Zohran Mamdani Is Right on Public Safety
On crime, just as on other issues, Zohran Mamdani is leading the Left out of dead-end sloganeering and toward progressive governance.
Page 1 of 5Next
Nick French is an associate editor at Jacobin.
On crime, just as on other issues, Zohran Mamdani is leading the Left out of dead-end sloganeering and toward progressive governance.

From our first interview immediately after he won his state assembly election in 2020 through profiles, op-eds, interviews, and speeches, Jacobin has closely covered Zohran Mamdani’s political career rooted in the socialist movement since its start.

The Trump administration says it will withhold funding for food stamps starting November 1. The move will inflict hardship on tens of millions of lower-income Americans who rely on the program and potentially cause broader economic disruption.

Compared to similarly rich countries, the US has an exceptionally punitive system of policing and prisons. What explains America’s extremely harsh penal regime?

The Democrats have failed to mount a serious response to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. Their fecklessness has left the door open for democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani to position themselves as the real opposition to Trump.

In New York City, 20,000 nurses are negotiating contracts with the city’s private sector hospitals. The hospitals are using federal Medicaid cuts as an argument for austerity. But nurses say the richer hospitals, and the state government, can fill the gap.

Christoph Schuringa insists that analytic philosophy serves as an ideological fig leaf for liberal capitalism. But his polemic distorts the discipline’s history and fails to draw persuasive links between its development and apologias for the status quo.

While Donald Trump assaults civil liberties and the social safety net, Democrats are lost. Capital’s continued dominance of both parties and Big Tech’s machinations in particular are key to understanding our political crisis, argues Thomas Ferguson.

Bernie Sanders clearly sees the future of his movement in Zohran Mamdani, who is now poised to become the next mayor of New York City. In inheriting Sanders’s movement, Mamdani inherits a daunting set of questions and challenges.

Donald Trump has offered Eric Adams a job in his administration, apparently to convince him to drop out of New York’s mayoral race. It’s now official and out in the open: Andrew Cuomo is allying with Trump to beat Zohran Mamdani.

Grassroots worker organization and mobilization is essential to the success of any socialist electoral project. But socialists in executive office can’t neglect other elements, like maintaining wide popular support and alliances within the state.

With the new reporting that Donald Trump has personally talked to Andrew Cuomo about how to defeat Zohran Mamdani in the mayor’s race, New York Democratic leaders have to choose which side they’re on: Mamdani’s, or Trump’s?

Saikat Chakrabarti, a founder of Justice Democrats and former top AOC aide, is challenging Nancy Pelosi for her seat in Congress. He talked to Jacobin about his vision for an ambitious program to transform the US economy and reverse class dealignment.

There is a hunger for bold, transformative politics in the United States right now. Zohran Mamdani shows how the Left can run on a principled, disciplined message that speaks to voters’ lived concerns — and win.

There is so much off base in yesterday’s New York Times editorial on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. Let us count the ways.

In last night’s New York City mayoral debate, socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani warded off attacks about “defunding the police” by articulating a principled and compelling message on public safety.

With some prominent Democrats and liberal pundits arguing for the party to try to win Elon Musk back to its side, you have to ask: Is American politics simply a matter of who can best kiss the ass of narcissistic reactionary billionaires?

The major intellectual and moral preoccupations of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this week at the age of 96, speak to key issues of modernity and morality that leftists will be grappling with for a long time.

Bernie Sanders says more pro-worker candidates should run for office as independents rather than as Democrats. He’s right.

In July 1979, Jimmy Carter described a spiritual “crisis of confidence” that could “destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” But the neoliberal policies of his administration helped make the US a more atomized, mean-spirited society.