A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
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Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

D. Taylor

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left.
Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The Washington Post
fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy by quoting him in his own words.
The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September.
Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves">of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934</a>. The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material.
What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest.
Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won.
First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s modus operandi
since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements.
Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/">More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined</a> for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes <a href="https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/">Dr Tom Alter</a>, a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/">had spoken at a socialist conference</a>.
Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. 
Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury<a href="https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/">
secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”</a> without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities.
One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states">exact opposite of the truth</a>, according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less.
Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry.
But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing.
In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech.
Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights.
The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms.

Lance Selfa

Free speech under attack in the US

The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on US campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist <a href="https://threewayfight.org/what-charlie-kirks-life-and-death-can-tell-us-about-the-u-s-right-in-the-age-of-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM4ESNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8PqzTEntFEztYxLQuEmyv4smjV33BW_JmQofQ3W6Q8P5lUO81PBwPWMsvq_aem_l9157vR0G7XvFPGl73RotA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Christian nationalists</a> of Turning Point USA. Yet one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/turning-point-usa-donations-surged-pandemic-rcna37143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rich and powerful</a> from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage.
Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalised media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023/202501359349304810/full" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IRS tax return</a> reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million in 2024. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms. But, for student politics, this was unprecedented. This <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=WORO-OgThig" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gushy video tour</a> of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage.
The post-sixties campus
Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to the working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s that the right had begun to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who, from my perspective, appeared virtually non-existent, disorganised and had little political appeal.
The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisers, first cut their teeth in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/05/us/man-in-the-news-fierce-ambition-karl-rove.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">College Republican politics</a> in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of the time was a New York Times article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”:
“In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ‘It was pretty much a dead thing’, Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year.
“This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton—a traditionally liberal school—it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.”
The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following, such as the <a href="https://dartreview.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dartmouth Review</a>, founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980. Anti-apartheid activists built <a href="https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/journeys.dartmouth.edu/dist/3/834/files/2016/05/DivestmentProtests-MandelaHall-1985.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“shanty towns”</a> on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the Dartmouth Review—attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/13/us/at-dartmouth-the-right-borrows-the-protest-mantle-of-the-left.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According</a> to an article in the New York Times:
“But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by The Review against most of the moves the college has made in the last decade to show sensitivity to women, nonwhites and homosexuals. ‘There is freedom of speech here as long as you’re firmly left of center’, said Roland Reynolds, the editor of The Review. ‘It’s the idea that you can’t criticize people who happen to be black, who happen to be women.’ He described the crew that attacked the shanties as ‘the Bernhard Goetz of Dartmouth’.”
Bernhard Goetz was the infamous New York City <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Subway gunman”</a> who shot four Black teenagers—and paralysed one of them—claiming they tried to rob him and he was defending himself. That a Dartmouth Review editor would openly identify with a racist vigilante, while its staff eagerly participated in a sledgehammer attack on anti-apartheid activists, speaks volumes about their racism and embrace of political violence against their opponents on the campus by 1986. The Dartmouth Review had rich and powerful friends, including <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ronald Reagan</a>. This was long before Charlie Kirk was around.
In the early 1990s, the campus far right received a boost from then-President George H.W. Bush with his infamous attack on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01kX1WGdJWc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“political correctness”</a>—a forerunner of the current attack on “woke”—during his commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1991. Bush was not known for his emotional displays, but he clearly enjoyed giving the speech, buoyed by the support of many students in the audience. Bush’s attack was enthusiastically taken up by the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mass media and intellectual pundits</a> with the broad support of the Republican establishment and a correspondingly weak response from the Democrats and most college and university administrators.
I was a member of the <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/international-socialism-is-my-north-star-c3730df819ba">International Socialist Organization</a> at the time, and we were one of the few socialist organisations that tried to build on a handful of college campuses despite our small size. We immediately recognised the threat that Bush’s attack on “political correctness” posed to the small, very limited gains made by African-Americans and other minorities, women and working-class students, who had suffered major setbacks during the two terms of Reagan’s presidency. Bush’s election triumph in 1988 was viewed by many of us as Reagan’s third term. The ISO <a href="https://archive.org/details/whats-behind-the-attck-on-politically-correct" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a pamphlet</a>, What’s Behind the Attack on Politically Correct?, by Lance Selfa and Alan Mass. They wrote in the introduction:
“No sooner had President Bush announced the end of the war against Iraq than he declared a new war at home. The battle wasn’t to be fought with weapons, but with idea. Its armies would be made up of right-wing ideologues, media pundits, university faculty, and students, not soldiers.”
The ISO was much better prepared to deal with this new witch hunt than many groups in the US left that had little to no campus presence. Even though we had a tiny number of members nationally in early 1990 (possibly 200), we bolstered our presence during the buildup to and war against Iraq during the latter half of 1990 and early 1991. We launched the National Network of Campuses Against the War, though short-lived, and we were able to project ourselves beyond a handful of campuses.
Under the perfect sun
