The US Doesn’t Need a Party, It Needs a Revolution

Ron Jacobs

 December 30, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Two hundred and fifty years ago, European colonists mostly from Britain were conspiring to chase the elements of the British monarchy from the shores of what we now call the United States. Many of those in the conspiracy were mostly interested in personal financial gain, whether it was measured in stolen land, enslaved humans or actual coinage. Freedom for all was not on the agenda for most of the men involved. However, freedom to keep their profits was. Over the years, the struggle by the humans left out of the founding fathers’ intentions has waxed and waned, occasionally winning those freedoms only to see them become weakened over time, mostly via the courts but almost as often through legislation and white supremacists in the White House.

Fifty years ago—1976—the year began with Washington and its media machine hyping the two hundredth birthday of the United States. The resignation of President Richard Nixon some seventeen months earlier was celebrated as proof of the superiority of the US way of governance. You know, no one was above the law and all that stuff. To top it all off, the year 1976 was also a presidential election year; another example of the durability of the “experiment in democracy” being touted by the mainstream media no matter what its political leaning. The then liberal Washington Post and New York Times shouted the same misleading malarkey about the land of the free and the home of the brave as New Hampshire’s right-wing Manchester Union Leader (now New Hampshire Union Leader) and William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review. Tributes to the nation’s history never seemed to mention the genocide of the indigenous that paved the highways and laid the rails across the amber waves of grain, while the fate of the millions forced to take the Atlantic crossing into slavery that consumed their descendants as well was most often framed in terms of denouement as a result of civil war. Rarely, if ever, was the situation of most African-American working people in the 1970s touted as proof of the success of the white man’s American dream. That dream had, as Langston Hughes reminded us, been deferred for far too long. Indeed, it had exploded only a few years before the big Bicentennial bash and been put down by thousands of cops and troops.

I was working as a short order cook at an IHOP in 1976. The best thing about the job was the access to food and the fac that my paycheck—as paltry as it was—covered my expenses and left me with money to spend on various entertainments, from beer to weed and concerts. This had a lot more to do with the price of things (and my side gig of selling weed to friends) in the mid-1970s than it had to do with the $2.50 an hour I was making for my fifty-hour work weeks. The US Left, which was in disarray but still capable of raising a fuss, was planning protest actions for the big day when the Bicentennial party would climax in a spasm of nationalist celebration from sea to shining sea. If Irving Berlin were alive, his royalties would certainly jump in the year to come. Francis Scott Key’s paean to the rocket’s red glare would be set on permanent repeat. The rulers were still convinced that God was on their side and that this land was their land. And don’t you forget it. The ultraleft in the form of the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the remnants and political allies of the Weather Underground were looking towards Philadelphia for their marches, while the more mainstream Left formed a coalition called the Peoples’ Bicentennial Commission and began acquiring permits for their rally in DC. Meanwhile, the official celebration that took place every July Fourth on the National Mall was booking bands and musicians. The myth became ever more magnified.

It’s now 2026. Fifty years later. The nation intends to celebrate its two hundred fiftieth birthday even as it becomes a mere shadow of what it proclaimed it wanted to be. If nothing else, we can see the emptiness of words in the wake of history, although this might be the place to note that some of the finest words we hear repeated regarding the founders of the nation were first written by men who owned slaves and celebrated the murders of the indigenous. Francis Scott Key was an attorney who represented slavers in cases challenging their abductions of runaways while he traded in slaves himself. And we know the rap sheet on Thomas Jefferson. Pretty words can only hide ugly truths for so long.

1976 was the historical moment just before the advent of neoliberal capitalism. The free marketeers’ ongoing attack on the so-called welfare state was enjoined in Britain and the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter made speeches that claimed the private sector could do many, if not most, things better than the public sector. Those sentiments were magnified by Ronald Reagan, the ultra-right’s candidate in the Republican party. It’s a reasonable argument that Reagan’s 1976 campaign was the beginning of his successful 1980 campaign for the White House. It’s also quite reasonable to conclude that that campaign began at least back in 1964 with Barry Goldwater who, at least had the wisdom to reject the support of the so-called Christian right wing. It would be Reagan’s embrace of that bunch of zealots (calling themselves the Moral Majority) that would propel the US into the long dark night of Reagan’s morning in America. Just like the champions of capital had proclaimed a hundred years earlier, the Christian god and the god of capital were united in their own pursuit of happiness at everyone else’s expense. When the nascent racism of the US white nation was added into the mixture, a new Trinity was conceived. Like they say on the TV, “Praise the Lord©.” And like they say in the Pentagon: “and pass the ammunition.”

