❈ ❈ ❈

A Seattle Socialist’s Victory Gives Elite Media the Jitters

Ari Paul

New York City isn’t the only city to have elected a democratic socialist as mayor. Seattle voters ousted incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell for community organizer Katie Wilson, who had the endorsements of unions, Democratic clubs and the Stranger (7/2/25), the city’s alt-weekly.

She credited her win to a “volunteer-driven campaign among voters concerned about affordability and public safety in a city where the cost of living has soared as Amazon and other tech companies proliferated,” AP (11/13/25) reported. The wire service noted that “universal childcare, better mass transit, better public safety and stable, affordable housing are among her priorities”—similar to those of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Corporate media are not happy about her victory, priorities or rhetoric. The Seattle Times editorial board (11/17/25) said upon her victory that she “painted her opposition as big businesses content with keeping people down,” and countered that residents will “fear that no one will come when they call 911, that parks will be unusable, that small businesses will shutter because of crime and revenues that don’t keep up with expenses.”

‘Woke Republic of Seattle’

The reliably right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/13/25) called Wilson “Mamdani West,” and described her as “soft on crime but tough on businesses.” The paper scoffed, “Maybe Ms. Wilson will moderate her views once she is confronted with the responsibilities of office, but the campaign had little evidence of that.” The board ended, sarcastically, “Good luck.”

In a smaller editorial, the Journal (11/17/25) mocked the “Woke Republic of Seattle,” quoting Wilson saying:

I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and people of color communities, as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.

The editorial board continued:

Now, that is some coalition. But what’s a 2SLGBTQIA+ community? We looked it up. It’s apparently an acronym for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, with the + covering anybody who feels left out.

With all of these groups to satisfy, we’re not sure there are enough jobs to go around. But may the Two-Spirit be with the mayor.

The New York Times (11/13/25) gave Wilson’s win tepid coverage, offering an unexciting news piece that failed to put her victory into context or contemplate the gravity of ousting a powerful incumbent. It also, bizarrely, quoted that defeated incumbent—and never quoted the actual winner of the race.

Childcare and other ‘goodies’

But it was the Washington Post editorial (11/16/25) about Wilson’s win that takes the cake here. And that makes sense: Socialist and left-wing activists in the Puget Sound point fingers at Amazon and other corporate giants as the main drivers of inequality.

The Post is owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration this year as president, the Post has vowed to become more right wing on the editorial page (NPR, 2/26/25). This fall the opinion page took a “massive stride in its turn to the right by hiring three new conservative writers after losing high-profile liberal columnists,” as the Daily Beast (10/2/25) noted.

First, the Post belittled Wilson’s proletarian life and went on to degrade her political priorities for being tied to her economic position. It said:

Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” childcare and other goodies.

“Goodies” in this case mean services that make life affordable for a working parent who doesn’t own much, like Wilson. This is in a town with feudal levels of inequality: “While one-third of residents are classified as low-income, one out of every 14 is a millionaire” (KCPQ, 6/12/24). Seattle’s housing rental costs are “among the highest in the nation, ranking 16th among the country’s 100 largest cities,” while the city’s “median rent is now also 47.4% higher than the U.S. average of $1,375, placing it on par with prices in Los Angeles and Oakland” (KCPQ, 3/7/25). An op-ed in the Seattle Times (3/18/25) noted that in the state generally “Hunger is on the rise” while “Food banks and meal programs are on the front lines of an unprecedented hunger crisis.”

This is truly a “let them eat cake” moment for the Bezos Post. The Post went on:

The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.

Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.

It’s bad enough that a paper owned by a Bond villain is mad that the next mayor of an expensive city has too much compassion for the homeless. But the dismissal of the grocery store idea isn’t based in fact, as Civil Eats (8/20/25) noted that “publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail.” Civil Eats said that “every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA),” with more than 200 stores around the world generating $5 billion in annual revenue. The outlet added, “If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”

‘Identifying class enemies’

The editorial was an echo of the Post’s earlier pearl-clutching (11/8/25) in response to Mamdani’s victory speech:

Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies—from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers—and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.

Bezos, as part of the billionaire class, finds himself as the target of this year’s leftward electoral swing. “Affordability” was Mamdani’s buzzword, an offense to the Bezos board, who wanted to hear “growth,” a catchphrase for the financial elite. Bezos’ position makes sense from his rarefied position, but that is precisely why billionaire-owned media, whether it’s the Ellison family’s consolidation of TikTok and CBS or the Murdoch empire of Fox News and the New York Post, are bad for democracy. These are media that are materially situated to side with landlords and bosses over tenants and workers, but there are no outlets in major media with editorial boards that consistently lean in the other direction.

Once again, these editorial boards are not afraid that Wilson and Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.

These media don’t grapple with why voters aren’t scared of socialism and want the rich to pay more for services. It is up to them to make a case that voters should choose a political platform of consolidating political power with the billionaire class.

[Ari Paul has reported for the Nation, the Guardian, the Forward, the Brooklyn Rail, Vice News, In These Times, Jacobin and many other outlets. Courtesy: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), a US-based progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.]

