This week, New York City delivered what a lot of people are calling a historic moment for the left. Three congressional candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their Democratic primaries, ousting two sitting members of Congress in the process. Brad Lander took down longtime Rep. Dan Goldman. Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, beat out the Brooklyn Borough President who had the backing of the retiring incumbent. And Darializa Avila Chevalier, who organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, knocked off Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a five-term member of the House. Mamdani stood on stage afterward and said it again, the same line he’s been repeating since his own mayoral win: this is not the end of a movement, it’s the beginning. People are celebrating. I am not. Not because I want the left to lose, but because I have watched this exact movie before, and I know how it ends.
I’ve said this before and I will keep saying it until people stop pretending it isn’t true: Democratic Party entryism does not work. It has never worked. Every time a self-described socialist, democratic socialist, or “leftist” decides the smart play is to run inside the Democratic Party rather than build something independent of it, the same thing happens. They get absorbed. They get diluted. They start out sharp and they end up soft, and the further they climb, the softer they get. This isn’t a hot take, it’s a pattern, and patterns deserve to be named every single time they repeat, because the people running this strategy are betting that nobody is counting.
Look at Mamdani himself. I’ve written about this before and I’ll say it plainly again: the positions he ran on are not the positions he’s governing on. The free buses, the rent freeze, the city-owned grocery stores, all of it has been negotiated, watered down, slow-walked, or quietly shelved in the process of actually running the machine of city government. You don’t have to take my word for it. Watch channels like Bad Empanada and Socialism 4 All on YouTube, who have been tracking this in granular detail since Mamdani took office. They use a word for what’s happening that I think is exactly right: treats. Medicare for All. Housing for all. Free this, subsidized that. The stuff Americans, understandably, want and need. The stuff that polls well and feels like winning. And it can be real, materially real, for the people who receive it. That’s not nothing. But treats are not the same thing as a transformed system, and the comfort of getting a treat is precisely what makes people stop asking what’s being traded away to produce it.
Here’s what’s being traded away. While Americans get their treats, the empire keeps running, and someone has to pay for the empire. It is never the people cutting the checks. It’s never the politicians smiling at the ribbon-cutting for a new free transit line. The bill gets sent abroad, to the countries getting droned, sanctioned, blockaded, and invaded so that the machine producing American “abundance” keeps turning. You cannot fund a welfare state and an empire at the same time without somebody footing the bill, and the people footing the bill are never the ones holding the microphone at the celebration party. That’s the actual trade being made every time a “leftist” inside the Democratic Party delivers a treat while staying silent on the violence that subsidizes it. It is not a coincidence. It is the deal.
And sure, these politicians will say they oppose war. They’ll post something solemn. They’ll say “deeply concerned” in a press release. But say it with me: rhetorical opposition is not the same as meaningful resistance. Do any of them actually use their position to obstruct, to organize, to make the empire’s business harder to conduct? Almost never. And we don’t have to speculate about this in the abstract, because we just got a perfect, almost cruelly clean test case.
A few days into Mamdani’s term as mayor, in January of this year, the United States bombed Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a military raid on his compound, and flew them to New York City, the city Mamdani runs, to be put on trial. This was not a metaphorical imperialism. This was the literal apparatus of American empire landing in his jurisdiction, with his hostage paraded through DEA headquarters blocks from his own desk. I said at the time that this would be the test. Not a hypothetical test, not a someday test, but an immediate, concrete, fell-into-his-lap test of whether a self-described democratic socialist mayor would use his platform to say anything real about an act of imperial aggression happening in his own city. He failed it. He hasn’t meaningfully challenged it. He hasn’t used his office, his platform, or his movement’s energy to organize against it. Silence, when the empire’s prize hostage is sitting in your own backyard, is not neutrality. It’s a choice, and it tells you everything about where the actual boundaries of “the movement” sit once you’re inside the party that runs the empire.
And it’s not just Venezuela. In a few days it’ll be the Fourth of July, America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, and the empire is not exactly taking the week off to reflect. The United States and Israel have been at war with Iran since February, a war that’s dragged in Lebanon, rattled the Strait of Hormuz, and disrupted oil markets and global shipping for months. There’s a ceasefire memorandum now, but ceasefires in this war have not stuck for long, and the broader machinery of the conflict, the buildup, the strikes, the casualties, has not actually gone away. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine grinds on, still funded, still fed, still treated by Washington as an open tab rather than a tragedy that needs an actual diplomatic ending. None of this is hidden. None of this requires special access to know about. It’s on the front page. And the loudest socialist victories of the week are happening in the same news cycle as all of it, with barely a connection drawn between the two by the people celebrating.
Oh, and Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire this month too, even if his net worth has wobbled back down below that mark in the days since. Just sitting there as a fact, a single human being briefly holding more wealth than entire nations produce in a year, while the empire that protects that wealth bombs other countries and the domestic political “left” debates whether free buses count as a revolution. It would almost be funny if it weren’t so completely, unrelentingly bleak.
So when I say Democratic Party entryism doesn’t work, this is what I mean. It’s not that the people involved are personally dishonest or acting in bad faith on a human level. Plenty of them probably believe every word they said before they got elected. It’s that the structure itself does the converting. You cannot run as a Democrat, govern as a Democrat, build coalition with the Democratic establishment, and depend on Democratic Party infrastructure for your next election, without that structure slowly, patiently filing down every edge that made you dangerous to the system in the first place. The party doesn’t need to silence you. It just needs to give you enough treats to distribute, enough credit to claim, enough proximity to power to make you cautious, and the radicalism does the rest of the work by quietly disappearing on its own.
This is why I don’t trust the Democrats, and I don’t trust anyone who calls themselves a leftist or a socialist and chooses to run as one. Not because individual policies they pass are necessarily bad on their own terms. Universal healthcare and housing as a human right are good things, full stop, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise to score purity points. The problem is what those policies are allowed to cost, who actually decides that, and what gets left completely off the table in exchange for being allowed to deliver them. A movement that can win a sweep of NYC primaries but can’t say a clear word about an invaded country’s deposed president sitting in a cell three miles from City Hall is not a movement that has captured the party. It’s a movement the party has captured, dressed up in DSA branding so the captivity feels like a victory.
I don’t say any of this to be cynical for its own sake, or because I enjoy being the person at the party pointing at the news ticker. I say it because the stakes of getting this wrong are not abstract. They’re measured in who gets bombed, who gets disappeared into a federal courthouse, and whose government gets toppled so a deal for cheap oil can get signed a few weeks later. Treats are real and they matter to the people receiving them, I’m not going to pretend a rent freeze means nothing to a family that needed it. But treats bought with someone else’s blood are not socialism. They’re not even close to it. They’re the oldest trick in the empire’s book, dressed up this time in DSA branding and democratic primary victories, and people are cheering for it like it’s something new.
It isn’t new. We’ve seen this movie. We know how it ends. The only question left is how many more rounds of “this time it’s different” people are willing to sit through before they stop believing the sequel is better than the original.