Despite the ravings of countless cheerleaders, neoliberalism was never a unique economics untethered to the history of capitalism; it is a logical step in capitalism’s destructive thrust. Fascist government is the political means by which capital and those who operate within its mechanism ensure their pursuit of profit proceeds. This is where we are currently at—the government of the United States operates primarily, if not yet completely, in the service of capital and those who hold the bulk of that capital. Marxists and capitalists alike agree that this 250^th birthday is the anniversary of a nation that put the capitalists in charge, transferring power to a capitalist class and unleashing market forces through debt, land reform, and institutions designed serve that market.

As far as I’m concerned there isn’t much to celebrate when it comes to this national birthday. Washington’s military is murdering people on the high seas and bombing Africans under the guise of religion. Domestically, unaccountable enforcers kidnap citizens and non-citizens alike in scenes reminiscent of police states around the world. Its war industry arms a genocide while provoking conflict across the globe. The rich and the super-rich profit from the rampage. The world can ill afford another twenty years of this, much less two hundred and fifty.

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com

SMOKERS’ CORNER: UNPRECEDENTED TIMES

Nadeem F. Paracha 

December 14, 2025 

EOS/DAWN


Illustration by Abro


The belief that history is a critical guide for predicting the future is facing a severe test. The enduring idea is best encapsulated by former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s 1944 observation: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

The Renaissance period thinker Niccolò Machiavelli argued that the people’s fundamental desires and behaviours remain unchanged across epochs, which is why a close study of past events can aid one to predict future political and social dynamics. The 19th century German ideologist Karl Marx famously noted that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The 20th century Spanish philosopher George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.

While this concept remains a popular belief, its relevance as a reliable predictive tool has begun to struggle. This is driven by unprecedented shifts in geopolitics, technology and ecology, which are introducing challenges without direct historical parallels. For over a decade, many experts and political commentators have found their predictions consistently wrong. A major contributing factor is their heavy reliance on historical parallels to understand current events — a methodology that is proving insufficient for the new realities of the 21st century.

A powerful early example of this failure actually stretches back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The US failed to predict the revolution because CIA analysts could not accurately gauge the political traction of the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The CIA’s analytical framework was largely based on studies of left wing revolutions, and those rooted in secular and nationalist movements since the French Revolution. The CIA lacked experts on the then-unique power of a new kind of radical religious movement that was emerging in Iran.

From Iran in 1979 to America in 2016 and Pakistan today, analysts continue reaching for historical parallels to predict the future. But these parallels no longer apply in a world being reshaped by new social, technological and geopolitical forces

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, however, observing the climate in Iran a year before the revolution, wrote extensively on an event that was challenging the Western understanding of revolutionary upheavals. It was a mass movement taking shape on the basis of religion; a phenomenon for which American analysts and the CIA could not find any suitable historical precedence. This led to flawed conclusions.

The failure to predict the game-changing 2016 US presidential election provides a powerful example of the limitations of relying on historical parallels in the 21st century. Before the election, most major political commentators ridiculed the idea of Donald Trump ever entering the White House. Their assessment was driven by historical precedents involving past charismatic American populists who ultimately failed to capture the presidency.


They compared Trump to figures whose popularity ultimately collapsed. These included the fiery governor of Louisiana Huey Long, who was a serious presidential contender but who became embroiled in political and financial scandals, before being assassinated in 1935.

Then there was the right-wing figure Barry Goldwater, who won the Republican nomination in 1964 but suffered a massive electoral defeat to Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater’s supporters mistook his regional popularity for national viability. There was also Ross Perot, dubbed “the billionaire populist”, who managed to secure nearly 19 million votes in the 1992 election but saw his support fade significantly in 1996, before his influence declined.

