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Mamdani Shows Us How to Defeat Trump's MAGA Vision
A democratic socialist won by acknowledging what everyone already knows—life has become unaffordable—and saying we're going to build our way out of it. He's shown Democrats how to stop lying and start acknowledging what's broken. Provide solutions and talk about them relentlessly with excitement and enthusiasm.
Jun 25, 2025
Zohran Mamdani just beat Andrew Cuomo in NYC's mayoral primary by doing something Democrats forgot how to do: acknowledging reality and promising to build our way out of it.
Too few people can afford to live in America anymore. We've given up on the idea that hard work gets you anywhere. We're buying lottery tickets and praying we got into Bitcoin at the right time because that's the only path to stability we can see.
I co-founded Justice Democrats. I was AOC's Communications Director. I've watched the fire die out from Bernie to AOC to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. I've seen movements and moments that seemed poised to take back our democracy and our economy for the people slow to a crawl. Partly because our leaders were too trusting of the Democratic party. They thought we were all on the same team.
We aren't. We never were.
It's time for a full court press on the party. It's time to reshape it in the image of a better FDR. Take it over from the inside. Primary every corporate Democrat who thinks extraction is an economic policy. We need a new party—not a third party, but a Democratic party willing to clean house—starting with those who forgot how to build.
The party establishment can't just steal Mamdani's message. They've spent 30 years telling us why we can't build things, why we can't have universal healthcare, why we can't afford what every other developed country has. If Chuck Schumer suddenly started talking like Mamdani tomorrow, everyone would know he's full of shit.
So they'll do what they always do. They'll join Republicans in calling him too radical, too far left. They'll wring their hands about needing to appeal to the "center."
The center ain't what they think it is. It's swing voters who went from Obama to Trump and they want change, not compromise. They want someone to acknowledge that the system is broken and promise to fix it. They want a plan that makes sense.
Only 22% of Americans believe government can improve their lives. Twenty-two percent. That's what happens when both parties spend 40 years making sure that public options aren't functional. They make sure we can't build our own housing, transit, childcare, or healthcare system. They made sure the public can't build anything except tax breaks for billionaires.
Democrats tell us it's complicated. Republicans tell us it's immigrants' fault. Working families are taking on credit card debt to buy groceries. Teachers are driving Uber at night. Parents are choosing between daycare and rent.
We've accepted that this is just how it is. That America doesn't build things anymore. That the best we can hope for is tweaking a broken system around the edges.
Mamdani just showed Democrats how to call bullshit on all of that.
He won by acknowledging what everyone already knows—life has become unaffordable—and saying we're going to build our way out of it. Housing that teachers can afford. Transit that actually works. Childcare centers so parents don't have to choose between working and raising their kids. And that the ultra wealthy are going to pay their fair share.
He hasn't even been elected yet. But he's shown Democrats how to stop lying about the problem.
Stop explaining why we can't. Start acknowledging what's broken. Then provide the solution. Talk about it relentlessly with excitement and enthusiasm.
The establishment endorsed Cuomo—a sexual predator who spent his career making life worse for working people—because he represents their vision: pretend everything's fine, blame messaging when voters don't believe you.
Bill Clinton, Bloomberg, Clyburn, Torres—they all backed the predator over the builder. Because predators don't threaten their business model. Someone who acknowledges reality does.
Wall Street is terrified of Mamdani because public building kills private extraction. Every public housing unit is one less rent check for Blackstone. Every public childcare center is one less profit center for private equity. Every public transit line that works means fewer Uber rides, fewer car loans, fewer opportunities to bleed working people dry.
Wall Street doesn't build anymore. They buy what exists, jack up prices, and extract until there's nothing left. Our economy runs on extraction now. Healthcare alone will suck up $75 trillion over the next decade—not to make us healthier, but to transfer wealth upward. Housing, childcare, education—they're all cash vacuums.
Mamdani's promising to build public alternatives. That scares the shit out of them. He's proving you can win by admitting what everyone already knows. You can say "housing is unaffordable and we're going to build more of it" instead of lecturing people about market dynamics.
Now someone wins by saying we can build the things people need? Their business model collapses. Democrats have spent 30 years helping corporations privatize everything—from healthcare to housing to transit. They've turned basic needs into profit centers for Wall Street.
Young people assume they'll never own homes. Parents quit jobs because childcare costs more than they earn. Families crowd into apartments they can't afford while Democrats lecture us about GDP growth.
