Stuck in a time loop? Mamdani and the Left’s amnesia

Dan Davison

July 7, 2025

In the classic 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Cause and Effect,” the crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves caught in a time loop. Each time, the ship fails to avert a collision with another vessel and is lost with all hands, only for everything to suddenly reset to a point shortly before the disaster. Initially, the crew doesn’t remember anything from the previous repetitions, so they keep following the same steps that culminate in the ship’s destruction. But the more the time loop repeats, the more a gnawing sense of déjà vu grows among the crew members.

Jumping from the world of science fiction to the not-entirely-unrelated world of politics, this past week or two, left media has been jubilantly greeting Zohran Mamdani’s win in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral election. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Mamdani successfully ran against Democratic Party establishment favorite and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. In outlets like Jacobin, Mamdani is celebrated for focussing on “issues that spoke to the most urgently felt needs of New York’s working class” and showing us “what it means to have a ‘class-struggle’ electoral approach." He’s praised for putting forward policies aimed at redistributing wealth and expanding the public sector, including rent freezes, subsidized childcare, fare-free buses, city-owned grocery shops, building affordable housing, and raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030. Importantly, much of the Left is also praising him for coupling such policies with promises to, e.g., expand and protect trans healthcare, make NYC “an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city,” defend reproductive rights, and refuse to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Much has been made of Mamdani’s support of the Palestinian cause, seeing his win as an expression of the pro-Palestinian protest movement’s discontent with how the Democratic Party leadership has approached the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.

In other words, across the press and social media, Leftists are brimming with joy that Mamdani’s platform has (apparently) shown the world how to build a winning socialist campaign that brings together and highlights the connections between “material” concerns on the one hand and “identity” concerns on the other. Predictably, much of this has been framed in terms of lessons for the Democrats in how to take on Trump. “You see!” cries the would-be left to the Democratic Party. “This is the kind of bold, positive alternative you should present to voters if you want to win! Here are the policies you should adopt, and here’s how you should campaign for them!”

Much like the Enterprise crew in the later repetitions of their time loop, my first thought upon seeing all this was “Haven’t I been here before?” I politically came of age as part of the Millennial Left. Like many other young Leftists, I watched Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run in the Democratic presidential primary with hopeful fascination. In my case, I was watching from the UK, where Jeremy Corbyn had been elected leader of the Labour Party the previous year, but it all felt like part of the same pivotal moment. My comrades and I followed the debates on the US Left about whether it’s viable to stand socialists for election on a Democratic ticket with a view to building the base for a new left party that would then break from the Democrats — the so-called “dirty break” strategy. When I came to the US for large chunks of 2018–19, I joined DSA. I went through all the usual motions of the would-be Left’s activity: I attended political meetings, participated in campaigns, went to rallies, joined solidarity delegations to picket lines, etc. While my comrades and I had many strong criticisms of this wave of “democratic socialism,” which those of us on the organized, ostensibly Marxist Left at the time saw even then to be little more than an attempt to revive mid-20th century social democracy, we still tended to see it a genuine opening for rebuilding the Left and winning wider layers of the working class to socialist politics.

Far from helping make socialism a real possibility for workers, the Millennial Left’s neo-social-democratic turn furthered the longstanding conflation of socialism with progressivism. We ended up creating a generation of would-be socialists who essentially understood socialism as “more generous redistribution plus equality rights”: as “maxed-out progressivism.” Even those who disavowed that understanding of socialism nevertheless tended to either explicitly or implicitly treat the expansion of state welfare as a step towards socialism — or at least as establishing the conditions of possibility for the fight for socialism. This contrasts starkly with late 19th and early 20th-century socialists’ opposition to progressivism. As Will Stratford explains:

Rather than appealing to the state for progressive reforms to improve the condition of working people, Socialists proposed that the working class should organize itself to take state power. They objected to welfare measures, believing there was nothing leftist, much less socialist, about rendering workers dependent upon the state rather than upon their movement, their union, and their party.