❈ ❈ ❈

How New York and Seattle Mayoral Victories Point the Way to Systemic Change

Patrick Mazza

The subversive power of imagination

In my last post I recalled the vision of historian William Appleman Williams seeking an American future beyond “empire as a way of life,” as he called and documented it through his career as one of the leading radical historians of the 20th century. Williams proposed reconstituting the United States as a confederation of regional commonwealths, each building social ecological economies geared to the needs of people and nature.

I quoted Williams from an earlier series I did on his thinking : “’We must return . . . to the Articles of Confederation. That document offers us a base from which to begin our voyage into a human future; a model of government grounded in the idea and the ideal of self-determined communities coming together as equals when and as necessary to combine forces to honor common values and realize common objectives.’ We must ‘create an American commonwealth of regional communities.’”

Obviously this is far from our current situation, where the Constitutional order is breaking down under an out-of-control president, a feckless Congress and a Supreme Court tilted far to the right. But this very breakdown opens the door to consider dramatically different alternatives. A system that brought us to this point obviously needs to change.

I posed Williams’ vision in the spirit of science fiction writer Ursula Leguin’s writings on the subversive power of imagination, which she demonstrated in her many books dreaming different worlds.

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary,” Leguin wrote. ”Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.”

We need imagination. We need vision to see beyond our current morass and point the way to a better world. Facing the darkness of our current situation, we have never needed it more. As much as we need to put up resistance to the depredations of the current administration, we also need to understand how we have fallen into this hole and how we can build our way out of it.

Two events show the way

Of course, when posing a bold dream, such as Williams’ vision of a new continental confederation, questions of practicality naturally rise. What are the paths forward? How do we get there from here? In the weeks since I wrote that earlier post, two events have occurred which point the way, the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor, and the apparent election of Katie Wilson as Seattle mayor. The latest vote count put her ahead by an apparently unassailable margin, though it may go to a recount.

In both cities, common people are being crushed under the exploding costs of housing, food and other basic human needs. Both Mamdani and Wilson ran on practical platforms for municipal action where the market is failing to provide reasonable alternatives. They promised efforts to create affordable housing, rein in landlords and improve transit, among other elements. Each called for progressive taxation. Wilson’s platform is here. Mamdani’s is here. In each city, they beat long-term machine politicians in bed with business interests. They relied heavily on grassroots mobilization, being significantly outspent in their campaigns.

Each campaign demonstrates the beginnings of a path to the future. I say the beginning, because ultimately the level of political change that will be needed will require a vastly stronger and more widespread social movement than is present today. It will have to spread out from progressive urban cores, and will need to embody an agenda that moves beyond reform to deep transformation.

In terms of movement, we need to make ways to bring together a range of current movements around a common agenda. Among them, and this is by no means and exhaustive list, are municipalists, bioregionalists, democratic socialists and progressive populists, human rights advocates, labor activists, and people who are working for specific changes such as social housing, public banking and single-payer health care. A vehicle that can draw varied groups together is the community assembly. These are democratic forums that exist parallel to elected bodies which can develop a common platform and push for enactment. They can make democracy a continual process rather than just an exercise on election day.

In terms of ambition, it is clear that we are on shaky ground economically, socially and ecologically. The current economic system is concentrating power and wealth in too few hands. It is operating in a way that is causing social disintegration and ecological overshoot, particularly evident in climate heating. We need to build a new social ecological economic system that spreads wealth and power more broadly while operating within planetary boundaries. We need to begin building it in our cities and states, communities and bioregions.

The need for continued mobilization

None of this is to in any way downplay the stunning accomplishments of Mamdani and Wilson. They both ran steep uphill races against high odds, proposing changes that will improve life for most people. To achieve those changes they will have to continue the popular mobilizations that won them their new offices. The forces stacked against them will be huge. In this continued process, new coalitions can be drawn together and successes achieved that build toward greater ambition.

Ultimately, we can look to a deeply transformed political and economic system that really will turn around the crises facing our country and world. We need dreams and visions of what is possible to move us there. On the way, we can take practical steps in the places we live to move toward broader changes. The tasks facing us are monumental, but we can begin with steps we take in our own communities. We must build the future in place.

[Patrick Mazza is a progressive activist and journalist since 1981. He lives in Seattle. Courtesy: Patrick Mazza’s substack page, The Raven.]

❈ ❈ ❈

Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s Victory

Subin Dennis

Zohran Mamdani, who describes himself as a “democratic socialist”, has won the New York City mayoral elections. He is a vocal critic of billionaires, ran on a plank to make the city affordable to the working people, and took a firm pro-Palestine stand in a country whose government is the staunchest supporter of the genocidal Zionist state. His campaign overcame the challenges posed by the propaganda fuelled by billionaires and the Zionist lobby. This, therefore, is a moment for cautious optimism.

Why optimism?