These were valid historical precedents of non-mainstream figures who failed to reach the White House. However, in 2016, these precedents did not account for the rapid, profound changes reshaping the American political landscape after the 2008 stock market crash.

The unique confluence of factors in the 2010s rendered old comparisons obsolete, marking the beginning of a new history that analysts failed to grasp. Intense distrust in mainstream politics following the 2008 economic crisis created fertile ground for an ‘anti-system’ candidate. ‘Cultural wars’ intensified and a more radical arm of the ‘new right’ began to gain significant traction among large sections of the American electorate.

Rapidly evolving digital technology was cleverly and effectively used, particularly by the radical right, to formulate new ways to construct perceptions of popularity and demonise opponents, bypassing traditional media gatekeepers. Analysts looked back, but the ground beneath them had moved, leading to flawed assessments and conclusions.

The tendency to rely on historical precedents remains particularly entrenched in Pakistani political analysis. This methodology has strongly influenced the discourse surrounding the political survival of former prime minister Imran Khan. Until the recent press conference by the DG ISPR, in which Khan was branded as “mentally unstable” and a “security threat”, only a few analysts or journalists were willing to predict Khan’s complete ouster from the country’s political scene.

The ‘predictions’ of Khan’s return were rooted in several historical assumptions about the power structure in Pakistan. These included the fact that the establishment has historically demonstrated a willingness to change its mind about opposed politicians, often ‘allowing’ them to return to power; and the perception that the establishment has never been as aggressively opposed to a leading politician hailing from Punjab than it has to non-Punjab politicians.

Conversely, Khan himself has consistently drawn upon the historical tragedy of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the former East Pakistani politician. Khan’s narrative suggests that the establishment’s refusal to allow Mujibur Rahman to assume power after his 1970 victory ultimately led to the breaking away of East Pakistan, implying similar dire consequences if his (Khan’s) ‘mandate’ is denied.

Despite the strong hold of these historical analogies on public discourse, current facts suggest that most of these precedents are struggling to remain relevant in the face of various new political realities. It is these realities that have fundamentally driven the creation of the current government in Pakistan and dictated the establishment’s current state of mind, making past dynamics a less reliable guide for the future.

The world is rapidly moving into unprecedented territory, necessitating political and state structures purpose-built to effectively address novel local and international challenges. The introduction of new technologies has compounded these challenges. Many of the new realities lack clear historical precedents. They are demanding innovative and unprecedented solutions rather than relying on past playbooks.

This line of thinking is being used to justify measures such as the controversial 27th Amendment to the Pakistani Constitution. The proponents of the amendment argue that it is a way to adapt to new internal and external realities. Critics of the amendment will continue to misfire, though, because their critiques are largely rooted in an understanding of politics that remains tied to historical precedents and traditional political norms that do not account for the unprecedented nature of contemporary challenges the state is facing.

The past remains essential for context but, in the 21st century, it has ceased to be the definitive teacher.

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 14th, 2025

Nadeem F. Paracha is a researcher and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com. He is also the author of ten books on the social and political history of Pakistan.

He tweets @NadeemfParacha

How 'reckless' John Roberts caused 'irreparable harm on the American people'

(REUTERS)

Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!

November 08, 2025 | ALTERNET

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in a case challenging President Donald Trump’s tariffs, with plaintiffs arguing that his unilateral levies on imported goods violate the Constitution, which grants Congress the power to impose taxes and regulate foreign commerce. The Trump administration has justified his unprecedented use of tariffs under a 1977 law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but several justices seemed highly skeptical of that argument, potentially putting President Trump’s signature economic policy at risk.

“There is no genuine emergency. There is no war that is the precipitating basis for invoking IEEPA. And even if it were, it would not allow the imposition of tariffs,” says legal expert Lisa Graves, founder of True North Research and co-host of the podcast Legal AF.