We've been trained to see poverty as inevitable. To see suffering as complicated. To see solutions as impossible.
Mamdani showed Democrats a different way. Admit that life has gotten harder. Acknowledge that work doesn't pay. Stop pretending the game isn't rigged. Then promise to build the things that make life livable.
Public building doesn't kill capitalism—it saves it from itself. When government builds housing, private developers have to compete. When we build public childcare, private centers can't charge whatever they want. But healthcare? Build public hospitals and clinics, and suddenly private insurers can't extract $75 trillion while people die rationing insulin. That's how you restart real competition. That's how you force corporations to actually create value instead of just extracting it.
Build the things people need to live. Not tax credits. Not market solutions. Not complicated programs that take three years to maybe help some people.
Mamdani won because he's the first Democrat in years to talk about the affordability crisis like someone who's actually tried to pay rent.
Americans aren't stupid. We know when we're being fed bullshit. We know when politicians are pretending our problems don't exist. We know when they're lying about why rent costs $3,000 a month or why insulin costs $600. We've just stopped expecting anyone to acknowledge reality, let alone fix it. We've accepted that politicians are liars and they will keep explaining why suffering is actually prosperity if you squint right.
The lottery tickets and crypto gambling show we've given up on the normal paths working. We need a party willing to admit those paths are broken before we'll believe they can be fixed.
What really terrifies them is if Mamdani succeeds in NYC, it spreads. Other cities start asking why they can't build public housing. Other states wonder why they can't have public childcare. The entire extraction economy—$75 trillion in healthcare alone, trillions more in housing, education, childcare—starts to crack. Every public option is a private profit center destroyed. Every successful public project is proof that we don't need them.
Mamdani hasn't even been elected yet. But he's shown us how to stop lying about what needs fixing. He's shown that you can win by promising to build for everyone, not just donors.
The movement's next job is to help Mamdani actually build—to prove the model works. Then we replicate it. Primaries in NYC, NYS, the US House and Senate. Every corporate Democrat who backs extraction over building needs a challenger who can build. Every AIPAC-purchased politician needs a challenger. Then maybe we can win in Texas and Tennessee and West Virginia. Then maybe people will believe the words we say.
If you still believe in this party, prove it. Help us take it back.
This isn't about purity. It's about survival. Either we build our way out of this mess or we keep managing the collapse until there's nothing left to manage.
Democrats need to learn from this. Or get sent home. We're building anyway.
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What Progressives Already Know About the 2024 Election Results
A Trump presidency will push progressives back on our heels, in a dire defensive position as we fight to protect rights and programs won during many previous decades. Regardless of who wins, the challenges for progressives will be enormous.
Oct 22, 2024
While the name of the next president is unknown, some outcomes of the election can be foreseen. For instance:
- President Biden’s successor will be a dangerous militarist.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are supporters of boosting already-huge Pentagon budgets along with continuing U.S. warfare in many forms. Trump likes to pander to voters who don’t want endless wars, but his actual policies as president kept them going. Harris’s glimmers of senatorial interest in scaling back military largesse faded into standard bellicosity. Both candidates beat cold-war drums, with Trump focusing on China rather than Russia.
- If Trump wins, corporate Democrats and mainstream media will blame the Harris campaign for not moving rightward enough.
Progressive ideas, as usual, will be convenient scapegoats for the failures of Democratic Party elites.
- If Harris wins, corporate Democrats and mainstream media will immediately warn that she must steer clear of the left.
The establishment is ever alert to the danger that progressive populism could majorly reduce income inequality and subdue corporate power.
- If Trump wins, progressives will be on the defensive for at least four years -- unable to accomplish anything of substance at the federal level and trying to mitigate the damage under an unhinged and fascistic president.
The disasters with a second Trump administration will include unleashed nativism and official bigotry. As one liberal commentator observed weeks before the election, “More than ever, Trump’s rhetoric is steeped in racism, xenophobia and dehumanization. He routinely calls immigrants ‘vermin’ and says they are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country. He claims they are ‘stone-cold killers,’ ‘animals’ and ‘the worst people’ who will ‘cut your throat.’ . . . He called migrants from Latin America, Congo and the Middle East ‘the most violent people on Earth.’ . . . He’s even suggested that nonwhite immigrants have ‘bad genes’ that make them genetically inferior.”
- As in the past, the Green Party will again congratulate itself on the tiny percentage of votes for its latest presidential candidate (after the party’s nominee received 0.36 percent in 2012, 1.07 percent in 2016 and 0.26 percent in 2020).
