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What Scares Establishment Media Most Is Not Socialism But Democracy Raina Lipsitz ([link removed])


NYT: How Zohran Mamdani Beat Back New York’s Elite and Was Elected Mayor

The New York Times (11/4/25 ([link removed]) ) explains that Zohran Mamdani won the mayor's race by "delicately disarming" New York City's "all-powerful establishment."

Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands ([link removed]) and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people ([link removed]) that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.

In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate ([link removed]) who emerged ([link removed]) after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was "built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25 ([link removed]) ).

After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an "improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, ([link removed]) suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.

NBC News (11/4/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.


** 'Building civic architecture'
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Dissent: Partyism Without the Party

Dissent (11/25/25 ([link removed]) ) traced DSA's electoral strategy to former FAIR analyst Seth Ackerman ([link removed]) 's call for a "party surrogate" (Jacobin, 11/8/16 ([link removed]) ).

This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers ([link removed]) , young people ([link removed]) and first-time voters ([link removed]) who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25 ([link removed]) ) and Jacobin (7/15/25 ([link removed]) ), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how
they were able to succeed against such long odds.

Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats ([link removed]) , which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.

These groups also spent years ([link removed]) planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani's campaign was the opposite of the Times' characterization as being "built from nothing in a matter of months."

As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”

Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ([link removed]) ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives ([link removed]) and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.

Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19 ([link removed]) ) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.


** 'Too much emphasis' on 'far-left positions'
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NYT: A New Democratic Think Tank Wants to Curb the Influence of Liberal Groups

“The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” billionaire-backed Adam Jentleson told the New York Times (9/17/25 ([link removed]) ).

One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.

The New York Times (9/17/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote about a new Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that attributes the party’s recent losses to “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights…at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states.”

Paraphrasing the think tank’s founder, Adam Jentleson, the paper's Reid J. Epstein ([link removed]) noted that

organizations focused on climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights have all managed to get Democratic presidential hopefuls on the record taking far-left positions to the detriment of their general election performance.

The Times quoted operatives who disagreed with Jentleson, but didn’t bother to analyze his essential claims: Were those positions really “far left” ([link removed]) and alienating to the party’s base? What evidence is there that candidates who took certain positions on climate change and/or LGBTQ rights underperformed in general elections as a result of those positions?

To the Times, the needs and preferences of the party’s “liberal base” are inscrutable and beside the point; what matters is the guidance of self-appointed experts like Jentleson, whose think tank is “subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors,” including prominent hedge fund managers and real estate investors.


** 'A lot of compromise'
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NYT: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.

David Brooks' advice (New York Times, 4/17/25 ([link removed]) ) for defeating Trump is all too normal: Universities have to stop being "shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter."

In a New York Times column (4/17/25 ([link removed]) ) calling for a “national civic uprising” against Trump, David Brooks ([link removed]) argued that the mass rallies Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders led in 2025 were “ineffective” because they were “partisan,” and made opposition to Trump “seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans."

Yet one day earlier, the Times (4/16/25 ([link removed]) ) reported that the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies had “drawn enormous crowds” and were “energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.” And according to a Sanders adviser, the paper noted, “21% of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’ events reported that they were independents, and 8% said they were Republicans.”

Organizing mass rallies that expose thousands of listeners in conservative areas to critiques, not just of Trump, but of oligarchy ([link removed]) in general, seems like an effective means of diluting right-wing power and demonstrating that leading Democrats and their allies care about Americans throughout the country, not just in blue states. But to those in corporate media, the point of politics is not to inspire regular people to organize and win broadly popular demands, but to “build power” and “do good things” by, as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein suggested in a recent interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick (9/29/25 ([link removed]) ), engaging in “a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.”

Klein is far from the only Democrat who believes we should take “an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.” But to Klein, that means penning paeans to hatemongers ([link removed]) like the late Charlie Kirk (New York Times, 9/11/25 ([link removed]) ), not standing up to plutocrats ([link removed]) .


** 'A better story'
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Despite evidence ([link removed]) that mass issue-based organizing campaigns ([link removed]) can and do politicize people, bring them into effective coalitions and achieve significant victories, corporate media outlets and establishment leaders remain laser-focused on encouraging the rank and file to elect centrists ([link removed]) rather than build mass movements.

As CBS News (12/16/25 ([link removed]) ) recently reported, former President Barack Obama—still one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures—is urging Democrats to “focus on winning the midterms and developing ‘a better story’ to tell voters, rather than on ‘nerdy’ internal disagreements.” The man once touted ([link removed]) as the nation’s “organizer in chief” has long since abandoned ([link removed]) encouraging Americans to organize, fight for and win life-changing policies; he is advising them to focus on winning the midterms by burnishing their brand.

The endurance of Trump, who won more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 but has never won the consistent support ([link removed]) of a majority of Americans, revealed to many that they cannot trust US political leaders to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, and recently elected Mayor Katie Wilson ([link removed]) ’s in Seattle, have shown people around the world that they have the power to win the policies and elect the leaders they want, without top-down instruction or management from—and despite interference by—elites.

To pundits and corporate media outlets, this is a dangerous lesson: If everyday people realize they don’t need overpaid consultants or self-declared experts to win real change, how long can the status quo be maintained by its beneficiaries?
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