Eric Ross, An Exit Off The Trumpian Highway to Collective Suicide?

It never seems to end, does it? There’s always another boat in the Caribbean (not to mention the Pacific Ocean) to send to the bottom of the sea, and it increasingly seems that Donald Trump is also bringing war home in a big-time fashion. As the first billionaire president in American history, he’s clearly doing it for the truly rich, including the record number of billionaires (at least 902 of them) now in America. As Bernie Sanders said recently at the enormous Washington, D.C. No Kings rally, “This moment is not just about one man’s greed, one man’s corruption, or one man’s contempt for the Constitution. This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth, who, in their insatiable greed, have hijacked our economy and our political system in order to enrich themselves at the expense of working families throughout this country.”

And he added, “We rejected the divine right of kings in the 1770s. We will not accept the divine right of oligarchs today.” Only recently, millions of Americans (I was one of them!) marched in No Kings rallies across the country to make that very point, carrying signs like “We don’t bow to billionaires!”

One thing is missing, though, in the growing opposition to an increasingly unpopular president and that’s a genuine political movement against the barbarism of this moment. Yes, Zohran Mamdani is likely to be elected mayor of my own city in November, but generally — Bernie aside — the politics of opposition in the Democratic Party seems all too weak and mild. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Eric Ross look back at American history and the role socialism once played in its politics. Consider it a way of remembering that there are indeed other worlds than the one we now find ourselves in. Tom

Socialism or Barbarism
Reviving the History of the American Left
BY ERIC ROSS

More than a century ago, from a Berlin prison cell where she was confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Her diagnosis remains no less salient today.

In the United States, we long ago chose the path of barbarism. Trump and his enablers have proven major catalysts in hastening our descent, but they are symptoms as well as causes. The compounding crises of our time, from ecological collapse to immense inequality to endless war, were hardly unforeseeable aberrations. They are the logical outgrowths of a capitalist system built on violent exploitation and rooted in the relentless pursuit of profits over people.

The unsustainable economic order that has defined our national life has corroded our democracy, eroded our shared sense of humanity, and propelled our institutions and our planet toward collapse. Today, we find ourselves perilously far down the highway leading to collective suicide. What the final autopsy will include — be it nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, AI-driven apocalypse, or all of the above — no one can yet be certain.

Yet fatalism is not a viable option. A different direction for the country and world remains possible, and Americans still can meet this moment and avert catastrophe. If we are to do so, Luxemburg’s prescription, socialism, remains our last, best hope.

That conviction animates the democratic socialist campaign of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. In a bleak political climate, he offers a rare spark of genuine hope. Yet his mass appeal has provoked a remarkable, if predictable, elite backlash. He’s faced Islamophobic smears, oligarch money, and backroom deals (efforts that, Mamdani observed, cost far more than the taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the Democratic establishment has chosen the path of cowardice and silence, or at least equivocation.

The outrage over Mamdani is not only about the label “socialist.” Every American has heard the refrain: socialism looks good on paper but doesn’t work in practice. The subtext, of course, is that capitalism does. And in a sense, it has. It has worked exactly as designed by concentrating obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench its power. Especially since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over elections, drowning out ordinary voices in a flood of corporate money.

What makes Mamdani’s campaign so unsettling to those (all too literally) invested in this status quo is not merely his critique of capitalism but his insistence on genuine democracy. His platform rests on the simple assertion that, in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world (as should be true everywhere across this nation), every person deserves basic dignity. And what undoubtedly unnerves the political establishment isn’t so much his “radical” agenda but the notion that politics should serve the many, not the privileged few, and that the promise of democracy could be transformed from mere rhetoric to reality.

Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics. Reviving socialism in this country also requires reviving its history, recovering it from the hysteria of the Red Scare and the Cold War mentality of “better dead than red.” Socialism has long been a part of our national experience and democratic experiment. And if democracy is to survive in the twenty-first century, democratic socialism must be part of its future.

The Roots of American Socialism

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of immigration brought millions of workers to the United States, many carrying the radical ideas then germinating in Europe. Yet such beliefs were hardly alien to this country. The growth of labor unions and the rise of leftist politics were not foreign imports but emerged as a byproduct of the dire material circumstances of life under industrial capitalism in America.

By 1900, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial power, surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913, producing nearly one-third of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. That share would climb to nearly half of the global gross domestic product by the end of World War II. However, the immense accumulation of wealth was not shared with those whose labor made it possible. American workers endured intense poverty and precarity, while being subjected to grueling hours for meager pay. They saw few meaningful protections, and suffered the highest rate of industrial accidents in the world.

