This article by Carter Moon originally appeared in his Substack, and is republished here with his permission.

The news of Democratic Socialist of America candidates in New York City’s primary elections winning 11 of their 12 races has dominated the discourse recently. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier are joining Alexandria Occasio Cortez in Congress, along with Brad Lander, who was not DSA-endorsed, but did get a major boost from Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement. This election is seen as a moratorium on Israel: All three candidates are critics of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. It’s also seen as a broader indication of DSA’s broader political viability; it is staggering that democratic socialists are building power at every level of government in New York. The continued intense popularity of Zohran Mamdani also clearly carries enormous weight; the fact that he’s being able to leverage his position as mayor to sway elections up and down the ballot is a huge sign. Labor reporter Hamilton Nolan summed it up very well: “Democratic socialists in 2026 are having a moment that is — not to be too bold, not to get too far over my skis in historical terms — more hopeful and more substantial than anything we’ve seen since World War II.”

I have recently re-joined DSA after many years of keeping my distance. I just finished working very hard to try to get a DSA candidate onto the city council in LA. I do ultimately believe contesting for political power at this moment is a core part of building a counter-hegemonic force to the fascist project we’re confronting day by day. But I am also plagued by anxieties and doubts about the sheer amount of momentum that the fascists currently have and how poorly the Left in this country is still organized to respond to it on a nationwide scale.

Let’s take honest stock of the power MAGA is continuing to accumulate. Nine anti-fascist anarchists in Prairieland, Texas were just sentenced to absolutely egregious, probably unconstitutional, prison sentences for anywhere between 30 and 100 years, mostly just for protesting outside of an ICE detention center. Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years for simply moving a box of zines out of his house after his wife was arrested. 15 anti-ICE protesters have been indicted as “Antifa members” and classified as terrorists under national security presidential memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Ken Klippenstein has been reporting on NSPM-7 extensively for the last year; it gives broad authority to federal authorities to prosecute and investigate pre-crime “indicators” such as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration.” The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration permission to turn back asylum seekers fleeing imminent threats of violence or disaster in their home countries. They simultaneously stripped Temporary Protective Status from 350,000 Haitian refugees and 6,100 Syrian refugees. Top this off with the Supreme Court effectively destroying the 1965 Voting Rights Act at the end of April; we are living in a brutal time of state repression and disenfranchisement. The judicial and prosecutorial power MAGA currently possesses will wreak absolute devastation for years to come, most likely even well after Trump leaves office.

Electorally, we also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Trump’s favored candidates continue to dominate GOP primaries. Even if Democrats manage to eke out a majority in Congress by the end of this year, their Republican opponents will be more fiercely MAGA and loyal to Trump than ever. This is a fascist movement with only a will to power and a rabid desire to dominate; they will not play nicely and allow the normal function of governance to continue if they’re in the minority. The DSA members and their ideological allies being added to the congressional ranks will still be a minority within the Democratic party — a party which, let’s be frank, has so far failed to meaningfully stand up to the Trump administration.

Another thing that’s been troubling me about these New York elections is how the DSA candidates won without the support of organized labor. Labor politics reporter Eric Blanc explored the frustrations and contradictions of politicians claiming to represent working-class people without the support of the labor unions which are meant to be the collective representation of working people’s power. This speaks to the decay and skittishness within the upper echelons of labor that unions were afraid to cross the establishment incumbents Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier were running against. But it also speaks to a continued lack of meaningful power built within unions by DSA. As Eric put it: “Democratic socialism’s organized roots in workplaces and working-class neighborhoods do remain alarmingly thin. Getting votes and building sustainable on-the-ground power are not the same thing.”

Union membership remains at a paltry 10% of the US workforce. With the NLRB controlled by the Trump administration, any new union organizing is going to be an agonizing, anemic process. I think waiting around for a majority of the working class to be organized into traditional labor unions to build the power necessary to eventually completely overthrow our oligarch class is probably not the best strategy when our neighbors are being thrown into concentration camps in the here and now. But I do think in cities like New York and LA where unions continue to hold a significant foothold of political and economic leverage, it’s a real mistake to try to govern without their enthusiastic support and protection, especially when divisive parts of their agendas need to pass. There is no class war without the full participation of the working class.

This possible lack of a meaningful grassroots coalition capable of really wielding power in office is already starting to show cracks in Zohran’s own term as mayor. Hammer and Hope recently ran a great series reviewing Zohran’s first six months, specifically through the lens of Black radical tradition. The most egregious mistake Mamdani has made so far in office has been retaining his political rival Jessica Tisch as Police Commissioner and agreeing to hire 580 new police officers to the already wildly bloated NYPD. As long-time abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba put it: “The cops really do rule this city. If you don’t take a stand against that, it is going to envelop and maybe devour Mamdani’s entire term.” This, while Mamdani’s promise to fully fund public gender-affirming care and libraries has fallen by the wayside in his first budget. Chenjerai Kumanyika sums it up well: “The deeper question is whether our criticisms are tied to a strategy for building enough power to move the mayor — and to protect political gains when he takes risks.” It’s not entirely on Zohran, or any of these newly minted DSA electeds, to win the world we need alone; that world is something that has to be relentlessly organized for by mass movements of regular people.

But to pivot and shade this conversation in a more positive light, I do think these electoral wins are a gateway to that deeper, continual organizing to build a new hegemonic consensus. As Van Jones put it on election night: “The roof is collapsing on the Democratic Party establishment tonight.” When people see someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier go from organizing pro-Palestine encampments at Columbia in 2024 to becoming a member of Congress in just two years, it expands the aperture of what’s acceptable in national politics. Avila Chevalier has faced some of the most hysterical coverage for her positions, painted as too radical on everything from abolishing the police to opening up the border. Everyone from the Canary Mission to Matt Yglesias has been trying to tear her down as too dangerous to serve in politics, but they’ll have to eat shit for at least one term of her in office. If Avila Chevalier can shore up the support of unions, the Working Families Party, and a governing coalition of groups ready to help her materialize her politics, she’ll be doing the whole American Left a service by pushing her positions at the federal level. The liberal commentariat has had to admit this week that these races show that a politics of solidarity and anti-imperialism has potential in this country, and that is an extremely good thing. A broad swath of Democratic voters agree with a lot of what the DSA is selling, even if they’re not ready to become card-carrying members yet.

A time of fascist lawlessness, senseless bloodshed, and staggering inequality has created fertile ground for these politics to take root. Much of the mainstream coverage of these races has emphasized how supposedly similar the DSA candidates and their opponents were, but it’s not simply about individual positions on taxing the rich, Gaza, and Medicare for All. The reason there’s a durable, active base of volunteers capable of knocking doors and persuading people to vote for these outsider candidates is rooted in a shared commitment to ideological principals. Traditional Democratic party politics is primarily a game of pantomiming the right politics to get elected in the immediate election cycle, and then safely spending your term in office appeasing donors and maybe throwing a bone to your non-wealthy constituents when it’s expedient. People are sick of that. The commitment to making campaign promises and actually following through with them is something almost anathematic to American politics. There’s a chance we’ll actually see that embodied with these new electeds more so than we have in the past.

1,000 people have died in the last week due to the intense, unrelenting heatwaves France has been experiencing. Leading climate scientist Johan Rockstrom warns that we have hit the limits of seven of the nine planetary boundaries that make Earth habitable for human beings. To me, the most essential component of engaging in politics is to build enough power in order to force the US to get serious about addressing the climate crisis. To meaningfully address the crisis, we will have to remake the global political economy to dramatically reduce inequality while simultaneously massively drawing down our military presence, since the US military is one of the leading contributors to climate emissions. In other words, the socialist project of the last two centuries that has struggled to build a global civilization where the majority of people are not exploited for their resources and labor and where no one is subjected to colonial or imperial rule is still the only historical political tradition capable of tackling the climate crisis in its entirety.

The task at hand of transforming conditions in the US in order to make this a reality can seem too daunting to believe in at times. This country founded on settler colonialism and slavery, which is ruled over by an unimpeachable aristocracy on the Supreme Court and stymied by a Congress which refuses to pass laws or actually govern, can objectively feel too structurally undemocratic to ever be transformed into something better. But I would argue that we owe it to the people of Gaza, the people of Cuba suffering a brutal blockade, the people of India suffering through deadly heatwaves, to try anyway. And I don’t see any other viable path to taking power that doesn’t involve elections as at least part of the strategy. We simultaneously have to build networks of solidarity and trust that truly reimagine social and economic relations in this country on a day-to-day level. As climate disasters are pretty much guaranteed to accelerate this fall as we get hit by an El Niño, we will need mutual aid networks capable of helping people survive. I’m dedicating a lot of my week-by-week organizing time to building a network of neighbors in my immediate vicinity to be ready for such an event. But if we don’t contest for power when the opportunity arises, if we don’t put forward a vision for a better world at the ballot box, I don’t see how we can continue to expand and grow.