In June Donald Trump, having manufactured a crisis over alleged obstruction in California of round-ups by his immigration police (ICE), flexed his authoritarian muscles, federalising the state national guard and deploying marines to back them up. Critics warned of the militarisation of the repression of dissent.
This week the LA dress rehearsal was followed up – federal troops sent in to Washington, DC on the spurious pretext that it is awash with violent crime. In fact violent crime is at a 30-year low.
And the president, determined to warn Democratic cities that he will not be defied and has the power effectively to take them over, threatened similar treatment to three other Democratic strongholds – Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland. He spoke to his real agenda: “If a communist gets elected,” he said, “we have tremendous power … to run places when we have to”.
As The New York Times points out, the contrast between Trump’s enthusiastic deployment of force against a mythical crime wave, and his refusal to intervene against mobs storming Congress speaks volumes.
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A communist in America? Some chance. Except that, horror of horrors for Trump and the city’s billionaire class, there is a very real chance that in November the New York mayoralty election will see a charismatic 33-year-old state assemblyman, self-confessed “socialist” Zohran Mamdani, top the poll. A “communist”, complains Trump, who has spoken of depriving him of his citizenship and of jailing him for interfering with immigrant arrests. The administration is also suing the city for its refusal to co-operate with ICE.
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Mamdani, born in Uganda to ethnic Indian parents, became a US citizen in 2018 and has attracted widespread controversy over his vocal support for Palestinian rights. He has brought a new dynamism to the left, stunning the political establishment with a sweeping victory, “the biggest political upset in the city’s history”, in the city’s Democratic primary in June. He took 56 per cent of the vote, 12 per cent more than next-placed, party leadership favourite, discredited former governor Andrew Cuomo.
Controversy over Mamdani’s immigration status follows a chorus of Islamophobic attacks on his Muslim faith, not to mention his unapologetic membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organisational backbone of his campaign. Remarkably, however, polls show him galvanising significant Jewish support. Young people have flocked to him.
The DSA traces its dramatic growth to the mid-2010s in the wake of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’ run for president and Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. It now boasts some 80,000 members, 10,000 of them in New York, the core of the 60,000 well-drilled door-to-door canvassers who mobilised in the primary. Mamdani’s success will offer it a huge national platform, reigniting a rich but largely eclipsed socialist tradition in American politics.
Until recently “socialist” remained largely a term of political insult. Now, according to a recent poll by the conservative Cato Institute, more Democrats have positive views of socialism (67 per cent) than capitalism (50 per cent), while among Americans under 30, 62 per cent feel favourable towards socialism.
The lacklustre, traditional Democratic leadership, unable to capitalise on Trump’s return or reverse his capture of significant parts of its working-class base, or to break with post-911 Islamophobia, is openly hostile to the upstart candidate. But the DSA and Mamdani have turned the politics of the country’s richest city, with its vastly unequal living conditions, on its head.
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Billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg, now an anti-Mamdani megadonor, boasted of gentrifying the city, transforming once grimy and rundown New York into what he called “a luxury product”. But its cash-strapped residents have turned, attracted by the DSA’s radical campaign focused on New York’s affordability crisis – its programme: a rent freeze, free child care and free buses, a doubling of the minimum wage, 200,000 new units of affordable housing, and expanded public services, paid for in large part by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
The crisis created by mass deportation has also prompted Mamdani to adopt a more militant anti-ICE posture than that of almost any other US politician, enabling the party to dig deep into the city’s huge ethnic populations, most notably the Hispanics. And without becoming drawn into the divisive identity politics that have so long riven New York.
The political climate, The Nation columnist Spencer Ackerman writes, has been transformed by “the detentions and renditions of restaurant cooks, delivery drivers, day labourers, and other members of New York’s working class. Mamdani, without necessarily meaning to, has illuminated the way that the tools of the war on terror are the tools of class war.”
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The campaign is on and fierce, and all rather old-fashioned. When Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was reproached for supporting Mamdani’s plans to tax the rich she retorted simply: “Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?” Touché. Roll on November.
