The time has come for all US progressives to stop haranguing voters on what to vote against, and focus instead on what to vote for – a clear platform of food for all, housing for all, mass mobility for all, renewable energy for all, and health care for all.
Dennis Redmond
Groundxero | November 10, 2025
On November 5, 2024, Trumpism – a.k.a. the US variant of a worldwide plutofascism – seized control of the US government. On November 4, 2025, the citizens of New York City overwhelmingly rejected plutofascism by voting for Zohran Mamdani, an avowed democratic socialist, to be mayor of the most populous city of the United States. Yet to understand the true significance of this political earthquake, we need to reflect for a moment on why plutofascism was able to seize power in the first place.
Since 2019, a grand total of 900 US billionaires have seen their wealth skyrocket, while the vast majority of US citizens have experienced a devastating and unrelenting economic crisis. Between 2020 and 2025, the price of staple foods such as butter rose 24%, milk 27%, chicken 36%, bread 40%, beef 63%, and eggs 139%, while the cost of utilities such as electricity rose 40%. Between 2019 and 2025, the cost of auto insurance rose 21% and the cost of new automobiles rose 23%. The median cost of a house in the US soared 27% from $327,100 at the end of 2019 to $415,300 at the end of 2024, while the annual cost of health insurance for individuals in the US skyrocketed 37% from an average of $6,797 in 2020 to $9,325 in 2025.
Trumpism won the 2024 election by channeling popular rage at this immiseration and promising to rebuild the US middle class. Once it took power, though, it sealed this latter’s doom. Since February 2025, Trumpism has persecuted and demonized immigrants, causing inflows of foreign students to collapse by 19% – the same foreign students who constitute one fifth all science and technology experts and two-fifths of all doctorate-level engineers and scientists in the US.
Trumpism has persecuted and jailed foreign tourists for no reason whatsoever, thereby wrecking the US tourist industry. While world international tourist arrivals will rise 5% from 1.45 billion in 2024 to 1.52 billion in 2025, international tourist arrivals in the US are on track to fall from 72.4 million to just 67.9 million in 2025.
Trumpism has openly threatened to invade Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela. This has alienated every other democracy on the planet, triggered boycotts of US goods in Canada and numerous other countries, and caused a 29% year-on-year collapse in sales of Tesla’s automobiles in European markets.
Finally, Trumpism has gutted US universities as well as its formerly world-class scientific and research institutions. Funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been slashed from $9.2 billion to $5.2 billion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from $7.5 billion to $3.9 billion, the National Institutes of Health from $47 billion to $27 billion, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from $6.1 billion to $4.5 billion, and the National Science Foundation from $9 billion to $4 billion. Predictably, 40% of all US-based researchers contacted by a recent Elsevier poll say they are seeking employment outside of the US.
The people of the United States have responded to these multiple catastrophes with a wave of protests far bigger than those of 2017 or 2020. This wave culminated in the titanic “No Kings” protest held on October 18, 2025. An estimated 5 to 7 million citizens, a remarkable 2% of the entire US population, gathered in 2,700 cities and towns across the US to condemn Trumpism. Three weeks later, the citizens of New York City began to transform protests into power by electing Zohran Mamdani to be their next mayor.
Mamdani and his team succeeded by doing two things no mayoral campaign had ever done before. First, they mobilized 90,000 volunteers to knock on doors and visit millions of New Yorkers in their homes, offices, parks and community spaces. Second, they understood that millions of voters were angry and disillusioned with politicians who promised to help ordinary citizens but did nothing but make plutocrats richer and everyone else poorer. The campaign turned that anger into an asset, by honing its message into an irresistible fifteen second pitch.
Everyone knows life for ordinary citizens in New York City has become too expensive, said campaigners to voters – but Mayor Mamdani would make the city affordable in three ways. First, he would freeze the rents of the city’s 1.05 million rent-stabilized dwellings for the next four years. Second, he would make city buses fast and free. Third, he would offer free universal childcare to all parents. Best of all, he would pay for all these things by taxing New York City’s obscenely rich plutocrats and undertaxed corporations.
The response from the electorate was overwhelming. Mamdani would receive 1.04 million out of 2.06 million votes cast during the 2025 mayoral election, winning an absolute majority (50.4%) of the vote – the highest number of votes for a New York City mayor since John Lindsay’s election by 1.15 million votes back in 1965. Just as importantly, large numbers of these voters were first-time participants. Whereas only 23.4% of the city’s 4.9 million eligible voters had participated in the 2021 mayoral election, 39.9% of the city’s 5.1 million eligible voters participated in 2025.
To be sure, Mamdani’s victory was partly conditional on New York City’s status as a city of immigrants. Whereas the overall US population in 2020 was 62% white, 19% Latino, 12% African American, and 6% Asian in 2020, the population of New York City was 31% white, 28% Latino, 20% African American and 16% Asian that same year. Similarly, 16% of all US citizens were immigrants in 2020, whereas the corresponding figure in New York City was 38%.
Mamdani’s campaign was also aided by his biographical background as someone born to Indo-African parents in Uganda in 1991, who was culturally Muslim (his father was professor Mahmood Mamdani and his mother was filmmaker Mira Nair), who came to the US in 1998, and who became a naturalized US citizen in 2018. This enabled him to appeal to the approximately half a million citizens of the city who are of South Asian descent as well as to the 1 million citizens who are Muslim, communities which have faced virulent forms of xenophobia, racism and Muslimphobia during the early 21st century.
That said, there is one indispensable lesson to be learned by all US progressives from Mamdani’s victory. Mandani did not win over New York voters by engaging in neoliberal identity-politics or by churning out social media clickbait. Instead, he spoke to voters about their daily struggle to pay the rent, get to work, and care for their children. Whereas all the other mayoral candidates gave voters something to vote against, Mamdani gave them something to vote for – a clear platform of affordable housing for all, free buses for all, and free childcare for all.
The time has come for all US progressives to stop haranguing voters on what to vote against, and focus instead on what to vote for – a clear platform of food for all, housing for all, mass mobility for all, renewable energy for all, and health care for all. Against the plutofascism of the 900 US billionaires, only the solidarity of 356 million US citizens will do.
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Dennis Redmond is an independent scholar of digital media, video games and transnational media.
Feature image: Karamccurdy, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons