Ages in Turmoil: The Rise and Fall of States in and out of Yankeedom

by Bruce Lerro / November 26th, 2025      LONG READ

Author, Bruce Lerro, Co-founder and Co- Manager for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Orientation

Does history have any rhyme or reason?
Mostly liberal historians insist that there are no patterns of history and that all historical periods are unique. Other historians such as Danilevsky, Spengler and Sorokin claim that history runs in cycles. Peter Turchin, author of the books Ages of Discord and End Times agrees with the later but bases his theory on much more quantitative studies which are called “cliodynamics” (after Clio, the Greek mythological muse of history) which are subject to empirical tests with data. He writes that his colleagues focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse throughout history

Why This Matters
Comparison of the 1850s to the 2020s
Turchin begins by writing that the America of 1850 and the American of 2020, despite being very different countries share a number of striking similarities

• Between 1820-1860 the relative wage, the share of economic output paid out to workers’ wages declined nearly 50% just as it has in the past 5 decades.
• The average life expectancy at age 10 decreased by 8 years.
• The heights of native-born Americans who in the 18^th century were the tallest people on earth, started shrinking.
• In the five years before the Civil War in 1855-1860 American cities were convulsed by no fewer than 38 lethal riots.
• There was the rise of the populist party, such as the anti-immigration, know-Nothing parties.

Turchin writes that we are due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s because of the following conditions:

• a state has stagnating and declining real wages;
• a growing gap between rich and poor;
• overproduction of young upper middle class graduates –set up for entry into the elite, and
• exploding public debt.

Turchin  tells us these causes are related to each other dynamically. All this has not happened just in the 2020s. In the US, all these factors started to take an ominous turn for the past 50 years. Turchin also says that the past 40 years resemble what happened in the US between 1870-1900, a kind of second Gilded Age.

Cycles of Disintegration and Integration
According to Turchin, over the course of world history the most common pattern is the alternations of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century. Disintegration refers to social instability, the breakdown of cooperation among and within the elite, and persistent outbreaks of political violence including rebellions, revolutions and civil wars. The longest period of integration is 200 years and the shortest disintegrative phases are 50 years. His analysis points to four structured drivers of instability:

• popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential;
• elite overproduction resulting in intra-elite conflict;
• failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state, plus
• geopolitical factors—such as what he calls “external forcing”.

The length of the overall integrative-disintegrative sequences varies depending on the characteristics of the society. Turchin claims that the most important driver for looming instability is elite overproduction. We will discuss this more later.

State Breakdown
What explains social breakdown? Why do states collapse? How do civil wars start? According to Turchin’s research, the danger of violent onset is especially high when one of the ethnic factions perceives itself as losing ground. Few people are born revolutionaries. It is only when people become convinced there is no hope of fixing their problems through means of reform that they turn to revolutionary strategies. Discussing the sweep of European history, during the late medieval crisis most conflicts in Europe were due to dynastic intrigue. In what has been called the General Crisis of the 17^th century, religion was the most important ideology –  for example the Huguenots vs Catholics or the Puritans vs Anglicans. During the Age of Revolutions in the 19^th century, the ideologies of liberalism and Marxism were prominent.

Still speaking of the world historically statistically crises result in which population declines are very common. Fifty percent of breakdown came from here. Next, thirty percent are from major epidemics. Other indicators focus on what happened to the elites themselves. Nearly 2/3 of the cases resulted in massive downward mobility from elites to commoners. One sixth of the time elites were targeted for extermination. The probability of assassination was 40%. But the biggest reason for state breakdown – 75% of the crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both). 20% of the civil wars dragged on for a century of more. 60% of the time the crisis led to the end of the state, whether conquered by another state or the state disintegration into fragments. These conclusions seem depressing. There are very few cases in which societies managed to navigate the crisis with no or few major consequences. Two states had revolutionary situations but came out of them with reforms The two exceptions are the British and Russian states.

Exceptions to the rule: 19^th Century England and Russia
The First example Turchin sites is England, specifically the Chartist period between 1819-1867. It began as massive popular protest demanding full male suffrage and improvement in working conditions. In Manchester the protest was brutally repressed by the authorities but the turbulence lasted until 1867. The reason it did not turn into a revolution was not because the rulers became enlightened. One reason was commoners went to other places either as immigrants, or refugees. This reduced immiseration numbers from below. Another was the repeal of the Corn Laws that imposed tariffs on grain benefitting the large landowners. The Reform Act of 1832 shifted the balance of power away from the landed gentry to the upwardly mobile commercial elites. This combined struggle of workers to establish their right for trade unions allowed for reform without threatening to overthrow the state.

Turchin points out that 1833 Russia was the mightiest European land power with an army of 860,000. In his 43-year reign, Peter the Great made the military serve the state either in the army or the bureaucracy. In addition, beginning in the 19^th century the number of peasant protests increased, culminating in 1858. After much pressure, Alexander II abolished serfdom. This let some air out of the immiseration bubble for the lower classes. Further reforms followed in the 1860s and 1870s. However, the loss to the aristocrats of their workforce resulted in their downward mobility and a large number of what became counter-elites. The upper-middle class sons and daughters of the dispossessed gentry could not get state jobs. Half of the students were the children of nobles or government officials. A combination of abject downward mobility and exposure to western revolutionary ideas of anarchism and Marxism radicalized the students and turned them into revolutionaries. Their agitation accelerated in the 1880s and culminated with the assassination attempts of Czars in the first Russian Revolution of 1905.

How Monogamy or Polygamy Affects the Cycles of Integration and Disintegration
Depending on their constitution some societies go through integrative-disintegrative cycles more swiftly and others more slowly. Why is this? Turchin writes that:

In preindustrial societies the speed with which elite ranks could grow was strongly influenced by the biological reproduction of elites, or more specifically by the reproduction rate of elite men and the number of mates men have access to.

In Western European kingdoms such as France and England, Christianity restricted how many legal mates men could have:

In Islamic countries a man could have 4 legal wives and as many concubines as he could support. This is also the rule of steppe pastoralists like the Mongols. As a result, these societies churned out elite aspirants at a frightening rate. The faster the rate of elite overproduction the shorter the integrative phase.

The theory tells us there should be a significant difference in cycle lengths between societies with monogamous ruling classes from those with polygamous ones.

• Monogamous societies average is 200-300 years cycles
• Polygamous elites –100 years or less

Geographical Factors Impacting the Cycles
Speaking of the world historically, why did waves of instability often hit many societies at the same time? Turchin asks why did the English Civil War, the Times of Troubles in Russia, and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China happen at roughly the same time? Conversely, why was the 18^th century a time of internal peace and imperial expansion in all three countries later on in history?

How Much do Climate, Demography, Famines and Sickness Matter
Turchin distances himself from environmental determinism. He says drawing a direct causal arrow from worsening climate to social breakdown does not work very well. For example, the troughs of solar activity during the past millennium only sometimes coincide with disintegrative phases. However, major epidemics and pandemics are often associated with periods of major socio-political instabilities. He points out these patterns for the last 2000 years:

• Antonine plague 2^nd century CE;
• Plague of Justinian 6^th century;
• the spread of the Black Death through Afro-Eurasia 14^th century was an integral part of the Late Medieval Crisis, and
• the most devastating cholera pandemics of the 19^th century occurred during the Age of Revolutions.

Power Politics
Any complex human society has a number of specialized positions that go with the functions they perform to manage the state. In a prosperous society as social wealth grows the number of positions available for work grow with it. But in a society where the ruling elites are too narrow in their visions for navigating society, the number of positions remain static. The rulers are either too short-sighted or they cannot afford to tell aspiring elites the truth about job availability. Therefore, they do not shut down educational opportunities to those training for specialized positions and their applicants continues to grow. It is these folks who are trained with no work prospects that have subversive potential. The number of satisfied elites stays the same while the number of frustrated aspirants continues to grow. As the number of aspirants per power position grows, some will decide to stretch the rules. Each revolving musical chair acquires a jostling crowd which is the consequence of elite overproduction.

Turchin reminds us that 200 years ago China’s economy was by far the mightiest in the world. Today, it is 20% higher than that of the US. But between these periods was a “Century of Humiliation” mostly at the hands of England. After 1820, China’s total GDP began to shrink and by 1870 it was less than half that of Western Europe. The Taiping Rebellion 1850-1864 was an attempt to overcome this humiliation. What we want to know is which classes were involved, not necessarily how successful they were.

Between 1644 and 1912 China was ruled by the Qing dynasty. It was ruled by a class of scholar administrators, who could advance up the ranks only after successfully passing a series of increasingly difficult examinations. Early industrialization also helped to fuel robust population growth. But population growth did not stop even after the beneficial effects of these innovations had been exhausted. By 1850 the Chinese population was 4 times greater than at the beginning of the Qing. In addition:

• The arable land per peasant shrank nearly threefold;
• real wages declined and
• the average height decreased.

