Between Mamdani and Prairieland

Approaching the midpoint of a second Trump presidency, how’s the US Left doing? It all depends on your angle of vision.

On June 23, the Democratic Socialists of America pulled off a surprise sweep in New York’s  legislative primaries, unseating centrist Democrats in a number of races, cementing Zohran Mamdani’s mandate, and stoking panic in the party establishment nationwide. On the same day, a federal judge in Texas sentenced eight defendants to a combined 450 years in prison in connection with a protest held at the Prairieland ICE detention facility, where an exchange of gunfire between a police officer and a protester left the former wounded. Over a dozen individuals were arrested in the weeks that followed. Prosecutors spun loose associations between near-strangers into a tightly organized “North Texas Antifa Cell” of domestic terrorists plotting to ambush ICE agents. The threat inflation netted the state an extraordinarily draconian sentencing: after the dust settled in July, 16 people now collectively face over 556 years.

Mamdani and the primary sweep are the crowning achievements of a string of recent electoral gains for DSA affiliates. For supporters and enemies alike, it appears that millennial socialism is all grown up and beginning to pose a serious challenge. The long march through the institutions that began with the 2016 Sanders presidential run is finally bearing fruit. Darializa Avila Chevalier’s ouster of Adriano Espaillat throws the emerging Mamdanian formula into relief: a populist focus on affordability bolstered by the moral prestige of outspoken stances on Palestine and immigration hits the incumbents where it hurts, spotlighting their weaknesses and distinguishing the newcomers on issues now non-negotiable for the most politically engaged segments of their base (and increasingly popular beyond it).

The Prairieland case, meanwhile, is the latest crest of a wave of repression that began under Biden and accelerated after Trump’s return. Biden’s response to the Gaza movement and crackdown on supposed Chinese and Russian agents hinted at what was to come; Trump declared it openly with the promulgation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), rallying the bureaucratic fiefdoms of America’s post-Patriot Act police state to focus on “far-left domestic terrorism.” From Minneapolis to Los Angeles, the picture is grim. Every day, headlines and rumors bring reports of another FBI raid, border detention, or congressional subpoena. The Minnesota 15, facing conspiracy charges for protesting Operation Metro Surge; the Michigan 8, charged similarly and threatened with decades behind bars for alleged vandalism in support of Palestine; Sam Tunick, detained by CBP at the border for alleged connection to the Stop Cop City movement and now facing a felony charge for entering a security password that wiped his phone; immigration status threatened or revoked for social media posts; dorm rooms ransacked; devices seized; polite door knocks promising immunity in exchange for names and dates. And at the heart of the push sits the Department of Homeland Security—flush with cash, granted access to expansive new surveillance technology, and openly salivating on official social media accounts about jackbooted brutality against migrants and political enemies alike.

As the post-2008 Left inches closer to a long-dreamed-of accession to state power, the shadow of state repression, even state terror, looms. Yet these parallel developments feel somehow distant from one another, rarely mentioned in the same conversations. How can we explain the gap?

Missed Connections

It has deep roots. The Millennial Left was born from two distinct streams, the “twin children of the financial crash”. One is best represented by Occupy Wall Street, animated by the grievances of downwardly mobile college graduates; the other by Ferguson, a specifically post-crash reemergence of perennial black struggle against police violence. For the first few years after the bubble popped, the streams mostly ran parallel. It took a second shock to bring them together: the rise of the MAGA right.

Providing a focal point, Trump 1 gave us the Millennial Left as we know it. Through its spectacular norm-breaking and the varied breadth of its attacks, MAGA not only knit together the movements represented by Occupy and Ferguson, it sparked a dozen more, from new feminisms and environmentalisms to immigration defense and an amorphous anti-fascism, approaching the “omnicause” of centrist derision.

