This piece was reposted from Carter Moon’s Substack. Click here to subscribe.

For the first time in a very long time, Zohran Mamdani has given me a streak of hope in what has been an incredibly dispiriting half-decade. Like many people on the Left, I pinned a lot of hopes on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign. When he dropped out of the primary just as the sheer magnitude of the pandemic was starting to come into focus, I can remember a crushing sense of dread and defeat wrapping itself tightly around my chest. I had done my best to try to temper my expectations for Sanders; I had devoted most of my organizing attention to a local campaign for jail reform from the fall of 2019 to the early months of 2020. I told myself that the masses of people still weren’t ready for Bernie’s democratic socialism, and in the end my cynicism was proven correct. Still, the ratfuckery of the Democratic Party combined with the obvious fact that we were running out of time to make decisive climate interventions sent me into a spiral of despair. I was unemployed for most of 2020 and 2021 as the entertainment industry shut down; I protested during the Black Lives Matter uprisings, participated in a lively socialist book club, and did my fair share of local organizing. But I largely sat in my apartment and stewed in feelings of dread and resignation.

That resignation persisted throughout Biden’s presidential term. I spent the first couple months of his administration clinging to the hope that the intensity of the uprisings and social safety net that had been hastily constructed during the pandemic could be a path towards a brighter future; Biden had, after all, written his campaign platform in collaboration with many left-liberal activists. But quickly I watched all those hopes get dashed upon the rocks. The vaccine rollout included brutal vaccine apartheid for the rest of the world; Biden refused to waive the patents on the vaccines that would’ve allowed the poorest countries in the world to develop their own vaccines and distribute them to their people, thus COVID-19 continued to spread, mutate, and resist the vaccines. The administration floundered as it tried to prosecute Trump; it should have been priority number one to convict Trump for treason after January 6th and they utterly failed to make it happen quickly. And then October 7th happened and we watched Biden adamantly support a genocide. I will concede that there were some positive things Biden accomplished, the Inflation Reduction Act was a substantial investment into transitioning off of fossil fuels, and Lena Khan was doing some good work at the Federal Trade Commission. But the sheer scope of his failures to meet the historical moment outweighs them entirely.

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This is why I and many others on the Left have been in a spiral of depression for years now. We have spent most of the 21st century living through the steady collapse of all our civil institutions that were supposed to be the bulwark against fascism. Congress and the Supreme Court have become so nakedly bought by the wealthy, so transparently out of sync with the wellbeing of 99% of the country, that I don’t see how these institutions don’t eventually collapse in a crisis of legitimacy. Furthermore, as climate disasters accelerate, I see a future where pockets of the country functionally stop being part of American civil society. There are still people struggling to recover from last year’s hurricane in western North Carolina. A tornado ripped through north St. Louis and people have had to scramble to establish their own aid networks as FEMA’s response has been inadequate. Here in LA, the rebuilding efforts in cities like Altadena have been stymied because the Trump administration has been deporting all the migrant day laborers who were building the new homes. We will essentially have internal climate refugees, escaping in similar conditions to the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression, who will be homeless and second-class citizens wherever they land. I devote most of my organizing energy hyper-locally because I see it as the best defense as the United States as a whole continues to crumble all around us.

Despite all this, all of the worst hacks in Democratic machine politics have been proven definitively, disastrously wrong by Zohran Mamdani. At last we have someone with national prominence who’s broken through the fascist malaise we’ve been sliding into. Zohran ran on making New York affordable for everyone, on enacting a rent freeze, making transportation free, and building out a free childcare program. You cannot look people in the eye in the wealthiest city in the history of human civilization and tell them these programs are impossible. Zohran had a clear platform on his website committing to gender-affirming care, totally negating the dead-eyed losers who claim we have to shut up about LGBT+ rights if we want to win. He built a multiracial volunteer army that knocked on a million doors; all the millions of dollars that billionaires poured into Cuomo’s candidacy and spent on junk mail and attack ads were utterly wasted. The New York Times refused to endorse a candidate but explicitly attacked Mamdani; their legitimacy as an institution is obviously collapsing. Matt Yglesis should have to delete his Twitter and Substack and ceremonially cut off his own thumbs with a miniature samurai sword so he can never post again. Nate Silver should have to write opinion columns for the Omaha World-Herald. Every campaign consultant who told Kamala Harris to tack to the right should wear a hood over their head and hold a sign of penance and shame in Times Square. Mamdani’s win is so resounding and so definitive, such a forceful repudiation of the kind of politics we’ve been told we have to accept forever. The sneering, monied centrism that only serves the ultra-wealthy is a cancerous poison we can excise once and for all.

There are many, many things about Zohran’s campaign that can be replicated, especially in major cities. Demanding universal public goods like fare-free buses and childcare is something we can all unite around. Stopping the exploitation of working people by the landlord class by enacting a rent freeze is deeply needed in every corner of the country. I have spent hours in online threads and in living rooms talking to friends about how electoralism will never fully liberate us, how it will never resolve the contradictions of living under wage exploitation in capitalism. This is entirely true, but I also am not sure how to build conditions for working class people to take more power without winning power electorally. Our ideas can only gain legitimacy if we engage in all aspects of public life. We have to wage the posting wars, we have to make art, we have to strengthen and expand unions, but we also have to contend for power in an obviously imperfect system.

I have so much love for everyone who engages in mutual aid, but to me it’s pretty defeating to get a sleeping bag in someone’s hands only to see a shitty city councilmember throw it in the trash three days later. It’s great to organize tenant unions, but if everyone in your city government is bought by real estate and refuses to enforce the law, people still get screwed. Unions are still the best engine for working people to build power, but you need people in office backing the unions and writing laws to give them more teeth. I completely agree that getting people like Mamdani elected does nothing to end capitalist imperialism, that this country’s addiction to fossil fuels and its military is not resolved by engaging in electoral politics, but to build towards that goal I really have come to believe that we have to build power, especially in our major cities. A majority of my neighbors are rent-burdened just like me, and the police refuse to stop killing people: Those are crises that demand intervention. The most immediate way you can make an impact on people’s day-to-day material conditions is by engaging them at the local level, by talking to people about their immediate lived struggles and how they’d like to tangibly improve them.

Since 2020, LA has been engaged in a sustained campaign to get left-progressives like Zohran onto the city council. It’s yielded mixed results; I personally am deeply frustrated that this block of folks can’t be more consistently critical of police spending, and I especially wish some of them would stop the cruel practice of homeless encampment sweeps altogether.. But probably the most ambitious and successful campaign we’ve seen has been Kenneth Mejia’s run for city controller. He made the city budget accessible and exciting by putting billboards all around LA showing how wildly disproportionate our police spending is in comparison to literally everything else. He got the idea from Black Lives Matter LA’s truly radical “People’s Budget LA” which surveyed Angelenos and asked them where they would most like to see city resources spent; overwhelmingly people do not support giving half of the total budget to the police. Kenneth’s platform won him 513,288 votes, the most any elected official has ever received in an LA election.

There has to be a paradigm shift in this country. People are in crisis in every community. As Naomi Klein has been pointing out relentlessly lately, if we want to stop the spread of fascism, we have to engage people constantly to encourage them to embrace a politics of solidarity rather than exclusion and domination. Municipal elections are an opportunity to invite people to conceive of a better society, to meet neighbors in your immediate vicinity who are willing to dream of something greater than what we have now. Zohran’s campaign really exemplified this, but I’ve seen it happen all over the country. My brother’s gotten a number of democratic socialists who focus on tenant’s rights elected to the city council in Ithaca, New York. The grassroots, bottom up transformation of our society is percolating in these municipal races, and has been for years. Zohran finally made the powerful elite recognize what’s been steadily bubbling up in cities across the country for years. Let’s pound the pavement, we have a world to win.