This stance has a long history on the Left. Marx and his co-thinkers in the First International objected to Otto von Bismarck’s social welfare programs — so-called State Socialism — on similar grounds. The Frankfurt School and the New Left both grasped that one can’t have a welfare state without an authoritarian state. The Austrian School economist Ludwig Von Mises was correct to observe that “[consistent] Marxians do not support interventionism,” but rather “scorn interventionism as idle reformism detrimental to the interests of the proletarians.” Despite its pedigree, such a stance was alien to most of the Millennial Left. Instead, socialism was conflated with its historical opponent: a conflation that Mamdani’s campaign and its left-wing cheerleaders continue today. Indeed, in a short video he made for his New York State Assembly election campaign five years ago, Mamdani explicitly says that, to him, socialism means having “a state that provides whatever is necessary for its people to live a dignified life.”

This is not to say that there would be no benefit for people from any of the policies Mamdani is promising. If I were to find myself living in New York again, I would almost certainly find things like fare-free buses and rent freezes personally convenient. Rather, the problem begins when Leftists fail to recognize such things as comfortably within the scope of capitalist politics. When I was in the DSA in the late 2010s, I supported measures like Medicare For All on the grounds that, if workers were to have a stronger social safety net provided by the state, then it would be easier for them to form a movement for socialism. While left-leaning Americans have tended to treat the welfare state infrastructure of Canada and Europe as a model the US should emulate, there is in reality no more of a workers’ movement for socialism in those other places than there is in the US — a point we never really addressed. And if the result of Mamdani’s campaign is to entrench the notion that socialism means state intervention in the economy, then it will simply be yet another impediment to any actual progress towards socialism.

Of course, the Millennial Left itself inherited the confusion of socialism with progressivism from the previous generations of the Left. Key here is the Popular Front of the 1930s. In the name of stopping fascism, the by-then thoroughly Stalinized Communist Parties sought cross-class alliances with the “progressive” capitalist parties. In the US, this took the form of allying with the New Deal Democrats, despite having previously denounced the New Deal as “fascist,” and recognizing the “official” leaders of the women’s movement and the black movement as representing their respective special group interests separate from the class interests of the working class. In other words, much of the Left’s understanding of its own task as expanding state welfare and getting organized labor and oppressed groups a seat at the table is a direct inheritance from the Popular Front.

In both the Stalinist and the social-democratic imaginary, the Popular Front tends to be remembered positively. Even Leftists who consider themselves opponents of both Stalinism and social democracy often inherit aspects of this understanding of the 1930s–40s, seeing measures like the New Deal welfare programs as historical gains of the workers’ movement and the Left that need to be defended. Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) that merged with the New American Movement to form the DSA in 1982, understood himself to be attempting to build something like the Popular Front despite his anti-Stalinism. In reality, the Popular Front was the self-liquidation of proletarian socialism. It was the lowering of the Left’s political horizons from socialism, the self-emancipation of the proletariat made necessary by capitalist society’s self-contradiction between bourgeois social relations and the industrial forces of production, to the social management of labor discontents. It was the dissolution of independent, socialist, working-class action. Despite valiant efforts by, e.g, the early New Left, those horizons have only continued to lower since.

In a degraded echo of the Popular Front, the Millennial Left liquidated itself in the name of anti-fascism. Faced with the threat of Trump, it became little more than the “radical” wing of the Democrats. In the end, it failed even to constitute itself as a Left. Like the remnants of the New Left in the face of Reagan and neoliberalism in the 1980s, the Millennial Left found itself completely overtaken by the changes within capitalism represented by Trump. Today, even the talk of a “dirty break,” which — despite its regressed character and questionable premises — registered at least some awareness of the need to organize a politically independent force for socialism, seems to have vanished. Now the goal is simply to put pressure on the Democrats — a goal that is, from the perspective of the struggle for socialism, fundamentally no different to getting Democrats elected. Like the experience of the 2010s Millennial Left and of the 1930s Popular Front before it, Mamdani’s primary win shows just how easy it is for Leftists to mistake the Left’s self-liquidation for its advance.

In the classic Star Trek episode I opened with, Lieutenant Commander Data is eventually able to transmit enough of a message to himself in the next repeat of the time loop to work out what the Enterprise crew needs to do to avert the same disaster they’d experienced each previous time the loop had reset. Unless the would-be Left takes the lessons of the Millennial Left and its antecedents seriously, it’s doomed to remain trapped in its own time loop, forever repeating the same steps towards its own destruction.