By 2017, the DSA had become an organizational centerpiece of this expanded Left renaissance, retrofitting a sleepy post-New Left relic into the flagship of the Occupy cohort, now intensely interested in seizing power at the ballot box after the apparent near-miss of the Bernie campaign. The organization’s rapid growth, however, left it closer to an ideological clearinghouse than a political party. Working groups and caucuses within the organization struggled with how (or whether) to reconcile the “economistic” populism of the first Sanders campaign with competing “extra-economic” priorities which were, nonetheless, inseparable from DSA’s comeback. 

For its Berniecrats and border abolitionists alike, the Millennial Left was in a tough position. The bread-and-butter populist side of Democratic Socialism could—somewhat plausibly—claim to address issues like the ascendant radical right or police violence by attacking their political-economic roots. In the short term, however, they often demanded de-prioritizing them in the name of coalition-building and political realism. The radicals could denounce electoral efforts as distraction or institutional co-optation. But in practice, their rival efforts tended to rely on the same pool of activists and sympathizers summoned, above all, by the 2016 presidential race, and still oriented towards elections as the default arena of American political life. The stage was set. Recurring controversies around carceral abolitionism or open borders wracked the DSA—and Millennial Socialism as a whole—as its ranks swelled throughout Trump’s first presidency.

2020 brought the tension to a head in the parallel letdowns of the George Floyd Rebellion (where the biggest protest mobilization in decades caught the DSA flatfooted, organizationally irrelevant on the ground and unable to channel the energy into its existing projects) and the second Sanders campaign (defeated again despite a belated dose of “extra-economic” race and gender messaging). For the first three years of the Biden presidency, the Millennial Left slipped into a stupor. The missed connection with the masses in 2020 and the seat at the table promised by Biden’s green industrial policy seemed to militate for less tenant unions and more ersatz think tanks, maybe building new political machinery to rival the Democratic establishment’s. Meanwhile, those with a focus on police and the border either put those impulses on hold or found themselves sidelined. Activists of all stripes turned inwards as they tried to chart a path forward.

The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza shook them back into motion together. The solidarity movement hit the streets and overcame the post-2020 hangover, reversing the Left’s flagging enthusiasm and breaking its electoral wing’s courtship with the Biden White House for good. Thrown back on their own resources, the DSA and their candidates got a bump from the Gaza movement’s crisis-response urgency. Mamdani’s outspoken support of Palestine, first feared to be a liability, proved a decisive selling point for the voters that put him in office. For the post-2020 DSA’s electoral efforts to take off, they turned out to need exactly the sort of confrontational protest and anti-racist, anti-imperialist “moralism” eschewed by the factions of the organization most focused on the polls.

It’s tempting to see DSA’s recent electoral success as a belated higher synthesis resolving the old tensions, epitomized in Avila Chevalier’s passage from Gaza encampment leader to congressional nominee. It's far too early, however, to declare such a synthesis achieved. The divides thrown into relief by 2020—both within the ranks of the activist Left and between them and the broader American working class—weren’t overcome by the Gaza movement so much as suspended or ignored. However popular some of its positions and candidates, Democratic Socialism still has yet to find the durable mass base it’s searching for. Without one, it depends all the more on the energy and commitment of its Leftmost wing, even as that politics is also feared as an alienating obstacle to further growth. For those less interested in holding office, the ballot boost lent by anti-imperialist street militancy has yet to be repaid in a revived extra-parliamentary protest movement. And just as the momentum Gaza solidarity generated is beginning to help win elections and re-orient a rising cohort of DSA candidates, the politics the movement embodied are becoming a serious legal liability, threatening to shatter any nascent unity all over again. 

Un-American Activities

If the US Left’s coherence looks tenuous from the inside, our enemies see things differently. For them, we have a clear unifying theme: once wokeness, now third-worldism. After a few months in circulation among conservative pundits, the term was elevated to an official diagnosis in the State Department’s recent report Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. Trumpeted on Rubio’s official X account, the document attempts to trace the tentacles of Castro’s third-worldist influence across decades of hemispheric subversion—including, in the present, Palestine solidarity activists, the National Lawyers Guild, “anti-ICE resistance networks,” the DSA, and Zohran Mamdani himself, ranged jarringly alongside hardline anti-imperialist cadre organizations and convicted Cuban spies. 