It was those who could not get jobs within the Chinese bureaucracy that became the leading edge of the Taiping rebellion. Turchin claims that the most important driver for looming instability is elite overproduction.

Forms and Faces of Power
Following closely on the work of CW Mills and William Domhoff, Turchin identified four forms of power:

• coercion or force — used by the army, generals, and police – this is the harshest form of power;
• wealth — economic power of accumulated material resources which includes not only goods but all public and private media;
• state, bureaucratic or administrative or political power and
• ideological — control over “meaning making” systems such as science, religion, art and philosophy

While all forms of power are always present, they are present in different proportions in different societies.

A good example of state bureaucratic administration power was the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. Putin led an alliance of administrative military elites who defeated the plutocrats. There was no sudden revolution, rather a process that was gradual. One oligarch after another was exiled. The Putin regime enjoyed a number of successes, especially within the first 10 years. It ended the civil war in Chechnya, put the state finances on a sound basis and its economic growth was rapid.

The three faces of power came out of a debate within the field of political sociology. The first form of power championed by left-liberal Robert Dahl has it that citizens themselves shape policies and contested issues. In this liberal democratic mode, politicians passively carry out what citizens want. The second face of power is more critical of what is called “democracy” in the US. What Bachrach and Baratz and others have said is that politicians behind the scenes control the agenda of public meetings and decide which issues can talked about, which don’t and which aren’t even put on the agenda.

Lastly, Steven Lukes in his book Power: A Radical View takes a major step further. He states that following Marx, the ruling class controls people’s preferences as to what is even talked about. This is done through ideology. As Marx says, the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of society even for the middle and working classes. To review:

• 1st face—citizens to shape policies on contested issues
• 2nd face—upper classes shaping the agenda on issues
• 3rd face—ability of the elites to shape the preference of the public through ideology

Is Power Wielding a Conspiracy?
Typically liberals imagine that there are no conspiracies and whatever happens between interest groups are simply the results of chance or unintended consequences. Those people who see that there are patterns in political and economic events in which the same group seems to maintain their power suggests that there are doings going on behind the scenes. They believe there are conspiracies. Liberals have spilled a lot of ink making fun of conspiracy theories, tin foil attempts that are products of paranoia. The degeneracy of the Democratic Party is revealed when the Democratic Party proclaimed a Russian conspiracy to explain why Hillary lost to Trump.

But there is a third kind of theory, a structural theory of what William Domhoff called class domination theory. Class domination theorists insist some conspiracies are real but not everything is a conspiracy. Turchin, identifying with Domhoff’s class domination theory offers the criticisms.

First, conspiracy theories attributed to the rulers’ motives are either vague or outlandish and require that the population be mind readers. For class domination theory the motives of the rulers are simple and direct. Rulers want to increase their wealth and power. Secondly, conspiracy theories usually attribute to the rulers omnipotent power in which those rulers’ plans are perfectly enacted and the follow-through is seamless. For class domination theory, rulers can botch the job and still stay in power. Class domination theory says that there can be unintended consequences that no ruling class can predict

Third, for conspiracy theories power is super centralized where there is no conflicting power within the conspirators. In class domination theory, the  power of the rulers is decentralized into networks of schools, clubs, and think tanks through which the rulers stay in touch. They have their squabbles but they conspire when their class interests as a whole are threatened by  the lower classes, especially the working class. Conspiracy theorists imagine that their plans require air tight secrecy so that their plans are not made public. For class domination theory, rulers’ plans can get leaked but the problem is will the lower classes be paying enough attention to notice, let alone be in a position to do anything about it.This is where Lukes’ third face of power comes into operation. Workers may be ideologically blocked from thinking the rulers would do such a thing or by being too preoccupied by escapist sports, music or movies to give a hoot.

Usually, conspiracy theories imagine the lower classes are ignorant, stupid and passive. But conspiracy theories often don’t offer mechanisms for controlling people. Domhoff’s theory offers empirical research in how PAC’s funding of lobbyists, campaign contributions and  mainstream media control people through the political stances of both parties. Lastly, conspiracy theories require that the rulers’ plans be top secret and not subject to any public record. Domhoff has spent decades recording statistics as to earnings, interlocking directorates and think tanks of the rulers that are a matters of public record. You don’t have to discover the Dead Sea Scrolls to understand what the rulers are up to. The table below is a summary.

Conspiracies Theories	Category of Comparison	Scientific Theories (class domination) Domhoff
Vague or outlandish.	Motives	Are realistic, “we don’t need to be mind-readers”. They want to expand their wealth
Are omniscient and plans are carried out seamlessly	How smart are theorists?	Can be bumblers, or dealing with unintended consequences
One strong leader or cabal centralized	Who is driving?	Decentralized networks of prep schools, country clubs, colleges, interlocking think tanks
Illegal plans can be kept secret for a long time	Can plans be kept secret?	Plans may get leaked but workers may not be paying attention or don’t care
Masses of people are assumed to be passive and stupid and offer no specific method of control. No empirical research.	Methods of control	PACs funding lobbyists, campaign contributions mainstream media based on empirical research.
No elite class conflict. A single concentration of rulers	Presence of class conflict	Yes, inter-ruler conflict
Secret	Who knows what they are doing?	Transparent…matters of public record
No	Make predictions?	Yes, data is testable
No chance or unintended consequences	How effectively carried out?	Chance and unintended consequences are part of the picture

How Cliodynamics the Science of History Came to be

Turchin describes cliodynamics as assembling a huge body of knowledge collected by professional historians and then using this data in a professional, scientific way comparing different  types of societies. It does not assume that people consciously act in their material interests. They factor in that people can act against their material interests because they misunderstand them or they are misled by manipulation of others

In the one of the Appendix of his book End Times, Turchin discusses how his quantitative research into history began. He points out that English mathematician an engineer Babbage  invented the Analytical Engine, a machine capable of general purpose computation. Its first description was published in 1837. Two years before, Babbage discovered the Belgium mathematician and statistician Adolphe Quetelet who published a book, Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties or Essays on Social Physics. This was an approach to understanding human societies using statistical laws. Inspired by the ideas of Quetelet and the father of modern sociology, August Comte, Crawford and his colleagues formed the Babbage Society whose goal is to develop a science of human history which they called “cliology” which stood for the Greek mythological muse of history.

The hallmark of mathematical chaos is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Ibn Khaldun was the great medieval Arab historian who wrote about the rise and fall of states, but he didn’t have the quantitative data. Turchin said that along with some of his colleagues he built a model of state formation in the Old World to the beginnings of the New World, between 1500 BCE and 1500 CE. He says that despite its relative simplicity the model did a very good  job of predicting  where and when macro-states (large states and empires) formed and how they spread. 1981 marked the introduction of the IBM PC. Gradually the plentiful computer power and storage revolutionized data science including the Era of Big Data.

One of the key members of the cliodynamics community was Jack Goldstone. Early in his graduate school.  Gladstone became interested in revolutions. He discovered an interesting relationship between population rise and revolutions. He found that between every revolution or rebellion between 1500 and1900 the population had grown substantially in the prior half of the century. Conversely, when revolution as in major rebellions were absent in Europe, the Ottoman Empire and China roughly from 1450 to 1550 and from 1660 to 1760 population growth was almost nil.

Cliodynamics only gained traction around the year 2000. The model of dynamic cycles followed the work of was Alfred J. Lotka and Vito Volterra.  In 2011, Turchin and his colleagues built “Seshat: Global History Databank”. So far, they have identified about 300 cases of crises spanning from the neolithic period to the present and located over all the major continents of the world.

The bones and ice cores of history

How do we collect data when we have no written record, or the written record is sketchy or from the experience and viewpoint of the upper classes? How is it that we can track changes in population size, health, equality or inequality in societies in which historians have very little data? One way of finding out about ancient climates is through the work of a group called paleoclimatologists. Through ice cores, sediment cores, tree rings and checking pollen they can reconstruct the environmental history of the region along with housing construction. Furthermore, Turchin states that skeletons have remarkable staying power for measuring size, malnutrition, high disease and parasite burdens. Low height  is usually a sign of an unhealthy lifestyle. Skeletal remains can also trace how people died. Violent deaths often leave telltale marks on a skeleton. Skeletons can also show where people were born and whether they moved.

Cycles of Prosperity and Decline in the United States

The United States has gone through two periods of prosperity (integration) and two periods of disintegration. The two cycles of prosperity went from 1760 to 1830 and between 1900 to 1960. During these periods wages doubled and people actually grew in height. The two periods of decline were between 1830-1900 and the second period of decline began in 1960 and has lasted into today. During these periods of the disintegration wages were lower and humans actually shrank in size. In both periods there were spurts of violence, the Civil War in the middle of a declining period as well as spurts of violence during a rising period. Please see  the summary table below :

Cycles of Prosperity		Cycles of Decline
Cycle 1 1760- 1830	Historical period	Cycle 2 1830-1900
US has tallest people in world Height increased 9 centimeters	Height of people	Decline in height of more than 4 centimeters
Relative wages doubled 1780 -1830	Wages	Wages lost most of their gains 1830 – 1860
Southern slave planters	Ruling Class	Southern planters Northern industrialists
Working class farmers and mechanics	Lower class	Working class farmers and mechanics
Democrats, Whigs	Political party	Republican Party
Cycle 3 – 1900 -1960	Historical period	Cycle 4 – 1960 to present
Height increased 9 centimeters	Height of people	Height trend stopped in US and Germany, Netherlands continued to grow because of better social programs
Relative wages doubled 1780 – 1830	Wages	Wages lost 30%
Industrial capitalists	Type of capitalism	Industrial capitalists Military capitalists Finance capitalists

History of Ruling Classes in America
Gilded Age
Before the Civil War the US was ruled by a coalition of Southern slaveholders and Northeast merchant patricians. They were challenged beginning in the 1850s by a new kind of wealth based on mining, railroads and steel production rather than on cotton and overseas trade. These new millionaires chafed under the rule of the southern aristocracy. The new elite who made their money in manufacturing favored high tariffs to protect budding American industries. The Democratic Party was clearly the party of the slave owners. The Whig party was actually split and destroyed by their inability to take a stand on the issue of slavery. The Republican Party rose up to take its place and in the second election won the presidency. The defeat of the South in the Civil War destroyed this ruling class. Between 1860 and 1932 the Republican Party won every election with the exceptions of 1884, 1892, and 1912.

In what became the first Gilded Age, northerners like JP Morgan, JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould ruled the roost. In just 10 years between 1860 and 1870 the number of millionaires exploded from 41 to 545. They were protected by high tariffs as a national banking system was established. Towards the end of the Gilded Age it was realized that the idea of unrestricted competition had dire consequences for small businesses, let alone for workers. Rockefeller and JP Morgan pointed out that more state regulation was introduced. They instigated a Great Merger Movement  between 1895 and 1904. Gabriel Kolko in his book The Triumph of Conservatism exposed how the political elites knew each other, went to the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, married into the same families and shared the same values. The main benefit was not in increasing economic efficiency but in increasing the political power of business against the rising socialist movement and populist farming.

Think tanks, foundations and policy discussion groups
The 1920s saw the beginning of policy planning networks funded by corporate power. The money came from Rockefeller, Carnegie and Robert Brookings. The roaring 20s was a wild and insecure time. By 1929 the party was over. Nearly ½ of the millionaires who thrived in the 1920s were wiped out by the depression. This corporate conglomerate also controlled the ideological basis of power through ownership of mass media. Turchin contends that the remaining source of social power, the military, has been thoroughly subordinated by the political network throughout American history.

From the New Deal to the Great Society of the 1960s, non-market forces pushed the minimum wage up faster than inflation. Some have said that from the end of World War II to 1970 was the golden age of capitalism. Things began to change as early as mid-60s as Germany and Japan recovered after World War II and the United States faced some stiffer competition. Corporate capitalists made a decision to close up shop in the US and invested in cheaper land and cheaper labor elsewhere in the capitalist periphery. These were called runaway shops. The standard of living began to decline as capitalists continued to invest in the military rather than produce goods. Finance capital rose to prominence along with credit cards, real estate and insurance companies.

During this period, there was a ¾ divergence between productivity and median hourly wages.

• Austerity and macroeconomics kept unemployment higher than is needed to keep inflation in check.
• They responded to recessions with insufficient force.
• Corporate driven globalization undercut wages and job security of non-educated workers.
• Purposely eroding collective bargaining  resulted from judicial decisions – individualized arbitration
• Weaker labor standards including declining minimum wage, eroding overtime protections began to fall into place.
• Industrial deregulation started.

There was a decline in family, church, the labor union, public schools, PTA and volunteer neighborhood associations. This undermined social connections.

Power at the Top in Contemporary United States
In terms of the upper echelons  of society, Turchin focuses on three social classes: the lower upper middle class, the higher upper middle class and the working class. He claims  if you are an American and your net worth is 1-2 million dollars you are roughly in top 10% or lower echelons of the upper middle class. Still higher up are those that make 10s of millions of dollars. These are the owners of businesses and CEO of large corporations  might be categorized as upper middle class. Many powerful politicians are also in this rank and there are 50 members of Congress who are in this category.

Engines of Disruption
Both in world history and in the case of the United States there are three factors that spell trouble for the ruling classes:

• Elite overproduction;
• Inter-elite conflict and
• Working class immiseration

Counter-Elites
Turchin points out that early in the 1950s fewer than 15% of the population went to college. By the 2000s the number of college degree holders greatly outnumbered the positions for them. Turchin goes on to say Credentialed salaried employees are the most dangerous class for social stability and this is based on numerous studies that include, not just the Taiping revolution in China. It was the factor in driving the revolution of 1848 in France and the Arab Spring of a few years ago. The most dangerous occupation of all, Turchin says is that of a lawyer. Famous revolutionary lawyers were Robespierre, Lenin and Castro; Lincoln and Gandhi. This would make sense given the rhetorical skills of a lawyer in court when it is turned loose on the lower classes.

Popular Immiseration
In the medium wage between 1976 to 2016 there is a big break in economic fortunes. First, the lower classes all lost ground while the more educated with salaries pulled ahead. During the same period the average medium wage rose from $ 17.11 to $18.90 per hour, a 10% increase. This is not much over a period of 50 years. For Americans without a 4-year degree – 64% of the population – have been losing ground in absolute terms. Their real wages shrank over the 40 years before 2016. Turchin says are the three items that define the quality of life for the working class are:

Higher education

Owning a home

Keeping yourself healthy

The cost of all three has risen faster than the rise of inflation. For example, the 1976 cost of college for a year was $617. Median workers had to work 150 hours to earn one year of college. By 2016 the cost has risen to $8,804. A person has to work 500 hours for it – three times more. In terms of owning a home a worker must work 40% longer. As far as keeping yourself healthy the obesity rate and drug use statistics have shot up in the last 50 years to the point where the Army has had to lower its entry standards because so many potential recruits cannot meet those standards.

In quantitative terms of employment, we must ask how many workers are looking for work? In this area the Bureau of Labor Statistics is unreliable because they don’t count part-time workers who are unemployed or those who are unemployed for a long time and have given up looking. Another factor Turchin sites is the rates of immigration. But this too is tricky for many reasons because a number of workers are working under the table so the official statistics come up short. An additional factor is the number of jobs which are leaving the country and how many jobs are lost to automation. Unfortunately, under capitalism automation is not the friend of workers. Most of the time workers do not keep their jobs. Instead, automation usually means jobs are lost. No matter how you slice and dice it the overall labor trends during the past 50 years have been an oversupply of workers.

Something called the “political stress index” combines the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction as a way of predicting disruption which is getting worse. To stabilize the wealth pump the pump must be shut down until wages are driven up to the point where upward and downward rates of mobility between commoners and elite are balanced.

Why is Yankeedom a Plutocracy?

Turchin points out that the extent to which economic elites dominate government in the United States is very unusual compared to other western countries. He cites Denmark and Austria that have ruling classes. However, they have been fairly responsive to the wishes of their population and they are ranked highly by the UN for their ability to deliver a high quality life for their citizens in the areas of life expectancy, equality and education.  In Denmark, the first Social Democratic Party was founded in 1871 in Copenhagen. It first entered Parliament in 1884. In 1924, it became the biggest party with 37% of the vote. Its leader became prime minister. The US is an exception to the Western world – why?

Importance of military power in Europe
In the Western world as a whole between 1500-1900 the geopolitical landscape was reshaped in that the total number of states was drastically cut down from over 500 to 30. In Europe, most of the plutocracies were extinct or swallowed up by “meritocracies” because of the military revolution in weaponry and fighting techniques. Gunpowder and weapons underwent a rapid evolution during the 15^th century and had changed the nature of warfare along with emergence of oceangoing ships. Small principalities and city states could no longer hide behind their walls easily breached by cannons. Intense military competition between states weeded out those that couldn’t raise large armies. The conditions of intense warfare favored larger, more cohesive states.

Weakness of military power in the United States

Unlike the  European great powers that had to direct most of their resources into land armies the British poured its resources into its Navy. The antebellum ruling class in the US was a direct offshoot of the English squirearchy. Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were settled by cavaliers. They brought with them their aristocratic ways and indentured servants. The Early American Republic was an oligarchy modeled after the United Kingdom. The military did not develop in the United States in the second half of the 19^th century the way it did in Europe, partly because most of the well-trained military men of the South were either incapacitated or killed in the Civil War.