In 1992, I was living in San Diego, California. An old friend and comrade, Phil, and I were trying to build a branch in a city that hadn’t had a previous branch of the ISO. I know that there were more than a few people who thought that our effort was more like a long vacation. I saw it as a fun adventure. San Diego had a reputation for being a <a href="https://archive.org/details/underperfectsuns00davi/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">major tourist destination</a> and very conservative. Our small ISO branch was largely active at the University of California at San Diego campus located in La Jolla, a rich, scenic seaside enclave. The campus felt more like a resort. Our campus club was called the International Socialist Club.
But San Diego had a radical tradition, despite being a Navy town with major Marine Corps bases nearby and having a large Christian evangelical presence. Socialist writer, novelist and historian Dan LaBotz <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-intellectual-autobiography-of-an-american-leftist/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recalled</a>:
“I finished high school in 1963, went to Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista, then to San Diego State, graduating in 1968, and a year later went to the University of California at San Diego where I studied literature with <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fredric-r-jameson-1934-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fredric Jameson</a>. I also sat in on <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Herbert Marcuse’s</a> undergraduate lectures on Marx and, on one occasion, convinced him to lead a discussion of the Paris Commune for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, of which I was a member. I helped to form a small IS chapter that engaged in strike support. Already a supporter of the United Farm Workers then organizing agricultural workers in California, we joined boycott picket lines at grocery stores, and also participated in strike support at a tomato ranch. We also supported a Greyhound Bus lines drivers’ strike.”
UCSD did have some radical legacy, including the New Indicator newspaper and its “Disorientation Manual”, a radical introduction to the campus, and a weekly film series with a political discussion after. Within the city limits, San Diego was pretty much like any other big American city, but it was surrounded by suburbs that were a bastion of the Christian right, replete with a <a href="https://creationsd.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creation and Earth Science Museum</a>. I remember my first night in the city—I was out jogging and paused to take a breath when a car stopped in front of me with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Rocks prove creation!”
In the early 1990s, historic changes were beginning to reshape San Diego. The post-Cold War and post-Gulf War reorganisation and downsizing of the defence industry, along with Bush’s recession that hit the city and county hard, especially housing construction, sent the economy into near depression. In 1992, however, it was the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/08/19/no-justice-no-peace" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rebellion in Los Angeles</a>, following the acquittal of three of the four police officers in the assault on Rodney King in April, that was a lightning bolt that shook up campus politics at the very end of the Spring.
President George H.W. Bush also faced a challenge from his right, first with fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries, and then an independent presidential campaign with the strange character of Ross Perot. All of this took the swagger of the UCSD Republicans, who increasingly gave off the aura of a defeated army. But some of the others on the right saw an opportunity. Three weeks after the LA rebellion, hundreds of posters were plastered across campus, along with hundreds of invitations on cards placed at the cafeteria dining tables, inviting the campus community to a lecture sponsored by the Objectivist Study Group, the followers of <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/garbage-and-gravitas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing crackpot</a> Ayn Rand.
The speaker was George Reisman, an economics professor at Pepperdine University and a well-known figure among followers of Ayn Rand. The title of his lecture was “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism”. Reisman wanted to target ethnic studies at UCSD, which he denigrated as “worshipping your savage ancestors”. He had a long involvement in far-right politics stretching back to the mid-1950s. At a banquet dinner honouring Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and mentor to Donald Trump, who was forced to resign from his committee assignments because of the swing public opinion against McCarthy, Time magazine <a href="https://time.com/archive/6869342/opinion-one-enchanted-evening/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“The noise rose several decibels when 17-year-old Columbia University Sophomore George Reisman of Students for America called Cohn the ‘American Dreyfus’ and barked: ‘Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.’”
Four decades later, he was at UCSD to attack Black and Latino students, faculty and administrators. Reisman was one of the direct connections between the old and new McCarthyism. The UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies at that time was two years old. Walking across campus that day, I saw many people reading the posters but not knowing quite what to make of them. Was this some weird prank? The Objectivists were a campus club, but not known for such provocative behaviour; they were dismissed as a small group of marginal weirdos with little cache. This meeting had all the hallmarks of an outside and well-funded operation.
Our small ISO kicked into high gear. We talked to everyone and every organisation on campus that we needed to picket the meeting and fill the hall to challenge whatever vile bigotries were going to be spewed out that night. Despite our hard work, we weren’t sure how many people were going to turn out. The night of 13 May, we began our picket with fifteen to twenty people outside the lecture hall. Phil made one of his class flyers, “Fight Racism. Defend Multiculturalism!”
It appeared to us that most of the crowd going into the lecture hall was from off campus; they gave off the vibe of being rich weirdos from La Jolla. Reisman and his coterie were incensed that we were protesting. They came out of the hall to stare at us and shake their heads. The hatred in his eyes was incredible. He went back into the hall, and then we came in. Our numbers grew, but at the beginning of the lecture we were outnumbered about two to one. There were about 50 of us and a hundred of them. The chair of the meeting began by reminding us that this lecture was to be copyrighted and not to be quoted without permission. There was a burst of laughter from our section of the audience. Reisman was not pleased.
Right away, he denounced us as “commissars” who stifled “free speech”. By the time Reisman’s lecture began, our supporters in the audience were about equal in number with the Objectivists. Reisman’s speech, with his repetitive drumbeat of the phrases “savage ancestors” and “western civilisation”, along with his sneering tone, enraged the audience. People exploded. “Don’t call my ancestors savages!”, Reisman snapped back, “Who the hell are you? Shut up!”, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A Gulf War veteran, who wore a gas mask and biochemical gear, rose every time Reisman said “western civilisation”, holding a poster of a slave ship over his head and turning to the audience. He later told me an older woman kept punching him in the back of the head the entire meeting.
It was the only campus protest where I thought a fight would break out because people were so enraged by the provocative racism of the speaker. The meeting got so rowdy that the campus police were called, and slowly the meeting dispersed. The Objectivists were enraged but defeated. Darlene Price, the president of the OSG, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Everything we put into that meeting was destroyed. We received nothing”. Phil, who was also the faculty advisor to the International Socialist Club, told the disciplinary board: “When he [Reisman] mentioned savages, he was motioning toward the Black and Latino areas of the audience”. Despite their best efforts to get us kicked off campus and fine us, we prevailed in the disciplinary hearing.
Looking back three decades at the events that night, I see that all of the vile politics of Charlie Kirk were present then, and what was needed was the financial backing and political hustle to turn into a nationwide threat to us all. I also look back on it and think it shows that we can beat them.
Joe Allen is the author of <a href="https://authors.tertulia.com/allenojoe-draftv4iskv/books/teamsterland-reports-on-america-s-most-iconic-union-reports-allen-o-joe/B0FLDHKX48">Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union</a> and <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king">The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS</a>. He lives in Chicago.

Joe Allen

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

In April, US President Donald Trump announced, on what he dubbed “Liberation Day”, a regime of tariffs on every country in the world, based on a sketchy formula that assigned higher tariffs to countries with which the US has trade deficits.
Stock markets went into free fall, there was a huge sell-off of US bonds, and Wall Street and other business titans spoke out against the tariffs. Trump pulled back, said he would make multiple deals over the next 90 days, and the stock market returned to setting records. Wall Street coined a term for Trump’s move: “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. 
In early August, with very few deals negotiated, the administration instituted broad-based tariffs. But unlike in April, the market took it in stride, even though they amount to the highest tariffs in a century: a 15-20 percent levy on all imports to the US. Trump carved out some countries for higher tariffs: Brazil at 50 percent, due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for trying to lead a coup after he lost the 2023 election. Trump set tariffs on <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/27/trumps-india-tariffs-take-effect-which-sector-will-be-hit-whats-exempt">India at 50 percent, reputedly to punish it for importing Russian oil</a>, but possibly also for refusing to <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/has-trump-lost-india-punitive-tariffs-and-nobel-peace-prize-insults-erode-once-close-relations">support his delusional bid for a Nobel Peace Prize.</a>
Then, on 29 August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier decision declaring most of these tariffs illegal. Their fate will now be in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
A tariff is a tax on imports paid to the US government. US importers pay it. In fact, many of them are unable to claim their products until they pay the tariff. Ultimately, the cost falls on consumers who pay higher prices on imported goods such as coffee, or who pay higher prices on products containing imported inputs. Think, for example, of cars or household appliances whose prices increase because tariffs have increased the prices of imported steel and aluminium. Prices may not have spiked much yet, but if the tariffs remain in place, we will likely see prices increase by the end of the year.
The Yale Budget Project estimates <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-14-2025">that tariffs will add about US$2,800 to the average household’s costs over the next year</a>. And some estimates suggest they could add $4,000-$5,000 to the cost of a new car. So much for Trump’s promise to lower prices on day one!
Government statistics are <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/short-run-effects-2025-tariffs-so-far">starting to show a pick-up in inflation on particular goods and sectors that rely on imports</a>. There are three main reasons why most people have not yet experienced big tariff-fuelled price increases. First, many companies, anticipating that Trump would impose tariffs, “front ran”—meaning that they built up their inventories before the tariffs went into effect. It’s likely that the decline in the first quarter gross domestic product, which most economic analysts attributed to an abnormal increase in imports, reflected front-running behaviour.
Second, companies are eating the costs, eroding their profits, rather than passing them on to consumers. It’s possible that some companies were relying on the courts tossing out the tariffs, or a mercurial Trump deciding to lower them. <a href="https://moneymorning.com/2025/07/23/gm-and-stellantis-lose-billions-as-tariffs-reshape-u-s-auto-industry/">Both GM and Ford reported losses in the billions that they attributed to tariffs. They have yet to raise prices across the board.</a>
Finally, other countries have yet to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
But these strategies merely postpone the tariff shock to the future. Unless companies want to accept lower profits, or lay-offs or bankruptcy, they will be forced to raise prices. 
Much of the neoliberal commentariat treats Trump’s tariffs as an absurdity, akin to RFK Jr’s anti-vax demolition of science or the crackpot beliefs of flat earthers. But the left <a href="https://youtu.be/f1CdbCsetpw">Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, the former finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece,</a>
says we must take Trump’s tariffs seriously. Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the US’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire US ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending.
Besides the fact that Trump seems to believe that tariffs will ignite a US “golden age”, he also views them as a way to wield his clout, both domestically and in foreign affairs. He has arguably been more successful on the domestic front, as his on-again, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-companies-exemptions-engineering">off-again threats to levy tariffs on certain industries lead those industry CEOs to make concessions or donations to Trump.</a> The opportunities for corruption are endless.
On foreign policy, Trump has reset the US’s average tariffs on imports to somewhere between five and six times what they were in 2024, without yet experiencing widespread blowback from US trading partners. He and other tariff “hawks” in the administration calculate that other countries have more to lose from being locked out of the US than the US has to lose in trade with them.
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, elected in an anti-Trump “Canada </a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods"></a>strong<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">” campaign earlier this year</a>, recently lifted retaliatory tariffs against the US, the destination of 75 percent of Canada’s exports. Canada is now attempting to negotiate a deal that will limit US tariffs on certain targeted Canadian exports, such as lumber, steel and aluminium.
On the other hand, Trump’s impetuous decision to place a 50 percent tariff on imports from India threatens to undermine the decades-long US cultivation of India as a counterweight to China in Asia. The <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/india-alliance-jake-sullivan-kurt-campbell">symbolism of leaders of India, China and Russia meeting together in Beijing</a>
wasn’t lost on mainstream foreign policy hands.
<a href="https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/04/on-channel-4-is-donald-trumps-tariff-war-about-to-totally-backfire/">Varoufakis thinks that tariffs may slow the US economy, but the US is still sucking in massive amounts of capital from the world</a>. If that continues, Trump may get away with the tariffs, even if they don’t produce the things he promised: reshoring American industries or replacing income taxes, among some of the more far fetched. But if Trump succeeds in cutting the US trade deficit, other countries will have fewer dollars to reinvest in the US stock market and in other assets.
To Marxists, tariffs are neither good nor bad. They are no better nor worse than “free trade.” They are just one mechanism capitalist states use to gain an advantage over other capitalist states in the international economy.
“Free trade” is most often the policy of the global economic and military hegemon. Britain in the nineteenth century pushed for “free trade” as a way of expanding markets for its industrial economy. Similarly, since the 1930s, it has been a policy of the US government to expand free trade.
The breakdown of free trade today is part of the breakdown of the unipolar US empire that existed in the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR-dominated Eastern bloc. Now that China is in a close competition with the US, the US government and its business leaders have embraced more protectionist measures against it. Here is where the politics of tariffs enters the discussion.
For now, if most people associate tariffs with higher prices, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-is-underwater-on-trade-in-40">they are among the most unpopular parts of Trump’s already very unpopular agenda</a>. But one place where they are not condemned—outside of MAGA world and a few favoured industries—is in the US labour movement.
Unfortunately, leaders like <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/04/uaw-fain-trump-tariffs-nafta">United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain</a>, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the United Steelworkers of America have embraced the Trump tariffs. This isn’t anything new. “Buy American” has been part of the labour movement for decades. But for labour to buy into Trump’s tariffs now, when <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-parliamentary-cretinism-of-the-democrats-opposition-to-trump/">Trump and his administration are waging an existential war against labour</a>, is letting MAGA off the hook.
Industrial union leaders support tariffs to prop up US industries where their dwindling ranks work. But support for tariffs targets the wrong enemy. The socialist labour scholar Kim Moody has shown that declining jobs, unionisation and living standards in the US owe more to automation and speed-up than to trade.
Socialist labour activist Andy Sernatinger’s critique of the <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">UAW’s position, titled “Nationalism, workers’ power, and the myth of auto tariffs”</a>, showed that there are as many autoworkers today in the US as there were in 1992 (before the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA). But far fewer of them are in unionised jobs. That’s because the unions have conceded control of the shop floor and have only weakly competed for non-union workers in plants in the southern states, where much of the job growth in recent decades has occurred.
For labour to sign on with policies that are shot through with nationalism and anti-Chinese racism is extremely dangerous. Labour activists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin">should remember the 1980s case of Vincent Chin</a>, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by an auto industry supervisor. Chin’s killing took place at a time when the UAW was leading an anti-Japanese car campaign that featured media events in which union members smashed up Japanese-made cars with bats and hammers. Chin’s killer shouted racial slurs at him while he beat him.
Not only does this sort of politics sow divisions among workers, but it also contributes to the general racist and nationalist climate that the Trump administration is leading from the top. It lays the foundation for political support for further economic, political and military confrontation with China.
Even if tariffs don’t have the catastrophic effects—like COVID-era empty store shelves and price gouging—that many predicted, they will still contribute to a slowing economy, higher prices and potentially mass lay-offs. The jobs economy <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/hiring-slowdown-spells-a-weakening-labor-market">is already weak</a>—the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/job-opening-data-falls-to-levels-rarely-seen-since-pandemic.html">number of job openings is around the level it was during the COVID recession</a>.
It’s not clear that Trump’s tariffs are the cause of all these problems. There is solid evidence that consumer spending was tapped out at the end of last year, before “Liberation Day”. But tariffs are not going to improve the situation. And in the current context, Trump’s tariffs are just another attack on the working class.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a>
(Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

CHICAGO—Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy. 
On 1 August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the US) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used “national security” as a pretext to void union contracts in several federal government agencies. Within days, managers across the federal government—most significantly, the <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/veterans-affairs/2025/08/va-says-its-ended-most-collective-bargaining-agreements/">Veterans Administration</a>—ripped up their union contracts.
The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a Congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic Congress members from the current thirteen to eight. That would leave the Texas Congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024.
Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court-sanctioned union-busting with a yawn, if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to battle stations.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander to net at least five and as many as nine new Democratic-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who viewed him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan.
Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about their jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump.
The liberal opposition to Trump can conceive of defeating him and Trumpism only at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede Democratic electoral gains is an existential question for them.
To return to the labour example, it’s clear that, aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labour movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labour leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionise the federal workforce. 
In a labour movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organising the unorganised, days of action and the like to galvanise a real opposition to Trump. But for most labour leaders, this is not even part of their thought process. As long-time labour activist and socialist <a href="https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-truths-about-the-us-labor-movement-an-interview-with-chris-townsend/">Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview</a> with Monthly Review: 
“We have slid into a period in our labour movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.”
The atrophy of social movement organisation and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-government organisation leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the US Supreme Court would overturn legalised abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-history-of-planned-parenthood-v-casey-and-pro-choice-activism-roe-v-wade/">This mobilisation stayed the hand of the Supreme Court majority—then, as now, </a>Republican-appointed.
But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest organising fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith in the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/why-doesnt-congress-just-make-roe-v-wade-federal-law">pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law</a>, especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster.
American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism: 
“For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the Ninth Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked”, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/unions-battle-for-survival-hit-new-wave-with-trump-termination-of-bargaining-agreements">Kelley told The Hill</a>. “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.”
Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honour the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House.
In a Boston Review essay, “<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-dead-end-of-checks-and-balances/">The Dead End of Checks and Balances</a>”, political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the US Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people. 
Periods of popular reform have come only when mass movements have forced the political system to break free from the straitjacket of “checks and balances”.
Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. A recent article in Convergence magazine co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions <a href="https://convergencemag.com/articles/labors-strategy-must-lean-into-synergies/">makes the case for reviving the general strike</a> as part of labour’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that the authors view labour activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 elections. So the article notes: “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other”.
This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labour leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside-outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organise “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside”. 
The long <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/whatever-happened-to-political-independence/">history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party</a> has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo rather than shift the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’ corporate-friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labour studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.)
It’s clear that the left and the labour and social movements are in a very precarious state, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out:
“The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.”

Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism

Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate in New York City struck a chord with many people who want a political alternative to the pro-business, pro-war status quo. 
The task for US socialists is to translate this potential into a real movement capable of winning its demands, cutting down the rich and powerful and advancing a radical world view. Unfortunately, only a month after his shock victory, there are clear signs that Mamdani is moving in the opposite direction. 
With the mayoral election set for November, Mamdani is trying to shore up the support of the city’s business leaders. In closed-door meetings with top executives, he has walked back his statement that “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, equivocated on his plans for a rent freeze and repudiated the pro-Palestine slogan “globalise the intifada”. 
He has distanced himself from past criticisms of the New York Police Department and indicated openness to retaining current police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heir and ardent defender of police murder. Mamdani’s pledge to maintain current NYPD funding levels is no small problem for a candidate who harnessed the hopes of anti-racists and Palestine solidarity activists. The NYPD is a massive force for repression: with 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees, it’s larger than some national armies. This is the force that was brought onto the city’s university campuses in 2024 to crush the Gaza solidarity encampments.
Mamdani’s brand pivot from leftist firebrand to safe pair of hands for Wall Street is a predictable product of his political strategy. Mamdani isn’t running for mayor as a stunt to raise the profile of socialist ideas; he’s serious about winning the position. But the whole notion of a “socialist mayor of New York” is a contradiction in terms. Anyone in this position would be responsible for the actions of the country’s largest police force, and would be one of the city’s largest employers, in charge of negotiating wages with 330,000 government workers. They would have to maintain attractive conditions for business to invest in Wall Street, home to the most predatory corporations on the planet. In short, Mamdani seeks an executive position crucial to the functioning of US capitalism. 
The recent experience of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, propelled by the city’s left and labour movement into office, should serve as a warning. Johnson induced unions to sign a no-strike pledge for the duration of 2024’s Democratic National Convention, while his police force attacked Palestine solidarity protesters outside it. The Chicago left that supported his candidacy has emerged from the experience discredited and demoralised. That was Chicago—the pressures exerted by big business and state bureaucrats will be far more intense in New York City.
Mamdani’s political program doesn’t express any real desire to confront these forces. Though he promotes supportable ideas for social reform, none of this is backed up by class struggle politics, even at a rhetorical level. Compared to previous prominent democratic socialists, Mamdani’s messaging lacks the combativity and sense of struggle that is the basic heart of socialism. 
Whereas Bernie Sanders framed his 2016 campaign as a confrontation with the power of the billionaire class, Mamdani implores the left to be “passionate about public excellence ... how we can make government more effective”. One of the objectives listed on his website is to “make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business”. His demands for rent controls and free bus rides, while progressive, are well within the parameters of traditional liberal conventions in New York. In fact, free crosstown buses were previously proposed by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. None of Mamdani’s proposals involves wresting away significant wealth and power from the ruling class. 
Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he hopes to be a “model” for the Democratic Party, pushing it to the left. This is the political approach championed by his organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America. In the US’ restrictive two-party system, leftists who prioritise office-holding above other objectives naturally gravitate toward working inside the Democratic Party, which offers the most immediate avenue for electoral success. But experience shows that instead of pushing the party to the left, participation in the Democratic Party pushes people like Mamdani to the right. They end up being coopted as part of the tamed “progressive” wing of a profoundly undemocratic party run by millionaires and billionaires. 
We’ve been here before. Wave after wave of progressives and self-described socialists have run insurgent campaigns inside the Democratic Party, which generate excitement and a sense of possibility, before quickly disappointing the hopes of their followers and finding a comfortable place in the establishment. 
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory unleashed an avalanche of expectations on the left. But rather than “burning it down”, as one of her staffers promised, AOC instead championed the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral employment contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to funding Israel’s Iron Dome. Politicians like AOC move swiftly from raising people’s political horizons to restraining them. There’s no evidence that Mamdani’s trajectory will overcome the pitfalls of his predecessors. 
His political strategy, promoted by the DSA, gets things completely back-to-front. Democratic Socialists recognise that public sentiment can be well to the left of the establishment. They see left-wing positioning as a means to win office, useful to the extent that it advances electoral gains. This is why DSA member and Jacobin magazine writer Eric Blanc lauded Mamdani for abandoning the demand to defund the police, which Blanc said would have affected his electability. This whole approach contrasts the radical view that participation in elections is important only to the extent that it can promote left-wing politics and social struggle. 
The DSA strategy envisions socialist organisations as cheer squads for elected officials, not vehicles that can act independently of whoever is in government. A co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America made this explicit in a recent interview: “The fate of DSA, and honestly, I think, the progressive movement in New York, is tied to Zohran’s administration, and we’re aware of that”. 
If the fate of the socialist movement in the heart of world capitalism relies on an individual who’s clearly ready to adapt to the structures of New York’s government, then the movement is in for a world of disappointment and demoralisation. 
Socialists can initiate movements for the demands Mamdani raised, such as rent controls, higher wages and taxes on the rich. But this has to start with a commitment to win people to a distinctly socialist strategy, separate from the major parties of US capitalism. 
Mamdani’s popularity reflects mass enthusiasm for left-wing politics, but this sentiment won’t go anywhere positive if it’s funnelled into yet another attempt to radicalise the Democratic Party.

Luca Tavan

Can Zohran Mamdani advance socialism in the United States?

The anti-migrant onslaught in the United States is being significantly expanded with a US$170 billion injection into the border and immigration regime. 
Even before this injection of funds, militarised raids have laid siege to Latino communities. Teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs have descended on farms. And it has become routine for heavily armed, masked goons to <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/07/10/what-goes-on-in-americas-immigration-courts">abduct people</a> from immigration hearings, leaving undocumented people deciding whether to risk arrest by showing up or risk becoming more of a “criminal” by missing their court date.
President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-deportations-arrests.html">had been stymied</a> in his administration’s first months in his attempt to reach unprecedented levels of deportations. But the massive assault that started in Los Angeles in June began to turn the situation around, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752">breaking the record</a> for the most immigration arrests ever. Now, it looks like all systems go for the president’s fascistic agenda. 
The program is real, not rhetoric
In April, <a href="https://azmirror.com/2025/04/08/ice-director-envisions-amazon-like-mass-deportation-system-prime-but-with-human-beings/">ICE Director Todd Lyons pledged</a> to make the deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings”. The administration has a target of 3,000 arrests per day, a tenfold increase on last year’s number. Trump’s “border tsar,” Tom Homan, in early July called for at least 7,000 arrests per day, which would amount to 2.5 million per year.
Migration cops exhibit exceptional cruelty as they attempt to reach these massive government targets. Agents recently camped outside of a hospital for a week to re-apprehend a woman who suffered a health crisis caused by the initial raid, which left her “handcuffed and covered in vomit” for more than eight hours, <a href="https://lapublicpress.org/2025/07/ice-agents-glendale-hospital-waiting-to-arrest-a-patient/">according to a report in the Los Angeles Public Press</a>. 
ICE leaders now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/04/immigration-officials-increased-detentions-collateral-arrests">openly encourage</a> agents to target as many migrants as possible—without warrants or even evidence of criminality. These “collateral” arrests of random people boost deportation numbers as much as any other. Since January, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in arrests of migrants with <a href="https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/55654-people-now-detained-by-ice">no criminal history</a>, and now almost two-thirds of all people in ICE custody reportedly have no criminal conviction. 
When a journalist pointed out these statistics, Homan got openly racist enough to suggest that a person’s “<a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-border-czar-suggests-ice-can-detain-people-based-physical-rcna218285">physical appearance</a>” was a good enough reason for ICE to target them. And shamelessly, raids have expanded to workplaces and community hubs where they expect to find vulnerable undocumented people. 
There is a discrepancy between the number of arrests and the number of deportations because not all arrestees are legally allowed to be deported immediately. But the administration is trying to lower the bar by expanding classifications for expedited removal and <a href="https://www.nycbar.org/reports/the-trump-administrations-early-2025-changes-to-immigration-law/">expediting the removal</a> of those already in proceedings. It has increased the pool of officially targeted immigrants by <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deportations-million-more-undocumented-legal-status-b2773394.html">removing legal protections for more than 1</a> million people. It is also seeking more deals with underdeveloped countries to take payments in exchange for deportees who can’t be sent back to their countries of origin. 
With the massive cash injection to support these attacks, Trump’s stated goals of a million deportations per year start to seem more frighteningly possible than ever. 
Immigrant prisons are reaching new depths of horror
The federal government has allocated an extra $45 billion to expand the country’s detention facilities. The prisons are packed with hundreds more people than they have beds for, sometimes at <a href="https://ig.ft.com/us-immigration-detention/">triple their capacity</a>, and brutal new tent cities are being built. Among them is the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, where cages inside tents were thrown up in eight days to hold hundreds of migrants on a remote airstrip in the sweltering Florida Everglades. 
This effort has fuelled a boom in the for-profit immigrant prison system. Most of these for-profit prisons are incentivised to hold as many people for as long as they can, so they overcrowd facilities, deny medical care and keep sick people detained for as long as possible. The leading prison profiteers involved, Geo Group and Core Civic, have been raking in record profits from human misery and speculating on even better years to come. 
They also use part of their profits to lobby for policies that strengthen their position. Detained migrants accused of crossing the US-Mexico border illegally <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/new-ice-policy-blocks-detained-migrants-from-seeking-bond-f557402a">will not be able to seek bond</a> to be released while their case is processed through the courts. So now, in the months or years in which they are awaiting a decision on their status, they will be trapped in these immigration gulags while prison capitalists will rake in greater profits each day. 
ICE is becoming more powerful
ICE is the primary agency responsible for the arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants within the US. The agency aims to hire 10,000 new agents, nearly tripling its force of arresting officers, and creating the potential for the spate of raids unleashed on Los Angeles to be repeated elsewhere at an even greater scale. 
This already brutal machine has been forged into a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ice-secret-police-horrifying-team-trump-laughing-1235384250/">ghoulish army</a> of masked people snatchers under the Trump administration. They’ve become even more explicitly politically reactionary, using <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/canary-mission-how-us-uses-a-hate-group-to-target-palestine-advocates">Zionist hate groups</a> to find lists of anti-genocide activists to brutalise.
This injection of resources will make ICE the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration">best-funded</a>
police agency in the US—more well resourced <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-funding-world-militaries-b2790466.html">than the vast majority</a> of the world’s militaries. 
The immigration machine is becoming embedded 
One of the other morbid innovations of the Trump administration has been to coopt virtually <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/ice-operation-trump-focus-immigration-reshape-federal-law-enforcement-rcna193494">all federal policing agencies</a> into the immigrant oppression machine. This builds on the legacy of cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and ICE that was established through the Bush and Obama eras in the 287(g) program. When agencies sign onto these programs, local police are deputised as immigration agents and act as a force multiplier for ICE. 
Since Trump came to office, these agreements have <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/immigration-challenges-implementing-the-one-big-beautiful-bill/">increased more than sixfold</a>. More than 6,200 local cops are already deputised as immigration agents. The targeting of people for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfdA9nIDUfk">minor infractions</a> in the hopes that they will be deportable has been an increasingly common pastime for local police, and more migrants are running out of space to breathe. 
Trump’s budget will <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/07/12/trump-budget-bill-police-immigration-criminal-justice">further entrench</a> this cooperation: US$15 billion has been earmarked for local and state collaboration with immigration enforcement. This triples federal expenditure for these agencies. 
People are still fighting
It’s not all bad news, however. Even before the explosion of immigration protests in June, there had been more immigrant rights protests in the <a href="https://acleddata.com/2025/06/12/us-expert-comment-la-demonstrations-the-most-explosive-escalation-of-tensions-between-demonstrators-and-police-since-blm/">first five months</a> of 2025 than in the previous five years. And despite the brutal crackdown that followed the Los Angeles protests, people are still confronting ICE outside <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/ice-immigration-protest-san-francisco.html">immigration courts</a> and demonstrating against <a href="https://www.wuft.org/politics/2025-07-14/protesters-rally-against-proposed-ice-detention-facility-in-clay-county">proposed jails</a>. In one instance, doctors and nurses <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/ontario-medical-office-immigration-enforcement-arrest/">tried to protect</a> vulnerable workers when they took shelter in a California medical clinic. 
An Economist/YouGov poll in July found that 52 percent of Americans think that Trump’s immigration policies are too harsh, up from 40 percent six months ago. A Gallup poll also found that the share of people wanting immigration reduced dropped from 55 percent last year to 30 percent today. So while only a minority of people are fighting against the government, the number of people hostile to Trump’s policies is growing. 
The administration has unleashed a brutal attack, and the future is frightening, but the situation remains volatile. What we witnessed last month in Los Angeles shows the potential for a fightback. Let’s hope the next fight is even bigger.

Brendan Stanton

Trump is creating ‘one big beautiful’ gulag state

NEW YORK—There is justifiable delight across the US left over the super-rich’s panicked response to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary last month. Whatever the outcome of the general election in November, the result is good news for all those seeking to build an activist response to the hard right turn in US politics under Donald Trump, including socialists who reject voting for Democrats on principle.
Activists have long focused on the issues that drove Mamdani’s win: a rent freeze, affordable housing, free buses, free child care for kids up to age 5, a higher minimum wage and progressive taxes. But Mamdani’s candidacy, driven by thousands of volunteers, highlights such efforts and their popular appeal in a city where the <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/49-topics/economy/683-as-incomes-gap-widens-new-york-grows-apart">richest 1 percent controls 44 percent of all wealth</a>, a fourfold increase in three decades. 
Mamdani appealed to the <a href="https://robinhood.org/news/robin-hood-annual-poverty-tracker-report-shows-25-overall-poverty-rate-in-new-york-city-climbing-beyond-record-highs-observed-in-2022/">one in four people who live in poverty</a>. He won big in immigrant communities and left-leaning neighbourhoods populated by young intellectuals and white-collar workers. This is partly because 52 percent of renters spend more than <a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-rental-housing-market/">30 percent of their income on housing</a>. Housing costs that hammer even the middle class mean minimal options for the poor: some <a href="https://citylimits.org/wait-times-for-nycha-apartments-doubled-last-year-as-number-of-vacant-units-climb/">278,000 are on waiting lists</a> for public housing.
These are just some of the long lists of statistics that explain how Mamdani stunned the establishment by trouncing the scandal-ridden former governor, Andrew Cuomo. Hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb sounded the alarm to his cohort, <a href="https://x.com/DanielSLoeb1/status/1937800092255183096">declaring on social media</a>, “It’s officially hot commie summer”. The Mamdani spectre haunting Loeb came even as President Donald Trump tried to drop the hammer on US urban politics by sending the Marines into Los Angeles to crack down on immigrant rights protesters.
Mamdani and his supporters have imposed themselves on the Democratic establishment, including union leaders, who mostly endorsed Cuomo. But the New York state legislator, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, faces the same constraints as any Democratic politician. One need not look too far back in history to see how the party is a shock absorber for left-wing electoral efforts within its structures.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who campaigned for president as a Democrat, became the Senate Finance Committee chair during the Biden administration, carrying the president’s agenda rather than pushing for the reforms he’d advocated on the campaign trail. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate who burst onto the scene with a Democratic primary win over a New York powerbroker, has staked out mainstream Democratic positions and disappointed her socialist backers with her stance on Palestine, union rights and much else.
Barack Obama, who crafted a progressive brand as a candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, made corporate handouts his top priority once in office, while workers suffered through the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. The disappointment of Obama’s successive administrations created the opening for Trump to be elected as a “populist” eight years later.
Mamdani’s success on a more left-wing program and his real shot at becoming mayor of New York won’t make him immune from these pressures, which are especially acute for anyone aiming to run the headquarters of world capitalism. Nor will his success transform the character of the Democratic Party.
What’s different is that Mamdani’s success defies the Democratic pattern of retreat. Most Democratic legislators have done nothing to challenge Trump’s power grab and the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/us-republicans-pass-the-most-damaging-laws-in-generations">passage of federal legislation</a> that will strip health care from millions, increase the immigration crackdown to monstrous proportions, boost military spending and cut taxes for the wealthy. What’s even more remarkable is that the message of resistance to Trump is being carried by a youthful figure with a Muslim background who’s stood up for Palestine amid a witch-hunt across US politics and academia against anyone criticising Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
Mamdani’s success has led to two approaches among New York’s financial oligarchs: discredit and destroy, or contain and coopt.
It is hard to tell if those pursuing the first strategy are more outraged by Mamdani’s plan to raise their taxes or his support for Palestinian rights. As journalist <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/zohran-mamdani-and-mahmoud-khalil-are-in-on-the-joke?utm_campaign=cm&amp;utm_source=crm&amp;utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_SubPersRec_020520&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;bxid=604695f06ea59138606fc186&amp;cndid=64050397&amp;hasha=8ecae643b2ebaec30f78f91ab7d16dce&amp;hashb=30047e3e6b001e088c14e7e66134985210e5549f&amp;hashc=4a0480735e1f1439ba1de333abd360ce5706083ba1ba8dc795f297bbf98757e7&amp;utm_term=NYR_CYGNUS_PERSRECS">Hanif Abdurraqib noted</a>, “far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X that Mamdani wanted to bring both Sharia law and communism to New York City”. But what matters to the bosses most is the threat to their money. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the dean of Wall Street bankers, said that Mamdani is “<a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/jamie-dimon-criticizes-zohran-mamdani-marxist-blasts-democrats-dei-push-big-hearts-little-brain">more a Marxist than a socialist</a>”. Kathryn Wylde, head of a business council, the Partnership for New York City, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/business/dealbook/new-york-mayor-mamdani-cuomo-business.html">summed up the mood of her peers</a>: “Terror is the feeling”. 
The Wall Street oligarchs aiming to discredit and destroy Mamdani assumed they had succeeded in permanently rewiring New York City politics in their interest. One of their own, Michael Bloomberg, boss of the media and technology empire that bears his name, served as mayor in the 2000s. During his tenure, the Democrat-controlled city council rewrote local laws to allow him to run for a third term as he focused on real estate development in the city, symbolised by multiple super-tall residential skyscrapers as homes for the world’s wealthiest.
Bloomberg’s successor, liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio, served the following two terms, ushering in some reforms such as extended public preschool. But he failed to reverse Bloomberg’s reductions in public sector pay and benefits and tended to his own real estate allies as his popularity waned. 
De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, a Black former police captain who first gained a public profile by calling out police racism, took office in 2022 on a program prioritising law and order. He was backed by Bloomberg and other wealthy residents. Multiple scandals led to Adams’ indictment on federal charges. But Trump’s Justice Department dropped the case—an obvious exchange for the mayor’s support for Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Adams, who had no chance of winning the Democratic mayoral nomination, skipped the primary and created his own party from scratch.
This created an opportunity for Cuomo to make a political comeback. Cuomo, who’d been forced to resign as governor following a series of sexual harassment allegations and a cover-up of COVID deaths in elder care facilities, immediately attracted tens of millions in campaign contributions. Bloomberg was again at the centre of the fundraising action.
Now, money is again flowing to him for the general election—Cuomo created his own party in case he came up short in the primary. (Democratic politicians who denounce the left for attempting to build third parties have no hesitation in doing so when it serves their interests, as was the case in the <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/11/buffalo-new-york-india-walton-mayoral-election-byron-brown">mayor’s race in the city of Buffalo</a> a few years ago.)
If the wealthy Mamdani-haters can’t stop him from being elected, they will resort to Wall Street’s playbook from New York City’s fiscal crisis of 1975. At that time, the federal government refused to provide financial aid, and the state governor and legislature put the city under the effective control of an unelected commission dominated by Wall Street bankers. The result: tens of thousands of layoffs of municipal workers and cuts to social services. The Trump-era version of such measures would be harsher still. The White House has already promised to punish New York if voters elect Mamdani.
A Mamdani victory is a very real possibility. Cuomo’s failure in the primary and his uncertain-at-best prospects in the general election have led to a contain-and-coopt effort by some prominent business leaders, who scoff at the notion that Mamdani’s victory would drive the ultra-rich and Wall Street banks to move to Miami en masse. Dubbed <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-mamdani-millionaires-supporting-the-socialist-for-nyc-mayor-13c1636b?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAimg6O7LLbl5--Y6CUVLT5e2rL93grwVR3HHy04OvwKJx4B7LbQvMUVPjgAN_4%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6879e38f&amp;gaa_sig=tZXMvFOJewE-nvDSGWa-lxCShixNREM4taLNlXB3RYB1oRRQDzYuHgj77KX3dgYihF6Uk6rZP76CX1mMD5tGkQ%3D%3D">“Mamdani millionaires”</a> by the Wall Street Journal, this group has a broad range. It includes younger well-off professionals who nevertheless find New York intolerably expensive, are aghast at the intensifying social inequality and would prefer moderate forms.
Others seeking to engage Mamdani include pragmatic deal makers who realise that blindly carrying out the program of the billionaires is courting a mass resistance far more threatening to their interests than Mamdani’s program. These liberal elites view Mamdani’s campaign promises as a milder version of the municipal program of the 1930s and 1940s under liberal Republican Fiorello La Guardia, who won elections by making concessions to a powerful labour movement and a big left dominated by the Communist Party. The result was a New York City-specific enhancement of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. Mamdani’s program seeks to revive such programs—but in the context of a far weaker labour movement and dramatically smaller left.
Given this balance of class forces, the business liberals calculate that a Mayor Mamdani could be curbed. Their plan is modelled on their approach to the 1989 election of David Dinkins, a DSA member and the first Black person elected mayor. Dinkins defeated a Democratic incumbent and Republican Rudolph Giuliani in large part because of widespread outrage over a series of racist murders. The corporations quietly strangled Dinkins’ agenda and funded a successful Giuliani comeback on a law-and-order, pro-business program.
If victorious, Mamdani should expect similar treatment. If he does not accommodate these liberal ruling-class elements, they’ll join the hardliners in backing an opponent. And most business elites who pragmatically support or tolerate Mamdani today would back his opponents in a future election anyway, even if Mamdani were to make big concessions to them.
With some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet on one side and a democratic socialist with many thousands of grassroots volunteers on the other, the left is under a lot of pressure to get involved in the electoral campaign. 
Yet it is not necessary to join Mamdani’s campaign and vote Democrat in order to take initiatives around the issues raised in this campaign. Rent freezes and housing costs are just one example: the nearly century-old tradition of rent control and stabilisation in New York will have to be revived as an activist movement for tenants’ rights, as will the struggle for a higher local minimum wage. Such fights can now be stepped up in New York and beyond, along with the ongoing struggles for Palestine and immigrant rights.
Whatever the outcome of the New York mayoral race, a mass, activist left independent of the Democratic Party will be needed to win the social gains Mamdani’s supporters seek. 
G. Stewart is a socialist and journalist in the US.