Of all the options available, why is this the MAGA right’s chosen angle of attack at this moment? It might help to look closer at what they say they’re scared of—not revolution, but subversion. A threat rolling in from overseas, seeping up through the floorboards of the homeland, hanging like a fog over universities, progressive NGOs, barista trade unionists and octogenarian ICE-observers.

The essence of this diffuse paranoia gets clearer at the margins. Take, for example, the targeting of eccentric communist financiers Neville Roy Singham—associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the People’s Forum—and James “Fergie” Chambers—associated with Palestine Action US. Both are accused of ties to foreign states or movements hostile to the US, and both are somewhat notorious to the mainstream Left represented by the DSA. Each has contributed large sums to anti-ICE and pro-Palestine organizing in the US. Both, therefore, provide opportunities for the national security state to target anything they’ve touched under the auspices of rooting out terrorism and foreign influence operations—and to paint a unified threat from abroad where most would see a tangle of mutually hostile domestic activists. So the People’s Forum now joins a growing list of organizations staring down congressional subpoenas, grand jury investigations, and IRS referrals on suspicion of acting as Chinese or Russian agents, while Chambers sits in a Spanish prison fighting extradition to the US on allegations of terrorist financing and conspiracy to riot.

Less obviously, a similar transnational logic appears in the latest iterations of the “Antifa” specter as well. The US has long struggled to formally designate domestic groups as terrorist without running afoul of the constitution, but prove a domestic group is sufficiently linked to a foreign group so-designated (FTO) and many of the protections afforded to homegrown organizations evaporate. Deployed against Arabs and Muslims throughout the war on terror, we’re beginning to see the same playbook applied to antifa in earnest. 

The move dovetails with a complementary development epitomized by Prairieland: the further metastasis of domestic terrorism prosecution. Pioneered late in the Cold War and supercharged after 2001, this body of law revived the guilt-by-association principles wielded against the radicals of the early labor movement, now updated within the framework of the Global War on Terror and supplemented with the conspiracy and racketeering-type charges infamous from the War on Drugs. The recent expansion and mutation of these tactics is novel, even by the standards we’ve gotten used to since the Patriot Act. The earlier application of state-level domestic terrorism and RICO charges in the Stop Cop City cases now looks like a taste of what was to come.

In Minnesota, where the net was cast even wider, we get a glimpse into where the trends are headed. Under the moniker Operation Puppet Master, DHS surveilled protestors at a depth and breadth unseen since 2020 and implemented sweeping probes of over a dozen different unions, NGOs, and Left collectives for their alleged role supporting anti-ICE protest efforts, now styled as domestic terrorist financing in support of antifa guerrillas. It’s clear that the war on foreign subversion and the war on the Left are being treated as one in the same—first in rhetoric, now increasingly in substance.

After expanding DHS’s ambit and juicing it with an infusion of $70 billion, Trumpism is well on its way to transforming the Department into its personal secret police. Other federal law enforcement agencies don’t seem quite as on board, but factions within each certainly are, as is the hard core of Trumpism’s rank and file. However mixed the public response to the past two years’ spectacular ICE raids, swathes of the Republican party base are as enthusiastic as ever to wield bloody terror against Marxist-Islamist radicals. 

What separates ordinary crime from subversion or treason? National security, made central by recent or impending international conflict. It’s no accident that our two Red Scares bookend the thirty year span of the two World Wars. McCarthy’s great adversary was not socialism or even communism per se but foreign subversion—“un-American activities.” And while McCarthyite witch-hunting is more famous as an emblem of the paranoid Right’s war against domestic reformers, it drew its warrant from the transnational menace it focused on. However fiercely their crusade bit into the ranks of patriotic progressives, their real enemy was the foreign hordes and their subversive agents.

