Zohran Mamdani, Democrats, and Hamsters

As not to shit on people going out to vote for what they perceive as socialism (nor do I live in New York City, though there were elections where I live, too), I didn’t say anything on election day. On some level, I’m happy people voted for someone who said they’d make public transportation free, groceries cheaper, and freeze rent.

These things are all good on paper. But so is Medicare For All/Single Payer Health, which Bernie Sanders and the DSA losers have run on repeatedly, both winning and losing, and no one has done anything of any significance in pushing it. When it was proposed to force a vote on it to get people on record as saying no, which would give a basis for running campaigns to get people who would vote yes in, everyone from Bernie to AOC deferred to the establishment, and the legion of freaks that support them online shouted that idea down and attacked anyone who said otherwise.

At best, these people are naive and incapable of learning that their own party is against their policy proposals. At worst, they are controlled opposition.

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Like all these individuals, Zohran Mamdani is a DSA member—an organization rooted in Cold War anti-communist containment rather than revolutionary socialism. The DSA descends from Max Shachtman’s “democratic socialist” current, which supported U.S. interventions like the Bay of Pigs and aligned with American foreign-policy goals to oppose Stalinism (Shachtman’s trajectory and influence is documented in pieces like WSWS’s “The Democratic Socialists of America: Providing a ‘Left’ Cover for American Imperialism” and “Social Democracy in Service of U.S. Imperialism”). This ideological line was carried forward by Michael Harrington when he founded DSA in the ’80s, advocating a “left wing of the possible” tied to the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, figures like Gloria Steinem (who was also involved in the early years of the DSA) collaborated with CIA-funded fronts such as the Independent Research Service (later acknowledging this, pridefully I might add) to influence youth and student movements toward liberal, non-Marxist ideals. (See the CIA reading-room file, USC’s “The Feminist Was a Spy”, and The American Prospect’s review of Patriotic Betrayal).

Reading into what is real shows that the American “left,” most visible in media and elections, is managed opposition, one that speaks the language of resistance while reliably channeling it back into the system it claims to challenge. This isn’t necessarily intentional nor conspiratorial, but it’s true.

The following image was shown to me yesterday:

I am sorry, but Mark Cuban is correct. He isn’t calling any of these things bad; he’s saying they won't happen because Zohran is the mayor of New York. And they’re not going to. I am happy that people voted for these things, and Mark may well not be (I don’t know or give a damn, really), but he’s correct that none of that shit has a chance.

The first thing I read Wednesday morning was The Independent’s “Mamdani announces veteran transition team” and USA Today’s “Zohran Mamdani, now NYC mayor-elect, announces mainstream transition team.” This is what a candidate from a “left wing of the possible” org tied to the Democratic Party winning is going to do: bring in Democrats.

And Democrats don’t do the things Zohran Mamdani campaigned on. They don’t do what AOC or Bernie Sanders campaigned on. These campaigns serve to show people that there are “at least people in the party that want to do something,” but there’s no guarantee that’s true. We know they campaigned on those things, and we should know we have not even taken a single step closer to any of them.

All around the country, people elected Democrats this week, and the Late Night shows have rejoiced. I have heard variants of “finally, things will change” in clips of stuff today. I overheard some people talking about it at the gym. And I just don’t understand how no one notices that, after all of the previous Democrats, no matter how grand their promises, nothing fundamental has changed. President Mush Brain ran on nothing fundamental changing, even.

Yet they win, and people say, “Finally, things will change.”

I do not wish to impart negativity on you, but I do want people to stop pretending a negative is a positive.

You get to the positive by not running in circles like a hamster to support the negative.

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