Above: Zohran Mamdani with Alex Soros, son of George Soros.
The ideological frameworks that used to hold dominance over the politically conscious masses, and define how they responded to our society’s problems, have lost their former sway within quite a short time span. These ideologies had held hegemonic power for a long time; but when the moment came in American history that people could no longer believe in our ruling institutions, it only took a few years for the masses to make an unprecedented transition. A transition where they first gravitated towards populist figures, became increasingly disillusioned with these populists, and thereby gained political experience that could let them actually defeat our ruling class.
Support for controlled opposition leaders can no longer be sustained in the way that it could be only a decade ago, because these leaders themselves had to be sent in as an emergency measure; by 2016, the traditional leaders had lost political viability, so pseudo-radical leaders like Sanders and Trump had to be used as substitutes. The problem with this ruling-class narrative management model is that the pseudo-populists keep needing to be replaced, because the people are looking for real allies and will largely catch on when they get betrayed.
This process of disillusionment is never total, of course; there’s always a delay between the objective changes in conditions, and the speed with which the people come to understand these changes. In the case of the “democratic socialist” brand, though, by 2020 the momentum had already in great part run out. When he ran a second time, Sanders lacked much of the support that he’d had in 2016, and this was in part because of the anger which had been provoked by AOC and “the squad.” People on the left who are principled about fighting the Democratic Party, like Jimmy Dore, did not pretend like AOC was correct to give up the battle over healthcare in 2018. So those in Dore’s camp became the new insurgency, while the liberal pundits who backed AOC positioned themselves as the new “Blue Dog” establishment Clintonites.
The question that these disillusioned former Bernie supporters then needed to grapple with, and that they’re being confronted with amid Zohran’s betrayals, is which direction to take the working-class movement when we know it can’t win through reformism. In the midst of the 2018-2019 era “Berniecrat” fallout, the conclusion myself and many other former Sanders supporters came to was that we must pursue the path of the Bolsheviks. That the workers need to overthrow the capitalist state, and build a state of their own. Our coming to this realization was a major breakthrough; and there were libraries worth of history and theory which we could study to get a deeper idea about how to materialize such a goal. To make Marxism-Leninism concretely mean something in today’s America, though, we would first need to learn from the crises that our society was shortly going to experience.
Part of why Zohran’s anti-establishment image is crumbling even faster than AOC’s was, with leftists like Dore being unwilling to entertain Zohran when they initially entertained AOC, is because our movements have recently been exposed to developments which are unprecedented. Ten years ago, Americans hadn’t yet been forced to get experimental vaccines in order to work, they hadn’t seen a war with as much direct economic blowback as Ukraine, and they hadn’t been collectively traumatized by seeing their government blow up babies in Gaza. These realities have made it so that when Zohran refuses to hire back the firefighters who were fired over the Covid mandates, or openly partners with the Zionist billionaires he was supposed to be fighting, the backlash is multiplied.
We are seeing a shift in the culture, where the working masses within both the conservative and left-wing camps keep turning on their leaders. And as Mao pointed out, a cultural shift brings us closer to revolution when the culture has been holding back society’s advancement: “When the superstructure (politics, culture, etc.) obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive. Are we going against materialism when we say this? No. The reason is that while we recognize that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness, we also—and indeed must—recognize the reaction of mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism.”
The decline in support for Obama liberalism, and for the false left-wing politics that Zohran represents, is part of a deeper reaction within our society towards U.S. imperialism’s decline. The only Americans who would seriously be okay with Zohran screwing over workers as a penalty for not following pandemic rules are the liberals within boutique society; within the “creative class” that has no connection to the proletariat, and looks down on workers despite claiming to be progressive.
Many working-class Americans have been drawn to the “progressive” Democratic candidates because these figures use the rhetoric of a proletarian leader, but these figures keep revealing themselves to be materially aligned with boutique society. And the left-wing workers are realizing that their interests aren’t reconcilable with those of the “creative class,” leading them to follow the same patterns as the MAGA workers who’ve turned against Trump. Regardless of their cultural associations, or the partisan affiliations that they grew up with, Americans keep heading in the same revolutionary direction.
Right now, our ruling class and its Zionist collaborators are trying to take advantage of the migration away from boutique leftism, seeking to justify new crackdowns in the name of defeating “the left.” Like how the Zohran Mamdani psyop will successfully influence parts of the left-wing base, the Zionist right will be able to sway parts of the MAGA base; but what the last decade has taught us is that even when a psyop is successful, it’s never as successful as the narrative managers want it to be. Not in the unstable landscape that America has entered into, where we have a perpetual economic crisis that’s forcing the masses to test out new political paths.
Idealism is certainly still a problem that we need to combat; but even as idealism’s propagators launch a new campaign, repeating the promises about how the Democratic Party will be changed from within, we can see that a shift has occurred compared to the past campaigns. Zohran cannot fully replicate the success of AOC’s marketing strategy from 2018, which itself ran into major problems quite fast. It’s not a matter of the ruling-class ideologies losing all effectiveness right away, it’s a matter of them needing to play catch-up faster as time goes on. Our task is to mercilessly smash idealism, and thereby let the people see a clear path towards victory.
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