When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they faced not only the monopolistic corporations of the Gilded Age, but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of inequality. Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an extraordinary degree. The richest 10% of Americans then owned some 90% percent of national assets, with such wealth used to buy power through the cooptation of a state apparatus whose monopoly on violence was wielded against labor and in defense of capital. As Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease described the situation in 1900, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

That was evident as early as 1877, when railroad workers launched a nationwide strikeand federal troops spent weeks brutally suppressing it, killing more than 100 workers. Such violence ignited a surge of labor organizing, thanks particularly to the radically egalitarian Knights of Labor. Yet the Haymarket Affair of 1886 — when a bomb set off at a May Day rally in Chicago provided a pretext for a bloody government crackdown — enabled the state to deepen its repression and stigmatize the labor movement by associating it with anarchism and extremism.

Still, the socialist left was able to reconstitute itself in the decades that followed under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived experience in the American Railway Union. There, as he recalled, “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.”

In 1901, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America. Over the next two decades, socialist candidates became mayors and congressional representatives, winning elections to local offices across the country. At its peak in 1912, Debs captured nearly a million votes, some six percent of the national total, while running as a third-party candidate for president (and again from prison in 1920). For a time, socialism became a visible, established part of American democracy.

“This War Is Not Our War”

Yet socialism faced its most formidable test during the First World War. Across Europe and the United States, many socialists opposed the conflict, arguing that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” a framing that resonated with broad segments of the American public.

The socialist critique went deeper than class resentment. For decades, socialists were drawing a direct connection between capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of labor at home and its predatory expansion abroad. Writing during the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism, as European powers carved up the globe in the name of national glory while showing brutal disregard for the lives of those they subjugated, progressive and socialist thinkers contended that imperialism was anything but a betrayal of capitalism’s logic.

Russian communist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin called that moment “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Capitalists labeled it the cause of “civilization.”) While British economist John Hobson similarly maintained that empire served not the interests of the nation but of its elites who used the power of the state to secure the raw materials and new markets they needed for further economic expansion. “The governing purpose of modern imperialism,” he  explained, “is not the diffusion of civilization, but the subjugation of peoples for the material gain of dominant interests.” That was “the economic taproot of imperialism.”

Similarly in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading civil rights advocate, situated the war in the longer history of racial and colonial domination. He traced its origins to the “sinister traffic” in human beings that had left whole continents in a “state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation,” making the “rape of Africa” imaginable and therefore possible. War, he argued, was the continuation of empire by other means. “What do nations care about the cost of war,” he wrote, “if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”

Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such critiques. In 1916, she wrote: “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines.” Of the First World War, she concluded, “the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”

Once Washington entered the war, it criminalized dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the same “emergency measure” that would be used, during future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.

After a 1918 speech condemning the war, Debs himself would be imprisoned. “Let the wealth of a nation belong to all the people, and not just the millionaires,” he declared. “The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.” The call for a world “in which we produce for all and not for the profit of the few” remains as relevant as ever.

Socialism After the Scare

The Red Scare of 1919, followed by McCarthyism in the 1950s and the broader Cold War climate of hysteria and repression, effectively criminalized socialism, transforming it into a political taboo in the United States and driving it from mainstream American discourse. Yet, despite the ferocity of the anticommunist crusade, a number of prominent voices continued to defend socialism.

In 1949, reflecting on a war that had claimed more than 60 million lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, he insisted, “is not condemned, because of its biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.” The alternative, he wrote, lay in “the establishment of a socialist economy,” with an education system meant to cultivate “a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success.”

Martin Luther King Jr. carried that struggle against capitalism, racism, and war forward. Building on the legacy of the Double-V campaign, he called for confronting the evils of White supremacy at home and imperialism abroad. In grappling with those intertwined injustices, he increasingly adopted a socialist analysis, even if he didn’t publicly claim the label. For King, there could be no half freedom or partial liberation: political rights were hollow without economic justice and racial equality was impossible without class equality.

As he put it, you can “call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Rejecting the pernicious myth of capitalist self-reliance with biting clarity, he pointed out that “it’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

In his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the American war in Vietnam, King made the connection clear. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he warned, “is approaching spiritual death.” America, he added, needed a revolution of values, a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” one. As long as “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights [are] considered more important than people,” he concluded, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

A Better Country and World is Possible

The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, who challenge entrenched power, is, of course, anything but new. It reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy. To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few. Mamdani and crew can’t be exceptions to the rule, if such a vision is ever to take root in this country.

In Donald Trump’s grim vision for and version of America, democratic institutions are decaying at a rapid pace, the military is being used to occupy cities with Democratic mayors, and tyranny is replacing the rule of law. Fascism has never triumphed without the assent of elites who fear the rise of the left more than dictatorship. Mussolini and Hitler did not take power in a vacuum; they were elevated by an elite democratic establishment that preferred an authoritarian order to the uncertainties of popular democracy.

Meeting today’s crises requires more than piecemeal reform. It demands a reimagining of political life. The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.

This country once again stands at a crossroads. Capitalism has brought us to the edge of ecological, economic, and moral catastrophe. Today, the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 93% of Americans combined, a trajectory that is simply unsustainable. The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it. The question is no longer whether socialism can work in America, but whether American democracy can survive without it.

https://tomdispatch.com/socialism-or-barbarism/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

US President Donald Trump has said he believes New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani “could do a very good job.” The political opposites held their first in-person meeting at the White House on Friday.

”I can tell you, some of my views have changed… I feel very confident that he can do a very good job. I think he is gonna surprise some conservative people, actually,” Trump said, praising Mamdani’s electoral victory.

A democratic socialist and little-known state lawmaker who won New York’s mayoral race earlier this month, Mamdani requested the sit-down with Trump to discuss cost-of-living issues and public safety.

After months of trading insults in the media, the mayor-elect and the president appeared to strike a rapport in the Oval Office.

“We agreed on a lot more than I thought,” Trump told the reporters following a private meeting. “We have one thing in common: we want this city of ours that we love to do very well.”

“It was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers,” Mamdani added.

Mamdani’s victory in the heavily Democratic city earlier this month came despite fierce opposition from conservatives and little enthusiasm from mainstream Democrats. Trump had branded him a “communist lunatic,” predicting that his policies would push New Yorkers to flee the city for Miami.

As Mamdani surged in the polls to victory, Trump issued threats to strip federal funding from the city. The mayor-elect has consistently criticized various policies put forth by Trump, particularly those aimed at increasing federal immigration enforcement in New York City, where nearly 40% of the population is foreign-born.

https://www.rt.com/news/628155-nyc-mayor-mamdani-could-do-very-good-trump/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SEE ALSO: AN AMERICAN IN MOSCOW.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIQrUX4VXmo

He's like Neil Kinnock, George tells New York caller Tom, he talks all this leftist guff but has no intention of implementing it

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will cut school and homeless programs to balance budget

BY Sandy English

The administration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was elected in November amid mass anger over unaffordable housing, collapsing social conditions, and staggering inequality in the nation’s largest city. Less than a year later, it is moving to implement austerity—preparing cuts to education, housing and homeless programs to meet the legal requirements of a budget “balanced” on behalf of the bond markets and the financial aristocracy.

In a hearing on Wednesday before the City Council, Sherif Soliman, Mamdani’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—a veteran of the Bloomberg, de Blasio and Adams mayoral administrations—noted that the city’s recently appointed Chief Savings Officers had identified $1.7 billion in cuts to various city departments. These include vacating underused office space in the Sanitation Department, lowering telecommunications pricing in the Fire Department, and modernizing technology and downsizing leases. 

The presence of another career austerity technician at the head of OMB underscores the class continuity of the Mamdani administration: behind the DSA brand stands the same apparatus that has enforced decades of cuts.

Health and Hospitals, the city-run public hospital system, will cut overtime and ramp up collections to save $14.1 million this year and $25.7 million next year. These cuts, however, were already accounted for when Mamdani announced the deficit of $5.4 billion last month.

Of the $1.7 billion, only $275 million has been identified, at least publicly. Soliman told the hearing that the remaining $1.45 billion has not yet been approved, since the OMB is taking a “scalpel” to cuts and reviewing them closely. In a press briefing after the hearing, Soliman said, “We’ve taken it as far as we can go to find those savings without cutting critical services.”

More significantly, according to city sources who spoke to the New York Times, cuts would also come from funds to implement the legally mandated plan to decrease class size in New York City public schools. The journal Chalkbeat estimated that $58 million has been cut from the Department of Education so far, but that cuts could range as high as $800 million, although city officials would not confirm that.

The cuts also include a plan to abandon an increase in assistance to CityFHEPS, a key program that helps people in city homeless shelters and those evicted from housing to find new homes.

The expansion of the program was voted into law by the City Council in 2023 and opposed by Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, and then mandated by an appeals court in July. On Tuesday, the Mamdani administration filed a notice with the New York State Court of Appeals (a higher court in the New York state legal system) seeking to halt enforcement of the program’s expansion.

The Mamdani administration is in deep crisis precisely because the DSA has no answer to the budget diktats of Wall Street except capitulation. Its role is not to mobilize working people against the financial oligarchy, but to impose austerity while smothering opposition with “progressive” rhetoric.

On March 11, the credit rating agency Moody’s shifted the city’s outlook (the likely direction of the rating over the next six to 24 months) from Stable to Negative.

On March 20, Fitch/Kroll, another major credit rating agency, announced that its outlook for the city’s finances was also negative, noting that it “expects the city’s fiscal profile to weaken as it navigates a period of elevated expenditure pressure.” This is the bureaucratic language of austerity, and the billionaires whom the ratings agencies represent are clearly concerned that Mamdani’s proposed solutions to the budget crisis are unworkable and insufficient.

