony to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government. Most had left the movement before the 1960s, disillusioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in Moscow in 1956, in which the then Soviet leader indicted his recently deceased predecessor, Joseph Stalin, as a bloodthirsty tyrant.By the time I met them, after the passage of another two decades, these American ex-communists, and the few who remained in the party, generally as dissidents, had had a long time to think over the errors they’d made, and the crimes they’d apologized for, in younger days.And because they were, as a rule, so thoughtful, introspective, self-critical, and eager to share their insights with a then twentysomething-year-old researcher – hoping in doing so, I imagine, to persuade a younger generation via my books not to repeat their mistakes – I forgave them a lot. I like to think I didn’t apologize for their blindness to Stalin’s crimes, or for their willing support of a movement that, had it actually come to power in the US, might well have been responsible for similar crimes.But I don’t think I fully understood, or at least fully conveyed, how the elderly men and women from whom I learned so much might not have seemed so appealing to me if I’d encountered their younger selves decades earlier, when they were still true believers. And this, despite the fact that some of them told me as much: “I was a little Stalin,” Dorothy Healey said of her early years as a Los Angeles communist party leader. “I’m not talking about anybody else.”The central contradiction of American communism – one that defined it from its founding in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution to its essential demise with the end of the Soviet Union 70-odd years later – was, as I write in Reds, that it “attracted egalitarian idealists, and it bred authoritarian zealots”. Some clung longer to their idealism and resisted the authoritarian temptation better than others, but only at the price of concealing their true feelings.Mary Heaton Vorse, a free-spirited feminist and socialist from Greenwich Village, was a labor journalist who seemed to be on the scene of every major moment that American labor challenged the power of capital, from the 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the 1937 auto workers’ strike in Flint, Michigan. She noted in her diary in the early 1920s that the people she met in the newly-established Communist party all seemed to have “closed minds, so certain, so dull. They bore me, bore me, bore me,” underlining the last words for emphasis.A few years later, however, she joined the party herself, and remained a member into the 1930s. But she retained the habit of confiding to her diary her dislike for many of her comrades. “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be,” she wrote in 1931. “But I am a communist who hates communists and communism.”Writing the history of American communism requires an appreciation of such contradictions. Somewhere along the line, I showed a draft of an early chapter of Reds to a friend and fellow historian familiar with my earlier works. Getting back to me a few days later, he said he liked it well enough, and saw how it grew out of my first books on the topic. But, he added: “You seem less patient with the communists than you used to be.”That was a shrewd observation. Now that I’m in my 70s, roughly the age of those I interviewed back when I first began studying the history of American communism, now that I’ve had ample time to reflect on some of my own youthful political follies in the 1960s, I probably am (in retrospect) less inclined to be patient with my interviewees in their younger days. Understanding, yes. Patient, not so much. As the great British historian EP Thompson, himself a former communist, wrote in his 1963 masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class, understanding the “obsolete”, “utopian” and “deluded” English working-class radicals of the early 19th century required rescuing them from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.Condescension, historically, can take the form of a patronizing dismissal of those who came long before us for failing to live up to the high standards of moral intelligence and practical knowledge we like to imagine we possess. But it can also take the form of cutting our ancestors perhaps too much slack.In the case of American communism, the appeal of the Soviet “experiment” in the 1930s and 1940s in a world racked by the Great Depression and menaced by domestic and foreign fascism is perfectly comprehensible. At the same time, it shouldn’t have taken a speech by Khrushchev to reveal Stalin’s all-too-evident crimes against humanity in his three decades of misrule over the Soviet Union; lots of people, including many on the American and international left, had figured that one out for themselves long before.In the end, studying the history of communism should be neither an exercise in filiopietism, the excessive veneration of ancestors, nor of demonology, the classification of malevolent spirits. I hope that in Reds I have avoided both (readers, please advise), and thus have been fair to my old and now departed friends, those veterans of the communist movement, whose memories and insights I taped so many years back.American communists in the 20th century included in their ranks people of talent, vision, and genuine idealism. Their tragedy lay in their willingness to subvert their own best instincts in their devotion to a flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state. And in doing so, they helped set back for generations the opportunities for the emergence of a genuinely American left. May the new generation emerging on the left avoid their mistakes.
      Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. His most recent book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism More