The end result is always abandoning everything. As Stahl says, "The earlier gestures toward economic populism evaporated, and the new government sold itself primarily on technocratic competence and national unity in the face of the perceived security threat from Russia."

Thanks!

If of interest, you can read more here:

hammerandhope.org/article/iden...

Organization was the method that articulated difference into a powerful political force. As Mamdani said in his DSA convention keynote address back in 2023, it all comes back to “knowing that I am a member of an organization that means what it says, that delivers on its promises.”

Mamdani didn’t win by calibrating his message for some imagined homogenous group of voters or by selective interpretation of poll data. He won through a grassroots movement that created a sustained dialogue among the campaign, NYC-DSA, and the people of New York City.

Feedback from those conversations in doorways worked its way through the task forces and field operations of both the campaign and NYC-DSA, in turn shaping the political messaging of the campaign itself.

Those visits and calls involved both giving and receiving information in one-on-ones with New Yorkers living in many different situations.

Not only did NYC-DSA help shape the political messaging of the campaign, the organization also brought together a group of canvassers that anchored the campaign and helped it grow. More than 104,000 volunteers knocked on 3 million doors and made more than 4 million calls.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s roughly 11,000-member New York City chapter created a political culture that DSA member Mamdani and his campaign were embedded in.

The deeper lesson of the campaign is that organizing, not mere messaging or style, wins in politics. This organizing undoubtedly involves articulation, but it also involves organization itself.

This is not a politics of retreat in response to the right wing winning elections and passing laws on anti-woke positions. It is what Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, called the politics of articulation: the construction of political unity through negotiations of difference.

In that speech, he continued: “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist, and most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

A less savvy economic populist might have just talked about a generic hard-working voter. But instead of downplaying people’s differences, Mamdani organized through them.

In his Nov. 4 victory speech, he said: “Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.”

The way Mamdani centered the cost of living in his campaign became the key way he incorporated different communities into his coalition through evocative appeals to their own unique experiences and struggles.

He won because he combined economic populist demands — rent freezes, universal child care, fast and free buses, municipally operated grocery stores to curtail inflation — with explicit solidarity with Palestine, immigrant communities, and New York’s most marginalized residents.