Mamdani has floated two of those solutions in recent months. The first is to encourage Governor Kathy Hochul, a right-wing Democrat, to approve a 2.5 percent tax increase on all incomes over $1 million and a just-under-2 percent tax increase on corporations.

Only the state legislature can implement these taxes. While a joint session of the Democrat-dominated Assembly and Senate has “approved” the tax increases, it has not voted on them. Even if it does so, as part of the 2027 budget, it is highly unlikely that Hochul will sign them into law. Even if she did, the taxes would still have to be approved by the New York City Council. The new speaker of the Council, Democrat Julie Menin, has indicated that she would oppose this.

Mamdani has left it up to the New York City DSA to make a show of pressuring Hochul, whom he endorsed in the upcoming Democratic state primary. Mamdani has not attended the DSA rallies or lobbying efforts calling on her to pass the millionaires’ tax. These protests are nothing more than politically dishonest exercises in distraction, as the DSA leadership knows.

As an alternative to budget cuts in case the millionaires’ tax is not passed, Mamdani has proposed a 9.5 percent increase in New York City property taxes. This would directly impact one million predominantly working-class and middle-class homeowners in the city, as well as small businesses, while indirectly impacting tenants in smaller housing units. Even if it brought in $3.7 billion in revenue for the city, the property tax hike would still leave a $5.4 billion deficit, since it is “baked in” to the Mamdani administration’s proposed budget. 

The property tax hike is so unpopular among homeowners that a recent New York Times article observed that the proposal is all but dead. The City Council will not support it, and it promises to evoke mass protest. All it appears to have done is to disrupt—if only slightly—Mamdani’s alliance with Kathy Hochul and the right wing of the Democratic Party.

The implications of the inability to raise revenue by increasing taxes and the pressure exerted by the credit rating agencies are significant not only because education and social conditions will continue to deteriorate in the most socially unequal big city in the United States—as gas and commodity prices rise because of the war against Iran—but, just as importantly, because it exposes the utter bankruptcy of the Democratic Socialists of America in power.

The DSA was voted into the mayor’s office promising minor reforms—such as free bus service, about which virtually nothing has been heard in recent months—and a freeze in rents for the city’s million rent-regulated apartments, a pledge that is itself in doubt and about which Mamdani’s rhetoric has notably cooled.

Instead, the pseudo-left DSA is now offering austerity and police repression, both conditioned and exemplified by Mamdani’s notorious political alliance with Donald Trump, the benefits of which go entirely to the fascist in the White House.

The second meeting between Mamdani and Trump, on February 26, occurred after Trump’s ICE goons had murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, two days after Trump’s State of the Union address, and just as the forces of Operation Epic Fury were preparing to launch an unprovoked war on Iran. 

This is the path followed by the DSA: not only an alliance with the corporate Democratic Party, but collaboration with the most odious representative of the financial oligarchy. While Mamdani has called the attack on Iran an “illegal war of aggression,” he has refrained from naming Trump or members of his cabinet as war criminals and calling for their arrest and prosecution.

This alliance with Trump goes hand in hand with Mamdani’s alliance with Hochul, with the city’s big business representatives and with their political offspring in the person of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

The support for the New York Police Department (NYPD) is particularly revealing. Mamdani praised the police after the killing of former Fire Department lieutenant Michael Lynch in a hospital in Brooklyn in January and the shooting of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant, the same month in Queens—both during psychotic episodes.

This week, city lawyers argued that the NYPD is not obligated to protect people from violence in a suit brought by a bystander who was attacked by Zionist thugs during a protest against an appearance by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s fascist national security minister, in Brooklyn in 2025. City attorneys are seeking to dismiss the suit on a variety of other grounds as well.

Mamdani has not disbanded the Strategic Response Group, the notorious NYPD “anti-terrorist” unit that was so active in suppressing student demonstrations against the Gaza genocide, as he promised in his campaign. He and Tisch have cited “operational hurdles” and safety concerns as primary reasons for the delay, although it is clear that even if the unit were disbanded, its responsibilities and officers would simply be reassigned to other units that would function in the same way, that is, suppressing protests.

In a similar vein, Mamdani has not said whether he will sign or veto a bill passed by the City Council on Thursday requiring the NYPD to develop and implement standardized “response plans” for managing protests at educational and religious sites to ensure public access and safety, without mandating a specific fixed-distance buffer zone. Mamdani signed an executive order in January that set a 15-to-60-foot buffer.

The law (and Mamdani’s executive order) is widely seen not only as a violation of First Amendment rights but as a concession to Zionists who opposed protests near synagogues where Palestinian land on the West Bank was being sold by Israeli and American realtors—illegal under international law. The bill also seeks to regulate protests outside college campuses, but, just as insidiously, it can apply to protests against the presence of ICE outside public schools.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/28/aahk-m28.html

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.