In October, this year’s Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein campaigned in swing states and declared: “This is a very dire situation that will be continued under both Democrats and Republicans. So we say there is no lesser evil in this race.”
Really?
- If Harris wins despite his best efforts, Benjamin Netanyahu will be disappointed that he was unable to sufficiently help get Trump elected.
“For anyone who doubts Trump will be even worse than Biden is on Gaza,” Mehdi Hasan tweeted a mid-October video clip of Trump saying that Netanyahu “is doing a good job, Biden is trying to hold him back... and probably should be doing the opposite. I'm glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do.’”
- Whether Trump or Harris wins, the U.S. government will continue to support Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians under the guise of its “right to defend itself.”
If Trump wins, virtually all Republicans and many Democrats in Congress will support his unequivocal backing for whatever Israel does. If Harris wins, we can expect her policies toward Israel to be dreadful, while she’ll be subject to increasing pressure from much of her party’s base and some Democratic members of Congress for an end to arming Israel.
- In response to the climate emergency, Harris has foreshadowed that her policies would be predictably inadequate, while Trump has repeatedly denied that a climate crisis even exists.
The burden will be on activists to demand actions commensurate with the realities described in The 2024 State of the Climate Report: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
- No matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is inaugurated on Jan. 20, the challenges for progressives will be enormous.
A Trump presidency will push progressives back on our heels, in a dire defensive position as we fight to protect rights and programs won during many previous decades. With a Harris presidency, progressives will have some space to organize, with potential to actually move some U.S. government policies in a positive direction.
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Corporate Democrats Go to Bat for Bloated Pentagon Budget
"We should not assume that there is no room to trim the Pentagon budget," said one expert. "Doing it correctly would not only make us safer, it would free up funds to address other urgent national priorities."
Jan 11, 2023
A group of corporate Democrats led by Rep. Jared Golden of Maine sent a letter Wednesday defending the out-of-control U.S. military budget and expressing concerns about looming attempts by House Republicans to cut it, even as several GOP lawmakers insisted the Pentagon would be safe from their coming austerity spree.
In their letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Golden, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and other members of the right-wing Blue Dog Coalition celebrated the bipartisan vote last month to add $45 billion to the latest military budget proposed by President Joe Biden, claiming the extra money is necessary for "the procurement of additional naval ships at a time in which China has developed the world's largest navy" and for "strengthening the defense industrial base."
But the lawmakers voiced alarm over the House GOP majority's expressed support for capping federal outlays across the board at Fiscal Year 2022 levels—a move that would, in theory, cut tens of billions off the military budget in addition to slashing spending on education, healthcare, and other key areas.
The 12 Democratic signatories of the new letter focused their attention solely on the supposed national security implications of a spending cap, declaring "such a drastic cut in defense spending would not only undo this bipartisan consensus in support of our national defense, but would also endanger our long-term national security by injecting substantial uncertainty into the long-term defense budgetary planning necessary to ensure timely investments in personnel, procurement, readiness, and research and development."
The White House, too, weighed in on the side of maintaining the current military budget this week, calling any push for cuts "senseless and out of line with our national security needs."
But analysts have argued in recent days that such reflexive defenses of U.S. military spending don't stand up to scrutiny.
Far from a "drastic cut," $75 billion is less than 10% of the current military budget, which stands at $858 billion—much of which is likely to wind up in the coffers of defense contractors.
Progressive lawmakers, led by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), argued last year that $100 billion could and should be cut from the Pentagon budget—which has long been rife with waste, abuse, and profitable giveaways to private industry—and redirected toward pressing needs, from healthcare to poverty reduction to climate programs.
Their proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act was voted down in July by an overwhelming bipartisan margin.
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in a blog post Tuesday that "the idea that dictators worldwide are basing their decisions on whether the Pentagon budget is an enormous $750 billion or an obscenely enormous $850-plus billion is ludicrous."
Hartung acknowledged that the kinds of across-the-board cuts floated by House Republicans "are never the best way to reduce government spending" because "they mean cutting effective and wasteful programs in the same proportions instead of making smart choices about what works and what doesn't."
"By all means we should debate how the federal budget should be crafted at this chaotic political moment," Hartung added. "But we should not assume that there is no room to trim the Pentagon budget. Doing it correctly would not only make us safer, it would free up funds to address other urgent national priorities."
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