A Turning Point: Progressive Landslide in the Heart of Establishment Power

By Theo Horesh

Zohran Kwame Mamdani. (Photo: Bryan Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons)

Let’s take this as an opportunity to remind our leaders of how much virtually everybody who is watching detests this genocide and demands that it end.

A Muslim, Democratic Socialist, who founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and accused Joe Biden of starving Gaza—who calls for free busing and childcare, and city run grocery stores in food deserts, paid for by a tax hike on millionaires and billionaires—just won the Democratic primary for Mayor of the most Zionist city in the world outside of Israel.

And to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

The significance of this race cannot be overestimated. If you stand for genocide, you are going to fall in the primaries. If you do the bidding of billionaires, we are coming for you. And AIPAC isn’t going to be able to take down a hundred progressive candidates in the coming primaries, like they did when they dumped tens of millions of dollars into defeating Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, and no one else.

They simply do not have enough money to take them all on, and what we are seeing here is a generational shift of historic proportions.

Mamdani is an exceptionally exuberant leader, perhaps the most charismatic politician to hit the American scene since Obama. But he was also riding a wave of collective disgust with the party, resulting from their support for the most closely watched genocide in history, with its multiple offshoot wars in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran—along with their failure to stand down Trump.

There is only so long they could ignore the party base, and for countless millions, genocide was the last straw.

But if the Democratic Party goes, so goes Israel. For once, there is a genuine debate about their endless crimes against humanity, Americans will fall out with Israel faster than you can say, “we spent $50 billion to help them starve a million children and shoot toddlers in the head?”—that is, if Israel is not toast already.

Easily the most despised nation in generations, Israel has become the Phillip Morris of states, a poisonous brand synonymous with evil—and there is no rebranding the endless shredding of children. Nor is there a way for a party that brands itself as multicultural and humane to associate itself with what is increasingly seen as the Nazism of the twenty-first century without looking like an evil clown parade.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mamdani is that he gives us a sense of what it might be like to come away from the genocide in Gaza with contagious optimism, uncompromising idealism, outrageous energy, a down-to-earth love of humanity, and extraordinary real-world potential.

In that sense, he is someone we all would do well to emulate, someone who has come out of this genocide ready to fight for a better world —with an open heart and boundless friendliness. His campaign certainly pointed the way to how we might win.

Mamdani still has to face a Republican and the current corrupt mayor of New York, who is running as an independent, in the general election in the fall. But we just showed the party establishment the way of the future. And just as they can dump hundreds of millions of dollars into defeating him, we can campaign for him from any position on the planet right here online.

Blanket the comment sections of the articles about him, and make them feel we are the wave of the future. Meanwhile, let’s take this as an opportunity to remind our leaders of how much virtually everybody who is watching detests this genocide and demands that it end.

– Theo Horesh is a human rights advocate and public intellectual, who has written hundreds of articles on genocide, climate change, fascism, and democracy. He is the author of four books on the psychosocial dynamics of globalization, including The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy, and his most recent, The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Storm. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.