As the Middle East burns, a re-arming Europe shuts its doors on migrant boats sinking by the dozen, and China’s economic eclipse of the US continues unabated, Trump’s rerun evinces the old fears in even clearer terms, identifying a single “third worldist” threat in otherwise bitterly divided segments of the Left. However far the earthquake spreads, we should recall the epicenter. The repressive state’s prime target remains the tactics, slogans, movements, and networks most oriented towards the Global South and least bound by the borders of the US polity. But just as in the last two Red Scares, the crusade won’t stop there, and attempting to amputate that politics—like a lizard dropping its tail—is no guarantee of safety. 

Strange Unity

We should all be bracing for impact. How? In any possible response, the basic choice is whether to band together or to fragment further—not just as groups or individuals, but in terms of the projects we decide to pursue. Will anti-imperialist, pro-immigrant street movements and Democratic Socialist electoral efforts—presently still a tenuous venn diagram—polarize further into totally distinct camps, or will we, somehow, find a way forward together? Two major versions of this choice present themselves.

First, socialists in office will need to decide whether—or how much—to distance themselves from the conflict between the security state and the Left’s more transnational commitments. A worst-case scenario would be active collaboration between DSA electeds and Trumpist repression, however reluctant. While some were quick to dismiss the idea as cynical, Mamdani’s record—to take the most obvious example—isn’t encouraging so far.

Despite early interventions on behalf of high-profile pro-Palestine protestors threatened with deportation, as of yet he’s failed to follow through on campaign promises to scale back the sprawling NYPD surveillance state he inherited (along with its close ties to Israeli intelligence). He declined to disband the notorious Strategic Response Group, instead placing it under his personal supervision—recently authorizing its deployment against activists protesting an ICE arrest and again during Netanyahu’s visit for the UNGA (where Avila Chevalier was among those arrested).  Just weeks ago, he appeared alongside Rebecca Weiner—NYPD’s highest ranking intelligence officer and counterterrorism expert, architect of the raid that ended the Columbia occupation and key link in the Department’s relationship with Tel Aviv—in a press conference warning of the threat of “far-left, far-right, [and] anti-government” terrorism. 

This is risky rhetoric to endorse for a mayor who’s included by name in Rubio’s dossier of Cuban-influenced left-extremists, and who was still denied federal security clearance over nine months after taking office. Maybe his hands are tied. Maybe it’s a calculated gamble to protect his fledgling municipal socialism. One thing’s certain: whatever the dilemmas Mamdani is facing in Gracie Mansion, future DSA candidates in higher offices are bound to face similar and worse.

A different choice faces those engaged in the type of organizing centered in the Trumpists’ crosshairs. Should those focused on internationalism or riskier tactics appeal to their electorally-inclined comrades for support and attempt to sway their electeds, or do they write them off as sellouts and figure out how to fend for themselves? Choosing the latter wouldn’t be easy. It would mean an even greater degree of isolation than the Left as a whole already struggles with—which is probably what’s prevented such a total break so far.

Because we do all have a strange sort of unity forced on us by circumstance, whether or not we recognize it. The entire organized Left’s only reliable base at the moment is itself, plus a slightly wider penumbra with a similar social background, concentrated among graduates of traditional four-year residential colleges. This is a source of constant anxiety and evasion, but it’s hard to ignore. The would-be working-class populists have the activist set to thank for their modest recent electoral gains, and the would-be radicals are equally dependent on their moderate peers for a social sea to swim in. 

Whether we like it or not, this objective community of interest is re-asserting itself through the dual prospects of state terror and electoral success, both embryonic but real. Each seems to suggest a very different prognosis for the organized Left in the coming years—isolation from the American mainstream on one hand, integration into it on the other. Each could simply come true for different parts of the Left, reflecting and deepening our fragmentation. But if the terror and the success overlap —as Rubio’s swipe at DSA, Mamdani’s debt to the Palestine movement, and a narrow shared base among America’s professional-managerial class suggest they might—circumstances may force a single, contradictory transformation on all of us, reshaping the Left once again. Whether it shatters further or becomes something new, change is certain. What sort of change is, at least in part, up to us.

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