Graves also discusses her new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We’re staying on the subject of the Supreme Court but now turning to a major case before the court on President Trump’s authority to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign goods. The court heard oral arguments on Wednesday. Solicitor General John Sauer argued President Trump has the power to unilaterally impose the tariffs under a 1977 law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants the president the authority to regulate commerce during wartime or other national emergencies. This is the solicitor general arguing.
JOHN SAUER: I want to make a very important distinction here. We don’t contend that what’s being exercised here is the power to tax. It’s the power to regulate foreign commerce. These are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental. The tariffs would be most effective, so to speak, if no — no — no person ever paid them.


AMY GOODMAN: Challenging the policy in the case is a group of small businesses. This is the plaintiffs’ attorney and former solicitor general, Neal Katyal, speaking outside the court.


NEAL KATYAL: Our message today is simple: The Constitution, our framers, 238 years of American history all say only Congress has the power to impose tariffs on the American people. And tariffs are nothing but taxes on the American people, paid by Americans. This case is not about the president; it’s about the presidency. It’s not about partisanship; it’s about principle. And above all, it’s about upholding the majestic separation of powers laced into our Constitution that is the foundation for our government. We thank the justices today for their extensive questioning in this case, and we look forward to the resolution.


AMY GOODMAN: The case has moved quickly through the federal courts. The court has heard roughly two dozen emergency appeals by the Trump administration, which the conservative majority has largely allowed Trump’s aggressive agenda to go forward. But this is the first time the court will make a final decision on one of those policies. On Wednesday, the justices, including conservative justices, appeared skeptical of the government’s argument. This is Chief Justice John Roberts.
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS: You have a claim source, an IEEPA, that had never before been used to justify tariffs. No one has argued that it does until this, this particular case. Congress uses tariffs and other provisions, but — but not here. And yet — and correct me on this if I’m not right about it — the justification is being used for a power to impose tariffs on any product, from any country, for — in any amount, for any length of time. That seems like — I’m not suggesting it’s not there, but it does seem like that’s major authority, and the basis for the claim seems to be a misfit.



AMY GOODMAN: For more on tariffs and the Supreme Court, we’re joined by Lisa Graves. She is the director and founder of the policy research group True North Research. Her new book is titled Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. She’s also the former deputy assistant attorney general. And she’s joining us now from Superior, Wisconsin.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Lisa. So, in fact, the chief justice is the main focus of your book on the Supreme Court. Talk about the significance of this case. And did it surprise you, the skepticism of the conservative majority, including the three Trump appointees?

LISA GRAVES: Well, this is an important case. And I wish that I could have confidence in the — I suppose, the sincerity of those questions that John Roberts posed, but we know that just last year he invented immunity from criminal prosecution for a president, for President Trump, out of whole cloth, despite the fact that the Constitution does not provide that power. So, now here we are, over a year later, with this court deciding whether this president has the power to engage in tariffs, even though the Constitution expressly gives those powers to Congress. And this law, IEEPA, does not provide any tariff power to the president.

And as you know and your listeners know, tariffs are taxes that end up being paid by the American people in the costs of the goods that we ultimately purchase. And Trump has bragged about how these tariffs are supposedly producing so much revenue, billions and billions of dollars of revenue, and yet we had the administration argue before the court that the revenue was incidental, that this is just a normal regulatory power. It’s not. Nothing’s normal.


I do think this court, the Roberts Court, is going to strike this down, but that’s in part because this court, you know, occasionally will rule against this president. But as you note and noted at the top of this show, 24 times so far this year, this court has intervened to allow reckless and damaging actions to happen to the American people, irreparable harm on the American people. And in this instance, with the business community weighing in, perhaps it will decide against Trump this one time, and then try to use that as a shield to say, “Look, it’s fair,” when in fact this court, under John Roberts, has behaved in innumerable ways, in very unfair ways, in counter-constitutional ways and in ways that have decimated our rights, including our voting rights.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about who actually brought this case. The businesses are not corporate giants. They’re small and medium-sized. And when you say everyone knows that these are taxes, explain more fully who pays these tariffs, as President Trump says, you know, “We’re going to get these countries to pay.” That’s not, in fact, who pays.

LISA GRAVES: Yeah, that’s not who pays. So, the tariffs are tariffs on goods sold in the United States, imported in the United States, which means, ultimately, whether it’s businesses buying those goods as components for building products or whether it’s consumers buying things at the grocery store or a department store, it’s the American people who pays. Right now some of the businesses that are involved in these — in imports are not passing those tariffs on to the American consumers. They’re waiting to see what ultimately happens and absorbing those costs. But those costs are already being passed on to the American consumers in lots of ways. And so, it is — this idea that this is some sort of non or revenue incidental tariff, that it’s supposedly foreign-facing so it doesn’t affect us, that’s not true. It’s we, the American people, who ultimately pay the cost of those tariffs.

And Congress has the power to tax. Expressly, in the Constitution, it’s given to it, not the president. And simultaneously, in that same provision, Congress is given the power to impose tariffs. This statute that the Trump administration is hanging its hat on does not give the president the power to tariff or to tax. And there’s a good reason for that. It’s not just that it’s in our Constitution. Trump’s behavior is exactly why no president has ever been given this sort of power, because putting that power in the hands of one person allows for arbitrary, capricious, whimsical, vindictive action by one person, as we’ve seen Trump do. That initial round of tariffs was announced as including tariffs on Penguin Islands, but not North Korea and Russia. The tariffs are arbitrary. We’re seeing sort of a shakedown process in some of the efforts to try to get countries to appease Trump’s ego in exchange for dropping tariffs or limiting them. That’s not how tariff policy is supposed to go. It’s supposed to be passed by Congress through genuine deliberation. And more than that, because it’s a tax on the American people, it has to be something that only Congress can do, because Congress has the power of the purse, not the president. And we cannot have this president, you know, exercising all the powers, basically, of the legislative branch and the executive branch.


AMY GOODMAN: This is an exchange between Justice Elena Kagan and the Solicitor General John Sauer during oral arguments, speaking about emergency powers.
JOHN SAUER: The president has to make a formal declaration of a national emergency, which subjects him to particularly intensive oversight by Congress, repeated — you know, natural lapsing, repeated review, reports and so forth, that says you have to consult with Congress to the maximum extent possible.

JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN: I mean, you, yourself, think that the declaration of emergency is unreviewable. And even if it’s not unreviewable, it’s, of course, the kind of determination that this court would grant considerable deference to the — to the president on. So that doesn’t seem like much of a constraint.

JOHN SAUER: But it is a constraint.


JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN: And, in fact, you know, we’ve had cases recently which deals with the president’s emergency powers, and it turns out we’re in emergencies everything all the time about like half the world.


AMY GOODMAN: English, please, Lisa Graves.

LISA GRAVES: Well, so, this question under IEEPA is whether there is an emergency that’s the basis for regulation or sort of an embargo. And in this instance, there isn’t. The administration has claimed that the fentanyl crisis somehow allows it to impose these wide and arbitrary tariffs. It’s also claimed that the trade deficit, which has been part of our, you know, economy for decades, is some sort of national emergency. It’s not. We’ve seen Trump assert emergencies in Portland, in Los Angeles. Like, he basically just uses the word “emergency” to try to get away with anything.

And it is true, the Supreme Court has traditionally deferred to declarations of emergencies by presidents. But I don’t think it has any obligation to defer to this president’s claims of emergency, which are factless, which are baseless, and which are just another argument, the kind of argument John — that John Sauer tends to make in justification of his client getting to do whatever he wants. So, there is no genuine emergency. There is no war that is the precipitating basis for invoking IEEPA. And even if it were, it would not allow the imposition of tariffs.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Lisa Graves, you’ve written this new book. It’s called Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. If you can talk more about the major points in this book, as you specifically look at Chief Justice Roberts? Start with the whole issue of the Voting Rights Act. Talk about Chief Justice John Roberts’ origin story.

LISA GRAVES: Yes. So, John Roberts chose to clerk for Bill Rehnquist, who was one of the most notorious anti-voting rights people on the Supreme Court. He, in his personal capacity, sought to make it harder for Arizonans to vote, targeting Black communities in Arizona with voter suppression, himself personally, in Bethune, in the neighborhood of Bethune. Then, when he was on the court, right before John Roberts joined him, he issued a decision, the first decision trying to cut back Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, to say that effects would not count.

So, then what happened was, Bill Rehnquist called Ken Starr, who was then the chief of staff for the new attorney general for Ronald Reagan, and urged him to hire John Roberts. John Roberts was hired by the Reagan administration and put in charge of voting rights. John Roberts had no experience in voting rights, no experience in litigation. The only experience he had was clerking for — basically, stodging for — the most regressive justice on Supreme Court when it came to voting rights. Rehnquist, by the way, actually urged that his justice he clerked for dissent from the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Rehnquist aided Barry Goldwater, the guy who — one of the, you know, senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act.

So, this is the origin story of John Roberts. He spent hundreds of hours trying to block Congress from repairing that, from overturning that ruling. And then, the Voting Rights Act was extended for more than 20 years, into 2007, and then, when John Roberts became the chief justice of the United States in 2005, as soon as there was a case teed up for him to do so, in the Shelby County case, he ruled against the Voting Rights Act. He struck down other key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Section 4 and Section 5, that required preclearance of changes in jurisdictions that had a history of voter suppression or history of targeting Black voters. And that Shelby County decision unleashed this wave of voter suppression and voter restriction we’ve seen over the past decade. And now, right now, this court, the Roberts Court, is considering overruling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and allowing white-majority legislatures to dilute the Black vote in Louisiana and other states.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Lisa Graves. Her new book is just out. It’s called Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. As you observe this court right now, what are your biggest concerns? And how do the other justices feel about the chief justice?

LISA GRAVES: Well, I think this court is behaving illegitimately. These emergency orders overturning the well-reasoned, factually founded, legally grounded decisions to impose temporary restraining orders in the face of unilateral, extreme actions by this president, where the plaintiffs have shown irreparable harm, these are illegitimate actions by this court basically to aid Donald Trump. And it’s part two of what it did last year in effectively pardoning Donald Trump, preventing the trial, the trial around January 6th, to go forward, and basically paving the way for his return to power. And now, once in power, John Roberts has helped to empower Donald Trump further with the help of his fellow Republican appointees.

I think the Democratic appointees to the court, in the minority, are very frustrated, as you can see from the dissents in these cases, where the court is not describing why it is overturning these lower court rulings and allowing Trump to put his foot on the gas pedal to go forward with them while people are being harmed every day.

I think that this Roberts Court is out of control. It’s behaving arrogantly. It has aggressively intervened in those cases, just like with the immunity decision. It could have let the lower court rulings, which were based on well-grounded precedent, stand, but instead it has sought to aid Trump at almost every turn and, in doing so, has exposed itself as a hyperpartisan court that isn’t really behaving like a court but is behaving like an arm of the MAGA Trump presidency.

AMY GOODMAN: What most surprised you in doing the research for your book?

LISA GRAVES: Oh my goodness. Well, it was a small thing. But, you know, everyone knows that John Roberts talked about how he was going to be a fair umpire just calling balls and strikes. When I looked into his background, it turned out that he never played baseball in high school or college. He was actually a football player. And his coach told a right-wing dark money group that helped support his confirmation that John Roberts was particularly skilled as a tackler, as someone who studied his opponents and sought to find out ways to tackle them. That’s who we really have at the helm of the Supreme Court, is a player on the field who’s moving that right-wing, regressive, Reagan revolutionary agenda forward, not the fair umpire that he claimed to be and that he sought to put — plant into the American people’s minds as who he is. He’s not that umpire. I’ve actually decided to call him a “Trumpire,” because he’s been so willing to help Trump in almost every way as he expands the presidency far more than any other president has had such power. And in fact, that ruling really took out one of the key pillars of the checks and balances in our democracy, making the oath that John Roberts administered to Donald Trump, that he would faithfully execute the law, almost meaningless.

AMY GOODMAN: Lisa Graves, I want to thank you for being with us, director and founder of the policy research group True North Research. Her new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. She was speaking to us from Superior, Wisconsin.

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

.
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.”