G. Stewart

The billionaires’ Mamdani freak-out and opportunities for the US left

Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since: who knows? 
Ronald Reagan’s first budget in 1981, which marked a major conservative turn in US social and economic policy, seems moderate by comparison. Comparisons to other historically racist, repressive and anti-immigrant laws of the past—the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, the 1924 Immigration Act or even the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—are not out of the question.
For such a radical change in social and economic policy, it barely squeaked by. Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate to pass it. And it received 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a four-vote majority in the 435-member chamber.
Many horrible things have been shoehorned into its nearly 1,000 pages, as Republicans who voted for it without reading it will discover. And while the GOP members might be pleasantly surprised by what they find, everyone else will be horrified. Three major impacts of this big, ugly mess are clearly discernible from the details.
The rich are made richer. The bill permanently extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that were tilted toward the rich. According to <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School</a>, the richest 0.1 percent of households will, on average, be more than $300,000 better off in 2027.
While the tax part of this bill preserves the status quo, it also exempts larger fortunes from estate taxes and increases the deductability from federal taxation of the amount of money taxpayers pay in state and local taxes. The “pro-working class” tax reforms that Trump and the Republicans will tout—no taxes on tips, added tax deductions for seniors 65 and over, and no taxes on overtime earnings—<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/temporary-tax-breaks-in-trumps-big-beautiful-bill.html">are heavily circumscribed and temporary</a>. All of them will disappear by 2028.
Even if one accepted the standard “trickle-down” argument that cutting taxes on the rich leads to a boom in investment and growth, it’s hard to see how largely preserving the status quo will provide “rocket fuel” for the economy, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/06/02/rep-darin-lahood-on-reconciliation-bill-this-is-going-to-be-rocket-fuel-for-the-economy.html">as Illinois Republican Representative Darren LaHood put it</a>. Even more fanciful is the notion that the unleashed economic growth will lower the government’s budget deficit and allow the tax cut to “pay for itself”. This has become an article of Republican faith approaching almost religious status, <a href="https://www.crfb.org/papers/tax-cuts-dont-pay-themselves">despite 50 years of empirical evidence to the contrary</a>. But Republicans have sustained their strategic goal of starving the government of funds and putting the onus on a future Democratic administration to raise taxes to cover government spending.
The poor are made poorer. To get the funds to make the 2017 tax rates permanent, to increase the military budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time and to establish a vast deportation machine, Trump and the Republicans are stealing from the poor. The University of Pennsylvania analysis suggests that the poorest 20 percent of households will endure a 7.4 percent decline in income by 2033.
Over the next decade, the bill cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid (medical insurance for low-income people) and about $500 billion each from Medicare (medical insurance for the elderly) and food assistance. This is the single largest cut ever to the already thin social safety net. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/">As Sasha Abramsky, writing in </a>the<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/">
Nation, put it:</a> 
“If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now a generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.”
Cuts to Medicaid will cost 12-17 million people their health insurance, depending on which estimate is more accurate. About 3 million will lose access to food assistance. But the effects go far beyond those cuts. Safety net hospitals, especially those in rural areas, will cut services and jobs, if not close altogether. Cuts to subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance will drive up out-of-pocket expenses. Soon, everyone’s health insurance will cost more and cover less.
This has nothing to do with rooting out “waste and fraud” or securing these programs for the future, as Republicans claim. Many of them have lied through their teeth, saying that the act doesn’t cut Medicaid, even though the black-and-white of the bill said so. The key point is that this represents, in crystallised view, the political right’s full agenda: tax cuts for the rich, entitlement cuts for the poor and the showering of money on the military and other repressive apparatuses of the state. 
“They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority”,<a href="https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/why-they-did-it"> the liberal writer Paul Waldman explains</a>. “And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, ‘This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it’.”
Anti-immigrant repression will be turbocharged. One of this package’s biggest “winners” is the immigration enforcement apparatus, which will receive more than $170 billion over the next four years. To put it in perspective, the current budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—whose masked agents are kidnapping people off street corners and from workplaces—is just under $10 billion.
The amount of money devoted to this arrest/detention/deportation operation will be more <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/congress-throws-more-money-at-removing-immigrants-than-most-countries-spend-on-their-armies">than is allocated to other federal agencies like the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons—even the US Marine Corps</a>. The sort of operation that ICE conducted in Los Angeles earlier this year will be expanded in every major city in the country simultaneously. And with an unaccountable, militarised police force operating nationwide, no-one—including US citizens—will be safe.
The federal government has been authorised to spend more than $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities like Florida’s <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/03/where-is-alligator-alcatraz-detainees-escaped-immigration-facility-nj/84457477007/">Alligator Alcatraz</a>, which will mostly house people who are not charged with a crime, but who are slated for deportation. The assault on the social fabric and civil liberties that is coming will be unprecedented since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
Because most of these facilities will be privately operated and crash-built, the opportunities for corruption will be limitless. Talk about “waste, fraud and abuse”! They could even be a source of <a href="https://sentientmedia.org/people-in-ice-detention-forced-to-work/">forced labour for industries such as farming and construction</a> that depend on immigrant workers.
With states and localities losing Medicaid, one of the largest federal sources of local and state budgets, they will be hard pressed to resist the one source of federal money where the spigot is fully open—that is, the billions that will be available to sign up local law enforcement as a “force multiplier” for ICE. And if rural hospitals close down, the GOP is hoping that ICE prisons will provide substitute <a href="https://boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-megabill-would-turbocharge-local-immigration-enforcement/">jobs that will entrench them in local political economies for the foreseeable future</a>.
For now, the “big beautiful bill” is, by most reliable measures of public opinion, extremely unpopular. In fact, it is the second most unpopular bill considered in Congress since the 1990s (second to Trump’s 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act), <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/one-big-unpopular-bill">according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris</a>. The party-line vote, in which no Democrats in either the House of Representatives or the Senate voted for it, means that the GOP owns it and its consequences.
The Democrats expect its unpopularity and adverse effects will help them win one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. But November 2026 is a long way off.
Moreover, Democrats don’t have clean hands. Their messaging on the bill focused on how it would slash Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Fair enough. But in 2023 and 2024, in an effort to restore “normalcy” after the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration ended the expansion of Medicaid, tossing <a href="https://www.kff.org/report-section/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker-enrollment-data/">16 million people from the program</a>. This was one of the contributing factors to <a href="https://www.crisesnotes.com/one-election-takeaway-voters-hate-temporary-safety-nets/">Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election</a>. 
Democrats were also reluctant to condemn the expansion of ICE and its gulag. Again, that’s to be expected from a party that has spent the last few years running away from any pro-immigration stance. Forty-eight House Democrats and 12 Democratic senators voted with the Republicans for the Laken Riley Act, which is helping ICE to round people up, and 75 of them <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/75-democrats-house-antisemitism-resolution-ice-gratitude-2083177">supported a resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE</a>.
All of this means that the Democrats, the courts, and other institutions are not coming to save us. In fact, many of them are being coerced or corrupted into accepting Trump’s austere authoritarianism as the new normal. The labour and social movements can only depend on ourselves to prevent the US’s further slide into the abyss.
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Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

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