Geography and racial issues

The United States has the forces of geography on its side. Turchin points out that neither Mexico nor Canada posed any danger to the US north. North American is a giant island protected from any potential threats by two oceans. However, its continued survival and efflorescence during the 20th and 21st centuries, is largely due to race and ethnicity.

Black workers, especially in the South, were excluded from the social contract of even the New Deal. This exclusion of Black Americans from the contract was a result of a tactical choice made by the FDR administration which needed southern votes to push its legislation against the resistance of conservative business elites. These conservatives were dead set against giving any ground to the working class. This was intensified by The Republican “southern strategy” which was to make the Republican Party the dominant party in the former Confederacy by appealing to the southern white voters and using racist issues. Such a strategy could not work in Denmark, at least until immigration slowly made workers more suspicious. Up until that time Denmark was racially and culturally homogeneous. The consequence to plutocrats is that they did not have to shell out union wages to both whites and blacks.

The Revolutionary Situation in America
Stepping back and now stepping forward, from 1960 on the most important trend during is the decline in relative wages. By 2020 both immiseration and elite overproduction, according to the PSI, reached very high levels. As usual, the ruling class is paying no attention. The tax code has become reactionary. Today taxes on corporations and billionaires are at the lowest levels since the 1920s and we know what happened soon after that! Turchin then divides conservatives into two categories, elite (my term) and populist.

Ultraconservative elitists
Elite ultraconservatives like Koch, the Mercer Family and Sarah Scaife are called by Domhoff the policy obstructurist network. While other think tanks develop policy proposals that push things through legislation, ultraconservatives attack all government programs and challenge the motives of all federal  officials. An example is of this is the climate denial campaign of the Heartland Institute. Meanwhile an organization called The Federalist Society has reshaped the judiciary. Furthermore, Turchin informs us that the hard right organizations have infiltrated police forces, as if the police were not right-wing to begin with. He writes that white supremacists in the US are not a marginal force. They are inside Yankee institutions. Yet strangely, 1% is losing its traditional political vehicle, the Republican party

The Populist Republican Party

Before 2016 the Republican Party was the stronghold of the ruling class for the 1%. But there is a rebellion afoot. There is growing dissention in the representatives of the  upper ranks in the persons of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Turchin tells us that Steve Bannon was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Bannon grew up in a working class Virginia family and served in the US Navy. While serving in the Navy he got a master’s degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business school. This led to a job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He then then launched his own investment bank. Turchin tells us of Bannon’s loathing of the ruling elites and his desire to overthrow them seems to come out of his experience of living and working among them. As he says, at Goldman Sachs these transnational elites are people in New York who feel closer to people in London and Berlin than they do to the people in Kansas and Colorado. Bannon is a firebrand. In 2012 he became executive chairman of Breitbart News, a far-right on-line news site. He ran a popular talk radio call-in show in which he  attacked mainstream Republicans. The right-wing popularism of Bannon wants the Republican party to overthrow its ruling elites.

Though lacking in the deep background of politics and economics, Tucker Carlson is more accessible and speaks more directly to conservative populists. He asks questions that were too much for his handlers at Fox and eventually left with legions of plebians right behind him.

Before leaving Fox, Carlson was the most outspoken journalist operating within the corporate media. He has been the most listened to political commentator in America. Turchin summarizes the  main ideas of Carlson’s book Ship of Fools:

• the two governing parties have merged;
• Democrats have lost whatever dwindling support they once had. He writes that kowtowing to identity politics is a lot cheaper than raising wages;
• the Republicans and Democrats are completely aligned in imperialist frequent military intervention abroad and
• he asks why we tax capital at half the rate of labor – why do working-class people die younger?

Tucker Carlson Tonight has become the most successful show in the history of cable news. Turchin rightfully points out that Carson is missing a key driver of instability – elite overproduction. Turchin puts his money on Tucker Carlson rather than on Donald Trump as the seed crystal around which a new radical party forms. The Economic Policy Institute tells us that Trump’s erratic ego-driven and inconsistent trade policies have not achieved any measurable progress in restoring manufacturing jobs.

Where is the Democratic Party in this revolutionary situation?

It is striking that after this in-depth analysis of Republican party, Turchin has so little to say about the Democrats other than the Democratic Party is now the party of the 10% upper middle class and the 1% of the ruling class. In other places he mentions that the Democratic Party has lost its working-class roots. The Democratic Party was never for the working class. The working class just tagged along for a while.  What Turchin does not discuss is the Democratic Party was the party of slaveowners up until the Civil War. Neither does Turchin trace the Democratic Party’s move from a centrist party in the 60s to center-right party with Clinton and Obama. Turchin names Bernie Sanders and AOC as constituting the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He never mentions Sanders’ role as sheepdog for rounding up naïve socialists to join the Democratic Party beginning in 2016 and ever since.

Will the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs?
Most Americans who haven’t studied American history just vaguely assume that the Republicans and Democrats are simply eternal parties with us forever. But in early US history we had a Federalist Party that came and went. In the 1840s or thereabout the Whig Party was the major competition for the slave-owning Democrats. But the Whig party fell apart in the 1850s as the Republican Party rose and after two elections won the presidency. Today the approval rating of the Democratic Party is 16%. This is partly so right-wing even the conservative elitists feel safe in joining. Where will the middle-class and working-class people who constitute 70% of the population go? Before you answer that a third party will never work, remember Ross Perot? He came out of nowhere and got 19% of the vote in a country where 40-45% of people don’t bother to vote and where 30% wins an election. A new second party of the middle and working classes is not far-fetched provided it has the backing of unions.

Criticisms of End Times
Where’s capitalism? In the index of End Times the word “capitalism” is mentioned three times and never in any significant way. In all of Turchin’s statistics comparing the rise and fall of states there is no distinction between capitalist state dynamics and the state dynamics of pre-capitalist agricultural civilizations like Egypt, India or China. It’s hard to believe that whether a society is capitalist or not does not impact the statistics of the rise and fall of states. After all, Marxists have developed at least four crisis theories of the rise and fall of capitalism that makes them different from pre-capitalist or socialist countries. World Systems Theory has discussed the history of capitalism and how it differs from the earlier empires and discusses its unique cycles as technological, commercial, industrial, military and financial. Turchin ignores this research, as far as I can tell.

Where are globalization and imperialism?
All nation-states are treated as self-subsisting entities. Whether speaking of the United States, China or South Africa there is no mention of how nation-states interact. There isn’t any consideration that countries in the capitalist core subjugate the capitalist periphery and semi-periphery and this changes the statistics of each country. There is nothing resembling Andre Gunder Frank’s argument that the west underdeveloped Latin America. There is no mention of imperialism as a force impacting the rise and fall of states. At the same time, there isn’t much mention of regional confederations like the European Union impacting the fates of individual nation states such as Greece or Italy. Nothing about the IMF, the World Bank and its impact on African countries. Lastly and most importantly, the presence of a Eurasian block as large as BRICS has changed the world dynamics of nation states. BRICS as a global unit is now more powerful than any Western configuration. There is no mention of how BRICS might impact the rise and fall of states today.

Irreversible Accumulation and Consequences
In the history of human societies there are the following trends that go beyond Turchin’s cycles:

• Growth in the human population within societies;
• The shrinking number of all human societies;
• Increase in the permanence of human societies;
• Expansion of societies into biophysical environments;
• Increase in technological innovation in complexity, durability, power and expansion;
• Increase in the store of symbolic information;
• Growth in material wealth;
• Growth in the quality, diversity and complexity of material products;
• Increasing complexity and specialization of social organization;
• Increasing stratification both within and between societies and
• Accelerated rate of social change.

All these trends show that there is more to history than never-ending cycles. The accumulation of social processes over time and many other processes are irreversible. One example is the impact of capitalism on the ecological environment over the past 200 years. Two results of many are caused extreme weather and the loss of diversity of species. In short, the dynamics of the world-system today may be partly a predictable cycle, but it also contains irreversible trends that make social-historical dynamics today unique. Turchin has nothing to say about this.

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Dignity of Working People

The election of Mamdani in New York City would indeed send a message across the country and the world

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Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a campaign event with New York City elected officials on November 1, 2025 in the Queens borough of New York City.
(Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

Douglas H. White
Nov 03, 2025

COMMON DREAMS


On Tuesday, New York, the largest city in America, has an opportunity to elect Zohran Mamdani, a young man, a democratic socialist, an immigrant (at age seven), a Muslim, a progressive, and someone hated by Donald Trump. And no wonder, since he’s the antithesis of Trump. No wonder he brings fear to the reactionary forces largely represented by the president and his supporters.

Zohran Mamdani is one of nearly 3.1 million immigrants now living in New York City, close to one-third of its total population. Its inhabitants are 30.9% White, 28.7% Hispanic or Latino, 20.2% Black or African American, and 15% Asian. There are also 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nearly four million residents speak a language other than English. That fact does anything but warm the hearts of reactionary folks, since many of them worry about what’s known as “replacement theory,” an idea created by White nationalist Republican strategists to scare the hell out of their base.

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Mamdani is running a very New York-focused election campaign, but one that also speaks to low-income and moderate-income voters across this nation. So many in Donald Trump’s America are now facing the possibility of either losing their healthcare or having healthcare that’s simply far too expensive and doesn’t cover what they need. All too many confront rising housing costs or their inability to purchase a home. All too many are seeing the cost of college reach a level that makes it unaffordable for their children and are now experiencing significant healthcare expenses, whether for young children or elderly sick parents, that have become suffocating.

Here in New York City, poverty is already double the national average. One quarter of New Yorkers don’t have enough money for housing, food, or medical care. Twenty-six percent of children (that’s 420,000 of them!) live in poverty. Of the 900,000 children in the city’s public school system, 154,000 are homeless. (And sadly, each of these sentences should probably have an exclamation point after it!) In the face of such grim realities, Mamdani, among other policies, is calling for a freeze on rents in rent-stabilized apartment buildings in the city; making buses free; offering free childcare for those under the age of five; building significant amounts of new affordable housing; improving protections for tenants; providing price-controlled, city-owned grocery stores as an option; and raising the minimum wage.

At its most basic, the Mamdani campaign is about affordability and the dignity of working people.

Make no mistake: Zohran Mamdani distinctly represents the “other” in Donald Trump’s universe. In that world, he’s viewed as not White, which is in itself a crime for so many of the president’s supporters. Trump has always been a divider. As the Guardian reported in 2020 in a piece headlined, “The politics of racial division: Trump borrows Nixon’s southern strategy,” the president warned that, if Joe Biden were to replace him as president, the suburbs would be flooded with low-income housing.

He’s backed supporters who have sometimes violently clashed with Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters across the country. He even refrained from directly condemning the actions of a teenager charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, suggesting that he might have been killed if he hadn’t done what he did. He’s also called the BLM movement a “symbol of Hate.”

With such rhetoric, the president is indeed taking a page or two out of the 1960s “southern strategy,” the playbook Republican politicians like President Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater once used to rally political support among White voters across the South by leveraging racism and White fear of “people of color.” Much of what drives Republican strategists today is figuring out what can be done to slow and mute the browning of America. It’s always important to remember that race is almost invariably a critical issue in the American election process.

The election of Mamdani in New York City would indeed send a message across the country and the world that this — my own city — is a place where immigrants can achieve political office and thrive. It would send a message that an agenda focused on low-income people — promising to provide them with opportunity, access to needed resources, and assistance — is a winning approach. In truth, Mamdani’s platform and agenda could undoubtedly be used to attract large groups of Americans who might indeed upend the political situation in many conservative districts across America. In other words, it — and Mamdani — are a threat.

As an observer of the Mamdani campaign, I can’t help reflecting on the civil rights struggle I was engaged in during the 1960s in the South. The challenges were enormous and the dangers great, but we made lasting change possible.

I hear a lot about the number and intensity of the workers in the Mamdani campaign. From my own past experience, I believe that the intensity of those involved in his campaign, the fact that many of them are workers, and their focus on affordability add up to a distinctly winning combination.

Let me now break down the future Mamdani experience as mayor of New York into four categories:

Vision

Zohran Mamdani has what it takes to be a great mayor because he has a vision that speaks to so many sectors of New York’s population, emphasizing as he does the dignity of working people and hope as an active force to put in place meaningful programs for a better future. He articulates a future for this city that is more equitable and will make it so much more livable for so many. As a politician, he’s both an optimist and unafraid to propose big solutions.

Dignity

At its most basic, the Mamdani campaign is about affordability and the dignity of working people. I’ve lived in this city for nearly 60 years and raised my family here. My wife was born here and has lived here her entire life. She was raised by a single father who worked for a fabric company. We managed to build a middle-class life, but right now such a future is anything but a given for so many in a city that has become all too difficult for working people to remain in and create a life worth living.

Make no mistake: Zohran Mamdani distinctly represents the “other” in Donald Trump’s universe.

It’s no small thing that, at this moment in the city’s history, Mamdani has made affordability the central issue of his campaign and suggested that a more affordable New York can be created based on a tax increase on those earning more than a million dollars annually. His focus on the dignity of working people and their families allows his message to have a deep resonance among the population and reach the young, the middle-aged, and the old. His focus is on how New York City can restructure its operations so that it serves us all, not just the well-off and the rich.

Hope

I suspect Zohran Mamdani recognizes that his focus on dignity is also connected to “hope,” and that such hope would be an active force in achieving change. His version of hope isn’t about mere optimism. It’s much broader than that. I was a member of the last generation born into segregation and a Jim Crow system in the American South. During my college days, the most powerful voice for dignity and hope in America was Martin Luther King Jr. He was just 26 years old when he was asked to lead the fight for civil rights and against segregation and Jim Crow in Montgomery, Alabama. Though that fight, in which I was a participant, did indeed seek to end segregation, it was equally about securing a sustainable economic life for Blacks. Indeed, Martin Luther King lost his life fighting for a decent wage for sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

Zohran Mamdani has been influenced by Dr. King when it comes to his focus on the issues of Dignity and Hope (which should indeed be capitalized in Donald Trump’s America). In a recent interview in the Nation Magazine, responding to a question about how he defines himself, and if he considers himself a democratic socialist, he said, “I think of it often in terms that Dr. King shared decades ago: ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. But there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s Children.'” King believed that hope was not a passive but an active force. As he once said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

Inclusiveness and Outreach

I spent 36 years working in the New York City and New York state government, much of that time as the leader or commissioner of agencies impacting the daily lives of citizens. I served under mayors Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, David Dinkins, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio. I was City Personnel Director, Commissioner of Human Rights for the State of New York, and Director of the Bureau of Labor Services. I finished my government service with a 16-year stint as Deputy Fire Commissioner for the Fire Department of New York City. And I know one thing: it’s critical to have vision and purpose if you plan to lead such a city successfully. In addition, a mayor can only put in place big ideas and see them to fruition if he’s connected to all the diverse constituencies and array of institutions that also work daily to reach citizens. In terms of outreach, Governor Mario Cuomo, the father of Andrew Cuomo, once told me that he judged a commissioner by how much time he spent in the community talking and listening to people as opposed to sitting in the office.

New York City has a population of 8.5 million people, which swells each day to more than 15 million, if you include all the commuters and visitors who must be served. With an annual budget of nearly $116 billion, it would be difficult for any mayor to manage. No one can truly be prepared for it, so it’s critical that the mayor selects a group of managers who have the experience and moxie to achieve his or her goals. I’m not concerned about Mamdani’s youth because no one becomes mayor with the singular management skills to confront such a giant budget and the diverse, powerful interest groups within the metropolis. None of those who preceded him, not Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, de Blasio, or Adams, could have led the city without the help of a cadre of able managers. Some chose well. Some chose poorly.

It’s critical, though, that if he wins on November 4th, a future Mamdani administration be composed of astute, experienced managers, from first deputy mayor to all the agency heads. And it’s not merely the agency heads who must be capable and well-focused, but all the other managers and deputies within those agencies, too. After all, in New York City, from fiscal crises to snowstorms, sanitation issues to policing, violence in the streets to ethnic tensions, education to housing, union negotiations to potential conflicts with New York State and the federal government, crises erupt on a remarkably regular basis. And don’t forget the more than 210,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022 in search of an opportunity for a better life. All of that can overwhelm any mayor.

As a result, assuming he wins, Mamdani’s Transition Committee must cast a wide net for the best managers the city has to offer. On the whole, they should be young, yet seasoned. They should be diverse and represent an array of sectors. What he needs are not “yes” personnel but leaders who are themselves astute, critical, and committed to government service. His outreach should be to all races, religions, business areas, and nonprofit groups. As it happens, I’m encouraged by reports in the press of the way he’s already reaching out and I hope he does so in all the years of his mayoralty.

If Mamdani merges a focus on leadership and management with his already clear commitment to expanding affordability, dignity, hope, and opportunity for ever more New Yorkers, then he’ll cement his place in the city’s history and possibly—as Donald Trump grows ever less popular in a distinctly disturbed country—in American history, too.


Douglas H. White
Douglas H. White is a civil rights activist, lawyer, and government official whose career has centered on human and civil rights and labor law. He was Human Rights Commissioner for the State of New York, City Personnel Director/Commissioner of the City of New York, and Deputy Fire Commissioner for New York City. He recently completed a memoir entitled Unbroken: The Last Generation of Black Americans Under Jim Crow and the Culture of Racism in America. The memoir is represented by Marie Brown Associates.
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Beware Zohran Mamdani Critics With False Accusations

There is an inherent danger in conflating Israel with the religion of Judaism and, by extension, conflating criticism of Israel or Political Zionism with antisemitism.