Optimism, because of the reasons stated above, and because such victories and campaigns (the other most notable campaign in the recent decades being the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020) have helped make the term “socialism” less taboo in the US, a society where scaremongering about socialism and communism has been widespread, and where those suspected of communist sympathies have been witch-hunted. This, along with a campaign plank calling for greater taxation of the billionaires, is something to applaud.

Why caution?

Because we have repeatedly seen “democratic socialists” who have campaigned for the Democratic Party ending up endorsing the imperialist agenda pushed by the US ruling class. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (AOC) are the best examples of this trend. It took two years and a huge barrage of criticism for Sanders to admit that what is going on in Gaza is a genocide, and even then, he added falsehoods to tone down criticism of the Zionist state. AOC even voted against a legislative amendment to cut $500 million in funding to the Israeli military.

They are also often quick to condemn socialist countries such as Cuba, and those with socialist-leaning governments such as Venezuela, as “authoritarian”. Zohran Mamdani himself recently stated that he believes both Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Miguel Diaz-Canel of Cuba are “dictator”, no less.

This weak-kneed position on socialism and lack of a firmly anti-imperialist stand are basic traits of social democrats.

“Democratic socialist”, or “social democrat”?

Social democrats, particularly in the advanced Western countries, have by and large been pro-imperialist, often failing to oppose imperialist wars (e.g. the wars against Syria and Libya in the recent decade and a half).

Note that many social democratic parties call themselves “Socialist Party”, “Social Democratic Party”, “Labour Party”, and the like. While in government, they have pursued imperialist policies, and often actively led imperialist wars (e.g. the leading role of the Labour Party government under Tony Blair in the War on Iraq).

Social democrats in Western Europe never built socialism, but they did build welfare states during a time when the socialist bloc was powerful and the “threat” that socialism might win seemed real. Eventually, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they actively pursued neoliberal policies, cutting taxes for the rich, selling off public sector enterprises and privatising public services. Another example worth recalling from the recent past is that of Syriza, a supposedly “radical left” party that came to power in Greece in 2015 promising to end austerity, and ended up reinforcing austerity, privatising airports and seaports, and undermining social security.

The situation in the US has been somewhat different. None of the two major parties in the US call themselves socialist or social democratic. Both of them have actively pursued horrendous imperialist wars. Both of them have implemented neoliberal policies in the past four and a half decades. The socialist and communist movements were significant forces in the past, but were weakened by the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. In recent years, particularly with the campaign of Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic Party candidature for US presidential elections, socialism as a positive term has re-entered the political discourse in the US. As an aside, the term “liberalism”, often used to denote the political inclinations of the Democratic Party, has been a source of confusion for many. In the US, with a historically weak socialist movement, “liberals” are often thought of as “leftists”, even though liberals have been consistently imperialist, and neoliberal in economic policy in recent decades. The worldwide influence of the US media has meant that this confusion has been imported into the discourse in many other countries. In countries of the Global South with relatively more powerful socialist movements, such movements don’t consider US-type liberals to be leftists at all, although many even in the Global South do tend to get misled.

The term “democratic socialism” is used by those who claim to uphold it in an obvious attempt to distance themselves from the socialism that has actually existed and which actually exists, which also explains Mamdani’s lack of solidarity with the revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela.

One could of course argue that socialism in the US doesn’t have to be and will not be a carbon copy of socialist experiments elsewhere. The problem here, however, is our concrete experience that the “democratic socialists” who became prominent figures in the Democratic Party have ended up taking the same position that social democrats elsewhere have taken.

In the light of this experience, it will be foolish for those of us in the Global South who are the main victims of imperialism to not be cautious.

Even with these caveats, we can hope that Mamdani would make a sincere attempt to make good on his promises to make New York a more affordable city for the working people. He would definitely face many obstacles put up by the Trump administration, the Democratic Party establishment, the bureaucracy and others. Whether he would hold steadfast, or go the way of Sanders and AOC, only time will tell. An optimistic take would be to say that just as the mass pro-Palestinian movement made it possible for Mamdani to maintain a pro-Palestinian position, an organised mass movement could possibly help him stay the course.

Excited about Mamdani’s victory? Join the Left and help build it!

The Mamdani campaign has excited a lot of people worldwide. While most people outside New York saw the brilliant, slick social media campaign, within the city itself, the campaign was powered by about 90,000 volunteers who knocked on 3 million doors.

If you are somebody outside the US who has become excited about Zohran Mamdani’s victory, join a left organisation where you are (if you haven’t already), and help build it. That will bring some positive change in your own society, and by extension, in the world. We see a lot of people from various parts of the world commenting below Mamdani’s social media posts, “my mayor (I’m from X country)” and so on. The fact of the matter, of course, is that no matter how much I wish, if I don’t live in New York City, Zohran Mamdani is not “my mayor”. If I want a socialist mayor/government and if I don’t have it already, I have to contribute by working for that outcome. And I must recognise that it is not just somebody else’s job to put in that work.

[Subin Dennis is an economist and researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Courtesy: Globetrotter, a project of Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit organization that educates the public through a diverse array of independent media projects and programs.]