New York City mayoral election, candidate Zohran Mamdani attends a campaign rally, calling for the full enforcement of the city’s Sanctuary City laws, June 21, 2025, in Diversity Square in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the borough of Queens, New York City.
(Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

James Zogby
Nov 03, 2025

Common Dreams


In the days before the election for mayor of New York City, a group of rabbis issued a “A Call to Action” attacking public figures like Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani whom they say “refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide.” The rabbis’ letter then leaps to the unfounded conclusion that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian human rights and his critique of Israeli behavior is acting to “delegitimize the Jewish community and encouraging and exacerbating hostility toward Judaism and Jews.”

In addition to this logical fallacy, there is an inherent danger in conflating Israel with the religion of Judaism and, by extension, conflating criticism of Israel or Political Zionism with antisemitism. This matter has long been a subject of debate, in particular, within the Jewish community.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the idea of Zionism was being debated by European Jews, there were competing currents of thought, even amongst those who agreed that the Jewish people had a connection with the biblical land of Israel. Some saw the connection as spiritual; others had a more secular cultural bond. While some in these two camps sought a partnership with the Arabs who inhabited the land, the view that came to dominate the new movement advocated, instead, for an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine. It was called Political Zionism and, tying itself to British colonial ambitions in the Middle East, this movement described the Arabs of Palestine in the same way the British defined those whom they subjugated in other lands—objects of contempt who were undeserving of rights.

In the early 1920s, a British journalist reported witnessing a group of European Jews carrying flags bearing the Star of David marching through the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Jerusalem is ours,” and “We want a Jewish State.” The journalist observed that Jerusalem’s inhabitants—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—were mostly befuddled. The flag with the star was foreign to them, as were the slogans. Arabs who objected to the march were accused of attacking Judaism because the flags included a Star of David. They were not. They were objecting to the European Jews’ claim that Jerusalem was theirs, as well as the marchers’ stated goal of ignoring Arab rights and supplanting them with a colonialist-supported foreign state.

As the British designs on Palestine and their pledge to the Political Zionist movement became known, the Arabs of Palestine came to understand the portent of that early Jerusalem march. During the next three decades, a bloody conflict unfolded.

While American Jews had some sympathy for their co-religionists in Palestine, the majority did not embrace Zionism or Israel as their self-identity. This was true even after the 1948 War and Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

In the 1960s, several factors combined to make a change in American Jewish attitudes toward Israel: the US was in the midst of the Cold War; the McCarthyite anti-communist surge that was tinged with antisemitism; and the anti-Vietnam war and the civil rights movements that combined to challenge the American identity. In this context, the successful 1960s hasbara film, “The Exodus” and Israel’s victory in the 1967 war played significant roles in moving American Jews to demonstrate greater affinity with Israel.

But affinity and financial support were not enough for Political Zionists. They continued to push the notion that Zionism and Judaism were the same. In the 1970s, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that had long been in the vanguard of defending Jews against bigotry, co-authored a book entitled, “The New Anti-Semitism,” advancing the case that because, in their view, Israel was so central to Judaism and Jewish identity, being against Israel was the newest form of hatred against Jews.

It was decades before this dangerous conflation took hold. Efforts by the powerful pro-Israel lobby to pass legislation in Congress equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism were repeatedly stymied by both Republicans and Democrats. When the arena shifted to the states, the pro-Israel forces were more successful. To date, more than three dozen states have passed such controversial bills, threatening protected speech.

In the wake of the public outrage that followed Hamas’s October 7th, 2023 attack, the ADL and its allies in government and media saw the opportunity to press hard make the case that the student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were threatening to the identity of Jewish Americans.

It didn’t matter to them the protests were against Israeli actions not Jews, nor that polls were showing that Jewish Americans were deeply divided over Israeli policies. Instead, they supported efforts by Republicans to have the protests banned and pushed universities to punish students who engaged in criticism of Israel. Thousands of students were arrested, and many were suspended from their universities and had their degrees withheld. Faculty who supported the students were silenced or terminated, and some foreign students were held for deportation because they had been critical of Israel.

Despite the fact that attacks against both Arab American and Jewish American students increased, the ADL and Republicans in Congress deployed a weaponized definition of antisemitism that slighted Arab concerns or judged them as extremism worthy of criminalization. Meanwhile Jewish concerns were prioritized as legitimate and worthy of full-throated support and action.

One such scene stands out:

During the early campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, US television captured a scene which was deeply troubling in its implications. A young Jewish woman with a large Israeli flag draped around her neck like a cape was shown walking right into the middle of a pro-Palestinian demonstration. She was followed by a reporter and camera. Despite her deliberate provocation and the fact that she was ignored by the pro-Palestinian protesters, the woman could be heard saying to the reporter, “I just want to feel safe.”

Enter Zohran Mamdani. He is an elected member of the New York State legislature whose entry into the mayoral contest electrified voters. His charisma and agenda to make New York more affordable has won support from young voters, the city’s working class, recent immigrants, and liberals. After decisively winning the Democratic primary, New York’s financial elites and political establishment mobilized to defeat Mamdani in the general election. While polls are showing him still holding a substantial lead over his main opponent, billionaire donors have poured tens of millions into ads that ironically have used anti-Muslim tropes to defame and smear the candidate and his community.

While there are many issues at play in this contest, the dominant media narrative has been that Mamdani’s criticism of Israel is making the city unsafe for Jews. This is easily disproven by the most recent poll of Jewish voters showing Mamdani tied with his nearest competitor—and leading by two to one among Jews between the ages of 18 to 45.

Mamdani’s support of Palestinians and his agreement with almost all US and international human right groups (including Israeli organizations) that Israel is committing genocide is not antisemitic. This shouldn’t threaten Jews. In fact, the threat to Jews comes from those, like the ADL, who falsely equate all Jews with Israel’s deplorable behaviors. Or the rabbis who use false charges to incite against a candidate whose one crime has been to tell the truth.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

James Zogby
Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream. Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years; in 1984 and 1988 he served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 1988, he led the first ever debate on Palestinian statehood at that year's Democratic convention in Atlanta, GA. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.
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Can Mamdani and Friends Revive Socialism in America? Our Future Depends on It

To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few.



New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani waves during a campaign rally at Forest Hills Stadium in the Queens borough of New York City on October 26, 2025.
(Photo by Angela Weiss /AFP via Getty Images)

Eric Ross
Nov 02, 2025

TomDispatch

More than a century ago, from a Berlin prison cell where she was confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Her diagnosis remains no less salient today.

In the United States, we long ago chose the path of barbarism. President Donald Trump and his enablers have proven major catalysts in hastening our descent, but they are symptoms as well as causes. The more thacompounding crises of our time, from ecological collapse to immense inequality to endless war, were hardly unforeseeable aberrations. They are the logical outgrowths of a capitalist system built on violent exploitation and rooted in the relentless pursuit of profits over people.

The unsustainable economic order that has defined our national life has corroded our democracy, eroded our shared sense of humanity, and propelled our institutions and our planet toward collapse. Today, we find ourselves perilously far down the highway leading to collective suicide. What the final autopsy will include—be it nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, AI-driven apocalypse, or all of the above—no one can yet be certain.

Yet fatalism is not a viable option. A different direction for the country and world remains possible, and Americans still can meet this moment and avert catastrophe. If we are to do so, Luxemburg’s prescription, socialism, remains our last, best hope.

Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics.

That conviction animates the democratic socialist campaign of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. In a bleak political climate, he offers a rare spark of genuine hope. Yet his mass appeal has provoked a remarkable, if predictable, elite backlash. He’s faced Islamophobic smears, oligarch money, and backroom deals (efforts that, Mamdani observed, cost far more than the taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the Democratic establishment has chosen the path of cowardice and silence, or at least equivocation.

The outrage over Mamdani is not only about the label “socialist.” Every American has heard the refrain: Socialism looks good on paper but doesn’t work in practice. The subtext, of course, is that capitalism does. And in a sense, it has. It has worked exactly as designed by concentrating obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench its power. Especially since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over elections, drowning out ordinary voices in a flood of corporate money.

What makes Mamdani’s campaign so unsettling to those (all too literally) invested in this status quo is not merely his critique of capitalism but his insistence on genuine democracy. His platform rests on the simple assertion that, in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world (as should be true everywhere across this nation), every person deserves basic dignity. And what undoubtedly unnerves the political establishment isn’t so much his “radical” agenda but the notion that politics should serve the many, not the privileged few, and that the promise of democracy could be transformed from mere rhetoric to reality.

Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics. Reviving socialism in this country also requires reviving its history, recovering it from the hysteria of the Red Scare and the Cold War mentality of “better dead than red.” Socialism has long been a part of our national experience and democratic experiment. And if democracy is to survive in the 21st century, democratic socialism must be part of its future.
The Roots of American Socialism

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of immigration brought millions of workers to the United States, many carrying the radical ideas then germinating in Europe. Yet such beliefs were hardly alien to this country.

The growth of labor unions and the rise of leftist politics were not foreign imports but emerged as a byproduct of the dire material circumstances of life under industrial capitalism in America.

By 1900, the US had become the world’s leading industrial power, surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913, producing nearly one-third of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. That share would climb to nearly half of the global gross domestic product by the end of World War II. However, the immense accumulation of wealth was not shared with those whose labor made it possible. American workers endured intense poverty and precarity, while being subjected to grueling hours for meager pay. They saw few meaningful protections, and suffered the highest rate of industrial accidents in the world.

When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they faced not only the monopolistic corporations of the Gilded Age, but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of inequality. Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an extraordinary degree. The richest 10% of Americans then owned some 90% percent of national assets, with such wealth used to buy power through the co-optation of a state apparatus whose monopoly on violence was wielded against labor and in defense of capital. As Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease described the situation in 1900: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

That was evident as early as 1877, when railroad workers launched a nationwide strike and federal troops spent weeks brutally suppressing it, killing more than 100 workers. Such violence ignited a surge of labor organizing, thanks particularly to the radically egalitarian Knights of Labor. Yet the Haymarket Affair of 1886—when a bomb set off at a May Day rally in Chicago provided a pretext for a bloody government crackdown—enabled the state to deepen its repression and stigmatize the labor movement by associating it with anarchism and extremism.

Still, the socialist left was able to reconstitute itself in the decades that followed under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived experience in the American Railway Union. There, as he recalled: “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.”

In 1901, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America. Over the next two decades, socialist candidates became mayors and congressional representatives, winning elections to local offices across the country. At its peak in 1912, Debs captured nearly a million votes, some 6% of the national total, while running as a third-party candidate for president (and again from prison in 1920). For a time, socialism became a visible, established part of American democracy.
“This War Is Not Our War”

Yet socialism faced its most formidable test during the First World War. Across Europe and the United States, many socialists opposed the conflict, arguing that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” a framing that resonated with broad segments of the American public.

The socialist critique went deeper than class resentment. For decades, socialists were drawing a direct connection between capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of labor at home and its predatory expansion abroad. Writing during the late 19th-century era of high imperialism, as European powers carved up the globe in the name of national glory while showing brutal disregard for the lives of those they subjugated, progressive and socialist thinkers contended that imperialism was anything but a betrayal of capitalism’s logic.

Russian communist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin called that moment “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Capitalists labeled it the cause of “civilization.”) While British economist John Hobson similarly maintained that empire served not the interests of the nation but of its elites who used the power of the state to secure the raw materials and new markets they needed for further economic expansion. “The governing purpose of modern imperialism,” he explained, “is not the diffusion of civilization, but the subjugation of peoples for the material gain of dominant interests.” That was “the economic taproot of imperialism.”

The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.

Similarly in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading civil rights advocate, situated the war in the longer history of racial and colonial domination. He traced its origins to the “sinister traffic” in human beings that had left whole continents in a “state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation,” making the “rape of Africa” imaginable and therefore possible. War, he argued, was the continuation of empire by other means. “What do nations care about the cost of war,” he wrote, “if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”

Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such critiques. In 1916, she wrote: “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines.” Of the First World War, she concluded, “the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”

Once Washington entered the war, it criminalized dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the same “emergency measure” that would be used, during future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.

After a 1918 speech condemning the war, Debs himself would be imprisoned. “Let the wealth of a nation belong to all the people, and not just the millionaires,” he declared. “The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.” The call for a world “in which we produce for all and not for the profit of the few” remains as relevant as ever.
Socialism After the Scare

The Red Scare of 1919, followed by McCarthyism in the 1950s and the broader Cold War climate of hysteria and repression, effectively criminalized socialism, transforming it into a political taboo in the United States and driving it from mainstream American discourse. Yet, despite the ferocity of the anticommunist crusade, a number of prominent voices continued to defend socialism.

In 1949, reflecting on a war that had claimed more than 60 million lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, he insisted, “is not condemned, because of its biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.” The alternative, he wrote, lay in “the establishment of a socialist economy,” with an education system meant to cultivate “a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success.”

Martin Luther King Jr. carried that struggle against capitalism, racism, and war forward. Building on the legacy of the Double-V campaign, he called for confronting the evils of white supremacy at home and imperialism abroad. In grappling with those intertwined injustices, he increasingly adopted a socialist analysis, even if he didn’t publicly claim the label. For King, there could be no half freedom or partial liberation: Political rights were hollow without economic justice and racial equality was impossible without class equality.

As he put it, you can “call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Rejecting the pernicious myth of capitalist self-reliance with biting clarity, he pointed out that “it’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

In his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the American war in Vietnam, King made the connection clear. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he warned, “is approaching spiritual death.” America, he added, needed a revolution of values, a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” one. As long as “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights [are] considered more important than people,” he concluded, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
A Better Country and World is Possible

The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, who challenge entrenched power, is, of course, anything but new. It reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy. To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few. Mamdani and crew can’t be exceptions to the rule, if such a vision is ever to take root in this country.

In Donald Trump’s grim vision for and version of America, democratic institutions are decaying at a rapid pace, the military is being used to occupy cities with Democratic mayors, and tyranny is replacing the rule of law. Fascism has never triumphed without the assent of elites who fear the rise of the left more than dictatorship. Mussolini and Hitler did not take power in a vacuum; they were elevated by an elite democratic establishment that preferred an authoritarian order to the uncertainties of popular democracy.

The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it.

Meeting today’s crises requires more than piecemeal reform. It demands a reimagining of political life. The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.

This country once again stands at a crossroads. Capitalism has brought us to the edge of ecological, economic, and moral catastrophe. Today, the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 93% of Americans combined, a trajectory that is simply unsustainable. The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it. The question is no longer whether socialism can work in America, but whether American democracy can survive without it.

© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Eric Ross
Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, researcher, and PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Opinion

How Zohran Mamdani's campaign will change perceptions of Muslims

(RNS) — Mamdani’s election may be a turning point not only for Muslims but for the promise of a new kind of Democratic Party.

New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks at the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx mosque in New York on Oct. 24, 2025. 

(AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

Dilshad Ali
October 31, 2025

(RNS) — Coming out of the subway near New York University on a brisk Friday last week, I spotted women wearing hijabs and men in kufis filing into a nondescript brick and glass building. My plan had been to attend Jummah (Friday) prayers at NYU’s campus Islamic center. Instead I followed the evidently Muslim crowd into the Islamic Center of New York City, a still-developing “independent epicenter for Muslim spiritual, intellectual, professional, and social life in Manhattan,” according to its website.

Shortly afterward, I realized I had stumbled onto a powerful khutba (sermon) given by Imam Khalid Latif, a campus chaplain at NYU and Princeton University and to the New York Police Department.
RELATED: Meet the New York rabbis planning to vote for Mamdani

The next day was the start of early voting in New York, beginning a historic election that would determine whether frontrunner Zohran Mamdani will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, and Latif’s sermon masterfully turned from the power of prayer, to the importance of being unapologetically Muslim, to a plug for voter registration. The imam also called on those gathered to learn from Mamdani’s campaign, which had withstood vitriolic and vile Islamophobic attacks from his opponent former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Republican U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik and others in recent weeks.

When Cuomo says anti-Muslim hate rhetoric, it is not just for his voters. It doesn’t embolden them. It is for us as Muslims, to “mess with our psyche,” Latif said.

The same day, outside the Islamic Cultural Center in the Bronx, Mamdani would give an emotional and pivotal speech in which he leaned into his Muslim identity in ways he had avoided doing throughout a campaign focused on economic issues. He gave voice to the difficult experiences of racism, targeted attacks and amplified hate so many Muslim New Yorkers and American Muslims in general have endured for years.

In doing so, he took an extraordinary step in being unapologetically Muslim. “I will be a Muslim man in New York City,” Mamdani said. “I will not change who I am, I will not change how I eat, I will not change the faith that I am proud to belong to. But there is one thing I will change: I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”

His words come as an open letter, now signed by more than 1,000 rabbis and cantors, called out the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism by political candidates. It comes as numerous articles have explored the complex and challenging struggles Jewish New Yorkers have faced in this election cycle as they grapple with the possibility of their next mayor being a Muslim with particular views on Palestinian rights, genocide and the state of Israel.

RELATED: For New York’s Muslims, Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy is a reckoning on 9/11 backlash

What is often overlooked in this anti-Muslim narrative is that, while New York is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, it is also home to the largest Muslim population in the United States. Mamdani’s joy-filled campaign should not be seen as a negation of another group’s place in city politics, but an inflection point for those often-unseen Muslim New Yorkers.

I caught up with Fahd Ahmed, executive director of DRUM Beats, a sibling of the South Asian American political organizing group Desis Rising Up & Moving. Ahmed said that something had changed, as Islamophobic attacks on him escalated.

“We can’t just sidestep (these attacks) and just focus on the broader message. In that moment of Zohran asserting his own Muslim identity and experiences, but again linking it to the experiences of so many Muslim New Yorkers over the last two-and-a-half decades, even now I feel emotional,” said Ahmed.

Even in talking about his Muslim identity, Ahmed pointed out, Mamdani stuck to his message of getting by in New York. “He came back and grounded it into the material experiences of being profiled, of being dismissed, of being disregarded, of being viewed suspiciously. It felt very validating,” Ahmed said.

In acknowledging the hate and racism faced by Muslim New Yorkers and many Muslim Americans — the burden of being asked to prove their Americanness time and time again, in hiding parts of themselves to fit into society, in having their experiences relegated to the background of life — Mamdani made clear that he was looking to the future of the city, its children.

“This isn’t about me,” Mamdani said. “It’s about whether Muslim kids growing up in this city can believe they belong here.”

In mid-October, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding released its 2025 American Muslim Poll, which measures Islamophobia using the National American Islamophobia Index. The poll disclosed that 63% of Muslims reported facing religious discrimination in the past year, which makes it “more likely than 50 percent of Jews and 22-27 percent of other religious groups” facing similar bias. Forty-seven percent of Muslim families with school-age children reported having a child who faced bullying for their faith in the past year.

Mamdani’s story in New York echoes Virginia legislator Ghazala Hashmi’s historic run for lieutenant governor and Minnesota legislator Omar Fateh’s mayoral race in Minneapolis. In a recent conversation with Hashmi, who is a friend, she asked, “Can you imagine that of all states, Virginia could have a female Muslim lieutenant governor?”

In a time of dismantling of government institutions, non-stop ICE raids, fear and worrying, local leaders are unapologetically being themselves in pursuit of serving their communities. Hashmi ran her first state senatorial campaign in 2019 with the tagline: “Ghazala Hashmi is an American name.” This time around, Virginians no longer need to be told.

Ahmed cautiously views Mamdani’s election and these other campaigns around the country as an inflection point, not only for Muslims but for the promise of a new kind of Democratic Party. He feels hopeful that they will change not only perceptions but policy.

RELATED: Mamdani’s win unleashed a surge of Islamophobia — and showed how to beat it

“Having a prominent figure who is willing to speak and act — we see that already with (U.S. Reps.) Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,” Ahmed said, adding that Mamdani and the others have invested by design in coalition-building. “That is where Zohran and the relationships and coalitions that have been built in (New York) have been more instructive for larger communities,” he said.

As this tumultuous campaign season full of ugly accusations ends, the hope is that one, two or more victories will be an acknowledgment that while one’s identity shouldn’t be the totality of a candidate’s politicking, neither does it need to be hidden to succeed.

(Dilshad D. Ali is a freelance journalist. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Meet the New York rabbis planning to vote for Mamdani

(RNS) – Mamdani’s defense of Palestinian liberation has alarmed many New York Jews. But some rabbis are enthusiastically embracing, and even campaigning for, the Muslim mayoral candidate.

FILE - Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, left, speaks on stage with fellow candidate Comptroller Brad Lander at his primary election party, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Yonat Shimron
October 30, 2025
RNS

(RNS) — At the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem this week, Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson was one of some 2,500 Jewish activists, organization leaders and government officials from around the world who gathered to decide how to spend more than $1 billion in annual funding for Zionist institutions around the world.

But Hughes-Robinson plans to be back home in New York in time to cast her vote for mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim who does not believe Israel should exist as a state that privileges Jewish rights above all others.

“I’ve been active in city politics for quite a while, and I’m not afraid of being in coalition with people with whom I disagree on foreign policy points,” said Hughes-Robinson, an educator and translator of Jewish texts, in a phone interview. “Mamdani has talked quite a bit about his plan to reduce hate and violence in a city that’s seeing a spike in antisemitic violence and Islamophobia. I want a New York City that is safe for all of us. And I think Mamdani actually has a really good, effective plan.”

Hughes-Robinson will not be the only New York rabbi to cast her vote for Mamdani. Despite widespread opposition to his candidacy among many voters whose core concern is Israel, Jewish leaders are hardly monolithic in their views of Mamdani. More than a third, according to a recent poll, intend to vote for the 34-year-old Democratic socialist candidate.

Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson. (Courtesy photo)

Mamdani, who campaigned mostly on a promise to make the city more affordable, has been steadfast in his defense of Palestinian liberation, alarming many New York Jews. He has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and has vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit New York.

In recent days, some 1,150 rabbis and cantors from across the United States signed a letter opposing Mamdani and the “political normalization” of his anti-Zionism. It followed a Shabbat sermon by the prominent Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, who said Mamdani “poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community.”

But Mamdani continues to show surprising strength among New York’s 1 million Jewish residents, especially with the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace and the progressive New York-based Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. The two organizations launched a joint campaign, “Jews for Zohran,” that has fielded thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls on behalf of Mamdani.

“What we’re trying to make clear as ‘Jews for Zohran’ is that Jews thrive in a multiracial democracy where all voices are heard and celebrated and uplifted,” said Beth Miller, JVP Action’s political director.

Bend the Arc, Jewish Action, another progressive Jewish organization that does not take a position on Israel, also made support for Mamdani a central campaign.

Among progressive Zionists, the most prominent rabbi to support Mamdani is Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, co-founder of the nonprofit New York Jewish Agenda and the rabbi emerita of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan. The 66-year-old rabbi appeared at a rally for Mamdani on Sunday (Oct. 26) in Queens’ Forest Hills Stadium, where she said she believed in his vision of a shared future for all New Yorkers — a city, she said, “where Jews and Muslims respect and care for each other.”

Other rabbis are joining in. A new letter, titled “Jews for a Shared Future” and drafted by mainstream rabbis, cantors and rabbinical students, already has hundreds of signatures. The letter does not endorse Mamdani but pushes back forcefully against the idea that Jewish safety will be compromised if he is elected.

“In response to Jewish concerns about the New York mayoral race, we recognize that candidate Zohran Mamdani’s support for Palestinian self-determination stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions,” the letter says. “Even though there are areas where we may disagree, we affirm that only genuine solidarity and relationship-building can create lasting security.”

Mamdami has visited synagogues and met with Jews throughout his campaign, and especially in the past month, as Jews marked the High Holy Days. While he has focused on liberal synagogues such as Congregation Beth Elohim and Congregation Kolot Chayeinu, he has also met with several Hasidic Orthodox leaders, sitting down at their sukkahs, or huts, during the holiday of Sukkot and donning a black yarmulke.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, Mamdani attended Lab/Shul, a liberal nondenominational synagogue in Manhattan, where he received a standing ovation. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie made it clear there would not be an endorsement, but the event nevertheless caused a backlash with some members furious that he was invited to speak.

“I understand and I respect the hurt of people I love who feel that he’s a legitimate threat to Jewish well-being and safety and the future,” Lau-Lavie said. “My question is: Are we approaching decisions from fear? Is it trauma that’s going to motivate how I go about the world, or is it the attempt to lean into love and to trust more?”

Several rabbis said they were initially drawn to Brad Lander, the city comptroller who also ran on the Democratic ticket for mayor and is Jewish. When Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other in the city’s ranked-choice voting system, many Jewish leaders saw it as a signal that they could trust Mamdani.

“When Brad and Zohran co-endorsed each other in the primary, I felt like any reservations that I may have had about Zohran were really addressed, because I trust Brad, and I trusted that Brad would not co-endorse somebody he felt he had any reason to be concerned about, vis-à-vis the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Emily Cohen, who recently appeared in a video spot of four “proud New York rabbis for Mamdani” sponsored by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.

New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a press conference outside the Jacob K. Javits federal building Aug. 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

These rabbis said they were also impressed with Mamdani’s ability to listen carefully to their concerns and to modulate and change his message in response. For example, in July, Mamdani reconsidered his use of the phrase “globalize the intifada” and said he would discourage others from doing so.

What most excites these rabbis about Mamdani is the new possibility of Muslim-Jewish cooperation in politics — especially after the two-year example of deadly conflict in Israel and Gaza.

Ellen Lippmann, the founding rabbi of Congregation Kolot Chayeinu, a nondenominational Brooklyn synagogue, said it was the promise that Mamdani brings that’s most inspiring to her. “A colleague of mine said, ‘He gives me hope.’ And I thought that was a great answer. It feels exciting. It feels hopeful.”